Items

Catholic Worker to speak at National Catholic Prayer Breakfast with Bush and McCain
How surprisingly weird. If this doesn’t lead to a Colbert moment, CWs across the country are going to be disappointed. (What would a pacifist anarchist like CW co-founder Dorothy Day have said to a sitting president?)

“18 students arrested in Darfur protest at White House”
On April 13. The next Worcester-based Darfur event in DC (that I know of) is a march between the Chinese and Sudanese embassies May 20 organized by the Catholic Worker community.

Democracy Now remembers Tom Lewis
I thought this was a nice piece about late Worcester resident Tom Lewis.

“Green Pirates Claim Victory on Whaling”
New York Times: “This year’s mission was disrupted intensively by Greenpeace and Sea Shepherd, who use violent means for disturbance,” said Hajime Ishikawa, chief of Japan’s whaling mission. I’ve previously mentioned that I think Sea Shepherd pirate-in-chief Paul Watson has one of the world’s funnest jobs.

Free Art Worcester
This morning I spotted Free Art Worcester’s Hexagrammum Mysticum on the way to work.

Quotes
Clay Shirky:

To hear publishers tell it, they are deeply concerned about losing their audience, but the facts don’t bear this out. They’ve been losing their audience since 1984, the year readership first began shrinking (and ten years before the launch of the commercial web.) When their audience was shrinking but their ad revenues were growing, they were mum about social value. Now that the web means their audience is growing again but their ad revenues are falling, they’ve suddenly discovered their civic function.

David Byrne:

What will happen when half the country is unemployed, with no medical insurance, stuck in a sheet rock house miles from public transportation? They’ll be ripe for religion or revolution if you ask me.

A button from Jacob Berendes: The Thong Song Is Still Relevant