Transformation – Page 11

2007051020131213

Pizzas fall from sky for homeless to honor
request of Executed prisoner.

The final meal request of Philip Workman ended up memorializing him in a way he probably never expected to be remembered – as the posthumous provider of pizza meals to thousands of Nashville homeless the day after his death.

Workman was convicted of killing a police officer during the robbery of a Wendy’s restaurant undertaken when he was addicted to drugs . . . and homeless. He asked that his final meal be a vegetarian pizza. Instead of eating it, he wanted the pizza donated to any homeless person located near Riverbend Maximum Security Institution, where he died last Tuesday by state order. read more

2007050620131213

American Nazis publicly blame Jews for wars and gas hikes

Nazis in downtown Minnesota, publicly blame Jews for the gas hike, the Iraq war and claiming that the Talmud gives permission to Jews to have sex with three year old babies. None of these allegations are true, of course.

Please take a couple of minutes to watch this video, and a couple of more minutes to post a blog or send a letter to your preferred news service/newspaper – voicing your distaste for this message of hate.

The first few seconds of the movie show commentary in Hebrew. Just wait until it ends. read more

2007050520131213

For some in Japan, a room is their world

An estimated one million Japanese youth suffer

from a problem known in Japan as hikikomori, which translates as “withdrawal” and refers to a person sequestered in his room for six months or longer with no social life beyond his home. (The word is a noun that describes both the problem and the person suffering from it and is also an adjective, like “alcoholic.”) Some hikikomori do occasionally emerge from their rooms for meals with their parents, late-night runs to convenience stores or, in Takeshi’s case, once-a-month trips to buy CD’s. And though female hikikomori exist and may be undercounted, experts estimate that about 80 percent of the hikikomori are male, some as young as 13 or 14 and some who live in their rooms for 15 years or more. read more

2007050420131213

World Without Oil: the online game

“Play it â€“ before you live it”

There’s a “very real possibility” that someday soon people will wake up worrying how they’ll get to work . . . because the world ran out of oil the night before. If you want to know how you and your neighbors will react, tune into the web. An “interactive month-long alternate reality event” is underway to explore every aspect of how prepared, or unprepared, society is to face a World Without Oil. The event began April 30.

The participation architect for this project is Jane McGonigal, who was named by MIT in the Fall of 2006 as one of the top 35 innovators changing the world through technology. read more

2007043020131213

Pope awards knighthood to Jewish Rabbi

On March 22, 2007, Cardinal SeÃ¡n P. O’Malley announced that His Holiness, Pope Benedict XVI, has named Rabbi Leon Klenicki to the Papal Order of St. Gregory.

The Cardinal said, “Rabbi Klenicki has been a pioneer in Jewish-Catholic relations for decades. His own personal experiences of anti-Semitism led the Rabbi to be a passionate advocate for education as means of dispelling religious prejudice and promoting interreligious collaboration.”

The Cardinal noted that, “On the occasion of the fiftieth anniversary of the Warsaw ghetto uprising, Pope John Paul II said, ‘As Christians and Jews, following the example of the faith of Abraham, we are called to be a blessing to the world. This is the common task awaiting us. It is therefore necessary for us, Christians and Jews, to first be a blessing to one another.’ Rabbi Leon Klenicki’s life has been the source of blessings for all of us. We are deeply grateful for his witness and his work.” read more

2007032920131213

The study of garbage

Don Hazen interviews Heather Roger on her book On Gone Tomorrow: The Hidden Life of Garbage

I wrote the book because I wanted to know what happened to my garbage. I knew that it disappeared — and I knew that it didn’t. I also was interested in this system that, if it failed to work, whole cities could be brought to a grinding halt. I wanted to know more about what garbage collecting looked like and how it really worked — something so integral to the way a city functions.

Is [recycling and reusing] happening better in other parts of the world, in Europe or … ? read more

2007032620131213

Presenting the car that runs on air . . .

Indians are going to have a treat that as a USan, I would love to have, and really need too: a car which drives at speeds up to 135 mph, has a body designed with aerospace technology, costs only $8000 and causes absolutely no pollution. $2.00 fills up the CityCAT’s tanks and lets you drive for 185 miles. Yowzer: the air car!

What fuel do you fill the car up with? Air! “Impossible, you might say, but no,” Guy Negre, who heads Moteur Development International of France [the MDI Group] is a fuel specialist and he has discovered the method for allowing compressed air to entirely run this baby at speeds under 30 mph. read more

2007030620131213

Blog post causes change in policy

Linda Rogers was battling with her mother’s insurance company over their policy to cancel home insurance coverage for seniors who temporarily transfer domicile to a care facility. Here’s how Linda used the internet to nudge the insurance company into providing the level of care they advertise as providing:

“After blogging about my experience with CUIS, I forwarded a link to the entry to a communications person with a note about my disappointment.

Within an hour or two I received an email and then a phone call from a CUIS contact person reversing the decision to cancel my mother’s home insurance. Did my blog entry make a difference? Who knows. But, this blog’s stats show three log ins from the insurance provider in that time period.” read more