Quote of the Day

“The more difficulties one sees in the world the more perfect one becomes. The more you plow and dig the ground the more fertile it becomes. The more you cut the branches of a tree the higher and stronger it grows. The more you put the gold in the fire, the purer it becomes. The more you sharpen the steel by grinding the better it cuts. Therefore, the more sorrows one sees the more perfect one becomes. That is why, in all times, the Prophets of God have had tribulations and difficulties to withstand. The more often the captain of a ship is in a tempest and difficult sailing the greater his knowledge becomes. Therefore I am happy that you have had great tribulations and difficulties. For this I am very happy—that you have had many sorrows. Strange it is that I love you and still I am happy that you have had sorrows.”

‘Abdu’l-Bahá in Fire and Gold p.13 in Star of the West Vol. 14 #2 p. 41

Revoked is a virus, worthy of WHO concern...

If you click the map, it will take you to the data page.

Since I can probably claim well over 2/3 of the USA hits -(for the postings I do) The folks in the Seychelles are statistically near the USA... a big howdy and a warm hello to the two hits in Afghanistan!

Onde estão os meus amigos Brasileiros, uai?

Leahy’s Immigration Provision Sows Sex Panic Among Key Religious Groups

Who is really pointing the dagger to the heart of immigration reform, the senator who seeks to include permanent partners (including gays) or the Bishops and evangelicals who oppose it?

the author concludes:

I was taught to take seriously the words, “whom God hath joined together let no one put asunder.”

These days I think it’s almost funny to hear pundits wondering why so many Americans, including so many Catholics <insert or Baha'is>, are giving up on religion altogether. Could it be on account of blinkered morality and irrational antics like this? Gee, I don’t know: Could it?

me: yep...

To see full article: Religion Dispaches

Lou Diamond Phillips: "Do not apologize for who you are"

Lou Diamond Phillips: "Do not apologize for who you are"

Controversy of the Day

There seems some concern by my hyper-literate, Berkeley grad son and his beautiful lady-friend about the spelling of this blog...

Let me explain


1. Everyone who knows me knows I can't type well. An injury in an 8th grade wood shop class earned me both a shortened right index finger and a “C” in the course. Which allowed me to drop typing and to add chorus... definitely contributing towards making me gay as we learned to sing a few show tunes and musical hits.
   

2. Everyone who knows me knows that I can't spell well at all, now I don't spell well in 3 languages – MS Word and Open Office have helped me with this.
   

3. Everyone who knows me knows that my reading vision needs an upgrade (new glasses headed to me in 7-10 days), and also wonder why on earth a near sighted, lasiked dude uses a small min-computer to blog with (ans. I find the lugging around of ton laptops very unsightly.
   

So there are some reasons, but after a great deal of market based research that took over 14 minutes, I decided upon REVOKED as Baha'is had revoked my administrative privileges and I was hoping mad. Mostly because, I wanted to celebrate my amazing talent to put my foot in my mouth with my inability to spell well.

Besides revolked, revocked seemed dumb, and well TheBahaisreallypissme off.blogspot seemed silly, tho it pretty much summed up my feeligns at the time. Rovoked was born, and few really great people snet their love, energy and disapointments...

So I revoked, just to be safe, and went to the defintion revoked - Definition from the Merriam-Webster Online Dictionary and found, that my spelling actually was quite fine, thank you very much.

revoked

One entry found.

Main Entry:

¹re·voke

Pronunciation:

\ri-ˈvōk\

Function:

verb

Inflected Form(s):

re·voked; re·vok·ing

Etymology:

Middle English, from Anglo-French revocer, revoquer, from Latin revocare, from re- + vocare to call, from voc-, vox voice — more at voice

Date: 14th century

transitive verb 1 : to annul by recalling or taking back : rescind <revoke a will> 2 : to bring or call back intransitive verb : to fail to follow suit when able in a card game in violation of the rules

• re·vok·er noun

Quote of the Day

"Preservation of one's own culture does not require contempt or disrespect for other cultures."

--Cesar Chavez

Me thinks thou dost...

Larry Stickney - Defender Of Marriage

Pam's House Blend contributor Lurleen has just posted an astounding evisceration of Larry Stickney, the campaign manager for Protect Marriage Washington, the group behind the effort to repeal that state's brand new "everything but marriage" domestic partners law. Among Lurleen's revelations is that the three-times married Stickney has had a restraining order issued against him by one of his ex-wives who alleged that he had beaten her. Stickney says that marriage equality "will demolish the historical understanding and definition of marriage as that of uniting a man and a woman for life." Life, or until she gets tired of you beating the crap out of her. Oh, and there is so much more.

U.S. State Department Condemns Anti-Gay Violence In Iraq

Courtesy of JMG:

U.S. State Department Condemns Anti-Gay Violence In Iraq

"THE HOUND DAWG SONG"

• "THE HOUND DAWG SONG"

  AS PERFORMED BY BOB DYLAN & THE BAND

---

Any copyrighted material on these pages is used in "fair use", for the purpose of study, review or critical analysis only, and will be removed at the request of copyright owner(s).
Audio files are DELIBERATELY encoded "low-fi" to enable faster streaming and are intended as "illustrations" and "appetizers" only.
Official and "hi-fi" recordings can (and should) be purchased at your local record dealer or through a number of web-based companies, like CDNow.

---

---

The link between the popular songs of the sixties [1860s], and the commercialized product of the nineties [1890s ] is best represented by the music of James Bland, born of free Negro parents in New York, musically well educated, a brilliant graduate of Howard University. He joined a Negro minstrel show company (of which there were not many) and wrote more than seven hundred songs for minstrel use, copyrighting only a few. Equaled perhaps only by Foster in his gift for melody, Bland turned out good songs by the score, many published under others' names.

"Carry Me Back to Old Virginny" (1878) alone was enough to place Bland with the popular immortals... "They Gotta Quit Kickin' My Dog Aroun'" was a comedy favorite for years. When Bland's troupe visited London in 1884, he stayed there to enjoy a highly successful career on the English stage. When he returned twenty years later the minstrel shows were nearly gone and he could not write what vaudeville wanted. Like Foster, he died broke and alone in 1911.

Russel Nye, The Unembarrassed Muse: The Popular Arts in America, New York, 1978, p. 314

---

Bob Dylan's likely source: Version #1, Alan Lomax, The Folk Songs of North America, Garden City, 1960; Song #158, listed as "The Hound Dawg Song", p. 311; from Vance Randolph (State Historical Society of Missouri), Ozark Folksongs, Columbia, Missouri, 1946-1950 (4 volumes), Vol. III, p. 278.

ALAN LOMAX:
Some say "The Hound Dawg Song," a favourite Ozark mountain song, originated before the Civil War, when a country boy named Zeke Parish had a tussle with a townie, who had kicked his dog. Old Aaron Weatherman, Swan Post Office, Taney County, Missouri, concurs -- "I was there and knowed Zeke and his paw and the hound, too."

Some of his neighbours laugh at old Zeke and say that "The Hound Dawg Song" is a recently composed piece, while others swear that Daniel Boone brought the song to Missouri. It became universally popular at the time when Arkansas's favourite son, Champ Clark, who was candidate for the presidency of the United States, used it as his campaign song. Since that time civic orgainzations and booster clubs in both Arkansas and Missouri have claimed it for their state. The tune is the old fiddler's favourite, "Sandy Land" or "Sally Anne."

Alan Lomax, The Folk Songs of North America, Garden City, 1960, p. 303.

---

VERSION #1 (also included in Digital Tradition, filename KICKDAWG, as "Hound Dog Song")

• Digital Tradition Folk Song Lyrics Database (full text search)

Ev'ry time I come to town
The boys keep kickin' my dawg aroun';
Makes no diff'rence if he is a houn',
They gotta quit kickin' my dawg aroun'.

Me an' Lem Briggs an' old Bill Brown
Took a load of corn to town;
My old Jim dawg, onery old cuss,
He just naturally follered us.

As we driv past Johnson's store
A passel of yaps come out the door;
Jim he scooted behind a box
With all them fellers a-throwin' rocks.

They tied a can to old Jim's tail
An' run him a-past the county jail;
That just naturally made us sore,
Lem, he cussed an' Bill he swore.

Me an' Lem Briggs an' old Bill Brown
Lost no time a-gittin' down;
We wiped them fellers on the ground
For kickin' my old Jim dawg around.

Jim seen his duty there an' then,
He lit into them gentlemen;
He shore mussed up the court-house square
With rags an' meat an' hide an' hair.

Every time I come to town
The boys keep kickin' my dawg aroun';
Makes no difference if he is a houn',
They gotta quit kickin' my dawg aroun'.

Quote of the Day

"The way to real growth is not to become more powerful or more famous, but to become more human and tolerant."

--Maya Angelou

This just in from JMG

Every Heart Matters

Courtesy of Pam's House Blend:

Every Heart Matters

Quote of the Day

"If any person's religious beliefs don't bring out the best in the spirit and the goodness of men and women, it's not a religion; it's an excuse for being a bigot." - Buzzflash

(29 of October 2006)

From a buddy...

Hi,
>
I just signed a petition to Air Force Secretary Donley asking him to let Lt. Col. Victor Fehrenbach -- who is getting fired simply for being gay -- keep serving his country.
>
Lt. Col. Fehrenbach has served honorably for 18 years in the Air Force as an F-15E Aviator. He has received eight air medals, one for Heroism, and was hand-picked to protect the Washington, D.C. airspace after 9/11. He flew combat missions in Iraq and Afghanistan, targeting the Taliban and Al Qaeda. Lt. Col. Fehrenbach has only been an asset to the United States Air Force, not a detriment to unit cohesion, morale, or good order. Please join me in signing the petition now and join the movement to repeal "Don't Ask, Don't Tell":
>
http://www.sldn.org/fehrenbach
>
Thanks!

Nice...

http://www.facebook.com/home.php#/video/video.php?v=565071520885&ref=nf

Revoked as of today

The hits to this website as of today:

vs June 4th

Thanks folks!

"What marriage has done to me"

at Farmoyz this:

Dear Father Tony,

In all the talk about marriage equality, we hear about laws and rights and injustice, as well we should. But the video interview of George Takei and his husband made me wish I could hear more about the difference it's made to newly-married gay couples. What does it mean to you, now that you're married? As a long-committed newlywed, you are one whose opinion I'd like to hear, and other Bilerico contributors might chime in as well. This is the sort of message that straight people need to hear, to understand the reality of what heretofore may have been just an abstract idea. We need stories—pictures in our heads—to replace the old rhetoric.

For further commnts, or to leave yours go to: http://farmboyz.blogspot.com/2009/06/today-on-bilerico-what-marriage-has.html#comments

Quote of the day

Notice the Flower has Nine Petals
Photo by Daniel Orey, all rights reserved

"... in this world, ... people widely differ in their manners and habits, their tastes, their temperament and character, their thoughts and their views, ... [it] is the sign of diversity, the symbol and the secret of perfection, and the revealer of the bounties of the All-glorious.

Consider the flowers of the garden; though differing in kind, color, form and shape, yet, inasmuch as they are refreshed by the waters of one spring, revived by the breath of one wind, invigorated by the rays of one sun, this diversity increaseth their charm and addeth unto their beauty. How unpleasing to the eye if all the flowers and plants, the leaves and blossoms, the fruit, the branches, and the trees of the garden were all of the same shape and color! Diversity of color, form and shape enricheth and adorneth the garden, and heighteneth the effect thereof."

-'Abdul-Baha

Easy to Be Hard

While watching the Tony´s last night, I remembered being in a mini-version of Hair for a music competition. This was many moons ago @ Oregon State University,the early 70's. We rather shook up the audience, like the tribe did in the Tony´s last night... so embracing the moment, as I foten do because of my Ipod, I bought the soundtrack.

My I-pod can be almost mystical. While driving around doing errands, it shuffled to this, which considering my exiled state from the Bahá´ís, rings so very true... its easy to be hard, when you are administrating...


Easy to Be Hard

How can people be so heartless
How can people be so cruel
Easy to be hard
Easy to be cold

How can people have no feelings
How can they ignore their friends
Easy to be proud
Easy to say no

And especially people
Who care about strangers
Who care about evil
And social injustice
Do you only
Care about the bleeding crowd?
How about a needing friend?
I need a friend

How can people be so heartless
You know I'm hung up on you
Easy to give in
Easy to help out

And especially people
Who care about strangers
Who say they care about social injustice
Do you only
Care about the bleeding crowd
How about a needing friend?
I need a friend

How can people have no feelings
How can they ignore their friends
Easy to be hard
Easy to be cold
Easy to be proud
Easy to say no