The Cruz de Ferra, surrounded by an ancient mound of stones left by pilgrims, is one of the marvels to be found along the Camino de Santiago in northwestern Spain. Photo by Alastair Bland.
Category Archives: News
Quote of the Day
“My consultants agree that the incidents meet all of our definitions, based on experience and education, of a likely pedophile’s pattern of building trust and gradual introduction of physical touch, within a context of a ‘loving,’ ‘special’ relationship.”
– Alycia Chambers, a psychologist, in a report to Penn State University police about Jerry Sandusky in 1998.
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Cartoon of the Day
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Picture of the Day
A gray wolf rests at Wolf Haven International, a wolf sanctuary in Washington State.
Since 1982, Wolf Haven International, a non-profit organization headquartered in Tenino, WA has focused on wolves; providing education about the animals and operating as a sanctuary for captive-born wolves. The gray wolf once was common throughout North America, but had been driven nearly to extinction by the 1930’s. Conservation efforts, including reintroduction to Yellowstone National Park in 1995, have led to an increase in their numbers.
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Quote of the Day
“We cannot afford to lose the Medicaid funding for low-income women to have health care services. We can’t keep turning back federal funds that every state gets and then try to find money in our budget, which is already being cut in key areas like education.”
— Republican U.S. Senator Kay Bailey Hutchison, R-Texas, criticizing Gov. Rick Perry for his war on women’s preventive care.
I don’t have much regard for Bailey Hutchison, but I’m glad that – although she’s a token female in the White male-dominated Republican hierarchy – she has the decency to turn her back on the patriarchal decision by the state of Texas to control women’s health care.
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Behind the Story of ‘Here is Berlin’
“Here is Berlin” is J.M. Stim’s extensive essay on the German capital, a city that has always been an entity unto itself, a magical, enigmatic metropolis like Paris or New York, where someone can disappear and metamorphose into a completely different persona. Stim modeled “Here is Berlin” on E.B. White’s “Here is New York” and had a tough time getting it published. He had consulted with 6 prominent European publishers in 2011, only one of whom expressed any interest in his work. Stim knows a few things about publishing. He’s founder and former publisher of Datum, a political and literary monthly in Vienna. He’d already put out one book with an established publisher, but after dealing with the rejection of “Here is Berlin,” he did what many writers are doing these days: he published the book himself. And, as many writers have experienced, it turned out better for him. “Here is Berlin” already has been published in 3 languages. Stim has relocated to the United States and, in this editorial, describes his newest adventures with trying to find an intellectual audience amidst a readership that seems to crave voluptuous vampires.
Quote of the Day
“He was completely cut off from reality.”
– Christian Etelin, about Mohammed Merah, a suspected Al-Qaeda-trained militant who was wanted by French police in the killings of a rabbi and 3 children at a Jewish school in Toulouse and 3 French paratroopers on March 11. Etelin is a lawyer who represented Merah in an incident earlier this year involving a traffic accident. Merah died in a hail of gunfire Thursday in Toulouse.
I know it doesn’t bring any real justice for the victims, but considering that France doesn’t have the death penalty – even for the most mentally deranged – this spares the families the pain of a long, politically-correct trial.
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Pollen Counts Exploding
For those of us who suffer from seasonal allergies, this year is turning out to be one of the worst. I thought it was just the Dallas / Fort Worth metropolitan area, due mainly to the severe Texas drought, but this mess is nationwide. The South and Midwest are particularly hard-hit. Pollen counts in individual counties are setting records. A clinic at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, for example, measured 11,000 grains of pollen per cubic meter this past Tuesday, the worst they’ve seen. Normal pollen counts for this time of year don’t exceed 2,000 grains per cubic meter. Aside from the past year’s drought here in Texas (which is starting to diminish for most of the state), an unusually warm winter is exacerbating the pollen explosion. Yes, it snows in Texas! We used to get heavy snow and ice every year in the DFW area. But, within the past 20 years, I’ve noticed a considerable decline in cold weather days. We haven’t had snow in DFW since February 2011. This doesn’t bode well for summer, and I don’t want to get into a climate-warming debate. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have to soak my burning eyes in Visine again.
