Spring watch

Carol is friends with Eva, and Eva is a farmer who grows organic greens primarily for the restaurant trade. Carol and Eva have a deal: Carol goes now and then to pull weeds for Eva, for it is hard to find weeders, and in return Eva gives greens and other produce to Carol.

Today Carol went to Eva’s place and picked some greens in the green house: baby spinach, arugula, various kinds of lettuce, miner’s lettuce, and some other things that we couldn’t identify. These are the first locally-grown greens I’ve eaten all winter. The flavor was stunning.

All the “fresh” food they ship from California (or even farther away) is a couple of weeks old by the time it reaches the supermarket, and has lost most of its flavor and goodness. As for frozen and canned food, about all you can say is that it’s edible, and at this time of year it’s often better than the so-called “fresh” produce. And this is what we have to eat for most of the winter: it keeps you alive, but it doesn’t taste like much.

A month ago, I did manage to get some wintered-over parsnips which had been grown nearby, and they were very good indeed. But I had forgotten just how good fresh greens can be.

Phragwrites

Yup, you can now get a pen made out of the invasive strain of Phragmites or Common Reed, a plant which is choking out wetlands in North America. The Phragwrites pen has a body made from Phragmites reed legally harvested in New Hampshire (legally harvested means a permit was obtained, and seeds or roots were not dispersed to infest new areas). But… we’ll have to buy lots of pens to make a real dent on the Phragmites population. Via.

William Howard Taft Attack Ad

In the 1908 U.S. presidential election, William Howard Taft was attacked for his Unitarianism. He refused to respond to the attacks, and won the election. But imagine if his opponents had had TV attack ads in their arsenal….

Screen grab from video showing Taft.

A note about the historical facts behind this attack ad….

The [1908 presidential] campaign was notable for the vicious attacks on Taft’s Unitarianism, particularly in the Midwest. Evangelical Protestants, in a flood of letters and newspaper articles, accused him of being an infidel, a Catholic, etc. His religion was no secret. He attended All Souls Church faithfully. Roosevelt and others responded sharply to the attacks. Following his own instincts, as well as the advice of the President, Elihu Root, and other Republican leaders, he said nothing himself in response. Bryan did not attack Taft personally, but he would not criticize those who did, thereby implying that he agreed with them. (Link.)

Any resemblance between the content of this attack ad, and attacks on the religious liberal running in the 2008 U. S. presidential primaries, is entirely intentional. 1:27.

Note: Although blip.tv is now defunct, I had a copy of this video and uploaded it to Vimeo. Click on the image above to view the video.

Photos of churches

The Prints and Photographs Online Catalog (PPOC) of the Library of Congress includes some photos and drawings of historic churches. The Historic American Buildings Survey produced many drawings and some photos of churches, and I found some rarities, e.g., drawings of the Marion, Mass., Universalist church. There are also many glass negatives from the Detroit Publishing Co., c.1900-1910, including quite a few churches. Great search engine allows easy searching; hi-res digital files for downloading.

PodCamp Boston 3 announced

PodCamp Boston 3 will take place July 19-20, 2008 at the Joseph B. Martin Conference Center at Harvard Medical School in Boston, MA. From the email announcement: “PodCamp Boston 3 will be two days of great conversations, knowledge sharing, and insights into the leading edge of new media.” No lie.

You can register at www.podcampboston.org/register — I’ve already registered. I was at PodCamp Boston 2, and it was a great opportunity to extend my knowledge about new media. Hope to see some of my Boston-area readers at PodCamp this summer — do let me know if you plan to attend.

More on “Spirit of Life”

Today I dug out my copy of Songs for Congregational Singing by Carolyn McDade (1991), with harmonizations by McDade and Marian Shatto. After writing a post earlier this week on the popular hymn “Spirit of Life” which appears in the Unitarian Universalist hymnal with a harmonization by Grace Lewis-McLaren, I decided to look at another harmonization.

McDade’s and Shatto’s harmonization of “Spirit of Life” for piano uses a chord progression that can be interpreted as follows (one chord per measure):
   C Dm G7 C Am Dm G7 Cadd9
   C Dm G7 C Am Dm G7 Csus4
   Cadd9 Dm G13 Cadd9 Am Dm G7 Cadd9 C5
(N.B.: the last note is held for an extra measure.)

The harmonies are somewhat more complex than this — for example, you could read a CM7 for the fourth, ninth, and twelfth measures; and a Dm9 for the twenty-second measure.

And the rhythm is somewhat more complex than the version in the hymnal — the left hand on the piano part plays arpeggio-like figures that vary from straight eighths to syncopated figures like this: | 1 & 2 &   &   & |.

Also of interest in this little book is the song “Spirit of Justice,” with words that include:

Your people call, in faith we call — Be with us now
that we may make of this pained and captive land
a city just, a people free, strong with hope
and cast our lot with those who face the storm
and don’t turn back but dare go on….

Personally, I’d have more interest in singing these words than the words to “Spirit of Life.”

Spring watch

A poem by Frances Watkins Harper:

Dandelions.

Welcome children of the Spring,
   In your garbs of green and gold,
Lifting up your sun-crowned heads
   On the verdant plain and wold.

As a bright and joyous troop
   From the breast of earth ye came
Fair and lovely are your cheeks,
   With sun-kisses all aflame.

In the dusty streets and lanes,
   Where the lowly children play,
There as gentle friends ye smile,
   Making brighter life’s highway

Dewdrops and the morning sun,
   Weave your garments fair and bright,
And we welcome you to-day
   As the children of the light.

Children of the earth and sun.
   We are slow to understand
All the richness of the gifts
   Flowing from our Father’s hand.

Published in Poems by Frances Watkins Harper, 1895. Complete book at Project Gutenberg.

While searching for poetry by Unitarians and Universalists, I came across “Dandelions.” Even though Frances Harper uses late 19th C. American poetic conventions which may sound dated to our ears, her images and her thinking captured my attention. I liked the image of “Where the lowly children play/ There as gentle friends ye smile”; which is both profoundly egalitarian, while also in the context of the poem perhaps offering an exegesis of Mark 10.13-16 where Jesus befriends children.

And I particularly liked the image of humanity she offers in the fifth and sixth stanzas, when she calls us human beings “the children of the light. / Children of the earth and sun.” Those two lines alone make the poem for me.

This being the week when dandelions are beginning to appear widely in New Bedford, I thought I’d post the poem here as a sort of meditation on the season.

Church Web sites

Nice article on administering church Web sites on the Alban Institute Web site: Link. The article identifies three main audiences for church Web sites, and discusses how to avoid the extremes of selling your church on the one hand, and ignoring the Web site on the other hand. Worth reading. (Via Bob Kelley, BCD Webmaster.)