Trying
to get a jump on this morning’s entry.
Just read over the paper, quickly.
What did I see? The San
Francisco Bay Area had a quake, just north of the Bay. That certainly caught my eye. Though it seems that while this 6.0
earthquake rattled some folk and destroyed some property, no one was
killed. I can remember waking up
in San Francisco to a minor quake and thinking someone had broken in. Reading it made me want to check the
magnitude of the Haitian earthquake as I seem to recall that a low intensity
quake caused so much death, but it was in fact much stronger, at 7.0. http://www.nytimes.com/2014/08/25/us/strong-earthquake-shakes-bay-area-in-california.html?hp&action=click&pgtype=Homepage&version=HpSumMediumMediaFloated&module=second-column-region®ion=top-news&WT.nav=top-news
Remaining in Hispanola, the papal nuncio from the oldest
cathedral in the Americas was whisked home for disciplinary action, after it
was revealed that he routinely went down to the wharf and paid shoeshine boys
for sexual services. Local people
understandably want Archbishop Jozef Wesolowski tried there in the Dominican
Republic, but the Vatican has invoked diplomatic privileges, as the Archbishop
is technically the Pope’s ambassador in the country. Francis is going to have difficulty convincing the world
that anything’s different if the Church continues to operate above the
law.
The simple video that the New York Times provided on the
murder of Michael Brown in Ferguson was one of the most thoughtful explanations
for what happened that I have seen.
Up until this, it was hard to understand particularly why things became
so incendiary. Watching as people
explained with video shot on their cell phones, showing a boy lying on the
road, shot dead, blood pouring out of his body, while the crowds gathered. No one was allowed to go beyond the
yellow tape. The body remained
uncovered, and the crowds kept growing and growing. And then a police force over armed with anti-terrorist
weaponry, they never needed but now have a surfeit of, escalated in equal
measure to the growing crowd. Ten
days on, hearing people calmly explain what happened in their neighborhood, it
all suddenly made sense. http://www.nytimes.com/2014/08/24/us/michael-brown-a-bodys-timeline-4-hours-on-a-ferguson-street.html?hp&action=click&pgtype=Homepage&version=LargeMediaHeadlineSum&module=photo-spot-region®ion=photo-spot&WT.nav=photo-spot
And it was good to read, at the top left of the page that
one of the other reporters held captive by ISIS, Peter Theo Curtis, has been
released. If I understand correctly
he was threatened to be the next captive to beheaded. Apparently thirteen months ago, another prisoner being held
with him was able to wiggle out a small opening to freedom, while Mr. Curtis,
of a bigger build, could not make it through. That would have been me and so I had a moment of empathy for
the man who was tortured and threatened with the unimaginable.
Unfortunately, the unimaginable which was removed from
Youtube, was, I’ve come to find, broadcast on a huge screen in downtown Beijing
at Dongzhimen, on an infinite loop of poor taste: http://www.tnp.sg/news/video-james-foleys-beheading-shown-giant-screen-beijing
And the soundtrack for this morning’s read? The spacious, haunting work I stumbled
upon randomly by the Swedish bass player Anders Jormin. This is his 1995 release “Jord.” I’ve tune on called “Mocambique” which
must be Swedish for the country in the south east of Africa. I’d like to play my little one the trumpet
solo. But who it is attributed to
I can’t tell from the album cover.
Born in Jönköping, Sweden in 1957, the mix is sparse enough to let his
bass playing reach for the canopy.
I had a look at what “Jord” means in Swedish. What do you figure?
I guessed it was either “north” or “Lord”, but it is, in fact,
“soil.”
One of those days where you start off considering
beheadings, and unarmed shootings and natural disasters and little boys lured
into prostitution by the powerful, rough injustice where 就地正法[1], transpires, swiftly, and I’m thankful
for the relative calm, and the time to plan before waking my kids up to face
the day.
[1] jiùdìzhèngfǎ: to execute
on the spot (idiom); summary execution / to carry out the law on the spot
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