It's almost May!!, originally uploaded by Becky B..

This is the view outside my window. Note that tomorrow is the month of May, and there's snow outside on the ground. I'm one bitter woman.

CLOVIS, N.M. - A call about a possible weapon at a middle school prompted police to put armed officers on rooftops, close nearby streets and lock down the school. All over a giant burrito.

Someone called authorities Thursday after seeing a boy carrying something long and wrapped into Marshall Junior High.

The drama ended two hours later when the suspicious item was identified as a 30-inch burrito filled with steak, guacamole, lettuce, salsa and jalapenos and wrapped inside tin foil and a white T-shirt.

"I didn't know whether to laugh or cry," school Principal Diana Russell said.Russell said the mystery was solved after she brought everyone in the school together in the auditorium to explain what was going on.

"The kid was sitting there as I'm describing this (report of a student with a suspicious package) and he's thinking, 'Oh, my gosh, they're talking about my burrito.'"

Afterward, eighth-grader Michael Morrissey approached her.

"He said, 'I think I'm the person they saw,'" Russell said.

The burrito was part of Morrissey's extra-credit assignment to create commercial advertising for a product.

• He nominated his National Security Advisor and chief war monger Condoleezza Rice to become the US's head diplomatic voice in the world. This is the same woman who spearheaded most of the push to invade a country under false premises, against the opinions of the ENTIRE world. And now she's supposed to be all diplomatic with them? Doesn't make sense.

• Or Bushie's last nomination for UN representative, Yosemite-Sam-mustached John Bolton. Bush nominates a man who not ten years ago publicly denounced the very institution he's now supposed to work under. That, and he's an "angry diplomat," apparently. This definitely doesn't make any sense, but looking at the previous appointment, I think I'm seeing a trend.

• There's still Paul Wolfowitz's nomination for President of the World Bank, and a number of others I could question, but let's move on to his latest nomination...

President George W. Bush on Wednesday officially nominated David Wilkins, 58, the Speaker of South Carolina's legislature and staunch Republican ally with close ties to the Bush family.

On Thursday, to a standing ovation in the South Carolina Assembly, Wilkins began to say his good-byes: "President Bush has nominated me to serve as United States ambassador to Canada, our friend and neighbour to the north."

That was his only reference to Canada during his five-minute address.

Wilkins has no experience in U.S.-Canada relations and political observers said he didn't seem to have any interest in Canada up to now -- with the possible exception of the longstanding trade dispute over softwood lumber. South Carolina is a big lumber state.

The southerner admits his lack of knowledge about the country, which he has visited just once -- in the 1970s.

The whole issue of "calling" is one that's interesting to me. Not too long ago, someone tried to explain to me that they were "called" to a ministry where all signs pointed the OTHER way. But if we questioned, we weren't questioning the person, but essentially God, and God's call on their life.

So, what is a call? Is it something only you, the called, can see? Or is it something others can also discern? How do you really know when you've been called -- or just have persuaded yourself this is the direction you really want to go?

I have no idea.

"A mega-church... am I wrong to be worried when our houses of worship sound like they could fight Godzilla?"

[quote from one of the Sunday speakers]"And what do they do, they say we're going to have a theocracy -- what do they think, we're the Taliban?!"
[Stewart]"No!! Of course not! I mean, yes, you're fundamentalists who are attempting to impose religion on our government, but no -- restricting women's rights and dictating school curriculm,

but... you don't wear the scarf-y things."

[Stewart] "So, Stephen, tell us about these mega-churches..."
[Colbert] "Well, Jon, this one begins in Georgia, goes up through the Carolinas and just touches on Eastern Kentucky. It's huge, Jon. Towers of glass and steel, thousands of seats, a food court, and it even has its own red-light district -- where, for a price, you can get a woman who's not your wife to honor and obey you."

"It was an historic moment for Christian conservatives -- a long oppressed majority ... they've got some token representation in government. A president, both houses of Congress, a handful on the Supreme Court (we're talking single digits there)... but the time has come for them to stand up and demand the REST of what they tragically do not quite have all of."

"Democrats are attacking the culture of life, traditional family values, and the institution of marriage, the very code words that make this country sound so great."

Liberty U. Not to Get Jesus as Graduation Speaker

Jerry Falwell’s Liberty University has announced that Sean Hannity of Fox News will deliver the keynote address at the Christian college’s commencement on May 14.

“Sean Hannity is America’s rising young voice for social conservatism and religious liberty,” Falwell said in the release. “There is no more articulate voice for Christian conservatives in America.”

“Sean Hannity speaks with a clear and consistent voice on the issues of concern to our culture in the 21st century,” added Dr. Boyd Rist, Liberty’s Provost and Vice President for Academic Affairs. “I am confident that he will bring a message to the class of 2005 that is both relevant to their lives and rooted in the core values we share as Christians.”

Meanwhile, Jesus Christ is scheduled to speak at U.C. Berkeley’s graduation on May 11, three days earlier. Liberty’s press release did not indicate whether Falwell and his colleagues felt betrayed by the Lord’s decision to go to Berkeley, not Lynchburg.

It is safe to assume, however, that Sean Hannity believes Liberty is getting the more important speaker.

We learned that God might be what the book itself is: a collaboration, a collage, a call-and-response. Our favorite thing about Killing the Buddha is that a single reader can have such a wide range of responses to it -- you might love parts of it, hate others, or see yourself in many of the people we write about and yet be frightened by a few as well. That seems very much like the way we often experience life and shape our religious (or irreligious) understanding of it: The world is beautiful and ugly at the same time, opposites piling up on top of each other. Not harmony but cacophony. And yet it can sound beautiful. Maybe what we call God is the same way: a hermaphrodite terrorist angel (to put it in the terms of our story from Henderson, North Carolina), or a collection of attributes and characteristics that shouldn't fit together, but do, despite all our assumptions.

In northern New Mexico we spent a week at the most popular religious pilgrimage site in America, Santuario de Chimayo, which is a Catholic shrine where people eat dirt. Really: The faithful line up to enter a small church through the back door, file past abandoned crutches and walls covered floor to ceiling with pictures of people who have been healed there, and then they crowd into a tiny room with a hole cut in the concrete floor. They reach in and grab dirt by the handful, or scoop it into Ziploc bags for later, and then they eat it. People say part of the miracle is that the hole is never empty -- no matter how much is scooped up, it always stays full. We asked the priest who runs this place if that were true, if the Lord keeps the dirt in the hole. "do you think God would have time for such a stupid miracle?" he said. "I buy this dirt. Twenty-five tons a year!" He took us to the pile in the back where a dump truck had dropped a recent load. He showed us where he kept the shovels and the buckets. And then he let us fill the hole.

It can happen. Sometimes it's as simple as the family business. Peter's father is a priest, his mother a former nun. Everyone in Jeff's immediate family makes books of one kind or another. But a "calling" is more complicated than that. If we claimed that we had a divine invitation to make this book, we'd be setting ourselves up as a couple more Buddhas, and we know what happens to them. Yet it probably is true that we were driven to make Killing the Buddha not just by the usual incentives, but by a sense that something like it was needed and that a strange set of circumstances had put us in the place to make it. All of which points to the accidental, contingent nature of a calling, whatever it may be. It is something shaped not so much by a divine voice but by all the voices you've ever heard.

LONDON (AFP) - Young girls who enjoy classic romantic fairy tales like "Cinderella" and "Beauty and the Beast" are at greater risk of becoming victims of violent relationships in later life, a British researcher says.

A study of both parents of primary school children and women who have been involved in domestic abuse claims than those who grew up reading fairy tales are likely to be more submissive as adults.

Susan Darker-Smith, a graduate student who wrote the academic paper, said she found many abuse victims identified with characters in famous children's literature and claimed the stories provide "templates" of dominated women.

Stars on 51st, originally uploaded by indigo child.

I love this shot. I need to get out in the real world and take some pictures.

In a live simulcast sent out to more than 1,000 churches across the country and broadcast on the Christian Television Network, Perkins and Dr. James Dobson (of Focus on the Family) will make the case that Senate Democrats have opposed a handful of the president’s judicial nominees not out of honest concern about their extreme political views but, simply, because the nominees are Christians.

“We must communicate to people of faith across this country that this is a filibuster of people of faith,” he said last week. “That the courts are consistently taking away the religious liberties of Christians in particular, and people of faith in general, in this nation.”

[...]

Perkins, Dobson, and other leaders of the religious right will also make it clear to their supporters that helping the Bush administration in its efforts to pack the courts with Antonin Scalia-type conservatives is the only way to save the republic from what Dobson has described as an impending “long night of paganism.”

As presently constituted, Perkins will point out, the federal judiciary presents a far greater danger to the United States than many other threats facing Americans today. “The court has become increasingly hostile to Christianity, and it poses a greater threat to representative government -- more than anything, more than budget deficits, more than terrorist groups,” he said last week.

(article)

Despite the fact that Democrats oppose these judges for their views on a variety of subjects, conservative leaders have singled out abortion and gay marriage as their chief concerns and only want judges who support their agenda. Despite the fact that many Democrats who oppose some of President Bush's nominees are themselves people of faith, Republicans and their religious supporters are questioning the faith and religious integrity of their opponents.

That is an escalation of the religious/political war. And the two together sound like assertions of a Republican theocracy. Behind these activities lies a fundamental assumption by Republican operatives and their conservative religious allies that they own religion in America. They demand that religious people vote only their way. They claim that "values voters" in America belong to them, and they disrespect the faith of those who disagree with their agenda. There are better words for this than just "politically divisive" or "morally irresponsible." For these are not merely political offenses, they are religious ones. And for offenses such as these, theological terms are better - terms such as idolatry and blasphemy.

Monday
Up early. Ran like hell. No sign of coyote. Ate. Fidgeted. Ran like hell.

Tuesday
Up early. Ran (speed work). Trompe l'oeil master class, 10 to noon. Meaning to push beyond highway-disappearing-into-tunnel, tried highway-disappearing-into-ballet-class (after Degas). Results unsettling. Light lunch. Coyote assembling whirlybird device (rotor, dynamite, etc.) in box canyon. Listens to Jimmy Buffett. Ran like hell. Barn swallows over for drinks.

Friday
Up early, not feeling 100 percent. Headache. Sore throat (sound like a Daewoo!). Runs. Did a little light roadwork, took it easy. Hard to stay cocky, perky. Coyote said to be fine but smells like brimstone. Sharks say coyote likely to countersue. Bring it.

april (i think)
still getting my balance. these heels don't help! loads of hot outfits. already tired of sucking in my gut. got to do something with this hair. everybody says wait till i meet ken.

april
if it's still april. heard i'm getting a corvette. hope it's better than this crappy beach house. not allowed to get a tattoo. thinking of becoming a stewardess. met ken. what a zero.

may
no smoking. no hanging out. no corvette. think my ass is getting big. can't be a stewardess, but go-go dancer or doctor are ok. go figure. ohmigod. g.i. joe. hot!

may or june
what kind of name is midge? she's had work done. ken says she looks like a hooker. i say except in the doctor's outfit we all look like hookers. ken says not me, girlfriend.

june, for sure
had it with transformers. too confusing?now it's a spaceship, now it's a scissors, now it's a hammer. like going out with a hardware store. got the corvette finally. pink.

"There were not sufficient reasons to unleash a war against Iraq. To say nothing of the fact that, given the new weapons that make possible destructions that go beyond the combatant groups, today we should be asking ourselves if it is still licit to admit the very existence of a 'just war.'"

- Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger, now Pope Benedict XVI, May 2, 2003.

Yesterday at Fort Hood, Texas, the president gave a rousing, appreciative speech to the 1st Cavalry and 4th Infantry divisions, insisting that the troops did such a good job in Iraq, he'll be sending them back there in the fall.

Bush marked the anniversary of Baghdad's fall and made a point of recalling one of the most powerful images of the war, saying, "The toppling of Saddam Hussein's statue in Baghdad will be recorded, alongside the fall of the Berlin Wall, as one of the great moments in the history of liberty." Yes, it was just like the toppling of the Berlin Wall, if the toppling of the Berlin Wall hadn't actually involved Berliners.

During his address, Bush called Iraq a central front of the war on terror and swore to defeat terrorists on their own shores. This speech now extends the tour of duty for those talking points to four years, and according to one stale cliché, "I thought I'd be done after two years, but to be continually pressed into service like this... even I'm tired of hearing me."

Also on the morale front, this week, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld visited troops in Afghanistan and Iraq. At a town hall-style speaking engagement, Rummy almost answered the question of when US forces can expect to return home, saying, "The way I think of it is that we don't really have an exit strategy, we have a victory strategy." Rumsfeld then thanked the troops for their time and made his way out of the hall through the nearest victory.

Not long ago, friends invited us to a ballgame at Yankee Stadium, where we enjoyed a pleasant summer evening. Because it was a weeknight, however, and because the home team had the game well in hand by the second inning, we decided to head for home in the middle of the seventh inning. As fans stood for the seventh-inning stretch and the traditional singing of “Take Me Out to the Ballgame,” we moved out of the box toward the exit.

Not so fast. The public-address system commanded everyone to stand for the singing of “God Bless America,” and yellow-shirted security guards holding chains blocked the aisles. We tried politely to move past the cordons toward the exit, but were turned back.

Although Kate Smith is an acquired taste that I haven’t yet acquired, I have no strong objections to “God Bless America,” in part because I think God has blessed America (though not to the exclusion of other nation-states). And if the idea behind the ritual invocation of Kate Smith is to demonstrate support for U.S. troops, I have no particular problem with that, although I’d prefer to demonstrate my support by demanding their return.

What astounded me was the compulsory nature of the exercise (“God Bless America,” after all, is not the national anthem). In the days after 9/11, when the wounds from the terrorist attacks were fresh and festering, Shea Stadium initiated the practice of singing “God Bless America” midway through the game, a practice picked up by the Yankees and other Major League teams. Most have since dropped the ritual, and none (to my knowledge) restricts the movement of fans during what I guess is supposed to be a reverential moment.

[...]

Have I missed something here? I keep hearing from the Bush administration that we initiated the war against Iraq in order to bring democracy to the region. I was always under the impression that democracy encompassed both freedom of expression as well as freedom from coercion, even compulsory patriotism.

But not, apparently, at Yankee Stadium.

VATICAN CITY - Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger of Germany, the Roman Catholic Church's leading hard-liner, was elected pope Tuesday in the first conclave of the new millennium. He chose the name Benedict XVI and called himself "a simple, humble worker."

On Monday, Ratzinger, who was the powerful dean of the College of Cardinals, used his homily at the Mass dedicated to electing the next pope to warn the faithful about tendencies that he considered dangers to the faith: sects, ideologies like Marxism, liberalism, atheism, agnosticism and relativism — the ideology that there are no absolute truths.

"Having a clear faith, based on the creed of the church, is often labeled today as a fundamentalism," he said, speaking in Italian. "Whereas relativism, which is letting oneself be tossed and 'swept along by every wind of teaching,' looks like the only attitude acceptable to today's standards.

MORE REASONS FOR INTERNATIONAL STUDENTS TO CHOOSE CANADA

OTTAWA, April 18, 2005 — The Honourable Joe Volpe, Minister of Citizenship and Immigration, is pleased to build on the success of Canada’s international study program by announcing new initiatives to better attract, integrate and retain international students in regions throughout the country.

In partnership with provinces and territories, Citizenship and Immigration Canada (CIC) is expanding two pilot initiatives to help make Canada a destination of choice for international students. The first will allow international students at public post-secondary institutions to work off-campus while completing their studies so that they can experience the Canadian labour market and gain a wider understanding of Canadian society. The second will allow students to work for two years, rather than one year, after their graduation. This second initiative will apply outside Montréal, Toronto and Vancouver to help spread the benefits of immigration to more of Canada’s regions.

A report to the UN human rights commission in Geneva has concluded that Iraqi children were actually better off under Saddam Hussein than they are now.

This, of course, comes as a bitter blow for all those of us who, like George Bush and Tony Blair, honestly believe that children thrive best when we drop bombs on them from a great height, destroy their cities and blow up hospitals, schools and power stations.

It now appears that, far from improving the quality of life for Iraqi youngsters, the US-led military assault on Iraq has inexplicably doubled the number of children under five suffering from malnutrition. Under Saddam, about 4% of children under five were going hungry, whereas by the end of last year almost 8% were suffering.

In Jerusalem, you can tell a person's religion within the first second you lay eyes on him or her. Muslim women wear a small qura'an hanging on a golden chain, Christian women a cross and Jewish women a star of david. Everybody is wearing their religion around their necks, but is any of it getting inside?

[...]

"I am not Muslim, not Christian, not Jewish,” this I declare today, knowing full well what each word means. Not Sunni, not Shea'a or any other category. I believe that all religions should come with an expiration date. Valid for consumption until. Beyond this date this religion will turn into poison if consumed. Since everybody is creating God in his own image anyway, I think that from now on I will create something that I like.

When asked by friends why I no longer pray or fast I reply that living in the Holy Land has cured me of religion. It always shocks people and shuts them up. After that, people tend to change the subject and talk about something else. I no longer get the speech on how as a good Muslim I should cover my head with a scarf.

A Catholic friend decides to visit me in Jerusalem. I decide that I will take her to all the religious sites relevant to Christianity. I do research on the Internet and I buy tourist guides. We visit the church of the Holy Sepulchure, the Garden of the Tomb in Jerusalem. We visit the Church of The Nativity in Bethlehem. And last, Tiberius lake. We visit a little chapel on the northeast part of the lake. Monks in dark robes are walking around. Pious worshipers look profoundly moved. Apparently this is the place where Jesus performed the miracle of walking on water. I walk towards the edge of the lake and look into the horizon. Fog was starting to lift in the early morning while white birds are flying around in circles. It feels incredibly peaceful with the soft chanting in the background. There is magic in the air. I exhale deeply and then I look down. There are huge boulders, lurking right underneath the surface of the water. Many of them! Stretching well into the lake . . . . ”I don't think that having a laughing fit in this place would be appropriate,” I think to myself as I rush to the car.