text:
Why Would Anyone Want To Kill Someone Like Jesus?
Because He basically kept standing up in church and in the middle of town (they didn't have TV or YouTube or newspapers) and saying this kind of thing (paraphrased into modern cultural references so people might feel it more deeply):
Beware of the kind of Christians which love to go around wearing pointedly modest clothing, and love being recognized in public and sitting in the front rows in church and standing up and speaking at various events: which make long prayers for show and preach and post inspiring things on Facebook with pictures of the sun bursting through the clouds. These shall receive greater condemnation.
When they tell you to do something that is from the bible, do that, but don't act anything like them, because they say one thing and then don't actually do it once they've said how important it is to agree that it is important. They paint unattainable images of supposedly ideal Christian life, though they themselves are making no real effort to live that way. Everything they do is to be seen as Christian by others: they dress in carefully understated business casual outfits (khaki and golf or rugby shirts) so as to seem affluent but classy. They love to sit in the seats of power and influence at church and at Christian gatherings. They like to be called "pastor," "reverend," "Father," "Sister" or "Brother."
Do not let anyone call you by these titles, for one is pastor and reverend, and that is Christ, and you are all brothers and sisters. And don't call anyone on earth "Father Geoff" because you have a Father in heaven already, and neither be called pastors, for you already have a shepherd, and that is Christ.
Do not be like the Christians who post things they are supposedly praying on Facebook or Twitter, showing off their contrite spirits and prayerful eloquence to a global audience. They have their audience and God's not in it. Do not be like the Christians who announce in person and on YouTube, their websites and the very t-shirts they wear that they support various charities. They have gotten the recognition they seek from the group of people they have reached with their posters, bumperstickers and brochures. And God's not part of that group. If you make a donation to a charity, let not your Visa card know what your PayPal account is doing.
And don't pray long, wordy prayers, superstitiously repeating the same supposedly magic phrases over and over again, hoping God will give you what you want if you throw enough words, repeated enough times, at Him. Pray privately in your room where no one can see, and be brief and to the point.
But woe unto you, Catholics and Protestants, Evangelicals, Charismatics, Mennonites, Plymouth Brethren, Quakers and Emergents! You are all play-acting. You are locking the doors of Heaven, and are neither going in yourselves, nor allowing anyone else to go in, inviting them instead to vow to remember to commit to think about remembering to rededicate their lives to remembering to consider going in and then watching a PowerPoint slideshow and singing a song about it without having ever done it.
Woe unto you, Catholics and Protestants, play-actors! For you travel to the other side of the planet to make one Christian convert, and when he is made, you make him twice as much the child of hell as you are yourselves.
Woe unto you, blind pastors, which say "We place no real emphasis, and waste little time talking about our church building, because churches are made of people and not bricks, but let's talk for two hours about the money we've spent, the money we've raised and the further money we want to collect and spend on multimedia extravaganzas to pull in more converts, while people are sitting at home thinking of killing themselves or wondering how they're going to raise a baby, or if they're gay or not!"
You fools and clueless: what's more important? The church as a corporation with money which is wholly invested in marketing itself, or the church as a group of people, many of whom need you not being afraid to "get real" with them?
Woe unto you, Catholics and Protestants, empty infomercials for church living! You raise charity money but have omitted the weightier matters of Christianity: fair judgment, mercy, forgiveness, grace and faith. You think forgiveness is nothing more than a promise not to bother someone about a given shortcoming until the next time they annoy you!
You blind people in important positions of church oversight, which gag at the idea of swallowing a mosquito, and swallow a moose whole. Woe unto you, Baptists and Free Methodists, you piles of garishly coloured Jesus junk mail cluttering the doors of the nation! For you make clean the outside of the cup and the undersides of the plates, but inside they are full of moneygrabbing avarice, pride, trite self importance and insincere personal indulgence. You blind church-goer, cleanse first that which is inside the cup and on the plate, that the outside of them may be clean also.
Woe unto you, Vineyard people, Harvest House and River of Life Ministries, hypocrites! for you are like whitewashed burial crypts, which indeed appear beautiful outside, but are within full of dead men's bones, stench and rot.
You also outwardly appear to be good churchgoing people to your neighbors, but within you are full of fakeness, insanity, rage, jealousy, competitive piety, deceit, self-delusion and corruption.
Woe unto you, Presbyterians and Pentecostals, you actors in B movies! because you quote C.S. Lewis and G.K. Chesterton and say "If we had been around when they were alive, we would not have gone on YouTube and made shrill, shrieking videos decrying ALL IN CAPS how they DENY THE TRUTH OF THE TRINITY!!! or ARE NOT CLEAR ON ETERNAL SONSHIP!!! DONT LISSEN TO HIM OR YULL END UP IN A LOST ETERNITY!!! We would certainly not have stood up on our pulpits and at the dinner table and warned people not to read the past equivalents of The Shack or Blue Like Jazz because we were claiming, without reading them, that they were full of lies about God."
Consider: You are the children of them which defamed and censored, called "commies" and sanctioned anyone who wasn't blindly supportive of the churches and their leaders and traditions, and of conserving your own error and of Republican politicians in general. Go ahead and fill the blood-stained jackboots of your fathers. Conserve their legacy and the tradition of doing things their way in the name of being right, no matter the cost to others.
You serpents, you generation of vipers, how can you escape the damnation of hell? In light of this, look: I send unto you malcontents, objectors, authors, poets, songwriters, social workers and therapists. I send unto you earnest teenage girls who were molested by their pastors who then told them not to read Harry Potter. They are people and they have stories to tell. I send unto you bitter choirboys who were molested by their priests, who then told them not to play Call of Duty. They are people and they have stories to tell. I send unto you angry gay Christians who are ostracized and alienated by married church members who have committed adultery and paid prostitutes for blowjobs in the back of their SUVs and then "spoke out" against gay marriage because they felt it demeaned the institution of marriage. God has sent homosexuality upon your culture, as said the scriptures, and gay Christians are people and they have stories to tell, if they are not shoved into a dusty shoebox in the back of a closet in a church basement.
You have brothers and sisters with you. And some of them you will kill the careers of; and some of them you will publicly humiliate and defame in your churches and homes, and hound and badger and vilify on the Internet: that upon you may come all the righteous blood shed upon the earth, from Mahondas Ghandi to Martin Luther King.
(That's why people wanted him killed. Because he sounded like that to them, a whole lot of the time.)
When I worked at Nortel, I had just come from working for government agencies with the developmentally handicapped. I had already got a snootfull of euphemisms and indirect talk. Now, my own heritage is that I come from unPC, blunt, socially awkward stock, people who don't know how to say things gently. That being said, I resented what was being done to language (and, by proxy, thinking) in those kinds of jobs.
All of my managers were women. And the sorts of women who got positions of power were women who cared more how things looked or seemed than how they were. It was important to them that they seemed successful and in control at all times. This meant that noticing any problem or inconsistency was a way to get unpopular fast. Even if you were drawing attention to it only by starting to fix it. Well I have a bit of a knack for seeing just those things. It's built into my basic design. It certainly can be useful, especially to people in groups, where things can get missed so easily, but that stuff's seldom welcomed.
In these jobs, I'd say something like "This has been going on. It is a problem. I think we should fix it." Right away, the women (they were not only always women, they were always of a very specific type) would get pained expressions on their faces liked I'd sworn or farted or something, and they'd say things like "Well, I'm sure you feel that there's an issue, but..." and then they'd make it go away, with language. It wouldn't be a fact anymore. It would become merely something I felt, because I was whacky, and that they in turn felt they weren't going to discuss, and in fact felt resentful about having any attention drawn to. And I realized "My language is being corrected. These ladies with very little education, or a bit of training in accounting or management or business administration are correcting my language. And I just got a degree in English Literature. The word "problem" isn't allowed. They want me to say 'issue' and they don't want me leaping on 'issues' to point them out and fix them. They want them to disappear without being fixed, because each one makes them feel less successful. There aren't any problems. There aren't even any issues. If I speak of any, or try to fix any, they will have concerns, and nobody wants concerns."
Also, you didn't say things like "embarrassing, bad, wrong, mistake, screwup, ineffective, broken, damaged, layoffs, disappointing, unworkable," or "silly." No, all of those words, those intellectual and emotional labels, those judgments or reactions, had to simply be replaced with the term "negative." (If you were talking about plural nouns, they could be called "negatives.") In fact, if you were really on your game, you'd say something more like "not the most positive." So, you wouldn't say "Bob got laid off. That sucks." You'd say "Bob was surplussed. That's not the most positive, I guess." It was about abstraction. I was simply not made for that. I was all about using language to accurately convey problematic stuff so we could look at improving it. I wasn't ready for a place where, if one person said something that wasn't true, and another person said something true, but unwelcome (because it didn't help the Success Story we were all required to be telling) nothing would be said at all, ever about the untrue statement, so long as it was "positive." Immediately, however, the unwelcome, off-point commenter would be reprimanded with a "That's actually pretty negative." I realized I was part of a big game of Let's Pretend. That stuff actually scares me. When you're dealing with people's lives and time and money, there is no room for anything but dealing in reality and truth.
If I as an individual screwed up, I'd get a talking to alright, with a bunch of "feelings" talk tossed in, all of which always made me feel worse rather than better. It often didn't matter what had happened, we were to take extremely seriously people's impression of what happened, with whatever had actually happened being completely irrelevant, and there was no focus on fixing anything, only on deciding whose feelings were to be focused on and dwelling in those feelings. Invariably, the person with the upset feelings. The more abstracted, vague, uprooted from facts, and euphemistic the talk got, the more I felt uncomfortable with it. And frequently, I got in trouble for seeing problems, mentioning them, and then having them happen. It was like they thought if I'd simply not thought about them, they wouldn't have happened. Nortel was run on blind optimism. (well, all optimism is blind, just like all pessimism is. I tried to explain that to a girl recently but she killed herself before we could pick that conversation back up again.)
I work in schools now. The corporate crap-talk is catching up to me here too. Increasingly, the people with any power in education are not educators or even behaviourists, but rather management, marketing, accounting, planning and public relations people. Principals become less educators and more those other things. The principals become less and less concerned with (and competent to discuss) what sorts of things are teaching kids stuff, and what sorts of things actually prove kids have learned stuff, and become more and more concerned only with whether parents and the community are all clearly getting the message that our school is providing world class educational opportunities in a variety of flexible learning environments for the broad cross-section of society represented in all of our diverse learners, each with their own attributes, aptitudes and attitudes, which we, as a school, value, foster, model, facilitate, scaffold and nurture daily with design-down, forward-focussed, centre-motivated, upwardly-aspiring, rollout methodology, pedagogy and ideation. Policy and decision-making are driven by what can be claimed (and neat acronyms made), not what needs to actually be workable, actually achieved.
Teachers have to sit through interminable meetings in which Mission Statements and new Vision Initiatives are unrolled, ramped up, rolled out, tabled, implemented, launched and spoken to. (I'm surprised, given the passion which which they are often presented, that they are not simply ejaculated.) Normally we are pulled in to admire these rhetorical, semantic trainwrecks when we've got report cards waiting for us to complete. I've seen this stuff before, too. All of this shit comes from the contrived corporate crapfactories that are seeking government bailouts because they are such houses of cards. Why are economies and corporations alike foundering so much lately? Because of what is at the heart and the foundation of them. You can't build a kingdom on optimism and greed. (if it's a church you're thinking of, rather than a corporation or other empire, instead of greed for sales, think greed for converts. Instead of greed for as many facilities and buildings, think the same thing, but in terms of church buildings. Instead of greed for as many new employees as possible, to meet the need of how much work they're getting, think greed for new members, and committees, initiatives, projects and missions. The blind need to simply be doing big things, not to achieve great good, but to be the big people who are doing the big things.)
My principals have performed well to varying degrees whenever I've fallen afoul of the usual "one or two parents in every year's worth of kids" who is going to come in and raise as much shit in the school as they can if their completely helpless, surly, coddled juvenile delinquent isn't being given solid passing grades and being made to feel special despite how many classes they've skipped, assignments they've not attempted, and teachers they've called fags and then told to fuck off. Many administrators just start with "You've got a parent pissed off? Why'd you do that? I don't really care what they did, or what the kid did or didn't do, nor even what you did or didn't do, nor indeed what happened here, but the fact is, they're pissed off. I certainly do not have the time to get into the details with you. They accused you of all sorts of things. How are you going to do your job here and not get accused of these things? We can't have this sort of thing as a school. We have to make sure that parents are all getting the right message. And by "we" I mean you. Fix this for me and make sure it doesn't happen again." Often it's more of the "The facts don't matter. What you said doesn't matter. What happened? Irrelevant. This is about what impression Mrs. Surly says she took away from the conversation I made you have with her, once she'd had a couple of days to think about it and rewrite most of it."
Some are a bit better. But each one has increasingly felt the pull to be more of a marketing agency for the school, with "the customer is always right" approach to parents who are very angry that in high school, suddenly real failure starts to become possible in certain classrooms, of which mine is a proud example. I do not believe success means anything if it was impossible to fail. I don't believe you can teach kids to take risks if you make sure there aren't any. I don't believe that the less the kids do, the more the teacher should do.
The language gets farther and farther from talking about anything that's actually happening or not happening. The people who write policy for our school board, who show up with glossy pamphlets and booklets and even glossier patter and smiles get farther and farther removed from being recognizable as knowing anything about how to handle a classroom.
The other day I thought to myself "I am going to imagine that, for some reason, some day, a specific administrator who I'm imagining, for some reason had to come in and teach my classes. The ones she normally interrupts continually, using phone, intercom and knocking on my door when I'm teaching. I sat in a staff meeting and just imagined that she had to make them treat her with respect. That she had to make them leave each other alone. That she had to make them believe she knew what she was talking about, knew what was going on, knew what she was doing. That once she'd taken attendance to her own satisfaction, she'd have to actually get them to understand and do things and that she'd have to deal with one half to a third of them trying like hell not to do them and claiming ignorance of and surly disinterest in those things."
Well I simply couldn't imagine her being able to even start doing my job. The very thought was amusing. I can't imagine she was ever able to do my job. Because she clearly can't deal with more than one kid at a time on the best of days. That's why she has the job she does. She can't make twenty kids shut and listen to her with any seriousness. She just wouldn't be able to do the job she constantly interrupts my doing. Couldn't. Not even without her interrupting by classroom phone and in person, as often as three times in one hour, to pester herself with questions or information about kids who aren't there, haven't been there and aren't going to be there, who haven't done work, aren't doing work and aren't going to do work, but for some reason need me to stop doing my job in that room right now, all to provide information to all and sundry regarding what they haven't done and what they will, in future, also be choosing not to do, and which I will then have recorded in great detail their not doing and not having been there to do, but must then justify how I failed to engage and promote their success through student-centred pedagogy while working in an administration-centered school board.
Because you don't get kids to do things they don't feel like doing because you're a good manager of people, a good administrator, a good scheduler. You get them to do those things because you build a relationship with them based upon being convincingly genuine as a human being they can relate to.
This week two people I cared about died. Also, there was a Remembrance Day Assembly today. (Outside of Canada, Remembrance Day is called things like Veteran's Day or ANZAC Day.) So one person died of old age, and the other committed suicide, though no one's really told me about it. (The "remembered" soldiers from the wars, of course, were killed and died.) But do you want to see a partial list of words which were never used in any of the talking and electronic communications regarding all of this death? Here it is: death, dead, killed, died, grave, suicide, funeral, loss, sad, alone, miss, never. How do you even have a conversation about those things without mentioning those words? Well, you say things like:
-gone to be with her Lord, now she's finally in the Loving Arms of her Dear Savior, on the Other Side
-these men paid the highest price, making the ultimate sacrifice
-she succumbed after a long, brave struggle with depression
-passed away, passed on, is no longer with us
-the celebration of life/visitation will be on Sunday
I asked a class "Why did we read those men's names?" The answer was "Because they passed away." I have to tell you: death is tough to deal with emotionally. For me. This week. And for me, when we're not allowed to say what happened, it is that much harder. At high school Remembrance Day Assemblies, kids have to be forcibly made to go sit in the chairs, because the favourite place of many of them is to stand at the back of the room, leaning on something, wearing their hats, watching the more compliant kids sitting in chairs watching a young soldier put up happily posed pictures of various whacky shenanigans by other soldiers when he was stationed in Afghanistan, without really mentioning the fact that Remembrance Day is anything to do with death in any form. Death was not mentioned. Call of Duty was. And some of the kids texted what was happening to other people who weren't in the room. Telecommunications is a technology used to put as many buffers between us and real-life experience as we can. Kids watching kids watch a soldier putting up pictures of other soldiers playing military shooting games on XBOX360 in which they play idealized soldier characters who get shot and "go hide in bushes and their life comes back" to quote the inarguably highly-trained, intelligent, charming young man who spoke to us. He at least said "It doesn't work like that." But he was so charming and funny and "Aw shuck!" that no one got a sense of loss or risk or death or anything unpleasant for a moment.
A girl in my class scoffed afterward that "this other girl" didn't even know what a poppy means. I asked her what it meant. She said it was a peace symbol. It was an anti-war thing. When I told her it meant blood, death and a way of easing the pain of the wounded and dying, it flew so counter to her expectations, to the message she'd been getting, that she couldn't really believe me. Couldn't believe the simple facts. Poppies mean peace. They represent there being no war.
It is my birthday this weekend. I don't know if I'll see any friends or relatives. I have two funerals to go to, neither of which is really being called a funeral, and I don't want to go to both. In fact, I don't feel able to handle both. At all. I might cry or something. I think I'll skip the "old lady who stopped writing to me once I really wasn't coming back to church again" one. It will be a big party with people being Christian at each other, and people who are shunning me for life asking me how I'm doing. I don't think I could keep from punching Christians there.
The other is the girl I was hoping to hang out with last weekend but who is dead. No doubt there will be many Christians acting punchworthy at her "celebration of life." Fact is, she's dead. No one celebrated her life until she ended it.
I found out from a Facebook status saying "Katie I will always love you." I knew that this wouldn't be the status if things were ok. If things were ok, the status would be more mundane, or only kinda roughly affectionate. I sort of knew right then.
When I checked her Facebook page and people had posted "too many" pictures of her at different ages, I had to "just know" but not really know. I've been stuck like that all week. I have chatted with the bereaved, dealing boyfriend about it, on Facebook, though he's a couple of blocks away. None of it was really directly about her. It was about "arrangements." It was about "dealing." It was about feeling numb, which is to say being in shock. There were pretty much no facts of any kind in the mix. No real mention of her. I have no idea what happened. And no voices. No faces. He LOLed occasionally. This is all a little too surreal for me.
When I first met Katie a couple of years ago, she was a cute, perky little thing working at the pet store. She had a big smile and she spoke warmly to everyone, eyes quickly moving from person's eyes to person's eyes. She was immediately recognizable as one of those people who light up a room. I saw a jar on the store counter which said she was raising money to go to Guatemala to help build stuff. The word "missions" was on it, so I knew it was church-based.
"What a typical cheery church girl!" I thought. "I can never relate to those people. Too sunshiney and out of touch with stuff they think is too dark. One day she will likely get disillusioned with all of it when she gets a taste of the real world. The one over here, where you have to live in the grey mundane bureaucratically-bounded tedium, rather than the one where you get to be a magic white person who helps brown people. Then we'll talk."
As I went to the pet store for cat food every few months over the next year or so, I saw the jar gone, and her gone too. "Katie in Guatemala?" I asked, and was told that she was.
She came back eventually. We both knew Dave, who'd been her manager at the coffee shop which had been her second job. I couldn't quite tell how old she was. Too young for me to date, though, I was sure. Maybe 20?
But then one time I went to the pet store and she looked different. She was wearing a lot of black. No makeup. A wool hat over her hair. She was a bit more sober-faced. "Church Girl is finally going through that process of getting disillusioned with church stuff and being a bit wild," I suspected. I tried to talk to her about her trip and she said she was "giving all that a rest for a while." It was clear that she was doing some heavy thinking. It looked like it could have been a deep, meaningful conversation, but she kept saying "I...can't think right now." She was clearly overcome with her introspection. Was trying to make sense of many things.
Months after that, and maybe two years after first seeing her working there, I went in to buy cat food and she was standing outside smoking. She had a new facial piercing (a "Monroe") and a wrist tattoo which said "This too shall pass."
"Church girl gone all the way rebel" I thought. We chatted. It was lively and sparkling and mostly about music and she wanted to talk more. I mentioned I'd written my second book and she wanted a copy. I said I'd leave her one. I went back a few days later and did that.
We talked a bit on Facebook, though she didn't "do Facebook" much, and she was full of questions about my book. She mentioned that she had trouble with depression. She asked if it would be weird to hang out. I said it would be fine. She'd told me that she had a boyfriend, so that made things simple, though as my friend Mark says, nothing a man and a woman do together is ever completely innocent.
I met her at the coffee shop which was her second job, and bought an organic soda, as I don't drink coffee. Her boss was a Christian who was connected by church and marriage to every Christian person I knew locally. She shared her experience of local churches, and seemed to see everything I saw. She said church was something she tried, but it didn't work for her. "They decided I was unsaveable" she joked. Turned out she was actually 24, having just had her birthday. Still too young to date, but not so embarrassing for a high school teacher in his forties to be seen having coffee with.
She'd asked if I wanted to sit inside or out front in the sun. I knew she liked the sun, so I said outside was better. She sat down on the grass instead of at the little tables, so I creakily sat on the grass with her and she showed me some things she was learning on guitar, and smoked and played me songs on her phone that she wanted to learn, and she had me play and sing on her guitar. Her boyfriend showed up from work (he had too many jobs) and seemed cool with us hanging out, eager to meet another person trying to come to terms with having Christian beliefs and upbringing, but problems with church Christianity.
We adjourned to the pub around the corner, where Katie knew everyone, and we sat on the back patio and she smoked cigarettes and we drank beers and talked and talked as the sun set. We laughed a lot.
The next weekend she offered to meet me "for coffee" at the coffee shop just down from where I live. We sat outside as everyone in town walked by. Between the two of us, we knew everyone. She had a coffee and I had an organic soda.
Then we walked down to a park. In the autumn sun we sat on a picnic table and talked about our plans to get in better shape. She claimed to be able to do ten pushups. Not bad for a girl. I wasn't sure how many I had left in me, but we got down in the leaves and she did ten and I did twenty without much trouble, and we got up, her with a big orange maple leaf stuck to one boob. (She had great boobs.)
We walked around the area, and through the park and down the big hill behind the arena, and then we came upon the pile of snow behind the arena from the Zamboni grooming the ice. She decided we had to hit a big tree with snowballs. We threw snowballs at it for a while until we were hitting it well, and then came back to where her bike was. We climbed out onto a concrete abutment by the waterfalls and talked about our apartments and rent and neighbors and stuff. It got cold and the sun had set, so we agreed we'd hang out the next weekend too.
"My place or yours?" she wanted to know. Mine is messy, so I said hers would be better. "Mine's messy too!" she protested, but agreed to clean it. "You bring a pizza and we'll watch Suckerpunch." She really wanted me to see it, though I was unenthusiastic. She said she liked movies about people in emotional distress, dealing with their problems.
The next weekend, after the usual Facebook messages saying "Do you still want to hang out? You know shit and are wicked smart and know about depression and everything. Are you sick of me yet?" I went to her place. She'd bought Suckerpunch so we could watch it.
The doorbell was broken so I went up and knocked. No answer. I decided she might be late getting home from work, and didn't see her red bicycle, so I decided to walk around the block and see if she'd get home during that time. I was halfway around when she leaned out of her window and said "How does someone miss the whole building?!" It turned out she'd had her washing machine on and hadn't heard the door.
I came in, met her pet bird and we watched Suckerpunch. I was perhaps a little MST3K, and a little jokey about it, but she didn't seem to mind. Then she put on Equilibrium with the sound low and we talked. She hadn't read George Orwell's 1984, nor seen V For Vendetta, so I told her about those and Gattaca and other movies of that type. She seemed interested. Then we got a bit deep. She sketched out her situation, which was that all summer long she'd play guitar and hang with her boyfriend and work two jobs, and bicycle, but she'd be haunted by the feeling that she was wasting her life, that she needed to get an education, get an important job, probably in the third world, making a difference. What was the point of anything? There had to be one, and she thought there wasn't. God was supposed to provide one and He wasn't real. In wintertime, when the sun left us, all this would really catch up with her. "I almost died last year," she told me.
I told her she was being a bad mum to herself, shoving herself in a direction she wasn't too clear about, telling her that what she was doing wasn't good enough. I tried to talk to her (as I'd been for weeks) about black and white thinking, about all or nothing approaches not being the best ones. I talked about how accepting "what is" can be kind of essential before changing it and moving on to making other things be. I talked about finding small "points" rather than one large one, about how she clearly felt that to be happy, one had to pretend, because all the real stuff was really awful. I talked about how pessimism is just as blind as optimism. I likened both of them to kids given a box filled with red and green Easter eggs, with one kid scrambling for a handful of green ones to prove Easter eggs are really green, and discarding the red ones because they didn't help make that point, while the other kid was doing the opposite. I explained that our tendency to think only bad things were real wasn't accurate. She seemed to like that. She always listened with rapt attention, knees drawn up to her chest, big eyes, following my face and gestures. She always claimed that what I said made sense and sounded good, but that she wasn't sure she could quite look at things that way. I was presenting the idea that she needed to give herself some middle ground, some room to breathe, some peace.
Her boyfriend came home, and quite unjealously plopped himself between us where we'd been sitting on the couch while the sun set. We chatted and talked more as Equilibrium finished. He talked about church stuff and his favourite bands, and how he and Katie had been working together in Guatemala and the Christian folk had wanted them to not be alone together. He talked about music and his church experiences. He talked about trying to get along with Christian parents while being sexually active. We talked about how Christians over-emphasize the biblical image of us being sheep, focussing upon herd movement, following the flock, and pastors (shepherds). Not as much mention of the soldiering, race-running, wrestling, "tree-planted-immovable-unshakeable-by-the-water" imagery as of the sheep stuff.
She said "But it says 'the Lord is my shepherd', right? So you're supposed to be sheep, according to that."
I said, "No, it's just a description. Because people are sheep. Often foolishly so. It's not something we have to try for. It is reality, mostly. And David wrote that, presumably, when he actually was a shepherd. Picture him sitting at 4:20 on a hillside looking at all his sheep, smoking a joint. He says to himself 'So, I'm like....(inhale) a shepherd, right? And the Lord...(exhale) is like MY shepherd... (cough) Yeah. That's so trippy.' So not an instruction. An observation." We had a great time and I went home, with that feeling like I wasn't the only one, for once, who wanted the talking to continue. I walked home in the chilly autumn darkness.
The next week I wondered what she'd made of our "getting deep." I wondered what she was thinking about it. I sent her a Facebook message and "gave her time" when she didn't answer immediately. The next Sunday (two days ago) I went to the pet store to see how things were. She wasn't working. So I left her a phone message.
Then today, I checked Facebook and saw her wall was now a tribute to her. Because she's dead.
No one's saying what happened, but I think I know. I remember hearing a lot of sirens Sunday evening now. Just after the sun set. Not long after I'd phoned.
My blood feels hot and fizzy. I feel like I can't breathe. I feel like I got stabbed. I feel like I felt those other times, like when I heard Doug had put a revolver in his mouth and pulled the trigger while talking on the phone to Michael, like when I heard Danny had hung himself from a rafter in his dad's barn, like when I heard Brian had overdosed, like when I heard that Paul the bartender had fallen in the bathroom and broken his neck, like when I heard that Rose had died in a car accident, like when I heard Bruce had put a shotgun to his chest and pulled the trigger, like when I heard Brett had stabbed his sister Dawn so many times in the belly in their parents' kitchen and now she was dead and he was in prison.
"When I talk to girls," I'd told her, sitting on the grass in the sun, holding her guitar, "Things go spectacularly wrong. First that one I just told you about, and look... now I decide to 'talk to the Christian girl who works in the pet store,' and look what happened there!" She laughed.
Look what happened. It's dark outside, and terribly, horribly silent.
Slap-Together Video For "Pomises (God's Country)"
Literally "playing God."
What Is The Message?
As a Christian child, I was brought up with the idea that the main function of a Christian human being on this earth was to "spread the gospel." (The use of the word "spread" made me think of Cheez Whiz, or possibly of a woman's legs. Or of AIDS.)
Of course the actual bible doesn't use that word. It uses words like "tell," "announce" or "preach." (think about how the behaviour of Christians has made the word "preachy" have a very specific connotation, mostly involving selfishly soapboxing, not listening or comprehending, not having a conversation, not building any personal connection, just yet another person selfishly selling an idea for their own reasons with no thought of what their hapless listener might be going through. Very different from what Jesus did.) The actual bible seems focussed on people hearing more than on all the ways that superpreachers would try to make that happen (the opposite of the multimedia megachurch mentality, seems to me).
Interestingly, no one seems to be able to agree anymore about what exactly "the gospel" or "the Word," or "God's Final Message To His Creation" really is anymore these days.
The gospel message I was raised with is lampooned with painful accuracy by the late standup comedian George Carlin:
...there's an invisible man living in the sky who watches everything you do, every minute of every day. And the invisible man has a special list of ten things he does not want you to do. And if you do any of these ten things, he has a special place, full of fire and smoke and burning and torture and anguish, where he will send you to live and suffer and burn and choke and scream and cry forever and ever 'til the end of time!
But He loves you. He loves you, and He needs money!
Considering that the word 'gospel' means 'good news,' this story always seemed ironically like bad news. People were so focussed on convincing potential converts that they were (despite their best self-images, efforts and intentions) horrible, hopelessly depraved, lust-mongering sinners, and of how horrible and excitingly Heavy Metal Album Cover Hell no doubt was, that they actually did a downright shoddy job of painting any kind of appealing view of Heaven. Heaven didn't sound like anywhere I wanted to be, anyway. I was supposed to loathe the wicked, evil, corrupt world which we were to forswear (filled as it was with corrupting, soul-destroying things like The A-Team, Pac-man, Pink Floyd and Star Wars) and I was supposed to eagerly await the rapture, to take me away to Heaven. Heaven, where one couldn't sneak comics or TV, because there just wouldn't be any.
Everything would be a blank white sheet of paper you weren't allowed to colour on (and there weren't any colours, let alone crayons) forever and ever and ever. And you had to sing. Church songs. For ever. So, a lot like church, but you'd never be allowed to leave. And just like with gyms, I have never in my life sat in church without wanting to leave shortly after I arrive. This "heaven is like never-ending church" imagery sounded very like Christian Kid Hell. For a Christian kid, paradise would involve not having to go to church or do church stuff anymore. (Not that any of that blank white, colourless, passionless, singing eternally imagery came from the actual bible, of course.)
And in the actual bible Jesus never made any attempt to draw away from and not associate with the world and the people and activities in it the way I was taught I must. He walked around in it and ate with people of all sorts. Talked to the slutty girls and the drunk guys. He didn't preach 24/7. Was that ok? "Well, He was God," everyone would tell me. "You aren't supposed to try to be like Him. You're supposed to live like a Christian." Apparently that was a kind of opposite thing. So, they'd taken away Jesus Christ as the head of the Christian faith, as the example or inspiration or forerunner for us, and replaced him tidily with joy-crushing, suburban, business-casual-wearing bureaucratic church folk with no balls nor guts. Where Jesus had been abrasive, challenging and revolutionary, they were insipid and nice. (To your face. Kinda. Sometimes) Where Jesus was confident and assertive, they were timid and were always bringing forward lists of concerns and possible offense taken in the past, present or future; in actuality or in theory only.
And then I encountered modern church Christians of a much less dour bent. And their gospel was "Jesus came! He's so awesome! He loves you! Come to our church and watch us sing about him! Maybe you'll catch it too!" It was all very Invasion of the Body Snatchers, very Pod People. It was like those Saturn commercials in the 90s which lampooned how cult-like they hoped their buyership could be induced to become. Because advertising to nonchurch folk how cuckoo for Jesuspuffs you are was somehow expected to attract them in droves. Terrifying thought, that a normal, rational person could go into that building, and then simply have their humanity and personality rent from them, leaving an empty husk, with a smiling church-mask, singing horrible, horrible songs and being bracingly cheerful and painfully earnest. And, I found, this was something that many people who'd never set foot in a church themselves feared would happen, should they ever do that. So many new converts to Jesus-following have expressed what huge delight they have taken in knowing that they didn't now need to become church sheep. And the church sheep bleat frantically "Well, but you have to go to church! You just have to! Or else you're disobeying God and the bible!" Bullshit, I say, with confidence, having read that book, and having seen that their one "forsaking not the assembling of yourselves together" verse is one which they need to disallow all non-church forms of Christian connecting in order to smack us all with.
Writers like N.T. Wright reject outright this idea that the message from God is all about how the world is horrible and hopeless and that we will therefore, thankfully, get airlifted out of it, as God has scrapped it, and that we'd best hide in a church community in the meantime. They feel that there is much in the bible about Christianity sanctifying (or redeeming or Jesusforming) our planet. They would point to the end of slavery in America, to the victory over Hitler during the second world war, to the growth of tolerance in our culture, and say that this is the work of Jesus coming to fruition, with Christians seen in every chapter of that story, helping bring it about.
Very new thoughts to me. Not sure it's the whole story. They seem uncomfortable with the actual faces of evil in our world, particularly those among them, and even the actual ugliness of Christ's death, when worshiping.
We are, largely, what we were raised to be. I realized today that I was raised to be sober, serious, blankfaced, solemn and respectfully reverent. I was to have a pained face handy, ready for things I wouldn't or couldn't get involved in ("dirty" jokes, partying, celebration), so I could opt out of those, tut tutting quietly, and then use the serious, solemn one the rest of the time.
I may have grown a bit over the years, but when I decide I "need to get serious" about anything (some talking to God, my job, my diet, exercise, whatever), there is a proud, satisfied feeling that I'm doing something immensely worthwhile and proper. All because I was brought up with so much approval earned for somber, serious reverence on Sunday morning, which was meant to be the very center of our lives. This feeling of proud, satisfied pride and virtue that I'm doing something good just because I'm "getting serious" is seldom warranted, if the end results are any indication at least. I end up doing far more interesting and important stuff when I follow a mischievous whim, rather than when I "get serious."
Conversely, whenever I'm being glib, sarcastic, flip, mocking, witty, clever, light-hearted, devil-may-care and the like, there is an intoxicating feeling like I'm snorting the Devil's Own Cocaine, and having far more fun than I "should." Because I'm not being sober, serious or reverent. And it's SO fun. My upbringing is still making that fun to this very day (and frantically telling me not to have that sort of fun.)
Equally, my upbringing taught that truly good things were Heaven-like in nature: empty, quiet, sober, pure, insipid, dry, dull, passionless. Modern music was all thought to be very bad of course, but I soon recognized what kinds of it immediately made my parents deeply uncomfortable, made them afraid it would rub off on me and transform my attitude. It was anything primal, energetic, edgy or anything with attitude. Anything with snarl. Anything with a deep glee to it. Anything with a depth or height of emotional expression not normally achieved by white people. That was all seen as marked with Satan's thumbprint, and the response to it can only be described as superstitious. So that stuff is still my favourite stuff, and the hardest thing for me to achieve in my own videos and music.
What's the easiest for me to successfully achieve in my own music? Quiet, serious, haunting, reverent, solemn sorrow and regret. Dirgey, hymnic stuff. I practiced that mood every Sunday of my adolescent life. I've got it down. It's a comfortable mood for me. Seems virtuous just feeling it. Every time I set foot inside a church and the music is joyful and peppy, my solemn mood fights it without me even trying. "That's not how it goes!" snarls my deepest, primal heart. "It's about death and darkness, fire and punishment, dark and light, pain and relief! It's an opera painted in bold strokes! It's not supposed to be a reassuring peppy thing by the Jonas Brothers or Justin Bieber! It's not supposed to be safe and reassuring!" And as much as church folk encourage me to "get over myself for one hour and just enjoy Jesus with us," I really can't do that. (And it's not just me I'm getting over. It's everything, including them.) And they and their music really don't seem worth it to me. Couldn't be bothered to pirate that music. If someone lent me a CD of it, I wouldn't be able to bring myself to endure it. Hardly seems worth trying to rewire my whole psyche so it responds favourably to what now seems like pablum.
Because nothing they are doing rings true to me. It still seems like it would almost belong in the "heaven" of my upbringing. It is still passionless, bland, empty, dry, dull, naively sincere and boring. It makes Justin Bieber seem like an angry young man with important feelings to express and deep roots in the very crotch of music. It makes Selena Gomez and Katy Perry seem insightful, edgy and heart-felt. It makes everything Disney wants to sell us seem palatable.
Because it's still about the children, apparently. They can watch Disney channel and Disney movies (so long as they don't get too edgy or passionate or dark.) We set no upper limits on schmaltz, on triteness, or plastic cheesy crap when it comes to our kids. Because that stuff's nothing to worry about, right? God likes it? Full House is, as far as we're concerned, as edgy as we need ever get with kids, providing the deep, heart-felt lessons and hysterically funny life moments we can only wish to experience in our real lives.
Last night three atheist friends took me to see Slim Cessna's Auto Club perform at the Dominion Tavern. I saw cowboy/hipster-looking dudes play manically to a room full of Ottawa's oldest hipsters, goths, punks, hippies, and whatevers. I saw the atheist son of a Baptist minister sing songs filled with half-ironic bible content, continually using stage moves taken from revival meetings. It was all hands held high in the air, wobbling fingers jazz-hands style. He wasn't quite slaying people in the spirit, but pretty much. And I saw the roomful of mostly atheist people unironically doing exactly what people would do in a Pentecostal or lively southern Baptist church, feeling the same way, filled with joy, hands in the air. And it was, to say the least, a tiny bit odd for me.
Posted by Wikkid Person at 12:15 1 comment:
Maybe Someday: Memories of Nortel and Loss
Once I had gathered and edited together all of the video from the weekend, I decided I needed some footage of my playing and singing the song too. Walking a fine line between wearing a wig and old glasses to hark back to that era, and ruining the video by looking too silly. I drove to a remote Park 'N Ride, put on the car headlights and shot the "playing the guitar and singing" sillouette, keeping it barely visible.


text:
FEDERATION OF TRADE UNIONS OF THE REPUBLIC OF KAZAKHSTAN
STABLE ENTERPRISE
– STABLE SOCIETY
– STABLE COUNTRY!
The Law of the Republic of Kazakhstan "On professional unions"
Trade-unions and youth
Help to trade unıon committee
The highest authority of the Federation is the Congress which is convened by the General Council of the Federation at least once every five years. Extraordinary congresses of the Federation are convened by the General Council of the Federation or at the request of collegial authorities by at least one-third of its member organizations.
The convocation and proposed agenda of the Congress is announced no later than two months before the Congress. The norm of representation of delegates to the Congress is established by the General Council of the Federation of Trade Unions.
The decision on convocation of the Extraordinary Congress and the proposed agenda is announced not later than one month.
Congress of the Federation:
— hears reports on the activities of the General Council of the Federation and the Audit Commission of the Federation;
— approves the Statute of the Federation, regulations on the Audit Commission, alterations and additions to them. The Congress has the right to delegate this right to the General Council on a specially issued authority;
— determines the next tasks and strategy of the Federation;
— elects the chairman of the Federation, the Audit Commission of the Federation;
— approves the composition of the Federation Council General Council;
— takes decisions, resolutions, statements, addresses on the most important issues of the life of the country, the activities of state bodies, trade union movement;
— considers appeals on the application of this Statute;
— takes decisions on reorganization, termination of activities and liquidation of the Federation
The General Council is the governing authority of the Federation of Trade Unions of the Republic of Kazakhstan.
The General Council is approved at the congress by the principle of direct delegation.
The General Council consists of the heads of all FPRK affiliates, one representative of branch trade unions with more than 30,000 union members, as well as the chairmen of the Commission for Working Women's Affairs and the Youth Council.
The General Council is convened as necessary, but not less than once a year and is considered competent if at least two-thirds of the General Council members who have the right to vote participate in it. Decisions of the General Council are taken by a majority of votes of its members participating in the meeting.
The General Council of the Federation:
— ensures the implementation of the goals and objectives of the Federation;
— develops the basic directions of activity on implementation of decisions of congresses and statutory tasks, protection of labor, social and economic rights and interests of members of trade unions and affiliated organizations;
—reports on its activities before the Congress;
— hears and approves reports of the Office of Property and Assets of the Federation of Trade Unions;
— determines the procedure for transferring contributions by the Federation's member organizations, adopts recommendatory documents concerning the system of remuneration of elected trade union employees;
— determines the procedure for owning, using and disposing of the property of the Federation of Trade Unions;
— determines the indicators of financial reporting related to the calculation and payment of membership fees and other money to the Federation, a list of statistical data submitted by member organizations;
— on the proposal of the Chairman of the Federation elects the Executive Committee of the Federation of Trade Unions;
— hears reports of the leaders of the Federation and information of member organizations on the implementation of the Statute and decisions of the authorities of the Federation, as well as their activities;
— determines the procedure for nominating candidates for the post of chairman of the Federation of Trade Unions;
— in the period between congresses, elects and dismisses the chairman of the Federation;
— makes proposals on alterations and additions to the Statute of the Federation and regulations on the Audit Commission for approval at the Congress;
— approves the Model Statutes of branch trade unions and territorial (at the level of the region, the city of the republican significance, the capital) unions of trade unions;
— decides on the conduct of the election campaign in the Federation;
— approves the descriptions and sketches of the Federation symbols and the Statute of Symbols;
— carries out other functions delegated to him by affiliates and the Federation Congress.
The General Council of the Federation of Trade Unions in order to direct the work between its sessions elects the Executive Committee (hereinafter – the Executive Committee) from among the leaders of the Federation's affiliated organizations.
The Executive Committee consists of deputy chairmen of the Federation whose number should not be more than one-third of the total number of members of the Executive Committee.
A member of the Executive Committee may be the head of the membership organization which pays timely and in full the membership fees for the activities of the Federation, fulfills the decisions of the bodies of the Federation.
The Executive Committee is accountable to the General Council of the Federation.
Meetings of the Executive Committee are convened as necessary, but at least once every three months.
The Executive Committee is authorized to adopt resolutions if at least two-thirds of the members of the Executive Committee participate in its meetings. Decisions of the Executive Committee are taken by a majority of votes of its members participating in the meeting. If necessary, the decisions of the Executive Committee may be taken by poll. The opinion of the interviewed members of the Board is stated in writing.
Federation Executive Committee:
— ensures compliance with the norms and requirements of the Federation Statute, decisions of the Congress and the General Council;
— considers the issues of admission of new members to the Federation, the exclusion and withdrawal of affiliates from it, and their withdrawal from the General Council (the Executive Committee), as well as the cancellation of these decisions followed by the approval of decisions by the General Council;
— decides on the temporary deprivation and restoration of the voting right of the head and representatives of the member organization at the meetings of the elected bodies of the Federation
— conducts all-republican activities of trade unions;
— defines the main provisions of the General Agreement with the Government of the Republic of Kazakhstan and the republican associations of employers;
— approves the composition of plenipotentiary representatives of the Federation in government, departmental commissions and working groups;
— convokes meetings of the General Council of the Federation, determines the draft agenda and the place of its holding;
— organizes and coordinates the training of trade union personnel and assets;
— at the suggestion of the chairman of the Federation, approves the structure, the staff list of the Federation's apparatus, considers candidacies of heads of structural divisions and organizations established by the Federation;
— asks in due course for awarding state and other awards to trade union workers and activists, awards trade union organizations and members of trade unions with Certificates of Honor, diplomas and other marks of distinction Federation of Trade Unions;
— organizes the work of the Federation's printed body, on the proposal of the chairman of the Federation appoints the chief editor of the printed organ;
— approves the budget for the maintenance of the apparatus of the Federation and the apparatuses of territorial (at the region level, city of the republican significance, the capital) unions of trade unions, the conduct of intra-union and international activities;
— develops international relations with trade union organizations of other countries, studies the practice of their activities; Decides on the membership of the Federation in international trade union associations;
— interacts with deputy groups, factions of the Parliament of the Republic of Kazakhstan, determines joint action plans with them;
— develops proposals for concluding a General Agreement with the Government of the Republic of Kazakhstan and republican associations of employers, other agreements; seeks to ensure that their content meets the interests of the Federation's member organizations, exercises public control over their implementation;
— creates commissions and other permanent or temporary working authorities, empowers them with powers, establishes the order of their functioning;
— hears reports of the leaders of the Federation and information of member organizations on the implementation of the Statute and decisions of the bodies of the Federation;
— submits to the elected body of the member organization the proposal to revoke decisions, suspend actions of member organizations, their bodies that contradict the resolutions of the General Council and the Executive Committee of the Federation of Trade Unions;
— unites and coordinates the activities of member organizations in the solution of federal tasks, conducts all-republican activities of trade unions;
— represents and defends the interests of affiliated organizations in the state bodies of the Republic of Kazakhstan, republican associations of employers;
— develops proposals and seeks to consolidate in the legislative and other normative legal acts issues relating to fiscal and tax policy, regulation of labor relations, employment, wages, conditions and labor protection, the environment, housing and cultural services, social security of employees;
— participates in the development and formation of state social and economic programs and promotes their implementation;
— in accordance with the current legislation, facilitates the holding of mass actions of trade unions, including meetings, rallies, street processions, demonstrations, picketing and other collective actions, strikes;
— elects and dismisses deputy chairmen of the Federation and heads of territorial trade union associations on the proposal of the chairman of the Federation;
— regularly informs affiliates and trade union members about their activities;
— creates commissions and other permanent or temporary working bodies, empowers them with powers, establishes the order of their functioning;
— facilitates the resolution of disputes between Federation affiliates;
— decides to open branches and representative offices of the Federation;
— executes the procedure for owning, using and disposing of the property of the Federation;
— performs other functions delegated to him by the General Council of the Federation.
The Audit Commission of the Federation is the control and audit authority that monitors the financial and economic activities of the Federation, the organizations it establishes the calculation and receipt of membership fees and other money, the correctness of spending money, the use of property of the Federation of Trade Unions.
The Audit Commission is elected at the Congress from representatives of the Federation's affiliated organizations, guided in its activity by the Regulation on the Audit Commission approved by the Congress.
The Chairman of the Audit Commission is elected at the meeting of the Audit Commission by a majority of votes, he is a delegate to the Congress of the Federation of Trade Unions, he can participate in the work of the General Council and the Executive Committee with the right of advisory vote.

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaCommonCrawl


There have only ever been two designer outfits that I have ever even slightly considered buying (with my imaginary pot of gold). They are a few years old from past seasons but I stumbled across an image of one recently and it reminded me of them. I put this up just for fun...and also as I turn 25 soon...very soon. Therefore, #justsayin.
Throwback: Ice Cream Break with Akio San. Courtesy of Natasha 2 years later.
Among all the photography, styling, blogging etc I can't forget that the genesis of THE BAMBOO DISTRICT is clothes! And lovely, colourful tropical inspired pieces to boot. Leading up to my sister's wedding (only 3 weeks to go...eeeeek!) I have been thinking what I will be doing when it is over and I get my life back, and yes...I thought of the clothes.


Unless you're staying at Karoonda Park, which can offer meals by prior arrangement, you'll need to bring all your food with you. Most campsites offer fireplaces for cooking. Bairnsdale is the best-resourced place for shopping; Bruthen and Buchan have a more basic selection of groceries.


text:
Chicago Cubs: Three reasons I'm willing to trust David Ross
By Brian Johnston
(Photo by Jamie Squire/Getty Images) /
Chicago Cubs: We have to trust this front office
Some Chicago Cubs fans are upset that the front office didn't give the other candidates, including Joe Espada and Joe Girardi, a fair chance. Yet it's been clear from the beginning the Ross was the favorite for the job. The other candidates needed to do something spectacular to pass Ross on the front office's list. None of them did so.
Cubs: Adrian Sampson is forcing his way into the conversation
Projecting the Chicago Cubs bullpen to open the 2023 season
Cubs fans are beginning to see the light at the end of the tunnel
Justin Steele has evolved into a frontline starter for the Cubs
The future of first base is murky right now for the Cubs
Yes, this front office has made some moves that haven't gone as expected. They've made some trades that haven't worked out, while some of their free agent signings haven't lived up to expectations.
Yet this is the front office that brought us our first World Series championship in 108 years. This is the front office that made the bold move to go out and get Joe Maddon as soon as he became available. Though I'm skeptical about how Ross will do, Epstein and Co. have a lot of faith in him, and I am going to respect that.
Chicago Cubs: The Cubs are my team
The Chicago Cubs have made a lot of moves over the years that I've disagreed with. Yet that doesn't mean that I've abandoned them. And I'm certainly not going to now.
Viewing my Twitter feed, there are a lot of angry fans out there right now. I get that. And many of them make valid points to be concerned about with Ross. Yet anger isn't going to make the Cubs play any better. And it's not going to help the former fan favorite become a better manager. Like it or not, he's the guy in charge now, so we have to rally behind him and give him the respect that this front office and all the players have.
These guys will have monster years under David Ross. dark. Next
David Ross has a lot of doubters out there. I think we should give him every opportunity to prove them wrong. I would love nothing more than for this guy to win a World Series as Chicago Cubs manager and I hope we see it soon.


text:
using JsonApiDotNetCore.Configuration;
using JsonApiDotNetCore.Controllers;
using JsonApiDotNetCore.Services;
using Microsoft.Extensions.Logging;

namespace JsonApiDotNetCoreTests.IntegrationTests.QueryStrings
{
    public sealed class CommentsController : JsonApiController<Comment>
    {
        public CommentsController(IJsonApiOptions options, ILoggerFactory loggerFactory, IResourceService<Comment> resourceService)
            : base(options, loggerFactory, resourceService)
        {
        }
    }
}

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaGithub


text:
Mind Blowing Films came into existence!
"New York" film became the first release in Australia by Mind Blowing Films in collaboration with Yash Raj Films.
First Indian Film Festival
It all started in March 2010 when MBF organised the Indian Film Festival: Bollywood and Beyond. Renowned film actress, Rani Mukherjee opened the festival and for the first time, Melbourne witnessed the glitz and glamour of Bollywood.
The festival was also attended by established film makers: Rajkumar Hirani, Imtiaz Ali and Sohail Khan.
Guinness record
The Indian Film Festival creates the Guinness World Record for the largest Bollywood dance in Melbourne on March 12, 2011.
Victorian government presents IFFM designed and produced by Mind Blowing Films
Now known as the Indian Film Festival of Melbourne, Film Victoria gave its valuable support to celebrate Indian cinema in Melbourne.
Bollywood queen Vidya Balan becomes the official ambassador of the festival to carry the baton in coming years. Attended by Priyanka Chopra and Shahid Kapoor, the festival was a tremendous success.
Dhoom 3 distributed by Mind Blowing Films in Australia wins the Highest grossing Foreign Film at AIMC ( Australia International Movie Convention)
Starring Aamir Khan, Dhoom 3 becomes the first Indian film to win this award.
IFFM Awards launched, commemorating the best of Indian cinema by esteemed Australian Jury.
The inaugural IFFM awards witnessed magical night of celebrating Indian Cinema with Mr. Amitabh Bachchan as its Chief Guest.
Judged by luminaries from Australian film industry, IFFM jury consists of some of the most established names to select the winners.
In the same year IFFM collaborated with La trobe University to present the Amitabh Bachchan scholarship
Mr. Bachchan presented an Indian student with a prestigious A$ 200,000 scholarship to develop a thesis related to media, digital technology and communication.
MBF wins second AIMC Highest grossing foreign film award for P.K.
The Bollywood hit, P.K., is awarded the AIMC Highest Grossing Foreign Film award, making it MBF's second win in a row.
Distributed by Mind Blowing Films in ANZ, it also becomes the highest grossing Indian film in New Zealand.
IFFM celebrates India's Independence day in Melbourne- the very first Indian flag hoisting public event at the Melbourne's iconic Federation Square
Attended by thousands, IFFM marked the occasion with traditional flag hoisting by globally known Bollywood actor Anil Kapoor at the Federation square.
IFFM is the first Indian event to have won the Melbourne Award
IFFM is the first Indian event to have won the Melbourne Award under the category Contribution to Multiculturalism by a Corporation in year 2016.
MBF wins the third AIMC Highest grossing foreign film award.
Distributed by Mind Blowing Films, Dangal is the highest grossing Indian Film in Australia and New Zealand. The only film distribution company to have won it thrice, Mind Blowing films bags the Box Office Achievement Award for Highest grossing Foreign Language film at AIMC for Dangal.
Distributed in New Zealand by Mind Blowing Films , Dangal becomes the highest grossing Indian film in 2017 in Australia and New Zealand.
Mind Blowing Films releases its first film in Fiji
Released on Diwali, Golmaal Again goes on to become the highest grossing Indian film in Fiji!
Indian Film Festival of Melbourne wins 'Most popular Film Festival abroad' at IFBA
Supported by the Government of Telangana, International Film Business Awards(IFBA) honoured IFFM with the title Most Popular Film Festival Abroad on December 3rd at Ramoji Film City in Hyderabad.
MBF founder and director wins Jill Robb Screen Leadership Award
Mitu Bhowmick Lange receives Jill Robb Award: established in 2012 Film Victoria's Screen Leader Awards recognise the impact of screen industry practitioners who have displayed outstanding leadership, achievement and service to the industry.
Indian premiere of Raising the Bar documentary | Special screening in Delhi | 20 February 2018
Mumbai premiere of Raising the Bar documentary | Special screening in Mumbai | 22 February 2018
Raising The Bar Awards
The Kolkata International Film Festival paid homage to Australian Cinema
Earlier this year the Kolkata International Film Festival paid homage to Australian Cinema. Our Director Mitu Bhowmick Lange in conjunction with Oz Fest showcased some of those films. They included Mary Magdalene, Breath, Jirga, Dancing the Invisible, and Swinging Safari (originally called Flammable Children).
This year was a momentous occasion for the KIFF because it marked 100 years for Bengali Cinema. The films shown at KIFF not only resonate with Kolkata but internationally. The festival included guests such as Sue Maslin a producer of The Dress Maker, actor Simon Baker (The Mentalist, Breath) director Garth Davis (Lion) and Phillip Noyce (Rabbit Proof Fence) who presented a masterclass. We are honoured to be a part of an event of such magnitude.
MBF Founder and director Mitu Bhowmick Lange becomes the first Indian to join the Prestigious Film Victoria Board
Simmba emerges as the highest grossing Indian film in Fiji
Simmba was distributed by Mind Blowing Films across Australia, New Zealand and Fiji and it has done exceptionally well in all three regions.
10 years of Mind blowing films
Produced by Rhythm Boyz and distributed by Mind Blowing Films in ANZ , CHAL MERE PUTT becomes the highest grossing Punjabi film
10 years of Indian film festival celebrated with Shah rukh Khan
The Indian Film Festival of Melbourne celebrates its spectacular tenth year with the King of Bollywood Shah Rukh Khan.The biggest names in the industry , over 20 events and films from every corner of India - it was the biggest IFFM yet!
Mind Blowing Films won the prestigious AIMC ( Australian International Movie Convention ) Award for the Highest Grossing Foreign Film ( 2018/19 ) for Raj Kumar Hirani's SANJU. Mind Blowing Films is the only distributor in Australia to win it four times in the last ten years!
MBF Founder and Director, Mitu Bhowmick Lange appointed to the Board of the Natalie Miller Fellowship, that supports professional leadership of women in screen industry through fellowship and programs. Image result for natalie miller fellowship
CHAL MERA PUTT 2
Highest opening of 2020 for a Indian film in Australia and New Zealand
Highest opening for a Punjabi film in Australia
Highest Opening for a Punjabi film in NZ
Indian Film Festival Of Melbourne
Mind Blowing Films hosts its first virtual film festival online which is an unprecedented success.
IFFM celebrates its second Online festival by launching the IFFM App on Apple TV to enhance user viewing experience
Record number of films, over 120 films in 27 languages screened at IFFM 2021 with films by 33 female film makers.
IFFM Awards Online is a raging success as IFFM celebrates the best of Indian Cinema.
© Mind Blowing Films / Web design by Nevis Infotech


YUBA CITY, Calif. -- A California teenager is in danger of being deported after she tried to raise money for a prom dress by selling pot-laced brownies, CBS Sacramento reported.
Saira Munoz of Yuba City wanted to go to the prom, but when she didn't have money for a dress, she became an entrepreneur.
"People make mistakes," said Carlos Robles, a friend of the teen.
But this mistake landed the River Valley High School student in handcuffs.
Munoz, who was 18 at the time, decided to put on a school bake sale. There was an extra ingredient in her brownies: marijuana. She hired a fellow student to sell her brownies.
Her pot ploy fell apart when a student got sick and needed to be rushed to the hospital by ambulance.
"I was hurt, because she got arrested, and nobody wanted to see somebody we cared about go away," Robles said.
Because Munoz hired a fellow student, she was charged with employing a minor to sell marijuana -- a felony.
Robles went to school with Munoz at River Valley High and remains friends with her.
"She was just a very positive person," he said. "I just don't like the turnout of this."
A judge sentenced her to four years probation on Monday and nine days in jail with credit for time served.
Munoz, now 19, also learned during her sentencing that she could be heading back home to Mexico. She came to the United States with temporary permission in 2000. After the Sutter County Probation Department called the feds about her conviction, she could now be deported.
Robles said deportation it too harsh a penalty for Munoz.
"There's people that deserve to be deported, and she just wasn't one of them," hes said. "There's people that do way worse."


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Hatton est un grand village du comté d'Adams dans l'État de Washington aux États-Unis. D'après le recensement de 2000, il comptait 98 habitants.

Histoire

Quand la Northern Pacific Railway fit construire une ligne à travers le comté d'Adams, on installa une gare là où se trouve Hatton actuellement et on construisit une maison abritant une pompe et une « section » . Avant 1890, la station s'appelait Twin Wells en raison des deux puits qui avaient été creusés pour alimenter en eaux les employés des chemins de fer. En 1890, James Bronson installa le premier commerce et, à la même période, un bureau de poste portant le nom de Hatton fut bâti. Le nom du village était dérivé du nom de la première receveuse du bureau de poste, Belle Sutton, fille d'un colon, John Hackett, un employé de la Northern Pacific Railway de Twin Falls
dans l'Idaho. Le commerce de Bronson fut racheté par Otis Algoe en 1897 qui devint plus tard receveur du bureau de poste.

Hatton commença sa croissance après 1901. À cette époque, la ville disposait de quatre grands entrepôts, cinq commerces, deux hôtels, une banque et une école. Un journal, The Hatton Hustler  exista durant cette période. Hatton fut officiellement incorporée le .

Géographie

Selon le bureau du recensement des États-Unis, le village couvre une surface d' entièrement couvert de terre. La ville est situé dans une région de l'État de Washington appelée Channeled Scablands et est placée sur la pente occidentale de la « Providence Coulee » avec les « Paradise Flats » à l'ouest et la « Michigan Prairie » à l'est. Cette coulée fut utilisée par la Northern Pacific Railway pour la construction de leur ligne principale entre Spokane et Portland.

Démographie
D'après le recensement de 2000, il y avait ,  et  résidant dans la ville. La densité de population était de . Le brassage ethnique de la cité était de 79,59 % de Blancs, 1,02 % d'Amérindiens, 16,33 % d'une autre « race » et de 3,06 % d'habitants appartenant à plusieurs « races ». Les Hispaniques de n'importe quelle race représentaient 16,33 % de la population.

Sur les , 43,8 % d'entre eux avait un enfant âgé de moins de 18 ans vivant chez eux, 65,6 % était des couples mariés vivant ensemble, 3,1 % était des femmes au foyer sans mari, et 25,0 % n'avaient pas de famille. 25,0 % de tous les ménages était composé d'un seul individu et 9,4 % était des individus seuls âgés de plus de 65 ans. La taille moyenne des ménages était de 3,06 personnes et celle des familles était de 3,58 personnes.

La répartition de l'âge de la population s'agençait de la façon suivante : 33,7 % des habitants avait moins de 18 ans, 12,2 % avait entre 18 et 24 ans, 24,5 % avait entre 25 et 44 ans, 20,4 % avait entre 45 et 64 ans et 9,2 % avait plus de 65 ans. L'âge moyen était de 32 ans. Pour 100 filles, il y avait 104,2 garçons, et pour 100 filles mineures il y avait 109,7 garçons.

Le revenu moyen par ménage à Hatton était de  et le revenu moyen des familles était de . Les hommes gagnaient en moyenne  par an contre  pour les femmes. Le revenu par tête d'Hatton était de . Environ 11,1 % des familles et 21,2 % de la population vivaient sous le seuil de pauvreté, dont 31,9 % de mineurs et aucun de plus de 65 ans.

Notes et références

Comté d'Adams (Washington)
Town dans l'État de Washington

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaWikipedia


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text:
Home press release Devant celebrates with a bang via "15.15.15"
Devant celebrates with a bang via "15.15.15"
By Rayrose Samson At July 24, 2018 0
This 2018, home-grown TV brand Devant is celebrating its 15th year of providing high-quality TV products in the country. Entertainment has truly come a long way – from basic LCD TVs to the most recent feature-packed Quantum Ultra HD TVs – and Devant has been part of many Filipino households through these years of TV entertainment evolution by constantly providing a wide range of products that cater to the needs of the consumers.
As technology advanced throughout the years, smart devices have captured the attention of today's generation and have become popular sources of entertainment. Due to the convenience it provides, smart devices have become must-haves for every individual in the era of tech-savy consumers. However, this development somewhat created a "bonding with myself" attitude, especially among members of Filipino families. Rarely will you see them talk and bond with each other at the end of the day because most of their attention is focused on their own devices.
Devant has always believed that regardless of how their day ended, it is of utmost importance that family members get together and enjoy common activities where they can share their feelings and other emotions while at the same time be entertained. Devant has continually advocated that families remain tied together, with the TV at the center of their precious family moments to help keep their tight bond and promote a stronger family relationship.
Want to spend family nights or weekend moments the best way possible? Whip up a steaming bowl of popcorn, or crack open those bags of chips, match it with your favorite drinks, and spend quality time with your loved ones by sitting in front of a TV and bond over your favorite movie or TV series. These precious moments are truly priceless compared to hits, likes or shares online.
As its way of giving back to its Filipino consumers for 15 successful years in the Philippines. Devant announces its latest exciting TV promo. Devant's "15-15-15" Anniversary Promo aims to allow more families to own a big screen TV and help keep family ties deeply rooted than ever.
Starting from August 15 to August 19, 2018, customers may avail of Devant's 49DL541 49-inch Digital TV with ISDB-T antenna at a special promo price of Php 15,000.00 only.
The promo entitles one customer to one (1) TV unit reflected in one (1) invoice and is available for straight or cash payment transactions paid in full amount within the promo period only. The TV product shall be a stand-alone unit, with no other premium items included. Other installment promos and cash discounts are not valid in this specific promo, and is also not applicable to Business-to-Business, institutional or corporate purchases.
The Devant "15-15-15' Anniversary promo is available in leading appliance stores nationwide.
For more details, follow Devant on Facebook, www.Facebook.com/devant.tvor visit their "15-15-15" Anniversary Promo website atwww.devant151515.com


I'm here too explore !!!!
Easy going, intelligent with good humor. I love reading,listen to music,have a stimulating conversation and having a good time.
I am a professional male working and living in the city. Would say have a very caring nature and easy going personality.


text:
I Quit Working Because Our Child Care Policies Are Ridiculous
Leigh Anderson
©wendycopley/flickr
Last week Tamara Straus's article "What Stalled the Gender Revolution? Child Care That Costs More Than College Tuition" quickly made the rounds on social media, prompting a chorus of frustrated sighs. My experience is probably similar to that of a lot of middle-class women: Before kids, I had a job at which I made good-but-not-great money. It was with a company that paid its employees as contractors, so there was no health insurance or maternity leave. When the recession hit, just as I got pregnant with my first child, the work dried up. Unemployment benefits weren't an option, and I couldn't find a job that would pay enough to cover child care for one and then two children. Finally, I was uneasy with the child care options available to me—primarily women who were undocumented immigrants with no formal training in early childhood education, or underpaid day care workers logging inhumane hours.
Nonetheless, I always framed staying home as a choice, to myself and anyone who asked. "Those early years are so precious." "I have the rest of my life to work…" Et cetera. And most of my stay-at-home friends used the same language. But once in a while, one of us would mention that we would have maybe liked to work some—maybe two to four days a week—if we could have found such jobs. Or that maybe we would even have liked to work full time, but not 70-hour weeks, and also, who can swing $40,000 a year for child care that might be sub-par or even dangerous? Or that our jobs had offered a maternity leave of 12 weeks, and we couldn't bear to leave a three-month-old in day care.
And so, we "chose" to quit.
Framing this as a choice is less painful than admitting that you're in a no-win situation.
The idea of choice pervades discussions of family-friendly policies. Read the comments on any article about the difficulty of working and paying for child care and someone will pipe up early with "Children are a choice—why should the rest of us pay for your day care? You don't pay for my dog kennel!" Which makes me wonder: If only rich people are allowed to breed, who will wipe the noses of the little Sun Kings when the servant class dies out? Are parents going to, say, place an ad in Town and Country?
Another example of choice: the idea that women choose to go into the lower-paid, care-work professions, choose to take more flexible jobs to be available for their families, and choose to leave the workforce when the strain of taking another unpaid sick day becomes too much. (For which their colleagues will complain about having to "pick up the slack," just as they will complain about picking up the slack for women on maternity leave.)
Framing this mess as a choice is less painful than admitting that you're in a no-win situation, and that despite your education, your hard work, your general moxie, you, too, could not make "work-life balance" work. You are poking around on Pinterest for lunchbox art installations because you want to, not because writing your dissertation became an impractical hobby after having a kid. (And I say this as someone who likes lunch ideas as much as anyone. I just don't want lunch ideas to be my full-time job.)
In fact, two researchers, Nicole M. Stephens at the Kellogg School of Management and Cynthia S. Levine at Northwestern, have demonstrated that this narrative of choice obscures the structural obstacles that parents, particularly women, face in caring for children while remaining in the workforce. The researchers presented a group of stay-at-home mothers with a set of statistics, in four fields, that demonstrated gender inequality. The women who framed their personal current situation as a deliberate choice were much less likely to recognize the discrimination and barriers to equality that the statistics demonstrated than the women who didn't.
In a second study, the researchers exposed a group of undergraduates to a subtle message about choice, a poster that read "Choosing to Leave: Women's Experiences Away from the Workforce" versus a poster with a more neutral message, like "Women at Home: Experiences Away from the Workforce." The students who'd seen the first poster were more likely to state that gender inequality no longer exists and that men and women have equal opportunities in the working world. (Another interesting study on choice and gender inequality: A sociologist at Appalachian State University has shown that both women and men perpetuate traditional courtship rituals—the man asking out the woman, etc.—and that those roles continue in marriage. The participants in that study also framed their traditional gender roles as personal preferences.)
The narrative of choice is convenient—it feels empowering.
But really, our only choice was exactly when to say "I quit" when the pressures of working, paying for child care, and juggling sick days and holidays became too much to bear. In my case, saying I chose to stay home ignores 35 years of cultural shunting towards a particular role: My husband was more established in his career when we married, and he'd considered "being a good provider" when choosing a career and job. I'd considered "flexibility and being at home on snow days" when selecting mine. He played engineering games as a child; I played dress-up. He entered an engineering field and I entered an artistic one. We've both absorbed messages about women being caretakers and men being breadwinners. My employer refused to hire salaried employees and provide family-friendly benefits because no one was forcing him to. The country doesn't seem to have the political will to provide subsidized child care or mandate a year of parental leave. These inexorable downward pressures squeeze a good number of women out of the workforce.
The narrative of choice is convenient—it feels empowering to women who might otherwise feel trapped between a day care bill and no paycheck at all. And it takes the heat off employers to provide decent benefits and off politicians to write legislation that would mandate them. But pretending that everyone has infinite options blinds us to parents' actual situations and dulls our empathy for those who are struggling. After all, if a woman has a kid and isn't married and works for Starbucks, well, maybe she should have made different choices.
Until we recognize that children are inevitable, someone's got to take care of them, and that the whole country is better off if we have family-friendly policies, our only choice is going to be between two evils.


The Reception staff were a little brusque - although a conference group was coming in at the same time; it's a stiff walk from the accommodation area up to the Dining Room - hence my qualm about Seniors (!) - but the food makes it all worth while. Lovely fresh air, basic but fine accommodation, obviously it is a little isolated but that is precisely why one comes here, stunning views. We came and went by Egged bus which is a long-distance route, infrequent and you need to allow time to wait for it, but it was OK.


Broadway Market, in the old Tony's space on the Golden Triangle-Capitol Hill cusp, is the 12th food hall to open in the Denver area, which says a lot about our region's preferred dining style. One might describe it as the antithesis of fine dining, except that, even in a casual setting, we want our food to be oh-so-fine.
We gave it go on a Wednesday evening, after we were told that lunch was busy but dinner was "a bit more vibrant and rowdy." Rowdy? Now there's a rare compliment for a new dining establishment, even one with nine food stops, from pizza to empanadas to sushi. But the convivial spirit of the place quickly emerged as we made our first stop—the beer wall—and giggled and chatted with other patrons over the high-tech system and selection of 24 self-pours.
In hand was our tiny fob, doubling as our meal ticket. A new concept in Denver, the Broadway Market fob is linked at check-in to your credit card, allowing you to wave it at the beer wall sensor and use it at any of the nine dining stands. We shared, but, if you're meeting eight friends, you can each get your own and thus be relieved of higher math and check wrangling. You can still buy and tip in cash, if you choose, or add on a tip at the end that will be divided based on where the money went that night.
My husband headed straight for Biju's Little Curry Shop, where he opted for the Daily Special Curry, tender and perfectly cooked grilled steak sauced in the house X-Hot Vindaloo ($12.95). With jalapeños, red onion, and greens alongside white rice, the colorful dish pleased his palate. He also ordered the chili lime tater tots ($3.50), addictive fried morsels that are a must-have side or appetizer no matter your choice of mains.
I scored on my entrée, the Lamb Doner Bowl from Mother Tongue ($11.50). A large mound of lovingly coddled and roasted Colorado lamb served on organic mixed greens was flavored with cucumber-dill yogurt, harissa aioli, roasted tomatoes, onion jam, cured vegetables, and tahini slaw. While I swooned and sipped my Ottoman Emperor cocktail ($10), the hubby got us a to-go French Rooster ($12) from Royal Rooster—fried thigh and house-made ham on a sandwich so good it almost didn't make it home. The Sea Salt Chocolate Chip Cookie from Miette et Chocolate sealed the deal.
If the word "steakhouse" conjures unwelcome ideas of traditionalism, you should try the Bone Marrow Luge at the new Steakhouse No. 316 in Boulder. On a recent evening, the dish came out unexpectedly, with a grinning explanation from our waiter. The bone luge, like the ice luge, is a means of imbibing liquor. Rather than a channel of ice, the booze runs through the cavity of a beef bone, picking up salt and marrow on its way. When the waiter tipped the bone to my lips and poured a shot of top-shelf whiskey down it, any notion of the place as stuffy evaporated on the spot.
• 1922 13th St., Boulder.