1. Remembering Sister Margaret Ann

    Today, April 5, is the 32nd anniversary of the death of Sister Margaret Ann Pahl. When the nun was slain in 1980 the date was Holy Saturday, the day before Easter.

    The brutal murder of a 71-year-old Catholic nun went unsolved for 24 years until cold-case detectives arrested Father Gerald Robinson in April, 2004. The priest was convicted in May, 2006, and is now serving a 15-years-to-life sentence at an Ohio prison.

    On this day during Holy Week, let’s pause to remember Sister Margaret Ann, a humble servant of the Lord who lost her life in such an ignominious way.

  2. Back in the digital saddle

    It’s been a while since I communicated via this medium, and for a number of reasons I don’t think I’ll get into here. But I’ve decided to ease back into the blogosphere and hope you continue to feel that what I have to say here is worthwhile.

    Might as well start with today. I covered a protest by SNAP (Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests) outside of the Toledo Catholic Diocese headquarters. There were only three people there and one of them was Barbara Blaine, founder and president of SNAP. They want the bishop to be more diligent in updating the diocese’s website listing the status of priests accused of abusing children. The story will be in tomorrow’s paper.

    Barbara is a native Toledoan now living in Chicago and was in town for a program yesterday at the University of Toledo regarding SNAP’s filing of a complaint against the Vatican and the Pope with the International Criminal Court in the Hague. Here is a link to the article published today.

    * * *

    I then drove to Perrysburg because lightning struck the steeple of historic St. Rose Catholic Church. We had some weird weather today, starting with good-sized hail and heavy rain around 9 am and then some big crashes of lightning and thunder, but not a raging storm. More like isolated bits and pieces of a storm.

    As I approached the church I heard someone calling my name and saw Sarah Hammitt standing on the steps of a house right across the street from St. Rose. I didn’t realize Matt & Sarah had moved there last year. Matt was just back yesterday from a three-week tour with Sanctus Real. They heard the boom when lightning struck the church and Matt videotaped it burning. Sarah called him while filming and just as he turned aside the cross fell off the steeple, so he missed getting it on video. 

    Bowen was running around in a diaper. It’s so great to see that little fella, about 1 1/2 years old now, playing and having fun. His chest has the scars from two open-heart surgeries for hypoplastic left heart syndrome, but otherwise you’d never know what he and the Hammitts have been through. Bowen fell down and hit the hardwood flood and started crying and Matt just said, “You’re OK.” Wonderful to see him treated like just a normal kid and not babied or coddled.

    * * *

    On the way back to downtown Toledo there wa a major accident scene in the southbound lanes of I-75… a bunch of police cars with lights flashing, a few ambulances, a semi with its hood popped open, and traffic backed up for miles. Later I learned that a car was struck from behind by the semi and pushed into a ditch. three vehicles were involved in the crash. And the driver of the car was doing 15 mph on the interstate!

    Suddenly it dawned on me… I had seen the slow car while heading south to the St. Rose fire. It had its emergency blinkers on and was in the far right lane while I was in the far left lane. Several semi trucks were in between us so I didn’t get a good look at it, but through the openings between trucks it did catch my eye. I didn’t realize it was going 15 mph, though, because I only saw it in glimpses.

    Here is a link to the odd story of this crash.

    * * *

    I’ll try to be more faithful about blogging. But be forewarned that even though my blog pops up on facebook, I rarely go to that social network anymore. If you want to correspond send an email to davidyonke@hotmail.com.

  3. Political humor

    * The problem with political jokes is they get elected.~Henry Cate, VII 

    * We hang the petty thieves and appoint the great ones to public office.~Aesop 

    * If we got one-tenth of what was promised to us in these acceptance speeches there wouldn’t be any inducement
       to go to heaven.~Will Rogers 

    * Those who are too smart to engage in politics are punished by being governed by those who are dumber.~Plato 
    * I think it’s about time we voted for senators with breasts. After all, we’ve been voting for boobs long enough. —
    Clarie Sargent , Arizona senatorial candidate

    * Politicians are the same all over. They promise to build a bridge even where there is no river.~Nikita Khrushchev 

    * When I was a boy I was told that anybody could become President; I’m beginning to believe it.~Clarence Darrow 

    * Why pay money to have your family tree traced; go into politics and your opponents will do it for you.~Author Unknown 

    * If God wanted us to vote, he would have given us candidates.~Jay Leno

    * Politicians are people who, when they see light at the end of the tunnel, go out and buy some more tunnel.~John Quinton 

    * Politics is the gentle art of getting votes from the poor and campaign funds from the rich, by promising to protect each
       from the other.~Oscar Ameringer 

    * The Democrats are the party that says government will make you smarter, taller, richer, and remove the crabgrass
       on your lawn. The Republicans are the party that says government doesn’t work and then they get elected and prove it. P.J.O’Rourke

    * I offer my opponents a bargain: if they will stop telling lies about us, I will stop telling the truth about them.
      Adlai Stevenson, campaign speech, 1952 

    * A politician is a fellow who will lay down your life for his country.~ Texas Guinan 

    * Any American who is prepared to run for president should automatically, by definition, be disqualified from ever doing so. ~Gore Vidal 

    * I have come to the conclusion that politics is too serious a matter to be left to the politicians.~Charles de Gaulle 

    * Instead of giving a politician the keys to the city, it might be better to change the locks.~Doug Larson 

    * Don’t vote, it only encourages them.~Author Unknown 

    * There ought to be one day - just one - when there is open season on senators.~Will Rogers

  4. Back to Mars

    After last night’s disappointment at the University of Toledo when clouds obscured the view of Mars through the massive one-meter telescope (and paying $7 for the futile attempt), tonight the skies are clear as can be. Of course!
    That inspired me to lug my Celestron with its 8-inch mirror into the yard. It was a good night for viewing with a just a little atmospheric disturbance, probably from high winds in the upper atmosphere.
    Mars was shining bright, and rust colored, in the eastern sky, near the full moon. In the west, I saw Jupiter with its magnificent stripes and four visible moons. Venus was near Jupiter and looking blue-white.
    The moon, nearly full tonight, never fails to amaze me. I could see so much detail, the “seas” and mountain ranges. It truly is breathtaking to see the planets and the moon in their glorious orbits, a testimony to the Master who created them (as I see it).
    ***
    Meanwhile, back at the ranch, Janet and I are now wincing at election results. She and i canceled each other out by voting for different Republican candidates in the Super Tuesday primary, but neither of us much likes the choices we had. It’s unfortunate when politics comes down to the lesser of evils.

  5. Pat’s foot-in-mouth disease (reprise)

    Good thing Pat Robertson isn’t running for president this year… check out his outrageous comments made on his show The 700 Club and reported in the Huffington Post:

    Pat Robertson has a theory for why tornadoes ripped through the Midwest last week: People didn’t pray enough.

    Right Wing Watch found a clip of the television evangelist making the claim during an episode of “The 700 Club.”

    “If enough people were praying [God] would’ve intervened, you could pray, Jesus stilled the storm, you can still storms,” Robertson said on the show.

    Robertson also blamed people for living in tornado-prone areas.

    “Why did you build houses where tornadoes were apt to happen?” he asked.

  6. Mars, politics and Indiana Jones

    Tonight I went to Ritter Planerarium at the University of Toledo for a program on Mars followed by a chance to look at the Red Planet through a 1-meter telescope. By comparison, my scope has an 8 inch mirror. The bigger the mirror, the more light it can gather and therefore the more deep space objects you can see,
    The Mars planetarium program was great… Good views of the planet from rovers, lots of cool graphics. Mars is about 65 million miles from earth now, compared to a max of 230 million and a minimum of 30 million. So it should be a good time to see it, unfortunately, thin clouds rolled in and turned Mars into a little red fuzz ball.
    The alignment will be good for a while so keep your telescope ready for a clear night.
    * * *
    Don’t forget to vote tomorrow. Its been an interesting political season, crazier than most. Who would ever have imagined Kid Rock backing Mitt Romney? SNL had a funny spoof about it wirh Kid Rock singing “I’m Mitt Romney, Get the F out of the Way.”
    ***
    Working on a story about a former Toledoan known as “the Indiana Jones of biblical archaeology”. Should run in the next few days….
    ***
    Did you see the freak accident at the Daytona 500, when Juan Carlos Montoya hit the track-drying truck? Bizarre.

  7. A terrible tragedy

    It’s hard to fathom how such a horrible thing can happen — three young women headed for spring break in the tropics killed by a wrong-way driver (click here for story).

    In the newsroom, we tried to speculate how 69-year-old Winifred Lein could have been heading southbound in the northbound lanes of I-75 at 2:10 in the morning. Lots of theories, no answers. She must have been either drunk, mentally ill, confused, or suicidal.

    As a father of three girls, and as a human being, the accident just devastates me.

    Reporter David Patch wrote a good story about the lack of adequate responses available to law enforcement officials when someone is going the wrong way on a major highway (click here).

    When you think about it, it’s almost impossible. Police have only a minute or two to find the culprit and … then what? Ram them? Spike strips? The ability of a person to get in a car and head into traffic is one of the flaws in our highway system. It’s “not economical” to put gates at every on-ramp. Permanent spike strips wear out and cut tires.

    Until we come up with some radical new transportation ideas, this is a risk that cannot be adequately addressed. We just have to pray that it’s increasingly rare.

    Meanwhile, our hearts and prayers go out to the families victimized by this terrible tragedy.

  8. Stranger than fiction

    News from the UK Guardian (here is a link):

    A Florida church has caused outrage by turning away children from its popular Sunday services to cater to a pastor who is a registered sex offender.

    The decision to allow convicted child molester Darrell Gilyard into the pulpit has angered neighbouring pastors and members of the congregation of the Christ Tabernacle Missionary Baptist church in Jacksonville.

    Gilyard, 49, is allowed no contact with minors under the terms of his release from a three-year jail sentence for abusing a 15-year-old girl at another church in 2009. As a result church leaders have made his services “adults only”.

    Parishioners claim security guards hired by the church have begun refusing admission to families with children, including a woman who tried to attend on Sunday with a two-year-old boy.

    Instead, they say, children are directed to remain “off site” while Gilyard is preaching, and they accuse the church of dismantling its playground to keep them away.

    Since Gilyard was hired last month, soon after his December release from jail, the church in Northside, one of Jacksonville’s poorest, mostly black neighbourhoods, has become the scene of angry exchanges between protesters and his supporters.

  9. Farewell to a pop icon

    In memory and in honor of Davy Jones, who died of a heart attack this morning in Florida, here is a copy of an article I wrote about him that was published in January, 2010:

    Davy Jones knows why fans buy tickets to his concerts and he doesn’t make them wait to get their money’s worth.
    “One of my first tunes is going to be ‘Daydream Believer’ or ‘Last Train to Clarksville’ or ‘Pleasant Valley Sunday’ and it’s going up from there. It’s a great, fun thing and we’re all going to have a fun night,” Jones said in a recent interview.
    The former Monkees lead singer will bring his six-person band to the Tecumseh Center for the Arts on Saturday night.
    “I probably sing about 22, 23 songs in the show. We’re booked for an hour and 15 minutes and two hours later they’re dragging us off the stage with a hook,” Jones said from Miami, where he was visiting relatives.
    The 64-year-old singer and actor from Manchester, England, was a child star on British television, and played the mischievous Artful Dodger in Oliver! on stage in London’s West End and on Broadway, where he was nominated for a Tony.
    But it was his role in the Monkees, a band created for a rock-and-comedy television series during the heyday of Beatlemania, that made Jones a household name.
    The group - with Jones, Peter Tork, Michael Nes-
    mith, and Mickey Dolenz - recorded a series of hits penned by some of pop music’s top songwriters, including Neil Diamond, Carole King, Harry Nilsson, and Neil Sedaka.
    The Monkees came along in a magical era when most entertainers felt a responsibility to their fans and tried to be positive role models, Jones said.
    “How many celebrities in the ’40s, ’50s, and ’60s did you really hear about bad behavior? Today, the baby boys and baby girls are more interested in flipping off the paparazzi when they come out of the clubs at 4 a.m. How many chances does Robert Downey, Jr., want? Music used to be about mingling souls, and now you get people who have the world in their hands and they surround themselves with idiots and influence people in the most negative ways. People do look at celebrities and people in the press and in the news and they follow suit,” Jones said.
    He had been an aspiring jockey as well as an actor as a teenager, he said, and he still enjoys spending time with race horses. He would like to get another chance to do some serious acting, “now that I’ve got more lines in my face than Union Station.”
    But “The Monkees ruined my acting career,” Jones said, because everyone wanted him to play the part of “a little guy who gets stars in his eyes and falls in love two times every episode. That’s not me. There’s a little more to the man than that.”
    A swift talker who jumped from one topic to another with barely a breath in between, Jones said some people are surprised when they see him in the supermarket shopping for groceries.
    “They say, ‘What are you doing here?’ ‘I’m getting food!’ They expect a Rolls Royce with a driver to be waiting outside as I moonwalk into the cheese department,” he said.
    Of all his hobbies and activities, singing Monkees tunes still tops the list, he said.
    “It’s the most fun I have, these personal appearances. The Monkees had so many familiar records, not just one or two. … When I’m on stage it’s the happiest time. I’m able to execute a bit of my expertise as a seasoned entertainer and also not be afraid of the unknown - not afraid of reaching out with humor and comedy and dialogue,” he said. “Ever since I was in school plays, there was no doubt in my mind that I was going to be an entertainer. This is what I do. I’ve got everything I’ve asked for.”

  10. T.S. Eliot on Ash Wednesday

    Here is a link to T.S. Eliot’s poem, “Ash Wednesday”: http://bit.ly/DMdic

    And President Obama offered these words:

    Statement by the President on Ash Wednesday

    Today, Michelle and I honor Ash Wednesday with Christians around the country and across the world. This is at once a solemn and joyous occasion, an opportunity to remember both the depths of sacrifice and the height of redemption. We join millions in entering the Lenten Season with truly thankful hearts, mindful of our faith and our obligations to one another.

About me

Everyday adventures and/or musings of journalist and author David Yonke. Contact me at davidyonke@hotmail.com