spewed forth

sweet pup in a crowded shelter needs a home now!

wendy — Fri, 22 Jun 2007 19:44:11 GMT

The following information was sent to me in a mass e-mail. I called the shelter and the pup is still there. He is a rescue, but they know nothing more of the situation from which he came. He is neutered: SWEET GUY NEEDS A PERMANENT FAMILY NOW! Merced County Animal Control http://www.petfinder.com/shelters/CA718.html ddulaney@wac.com Shepherd *Mix* Size: Large Age: Young Gender: Male ID: Kennel #3, AO29263 Additional pics: <http://photos.petfinder.com/fotos/CA718/CA718.8354779-1-x.jpg> <http://photos.petfinder.com/fotos/CA718/CA718.8354779-2-x.jpg> <http://photos.petfinder.com/fotos/CA718/CA718.8354779-3-x.jpg> Tod Browning is pretty soft and has a cute flipped tail that wags ALL the time. He walks well on the leash and is an inquisitive sniffer. He is nice, cool and calm and did I mention he has great manners. He *seems* to be fine with cats, but we're not positive. Tod is a friendly boy but he has markings on his face that make him look as if he's worried about something. Maybe he's worried that his special someone won't find him in time. Tod is approximately 1 1/2 years old and about 45 pounds. It is unknown if this dog is good with children or if he is housebroken. You can pay the adoption fee before hen to ensure that this pet will become your family member, if not claimed. ***Due to overcrowding, the shelter will be forced to euthanize this pet very soon*** For GENERAL INFORMATION about this pet, please e-mail ddulaney@wac.com. To check on AVAILABILITY of this pet, you MUST call the shelter at (209) 385-7436. You may get the dispatcher, however just ask him to transfer you to the Shelter (they switch off on the calls). If you can help this dog please call or go to the Merced County Animal Shelter immediately. --Their hours are Mon-Fri 9:30-1:00 2:00-4:30 (closed for lunch from 1-2) and on Sat 10:00-12:00 1:00-3:00. (closed for lunch from 12-1). They are closed Sundays & holidays. -- If you are driving a distance, please call (209) 385-7436 ext 4806, and make sure this pet is still available.

very cool.

wendy — Thu, 13 Oct 2005 16:05:43 GMT

British Playwright Wins Nobel Prize for Literature By TIMOTHY WILLIAMS/NYT Published: October 13, 2005 Harold Pinter, the British playwright known for enigmatic plays such as "The Birthday Party" and "The Homecoming" and a well-known peace activist, was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature today. Mr. Pinter, 75, has also acted, directed, written poetry and written for film, including the screenplay for "The French Lieutenant's Woman," during his long career. Mr. Pinter was treated for cancer of the esophagus in 2002 and has announced that he has retired from writing to focus on working for peace. He is a prominent anti-war activist in Britain, writing frequently in British newspapers about his staunch opposition to the United States-led invasion of Iraq. Mr. Pinter's trademark style is full of tense silences and spare dialogue, and he is among a handful of writers whose name has inspired an adjective: "Pinteresque." His plays, which have been labeled as absurdist, are deeply psychological. His characters speak to each other, but have difficulty truly communicating, and are often unable to finish sentences or express their desires. In awarding the $1.3 million prize, the Swedish Academy said Mr. Pinter "uncovers the precipice under everyday prattle and forces entry into oppression's closed rooms." The citation added, "Pinter restored theater to its basic elements: an enclosed space and unpredictable dialogue, where people are at the mercy of each other and pretense crumbles." Influenced by James Joyce and Samuel Beckett - who became a friend -- Mr. Pinter wrote plays, particularly those during the 1960's, that veer unexpectedly from comedy to examinations of fear and evil. In his early plays, menace lurked just beneath the comedic surface of things - a style that became known as the "comedy of menace." Mr. Pinter was born in London in 1930 to working class Jewish parents and studied at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art and the Central School for Speech and Drama. As a child, he grew up during the Blitz, and he and his family were forced to evacuate London for three years. That experience, he said later, informed his desire to work for peace. As a teenager, he twice refused national military service, and was fined. The Nobel committee has on occasion presented awards with a political tinge, and this is the second Nobel Prize in a week that has gone to an opponent of the Iraq war. Last Friday, the peace prize was awarded to the International Atomic Energy Agency and its head, Mohamed ElBaradei; in the weeks before the 2003 United States invasion, Mr. ElBaradei openly disputed the American contention that Saddam Hussein had rebuilt a nuclear weapons program.After devoting time to poetry and acting, his first play, "The Room", was performed at at Bristol University in 1957. His second play, "The Birthday Party", was generally demeaned by critics, with the exception of Harold Hobson, who was among the most influential theater critics in Britain at the time. Despite Mr. Hobson's praise, the play closed after about a week. When Mr. Pinter achieved commercial success with "The Caretaker" in 1960, "The Birthday Party" enjoyed a second, successful run. The drama takes place in a run-down boarding house near the seaside that has only one resident, a man named Stanley. Later, two men, Goldberg and McCann, arrive at the house and appear intent on possessing Stanley's persona. In the 1970's, Mr. Pinter became outspoken on political issues, especially about human rights violations. In 1985, he and the American playwright Arthur Miller traveled to Turkey. During remarks at a party at the American embassy, Mr. Pinter said he had spoken to Turks who had been the victims of torture by the Turkish government, including having their genitals electrically shocked. Although the party was held in his honor, he was asked to leave the embassy. In recent years, Mr. Pinter criticized the NATO bombing of Kosovo and the American-led invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan.

Simon Wiesenthal Dies at 96

wendy — Tue, 20 Sep 2005 18:27:38 GMT

By RALPH BLUMENTHAL/NYT Published: September 20, 2005 Simon Wiesenthal, the death camp survivor who dedicated the rest of his life to tracking down fugitive Nazi war criminals, died today at his home in Vienna. He was 96. His death was announced by Rabbi Marvin Hier, dean and founder of the Simon Wiesenthal Center in Los Angeles. The Holocaust survivor devoted his life to tracking down Nazi war criminals and fighting anti-Semitism after World War II. After hairbreadth escapes from death, two suicide attempts and his liberation by American forces in Austria in 1945, Mr. Wiesenthal abandoned his profession as an architectural engineer and took on a new calling: memorializing the six million of his fellow Jews and perhaps five million other noncombatants who were systematically murdered by the Nazis, and bringing their killers to justice. His results were checkered: claims that he flushed out nearly 1,100 war criminals were sometimes wrong or disputed. But his role as a stubborn sleuth on the trail of history's archfiends helped keep the spotlight on a hideous past that he said too much of the world was disposed to forget. "To young people here, I am the last," he told an interviewer in Vienna in 1993. "I'm the one who can still speak. After me, it's history." From the cramped three-room office of his Jewish Documentation Center in Vienna, Mr. Wiesenthal spent years collecting and disbursing tips on war criminals through a network of informers, government agents, journalists and even former Nazis. He recounted these efforts in a memoir published in 1967, "The Murderers Among Us," and a second volume, "Justice, Not Vengeance," in 1989. With a grave and tenacious manner, undercurrents of humor and a flair for gaining attention, he was lionized in 1989 in an HBO movie "Murderers Among Us: The Simon Wiesenthal Story," based on his memoirs and starring Ben Kingsley. A character modeled on him was played by Sir Laurence Olivier in the 1978 film "The Boys from Brazil" (though Mr. Wiesenthal was mortified by his depiction as a bumbler). And he served as a consultant for yet another thriller, "The Odessa File." Dozens of nations and institutions honored him: the list of his awards, typed single-space, takes up nearly an entire dense page. But one prize that eluded him, to his great disappointment, was the Nobel Peace Prize. Mr. Wiesenthal, a bulky figure with a clipped mustache who sometimes laughed that people mistakenly saw him as harmless, pressed his searches despite vilification and threats of death and kidnapping made against him, his wife, Cyla, and their daughter, Pauline. In 1982 his house in Vienna was damaged by a firebomb, but he escaped unharmed. (German and Austrian neo-Nazis were charged, and one went to jail.) Yet he rejected entreaties to move, insisting that there was a symbolic purpose in doing his work from a longtime redoubt of Nazism and anti-Semitism where, he once said, his efforts were "unhappily tolerated." Calling himself "the bad conscience of the Nazis," he vowed to continue his efforts "until the day I die." His goal, he said, was not vengeance but ensuring that Nazi crimes "are brought to light so the new generation knows about them, so it should not happen again." It was a matter of pride and satisfaction, he said in 1995, as he approached his 87th birthday, that old Nazis who get into quarrels threaten one another with a vow to go to Simon Wiesenthal. He wrote grippingly of the German killing industry, cataloging a list of property sent to Berlin from the Treblinka death camp between October 1942 and August 1943: "Twenty-five freight cars of women's hair, 248 freight cars of clothing, 100 freight cars of shoes," along with 400,000 gold watches, 145,000 kilograms of gold wedding rings and 4,000 karats of diamonds "over 2 karats." Of the 700,000 people known to have been taken to Treblinka, he wrote in the 1960's, "about 40 are now alive." He suggested that train stations in Europe should get plaques reading: "Between 1942 and 1945 trains passed through here every day with the sole purpose of taking human beings to their annihilation." In recent years he also spoke out in favor of war crimes trials for genocide in the former Yugoslavia, and lent his name to a Holocaust study center and Museum of Tolerance in Los Angeles. http://www.nytimes.com/2005/09/20/international/europe/20cnd-wiesenthal.html?ex=1284868800&en=1c071eb4be5a7ea1&ei=5088&partner=rssnyt&emc=rss http://www.wiesenthal.com/site/pp.asp?c=fwLYKnN8LzH&b=242023

HSUS disaster relief

wendy — Sat, 10 Sep 2005 00:41:49 GMT

https://secure.hsus.org/01/disaster_relief_fund_2005?source=drfhb4

Synthesizer Innovator Robert A. Moog Dies

wendy — Mon, 22 Aug 2005 17:14:56 GMT

Synthesizer Innovator Robert A. Moog Dies By NATALIE GOTT, Associated Press Writer RALEIGH, N.C. - Robert A. Moog, whose self-named synthesizers turned electric currents into sound, revolutionizing music in the 1960s and opening the wave that became electronica, has died. He was 71. Moog died Sunday at his home in Asheville, according to his company's Web site. He had suffered from an inoperable brain tumor, detected in April. A childhood interest in the theremin, one of the first electronic musical instruments, would lead Moog to a create a career and business that tied the name Moog as tightly to synthesizers as the name Les Paul is to electric guitars. Despite traveling in circles that included jet-setting rockers, he always considered himself a technician. "I'm an engineer. I see myself as a toolmaker and the musicians are my customers," he said in 2000. "They use the tools." As a Ph.D. student in engineering physics at Cornell University, Moog — rhymes with vogue — in 1964 developed his first voltage-controlled synthesizer modules with composer Herb Deutsch. By the end of that year, R.A. Moog Co. marketed the first commercial modular synthesizer. The instrument allowed musicians, first in a studio and later on stage, to generate a range of sounds that could mimic nature or seem otherworldly by flipping a switch, twisting a dial, or sliding a knob. Other synthesizers were already on the market in 1964, but Moog's stood out for being small, light and versatile. The arrival of the synthesizer came as just as the Beatles and other musicians started seeking ways to fuse psychedelic-drug experiences with their art. The Beatles used a Moog synthesizer on their 1969 album, "Abbey Road"; a Moog was used to create an eerie sound on the soundtrack to the 1971 film "A Clockwork Orange." Keyboardist Walter (later Wendy) Carlos demonstrated the range of Moog's synthesizer by recording the hit album "Switched-On Bach" in 1968 using only the new instrument instead of an orchestra. Among the other classics using a Moog: the Who's "Won't Get Fooled Again," and Stevie Wonder's urban epic, "Livin' for the City." "Suddenly, there was a whole group of people in the world looking for a new sound in music, and it picked up very quickly," said Deutsch, the Hofstra University emeritus music professor who helped develop the Moog prototype. "The Moog came at the right time," he said Monday. The popularity of the synthesizer and the success of the company named for Moog took off in rock as extended keyboard solos in songs by Manfred Mann, Yes and Pink Floyd became part of the progressive sound of the 1970s. "The sound defined progressive music as we know it," said Keith Emerson, keyboardist for the rock band Emerson, Lake and Palmer. Along with rock, synthesizers developed since Moog's breakthrough helped inspire elements of 1970s funk, hip-hop, and techno. Charles Carlini, a New York City concert promoter, staged Moogfest in May 2004 to mark a half-century since Moog founded his first company while still in college. Emerson, Rick Wakefield of Yes, and Bernie Worrell of Parliament/Funkadelic were among those who played, and a second Moogfest was held a year later. Moog had "this absent-minded professorial way about him," Carlini said. "He's like an Einstein of music," Carlini said. "He sees it like, there's a thought, an idea in the air, and it passes through him. Passing through him, he's able to build these instruments." "A lot of people today don't realize what this man brought to the masses," Carlini said. "He brought electronic music to the masses and changed the way we hear music." But the now-pervasive synthesizer's ability to mimic strings, horns, and percussion has also threatened some musicians. In 2004, musicians extracted a promise from the Opera Company of Brooklyn to never again use an advanced kind of synthesizer, called a virtual orchestra machine, in future productions. Born in 1934 in New York City, Moog paid for his studies at Queens College and Columbia University by building and marketing theremins, which are played by passing the hand through and around vibrating radio tubes. Theremins were used create the spooky "eww-woo-woo" sounds on the soundtracks of science fiction films such as "The Day the Earth Stood Still." He went on to attach his name to a long list of synthesizers developed over the years — among them Micromoog, Minitmoog, Multimoog and Memorymoog. Moog, who had set up shop in suburban Buffalo, N.Y., sold R.A. Moog in 1973 and moved five years later to a remote plot outside Asheville, a scenic Appalachian Mountain city and center for new-age pursuits that Rolling Stone magazine once dubbed "America's new freak capital." A deliberate man with brushed-back white hair and a breast pocket packed with pens, Moog drove an aging Toyota painted with a snail, vines and a fish blowing bubbles. "When I drive that thing around, people smile at me," he said. "I really feel I'm enhancing the environment." He spent the early 1990s as a research professor of music at the University of North Carolina at Asheville before turning full-time to running his new instrument business, which was renamed Moog Music in 2002. The roster of customers includes Nine Inch Nails, Pearl Jam, Beck, Phish, Sonic Youth and Widespread Panic. Moog is survived by his wife, Ileana; his children, Laura Moog Lanier, Matthew Moog, Michelle Moog-Koussa and Renee Moog; a stepdaughter, Miranda Richmond; and his former wife, Shireleigh Moog. A public memorial is scheduled for Wednesday in Asheville. ___ http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20050822/ap_on_en_mu/obit_moog On the Net: Moog Music Inc.: http://www.moogmusic.com/ Moog family Web site: http://www.caringbridge.com/visit/bobmoog/

jazz is the sound of god

wendy — Wed, 15 Jun 2005 03:25:53 GMT

Jazz Is the Sound of God Laughing by Colleen Shaddox All Things Considered, June 13, 2005 ? Jazz is the sound of God laughing. And I believe in it. I came to know jazz as a child, stretched out beneath my uncle's baby grand. I would lie there for hours drawing while Uncle Charlie practiced. I could feel the vibrations go right through me, filling me up with jazz. I felt happier in that room than anywhere on the planet. A lot of that had to do with being admitted to the inner sanctum of my favorite grown-up. But in retrospect, I realize it was also about the music. I believe in the fundamental optimism of jazz. Consider the first four notes of "Rhapsody in Blue." Can you hear it? It's saying, "Something monumental is going to happen. Something that's never happened before. And you are alive to witness it." Jazz is always like that. Even the songs that take you to despair lift you. That’s because the music remembers where it came from, from people kidnapped and enslaved. It came from a humanity that was attacked a thousand different ways every day, but never defeated. It's the People's Music. I remember my uncle's hands on the piano. His fingers always had tiny burns on them, a hazard of his job as a welder. He spent his days at the Brooklyn Navy Yard building the ships that won the Second World War. He spent his nights playing piano and sax for couples who glided and gyrated across the city's polished floors. In jazz, anybody can sit in. It's dogma-free, which allows the music to take more than its share of detours. This forces you to have faith. Faith that if you keep moving forward, you'll get there. As an adult, cancer tested my faith. I was not afraid of dying -- after all, that's only a key change -- but I was terrified of leaving my baby without a mother. Walking in the woods with my son, who by no coincidence bears my uncle's name, I was fighting back tears. Charlie noticed some honeybees and started imitating their sound. All of a sudden, he sang "Buzz, buzz buzz buzz. Buzz." Those are the opening notes of "Green Dolphin Street," a jazz standard that I'd wager few 3-year-olds know. Thankfully, I lived. But even if I hadn't, I learned that day that I could never leave my Charlie, any more than Uncle Charlie had ever left me. The three of us shared a treasure passed through generations. My baby knew jazz, which is the same as knowing that the universe carries us all toward joyful reunions. There are some ugly noises in the universe today. At any given moment, I can turn on my television and watch people trampling over each other to gain the moral high ground. Sometimes, I despair. But on good days, I turn off the television and put on some Oscar Peterson. And I whisper a prayer for America to remember that we are "Green Onions," "String of Pearls," "A Sunday Kind of Love" and "The Dirty Boogie." We are the people of Louis, George, Miles and Wynton. We are the jazz people. We'll get there. I believe it. http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=4683842

the bush administration casts itself as "compassionate"

wendy — Mon, 06 Jun 2005 17:42:17 GMT

yet they continually prove otherwise, and they can't wait to add more of their own to the Supreme Court. just what we need. this is the antithesis of compassion. Court Rules Against Pot for Sick People By GINA HOLLAND, WASHINGTON - Federal authorities may prosecute sick people whose doctors prescribe marijuana to ease pain, the Supreme Court ruled Monday, concluding that state laws don't protect users from a federal ban on the drug. The decision is a stinging defeat for marijuana advocates who had successfully pushed 10 states to allow the drug's use to treat various illnesses. Justice John Paul Stevens, writing the 6-3 decision, said that Congress could change the law to allow medical use of marijuana. The closely watched case was an appeal by the Bush administration in a case involving two seriously ill California women who use marijuana. The court said the prosecution of pot users under the federal Controlled Substances Act was constitutional. "I'm going to have to be prepared to be arrested," said Diane Monson, one of the women involved in the case. Stevens said the court was not passing judgment on the potential medical benefits of marijuana, and he noted "the troubling facts" in the case. Monson's backyard crop of six marijuana plants was seized by federal agents in 2002, although the California law was on Monson's side. In a dissent, Justice Sandra Day O'Connor said that states should be allowed to set their own rules. Under the Constitution, Congress may pass laws regulating a state's economic activity so long as it involves "interstate commerce" that crosses state borders. The California marijuana in question was homegrown, distributed to patients without charge and without crossing state lines. "Our national medical system relies on proven scientific research, not popular opinion. To date, science and research have not determined that smoking marijuana is safe or effective," John Walters, director of National Drug Control Policy, said Monday. Stevens said there are other legal options for patients, "but perhaps even more important than these legal avenues is the democratic process, in which the voices of voters allied with these (California women) may one day be heard in the halls of Congress." California's medical marijuana law, passed by voters in 1996, allows people to grow, smoke or obtain marijuana for medical needs with a doctor's recommendation. Alaska, Colorado, Hawaii, Maine, Montana, Nevada, Oregon, Vermont and Washington state have laws similar to California. In those states, doctors generally can give written or oral recommendations on marijuana to patients with cancer, HIV and other serious illnesses. "The states' core police powers have always included authority to define criminal law and to protect the health, safety, and welfare of their citizens," said O'Connor, who was joined in her dissent by two other states' rights advocates: Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist and Justice Clarence Thomas. The legal question presented a dilemma for the court's conservatives, who have pushed to broaden states' rights in recent years. They earlier invalidated federal laws dealing with gun possession near schools and violence against women on the grounds the activity was too local to justify federal intrusion. O'Connor said she would have opposed California's medical marijuana law if she were a voter or a legislator. But she said the court was overreaching to endorse "making it a federal crime to grow small amounts of marijuana in one's own home for one's own medicinal use." Alan Hopper, an American Civil Liberties Union attorney, said that local and state officers handle 99 percent of marijuana prosecutions and must still follow any state laws that protect patients. "This is probably not going to change a lot for individual medical marijuana patients," he said. The case concerned two Californians, Monson and Angel Raich. The two had sued then-U.S. Attorney General John Ashcroft, asking for a court order letting them smoke, grow or obtain marijuana without fear of arrest, home raids or other intrusion by federal authorities. Raich, an Oakland woman suffering from ailments including scoliosis, a brain tumor, chronic nausea, fatigue and pain, smokes marijuana every few hours. She said she was partly paralyzed until she started smoking pot. Monson, an accountant who lives near Oroville, Calif., has degenerative spine disease and grows her own marijuana plants in her backyard. In the court's main decision, Stevens raised concerns about abuse of marijuana laws. "Our cases have taught us that there are some unscrupulous physicians who overprescribe when it is sufficiently profitable to do so," he said. The case is Gonzales v. Raich, 03-1454.