Thoughts and opinions from a Priest in the PNCC
I upgraded to WordPress 2.5 this afternoon. I used the WordPress Automatic Upgrade plugin (and have used it for the last 4 updates). That went very smoothly.
On accessing the blog, it appears that my host, Dreamhost, has been having a multitude of problem on the particular server cluster upon which I am hosted. At times, over the past two weeks, the blog has been inaccessible. Hopefully they will have everything moved to a new server soon….
From the San Francisco Chronicle: Study: Incarceration rate lower for immigrants
Immigrants in California are far less likely to land in prison than their U.S.-born counterparts, a finding that defies the perception that immigration and crime are connected, according to a study released Monday.
Foreign-born residents make up 35 percent of the state’s overall population, but only 17 percent of the adult prison population, according to the Public Policy Institute of California, which conducted the research.
Noncitizen men from Mexico between the ages of 18 and 40, which the study indicated were more likely to be in the country illegally, were eight times less likely to be in a “correctional setting,” the study found.
The study did not address the visa status of those included among the foreign-born, which would include citizens and noncitizens, including those in the country legally and illegally.
Nonetheless, these results have implications for the current debates over immigration policy, said Kristin Butcher, co-author of the report.
“Our research indicates that limiting immigration, requiring higher educational levels to obtain visas or spending more money to increase penalties against criminal immigrants will have little impact on public safety,” Butcher said in a statement.
While immigrants often have lower levels of education and higher poverty rates, which are normally associated with higher crimes rates, other factors are probably contributing to the underrepresentation among the foreign-born in state prisons…
The story doesn’t mention it, but I would venture to state that immigrants are representative the societies they come from, i.e., family oriented, hard working, and with a strong religious and moral code founded in the Catholic faith. They are here for the purpose of improving the lives of their families – the collective whole of their lives. Going to prison defeats that purpose.
Check out the definitive kid answer at Orthodoxie in Kid Church: Instructional Liturgy.
Came across this here while I was browsing around. It bears an echo of the Polish Christmas hymn Dzisiaj w Betlejem.
Two images that struck me were the image of Mary and Joseph wandering through today’s busy streets and the image of Mary cradling the Eucharistic bread – very nice.
Here is the English translation.
“Beautiful night, peaceful night,
A star is shining above a cave,
In the cave mother is sleeping
An angel is cherishing Jesus.
Angels are singing,
Shepherds are playing,
Angels are singing,
Sages are revealing themselves:
What the people have been waiting for,
What prophets have been prophesying,
And now the world responds,
The world responds and declares;
Our Saviour, Christ is born
for the salvation of all of us.
Alleluia, Alleluia.
Lord have mercy!”
Oh, happy day, when first was poured
The blood of our redeeming Lord!
Oh, happy day, when first began
His sufferings for sinful man!
Just entered on this world of woe,
His blood already learned to flow:
His future death was thus expressed,
And thus His early love confessed.
From heaven descending, to fulfill
The mandates of his Father’s will,
E’en now behold the victim lie,
The Lamb of God, prepared to die;
Beneath the knife behold The Child,
The innocent, the undefiled;
For captives He the ransom pays,
For lawless man the law obeys.
Lord, circumcise our hearts, we pray;
Our fleshy natures purge away;
Thy name, thy likeness may they bear:
Yea, stamp thy holy image there!
The Father’s name we loudly raise,
The Son, the Virgin-born, we praise:
The Holy Ghost we all adore,
One God, both now and evermore.
From The Hymns of the Primitive Church by the Rev. John Chandler, 1837.
About a week or so ago I decided to finally drop Yahoo! as my hosting company.
There were a few instances where I had to patch WordPress to make it work on Yahoo!. In addition I was getting more and more displeased with the responsiveness of their servers.
It was taking forever to load my site. Because of the slow load times I was loosing readers like crazy. My average visitors per day was cut in half.
As of December 19 I’ve been hosted on DreamHost.
After the normal cutover issues, like switching my DNS, things have been going well. Dreamhost did make the switch easy. They had easy one-click installs for things like WordPress, they use phpMyAdmin, and they have all sorts of other one-click installs for other wonderful options.
Best of all, their price is better and their server settings do not disable native WordPress stuff.
The Dreamhost servers have been running fast and my stats are picking back up (thank you to my dedicated readers).
That was until today. Dreamhost experienced a prolonged blackout on a set of servers, mine included.
I apologize if you were unable to get to my website earlier today. All seems to be resolved now.
I received a spam E-mail from the United Nations… well not exactly.
The give away was that the E-mail from the U.S. Committee for UN (which isn’t a real organization) came from Dr. Adams Collins who directs me to send my resume/CV to: adamscollins2004@yahoo.com. Once you apply it looks like they hit you up for application and training fees.
You could also write to:
Dr.Adams Collins
Recruitment Officer
U.S. Committee for UN
Two UN Plaza, 24th Floor
New York, NY 10017
For a full exposition on this see Spam of the Week: Fake UN Agency Job Advertisement from Rik Panganiban at The Click Heard Round the World.
Lots of other interesting stuff at his blog a well.
The Skalny Center for Polish and Central European Studies at the University of Rochester is proud to announce the 2007 Annual Polish Film Festival.
The festival is sponsored by a generous grant from the Louis Skalny Foundation.
All films are in Polish with English subtitles.
List of Films & Show Times
SOLIDARITY, SOLIDARITY (Solidarność, Solidarność)
Directed by 13 outstanding Polish directors, 2005
November 10, 3:30 & 7:20pm
This feature, the brainchild of Andrzej Wajda, is a joint venture of 13 great Polish directors to memorialize the events of August 1980, when Polish workers went on strike across the country and began a hard-fought campaign for workers’ rights. Each of directors shot a 10-minute-long film. The plots and their genre were up to the filmmakers. The resulting 2-hour-long film feature a wide variety of forms: from a video-clip through comedy and documentary to a rarefied interview with Lech Wałęsa that echoes the famous films by Andrzej Wajda: Man of Marble and Man of Iron. The result is truly fascinating, irrespective of what you know, or can remember, about Solidarity.
JASMINUM
Dir. Jan Jakub Kolski, 2006
November 11, 3:30 & 7:20pm
Kolski is at his best with this heartwarming, beautifully told bitter-sweet comedy.
A young woman, with a small daughter, arrives at a convent where she is restoring paintings. She works during the day but at night she experiments with alchemy and creates fragrances inspired by the mysterious monks who live at the convent and smell of the most incredible scents… . The inquiring mind of her charming five-year-old daughter wreaks havoc in the ordered life of the monastery, where people, buildings, and smells have their own secrets.
FORECAST FOR TOMORROW (Pogoda na jutro)
Dir. Jerzy Stuhr, 2003
November 12, 7:20pm
Poland’s most beloved actor, Jerzy Stuhr, directs and stars in this serious-minded comedy satire about a member of Solidarity who disappears to live as a monk in order to hide from repressions by the communist authorities.
Seventeen years later, accidentally found by his family and thrown out of the monastery, he does not like the new world he has to live in. During his long absence, his wife has settled down with a businessman, his son is developing a political career, his older daughter strips at a TV reality show, and his youngest daughter’s attention is focused exclusively on the internet.
Nevertheless, he tries very hard to adjust to the rapidly changing reality and to put his relations with his family on healthier basis.
COLONEL KWIATKOWSKI (Pułkownik Kwiatkowski)
Dir. Kazimierz Kutz, 1995
November 13, 7:20pm
This hilarious comedy depicts Poland during the Stalinist era and tells the adventuresome story of the title character, who travels around the country masquerading as an officer of the Polish Secret Police.
Kutz produced wonderful human portraits, including grotesque portrayals of Communist Party apparatchiks and functionaries of the State Security Bureau. The main character’s satiric use of the Communist Party lingo, as he turns its intended meanings inside out to manipulate the unwitting Party faithful, is another highlight of this film.
I AM LOOKING AT YOU, MARY (Patrzę na ciebie, Marysiu)
Dir. Łukasz Barczyk, 1999
November 14, 7:20pm
This film draws attention to important factors shaping the lives of young people after the collapse of communism in Poland: their dependence on parents and fear of the future.
Marysia is a Geology student; her boyfriend Michał works as a junior psychiatrist in a hospital. They are living together in rented accommodations and are supported by their parents. This dependency affects Michał’s self-confidence and perception of the future. He avoids making commitments, especially in terms of a family. He becomes unhappy when he learns that Marysia is pregnant. He tries to convince her to arrange an abortion, but she refuses. This is followed by Michał’s increased difficulties at work. During a speedily arranged wedding he has a mental breakdown and decides to quit his job as a psychiatrist.
All films were provided by Telewizja Polska SA
Ticket Information:
Tickets for the Little Theatre screenings can be purchased at the Little Theatre box office before each show (Little Theatre, 240 East Avenue, Rochester, NY, Telephone 585-258-0444.)
The ticket price is $8.00 for the evening shows and $6.00 for the matinée, students and seniors pay $5.00. Little Theatre Film Society members receive their membership discount.
For more information, please call the Skalny Center at 585-275-9898.
As some may have noticed, I’ve switched WordPress themes a few times lately.
I’m trying to work out the right mix. Thanks to the Young Fogey who noted the particularly slow load times with the current theme. The articles column and sidebars should be a white background with black text. Links are in green and blockquotes are in a pinkish color.
I do like this theme. I worked on it a little. I also removed some of the JavaScript stuff from the sidebar which improves load times (it wasn’t necessary stuff anyway).
I will continue to tinker a bit to see if I can improve it further. I appreciate your patience with my tinkering…
I tested my load times in various browsers (unscientifically). I received the best results in IE and Safari. Opera was a close second. Firefox and Flock were the slowest 🙁 . Also note that I am using the latest version of each.
New paintings by award winning Polish artist Michal Zaborowski will be featured in a solo exhibition at the Nevin Kelly Gallery, 1517 U Street, NW, in Washington, DC. The exhibition, titled “H20” will depict ordinary people in everyday activities associated with water.
The Nevin Kelly Gallery (Gallery blog) presents Michal Zaborowski’s paintings in Washington from October 11, 2007 through November 4, 2007.
Gallery owner Nevin J. Kelly describes Zaborowski as “a romantic impressionist with a contemporary voice; Zaborowski is one of the most talented painters working in Poland today.” The artist’s paintings depict what Kelly calls the “nobility of the mundane.” He paints ordinary people in ordinary activities, but he gives them such heroic import that one is compelled to look at them. He finds such beauty in these ordinary events—”-a man and a dog in a boat, or a woman with a toy balloon–that we wish we could trade places with them. The artist’s palette is subdued. There is a mixture of beauty and a gnawing sense of melancholy in his paintings, a combination so common in our everyday lives that we almost fail to notice it. Zaborowski reminds us that, even in moments of personal darkness, a moment of sublime beauty is just around the corner.
The artist began his career as a painter of church interiors, working in fresco. In 1986, he was awarded a scholarship of the General of the Palatine Order, which permitted him to work and study in Rome and at the Vatican. He has exhibited in Poland, Germany, Austria, The Netherlands, Luxembourg, Monaco and the U.S (including New York; Palm Beach; Santa Fe; Washington, D.C.; Aspen and Vail). Zaborowski lives and works in Warsaw, Poland.
For additional information contact:
Nevin Kelly Gallery
1517 U Street, NW
Washington, DC 20009
Tel: 202-232-3464
Select images of Zaborowski’s paintings are also available on the gallery’s website.