Musical interlude of the day

again, the wonderful Mary Fahl sings...
the photos are of the Gettysburg battle field in Pennsylvania, over the mountain pass from the Shankesville area.

Notes from a sad day

The Philippines lost 20 of their citizens in the 911 attack.

“Honey, I love you. I’ll see you when this is over.”

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Bush gives a speech in honor of the passengers who saved the USSenate:



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For me it's personal: One of my classmates was at the Pentagon...
more HERE:

Perhaps a dozen injured were on the lawn, most suffering from blistering, second-degree burns on the face, hands and arms. Some had inhalation injuries; almost all were in shock.

...Frost and Feerick appeared to be the first doctors on the scene. They began using the medical kits, putting in intravenous lines with saline and dextrose drips.

Someone with a badge began yelling that there was a threat of incoming aircraft. An FBI agent ordered the doctors to move. Frost just kept working...For about 45 minutes, Frost worked to stabilize the dozen to 15 patients on the lawn....

Feerick left to establish triage areas in the tunnels leading to the parking lots. Frost moved to treat those with inhalation injuries and those who had been hurt by debris. The stream of incoming patients began drying up.

"This began to bother us - were we in the right place?" Frost said. He began hearing stories about the World Trade Center. "I then understood this was a far greater tragedy than we'd hoped."

For the next several hours, Frost treated firefighters and other rescue personnel.

In late afternoon, Frost remembered to call his wife, Zan. She was frantic, having learned that morning that he had gone to a Pentagon meeting.

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Peggy Noonan says it best:

And there were the firemen. They were the heart of it all, the guys who went up the stairs with 50 to 75 pounds of gear and tools on their back. The other people who were there in the towers, they were innocent victims, they went to work that morning and wound up in the middle of a disaster. But the firemen saw the disaster before they went into it, they knew what they were getting into, they made a decision. And a lot of them were scared, you can see it on their faces on the pictures people took in the stairwells. The firemen would be going up one side of the stairs, and the fleeing workers would be going down on the other, right next to them, and they'd call out, "Good luck, son," and, "Thank you, boys."

They were tough men from Queens and Brooklyn and Staten Island, and they had families, wives and kids, and they went up those stairs. Captain Terry Hatton of Rescue 1 got as high as the 83rd floor. That's the last time he was seen.

Three hundred forty-three firemen gave their lives that day. Three hundred forty-three! It was impossible, like everything else.

Many heartbreaking things happened after 9/11 and maybe the worst is that there's no heroic statue to them, no big marking of what they were and what they gave, at the new World Trade Center memorial.

But New York will never get over what they did. They live in a lot of hearts.

They tell us to get over it, they say to move on, and they mean it well: We can't bring an air of tragedy into the future. But I will never get over it. To get over it is to get over the guy who stayed behind on a high floor with his friend who was in a wheelchair. To get over it is to get over the woman by herself with the sign in the darkness: "America You Are Not Alone." To get over it is to get over the guys who ran into the fire and not away from the fire.

You've got to be loyal to pain sometimes to be loyal to the glory that came out of it.

Musical interlude of the day

the singer is Mary Fahl.

Stagecoach Mary take three

Information you can use

UncleOrson tells you everything you need to know about birdfeeders.

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Fish head terrorism...

via davebarry
actually, here in Asia, they are a delicacy...Lolo always sucks his clean (I give mine to George the Killer Dog).

fish head recipe here.
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Twitter and Flicker, the maps


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DIY food dehydrator.

here, we wait for a rainless day and dry them in the sun.
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Nat Geo best astronomy photos of the year:
Jupiter with moons.

Photograph courtesy Damian Peach

The "Hell Freezes over" post of the day

Someone at the NYTimes writes something good about...Sarah Palin?!

She made three interlocking points. First, that the United States is now governed by a “permanent political class,” drawn from both parties, that is increasingly cut off from the concerns of regular people. Second, that these Republicans and Democrats have allied with big business to mutual advantage to create what she called “corporate crony capitalism.” Third, that the real political divide in the United States may no longer be between friends and foes of Big Government, but between friends and foes of vast, remote, unaccountable institutions (both public and private)....

Strangely, she was saying things that liberals might like, if not for Ms. Palin’s having said them.

“This is not the capitalism of free men and free markets, of innovation and hard work and ethics, of sacrifice and of risk,” she said of the crony variety. She added: “It’s the collusion of big government and big business and big finance to the detriment of all the rest — to the little guys. It’s a slap in the face to our small business owners — the true entrepreneurs, the job creators accounting for 70 percent of the jobs in America.”

This is not news to those familiar with her attempt to clean up the Republican "good old boys" club in Alaska...

Stagecoach Mary and the Sisters

The link below on Stagecoach Mary notes she came west to nurse her childhood friend (and "owner's" daughter who became a nun).

This blog retells the story, but one comment fills in more personal information on Mary's parents: Her mother, a "house slave" got pregnant by a field slave, so the man was sold away...but Mary was allowed to play with the daughter, and learned to read and write...and later, when the daughter became a nun out west, Mary traveled to Montana to nurse her back to health.

Mary had no fear of man, nor beast, and this sometimes got her into trouble. She delivered the mail regardless of the heat of the day, cold of night, wind, rain, sleet, snow, blizzards, Indians and Outlaws.

Mary was a cigar smoking, shotgun and pistol toting Negro Woman, who even frequented saloons drinking whiskey with the men, a privilege only given to her, as a woman. However, not even this fact, sealed Mary's credentials given to her, her credentials boasted that, “She would knockout any man with one punch”, a claim which she proved true.

and if you think it would make a great movie, you are not alone: LINK

This book mentions Mary and the gunfight that got her fired, and three is a biography of her at Amazon (but not on line) and there is more information about both of them HERE. in a book about Catholic schools and hospitals.

Just like the story of the "Buffalo soldiers" is usually ignored in common history, so is the story of how Catholic nuns helped to tame the west.

Many communities actually asked Catholic sisters to come and set up schools and hospitals, not only for the Catholics but for all the people. You rarely read about them but they pop up in unexpected places when you read history, such as finding that the sisters in Santa Fe knew Billy the kid, or Doc Holliday's cousin (Melanie of GWTW was based on her sweet personality) became a nun, or that Brigham Young encouraged the sisters to nurse the local miners.

So Mother Amadeus established not only a school for local settler's daughters in Montana but for the local Indians....the sisters not only faced 30 below winters, poor food, but also the bishop, anti Catholicism with the feds and locals, and culture clashes with Native Americans.

And I find it amusing that when Mary got into a gunfight on the mission, that the bishop ordered her fired, but Mother Amadeus made sure she had other employment...so at age 60 she ended up delivering mail (the second woman to ever get a post office job).

Even back in the good old days, Catholic nuns were not exactly meek and mild brides of Christ...

Hisory stories for your reading pleasure

don't mess with Stagecoach Mary Fields.

a fascinating story but too long to excerpt here. go read the whole thing.

headsup TYWIKIWDBI

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Defending evil foreigners from religious minorities who were suspected of supporting terrorism...

no, not CAIR: Edmund Burke

headsup TeaAtTrianon

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Great Scott!

but who is "scott"? Freakonomics discusses.
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Factoid of the day

the Sphinx has a tail! well, I guess that makes sense, since it is half man half lion...

which can be viewed if you approach the Giza complex from the south.

photo from this website of the right foot and tail...


the website has lots of neat stuff on Egypt, including some quicktime panoramas of Giza and other areas.


another factoid: The Sphinx of Mesopotamia has wings.


as did the sphinx that Oedipus overcame in the Greek legend.

Ideas that make you go: uh?

Ten uses for Tennis balls.

Put them on the bottoms and corners of furniture, use them to massage sore muscles, open a jar, use them to buff floors and remove grease from swimming pools...

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Here in the Philippines, to buff a hard wood floor, we use a coconut husk cut neatly in half. The fibers won't sratch, and the maids just scoot them around with their feet.


you can buy one here if you are interested, along with the short handled Baguio broom to pick up dust and the

we also have an electric buffer, for the public area which has marble tiles. Yes, it sounds expensive but it's actually not much more than ordinary tiles, and it doesn't stain when the roof leaks.

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we used to use our second rinse water from the washing machine to water our plants when we had a drought in the US: the rinse water went into a sink, so we just put a bucket in there to collect it to use. The problem was that it was a lot of time and effort to do this.

but now Inhabitat says there is a machine to use your used water for the toilet.

it will catch on...Only if it's cheap and easy.

Oh Canada!

We are still waiting for justice in the murder of our nephew, but a strict libel law here in the Philippines means I can't write all the details that is common knowledge but you aren't allowed to say such things.

The strict libel law is one reason that so many politicians get away with stealing "over the table, under the table and with the table".

In the US of course you can accuse any public figure of anything and get away with it.

However,that isn't so in the Philippines, nor in Canada either.
Mrs. Caswell, a Canadian blogger and politician, is still fighting a libel suit in Canada, because she accused someone of "he "grows and uses marijuana, uses cocaine, has misappropriated funds, been disbarred as a member of the Law Society of Saskatchewan, has breached the public trust and misused his office and is a dishonest and despicable person,"

I follow her blog because she is a metis and often writes about the problems facing the First Nation kids in her area, problems similar to that which we faced on reservations in Minnesota.

Apparently, she accused someone of using drugs and being involved in the drug no one bothered to do a drug test of the guy or check if her accusations were true, instead she was sued for libel, and she lost in 2009.

A lot of this sounds like trying to quiet political enemies and whistleblowers working with the minorities in her area.

And, as Mark Steyn and a couple other major writers found, Canada isn't just silencing isn't limited to Metis women politicians in the hinderland but it's human rights folks can hit anyone who dares to say anything against political correctness.

Lake Urmia

a nice film about the problem...if you don't like history just ignore the film and listen to the lovely music.

Stuff below the fold

Floods in the Berkshires and in Broome County NY...and the Philly suburbs....My prayers to friends and relatives in those areas.

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from ThinkGeek:

Today in Geek History: Star Trek first airs in 1966, pioneering a multiracial--and multi-species--television cast. 45 years later, Star Trek is still boldly going. Live long and prosper! \\//,

and Bakingdom has instructions on making your very own Spock cookie.

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Crocodiles in the Philippines? Yes, writes the PhilInquirer: they used to be common, and one of the scenes in "Noli me Tangere" is about a man rescued from a croc attack.

the writer also notes that in the Philippines, we have St. Nick and Santa Claus, but some in the Philippines also celebrate San Nicolas de Tolontino on Sept 10th...and this St. Nick doesn't bring presents, but they do give out a cookie in his honor.

DessertComesFirst discusses the cookie HERE...more info at Traveleronfootblog.
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American support for the MILF is no secret.

The problem was probably made worse by US colonial policies...

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leaving trash behind on the moon...

as one wag put it: well, at least it proves that the moonwalk wasn't faked...
not that it will change the minds of the conspiracy paranoid types.

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Lake Orumieh in Iran is drying up, and locals are worried and protesting. PBS report HERE.
Dr. E, who is active in environmental issues, also has a report, and comments dryly:

The DOE had warned the officials in 1998 we had layed out a road map for the protection of the Lake. Many parts of that project were underway in 2004 . These protection schemes and strategies were later abandoned by the ninth government and only reconsidered recently after serious protests rocked the region. No one can dispute the fact that the environment was never a priority for the government of Mr. Ahmadinejad.

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the RedLake Ojibwe have plans to reforest areas destroyed by the federal gov't overlogging the area in the past century.

In the lawsuit filed by Red Lake, tribal officials say the federal Bureau of Indian Affairs allowed too much clear cutting and they sold timber cheaply to big loggers and timber barons. The tribe says it lost nearly $400 million in timber revenue over the past 80 years.

I was always shocked to see the forest degredation there,..we had protected forest area near the hospital, but in other areas, much of it was scrub pine/straggly aspen with only a few large trees near the roadways.....
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Oklahoma has an ebook/audiobook/mp3 library program.

They will send what you want to you via your local library...which should improve the ability to get books in small towns (unlike the coal town in PA which had a good selection of books for their kids going to college, in Oklahoma the library had mainly junk to read, not textbooks/college level specialty type books...I had to buy the books I wanted used from Amazon...which is why I have such a large library with me here in the Philippines).

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The Green Global economy Index list...

South Africa is number three, proving that the apartheid laws keeping the locals living their green "traditional" lifestyle (57% below the poverty level) instead of driving around in cars and eating hamburger at McDonalds is good for the planet.

Founder of Project Gutenberg

Michael S. Hart, the founder of Project Gutenberg, has died.

On July 4 1971, after being inspired by a free printed copy of the U.S. Declaration of Independence, he decided to type the text into a computer, and to transmit it to other users on the computer network. From this beginning, the digitization and distribution of literature was to be Hart's life's work, spanning over 40 years.

Project Gutenberg allows those of us with a computer (but a small budget) to download copyright free books for free.

Musical interlude of the day

The article on Rick Rescoria noted:

A picture, taken after the attack started, shows Mr Rescorla, megaphone in hand, guiding staff down stairs to safety.

Workers recalled him singing patriotic songs, including a Cornish adaptation of Men of Harlech as he led them down. So well-drilled were the staff that just three, including Mr Rescorla, died in the attack.

for those of you unfamiliar with the song, here it is:

News from the past

A Blind man and his dog:

I clutched Roselle’s harness and with focus and confidence we headed down the 1,463 stairs to fresh air and freedom. We didn’t know that the worst was yet to come.

My life changed that day because of the beliefs and actions of a few zealots who though they had all the answers and who imagined the murderous violence that destroyed the center of New York City would bend the world to their will. They did not win, however. Love, trust, and teamwork did.

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When the Airspace was shut down, where did all those incoming planes go?

Remembering Gander.

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and the man who predicted 911 (and saved 2600 lives because he insisted on drills on how to get out in an emergency).

The Gratuitous Lady Gaga Post of the day

Stuff below the fold

NPR remembers Father Judge.

On the morning of Sept. 11, 2001, Judge rushed with some off-duty firemen to the World Trade Center, which had just been hit by the first plane. Tom Von Essen, who was then commissioner of the New York Fire Department, saw him in the North Tower.

"And he looked really concerned," Von Essen recalls. "We didn't talk. We always talked. We always fooled around. But we didn't that morning."

As it happened, French documentary filmmakers were inside the North tower. Their camera captured some of the last moments of Mychal Judge's life. In the film, says his friend, Father Michael Duffy, you can see the priest standing by the plate glass window, watching the bodies fall on the patio outside.

"And if you look closely at that film, you'll see his lips moving," Duffy says. "Now, for those of us who know him, he wasn't one that talked to himself. He was praying. And absolving people as they fell to their death."

Moments later, the South Tower collapsed. The force of the explosion shattered the windows and flung the priest across the lobby. In the darkness, some firemen stumbled over a body.

"It's Father Mike!" they yelled. They lifted his limp body and gently placed him in a chair. As they carried him outside, a photographer snapped an iconic picture of the developing tragedy.

but no first responders allowed at the memorial service...no clergy or prayers either...




photo: Holy Name Province Franciscan
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Bomb? No, forgotten mooncakes in a box.

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another "we're all gonna die and we deserve it" film.

And ALGore approves.
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another day another typhoon...due tomorrow.

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US was pushing the Philippines to let the MILF get all their area (ignoring the many Christians who live there and ignoring Philippine sovereigty).

the Supreme court nixed the deal since it was illegal...and no, this is not about religion but about who gets to steal all the money.

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a local Review of John Sayles latest film, about the Philippines fighting US occupation...

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a new panel will investigate the death of Dr Jerry Ortega, killed for opposing mining in Palawan.

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survival of the fittest, or the sexiest...

Gift item of the day

HelloKitty Plush Turkey costume

Gobble gobble! This super cute Hello Kitty 8" Plush will steal your heart. She is dressed adorably in a head to toe turkey outfit complete with feathers.

Musical interlude of the day

headsup the westernconfucian