Naked man shot near U.S. embassy in Kyrgyzstan

BISHKEK (Reuters) - Police guarding the U.S. embassy in Kyrgyzstan shot a naked man who approached the site "in a threatening manner," the embassy said Monday.

"At approximately 3:00 a.m., a seemingly disturbed naked man approached the front guard booth of the embassy. The man threw a heavy object at the booth, cracking one of the windows," the embassy said in a statement.

"Local ... police fired two warning shots. When he continued to ignore the policemen's commands, they fired two shots at the man, wounding him once in the leg."

The embassy did not identify the man and said he was in hospital in a stable condition.

The Central Asian nation is home to a U.S. military airbase used for operations in nearby Afghanistan. Last December, a U.S. serviceman shot dead a Kyrgyz truck driver at the base who the United States said threatened the airman with a knife.

This is the update on Al and Nick

They are getting married in San Antonio on 5/6. The Coffields and us are looking forward to it. As it turns out if they get married before he graduates he can qualify for "family housing" on base which explains the change in plans. He has received his orders for the location of his home base. The possibilities were Turkey, Korea or Minot. His orders were Minot which is a nuclear base. He did not have a choice as it is assigned and we are all happy about the location. Five hours to the cabin, Amtrak service, etc... We are told he is in a non-deployable position but who knows. We are still trying to put a reception together possibly 7/14. Sorry for any confusion.

The Jorde's and Coffields.

As they say in Minot..."Why not Minot"

2006 World Equestrian Games

Submitted by Jessica

Kitty Carlisle Hart, actress-singer, dies at 96

By Los Angeles Times and The Associated Press


Kitty Carlisle Hart, shown in 2004, sang in the 1935 classic "A Night at the Opera."

HOLLYWOOD — Kitty Carlisle Hart, an actress and singer who earned a niche in movie history by singing in the Marx Brothers' "A Night at the Opera" but who achieved her greatest fame as a panelist on television's "To Tell the Truth," has died. She was 96.

Ms. Carlisle, the widow of Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Moss Hart and former longtime chairwoman of the New York State Council on the Arts, died of congestive heart failure Tuesday night at her New York apartment, her son, Christopher Hart, said Wednesday. She had been in poor health since contracting pneumonia in December.

Kitty Carlisle, as she was known professionally, was a regular panelist on "To Tell the Truth" from 1956 to 1977 on both CBS and a syndicated version of the popular quiz show. The well-dressed, carefully coiffed Ms. Carlisle, who had an opera-trained voice and precise diction, brought an air of sophistication and Manhattan glamour to the show.

She was born Catherine Conn in New Orleans on Sept. 3, 1910. Her strong-minded mother played a crucial role in Ms. Carlisle's life, making her practice piano for two hours a day beginning at 6, and also taking her to concerts and to the opera.

"I was a shy, introverted child, and Mother educated me, kept pushing me and gave me discipline; but she was too hard on me," Ms. Carlisle told the Palm Beach Post in 2002. "She would say things like, 'Your performance was fine, but that F-sharp was a little too acid, don't you think?' Oh, boy! You know what that can do for you."

After her father, a physician, died when she was 10, Ms. Carlisle and her mother moved to Europe. She attended the Sorbonne, the London School of Economics and the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art in London.

She began her acting career on Broadway in "Champagne Sec" and went on to appear in many other Broadway productions, including the 1984 revival of "On Your Toes." In 1967 she made her operatic debut at the Metropolitan Opera in "Die Fledermaus" and created the role of Lucretia in the American premiere of Benjamin Britten's "Rape of Lucretia."

Ms. Carlisle's film career began in 1934; in "Murder at the Vanities," she sang "Cocktails for Two," a song later made famous in a spoof by Spike Jones.

On loan to MGM, Ms. Carlisle played the ingenue part of the opera singer in the 1935 comedy "A Night at the Opera," which became one of the Marx Brothers' biggest hits.

She married Hart in 1946. They had two children, Catherine and Christopher. Catherine, a medical doctor, and Christopher, a director, writer and producer, survive her, along with three grandchildren.

Ms. Carlisle once described the death of her husband in 1961 as "the only real tragedy of my life." She never remarried.

In the ensuing years, she became a passionate advocate for the arts, serving as vice chairwoman of the New York State Council on the Arts from 1971 to 1976 when Gov. Hugh Carey appointed her chairwoman, a job she held for 20 years.

Over the decades, Ms. Carlisle continued to perform occasionally on stage, most notably in "Die Fledermaus" at New York City's Metropolitan Opera during the 1966-67 season; and she cropped up in an occasional movie, including Woody Allen's "Radio Days."

In 2002, at age 91, she was performing in her one-woman show, "My Life on the Wicked Stage," featuring songs and anecdotes about American musical theater. She was still performing until late last year.

Copyright © 2007 The Seattle Times Company

Barney Vincelette purchased his unusual house from a catalog and erected it on his Houston lot. While he revels in its "geometric simplicity," his wife, Carol, says it doesn't have enough space (pun intended?)

A case of mild autism has made him extremely sensitive to noise. Vincelette, who lives in a spaceship-style house, thinks music, especially top 40, rap and rock 'n' roll, "sounds the same way feces smells."
Full Article

The trip to Missoura

The trip to Missoura was a smashing success! A good time was had by all. Corkamama returned in good health and there were no reported incidents of the locals drooling over her new choppers. Although, I did hear of one local (A thirty something named LorieEllen) who wanted the Cork to go two out of three rock, paper, scissors just to try them choppers on. Upon hearing this request the Corkamama responded " You have paper here?". Good times.

(Click images to enlarge)

Reuters - Thu Apr 12, 2:08 PM ET

A crocodile at a zoo in the southern Taiwan city of Kaohsiung holds the forearm of a zoo veterinarian in between its teeth, April 11, 2007.

Kurt Vonnegut vs. the !&#*!@

In honor of Kurt Vonnegut's passing, I thought a re-print of his last interview would be appropriate.
BBlebowski



By Joel Bleifuss | 1.27.03

In November, Kurt Vonnegut turned 80. He published his first novel, Player Piano, in 1952 at the age of 29. Since then he has written 13 others, including Slaughterhouse Five, which stands as one of the pre-eminent anti-war novels of the 20th century.

As war against Iraq looms, I asked Vonnegut, a reader and supporter of this magazine, to weigh in. Vonnegut is an American socialist in the tradition of Eugene Victor Debs, a fellow Hoosier whom he likes to quote: “As long as there is a lower class, I am in it. As long as there is a criminal element, I am of it. As long as there is a soul in prison, I am not free.”

—Joel Bleifuss

You have lived through World War II, Korea, Vietnam, the Reagan wars, Desert Storm, the Balkan wars and now this coming war in Iraq. What has changed, and what has remained the same?

One thing which has not changed is that none of us, no matter what continent or island or ice cap, asked to be born in the first place, and that even somebody as old as I am, which is 80, only just got here. There were already all these games going on when I got here. … An apt motto for any polity anywhere, to put on its state seal or currency or whatever, might be this quotation from the late baseball manager Casey Stengel, who was addressing a team of losing professional athletes: “Can’t anybody here play this game?”

My daughter Lily, for an example close to home, who has just turned 20, finds herself—as does George W. Bush, himself a kid—an heir to a shockingly recent history of human slavery, to an AIDS epidemic and to nuclear submarines slumbering on the floors of fjords in Iceland and elsewhere, crews prepared at a moment’s notice to turn industrial quantities of men, women and children into radioactive soot and bone meal by means of rockets and H-bomb warheads. And to the choice between liberalism or conservatism and on and on.

What is radically new in 2003 is that my daughter, along with our president and Saddam Hussein and on and on, has inherited technologies whose byproducts, whether in war or peace, are rapidly destroying the whole planet as a breathable, drinkable system for supporting life of any kind. Human beings, past and present, have trashed the joint.

Based on what you’ve read and seen in the media, what is not being said in the mainstream press about President Bush’s policies and the impending war in Iraq?

That they are nonsense.

My feeling from talking to readers and friends is that many people are beginning to despair. Do you think that we’ve lost reason to hope?

I myself feel that our country, for whose Constitution I fought in a just war, might as well have been invaded by Martians and body snatchers. Sometimes I wish it had been. What has happened, though, is that it has been taken over by means of the sleaziest, low-comedy, Keystone Cops-style coup d’etat imaginable. And those now in charge of the federal government are upper-crust C-students who know no history or geography, plus not-so-closeted white supremacists, aka “Christians,” and plus, most frighteningly, psychopathic personalities, or “PPs.”

To say somebody is a PP is to make a perfectly respectable medical diagnosis, like saying he or she has appendicitis or athlete’s foot. The classic medical text on PPs is The Mask of Sanity by Dr. Hervey Cleckley. Read it! PPs are presentable, they know full well the suffering their actions may cause others, but they do not care. They cannot care because they are nuts. They have a screw loose!

And what syndrome better describes so many executives at Enron and WorldCom and on and on, who have enriched themselves while ruining their employees and investors and country, and who still feel as pure as the driven snow, no matter what anybody may say to or about them? And so many of these heartless PPs now hold big jobs in our federal government, as though they were leaders instead of sick.

What has allowed so many PPs to rise so high in corporations, and now in government, is that they are so decisive. Unlike normal people, they are never filled with doubts, for the simple reason that they cannot care what happens next. Simply can’t. Do this! Do that! Mobilize the reserves! Privatize the public schools! Attack Iraq! Cut health care! Tap everybody’s telephone! Cut taxes on the rich! Build a trillion-dollar missile shield! Fuck habeas corpus and the Sierra Club and In These Times, and kiss my ass!

How have you gotten involved in the anti-war movement? And how would you compare the movement against a war in Iraq with the anti-war movement of the Vietnam era?

When it became obvious what a dumb and cruel and spiritually and financially and militarily ruinous mistake our war in Vietnam was, every artist worth a damn in this country, every serious writer, painter, stand-up comedian, musician, actor and actress, you name it, came out against the thing. We formed what might be described as a laser beam of protest, with everybody aimed in the same direction, focused and intense. This weapon proved to have the power of a banana-cream pie three feet in diameter when dropped from a stepladder five-feet high.

And so it is with anti-war protests in the present day. Then as now, TV did not like anti-war protesters, nor any other sort of protesters, unless they rioted. Now, as then, on account of TV, the right of citizens to peaceably assemble, and petition their government for a redress of grievances, “ain’t worth a pitcher of warm spit,” as the saying goes.

As a writer and artist, have you noticed any difference between how the cultural leaders of the past and the cultural leaders of today view their responsibility to society?

Responsibility to which society? To Nazi Germany? To the Stalinist Soviet Union? What about responsibility to humanity in general? And leaders in what particular cultural activity? I guess you mean the fine arts. I hope you mean the fine arts. ... Anybody practicing the fine art of composing music, no matter how cynical or greedy or scared, still can’t help serving all humanity. Music makes practically everybody fonder of life than he or she would be without it. Even military bands, although I am a pacifist, always cheer me up.

But that is the power of ear candy. The creation of such a universal confection for the eye, by means of printed poetry or fiction or history or essays or memoirs and so on, isn’t possible. Literature is by definition opinionated. It is bound to provoke the arguments in many quarters, not excluding the hometown or even the family of the author. Any ink-on-paper author can only hope at best to seem responsible to small groups or like-minded people somewhere. He or she might as well have given an interview to the editor of a small-circulation publication.

Maybe we can talk about the responsibilities to their societies of architects and sculptors and painters another time. And I will say this: TV drama, although not yet classified as fine art, has on occasion performed marvelous services for Americans who want us to be less paranoid, to be fairer and more merciful. M.A.S.H. and Law and Order, to name only two shows, have been stunning masterpieces in that regard.

That said, do you have any ideas for a really scary reality TV show?

“C students from Yale.” It would stand your hair on end.

What targets would you consider fair game for a satirist today?

Assholes.


Joel Bleifuss is the editor of In These Times, where he has worked as an investigative reporter, columnist and editor since 1986. Bleifuss has had more stories on Project Censored's annual list of the “10 Most Censored Stories” than any other journalist.

Sarah Ulmer's Internet Invitation

This is from Sarah Ulmer (and Denny). They asked me to forward this to you all.
Sara Jorde Photography
612-338-6923
www.jorde.com


Forwarded Message:

If able to attend, great, if not we don’t want anyone to feel obligated as it is a holiday weekend and we understand. Just didn’t want anyone to feel left out as it is in the Cities, etc. Hope all is well !!

Denny



Hello All!!!

As many of you have heard, Jonathan and I are engaged, which of course, means that we are getting married! I've created one of those oh so thrilling, cheezy, online wedding websites to capture the digital excitement of our wedding plans for you all.

The site is on the knot and the link is: Click Here

The wedding is coming up quickly on Sept 1st (Labor Day Weekend) of this year!! In an effort to save money and trees, we are trying to send some invitations digitally. If you would be willing to consider receiving this email and viewing our website as your invitation, please indicate so by SIGNING the GUEST BOOK on the webpage. DO NOT SIGN the guest book if you would prefer to receive an invitation by mail.

Leave me your name, the number of people attending including yourself (unless you're a parent with a large family, like most of the Frieden's, you only get ONE guest or ONE date), and your email address so I can keep you updated on the planning progress. DO NOT SIGN the guest book if you would prefer to receive an invitation by mail.

Feel free to email me with any questions you have. Don't bother if the question is "will you be playing the chicken dance," the answer is NO!

We love you all and look forward to celebrating with you in September!


Sarah and Jonathan

White Boy at the Apollo

Submitted by: Janelle

Disney World and Grandpa's

Even unopposed, candidate gets no votes

Thu Apr 5, 10:26 AM ET

MISSOURI CITY, Mo. - Joe Selle didn't exactly get voted out of office this week, but he wasn't re-elected, either.

Selle, who was running unopposed for City Council, didn't get any votes at all. Not even one from himself.

Selle, 42, said he simply forgot that Tuesday was election day, and apparently so did Ward 3's other 34 registered voters.

The result was zero votes cast in Selle's race, but the city charter lets him keep the seat unless someone else is "successfully elected and qualified," the city attorney said.

Selle, a professional musician, was recently appointed to fill a council vacancy and had been seeking a full term.

He said he saw other residents at the school where the voting was held, "but it never occurred to me that's what they were there for."

"It's pretty small-town stuff down here, man," Selle said of the Missouri River town of about 300 people, 16 miles northeast of Kansas City.

Turnout was better in Ward 2, where two people voted.

Dear Friends and Family,

The National MS Society is kicking off the 2007 Larkin Hoffman MS 150 Bike Tour presented by GMAC ResCap. I am planning to be a part of that event and, I ask you to join me in the fight against multiple sclerosis by making a contribution to support my effort.

The National Multiple Sclerosis Society is dedicated to ending the devastating effects of MS. They simultaneously fund research for a cure while also helping people who currently live with MS lead more fulfilling lives. I believe in the work they do, and I invite you to see for yourself all the good they've done for the MS community. More than 400,000 Americans live with MS, and your support can and will make changes in their lives.

Please help by making a donation — large or small — to fight MS. Or, why not join me on the event? Become a participant and side by side, as teammates, we can work together to raise the funds that make a difference.

Whatever you can give will help! I greatly appreciate your support and will keep you posted on my progress.

Sincerely,
Janelle Jorde

Click here to visit my personal page and make a secure, online donation.

To send a donation:

Make all checks payable to:
The National MS Society
Please note my name and MS Larkin Hoffman 150 Bike Tour on your check.

Mail to:
Janelle Jorde : 23475 Arrowhead St : St Francis, MN 55070-9563


National Multiple Sclerosis Society | 1-800-FIGHT-MS (1-800-344-4867)
© 2006 The National Multiple Sclerosis Society. All rights reserved.