I was uploading a video to YouTube today and it didn't stop uploading after about an hour and a half. I decided to delete it and start over. In the process, I seem to have deleted all the videos I have ever posted there. If you try to watch any of my YouTube videos that are posted on this blog, you won't be able to until I have uploaded them and edited the links. I apologize profusely.  YouTube does not have any undelete function for videos, assuming, I guess, that all its customers are perfect (except me) :)

Here is the (atypical video I was in the process of posting when it all went terribly wrong.

A young friend made this rap video at Pendle Hill, a Quaker retreat center in Pennsylvania, and it includes some folks associated with my Quaker Meeting in New Hampshire. The words talk about how the Quaker emphasis on direct experience puts it outside what is traditionally thought of as Christianity, but in direct relationship to the Christ spirit. Besides that... it's Fun!



Our Meeting (monadnockfriends.org) is having a series of events called Quaker Quest this month, which is aimed at getting the word out about Quakers. Please feel free to drop by, physically or via the Web.

Some cousins visited us this week, and we unearthed a few treasures of family history. It has long been a family story that my father held the record for the ascent of fourteen-thousand-foot Longs Peak in the Colorado Rockies. Now we have some concrete evidence in the form of a contemporary article from  Colorado newspaper. At the time, he had dropped out of college and gone to live in the wild, working as a winter watchman for remote mountain properties.

The violent suppression of a peace rally last week in Rochester, NY, which can be seen at
http://therealnews.com/t/index.php?option=com_seyret&Itemid=91&task=videodirectlink&id=4702

and the use of military sonic weapons at the Pittsburgh protests against the G20 meeting a few weeks ago have me wondering why the police seem so intent on intimidating dissenters at this point in history. What was the difference between the peaceful and un-police-molested  demonstation in Boston last week (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VF2qn9qFusQ) and the other two?

My guess is that the participants in the demonstrations that were attacked were all young, and that those demonstrations included people dressed in clothing and carrying banners that indicated support for anarchist ideals, while the Boston gathering included a mixture of generations and clothing styles. My friends in the Boston IWW branch noticed a distinct absence of the "black bloc" which has been prominent in previous peace marches there.

Do the police have orders to scare the wits out of emotionally vulnerable young people and get them to conform and support only "moderate" causes in the future? It would be reasonable to assume that anyone my age who participates in a demonstration is not going to be scared into staying away, but that young people are more susceptible to intimidation. Is it some kind of demographic trend that fewer Boston young people are acting black-blockish; are teenagers just no longer seeing the point in that style of confrontation and thirty-somethings mellowing politically? (if so, why are teenagers in Rochester still doing it?)  Is it a conscious decision on the part of some youthful social justice groups to stay out of coalitions with moderates because they blunt the effectiveness of radical causes? Or is it the result of effective police intimidation in the past?

The University where I work has adopted  smart-card technology to solve a number of problems cheaply and reduce staffing costs. My ID card opens selected doors, lets me into certain faculty parking lots, gets me into classes and even buys me a cup of coffee (with my own money). But there's one major disadvantage to it: Every month or so it just stops working. To get it working again I have to telephone the card-services office and often have to physically show up at the office and have the card reprogrammed. The office is open a certain number of hours each weekday, but often there is only one person handling walk-in customers and telephones. The card died this morning...

Fortunately, my car is just narrow enough to squeeze past the lift-gate at the entrance to the parking lot, otherwise I would have had to pay 25 cents an hour at a commercial lot and sneak out to feeed the meter every four hours,  or risk getting a $20 ticket for parking in a reserved-for-neighborhood-residents on-street spot. At the radio station studio, I was thankful to be let in by one of the co-hosts, even though it meant interrupting an intriguing discussion of the history of zombies. I tried calling the card services office and was on hold three times for as much as a half hour. Finally, after lunch I got through to the lone woman in the office, and she was able to fix the card so it let me into parking lots again, but I needed to show up physically at the office to solve the studio door problem. The office is more than half a mile away on the other side of the river. It always takes a lot of time and aggravation to solve these problems, and they are completely unnecessary.

It seems that I am in the anomalous position of being a graduate student who is through with classes and working on a thesis and also a faculty member. The reason my card was disabled was that  I did not show up as being registered in any classes, but I wasn't supposed to be registered in any. Some software switch just went "click" and turned off my card. No human being was notified, certainly not me. What I wonder is why such a sophisticated system could not send an automated email to me a day or two before the cutoff and allow me an opportunity to correct the error before I was locked out. There is really no need to build this kind of artificial cruelty into the personality of the robots that run services for our benefit. It is for our benefit, after all.... Just a thought.

My Spanish-language radio co-host Lindolfo Carballo has been posting up-to-the-minute audio coverage of the dramatic events unfolding in Honduras at Nuestras Voces Radio. The reports come from the clandestine radio station Radio LIberada, which is only occasionally on the air but is continuing to webcast. The reports are all in Spanish

There have been reports of chemical-weapons use, sound-blasting techniques aimed at the Brazil Embassy where President Zelaya is living, torture and other human rights abuses, which are not being mentioned  in the US English-language press. The fact that a major soccer match may have to be cancelled due to the coup is also a big deal in Honduras. The failure of Obama and Clinton to make clear condemnations of the coup and to enforce sanctions that have been promised, needs to be widely known. As usual, we need to let our leaders know we are watching and we will not be deceived by pretty rhetoric.

The mainstream US media are doing their usual false-balancing act of equating the oppressors' actions with those of the oppressed. One US English-language media source, The Real News, has been doing a good job of covering the resistance in depth, albeit a few days late. Take a look at this excellent report:


More at The Real News

People are being tear-gassed, beaten, jailed, and in some cases probably killed in massive police violence against peaceful protesters outside the Brazilian embassy in Tegucigalpa Honduras as I write this. My Spanish radio co-host has been carrying recordings from webcasts from Honduras with very little delay today at http://nuestrasvocesradio.ning.com/ , and the reports are hair-raising. The mainstream English language press seems to be playing this down and emphasizing things like the US response and the right-wing demonstrations at the Brazilian consulate in Miami rather than the suffering of brave people who are fighting nonviolently for democracy and justice in their country. All the oppostion radio and tv stations in the country have been forced off the air, but some are still webcasting to get the word out to the world. We need to let our government know that fine words are not enough, and that the "de-facto" regime in Honduras is an outlaw regime that is attacking its own people.

More at The Real News

Mary Travers, the Mary of Peter, Paul and Mary, a 'sixties folk group that definitely helped mold my subconscious understandings of the world, died today at age 72. In her later years, she had been part of a revival of the trio, and I was impressed with the way she insisted on performing even when she could barely stand, as in this blurry amateur YouTube video from 2007 (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UGLfIoNAsso). The determination and exuberance she brought to her early performances seems to flow out through the seated form on stage, in spite of the pain she must have been enduring.

My friend Nancy (http://blogs.myspace.com/bluebirdsarefree) reminds us that today is Leonard Peltier's birthday, and that we can leave him a birthday greeting at http://kola-ipf.livejournal.com/ .

Courtesy of my friend Chris Chandler, here are some more reasons to "celebrate" 9-9-09"
http://www.myspace.com/chrischandlerorg

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Today is 9-9-9 Let us celebrate the number 9...

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Well, it's that time of the ummm year again

For the past 9 years, I have been sending out an additional "Muse and Whirled Retort" when the day, month and year are the same, such as February 2nd, 2002 etc. Four four four was a particularly good one.

So it is that time again! Today is Nine Nine Nine. Let us have a look at the number 9.

Ninety-nine bottles of beer on the wall

Number Nine Number Nine Number Nine Ironically, The Beatles are choosing this date to launch the Beatles Rock Band video game. How's that song go? Number Nine
Number Nine Number Nine No, Not that one "Gimmie Money that's what I want!"

John wrote Revolution 9 and George wrote "Cloud 9." When the remaining two were asked if there was any significance to the release date being 9-9-9, they answered in German: "nein."

I guess the most common reference is to 9 is a cat having nine lives hence the Nine Lives brand of cat food. I always thought that was an odd name for a brand of food. Like their slogan, "Well it's not going to kill the cat." But it may kill the K-9.

So where does it come from the nine lives thing?

One theory on the origin of this expression is that in ancient times nine was a lucky number because it is the Trinity of Trinities. As cats seem able to escape injury time and time again, this lucky number seemed suited to the cat. While in most countries the cat is said to have nine lives, in Arab and Turkish proverbs, poor puss has a mere seven lucky lives, and in Russia is said to survive nine deaths.

In Europe, a fear of cats for some religious reason or other I really dont quite get it led to their mass slaughter and when folks tied to drop them from high places, they had to do it nine times. The cats got the last laugh though, 'cause without the cats, the fleas needed somewhere to lite and, well, that brought on the plague, and humans only have one life.

In many African cultures, the cat is considered holy I only say this as I cite Zora Neale Hurston, an influential African-American writer of the early parts of the 20th century. She told the story of a very hungry cat that entered a house one day and found a plate of nine fish that were going to be eaten for dinner by the nine starving children who lived there. The cat was feeling a little selfish that day and ate up all of the fish in nine quick bites. With no food on the table, the nine starving children died of hunger the very next day, along with the cat, who died from eating WAY too much.

God was so angry with the cat that he threw him out of heaven and made him fall for nine days all the way back to earth. To this day, the cat still holds the nine lives of the starving children in his belly, which is why he must die nine different times before he will stay dead.

A similar thing happened to Sally Struthers, but I digress

I had always thought it had something to do with the cat-o-nine tails. But no. That goes back to the 17th century. It is a whip much like a riding crop with 9 tails designed to inflict much pain (oddly, from Hinduism). 9 is the complete number, and after the English invaded India, it was developed by the English Navy for complete punishment. These days, its mostly used in the S&M scene. Brings new meaning to that song "In the Navy."

Nine is the counting number between 8 & 9 (for the fourth year in a row). Why was 6 afraid of seven? Because 7 ate 9. Sorry, I had to.

Nine is the last digit and has often represented the end.

There are 9 planets (I still love you, Pluto!).

And nine muses (also streets in New Orleans): Calliope (epic poetry), Clio (history), Erato (erotic poetry), Euterpe (lyric poetry), Melpomene (tragedy), Polyhymnia (song), Terpsichore (dance), Thalia (comedy), and Urania (astronomy).

The muses get 9 streets in New Orleans named for them because the city that never sleeps (alone) is also the home of Engine Engine #9.

Ramadan takes place in the 9th month.

The number 9 is revered in Hinduism and considered a complete, perfected and divine number because it represents the end of a cycle in the decimal system, which originated from the Indian subcontinent as early as 3000BC.

There are 9 circles of hell in Dante's Divine Comedy.

There are several rituals involving 9 Buddhist monks but they also involve a vow of silence, so I really dont know what they are.

The term Cloud Nine, which usually means to be in a place of bliss, actually came from the US, from a late 40s radio broadcast Johnny Dollar. Whenever the hero knocked the villain out, the announcer said he had gone to cloud 9.

Cloud Nine was not enough for Gene Rodenberry He took it all the way to Deep Space 9. At least he didn't take it to District 9.

There are 9 innings in a baseball game one for each member of the Supreme Court.

9-ball became popular when they started televising pool matches. Watching someone else play pool on TV sounds about as exciting as watching someone play cards on TV, but people do it. 9-ball proceeds more rapidly than 8-ball because contrary to what the names would imply, there are actually fewer balls on the table.

The San Francisco 49ers are often called the 9ers perhaps that is because they play so poorly you would think there were only 9 on the field instead of the eleven you are supposed to have.

"BLOCK THAT KICK BLOCK THAT KICK number nine BLOCK THAT KICK number nine" not exactly a sing along I went to art school and it was our fight song not really it was Carmina Barana (really)

Drew Brees of my beloved New Orleans Saints wears number 9 and the season starts on Sunday so we do not yet have a losing record. We are in fact #1. Granted, we are tied with everyone else, but we are in fact #1 but will likely wind up around 9th. (8 teams make it into the playoffs)

I figure the Saints will finally be Superbowl-bound about the time I write the 12-12-12 newsletter but then the Mayan calendar will end, and all of the euphemisms about the saints winning the super bowl and the world ending will be true.