ABOUT TRADITIONAL MARRIAGE...

From today's readings from the Lectionary:

King Solomon loved many foreign women along with the daughter of Pharaoh: Moabite, Ammonite, Edomite, Sidonian, and Hittite women, from the nations concerning which the Lord had said to the Israelites, ‘You shall not enter into marriage with them, neither shall they with you; for they will surely incline your heart to follow their gods;’ Solomon clung to these in love. Among his wives were seven hundred princesses and three hundred concubines; and his wives turned away his heart. For when Solomon was old, his wives turned away his heart after other gods; and his heart was not true to the Lord his God, as was the heart of his father David.

1 Kings 11:1-4

...I guess it depends upon how far back you go in the traditions.

DISCIPLINE

Doug has very kindly been searching for the Episcopal Church take off on the New Yorker cover pictured here. He did not find what he was looking for, but he found the image below. Click on the picture for the larger view.

STORY OF THE DAY - ENGLISH MAJOR

When I told him I had a major in
English, he said, too bad for you this is
America & he started me out at the
bottom.

From StoryPeople.

PLEASE PRAY FOR DAVID (DAH-VEED) AND BIRDIE

From the comments:

Paul Powers said...

Another David (a/k/a Dah-Veed) mentioned on Anglican Down Under the other day that he is undergoing some sort of cardiac procedure tomorrow morning. Please keep him in your prayers.

'Almighty God our heavenly Father, graciously comfort your servant David in his suffering, and bless the means made use of for his cure. Fill his heart with confidence that, though at times he may be afraid, he yet may put his trust in you; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.'

UPDATE: David's (a/k/a Dah-Veed) words from Anglican Down Under:

Blogger Brother David said...

And I am sorely in need of a cardiac procedure whose date approaches next Thursday morning and I am still mentally preparing for that trip and appointment. I am too young (47) to have a bad heart, no!

August 27, 2011 5:17 AM

Please pray for Birdie, Brian R.'s friend, who is undergoing treatment for breast cancer. Brian R. blogs at Noble Wolf.

'O God, the strength of the weak and the comfort of sufferers: Mercifully accept our prayers, and grant to your servant Birdie the help of your power, that her sickness may be turned into health, and our sorrow into joy; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.'

R. I. P DAVID 'HONEYBOY' EDWARDS

From The Huffington Post:

CHICAGO -- Grammy-winning Blues musician David "Honey Boy" Edwards, believed to be the oldest surviving Delta bluesman and whose roots stretched back to blues legend Robert Johnson, died early Monday in his Chicago home, his manager said. He was 96.
....

Born in 1915 in Shaw, Miss., Edwards learned the guitar growing up and started playing professionally at age 17 in Memphis.

He came to Chicago in the 1940s and played on Maxwell Street, small clubs and street corners. By the 1950s Edwards had played with almost every bluesman of note - including Howlin' Wolf, Little Walter, Charlie Patton and Muddy Waters. Among Edwards' hit songs were "Long Tall Woman Blues," "Gamblin Man" and "Just Like Jesse James."
....

"Blues ain't never going anywhere," Edwards told The Associated Press in 2008. "It can get slow, but it ain't going nowhere. You play a lowdown dirty shame slow and lonesome, my mama dead, my papa across the sea I ain't dead but I'm just supposed to be blues. You can take that same blues, make it uptempo, a shuffle blues, that's what rock `n' roll did with it. So blues ain't going nowhere. Ain't goin' nowhere."

Edwards won a 2008 Grammy for traditional blues album and received a Grammy Lifetime Achievement award in 2010. His death represents the loss of the last direct link to the first generation.

Another one of the old timers gone. Honeyboy's right. Blues ain't going nowhere.

Play the blues in heaven, Honeyboy. Play the blues for us who are left behind.

LONDON RIOTS NO KATRINA

 

From Matt Davis at The Lens:

After plenty of research, reporting and countless conversations on the riots in England, it is my considered opinion as a native Englishman with dual U.S. citizenship, that sometimes, weird things just happen, and that the riots in England were just that: weird.

I arrived back in Blighty on August 20 for a long-planned vacation, burdened with a question many Americans had asked me: What was with those riots, anyway? Somehow, the more people I asked, the more the question came to feel basically unanswerable.

That’s not to say there is no merit in the many theories being put forward. Some of them, anyway.

Case in point. On August 10, the British newspaper, The Independent, ran an editorial under the headline: “Britain has experienced its Katrina moment.” On the same day, a photograph of my hometown ran on page one of The Times-Picayune with the caption: “A building burns Tuesday in Croydon, South London.”

Matt is a transplant from South London, Croydon specificaly, who so far as I can ascertain, moved to the US, because his South London accent would never, ever be considered posh 'over there', but 'over here', any English accent sounds posh. (Just kidding!, and aren't we glad to 'ave 'im)

Matt continues:

I considered calling The Independent to ask why its editorial writers had chosen to diminish the experience of disaster victims in my adopted city with such a glib and ridiculous reference to Katrina. Yes, British Prime Minister David Cameron was lost in a Bush-like moment of political disengagement when the disaster struck. But what’s next? Describing a leaky dishwasher as a Katrina moment?

When Matt returned to Croydon, he walked the ruined areas with his high school friend, and they discussed the reasons for the rioting. Was it a race thing? Was it a class thing? Was it the have-nots getting back at the have-mores? In the end, he comes up short. The best he and his friend can come up with is 'weird'.

Matt tells of a conversation with 'a man in a suit' in Croydon:

“I think we’ve created an underclass,” the man said, when I asked him what he thought had happened. “There’s too many people without fathers, and there’s no structure. What bothers me is we have to spend taxpayer money to babysit these people to give them places to play, otherwise they do this.”

He was affable, perhaps a little conservative by English standards, but then his tone changed, and so did the look in his eyes.

“What we really need is a good war,” he said. “Send ’em all to the front and they’ll all get shot. The Nazis had the right idea.”

Oof! We have that kind over here, too.

I confess I'm intrigued by a South London transplant living and writing in and about my beloved city of New Orleans. I'm sure Matt has more than a few experiences of two countries divided by a common language and of misunderstandings due to cultural differences, as the wedding comparison story which he relates in his post demonstrates.

Read his entire post. I hope I have not gone beyond fair use. Sometimes I get carried away.

ABOUT THE OVERDONE NEWS COVERAGE OF IRENE...

...if it didn't happen in New York city, then it didn't happen, right? Click right over to Caminante's blog, Vermont's Own, for a report on the State of Vermont after the minor little tropical storm paid them a visit.

The state of Vermont woke up this morning to a new reality that turns the joke, ‘You can’t get there from here’ on its head. All of a sudden, we truly can’t get there from here. Whether it is from the south or the east or the north or west, either there are no options at all or extensive detours. The north, south and west will open up soon enough once the flood waters recede and repairs made but the eastern entry points, notably Route 4, will take much, much more time to be restored to pre-Irene status.

Below are a few pictures to help you get the picture in Vermont. Click on the pictures for the larger view.

Not pretty.

Pretty ugly.

Read Caminante's post, see the rest of her pictures, and weep.

Senior pundit George Will's utterly loathsome words:

“Florence Nightingale said, ‘Whatever you say about hospitals, they shouldn’t make their patients sicker,” he said. “And whatever else you want to say about journalism, it shouldn’t subtract from the nation’s understanding, and it certainly shouldn’t contribute to the manufactured, synthetic hysteria that is so much a part of modern life. And I think we may have done so with regard to this ‘tropical storm,’ as it now seems to be.”

It's way past time for Will to retire, don't you think?

And finally, Rmj at Adventus' brilliant find - this old cover from The New Yorker.

YOUR BOLERO FOR THE DAY

The Copenhagen Philharmonic at Copenhagen Central Station, conducted by Jesper Nordin.

I love the music of flash mobs when it's well done. I remember my delight at the first I ever saw. I believe it was by singers from an opera house in a restaurant, perhaps in Spain.

Thanks to Paul (A.).

COWBOY

An apparently drunken cowboy lay sprawled across three entire seats in a posh Billings Theater. When the Usher came by and noticed him, he whispered to the Cowboy, "Sorry, Sir, but you're only allowed one seat."

The Cowboy just groaned but didn't even budge.

The Usher became more impatient and insistent: "Sir, if you don't get up from there I'm going to have to call the manager."

Once again, the cowboy just groaned.

The Usher marched briskly back up the aisle, and in a moment he returned with the manager. Together the two of them tried repeatedly to move the cowboy, but without success. He just lay there in a dazed stupor. Finally they had enough and summoned the police.

The sherrif arrived, surveyed the situation briefly, then asked, "Alright buddy what's your name?"

"Rudy," the Cowboy moaned.

"Where y'all from, Rudy?"asked the Ranger.

With terrible pain in his voice, a grim expression and without moving a muscle, Rudy said, "The Balcony."

The punch line caught me compeletly by surprise.

Thanks to Ann.

VALERIE PLAME AND JOE WILSON - NO APOLOGY YET

From The Huffington Post:

Seven years after top officials in the Bush administration turned their world upside down in an attempt to convince the public to support the war in Iraq, Amb. Joseph Wilson and outed CIA agent Valerie Plame said they still have not received an apology from anyone involved.

"No, in a word," Plame laughed and told The Huffington Post when asked if she or her husband had heard from any Bush officials. She said the closest thing she has received to an apology is when Richard Armitage, the former No. 2 at the State Department, publicly said it was "foolish" of him to leak Plame's undercover CIA identity.

Apparently Valerie Plame 'deserved' to be outed as a covert officer in the CIA's counter-proliferation division, because her husband's report which followed his investigation of the claim that Saddam had purchased enriched uranium from Niger did not line up with the Bush administration's contention that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction, including materials for manufacturing nuclear weapons.

"One of the things that we have always tried to say is that whatever has happened to us as a consequence of the battles we've been involved in over the last seven years, and however painful it may have been for us, it is nothing compared to what has been done to our country -- and particularly the service people and their families -- by the ill-conceived war in Iraq and by confusion of what the mission was in Afghanistan," Wilson told The Huffington Post in an interview on Friday.

Yes, indeed. No good deed went unpunished for those who did not hew to the party line in the feverish atmosphere within the Bush administration as it prepared to invade Iraq.

Valerie Plame and Joe Wilson are patriots in the truest sense of the word. I was outraged by Plames' outing, and I'm still outraged today that this sort of dastardly deed was done in the name of pursuing a war which should never have started, a war that was justified on the basis of lies and misleading information. As Wilson describes the situation in Baghdad today, we will leave behind a sad legacy, which cost us and the Iraqi people dearly, but it's way past time for us to go.

Valerie Plame's picture from Wikipedia. Joe Wilson's picture from Military Religious Freedom Foundation.