Sakirin Mosque, Istanbul

Sakirin Mosque, Istanbul

Architect, Hüsrev Tayla

Interior Design, Zeynep Fadillioglu

Mosque designed by a Woman

Fred Flintstone Endorses Michele Bachmann for Presidency

(Des Moines) Fred Flintstone, his stage name, a local actor, is endorsing Representative Michele Bachmann’s GOP bid for the Presidency.

Fred, who describes himself as an expert Fossil Reenactor, was recently laid off at a local Creationist Museum because of the economy.  He currently does children’s birthday parties and occasionally performs at home schools.

“I do the method acting thing. Really get into my subject of being a caveman who knows how to interact with dinosaurs and is of course waiting for the Savior to be born.  It’s a specialty that calls for a certain amount of dedication and consecration. 

When asked why he was endorsing Bachmann he replied.

“Well she is like Shakespeare when she says things like ‘A grain of wheat plus a starfish does not equal a dog, and that this is what evolutionists are teaching in our schools’.

“We can’t let the government shut down home schools and force kids to learn godless science.  Besides, home schools right now account for close to half this actor’s bread and butter. 

John Corapi - Judas Priest?

Innocent or guilty, I have formed an opinion of this matter burning up keyboards on the Catholic blogosphere.

Father Corapi, until recently a living saint, has apparently taken the money and run so to speak.

There were allegations of sexual amusement (with women) and drug addiction.

FYI The Ongoing Story 

I saw him a few times on EWTN, haven’t watched it in years, with his aggressive defense of the RC catechism and all things RC. I was not impressed.

His speech seemed to be impeded by badly fitting dentures as he seemed to spit a lot when making a point. 

Quite popular with devout middle aged catholic babes.  There is a great wailing and gnashing of teeth since his departure from the official catholic airwaves on the very huge rosary, middle aged catholic babe blog circuit. 

In a sense, he has gone over to the other side.  His Santa Cruz Media seems to be in his for-profit name and not in name of his religious order or any greedy diocese.   Get the deed.  Keep the deed.  Screw everybody else. Catholic rock stars don’t need a conscience.

Screw the ecclesiastic courts set up to investigate abuse.  Set up shop in God’s country, Montana, praise the lord and pass the ammunition – and keep the profits on DVDs, pamphlets, inspirational books etc.  And let’s not forget the lecture circuit.  Great deal.

And now a second planned career to out church corruption.  Caiaphas lives!

The Catholic church has gone to hell – surely and truly gone to hell.

Jimmy Swaggert move over. 

Good News of Miriam - Novel - Chapter 17

Having a precious jewel in one’s possession sounds great, the problem is holding onto the jewel.

Unfortunately, after I spent some quality time with Jesus that day, I kept running into what I will call the committee.

Those surrounding Jesus were a mixed bunch of people. There was an outer core of James, his brother, Mary (another Mary), his mother along with assorted cousins and half brothers and half sisters. There was also this Simon person. They also called him Rocky or Peter as a nickname, perhaps as an invention of sarcasm. It takes intelligence to understand and appreciate the dark humor of sarcasm.  I learned that well from my Greek plays, especially the more formal comedies.  In any case, sarcasm was completely lost on this Simon person.  And lost on James too as well I might add. These were the original ones of his hard core Galilee base.

This outer core, with the exception of Rocky, were all family. This family did not seem to be a very close family that I could see.

The closest circle were what I called the worldly ones. They were Matthew the tax collector, and two brothers James (another James) and John.

James and John, the brothers, were called the “sons of thunder”. Whenever they were around, their loudness and boyish enthusiasm centered all attention about themselves and the subjects that they were to talk about or address.

When one brother spoke or preached, the other usually joined in to accent a point of conversation or start a play on words.  And there were many words to choose from with many local dialects.  In a way, if James got silence on any given line of a preaching idea and it went dead in the faces of the local native, it was John that then threw in an assortment of words, local, Hebrew, Greek, Latin or even Persian to finally get a response on the faces of those being preached to.

If I had not known differently I would have thought these two were theatre folk doing short comedies and using plays on words as comedic technique to emphasize some fact stated.  That and using their gesture of the hands waving or slapping each other in the chest as each made points to a story or a debate within a story.  They had the talent but not the polish of the theatre people I had recently met and associated with. 

All in all, the best of them, this Jesus crowd, had a country bumpkin air about them.  Even if the sophisticated Jerusalem urban types would see this country cousin veneer, some could see through to the strength, self confidence and even arrogance of the northern Galilee local culture in these two brothers.

Even Jesus with his charisma could not compete with their energy and this horsing around of James and John once it was ignited. The only time I saw Jesus laugh was when James and John got together into their verbal mischief and childish pranks.  It was they who went ahead of the group and scouted out any town or village that would be willing to welcome Jesus as a visiting preacher.

This Matthew, James and John sub-committee were also the one time followers of the martyred John the Baptist figure.

I have heard lately that Jesus was supposed to have been a cousin of this Baptist fellow. I heard no such thing when I first encountered Jesus.

The next layer surrounding Jesus had to do with the rabbis and scholarly crowd.

It was here that Jesus was most successful. His knowledge of most of the Jewish sacred and semi-sacred texts was phenomenal. He had a perfect memory.

I understood from my old friend Hiram that there were many sacred Jewish texts floating around. Some cults were focused on one or two ancient books. Only a handful of scholars had any idea what the true inventory of sacred books was in the Jewish culture.

There was something Jesus had once disclosed to me. As a recognized child prodigy with a perfect memory, he was made to recite volume after volume of Jewish law. In fact, Jesus looked back with regret. His name and fame as a child was that of someone more like a freak going from town to town and from synagogue to synagogue for a small fee or donation.

Jesus wept. He felt that he had been denied a childhood because of his talents.  And like many children denied a childhood, he had seen too much of the complex and many times corrupt workings of the adult world.

Let us get back to the committee…

For more sample chapters:

Good News of Miriam

Sanctuary of the Heart - Albert Ketelbey

I ran into this old fashioned sentimental music of Albert Ketelbey.  He was a very successful British composer very popular in the early part of the twentieth century.

Music was designed as an accompaniment to vaudeville, music halls and silent films.  He also broke the million mark on at least one of his records.

I find it quite relaxing to listen to.  In this complicated scurrying age, it is nice to look back on the tastes of the past and share them briefly in the present.

Goodness in Grace

The Serapis Flag – Flag Day USA

John Paul Jones gets his ship shot out from under him, the Bonhomme Richard (1779), and he boards his prize, the British ship HMS Serapis.

Jones lands in a Dutch port for repairs and supplies. The Dutch were supposedly neutral. The Brit diplomats say that Jones is a Pirate, in that he has no recognizable national flag on his captured vessel.

The Dutch recognize the United States as a legitimate political entity and with some digging, letters from diplomats Franklin and Adams to the Dutch with a description of what the official American flag is supposed to look like, Jones on his ship comes up with the first Navy ensign, the Serapis Flag.

The Dutch, by diplomatic reason and or bribe (probably bribe from Dutch bankers already banking on the Americans backed by the French) slips a sketch of Jones’ improvised flag retroactively into the Dutch records.  They recognize the Serapis flag as the official flag of the USA.

Voila! The HMS Sepapis is then a legitimate prize of war by a legitimate nation. It goes to show you how with the Serapis American flag, how too many cooks can spoil any broth.

And so it goes. Or so it went.

Sam Harris – Journey to Atheism

Perhaps the old definitions of God, being obsolete, has created a gap, called the present atheism, leading to a possible future redefinition of that past idea and or concept – by a first modern generation, of not touched by past religion, atheists.

Sam Harris – on Islam

Sam Harris

Baptized in the Oneness of Feeling

I ran into the above quote and was taken by the poetry of the words -"baptized in the oneness of feeling", a Friend’s description of the atmosphere at Abington Pa. regarding a meeting with Nicolas Waln as speaker, 1797

Apparently after this guy gave a very inspirational sermon, the assembly did not want to leave the building and it continued for a short time trying to come down from a spiritual high.

Funny how the use of words like “baptized in” is used as metaphor in that Quakers don’t do baptism.

I was doing some historic research using old maps of Philadelphia on the Internet.  I was looking up spaces I grew up in sections of Philly that might be labeled as Tacony or Frankford.

I did some further research after I realized that a lot of colonial mansions and summer homes had once existed, and disappeared, long before I came along and co-existed with factories and national trucking firms on massive lots. 

The most deciding factor that changed everything, from rural to inner city and industrial was with the railroads starting about 1860 and or the Civil War era.  War does make jobs and progress of sorts somewhere, sometimes or it used to.

Looking for a defunct borough of White Hall led to a White Hall mansion on old maps across the street from the old Frankford Arsenal where my grandfather had once worked as a “millwright” whatever that is.  Have to look that one up.  Oral family history said he was a “rigger”.   Whatever.

The White Hall mansion led me to the Waln family, one of the founding Quaker families of the Philadelphia area.  Starting with a thousand acre grant from William Penn as incentive to uproot form England and religious persecution. 

One of the reasons another Quaker in England spent seven years in jail there was because he refused to pay a tax or assessment for the rebuilding of the local COE church’s steeple.  Thank God for separation of church and state here these days.  Small favors.  Buy me a ticket to the new world – fast.

Well anyway, I did not want to do too much research on this Quaker family.  I was curious to a point but not obsessed. Not much material on the Net in any case.  No doubt a lot of papers and diaries exist at Quakers colleges, libraries and archives but are not as yet digitalized etc.  

You can see and or wonder how in less than a hundred years, a virgin forest got chopped up, turned into farms and or plantations, mills, roads and in time to give all four foot eleven inches (150 cm) of George III a pain in his royal ass. 

Amazing stuff.  Some of these Quakers built small ships, brigantines, out of their forests.  Farming, trading, mills, foundries, and all in just a few generations.

From this background came Nicolas Waln, itinerate Quaker preacher.

Nicholas Waln 

"...He was a lawyer of some repute… He also had a dry wit. For instance:

"One time Nicholas Waln was visiting one of his sick friends who said to him, ‘Nicholas, I am very sick, I think I am about to die.'

Nicholas was a great joker and, no doubt to distract his friend's attention, replied, ”Yes, I think though wilt and when thou gets to heaven, please ask the Apostle Paul to return to earth and explain some of the hard things in his letters."..."

Waln - 254 S. Second St.

"Waln began his career as a lawyer, but as the following antidote illustrates he soon became disillusioned with the profession. When traveling home from trying a case in Bucks County, Waln stopped by his friend's country home and is reported to have said, "I did the best that I could for my client, gained the case for him, and thereby defrauded an honest man out of his just due. " After this he never practiced law again and instead became a Quaker minister..."

Apparently some of that old fashioned Quaker religion rubbed off on him.  A victim of conscience – pangs of it – walking away from a profession at the top of his form but one which he suddenly lost his passion for.  “What does it profit a man…”

Further research sees that the name of Waln has disappeared locally in the phone book. The name Waln still exists, as a minor historic footnote, on a small stretch of a back street in Frankford near a still existing Quaker meeting house.

The idea of following your conscience might explain why there are fewer Quakers these days than might be expected given their head start from Billy Penn.   Apparently the Quaker push for the abolition of slavery took its toll internally and nationally. Their ranks were thinned in border states like Maryland as an example where many Quakers joined mainstream Protestant sects.  This, in order to keep their property and still go to church on Sunday without hearing anything favoring the abolition of property. 

And so it goes.  Or went. 

Search for Spirituality - Peter Kennedy

Thumbnail Sketch of Jesus

Perhaps in one of my long standing prayers to somehow meet Jesus, I think I briefly channeled into an image of him – sort of  – a thumbnail image – just before I awoke this morning.


The conversation was something like he needed a driver with a license to drive his pick up truck.  (Apparently he did not have a license? I am not sure.)


He needed to drive over to his aunt’s church (parish?) (aunt? What was his aunt’s name?) to help hand out food to the poor.


Before I realized who he was, had been, he had turned away from me and was walking over to some nearby spot. I was searching dream memory for an image of the person I had just been speaking to in a dream and I came up blank. (I did not see his face though I knew it was him.)


Walking away in jeans and a denim shirt he had almost shoulder length unkept hair.  He carried himself like some aging has been rock star who after being on a binge or two knew that he was needed elsewhere other than in his own present self pity.  


In a way, a human Jesus is all we aspire to meeting.  The gold, the glitz, the hype, the groupies of some long gone old day history tours was long faded. 


But the spark and the talent is still there.

Lady Gaga – Judas – Lebanon – Censorship

“I am in love with Judas.” (lyric)

Lady Gaga's Born This Way banned in Lebanon

“ - Lebanese officials have reportedly banned Lady Gaga's new album, deeming it "offensive to Christianity". Police have impounded copies of Born This Way, currently No 1 from London to Tokyo. Its recent single, Judas, has been criticised by Catholic groups and was banned from Lebanese radio in April. … - “



BTW I have gone to the trouble to view the Lady Gaga Judas video three times. The lyrics are a bit ambiguous. On a visual level I get ambigous stuff too. But I see on one level, Gaga, if a Mary Magdalene figure, driving a wedge between bosom buddies Jesus and Judas and on another level I see Gaga speaking in a metaphoric feminine voice for the person of Jesus. Quite brilliant. She is not as talented at Madonna IMHO but give her time to evolve.

In any case, with 52 million hits on YouTube, anybody in Lebanon on the Internet can have the freedom of choice to view and hear this wonderful song.

Censorship in a free global world be damned!

If the video or the lyrics seems vulgar, well this is the age of vulgarity, a step toward evolution in society to another, hopefully higher, more mature level, in an evolved global society and or the near ending of a decaying dying civilization. I vote for the former.

I am reminded of the scandal and feigned alarm from the church fat cats about Madonna’s Like a Prayer in 1989. That is tame today and Judas by Lady Gaga will be considered tame too in time. If anything, these lazy dogmatic church types should be glad that Jesus, Judas or anything in the obsolete Christianity even gets a mention in the MSM even if by way of a back door. Etc.

I would show that Madonna video but it is blocked on You Tube. Instead a rendition of Like a Prayer from the mainstream TV show Glee – cannot get more tame, contemporary or gayer than that.



Have a cool day dudes and dudettes!
Warning: (Please do not take yourself and or somebody else’s lyrics too seriously.)




Happy Belated Birthday Jefferson Davis

I missed it.  Jefferson Davis’ birthday.  Yesterday?

Yesterday was an excuse for lazy state workers in Alabama and Florida to cheat taxpayers out of a day’s work in favor of a fake Monday, three day weekend holiday. 

He was actually born on June 3 which was Friday.  Tennessee has its official state holiday on June 3 and Mississippi celebrates Jeff’s birthday on the last Monday of May – Last Monday of May?  Memorial Day?  I thought Memorial Day was for all the dead of the Civil War.  And don’t give me the revisionist title “war between the states” bullshit. 

I have stopped trying to research this fake messiah birthday item state by state in the old southern states of the Confederacy.  Why bother?

I, did while researching, run into a blatant lie in of all places a government web site on the U.S. Senate.

January 21, 1861 Jefferson Davis' Farewell

“Tall, slender, and gaunt at the age of 52, Davis had been confined to his bed for more than a week….”

Tall?  Tall?  He was a shrimp! (Sorry)

Forty years ago I saw the “dress” he was captured in, in a display case at the Civil War Museum in Philadelphia.  It was not a dress but a silk paisley dressing gown.  How metrosexual for the times guys!  Did I mention how small this article of clothing was?  Like when I first saw it.  I thought it was for a child, the gown was so petite.

 (click on photo to enlarge image)

I researched it.  He was five foot four inches tall (162 cm).  I guess he was tall in the Senate and compared to the other senators?  Perhaps if he were alive today, Jeff would be driving or have one of his slaves driving him in a Hummer to offset psychological physical short comings if you know what I mean etc.

As I have stated before in this or some other blog, Jefferson Davis, as one time Secretary of War had the blueprints and plans for a southern route of a national transcontinental railroad, the projected moon shot space project of its day, to be financed by the federal government.

The lawyer for the northern railroads and the northern railroad transcontinental route lobby groups in the form of Abraham Lincoln signaled the end of the expansion of slavery on the continent.  Davis’ plans to build the southern route with cheap slave labor would have given him a shot at becoming the nation’s first billionaire.

 

How many dead darkies per mile would it have taken to make Jeff and his cronies’ multi multi millionaires building this dream of a southern railroad cash cow to the Pacific? Who would care?

Strange thing is that most “Christians” don’t really know their neighbors let alone love them as commanded by one long forgotten mystic and seer. 

Odd thing was that Jeff was educated in a Catholic school along the way, even though not catholic.  Which is why I think Pope Pius IX had such a fondness for Jeff, and his brave stance defending the honorable age old institution of slavery. Whatever.

With the Gadsden Purchase in hand for a southern railroad Pacific route, the business men of the old south went their way into their brave new world of the Confederacy. With lots and lots of nut cases running around the planet like pro-slavery southern freebooter William Walker taking over countries like Nicaragua, funded by Vanderbilt types, the future seemed bright to fuel the future slave republics of Mexico and Central America in league with the Confederacy.

All Jeff Davis had to do was build the south’s railroad to the Pacific Ocean to be king of the world. 

I am not exaggerating these facts.  Greedy men with ego problems like Jeff Davis have and continue to plague and ruin the world to this day for the rest of humanity, slave or not. 

If you want to have cake with slave master dictators in the old south y’all, go right ahead.  Enjoy.

Have a nice day.

The Gospels and Sarah Palin

Lame Stream Media grifter Sarah Palin got caught the other day by a reporter who asked her what she thought of her tour of Paul Revere’s House in Boston.  She then went on in casual campaign chit chat to describe how Paul Revere had warned the British with shots and bells or something to that effect.  Her fans then went into Wikipedia to hack the story of Paul Revere to match Saint Sarah’s view of what I believe is sacred American History. 

Well anyway her boss, Roger Ailes, inventor of Lame Stream Media Fox News, in his bulletproof, bombproof office, in fear of gays and or blacks, has sent her on a Vacation to Nowhere on a bus leaving a huge carbon footprint in perhaps the hope that one of her insane stalkers gets off a few rounds of sacred second amendment sacramentals, that she of course survives, wonder woman, saint, and he can have Cheney’s old office during Sarah’s first term as Prez.

This is not the America I grew up in.  The nuts are running the insane asylum. 

I have to think, wonder, how the gospels possibly got distorted in similar fashion after they were verbally transmitted and then in writing transcribed to suit the decade and or the ego of the current saint in charge of the Jesus cult. 

“and on this nitwit (Sarah Palin) I will build my whats-sha-ma-call-it”.(Roger Ailes)

HMOG!?

Have a nice day.

Lois Kibbee - Actress and Writer

I personally do not believe in reincarnation.  The numbers, odds, are far too great that I come back as anything animal, vegetable or mineral.

But sometimes I have to think about it and when I do, the following memory always pops into my mental view.

I made a brief acquaintance with a famous TV actress, the late Lois Kibbee.  TV actress, I say, and or long term soap opera star on the Edge of Night as character Geraldine Whitney Saxon.  I use the word actress instead of actor as is so common these days in the lexicon.  And I made the effort on one or two occasions to watch that soap to see her as a screen actress.  Didn’t know who she was when I first met her.

Ms. Kibbee was a friend of a distant relative that introduced me to her back then in the 80s after I first came to NYC. Lois was also a writer and had very kindly read one of my plays and commented. She had also been a producer over her long career in the theatre of off Broadway type plays as well as being the igniting and maintaining spark of community theatre companies over the years.  

She didn’t like my play, thought it was too vulgar.  I may have been ahead of the curve on America’s taste back then but she was kind in pointing out its strengths and weaknesses.  It still is in the drawer waiting for a third rewrite.  She did use that old cliché a lot about how “there is no such thing as write.  It is all rewrite.” 

One of her books, as a ghost writer, was The Autobiography of Christine Jorgensen.  It is June and LGBT pride month, so I thought I might mention that.  Story is that Lois never got paid for a book that became a perennial bestseller over the years in the paperback category.  Oh well.  Formal contracts are sometimes better than handshakes.

Of course she was the daughter of and niece of very famous, prolific character actors, Milton and Guy Kibbee, from the heyday of Hollywood in the 1930s and 40s.  She had a long family history of show people on her mother’s side, the Wilsons, as well.  All and all something of a royal theatrical blood line ran through her veins and psyche. She had that kind of presence.

Subject I started out with is reincarnation.  Well here is the strange thing.  I was in her Manhattan apartment once and its walls were covered with famous people’s photos, autographed by living movie stars and writers in her day as well as classical prints and signatures of people long dead like Charles Dickens and Edwin Booth, cannot remember the others etc.  The apartment had a dramatic ambiance like a stage setting. 

Lois, in her private life, had a theatrical image of herself in the form of the famous character Harlequin.  There were various prints and images of Harlequin on the wall.  Apparently there is an old theatrical style of performance called Commedia dell’ arte, comedy of the (acting) class.  It is a standard look at life through a handful of characters common to everyone’s life.  Three standard characters of this improvised acting style are Harlequin, Columbine and a clown.  In a way the cliché of Hollywood film making – boy meets girl – boy loses girl – boy fights to win girl back – is a centuries old scenario found in traveling theatres, operas, stage dramas, movies, TV etc.

A variation of the Harlequinade style has puppets such as Punch and Judy going through the standard Harlequin Columbine farce.   The intermediate clown acts as protagonist.

Well anyway, in Lois’s apartment was this ambiance, atmosphere that I somehow reacted to, being in love with the autographs of Dickens and others.  It was as if there was a genuine energy connection from those mostly dead personalities by their pictures and signatures on the walls.  I do have a vivid imagination.

Lois also was an opera buff.  One other piece of historic paraphernalia she had on the wall of the her living room was a rather large piece of gold damask curtain, framed and behind glass, from the old New York Metropolitan Opera House torn down in 1967.

Over the years, I have come to know many opera buffs and I have to say the majority of the ones I have met have said that they believed in reincarnation.  Some believe that opera is a staged version of life, in its many aspects, and more tragic than comedic.  That life, no matter how many times you live, the content of the play rarely changes.  Whatever.

So a question ran into my head when I first saw this artifact from the old Met.  I just popped it out without thinking. 

“Do you believe in reincarnation Lois?”

To which she replied simply “I don’t disbelieve in it.”

Good answer. 

End of story.