STORY OF THE DAY MOONLIGHT

I like this place best by moonlight, she
told me. During the day, it just looks like
dirt.

From StoryPeople.

Oh yes.

PACO AND THE PUMPKIN

 

Whoops! Paco wanted out of the pumpkin just as we wanted a picture.

 

Still not quite what we want, but cute.

 

Now we're getting close...the eery eye.

 

Boo!!!

Paco lives with my daughter and her three sons.

OCCUPY WALL STREET - THE NO-SPIN ZONE

From Dahlia Lithwick at Slate:

I confess to being driven insane this past month by the spectacle of television pundits professing to be baffled by the meaning of Occupy Wall Street. Good grief. Isn’t the ability to read still a job requirement for a career in journalism? And as last week’s inane “What Do They Want?” meme morphs into this week’s craven “They Want Your Stuff” meme, I feel it’s time to explain something: Occupy Wall Street may not have laid out all of its demands in a perfectly cogent one-sentence bumper sticker for you, Mr. Pundit, but it knows precisely what it doesn’t want. It doesn’t want you.

What the movement clearly doesn’t want is to have to explain itself through corporate television. To which I answer, Hallelujah. You can’t talk down to a movement that won’t talk back to you.
....

Occupy Wall Street is not a movement without a message. It’s a movement that has wisely shunned the one-note, pre-chewed, simple-minded messaging required for cable television as it now exists. It’s a movement that feels no need to explain anything to the powers that be, although it is deftly changing the way we explain ourselves to one another.

The media and a good many other folks want simple explanations from the protestors for why they are there, sound bites for those with short attention spans...sort of like a political campaign that stays on message. Of course, the protestors at OWC have the sound bites on their signs. But wait! The signs are often amateur jobs, obviously not paid for by the Koch brothers and their ilk, and they don't all say the same thing. Oooh, it's so confusing. People there have lost their jobs; others have lost their homes to the banks and mortgage companies; young people coming out of school or university can't find jobs. The homeless are present. The miseries are many. And to confuse the situation even further, there are those who are fairly well off themselves but wish to join in solidarity with the dispossessed, because, as Archbishop Óscar Romero, the martyr and advocate for the poor in San Salvador, said, “Let those who have a voice, speak out for the voiceless.” And who knows? They/we could be next.

Hey, occupiers: You’re the new news. And even better, by refusing to explain yourselves, you’re actually changing what’s reported as news. Because it takes a tremendous mental effort to refuse to see that the rich are getting richer in America while the rest of us are struggling. Maybe the days of explaining the patently obvious to the transparently compromised are finally behind us.

By refusing to take a ragtag, complicated, and leaderless movement seriously, the mainstream media has succeeded only in ensuring its own irrelevance.

The media pundits look sillier and sillier - as if they didn't look silly enough already.

See the splendid cartoon titled 'The Silent Majority'.

THE PRICE OF OIL

Still Life in Oil

Fort Jackson, Louisiana (USA). June 20, 2010. Volunteers of the Tri-State Bird Rescue and Research and the International Bird Rescue Research Center run the facility in Fort Jackson, Louisiana , where they clean birds covered in oil from the Deepwater Horizon wellhead. The BP leased oil platform that exploded on April 20 and sank after burning. Photo by © Daniel Beltra/Greenpeace.

Click on the pictures for the larger view.

The picture above and the pictures below are from the The Veolia Environnement Wildlife Photographer of the Year 2011 exhibit at the Natural History Museum in London.

After months of anticipation, the winners of Veolia Environnement Wildlife Photographer of the Year 2011 have been announced and the exhibition is now open at the Natural History Museum.

The photos of all of the winners are outstanding. Browse the gallery at the link above. Any of you who are in or near London while the exhibit is on display through March 11, 2012, would do well to pay a visit. Book your tickets online.

The exhibition will tour nationally and internationally after its launch in London.

PLEASE DO NOT COPY THE IMAGES TO ANY OTHER FORUM WITHOUT EXPLICIT PERMISSION FROM THE NATURAL HISTORY MUSEUM IN LONDON.

Since I live in south Louisiana, about 40 miles away from the Gulf of Mexico as the crow flies, my particular interest was in the photos by Daniel Beltra, who is from Spain, of the explosion of the Deepwater Horizon oil rig on April 20, 2010, and the aftermath. The photos are stunning, some of them quite beautiful, but they tell the story of a tragedy in which 11 men were killed, others injured, and a great deal of death and destruction dealt to the wildlife and plant life that inhabit the Gulf and coastal areas. The picture of the oiled pelicans is heart-breaking.

The photos are copyrighted by the photographer and are used here with permission. The pictures and captions, which are arranged by date starting with the earliest, with the exception of the photo at the head of the post, speak for themselves.

Louisiana (USA). May 6th, 2010. Aerial view of the oil leaked from the Deepwater Horizon wellhead, the BP leased oil platform exploded April 20 and sank after burning. Leaking an estimate of more than 200,000 gallons of crude oil per day from the broken pipeline to the sea. Eleven workers are missing, presumed dead. Photo by Daniel Beltra/Greenpeace

On April 20, 2010, Deepwater Horizon exploded, killing 11 crewmen and injuring 17. The platform sank 50 miles off shore, 1 mile deep, and weighed 58,000 tons. Oil from the wellhead rises up to the surface of the Gulf of Mexico near a different offshore platform, May 18, 2010. Photo © Daniel Beltra for Greenpeace

June 17, 2010. Louisiana (USA)Boats burning oil on the surface near BP's Deepwater Horizon spill source. ©Daniel Beltra/Greenpeace

June 17, 2010. Louisiana (USA)Oil covers the surface of the Gulf of Mexico on the vicinity of BP's Deepwater Horizon spill source. ©Daniel Beltra/Greenpeace

Louisiana (USA). June 24, 2010. Flight to the Deepwater Horizon site, the BP leased oil platform exploded on April 20 and sank after burning. In the picture, the wake of a vessel leaves a trail through the surface oil.Photo by © Daniel Beltra/Greenpeace.

Thanks to my friend Cathy for calling the photos of the winners to my attention.

SOMETHING TO THINK ABOUT

From Randomly Funny $tuff on Facebook.

STORY OF THE DAY - STRICT FOLLOWERS

Trying to follow in the footsteps of the
masters, but it's a lot harder than it
looks because even though they had the
same size feet as us, they weren't
looking down the whole time while they
walked to make sure they were doing it
right.

From StoryPeople.

A FEW GOOD WORDS FROM GILES FRASER

From the Church Times:

THE reader will, I hope, excuse me if I do not address the complicated issues that currently beset St Paul’s Cathedral. Suffice to say, when you sit in the middle of a storm, and a great deal of misinformation is flying about, you are thrown back on the fundamentals of your faith.

No one ever said that following Jesus would be easy. In fact, as Christians, we are given fair warn­ing that the opposite is likely to be the case. And so it turns out.

But one of the most interesting things about these challenging times is how scripture comes alive. Indeed, I do not remember the Bible ever speaking to me as vividly as it does today. As the saying goes, I don’t read scripture: scripture reads me.
....

St Paul’s Cathedral takes its name from a man of faith who knew a thing or two about being caught up in an extraordinary whirlwind. May I ask you all to pray for all those who live and work in — and indeed those who are now camped around — this wonderful place? May we all be a beacon of God’s love and mercy in a complicated world.

Having written that sentence, I realise that I have never used a column to ask for prayer. Perhaps, after all, this column is not a clever exercise in issue avoidance. Perhaps for all my years of being a column­ist, it has taken a crisis to show me what I have always wanted to say.

Drawing by Adrian Worsfold who writes at Pluralist Speaks.

H/T to Simon Sarmiento at Thinking Anglicans.

UPDATE: Alan Rusbridger at the Guardian has a wonderful interview with Giles Fraser. No quotes. Just read it all.

ANOTHER SHAME

From Dennis on Facebook:

From my lecture this afternoon: Of all of the nations in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) only three (the US, Mexico and Turkey) lack universal health care. Every other developed nation in the world has it. And Mexico and Turkey are both in the process of implementing universal care. In four years America will be the ONLY country in the developed world without universal care.

Why can't the US, the richest country in the world, implement universal health care?

MR CATOLICK FROM THE STEPS OF ST PAUL'S CATHEDRAL

Brilliant! This may be Mr CatOLick's best video ever.

Should you have any difficulty at all understanding Mr C's every word, please click the link to his website, where he's posted a transcript, along with the video.

MEANWHILE HERE IN THE US - SHAME!

Oakland, California



From the Marine Times:

An uncle of an Iraq War veteran injured when anti-Wall Street protesters clashed with police in Oakland, Calif., said he was appalled by officers’ action.

A hospital spokesman says the 24-year-old veteran and Wisconsin native, Scott Olsen, was upgraded to fair condition and moved into an intensive care unit on Thursday.
Related reading

His uncle, George Nygaard, tells The Associated Press from Wisconsin that Olsen’s parents were heading to California on Thursday morning.

Olsen apparently suffered a fractured skull Tuesday in a march with other protesters toward Oakland City Hall. The demonstrators were trying to re-establish a presence in the area of a disbanded protesters’ camp when they were met by officers.

It’s not known exactly what type of object struck Olsen or who might have thrown it, although the group Iraq Veterans Against the War said officers were responsible for his injury.

Oakland Police Chief Howard Jordan said officials will investigate whether officers used excessive force.

Atlanta, Georgia



My hands are not clean. We own investments. Still, my sympathy lies with the Occupy Wall Street protestors. The injustices are too great to brush away. The disparities in income between the rich and the working poor are too monstrous to ignore. That's not to speak of those who have no work, those who are stuck in part-time jobs, and those who are underemployed.

Why can't the protestors occupy public space and show themselves? None of the people with the power to change the sorry situation are listening. Can they close their eyes, too? Why can't the police let the protestors be, so long as they're peaceful?

"The bank is something more than men, I tell you. It's the monster. Men made it, but they can't control it." John Stinbeck - The Grapes of Wrath

H/T to Counterlight for the videos.