fire Paul Wolfowitz

I got the following in an e-mail today. Personally I think that firing Wolfowitz is an important first step but that this shouldn't end until the World Bank and IMF are disolved and people around the world are encouraged to start looking ot each other for the help and support that is needed to create a just and better society the world over. A good first step might be to sign this petition and get that man out of any job where the economic fate of the third world is in his hands.
CR

The battle for the Presidency of the World Bank is coming to a climax, and it's a replay of the Iraq war: George Bush and Paul Wolfowitz vs the World. The world is on the verge of winning this time -- and we can help tip the balance.

On Monday Wolfowitz will testify before the Bank Board. At the same time, Bush will meet with European leaders to decide his fate. We need one last push to build our petition before we deliver it on Monday. Click below to sign it and pass it on to 5 friends:

http://www.avaaz.org/en/sack_wolfowitz

Our YouTube campaign against Wolfowitz's misleadership of the Bank has gone viral with over 100,000 views, and has been covered by USA Today, the Washington Post, and the Guardian (UK). World Bank staff have also been circulating it on their internal staff lists.

All the pressure is working. Governments around the world, the World Bank Staff Association, even Wolfowitz's own deputies believe he should resign. The World Bank is far from perfect. Some of its policies have helped alleviate poverty; others have made things worse. But fixing it is urgently important for the world's poor -- and no progress is possible so long as Wolfowitz is in charge.

Let's win this one. Sign the petition, and send it to five of your friends. It's time to show Bush that the world won't stand for Wolfowitz to stay.

http://www.avaaz.org/en/sack_wolfowitz

God have mercy

I've got a stomach bug. I'm pretty sure that I single-handedly used a whole roll of toilet paper today, I'm dehydrated and everything I put into my stomach passes right on through faster than you'd believe.

bleh.

I feel like shit, I hope this is over soon.

it's all about the Russians

getting ready for the zine. I'm hoping to have something ready in the next week. I keep missing Vespers recently but I've also been seeing people I havn't heard from in a year or more.

I got a whole lot of tapes today from a lady on the drive great music by Bad Brains and Helmet and Alice in Chains. Also got some good posters from beckwomans, that store's been around since I was born!

Also recently been listening to this http://www.rantradio.com/shows/newsreal/
it's kind of like democracy now vs. prison planet with a healthy dose of geek core and diatribe and the dude who makes this broadcast is from Vancouver... sweet.

argh. everything is in from writers for the zine and Karl's going to work on it presumably but I kind of hope it comes back in good time because I like making zines and this new deadline might mean I can take more time putting it together so I don't have to go agro for two days shutting myself in so it's ready on time.

just so you know there's going to be a lot of reprinted stuff this month... hope that changes.

I was a stock footage stoner

I'm eating a bag of masala peas for breakfast. They are way better then wasabi peas much more flavour and still nice and hot. mmmmmmm Masala Peas

It's 4:20 day today. I can remember being a kid in highschool and going to the hemp rallies. One year I went down there and ended up on the news without realising it. Then for the next five years or so whenever the local news reported on a hemp rally they would pull out this old footage of my 16 year old ass getting high. I wonder if they still use that footage or if they've goten more recent stuff.

no I won't tell you what I'm upset about

sometimes I wonder what's the fucking use.

yah that's right.

what's the fucking use?

tiring newsletter

so I just finished making the newsletter I do for my union. I am packing it in. I have been dragging my heels about making it and it sucks not to get more help from the branch so I finished putting it together and wrote them to say that I've finished with it for now. lasty month there was nothing in it that had anything to do with us! I had to re-print things from the web just so there would be something to print.

this month I had to extend the deadline because only one person sent anything in on time.

I'm just griping right now but the truth is I'm in a tired sort of mood.

bleh

I remember you well in the chelsea hotel

so in a couple of weeks I'll be going to Italy with my mom via New York and Toronto. the ticket's booked and things are startring to fall into place. I still need to find a way to get to Utica from Toronto I'll either take the dirty dog down or fly but I don't have that figured out, I'm actually not even sure that Utica NY has an airport... I'd rather take the bus anyway.

After visiting central NY I'll be meeting my family in NYC, I talked to my mom today about travel arrangements she's booked us rooms at the Chelsea Hotel. This is really exciting for me because the Chelsea is a really famous place. I think Bob Dylan was born there, Leonard Cohen wrote a song about the hotel and Syd Vicious killed Nancy Spungen there. I have no idea what it's going to be like to stay there but it's kind of neat to know that we'll be staying at a place that has so much history to it. Also, I'm going to Italy! For two weeks! w00t!

Into the flaunch plasmodulator

I'm listening to a tape of something you might roughly be able to call music it was recorded by my friend Maarrq and myself back in highschool. Maarrq and I did a lot of recording back then, almost as much as we did drugs. We used to go hang out in his room at his parents house and drink homemade wine and smoke marijuana and cigarettes and make bad accoustic music usually recorded on an answering machine or on a hand held tape recorder. We called ourselves the flaunch plasmodulator and we had this great idea that if we ever got a gig someplace we'd get a couple of big refrigerator boxes and decorate them so that they looked like badly drawn super comupters from the 60's and then we'd sit inside them with our musical instruments and make awful music live inside the flaunch plasmodulator.

I'm just not sure how to discribe this stuff to you, it's two stoned, half drunk punk rock kids with an accoustic guitar, recorder flute, pots and pans, conch shell, trumpet, and answering machine. sometimes the guitar sounds really fucking emo, dissonant voices sometimes trying to out shout eachother, sometimes trying not to wake up his parents. we never actually wrote any songs we'd improvise our lyrics and sometimes it worked really well more often it didn't if I were someone who isn't me listening to this and I didn't know anything about it I'd probably want my money back from the people who sold it to me...

I wish we had made that cardboard computer and played a gig somewhere.

giving up second hand smoke

After spending a week in Revelstoke with the old man I realised that my body is having a withdrawl from second hand smoke. I gave up smoking almost three years ago now but though I can live in close quarters with a heavy smoker for a week and not feel tempted to hit him up for a butt my body is telling me that it mmisses the fumes. To this I have to say a resounding fuck! I'm sure it will blow over but in the mean time I don't like being reminded of the addiction and I wish I didn't have to feel this all over again even though it's relatively minor compared to when I originally quit. If you feel so inclined though could you say a prayer for me about this? I don't normally ask for prayers for myself or over the internet but I live in a Catholic Worker house where one of my housemates smokes in her room and I feel sensitive to this kind of thing at the moment, by the grace of God I've gone this long as a non-smoker and I like not having a monkey on my back any more.

in other, better news the Russian Orthodox Church Outside Russia (ROCOR) is in the process of becoming re-communicated with the Moscow Patriarchate. ROCOR split off durring the cold war because of the institutional Russian church complicity with the Soviet rulership. This was not universal, there were countless martyrs in Russia and many holy priests, monks and lay-people who didn't bend to the new class but there were also many priests monks and church-goers who fingered people and helped the state. This break has been a long time in healing, some members of ROCOR are still hesitant even to the point of wanting to break with those seeking reunification but even if that were to happen I believe that the healing of the Russian church is inevitable and if it has to be like pulling off a band-aid (slow and at times sore) it will help let old wounds air and heal and that can only be good.

God bless the healing of the Russian church may the memories of those martyred be for the healing of her wounds and the re-communing of her spirit. Amen.

coming home from Revlo-stoke

Every year I come out here and every year I intend on buying myself one of those Revlo ice cream bars. You know the ones, that thin layer of waxy fake chocolate covering some vanilla flavoured "icecream" which is probably a petrolium bi-product... anyway I always joke about that and every time I come out here I forget then this year I actually tried to remember to look for a place that sells them but I havn't seen a single one. Do they still make them? they were nothing compared to the fudgecicle but fudgecicle just doesn't sound like Revelstoke.

It's hard to keep the Orthodox fast out here, I thought I had told my dad thsat I was abstaining from meat and dairy but I must have forgotten, the dietary rules kind of went out the window of the greyhound over here (you try and find a bus depo between here and Calgary that caters to vegans and you will be s.o.l.).

This week's been good though I always enjoy visiting the old man.

go lent!

tentacles for dinner.

tentacles for breakfast.

I'm in Revelstoke right now visiting my pops. It's a hard place to keep the lenten fast particularly the no-meat part. This is a great town to visit but I wouldn't want to live here, working on a chap book for a poet I met last year in LA. I'm using a wireless connection from someone elses appartment. go internet!

I'll be back in Vancouver in time for Bright Week, looking forward to eating steak. Have a great Easter weekend everyone.

-Chris