There was a swan jam on my way to work today — this pair were installed at the retention pond at the rear of our building to discourage a large flock of Canada geese from sticking around all summer, and of course they have a nesting site that their trainer built for them with bales of hay and bits of straw. A large work crew disturbed them today with a big sod-laying project, and both adult swans and their little cygnets took off for freedom. Problem was, they waddled all the way to the end of the parking lot and…
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EpiscopalOnline.org | Welcome This would make a good gift for Bob, who will probably be running the Stewardship campaign at Holy Moly. It’s “Episcopoly.” Heh.
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This continues to be the dirty little story that keeps bubbling away under the surface of the Anglican Communion in Africa. Zimbabwejournalists.com: MUGABE, THE ANGLICAN CHURCH AND THE “ILLEGAL SANCTIONS The drive to sanitise the offensive regime of Robert Mugabe has sucked in the Church, with the Anglican Church being the most high profile to have openly expressed views that chime with the daily propaganda that is churned out of the government controlled media. The Pastoral Letter of its Bishops released after the Episcopal Synod in April demonstrates how pliant and subjugated the Anglican Church has become to the regime…
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 Well, there’s a familiar name: the “bad bishop of Harare” has also not received an invitation to Lambeth, along with another politically tricky bishop from the Southern Cone who is allied with the regressive, repressive wing of the Anglican Communion. Apparently “contumacy” is a form of stubborn unrepentant behavior, or contempt of rules or church canon maybe, and I expect it’s related to a word I know from Shakespeare, “contumely,” which currently means “abusive language.” “Invitations to the 2008 conference have been mailed to over 800 bishops by the Conference’s host, the Archbishop of Canterbury Dr Rowan Williams. Invitations to…
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I’ve been frustrated by my inability to post the occasional bit of flash or video using WordPress – the software is coded to be pretty strict about XHTML niceties, and the method for embedding anything involves a tedious routine: turn off the rich text editor, hand-code the embedded stuff or figure out the built-in but n00b-unfriendly custom fields, publish, and turn the rich text editor back on (which is a process in itself, as unless you’re a good WP codehax0r, you have to uncheck a little box buried in your user profile). So: here’s that weird Flash video showing how…
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Via The Lead: The Times of London reports on a recent conversation with the former archbishop: “What is sad to me is that we are investing so much time and energy in the subject of homosexuality at a time when the world is groaning from poverty, disease and corruption. God must be weeping.†Just as he opposed discrimination against people because of the colour of their skin or their gender, he said he opposes discrimination against gays. “I cannot have fought about the injustice of apartheid and keep quiet about the injustice of being being penalised for something about which…
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Destination Creation» Blog Archive » Reality Simpsons: The Family They all look like my cow-orkers. Really. Lisa looks just like this woman from another team who pretty much smiles like that constantly, although her hair isn’t spiky. Bart looks… disturbingly like someone who’s been on my team before and has bounced to and from several other teams – too smart for his own good, he gets bored and likes change. Even Maggie looks like someone, although the person I have in mind is a lot older and a LOT more talkative. Marge looks like Lisa, but also resembles the one…
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Chicago Tribune | The Watcher “It was more of a trip for Ziva than for Cote,” the actress said of her character on “NCIS,” which has its fourth-season finale 7 p.m. Tuesday, Ch. 2. “It absolutely informed my insights into her soul.” That’s pretty cool! Actress Cote de Pablo, who plays Israeli former Mossad agent Ziva David on NCIS, just got back from a tour of Israel – apparently someone in the Israeli tourism department likes the show and put it together for her. One of the commenters at Maureen Ryan’s “The Watcher” blog said simply ” <3 Ziva ”…
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Chicago Tribune | The Chicago Gardener Chicago and the surrounding suburbs are going a little crazy waiting for the 17-year cicadas to emerge. I’ve lived here 11 years, and apparently the noisy buggers that annoy the shit out of me every summer are nothing compared to the much larger swarms of noisy buggers that emerge on the 17-year cycle. As I was leaving work, there was a “puff” piece on the local news with a lady newscaster and a whole bunch of schoolkids dressed up in pink construction paper cicada hats. They were all mighty disappointed, because the cicadas failed…
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My husband David and I spend most evenings in front of the television, and I’ve blogged before about what we watch. Our watch list includes a lot of criminal investigative shows, and yes, we watch all three CSI shows – the original set in Las Vegas, the one set in Miami, and the one set in New York. These three shows have a definite hierarchy in our viewing habits and in our attitudes toward them; we like and respect the original show, we diss the Miami one but watch it anyway, and we like and respect the New York outing.…