He agreed with me!

My blog is worth $1,693.62.
How much is your blog worth?

I have known many people who have been encouraged and influenced by the biographies of the military, of politicians and sports-people.

My personal favourites who inspire me tend to be people who have influenced people at a grass-roots level. Dorothy Day, Catherine de Hueck Doherty, Jean Vanier, Thomas Merton, Henri Nouwen, CS Lewis all spring to mind.

Today I shed a tear(actually several) in honour of the memory of Rosa Parks.

Sulla Jones at the Agonist posted the wapo story, at wapo I found this list of blogs via technorati linking to the wapo story about Rosa.

Gentle readers,
the deed is done
all first year assignments
have been handed into respective lecturers
and so the wait begins
to discover what
my results
will
be...

Spring has sprung, showers have brought out many flowers and not too many snails seem to be around this year!

Current Addiction remains H5N1, aka avian flu, bird flu...

Have grabbed 3 SF novels from the local library, DVD's of Steeleye Span and Concert for George and intend to walk a little if the hayfever and asthma settle down.

and so to bed... g'nite.

Agonist Bulletin Board is having corruption woes,
meanwhile Avian Flu is still flapping around Vietnam and more recently Indonesia,
keep in touch with the latest developments: http://www.curevents.com/vb/forumdisplay.php?f=40

New Orleans crisis shames Americans
By Matt Wells BBC News, Los Angeles

Matt tries to get a handle on what slowed the response.
fav line: The truth was simple and apparent to all. If journalists were there with cameras beaming the suffering live across America, where were the officers and troops?

remember:
Give me your tired , your poor, your huddled masses, yearning to breathe free, well it aint so bros, it aint so. If you aint got no mo or no mo-car you aint nobody, you just get forgotten.

It's a national humiliation over in the land of the free, the poor have been overlooked, this is a challengin read from pbs: POLITICS AFTER KATRINA. So will the US national consciousness finally realise that people are people and poor blacks are not "three-fifths of a human being?" as Jesse Jackson said on Saturday. We can but hope.

Nature is a great leveler and hopefully out of this suffering and maelstrom a new day for the Ameican Black People will arise. A new 'preferential option' is possible.

What is particularly eerie after watching for years thin, ravaged human bodies on the television is the large physical size of the distressed down in Southern Louisiana.

In early 2001 the USA warned its citizens that the three most likely major disasters were hurricane, earthquake and act of terrorism. I sure hope we are not going to have a hat-trick.

Well, Friday afternoon August 26th arrived, a lovely late winter sunny afternoon. I'm given a lift by a friend to the ACT Legislative Assembly for the Australian Citizenship Ceremony where I hand in my letter of invitation. I am asked to prove my identity by showing my UK passport and given a form to change my electoral status from UK citizen to Australian. I am escorted down to Row C. Row's A, B and C have Bibles on the seats, a pledge of allegiance, order of ceremony and the words to Advance Australia Fair. The seats in the row behind me do not have Bibles.

Two seats to my right is a lady from Malaysia. Behind me a gentleman from Thailand, next to him a woman from California. A petite woman sits down next to me and we exchange pleasantries. She is from the Karen, her parents fled Burma in the 1960's and she was born and grew up in a camp in Thailand. She met her Aussie husband there. A guy from the USA sits down on my left. Most of the people around me have lived in Australia from 4 to 6 years, much laughter erupts when I admit to having lived here for 40 years, and that I am becoming an Australian out of financial expediency to assist with university study costs.

The ceremony begins, the politicians make all the usual spiel about how great we all are adding to the tapestry of Australian life. Citizens from the UK are particularly noted as contributing especially to building Australia over the past 60 years. My chest swells with pride.
Suddenly I find myself on my feet with the other occupants of rows A, B, and C pledging our oath to God of allegiance to Australia. Changes to the oath make interesting reading.

Then we sit down and row D make their pledge without reference to God. So it looks like 25% of new Aussies do not wish to involve a deity in their citizenship ceremony.
Then we have to sign our electoral papers, they are collected and we sing the first two verses of Advance Australia Fair.

Then I tumble outside and walk back to work, an errant Englishman no more.
Aussie, Aussie, Aussie, OY OY OY!

72 hours to go, until I take the oath of allegiance to the Queen of Australia and become a citizen fully of Australia.

This will then mean that I have to watch sport for at least 30 hours a week, drink a slab of beer twice a week, lose any sense of respect for fellow human beings and use bloody in every sentence.

just joking

everything old is new again.

Westward ho, bird flu moves inexorably towards Europe.
meanwhile i have created a group, a yahoo group:

Click to join diseaseoutbreaks

Avian Flu, anthrax, swine flue, ebola, the picture from China is foreign.

The links and posts here are recommended.

Niger.

Niger is not an isolated island of desperation - it lies within a sea of problems across Africa, says Nobel Prize laureate Desmond Tutu.

meanwhile in the motherland:
In the wake of Niger's food crisis, we must question the right of charities to have a monopoly on "calling famines", says Simon Harrigan, a freelance anthropologist with experience of famine relief in Sudan.

staying with the Guardian:
It's up to African writers to provide positive alternatives to the global media's preoccupation with hunger, war and catastrophe, says Doreen Baingana, Ugandan poet and novelist.

Starvation in Niger is not only an inevitable consequence of poverty, drought and locusts but also the result of applying free market policies to try to lift the country out of poverty.

over to the NYT:
It is shocking that the crisis in Niger developed in a year heralded as a year for Africa, says this editorial.

no pictures, the emotional effect is enough in words alone.

As part of semester II, alongside the history of Christianity, synoptic gospels, Australian Theologies, we are studying Practical Theology. It all becomes rather academic in the light of pondering Niger.

To pinch a line from JCSuperstar "what's it all about", indeed. weep and know no answers...

Dance of deception by James M. Wall " Among the messages of sympathy that poured into London following the July 7 bombings were condolences from the governments of Egypt, Syria, Saudi Arabia, Morocco, Iran, Turkey—all nations with majority Muslim populations—and at least two Muslim nongovernmental groups: Hamas and Hezbollah.

But as Middle East scholar Juan Cole pointed out on his Web site "Informed Comment," only ArabicNews.com and a few Chinese sites mentioned this list. The Western media gave little attention to this strong Muslim expression of solidarity.Why this omission? Support from Muslim nations did not fit the dominant narrative in the U.S., which insists that "the reason we are attacked is that they hate us and our way of life, and we are not going to let that deter us from fighting terror." This narrative is not based on reality."
hattip Don over at agonist.org.

Semester two has begun and the workload is massive. Assignments and book reviews on church history, the gospels, australian theologies, practical theology and other stuff I have already forgotten. There will be little time for agonising or blogging over the next three months.

BUT somethings are just too powerful and righteous to ignore. L O Y A L T Y by Larry Johnson, proud to be an American. I am well pleased. May more like Larry stand up and tell it as it is.

Other trees remain a naked forlorn testimony of the raging fireballs of January 18, 2003

Eucalypts trunks enveloped with new growth.

Sunday afternoon the family piled into the wagon and up into the Brindabellas we drove. Major rainstorm Friday evening had washed a lot of snow away but there were occasional mini drifts. Lots of trees are still bare from the bushfires but some are regenerating.

Just so it seems that the whole world cares about skippy, click here. Sometime I may vent forth on the use of animals as pseudo-heroes but life is busy this week, juggling home, work and a conference as well as preparing for Semester II, next week. Just click it. Thank You.

sometimes it's just fun to read and tinker. Remember that disclaimers are to ensure your safety.
As a kid I got thrown head over heels several times by playing around inside television sets and once by a vacuum cleaner that I had forgotten to unplug before I started examining the brush contacts on the motor.

Garage / yard sales are a great place to pick up hi fi gear that often just needs dust blown out or rubber bands replaced.