2007 from Bklyn Hts Promenade by Robert Bove

Horse folk on 9-11 here. Some of their posts are just so.

Lower Manhattan. 9-11-01. Robert Bove

The Blind Man’s Guide

 There is no path; there is no road,

That we have made, that leads away

From doors in flame, from glass-shard floors

Guide dog no use but to stay close.

But to presume a path will appear,

First to blind feet, then to scorched hands,

Each step borne by that presumption—

That foot will find fall after fall,

Descending an obscure staircase

Long minute after long minute

Until a familiar embrace,

Merely imagined up to now,

Saying you are home—

Brings you home.

~ 2002 by Robert Bove

Anthony Sacramone has some fun with The Secret:

Astounded as I was by the phenomenal bestselling success of Rhonda Byrnes’ The Secret—gobsmacked by the sheer weight of its pages, the width of its margins, and the commodious depths of its solipsistic inanities—I wondered: How can I cash in on the gullibility of the average consumer of spiritual bromides and New Age gobbledigook?

It would be tough going. After all, how could I hope to compete with such Secret insights as:

“This is a feeling Universe. . . . Ask once, believe you have received, and all you have to do to receive is feel good” (page 53).

“You are the master of your life and the Universe is answering your every command” (page 146).

“You are God in a physical body. . . . You are all power. You are all intelligence” (page 164).

“You are a human transmission tower. . . The frequency you transmit reaches beyond cities. . . . It reverberates throughout the entire Universe” (page 11).

Read the rest here.

The Tide. 1966. Renee Radell

Interesting read: Popular Mechanics asks the technical advisor to Danny Boyle's flawed but fascinating new film Sunshine 10 questions here.

Training our new horse:

Sampling strange brew:

And testing out the English department's new Super Personal Lecturing Device for the Fall semester:

Phil Rizzuto (left) lights cigars with fellow Hall of Famer Yogi Berra to celebrate the birth of Berra's son in 1951. AP photo

Phil Rizzuto: Hey Yogi, I think we're lost... 
Berra: Yeah, but we're making great time!

More such shenanigans here.

Phil Rizzuto, R.I.P.

From the AP report:

NEW YORK  —  People in the U.S. who quietly band together and adopt radical ways — not just established overseas terrorist groups such as Al Qaeda — pose a serious threat to America's security, a new police analysis has concluded.

The New York Police Department report released Wednesday describes a process in which young men — often legal immigrants from the Middle East who are frustrated with their lives in their adopted country — adopt a philosophy that puts them on the path to violence and attacking civilians that Muslim extremists say is acceptable under jihad, or holy war.

At a briefing, NYPD officials argued that local law enforcement is best-suited to deal with the homegrown terror threat.

"Hopefully, the better we're informed about this process, the more likely we'll be to detect and disrupt it," Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly said during the meeting with private security executives at police headquarters.

Meanwhile, NYC still still plans to open the taxpayer-funded Khalil Gibran madrassa, and Mayor Bloomberg wants the city to adopt more "Middle Eastern" and other young men, whether here legally or illegally—and his "don't ask, don't tell, don't deport" policy regarding crimes committed by these folk indicates he thinks it's just peachy to let them stay here no matter how long a rap sheet they amass. Do mayor and police commissioner share the same planet?

There will come a time—there better come a time—when such willful blindness in public officials is recognized as dereliction of duty in war time.

(This politically correct lingo—"Middle Eastern" when we know it means Muslim—will make New York's  non-Muslim Middle Easterners as happy as non-Muslim "Asians" in the UK are made to feel by being lumped with the bad guys.)

I hope this post is tongue-in-cheek, but somehow I doubt it:

Talking Points for the Madrassa
by Baron Bodissey

Supporters of the Khalil Gibran International Academy (KGIA) in Brooklyn organized a community meeting on Monday night at the Islamic Society of Bay Ridge to discuss the school and coordinate their efforts.

The original contents of this post have had to be removed due to legal concerns for the parties involved.

Sorry.

Meanwhile, Daniel Pipes here and Alicia Colon here weigh in today on the Khalil Gibran madrassa. From Colon's piece:

The question is, where is the ACLU? If a cross is anywhere to be found on public property, the ACLU will file a case to have it removed. Yet, clearly, this zeal is nonexistent when it involves Islam.

The University of Michigan-Dearborn is spending $25,000 to build footbaths for Muslim students. In San Diego, an experimental school, Carver Elementary, has morphed into one with accommodations for Muslim prayers and dietary needs not previously made for Christian and Jewish students. In San Francisco, the Bryon Union School District held a three week "How to be a Muslim" program wherein students prayed to Allah and took Islamic names. When the case was taken to court, the liberal Ninth Circuit ruled for the school.

Perhaps the ACLU requires someone to initiate the complaint and atheists only seem interested in targeting Christian artifacts. Exactly what is it about the religion of peace that makes it immune from litigious nonbelievers?

Update: The Baron's post clearly was serious. Here's his statement replying to a comment:

It's not my liability that I'm worried about, but somebody else's.

They had to take down their post, so I removed my quotes & links.

Free daily papers have their fans, but I am not one of them. It's hard watching people read them on the train when you suspect it's the only leisure reading they will do all day. (h/t John Hawkins).

Say what? 'Nobody reads newspapers anymore' allegedly gets columnist fired

The Internet, as we all know, has taken a toll on the venerable newspaper industry--so we'd understand that print media folks would be a little bit sensitive when their writers crack jokes about it. But, as it turns out, they might be more thin-skinned than we thought. Humor writer Elliot Kalan, who writes a column for the free daily newspaper New York Metro, might've just gotten fired over it.

Kalan, who is also a segment producer for Comedy Central's The Daily Show, wrote a column in the publication's August 3 edition entitled "Newspapers: Information's Horse & Buggy, in which he asserted that "Nobody reads newspapers anymore...As this very copy of Metro shows, the only way to get most people to read a newspaper is to literally force it into their hands." Ouch. A potshot not only to the print media as a whole, but also to the phenomenon of free dailies that are ungracefully waved in your face like giant newsprint mosquitoes as soon as you emerge from the dank underworld of New York City's subways.

New York magazine's Web site reported that the powers that be over at Metro, which also runs Boston and Philadelphia editions, weren't too happy, and sacked Kalan immediately.

Betting pool time: Which blog will hire him now?

This is a fine example of what you will not read in your newspaper this morning. Stop the Madrassa reports:

[New York City Schools] Chancellor Klein has predictably chosen Danielle Salzberg as the interim acting principal for [Khalil Gibran International Academy]. The actual KGIA problems of separation of church and state, and separation of education and Islamist ideology, will now become more acute behind the camouflage of a principal who, according to the NY Daily News, is a member of the Jewish Orthodox Feminist Alliance , was raised in an Orthodox Jewish household and belongs to a Manhattan synagogue, according to the New York Sun.

[...]

Salzberg has had “direct responsibility” for the KGIA’s flawed design that explicitly preferences Islam and Muslim religion in the curricula, and Islamist and sharia ideologies in the teacher “partners” for the school. And that she continues to have that “direct responsibility.”

She has direct responsibility for appointing Almontaser as principal, even while Almontaser serves on the Muslim Consultancy Network with a host of extremist organization participants including the unindicted co-conspirators in terrorism financing, ISNA and CAIR, the second of which also awarded her efforts with a major award.

Salzberg has direct responsibility as senior program officer for choosing an entirely religious Advisory Board for a public school, in apparent contempt of constitutional separation of church and state.

There's much more at Stop the Madrassa, including a critique of Salzberg's sharia-safe work at Teachers College, Columbia University.

When Catholic Bishops go bad: The Baron has the sickening story of a Dutch bishop who says,

I worked eight years in Indonesia, and prayed together with other priests. In the Eucharist of the Holy Mass God is there named Allah. Why don’t we look at this example and do the same thing? Why can’t we celebrate mass together?

Somehow I think Pope Benedict will expedite this bishop's request to take early retirement.

This is one wall I would try to put back up before Halloween (from The Scotsman):

NEW evidence has been unearthed suggesting Orkney islanders once built a physical barrier between the land of the living and the spirit world.

Archaeologists are working on a Neolithic settlement, dating back nearly 5,000 years.

Only a small part of the Ness of Brodgar site has been unearthed, but already experts say it has given up fascinating discoveries and is helping them better understand the wider Neolithic complex between the Ring of Brodgar stone circle and the standing stones of Stenness.

It is even suggested that the remains of the unusual buildings recovered at Ness of Brodgar could be as historically significant as the islands' famous Skara Brae village.

Village of Skara Brae

"On the far curving shore of the bay lies Skara Brae, hazy through the sea-haar."
George Mackay Brown - Rockpools and Daffodils

This one impresses a lot of folk, myself included (suggested by this post below).

... and/or Scotland:

North Sea Cove from Tantallon Castle Battlement. June 2006 by Robert Bove

Though its principal has resigned under fire (and will continue to draw a taxpayer funded salary), Brooklyn's Khalil Gibran International Academy public school will open in September.

More at Stop the Madrassa:

Unfortunately, the removal of such a principal from this school less than a month before it opens is not sufficient. Serious questions about her handiwork - her choices with respect to KGIA’s curriculum, its textbooks, its teachers, the “retired Arabic-speaking community members” the Post reported that she wanted to bring in to “converse with the students during lunch periods,” etc. - remain to be satisfactorily addressed.

As Pam Hall, a spokeswoman for the Stop the Madrassa Community Coalition, said upon learning of the Almontaser resignation:

“Dhabah Almontaser’s resignation is an implicit admission of what we at the Coalition have maintained all along: Her ideological agenda of using taxpayer-financing to promote Islamism disqualified her from having anything to do with a public school. Under present circumstances, however, the only way the so-called Khalil Gibran International Academy could open this September would be to rely upon Ms. Almontaser’s appalling and reprehensible decisions, her judgments and, yes, her political agenda. So this school must not open.”

Examples of that agenda are contained in the “Executive Summary” Ms. Almontaser produced to describe her program for KGIA, which was made public in response to a Freedom of Information Law request filed by the Coalition member John Matthies of the Middle East Forum’s Islamist Watch. As two members of the Coalition, William Mayer and Beila Rabinowitz, note in a critical analysis of the Summary posted on their blog, PipeLineNews.com http://www.pipelinenews.org/index.cfm?page=kgiaexec8607%2Ehtm):

“Charges leveled against KGIA by these writers - that it will in essence function as a madrassa, a center for indoctrination not education - are proven by the school’s own executive summary, a document recently released under threat of a lawsuit by the Stop The Madrassa Coalition. The summary is actually a manual for creating an Islamist vocational school, one in which every activity is planned around creating social activists with an Arab supremacist mindset, in the mold of KGIA’s activist/principal Dhabah Almontaser.”

MEMRI has produced a graphic list of linked terrorist Web sites based in the U.S.A. (including screen shots) here.

PJ Media tweaks the MEMRI list to include sites found in the U.S. and other Western nations here.

[Note: There is no truth to rumor that CAIR is researching Quaker Web sites based in Muslimania.]

This strong 9% ABV sipping ale holds up well, meaning it gains flavor and retains head as it approaches room temperature. Only those with heroic livers and personal attendants and/or pages should guzzle this stuff.

I grilled lamb burgers garnished with Uncle Roy's Moffat Chuckle last night—and served up imperial pints of KT with which to wash them down. Delightful.

Heavy food and brew for an August night in Brooklyn Heights, you say? Not when the mercury dropped to 58° F as it did here yestereve. Perfect.

Seen yesterday in Brooklyn Heights.

Bklyn Heights crepe myrtle Aug. 2007 by Robert Bové

Bukowski. He's not for everybody—but he don't care (and not just because he be dead).

A musical based on his writings is now at the New York Fringe Festival. It's titled Bukowsical!.

A splenetic taste of the SoCal bard from his poem, "The Shoelace":

with each broken shoelace
out of one hundred broken shoelaces,
one man, one woman, one
thing
enters a
madhouse.

And speaking of drunks, actor Stacy Keach has some advice for suicidal pop tarts:

"I did my most important rehab in the Reading Gaol, England's version of very tough love. So tough they wrote songs about it. A 6-by-6 cell for six months, talk about 666," Keach told Page Six. "Rehab is not a walk in the park for two months and out. It's the toughest role you'll ever tackle." Sobriety has paid off in career longevity. Keach, 66, stars in John Sayles' upcoming feature "The Honey Dripper," just finished the Hallmark Western "The Lone Rider," and portrays St. Paul in the star-studded audiobook of the Bible.

Joseph Bottom* waxes lyrical on the "new atheists":

Christopher Hitchens
picks up the rice in a church
where a wedding has been.
Lives in a dream . . .

All the lonely doubters,
where do they all come from?
All the lonely doubters,
where do they all belong?

The rest of Bottom's piece discusses Harvey Mansfield's probing into the topic. Fascinating.

*Speaking of names, Mary.

This does it for me. If Christian broadcaster/science maven Pat Robertson has got global warming religion, it must be true:

"We really need to address the burning of fossil fuels," Robertson said during his "700 Club" broadcast on Thursday. The high temperatures in some regions of the U.S. East are "the most convincing evidence I've seen on global warming in a long time," he added.

Evidence, at least, that there is something new in Mr. 700's world view.

The numbers were wrong.

Better tell Pat Robertson.

Archaeologists embarrassed somewhat by their own delight.

Rannoch Moor, June 2006 by Robert Bové

Just got a survey cum fundraiser from Senator John Thune (R-SD). The survey requires one of the above.

S'wonderful, this persistence of stylus.

Multi-octaved Diamanda Galás (debut album, 1981: Wild Women With Steak Knives) understands:

"I worship the singers who sang it straight," she said. "They actually knew the melody. They knew the changes. They could sing over the changes. They weren't just going up there and doing their thing over the top of it. That's disgusting. That's what you hear on ‘American Idol.' I can play it as straight as Doris Day. Love her. Best legato in the business. And from there you can take the song to another place."

Yes, there is so much imitation of music out there now, so little music: our children have been digitalized.

I've never seen Galás perform, though a friend did use one of her albums in his multi-media shows in the late 1980s. Hearing her the first time back then, I remember asking myself after just a few notes if I was up to listening to an entire album. Very powerful, scary voice.

James Taranto focuses on what we feed youth:

The Spirit of Virginia Tech

"On September 6, Virginia's own Dave Matthews Band along with John Mayer, Phil Vassar, and Nas will join together in 'A Concert For Virginia Tech' at the university's Lane Stadium," declares a press release from the institute:

"We're extremely grateful for the compassion and generosity of these artists who wished to create a very special event where our students, faculty, and staff can come together to celebrate the spirit and resiliency of our university community as we begin a new academic year," said Charles Steger, President of Virginia Tech. . . .

"While we obviously will never forget those lost or affected by the events of April 16, this concert will help us to honor Virginia Tech's enduring Hokie Spirit," said Scott Cheatham, president of Hokies United. Hokies United is a student-driven volunteer effort organized to respond to local, national and international tragedies that may impact the Virginia Tech community.

"Nas," whose full name is Nasir Jones, is, according to the press release, "hip hop's foremost lyricist and thinker. And, some would argue, hip hop's conscience." Here is a sample of hip hop's conscience's oeuvre, a 1999 work called "Shoot 'Em Up" (warning: unredacted obscenities at link):

One 44, two 45's
3 loaded clips, 4 niggas roll, one nigga drives
500 Benz, 6 reasons why
This kid should die
We shootin every m-----f---er outside
Pulled on his block, jumped out the car, guns in our hand
At the same time everybody ran
There that nigga go, hiding in the crowd
Let the trigger blow, 7 shots now he lying on the ground

Hip hop's conscience is helping the Virginia Tech community come together to celebrate its spirit and resiliency and ensure that we never forget those lost or affected by the events of April 16. Doesn't that make you feel warm all over?

I'll get to Dave Matthews at some point. In the meantime, get your hands on a copy of Eduardo Velásquez's new book on Matthews, Cold Play, Tori Amos, &cetera ad nauseum: A Consumer's Guide to the Apocalypse.

Because "authorities" are arguing over the definition of "bomb."

These would be the two Quakers arrested near an important U.S. Naval facility in South Carolina.

Bill Riehl has fine updates on the contortions mainstream media have gone through and are going through in their efforts to avoid stating the obvious.