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POPSHave you found your soul place? Richard Ford, Pulitzer Prize winning author, was born and raised in Jackson, MS. His wife’s job as a city planner took them to many cities but when they moved to New Orleans, Ford said he had “an instantaneous recognition.”Even now, living in Maine, he considers New Orleans home. Often we are inspired to build monuments on these sacred grounds: pyramids, cities, stone circles, churches, mosques. Whatever caused our ancestors to pilgrimage to these spots, it is still drawing us as well. Perhaps the earthy taste of freshly squeezed olive oil, never before experienced, causes you to feel as one with the rocky landscape of a Greek island. No matter the reason, we are inexplicably attracted to locations and feel a connection that we cannot readily explain. In their special issue on Sacred Places, U.S. News and World Report states that that these spots are “as varied as the human sense of the sacred and as various as the world’s spiritual traditions.”
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POPSRepublicans: Crazy, Or Nuts?
Who in their right mind would argue with the observations in this article? More: "The Republican Party has become an aggregation of people who prefer to live in a world of fantasy -- and their first fantasy, the Ur-myth on which the entire conceit rests, is (classically) "we are the realists." "It degrades, into farce and Newspeak, from there. The perpetrators and defenders of the outing of a CIA agent are "patriots." Tom DeLay is a "leader" and Newt Gingrich is a "visionary." The President plays guitar while New Orleans drowns, causes a hundred thousand Americans and Iraqis to be killed or injured, and outsources torture, and it's the Democrats who, per the repellent Ramesh Ponnuru, are the "party of death." "It has gotten so that you have to muster all the compassion and understanding of which you are capable just to think of the Republicans as a party of greedy corporatists manipulating the credulous, the provincial, and the bigoted. That's the nice way of putting it.”
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POPS White Radical Evangelicals Get a Pass "Thus, white evangelical Ministers are free to advocate American wars based on Biblical mandates, rant hatefully against Islam, and argue that natural disasters occur because God hates gay people...By contrast, black Muslim ministers like Farrakhan, or even black Christian ministers like Rev. Jeremiah Wright, are held with deep suspicion, even contempt. McCain is free to hug and praise the Rev. Hagees of the world, but Obama is required to prove over and over and over and over that he does not share the more extreme views of black Ministers."
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POPS5 hotels that will scare the daylights out of you The name says it all. In the late 1800s in Chicago, Dr. H.H. Holmes, born Herman Mudgett, built and operated a hotel that would later be dubbed the "murder castle" by law enforcement agents. Holmes was a lifelong cheat, swindler and fraud artist -- in medical school he took out insurance claims on cadavers and mangled the corpses to look like they were accident victims. Shortly before the 1893 World's Fair, which was hosted in Chicago, Holmes built a 60-room hotel in the Chicago suburb of Englewood. Holmes was the architect, and the hotel housed many bizarre features -- doors that led to nothing, rooms without windows, trap doors and hidden passageways. When Holmes opened the hotel up for business, guests got more than they bargained for. For four years, Holmes held various guests prisoner, tortured and killed them. He is known as America's first serial killer, admitting to 28 murders, Lovely, I know.
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POPSFlood victims without insurance; FEMA had assured safety Gulfport, IL: FEMA had assured townspeople here that their new levee was strong enough to withstand historic flood. Banks no longer required flood insurance. On Tuesday, the levee broke. Now under 11 feet of water. I grew up in Burlington, IA, nearly within sight of Gulfport.
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POPSA Gut Wrenching Story This is a heartbreaking and maddening story about just how perfectly organized the effort is to keep the poor black population from returning to their homes in New Orleans. Even the black mayor seems to be involved big time. Please read this piece in its entirety; it is important.
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POPSMuseum of Unintended Use An interesting new blog. And oh yeah, that last pic was taken in a pet supply store; it's a dog beg with an unintended sleeper inside. :)
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