Knowledge

"Is this faith - to understand nothing, but obediently to submit our understanding to the Church? Faith consists not in ignorance, but in knowledge."

(John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion)

Jean Cauvin (John Calvin) was born in Noyon, France, on 10th July 1509.

Anniversaries

Henry Purcell (born 1659), George Frideric Handel (died 1759), Franz Joseph Haydn (died 1809), Felix Mendelssohn (born 1809), Bohuslav Martinů (died 1959).

Tyrannosaurus Sex

"Prime minister, have you had a, let's say, spicy, or more than spicy, relationship with an underage girl? Absolutely not." (Silvio Berlusconi)

"I've looked on many women with lust. I've committed adultery in my heart many times. God knows I will do this and forgives me." (Jimmy Carter)

"For seven and a half years I've worked alongside President Reagan. We've had triumphs. Made some mistakes. We've had some sex...uh...setbacks." (George H.W. Bush)

"If I don't have a woman every three days or so I get a terrible headache." (John Kennedy)

"I did not have sexual relations with that woman." (Bill Clinton)

"They don't call me Tyrannosaurus Sex for nothing." (Ted Kennedy)

Tip or Treat?

"Watergate wasn't about a tip. It was about extensive reporting and getting information you can put in the paper... We get this idea that this is about one story or one source or one tip, it is not... It is not about a tip, that is the distortion that comes out here - it is what you do about it. What backs it up? What reporting do you do about it?" (Bob Woodward)

[E&P]

I Could Write a Book

If they ask me, I could write a book...

Smile and Laughter

"A saint can smile but laughter is only for the devil."

(Giuseppe Prezzolini, The Legacy of Italy)

Elementary!

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle was born on 22 May 1859 in Edinburgh, Scotland.

He is most famous as the inventor of Sherlock Holmes, but he had a varied career as a writer and journalist. He trained as a doctor and worked as a surgeon and medical officer.

B16 2 U

"The new digital arena, the so-called cyberspace..." [Pope2you.net]

For the Record

Be wary of sources offering information for favors or money; avoid bidding for news. (Society of Professional Journalists, Code of Ethics)

Chequebook (US checkbook) journalism
Function: noun
Date: 1963
: the practice of paying someone for a news story and especially for granting an interview.

According to Robert Boynton (Checkbook Journalism Revisited: Sometimes We Owe Our Sources Everything, CJR, January / February 2008) in 1963 Esquire paid Muhammad Ali (then Cassius Clay) $150 ($1,000 today) to cooperate with a young journalist named Tom Wolfe for his article, "The Marvelous Mouth," which it published in its October issue.

In November 1970, Esquire published one of the most memorable covers in its history. Illustrating "The Confessions of Lt. Calley," the first of three articles about the man who, with his platoon, murdered hundreds of unarmed Vietnamese civilians in the village of My Lai, it consisted of a photograph of Calley, in uniform and grinning broadly, surrounded by four adorable Asian children.

"Perhaps one reason for Calley's smile was that Esquire had paid him $20,000 (the equivalent of over $100,000 today) to work with veteran journalist John Sack, who received $10,000 for writing the articles."

Mamma Mia!

Can the Catholic Church survive Carla Bruni's attack on Benedict XVI? [Gerald Warner]

Checkbook Journalism

"In the UK, so-called checkbook journalism is common, though little acknowledged. Most frequently, it applies to tabloid topics..." [UK Expenses Row Also Dogs the Media, WSJ]

A Migrant Flame

Be a lone dog
Little brother
And paddle
Down the crowded street
With sleet in your eye
Killing all the Fathers
With your cigarette.
In the lobbies
And elevators
Be a cloud of hailstones
A visible episode
Or a migrant flame
Feeding on nothing
An anti-prophet
A dry homeless tree
With a knife in your side
And many skinny years to die in
As a life member of the unemployed.

(Thomas Merton, To Sons: Not to Be Numb)

The Risk of Being Local

"When most people think of journalists dying for a story, they picture war correspondents caught in a cross fire, but... Almost three-quarters of the more than 720 journalists who have died in the line of duty since 1992 have been targeted and murdered. The majority of the fallen – more than 85 percent – have been local journalists. Almost all the masterminds of these murders – 95 percent – have escaped punishment."

(Terry Gould, Murder Without Borders: Dying for the Story in the World's Most Dangerous Places)

What makes a poor, small-town journalist stay on a story even though threatened with certain death, and offered handsome rewards for looking the other way?

Over four years, Terry Gould, a Brooklyn-born investigative journalist who focuses on organized crime and social issues, has travelled to Colombia, the Philippines, Bangladesh, Russia and Iraq – the countries in which journalists are most likely to be murdered on the job – to attempt to answer this question.

In each place, through conversations with their colleagues, their families and in some cases their murderers, he uncovers the lives of local reporters and broadcasters who stayed on a story to the point of death. He searches for the moment in which each of his protagonists understood that they were willing to die, and finds complex reasons for their bravery.

In his wonderfully vivid portraits of seven courageous souls - Guillermo Bravo Vega (Colombia), Marlene Garcia-Esperat (Philippines), Manik Chandra Saha (Bangladesh), Anna Politkovskaya, Valery Ivanov and Alexei Sidorov (Russia), Khalid W. Hassan (Iraq) - he brings their lives and the stories they worked on to light, telling truth to those who would murder truth tellers.

Well done.

Twittering

"We inform you that Queen Rania is on Twitter (here) to keep you informed on the occasion of the Pope's visit to Jordan."

'No'

London: Hindu loses fight for UK open-air funeral pyre [Reuters]

RELATED POST: A Burning Matter

PRESS RELEASE: Baba Ghai was not informed that the verdict would be delivered today and has been in India receiving a course of medical treatment.

He has been informed of the verdict and is returning on the next available flight.

Baba Ghai is saddened by J Cranston's verdict but a full judgement has not yet been received and further comment will be made once that judgement has been absorbed by Baba Ghai and his legal team.

J Cranston has given permission for appeal to the Court of Appeal, stating that, "it seems to me sufficiently a matter of public importance for me to give permission to appeal."

Baba Ghai:

"I respect the decision of the Court but, for me, this is quite literally a matter of life and death. I shall appeal until the very end, in the faith that my dying wish will not go unheard. A matter of such magnitude deserves to be heard by the highest courts in our land and I shall not tire until all legal avenues are exhausted.

It is the final verdict which will decide my fate, notwithstanding any disappointments faced along the way. This is the beginning, not the end. I have been pitted against the might of the Ministry of Justice and Newcastle City Council - but I take solace from the fact that, with faith, a David like me can ultimately overcome the Goliath of state machinery.

In 2006 I offered Northumbria Police an undertaking that I would not encourage or participate in any natural cremations until the legal case was resolved. As a man of honour, I stand by that undertaking and respect the fact that legal proceedings must take their due course.

I am saddened and disappointed that I was not informed a verdict was due today. In light of the extensive and extremely supportive media coverage, I can help wander why this verdict has effectively been issued through the back door, in a manner that makes it difficult to fully respond to the media at this time."

Singing

"I have no money, no resources, no hopes. I am the happiest man alive. A year ago, six months ago, I thought I was an artist. I no longer think about it, I am. Everything that was literature has fallen from me. There are no more books to be written, thank God.

This then? This is not a book. This is libel, slander, defamation of character. This is not a book, in the ordinary sense of the word. No, this is a prolonged insult, a gob of spit in the face of Art, a kick in the pants to God, Man, Destiny, Time, Love, Beauty... what you will. I am going to sing for you, a little off key perhaps, but I will sing. I will sing while you croak, I will dance over your dirty corpse...

To sing you must first open your mouth. You must have a pair of lungs and a little knowledge of music. It is not necessary to have an accordion, or a guitar. The essential thing is to want to sing. This then is a song. I am singing."

(Henry Miller, Tropic of Cancer)

Work in Progress

"It is clear now to everyone that the suicide of civilization is in progress."

(Albert Schweitzer, The Philosophy of Civilization)