New-born albino Pygmy Marmoset (Reuters)Updated: …

New-born albino Pygmy Marmoset
(Reuters)Updated: 2006-08-25 23:08

Rare newborn albino Pygmy Marmoset monkeys perch on a zookeeper’s fingers at Froso Zoo in Ostersund, Sweden August 22, 2006. The Pygmy Marmoset, which lives in the upper Amazon basin in South America, is the world’s smallest monkey and reaches 35 cm (13.7 inches) in length and weighs up to 100 grams (3.5 ounces) at maturity.

Picture taken August 22, 2006. [Reuters]

MIRACLE IS SUNK

30 August 2006
MIRACLE IS SUNK

A PRIEST has died after trying to demonstrate how Jesus walked on water.
Evangelist preacher Franck Kabele, 35, told his congregation he could repeat the biblical miracle. But he drowned after walking out to sea from a beach in the capital Libreville in Gabon, west Africa. One eyewitness said: “He told churchgoers he’d had a revelation that if he had enough faith, he could walk on water like Jesus. “He took his congregation to the beach saying he would walk across the Komo estuary, which takes 20 minutes by boat. “He walked into the water, which soon passed over his head and he never came back.”

Wal-Mart kills prairie dog colony on site

Wal-Mart kills prairie dog colony on site
Daily Camera

Construction started this week on a Wal-Mart Supercenter along U.S. 287, and some local residents are unhappy with the company’s decision to kill a small prairie dog colony on the site. Earlier this year, Boulder County asked Wal-Mart to contribute to local land preservation to offset the impact its new store will have on local prairie habitat. Additionally, one local resident offered to help the company relocate the animals to city open space. The company rejected both offers and fumigated the colony after researching relocation and other options.

Oil CEO’s pay averaged $32.7m in 05

Oil CEO’s pay averaged $32.7m in 05
Bloomberg

Rising prices and profits translated into pay packages for oil company chief executive officers that are nearly three times the size of similarly sized businesses, a new study from two watchdog groups said. In 2005, the CEOs of the largest 15 oil companies averaged $32.7 million in compensation, compared with $11.6 million for all large U.S. firms, according to the study, released today by the Institute for Policy Studies and United for a Fair Economy.

State Farm Shredded Documents to Avoid Paying Katr…

State Farm Shredded Documents to Avoid Paying Katrina Victims
Exclusive: Whistleblowers Say State Farm Shredded Documents to Avoid Paying Katrina Victims, Allegations of Massive Fraud
August 25, 2006 11:53 AM
Brian Ross and Joseph Rhee Report:The Blotter

The Nature of Change

Part of yogic philosophy is the idea of “detachment.” This means that, instead of hanging on desperately to people, activities, or objects, we should learn how to flow with the current of life and recognize that change is the only constant.

“As the Buddha said, impermanence is the nature of the human condition,” according to yoga teacher Judith Hanson Lasater. “This is a truth we know in our minds but tend to resist in our hearts. Change happens all around us, all the time, yet we long for the predictable, the consistent. We want the reassurance that comes from things remaining the same. We find ourselves shocked when people die, even though death is the most predictable part of life.”
So the next time you notice that you are grasping onto something in your life, ask yourself what it would feel like to appreciate that thing fully while at the same time being prepared, when the time comes, to let it go.

Warrior of the Light

The Warrior of Light and strategy

A sword can last a short time, but the warrior has to last a long time. That is why he must not let himself be fooled by his own capacity and so be taken by surprise. To each thing he gives the true value that it deserves. Often, when he is faced with serious matters, the devil whispers in his ear: “Do not bother about that, that’s not serious.” Other times, when he is faced with trivial matters, the devil whispers: “You need to spend all your energy on solving this situation.” The warrior does not listen to what the devil is saying. He is the master of his sword.
Pay attention to your allies
A warrior does not associate with anyone who wishes him harm. Nor is he seen in the company of those who want to “console” him. He avoids whoever is only at his side in moments of defeat. These false friends want to prove that weakness has its rewards. They always bear bad news. They always try to destroy the warrior’s trust, under the disguise of “solidarity”. When they see him injured they break into tears, but deep in their hearts they are happy because the warrior has lost a battle. They fail to understand that this is a part of combat. A warrior’s true companions are at his side at each and every moment, in times both difficult and easy.
Negotiating with the enemy
When the moment of combat draws near, the Warrior of Light is prepared for any circumstance. He analyzes each possibility and asks himself: “What would I do if I had to fight against myself?” This is how he discovers his weak points. At this moment the adversary approaches, carrying a bag filled with promises, agreements and negotiations. He has tempting proposals and easy alternatives to offer. The warrior analyzes each of these proposals; he also seeks an agreement, but without losing his dignity. If he avoids combat, it is not because he was seduced – but rather because he decided that this was the best strategy. A Warrior of Light does not accept presents from the enemy.
On the defense and on the attack
The warrior is careful with people who think they can control the world, determine their own steps, and are certain that they know the right path. They are always so confident in their own capacity of decision that they do not realize the irony with which fate writes everyone’s life. The Warrior of Light has dreams. His dreams carry him forward. But he never commits the mistake of thinking that the road is easy and the door wide. He knows that the Universe works like alchemy: solve et coagula, say the masters. ”Concentrate and disperse your energy according to the situation.” There are moments to act and moments to accept.
In the face of defeat
The Warrior of Light knows how to lose. He does not hold defeat as something indifferent, using phrases like “well, it wasn’t all that important”, or “to tell the truth, I did not really want that”. He accepts defeat as a defeat; he does not try to change it into a victory or an experience. He suffers the pain of his wounds, the indifference of his friends and the loneliness of loss. At such moments he says to himself: “I fought for something, and I failed to get it. I lost the first battle.” This phrase will give him strength. He is aware that nobody wins all the time – but the courageous always win in the end.

Tom Waits Way With Words…

Some of the reasons I like the main Rain Dog…

• “…Never could stand that dog…”
• “I’d rather have a bottle in front of me than a frontal lobotomy.”
• “I don’t have a drinking problem ‘Cept when I can’t get a drink.”
• “I was born in the back seat of a Yellow Cab in a hospital loading zone and with the meter still running. I emerged needing a shave and shouted ‘Time Square, and step on it!’”
• “It’s colder than a ticket taker’s smile at the Ivar theater on a Saturday night.”
• “Colder than a jewish american princess on her honeymoon”
• “Colder than a well digger’s ass”
• “I knew him when he was nothing and he hasn’t changed a bit”
• “…it seems a stray bullet actually pierced the testicle of a Union soldier and lodged itself in the ovaries of a woman standing approximately 100 ft. away. She’s alright, the baby’s doing fine…ofcourse the soldier’s a little pissed off…”
• “…You end up taking advantage of yourself. There ain’t no way around that.”
• “I’m so goddamn horny the crack of dawn better watch itself around me.”
• “Coleen’s belly was shakin’ like jelly And I’m gettin’ harder than Chinese algebra.”
• “Oh I don’t mind going to weddings, just as long as it’s not my own…”
• “And i’m glad that you’re gone, but i wish to the lord that you’d come home”
• “It walks down to end of the counter (His Veal Cutlet) and beat the shit out of my cup of coffee. I guess the coffee just wasn’t strong enough to defend itself.”
• “Veal cutlet came down…started beatin’ the shit outa my cuppa coffee…coffee just wasn’t strong enough to defend itself….”
• “I’m not weird about it or anything (Masturbating in this instance). I don’t tie myself up first or anything.”
• “All the donuts have names that sound like prostitutes”
• “Let me fall out of the window with confetti in my hair” Deal out jacks are better on a blanket by the stairs, I’d tell you all my secrets but I’ll lie about my past, So send me off to bed forevermore.”
• “The large print giveth, and the small print taketh away”
• “It was a hubba, hubba, ding dang, baby you are just everythang. A week later it’s a hubba, hubba, ding dong, baby sure didn’t last too long.”
• “Never trust a man in a blue trench coat, never drive a car when you’re dead”
• “There’s a world going on underground”
• “There ain’t no devil, there’s just god when he’s drunk”
• “I want to thank you all for being here tonight; it’d be mighty strange here tonight if nobody showed up.”
• “And I hope that I don’t fall in love with you”
• “Wake me up in my dreams.”
• “It takes much more than just wild courage Or you’ll hit just the tattered clouds you must have just the right bullets And the first one’s always free”
• “Theres a golden moon that shines up through the mist And I know that your name can be on that list Theres no eye for an eye theres no tooth for a tooth I saw Judas Iscariot carrying John Wilkes Booth He was down there by the train.”
• “The sky turned black and bruised and we had months of heavy rain.”
• “If you’ve lost all hope/If you’ve lost all your faith I know you can be cared for/I know you can be safe And all of the shamefuls/And all of the whores And even the soldier who pierced the side of the Lord Is down there by the train.”
• “I always wondered how Tom Waits would sing Greensleeves….” –Loreena McKennitt, _The Visit_ (liner notes for Greensleeves)
• “Pour me a cab, I just can’t drink no more.”
• “Broken umbrellas like dead birds; steam comes out of the grill like the whole God-damn town is ready to blow.”
• “…If you want a taste of madness, you’ll have to wait in line. You’ll probably see someone you know on Heartattack and Vine.”
• “And the moon’s teeth-marks are on the sky, Like a tarp thrown all over this.”
• “The cat’ll sleep in the mailbox and we’ll never go to town, till we bury every dream in the cold cold ground.”
• “Crawlin’ down Cahuenga on a broken set of legs…”
• “And it is such a sad old feeling, All the fields are soft and green. And it’s memories that I’m stealing, But you’re innocent when you dream.”
• “And the ambulance drivers don’t give a shit, they just want to get off work.”
• “..the quality goes in before the name goes on..”
• “The piano is fire wood, Times Square is a dream”
• “Won’t you tell me, brave captain why are the wicked, so strong, how can the angels get to sleep when the devil leaves his porch light on.”
• “I know a girl, she been married so many times, she got rice marks all over her face”
• “Oh, you call yourself up too, eh? A heh heh heh”
• “Why don’t you have another swig and pass that car if you’re so brave i wanna get there before the sun comes up in burma shave”
• “Well, I don’t mind working cause I used to be jerking off most of the time, in bars”
• “I lost my st. christopher now that i’ve kissed her”
• “Planes and trains and boats and busses characteristically evoke a common attitude of blue unless you have a suitcase and a ticket and a passport and the cargo that they’re carrying is you”
• “The light man’s blind in one eye and he can’t see out of the other”
• “I’m reliable sources, I’ll tell ya anything you want me to know.”
• “My friends think I’m ugly, I gotta masculine face.”
• “Oh yeah, I remember my first beer.” (to a waitress dropping a tray of drinks)
• “In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king.”
• “He’s a lawyer, he ain’t the one for ya.”
• “And when they pulled her from the wreck, you know she still had on her shades.”
• “It’s harder to get rid off than tatoos”
• “I don’t need no make-up, i got real scars, i got hair on my chest, i look good without a shirt”
• “There’s a place down the street; Seven Xs. What does that mean? Maybe it’s… girls without skin.”
• “‘Cause there’s nothin strange About an axe with bloodstains in the barn. There’s always some killin’ You got to do around the farm.”
• “Don’t plant your days they turn into weeds”
• “Theres nothing woung with her that a hundred Dollers can’t Fix”
• “… while making feet for children’s shoes …”
• “They take apart their nightmares and they leave ‘em by the door.”
• “They all come from nice families, but somewhere along the line they picked up ways that just aren’t RIGHT.”
• “I ain’t king of anything”
• “and the things you can’t remember tell the things you can’t forget that history puts a saint in every dream”
• “You can tell me that it’s gospel but I know that it’s only church”
• “Matilda asks the sailors `are those dreams or are those prayers?’”
• “Small-time Napoleon’s shattered his knees, but he stays in the saddle for a rose and all his desciples, they shave in the gutter and they gather what’s left of his clothes”
• “I’ve got a bottle for a trumpet, a hatbox for a drum…”
• “Driving dangerous women over dirty sheets”
• “The Moon ain’t romantic. It’s intimaditing as Hell”
• “I did my time in the jail of your arms”
• “She used to have a sugar daddy and a candy-apple caddy. A bank account and everything,accustomed to the finer things.”
• “And I floated down stream on an old dead tree”
• “Cross my wooden leg, swear on my glass eye”
• “Drivin’ dangerous curves across the dirty sheets”
• “She was sharp as a razor and soft as a prayer”
• “The boys just dive right off the cars, and splash into the street”
• “And the earth died screaming As I lay dreaming”
• “It’s new, it’s improved, it’s old fashioned”
• “Yeah, and I was using parking meters as walking sticks!”
• “The moon was sharp enough to draw blood from a stone”
• “One look in his eyes… and everyone denies… ever having met him.”
• “Even jesus wanted just a little more time, when he was walkin’ spanish down the hall”
• “The rooms, they smell like diesel, and you take on the dreams of the ones that have slept there”
• “The moon is sharp enough to draw blood from a stone”
• “I’ll take a rusty nail, scratch your initials in my arm…”
• “This ain’t a purchase, it’s a rental and it’s purgatory… now what’s your story, well I don’t even care… I’ve got my own double-cross to bear”
• “I thought I heard a saxophone, I’m drunk on the moon”
• “Romeo is bleeding, but not so as you’d notice”
• “Broadway’s like a serpent spewing shiny top-down cars”
• “I climb through the window and down to the street.. I’m shining like a new dime. The downtown trains are full… full of all those Brooklyn girls. They try so hard to break out of their little world… You wave your hand and they scatter like crows…”
• “We’re going out of business! We’ll give you the business! Get on the business end of our Going out of business sale…”
• “Makin’ the scene wirth a magazine – there ain’t no way around that”
• “Such a crumbling beauty. Ah, there’s nothing wrong with her that a hundred dollars wouldn’t fix.”
• “I stay in a place called ‘Rooms’… There’s a whole chain of them.”
• “I’ve lost my equilibrium, my car keys and my pride.”
• “It’s hard to believe that the same moon shining down on this chinatown fair could shine down on illinois and find you there… I love you baby”
• “Tom do this, Tom do that, Tom…don’t do that”
• “Uncle Verlin, Uncle Verlin, independent as a hog on ice. He’s a big shot down there at the slaughterhouse, plays accordian for Mr. Weiss.”
• “I’m gonna make like a bakery delivery truck and haul buns.”
• “I need to borrow money to pay this lawyer, Johnny hey. I’ll be eligible for parole come Valentine’s Day.”
• “I’ll ride upon a field mouse, I was dancin’ in the slaughterhouse.”
• “I’d like to go drowning, but the ocean doesn’t want me today.”
• “It ain’t no sin to take off your skin, and dance around in your bones.”
• “The monkey rode a blade on an overhead fan.”
• “Will you sell me one of those if I shave my head.”
• “…and I’m standing on the corner of Fifth and Vermouth.”
• “…using parking meters as walking sticks.”
• “Licorice tattoo turned a gun metal blue scrawled across the shoulders of a dying town The one eyed jacks across the railroad tracks and the scar on its belly pulled a stranger passing through…”
• “Well I fell in love with a Gun Street Girl!”
• “Blew a hole in the hood of a yellow corvette”
• “…Well I hear that it pays well How do your pistol and your Bible and your sleeping pills go?”
• “Eddie Grace’s Buick’s got four bullet holes in the side.”
• “Well pale face said to the eyeball kid She just goes clank and boom and steam”

Thousands of New Orleanians will see the premiere of Spike Lee’s Hurricane Katrina documentary tonight.

Thousands of New Orleanians will see the premiere of Spike Lee’s Hurricane Katrina documentary tonight. T-P television critic Dave Walker got a sneak preview, and here’s what he thinks.

Wednesday, August 16, 2006
Dave Walker

The word other critics likely will use most to describe Spike Lee’s Hurricane Katrina documentary for HBO is “wrenching.”

My word is “unfinished,” even at four hours.

“When the Levees Broke: A Requiem in Four Acts” locks in on the black Katrina experience, which should not come as a surprise to anybody who knows Lee’s filmmaking career.

As such, “Levees” tells only half the story. Or, rather, 67.3 percent of it.

Frequently brilliantly, but still.

The tragic story of black New Orleans trapped in Katrina’s path has found a supreme chronicler, but the flooded-out residents of Lakeview or Old Metairie who attend tonight’s sold-out premiere at New Orleans Arena will spend all night sitting on a hard plastic chair and then wonder: Where am I in this?

Perhaps they’ll be coming attractions. Lee has said he’d like to make “Levees” the first installment of a series of films about the ongoing battle to save New Orleans.

“Depending how this ends up, I would like to go back (and see) how the city ends up and not let this be the final statement on the Crescent City,” Lee told TV critics last month in Los Angeles.

Those who were here know that, in virtually every way, Katrina was an indiscriminate storm that killed and destroyed without regard to ethnicity or economic condition. That is not the impression that the nation received watching coverage of the immediate aftermath of the storm, nor the one viewers will take away from Lee’s documentary.

In one of his future installments, perhaps, will be the stories of Lakeview families whose losses were every bit as tragic as the stories told so movingly in this film.

Or the similar stories of the Asian families in eastern New Orleans, the Central American workers literally putting roofs over our heads again, the doctors and nurses who risked their lives to stay with patients in drowned hospitals, the tourists who suffered alongside locals in the Superdome and Ernest N. Morial Convention Center.

Four hours seems like a down payment.

As it is, Lee’s epic-length film has a few significant flaws but packs an overall impact that will move anyone who invests the time to see it through.

It’s not an easy task. Sadness and anger are the film’s relentless themes, a sign of the project’s emotional veracity.

For the next few weeks, we’re counting on TV retrospectives just like this to tell and retell our story to the world.

Political ramifications

On that count, Lee picks his villains well. The Army Corps of Engineers and the Federal Emergency Management Agency are, in order, the bad guys in this catastrophe. To a lesser extent, the local, regional and national politicians who made this mess and then failed to save their fellow Americans from it also take ire.

I’ll let others parse the political impact of “When the Levees Broke,” but not without sharing this nugget from one habitually quotable politician: New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin good-naturedly describes Air Force One as a “pimpmobile.”

For those who can’t make tonight’s screening, HBO will premiere the film in two parts Monday and Tuesday at 8 p.m. All four hours will air in sequence on Aug. 29 at 7 p.m.

Act One watches the storm’s approach and landfall, then the levee failures. Act Two is immediate aftermath. Act Three begins with the rescue diaspora, then circles back to catch up on some of the cultural history that makes the dispersal such an ongoing tragedy. Act Four examines recovery problems (FEMA, insurance companies) and solutions (wetlands restoration, improved levee protection).

The film is framed by Louis Armstrong’s “Do You Know What it Means to Miss New Orleans?” at the beginning and a concluding second-line rendition of “I’ll Fly Away.”

The overall structure is chronological, but Lee takes jogs in time to make editorial points.

The filmmaker is occasionally heard asking off-camera questions, but there is no narrator, just the voices of various witnesses both well-known and not.

Of them, standouts include Herbert Freeman Jr., whose mother died in a wheelchair outside the convention center; author Michael Eric Dyson, who is ruthless in recounting Condoleezza Rice’s New York City shoe-shopping-and-evening-at-the-theater getaway while Ethel Freeman sat dying in the heat; and WWL talk radio host Garland Robinette, whose emotions still roil a full year after he narrated Katrina’s deadly fly-by live on the air.

Adding a light touch

Phyllis Montana LeBlanc, once of eastern New Orleans and now a FEMA trailer resident, is the personification of her city’s eternal secret weapon in the face of despair: humor.

Recounting her survival year, she’s profane and prosecutorial, as much of a thread throughout the movie as Terence Blanchard’s deep-blue score.

A New Orleans native and frequent Lee collaborator, Blanchard himself takes an on-camera role in the third act, acting as his mother’s guide on her first trip back to her ruined Gentilly home.

A similar sequence in the last act shows actor Wendell Pierce, star of HBO’s “The Wire” and another favorite son succeeding so triumphantly in the wider world of the arts, retelling the devastation to his father’s Pontchartrain Park home, but also the subsequent and related damage done to his father’s soul by a heartless insurance company.

The heart of Act One is a sequence in which schoolboy Glenn Hall III plays “St. James Infirmary” on his horn to accompany footage of people wading out of their neighborhoods, then Wynton Marsalis sings it.

Act Two ends with a haunting montage of floating bodies, which you hope could be the film’s lowest mood trough.

Then comes the drowned child’s funeral that concludes Act Three.

“Wrenching” is right, in other words.

Letting rumors fly

But the film’s most troubling passage has been anticipated since HBO announced that Lee would make it.

Early in the opening act, several witnesses swear they heard explosions before the Florida Avenue breach.

Refutations are made in follow-up sound bites, but the overall takeaway is that intentional levee destruction might’ve, could’ve, probably happened.

For both Katrina and Betsy.

There is value in exploring how such impressions are made and last, but absent any real evidence beyond inexpert testimony — and there is no evidence introduced in the film — such notions must be presented as folklore and nothing more.

Here, they’re presented as likely fact, in a confusing sequence of quotes and clips that mix references to Katrina and Betsy with the one time there actually was an intentional levee destruction, during the Mississippi River flood of 1927. That breach inundated St. Bernard Parish.

“During Hurricane Betsy, there were rumors, and it became almost an article of faith with people in the community that the 9th Ward flooded because there was an intentional breach of the levees,” former New Orleans Mayor Marc Morial says to Lee’s camera. “It was never investigated. It was neither proven nor disproven. In this case, for the government and others to sort of dismiss it without looking into all of it is not doing the people or the public a service.”

In this context, the same could be said for statements just like that.

Morial is a frequently recurring character in early parts of this film, and his righteous indignation at how seared he was by watching his fellow New Orleanians suffer in the toxic water is leavened by the fact that he had eight years to plan and practice an evacuation that might’ve better served his city.

Later, a pastor from New York states as fact that “a master plan” has been put in place by “Trump land-grabbers” to “bulldoze down the 9th Ward.”

A quote from Nagin denying that possibility comes just a few seconds after, but again, someone is allowed to make an explosive charge for which no evidence is evident.

In a flash-forward at the very opening of the story, while Katrina still spins in the Gulf, Lee jumps to a December congressional hearing at which Nagin says, “We come to you with facts.”

It’s intended as a setup device for the four hours to come, and it’s largely backed up thereafter.

But the allies of New Orleans’ enemies will obsess over the few sequences that forgo known facts, allowing them to too easily overlook the sweetness and sadness in Wendell Pierce’s eyes when he talks about how his father paid insurance on that little house for 50 years and got nothing.

Awful anniversary

Among just a few other lapses, the levee section of “Levees” diminishes what could’ve been a profoundly compelling history of the most scarring unnatural disaster in recent American history.

Still, millions will watch and be hurt and angered, again, by what happened here and at points elsewhere on Katrina’s track.

And that’s a good thing, because here at K+1, New Orleans needs all of the sympathetic and accurately informed allies it can get.

. . . . . . .

TV columnist Dave Walker can be reached at dwalker@timespicayune.com or (504) 826-3429.

Tom Waits @ Akron Civic Theater, August 13, 2006

I was one of 2500 lucky ticket holders to see the first Tom Waits show in NE Ohio in 20 years. Whoo hoo! I’ve been a long time fan of the dark carnival music of Tom Waits and to see the man perform his mojo live was something I couldn’t pass up.

The Civic Theater is a beautiful old gaudy place that is only about 3 miles from my house. My back problems have been giving me serious grief for the past few weeks so I was heavily medicated at 7:30 pm when I realized I needed so scoot out for the show.

The two hour show was spectacular and I think the medication gave a surreal show, and even more surreal edge. I drifted in and out of the music and the mojo, never quite sure if what I was seeing was actually happening or not.

At the end…I just knew I was smiling from ear to ear and humming “Blue Melody” all the three miles back to my abode.