Catch-23

PARKLAND, Wash. (AP) — A gunman burst into a coffeehouse Sunday and opened fire on four police officers as they sat working on their laptops, killing the three men and one woman in what an official described as a targeted ambush.

Pierce County Sheriff’s spokesman Ed Troyer said officers were looking for one male suspect who fled the scene and haven’t ruled out an accomplice, possibly a getaway driver.

Troyer said investigators had spoken to a person in nearby Tacoma, who gave information that led them to believe the gunman was on foot and still near the coffee shop. Troyer would not given any details nor characterize that person in any way, but said the information led officers to carefully search buildings close by.

It wasn’t clear whether the slain officers even had time to draw their weapons to return fire, Troyer said.

“This was more of an execution. Walk in with the specific mindset to shoot police officers,” Troyer said.

Troyer said the officers — all from the Lakewood Police Department — were catching up on paperwork at the beginning of their shifts when they were attacked at 8:15 a.m. Sunday.

Troyer said the attack was clearly targeted at the officers, not a robbery gone bad.

“There were marked patrol cars outside and they were all in uniform,” Troyer said.

You know how Gov. Rockefeller died, right?

I am so sick of sex scandals, they are just so fucking stupid. They only serve to wreck enourmously important governments and economies and are never there when you need them when people actually do act like cheap whores in their real lives.

Spitzer’s wife though, well. I think she’s cute. Poor lady, she probably believed in the power structure that gave her all of New York to play with, though maybe she’s just as cynical as anyone else. When Mitterand died there was a whole row of seats for all his girlfriends, they were all sobbing in their little veils, no one gave a shit, because it wasn’t important, and it’s not.

My friends list on livejournal is filled with pictures of this prostitute lady Spitzer found and it’s just making me sick about all the attention paid to this thing which is just so damn unworthy. Albany is a sleazy town, it is so corrupt that there are thousands of layers to it, no matter what station in life you have the will to do something illegal is the rule, it is expected. Prostitution isn’t shocking there, it’s a plague you have to run from if you’re caught outside late at night, it’s the norm, and it’s the basic food group of anyone in charge of anything. I have no idea how Cuomo got through with his soul intact. That guy was one of the very few exceptions to the sleaze rule in that town, perhaps the only exception.

If anything, Spitzer was brought down by the cheap standards of his surroundings, finding a girlfriend-for-hire on the internet is so AOL it’s funny, anyone could do better than this Emperor’s Club thing, and look at the name of that group anyway, playing on the client’s vanity to justify the hilarious overcharging involved. Sure sure, you’re not a scumbag, you’re an emperor, you’re Caesar, you’re not some loser trolling for Jersey chicks online.

Albany gets you by having such low standards, it’s one of the white trash capitals of the universe, anything of substance is eventually destroyed by imported greed or the tenacious denial of beauty. The whole place is polluted, the river is made of death, the food is made of old circuitboards, the schools are where brains get bruised and beaten by thugs, everything good there flees, everything.

All nice people are inevitably punished for their niceness, my fake family through Brendan’s Mom had their house burn down just because they were in danger of being happy. Both my brothers had serious birth defects because of environmental damage, all my relatives are corrupt or are being hidden from corruption by other relatives, all that’s left is television and a sense of ignorance so profound you can actually ignore how nasty everything is after just a few sips of water.

Albany cries whenever I leave, it says “no come back”! They need the new blood, they need any kind of inspiration at all and the State University there is so far the only way to get that stuff. So of course, the State University is thriving. Students find cheap rent in the abandoned downtown and the beer is almost free as long as you have college ID.

The State Legislature is there, so of course criminal lobbyists all over the place. The Courts are there, so the mafia does what it can to creep into every surrounding crevice. They’re paid by private interests and big business also to influence the electoral process, thugs on all levels hired by the elite on all levels to get whatever is needed at any time. The result is an army of disaffected poor people all across downtown, and toothless brain damaged freaks in every park and convenience store and available public place.

It is tempting to want to take the place over, this is the appeal of the Dark Side. It is tempting to look at the effect of Rockefeller’s wealth and the giant marble buildings and the sense of gravitas that lawmaking creates and want to just rule everyone there like the tiny bugs they are. But then when you give in to the Dark Side the Dark Side defeats you. If you rose to power fighting corruption you have to stay in that mode, aggressively, you can’t let the low culture drag you back to caveman status like what happened to Eliot.

Billions upon billions of dollars float through government channels in Albany, it is the home of much of the U.S. biowarfare safety net, it’s where the Articles of Confederation were first written before Philadelphia stole the show and gave birth to this country. Now except for this one dude Ryan it is all porn and bird shit and uncontrollable fires. The only person from Albany to ever win a Pulitzer did so by truthfully documenting the crime and desperate poverty that plagues the mind of that town, the foul thoughts so deeply rooted in Albany’s modern history. They made a movie of his book which launched the acting career of Tom Waits, what does that tell you? Who are you going to get to play a typical Albany resident? Fucking Freddie Prinze? What?

The people of Albany are absolutely apeshit with glee over the attention they’re getting now, and the new Governor Dave is the first African-American Governor New York has ever had, with his one good eye and amazing sense of patience.

The reason why he’ll be an admirable leader of that State is because he can’t see the ugliness that inevitably poisons everyone else around there. He can’t physically see the ads on cable and he can’t see the insulting Barbie Doll women on every television channel, he can’t be taken in by whatever pretty face organized crime puts in his path, he doesn’t have weaknesses like others do just because it’s physically impossible.

Stevie Wonder had a sex scandal too I guess, he promised a girlfriend money for giving her a virus and then never paid, she had to sue him to get any attention at all. So it’s not that blind people can’t have moments of weakness. I write to you from the Assistied Living lab at PSU this afternoon, the computer lab for students with physical handicaps, the wave of the future for all schools in this country where the genome is being worn to shit by pure greed and that mineral in cell phones.

None of the people in the lab here have ideas about the white collar crime or even that it should be stopped, none of them here can see past the pictures of the bikini babe the media finally located yesterday.

IBM has been poisoning Broom County for 80 years and making mutant babies crawl out of every hollow stump in the land, BASF and General Electric doing the same thing to Albany, the Technology Park in North Greenbush where I used to work alongside actual robots, everywhere in between now a biosphere for dollars to breed with each other, and even the dollars are dying out. The ironworks in Troy which brought that city down in the 80’s, the rustic homes of Loudonville now humming from the tritium sewage, the leaves turning red in the Autumn now due to actual metallic rust.

There are serious problems in this world, and few leaders capable of going after the wealthy who cause them, but instead the power falls on some chick who dots her i’s with little hearts.

This is where I grew up.

Hi Mom!

Where people climbed on the roof of Bob Dylan’s house

Woodstock Rocks On, but The Beat Is Quieter

Posted by CN Staff on February 26, 2004 at 22:17:12 PT

By Denny Lee 

Source: New York Times
 


Woodstock, N.Y. — For a place synonymous with music, Woodstock is eerily silent at night. The Tinker Street Cafe, where Bob Dylan composed two influential albums of the 1960’s — “Another Side of Bob Dylan” and “Bringing It All Back Home” — is now a hushed photography gallery.



The Bearsville Studios, where artists from the Band to Muddy Waters recorded albums, may soon become a private residence. And the Joyous Lake club, where Phish once threw surprise concerts, has been shut more than a year.



But the music lives on in ways unexpectedly chic and quintessentially bohemian. Despite a popular image burnished by countless CD reissues and VH-1 retrospectives, Woodstock is no longer just a shrine for burned-out hippies who cling to the Woodstock festival of 1969 in the tradition of former high school quarterbacks reliving past glory.



New recording studios are cutting hit records. Homegrown bands are headlining national tours. And musicians of all stripes, from chart toppers to club crawlers, continue to flock here for inspiration — and, in some cases, good real estate deals — amid the gently rolling Catskills.



Last year, according to The New York Observer and several local newspapers, David Bowie paid $1.16 million for a 64-acre property on Little Tonche Mountain near Woodstock, where he plans to build a palatial retreat for himself and his wife, the model Iman. But Mr. Bowie is only the latest and most recognizable name to be seduced by this close-knit town with a long reputation for breeding musical virtuosity.



Most are like Peter Levin, a keyboard player from Manhattan, who first came to Woodstock to get away from the cacophony of the city, but found himself in a music-minded Shangri-La. “It’s really easy to start a good band up here,” said Mr. Levin, 61. “I’m in five or six bands right now. There are musicians making seven figures living down the street from musicians who barely eke out a living.”



Two years ago, Mr. Levin bought a 150-year-old farmhouse for about $300,000. His synthesizers and entire Manhattan studio soon followed. His 30-acre wooded property provides soundproofing for neighbors.



Ensconced in a 1924 estate that sits atop its own mountain overlooking the Ashokan Reservoir is Allaire Studios, which opened in 2002. It features a 2,000-square-foot recording room with 45-foot vaulted ceilings, three Steinway pianos and 16 apartments for artists and their posses. To get there, one must traverse a private switchback to the top of Tonche Mountain.



“Norah Jones just recorded a part of her last album in here,” said Mark McKenna, Allaire’s studio manager, referring to “Feels Like Home,” which came out this month. “Musicians come here for the space, privacy and serenity.”



Recording studios are an integral part of this musical landscape. Woodstock’s history of arts and social reform may date back to 1902, when a wealthy Englishman started the Byrdcliffe arts colony. But the better part of its music heritage can be traced to 1969, though not for the reasons most people think. As every local musician knows, the festival didn’t even take place in Woodstock in Ulster County, but about 50 miles away in Bethel in Sullivan County, N.Y.



Albert Grossman, who managed the Band, Mr. Dylan, Janis Joplin and Todd Rundgren, founded the Bearsville Studios that year in a secluded field on the outskirts of town. Bearsville nurtured a local industry and today there are more than a dozen professional recording studios in and around Woodstock, ranging in size from Allaire to smaller studios like the Clubhouse. In any given month, the Woodstock Inn on the Millstream has at least one band staying there to record at a nearby studio.



After Mr. Grossman died in 1986, however, Bearsville — along with a rambling compound that includes a 250-seat theater and a second recording house — fell on hard times. The studio, where R.E.M. recorded three albums, has been put on the market by Mr. Grossman’s widow, Sally, for $725,000.



Other music landmarks have been silenced. Only one place devoted exclusively to live music is currently open in downtown Woodstock — the Colony Cafe. Otherwise, Tinker Street, the main thoroughfare, offers little in the way of tunes, except perhaps for the wind chimes and meditation bells sold at nearly every gift shop in town.



On weekends, the town swells with day trippers who dust off their tie-dyes to hunt for hippie paraphernalia. There is no shortage of marijuana pipes, patchouli, herbal chai, Afghan hats and Tibetan knickknacks. There is one Woodstock for musicians, and another for nostalgic shoppers.



“We sell mostly to tourists, Westerners and a few Dharma students,” said Sering Yoden, who owns the Tibetan Emporium on Rock City Road. On warmer days, drummers have been known to plant themselves on the village green and hash out a few beats. But on a sunny afternoon last Sunday, the only people there were four teenagers playing Hacky Sack and seven older women who were carrying signs, including one that read: “Women in Black for Global Peace and Non-Violence.”



“This is a movement to bring our silent voices into the street for a potent political voice,” said Jane Toby, 63, who teaches Italian in New Paltz, N.Y. As Ms. Toby stood in silent protest, the driver of a Subaru waved in a show of solidarity.



Subarus, however, are slowly being displaced by S.U.V.’s as Woodstock, and much of the Catskills, draws more affluent New Yorkers. “Woodstock is the next Hamptons,” declared Allen Gurevich, a commercial real estate agent from New York, who was nursing a beer at the Woodstock Lodge, a former dive bar that now serves mojitos and merlot. “We’ve got Brad Pitt, Liv Tyler and Uma Thurman.”



Mr. Gurevich, 32, who is renting a house with several friends, wants to buy something in town. But prices may be out of reach, if not for Mr. Gurevich, then certainly for many young musicians. “We’ve had a huge upswing during the last five years, especially after 9/11,” said Joan C. Lonergan, the broker at Coldwell Banker Village Green Realty. The price of a three-bedroom house on three acres averaged $349,000 last year, compared with $259,000 in 2001.



And the newer arrivals did not come to awaken their musical voice, but for Woodstock’s proximity to New York and nature. “It’s very laid back,” said Enrico Palazio, 50, who owns a supermarket in Brooklyn and has a house overlooking Indian Head Mountain. “There’s no pretension and a good amount of New Yorkers.”



But musicians are not singing the blues. Mic Todd, the 23-year-old bassist for Coheed and Cambria, an emo rock band whose members grew up in the area — and is often cited as the next big thing coming out of Woodstock — said that the town’s musical heritage is too entrenched to be stifled by rising real estate prices. “The only problem,” he said, “is that there’s no place to play in front of an audience.”



That might soon change. Janet Morra, a music promoter and fund-raiser from Croton-on-Hudson, recently made an offer for the Joyous Lake. “We want to bring live music back to Woodstock,” she said. “And we’re going to do it right this time. We’re going to have really good alcohol — all the types of martinis that money can buy. And we’re going to have disco.”



Source: New York Times (NY)

Author: Denny Lee

Published: February 27, 2004

Copyright: 2004 The New York Times Co.



Related Articles:

“Woodstock 69″

“Hippie Who Never Left Serves as Woodstock Host”


“Nostalgic For The ’60s”


“Sparsely, Sage and Timely”


A “Celestial summit” this weekend…

(This is a story from Yahoo news I archived here after the original Yahoo link went dead.)

File photo, Crescent moon occulting crescent Venus, October 28, 2006

The brilliant planet Venus arrives at the pinnacle of its current morning apparition next week, rising at, or shortly before 3:20 a.m. local daylight time, its earliest rising time this year or next. That works out to more than two hours before the first sign of dawn begins to light up the eastern sky.

At sunrise, Venus will have climbed nearly 40 degrees above the east-southeast horizon (10 degrees is roughly equal to your clenched fist held at arm’s length. So at sunup, Venus will stand nearly “four fists” up from the horizon).

Meanwhile, a much dimmer planet, Saturn, glowing with a mellow yellow light, rises shortly after Venus. And right in between the two planets shines the blue-white 1st-magnitude star, Regulus, in Leo, the Lion.

Next week, an ever-changing “Celestial Summit Meeting” will greet early risers as Venus interacts with Regulus, Saturn and a lovely crescent Moon in some very interesting celestial configurations.

The eye-catching array kicks off this weekend. On Saturday morning, Oct. 6, Venus, Regulus and Saturn will form a wide triangle with the Moon hovering high above them.

On Sunday morning, Oct. 7, the Moon will be strikingly positioned inside of the Venus-Saturn-Regulus triangle.

Venus will appear to speed to the south of Regulus on Monday, Oct. 9. Then finally, on Sunday, Oct. 14, Venus will pass to the south of Saturn.

Crescent Venus

In telescopes and even steadily-held binoculars, Venus is revealed this week as a wide crescent, but as it pulls ahead of Earth and speeds away in its orbit, its disk will shrink and it will display an apparent half-moon phase as seen in a telescope, soon after the start of November.

Saturn, in contrast appears much dimmer – about 1/120 as bright as Venus – primarily because it’s located about 17 times farther out in space than Venus as seen from here on Earth.

Another factor is that the famous ring system, which can be seen in any telescope magnifying over 30-power, is gradually closing as seen from our Earthly perspective. Their angle of inclination diminishes from 8.8 to 7.4-degrees during October. By the summer of 2009, the rings will appear edge-on to us and will be difficult, if not impossible to see, even in large telescopes.

Heart of Leo

As for Regulus, it marks the heart of Leo, a star pattern whose origins trace back to the earliest Mideastern peoples, especially those of the Tigris and Euphrates area. Among virtually all civilizations there, this constellation was accorded king-of-the-beasts status and regal symbolism.

And although it shines only 1/229th as bright as Venus and ranks at the bottom on the list of the 21 brightest stars, we know today that Regulus is also regal in an astrophysical sense. It’s a highly luminous blue-white star, and just as earthly kings were uncommon personages among the human population, a star like Regulus is also uncommon among the stellar population. Its spectral class is B7; one of the very small minority of those born with enough mass to occupy an exalted station near the top of the main sequence of star classification.

And lastly, its distance of 78 light-years means the light you see arriving from Regulus now started on its journey to Earth right around the time of the great stock market crash in 1929.

(Joe Rao serves as an instructor and guest lecturer at New York’s Hayden Planetarium. He writes about astronomy for The New York Times and other publications, and he is also an on-camera meteorologist for News 12 Westchester, New York.)

File Photo: Bright Star Regulus near the Leo 1 Dwarf Galaxy

From the Wikipedia article on Regulus:

Regulus (α Leo / α Leonis / Alpha Leonis) is the brightest star in the constellation Leo and one of the brightest stars in the nighttime sky. Regulus is approximately 77.5 light years from Earth’s Solar System. Regulus is considered the last first magnitude star in the sky because the next brightest star, Adhara, has a magnitude of 1.50, officially making it a second magnitude star. Of the brightest stars in the sky, Regulus is closest to the ecliptic, and is regularly occulted by the Moon…

Regulus is Latin for “prince” or “little king.” The Greek variant of Basiliscus is also used. It is further known as Qalb Al Asad, from Arabic قلب الأسد qalb[u] al-´asad, meaning “the heart of the lion.” This phrase is sometimes approximated as Kabelaced, or translated into Latin as Cor Leonis. In Hindu astronomy, Regulus corresponds to the Nakshatra Magha. It’s known as 轩辕十四 (the Fourteenth Star of Xuanyuan) in Chinese. Xuanyuan is the name of Yellow Emperor.

Map of the constellatioon Leo:

Where Are Burma’s Monks?

By KEVIN DOYLE Fri Oct 12

For much of late September, the road to the eastern gateway of Rangoon’s revered Shwedagon pagoda was a sea of maroon and saffron robes, as hundreds of Buddhist monks gathered to march in protest against Burma’s military government.

Now, two weeks after the junta brutally cracked down on the pro-democracy demonstrations, the small monasteries that line both sides of the road are mostly locked and empty, while wooden barricades and bales of rusted barbed wire that police used to seal off Shwedagon are stacked on the pavement. Police and soldiers armed with automatic weapons sit on stools outside the mostly silent monasteries. More are stationed at the entrance of the hilltop temple, the spiritual center of Burmese Buddhism. As many as a thousand monks lived and studied at these small monasteries in the shadow of Shwedagon. But troops now far outnumber the handful of monks that are still seen at Shwedagon and the downtown Sule pagoda, another focal point of the pro-democracy protests.

When the military and police moved to crush the demonstrators, they first went after the monks. Under cover of darkness, say several sources who did not want their names used, doors of monasteries were kicked in and the monks around Shwedagon, including some nuns, were bundled onto trucks and taken away. When asked where the monks had gone, one 30-year-old man who was at Shwedagon in the early days of the protests puts his wrists together in the sign of locked handcuffs. According to Burma’s state-run paper, The New Light of Myanmar, raids on 18 monasteries netted the authorities some 513 monks, one novice, 167 men and 30 women. The monks were summarily defrocked and interrogated and those found to be innocent were re-ordained and sent back to their monasteries. While the paper said that only 118 monks and laymen were still in custody, Rangoon’s pagodas remain empty and quiet; many say the figures are much higher than the state has reported. One Rangoon resident told me that the remaining prisoners will probably be released once the situation calms down, which he believed would be at least a couple of months.

Many who eluded the authorities have fled the city for the relative safety of their home villages, where they remain, still fearful of arrest for their roles in the protests. One man who helped shelter a young monk who had suffered a deep gash on the head while escaping from a monastery raid told me the monk had later fled for the provinces. He believes the attack on the clergy of this devoted Buddhist nation and the imprisonment of monks will come back to haunt the junta. “We believe that if you do good, you receive good,” he says. “If you do bad things you receive bad things. This will be the same for the military.”

To head off such an outcome, the generals are waging a propaganda war to win back Burmese hearts and minds. Burma’s state-run television broadcast footage over the weekend of military officers and their wives presenting gifts of rice and cash to an assembly of forlorn-looking, elderly Buddhist patriarchs in Rangoon. On Sunday, The New Light of Myanmar assured readers that the military was only targeting “bogus” monks and demonstration leaders with its purges. “Although authorities and security members pay respects to the real monks, they had to take action against those bogus monks trying to tarnish the image of the Sasana [religion],” the paper announced.

But many, even some members of Burma’s own oppressive security forces, remain unconvinced. On Monday evening, a 26-year-old member of the plainclothes security apparatus knelt to pay a final homage to the Buddha at Shwedagon before fleeing for the Thai border. The officer had taken part in the nighttime roundup of monks, and it still weighed heavily on his conscience. “I have had enough. I have to leave,” he said as he rose from his knees and started his journey to the border. Still, the nightly roundup of suspects continues under the darkness of a 10 p.m. curfew. One source with friends in the security forces says police are still trying to put names to faces on video footage of those who took part in the demonstrations. Police apparently carried out a nighttime arrest on Monday night near the guesthouse where I stayed, according to the manager, who whispered that to me after watching a story about Burma on the BBC the following morning.

As I traveled to the airport on Tuesday I noticed two elderly Buddhist nuns accepting alms at a large house on the outskirts of the city, the first adult clergy members I had seen doing this all week. But my line of sight was momentarily blocked by an image that better sums up a week in Rangoon in the aftermath of the pro-democracy protests. A fast-moving police wagon passed the two nuns; the arms of the detainees inside protruded through gaps in two iron grills along the vehicle’s side.

For just a moment I could see the frightened faces of the prisoners inside: Dozens of young teenagers, boys and girls wearing brightly-colored T-shirts, packed cheek-to-cheek, their outstretched arms and hands grasping at the world passing by outside.