Kenya
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Sun, 12/30/2007 - 19:35At church today, Father Peter spoke about his phone call with Evelyn. Evelyn is a priest from Kenya that has often visited our church. She is back in Kenya, as things are getting a bit dicey there. She is in western Kenya and her family is in Nairobi.
For those who haven’t been following politics in Kenya, they recently had a presidential election. In what is being reported as a very close election, the incumbent President Mwai Kibaki narrowly defeated Raila Odinga in an election that the New York Times calls “deeply flawed”.
Peter said that Evelyn and her family are currently safe, but things seem to be worsening in Kenya since Church this morning. After church, we went to Kim’s parents house. I went online to get more news about Kenya.
RIP Fred Lemieux
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Sun, 12/30/2007 - 19:33Fred Lemieux was my uncle. This morning, I got a phone call from my mother. Uncle Fred has died. Uncle Fred was my mother’s sister’s husband. I’m not sure how old he was, but I’m going to guess he was in his 80s. My understanding is that both he and my Aunt Susie have been fairly ill, so this didn’t come as a great surprise. The wake will be Wednesday and the funeral Thursday. I’ve spent some time figuring out my travel plans. It isn’t all that far from where we live, but I have to figure out how to juggle everyone’s schedule.
When I was young, we would see Fred and Susie and their kids a few times a year. My mother was the youngest of seven kids. Susie was the next youngest, so Fred and Susie and their family had the cousins that we closest in age. When my grandparents grew too old to live by themselves, they moved in with Fred and Susie. My memories of the visits are vague. There was a mulberry tree and we would eat mulberries. There were large bamboo stocks. They lived on a long road and we would walk or ride bikes. There was an old house behind the main house which is where my grandparents initially lived when they moved down there. Later, they moved into the main house as their health declined.
I remember that the TV was usually on in one room or another, that many of my relatives smoked and that there was an endless supply of food. I believe it has been thirty years since my grandparents died, one soon after the other and I can’t remember the last time I was at Fred and Susie’s.
Dealing with the difficult questions
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Sat, 12/29/2007 - 11:36
My daughter Fiona asks the hard questions every six year old asks. John Edwards is the only candidate addressing these hard questions.
(Hat tip To CarolinaGirl for the clip of Sen. Edwards at the end.)
Additional developments in Second Life Brokerage
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Fri, 12/28/2007 - 23:08Since I first wrote about LLBT opening up its brokerage, another 2,751 shares have traded on their site. That’s still a very small number, but it is the end of the year and trading is thin. What is more significant is that 1,151 shares were of BBX, and that was enough to move it from the IPO stage to regular trading. This gives us a chance to look a little more closely at how things are likely to work.
An Invitation to Innovate, and Collaborate
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Fri, 12/28/2007 - 19:23The following is a comment I added to Tracy Joan’s diary on DailyKos about the Edwards My Vote, My Voice contest.
I’ve been fairly critical of all the Presidential campaigns this time around, including the Edwards campaign, even though I’m supporting Sen. Edwards. I’ve felt that they’ve looked at the tools that contributed to some of the successes of the 2004 election cycle, but have missed what is really important, the invitation to innovate.
I believe this is a step in the right direction. The Edwards campaign is inviting people to, hopefully, come up with some innovative advertisements. However, I would like to push this even further. We are at our best when we work together.
I thought about this as I worked on my submission for the contest. I recorded my daughter asking a bunch of those hard questions that six year olds are likely to ask. No, not where do babies come from. She’s asked questions like “Why can’t some of my classmates afford to go to the doctor?”, “When will Joey’s daddy come home from Iraq?”, or “Do you think I’ll get to go see a glacier when I’m older”? I’ve recorded a bunch of these questions and spliced them together into a video. You can see the video on Blip.TV. You will note that it is tagged with a Creative Commons license, “Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike” This means that someone more creative than I am is free to take it, work with it, and come up with something even better, if they also share it and acknowledge they got it from me. It is part of the reason I like to use Blip.TV. Videos there can be downloaded in their original format and then edited with programs like Movie Maker of iMovies.
I haven’t added the final part of my ad. I’m hoping to get a clip of Sen. Edwards talking about the Moral Test of Our Generation:
America lives because 20 generations have honored the one moral commandment that makes us Americans.
To give our children a better future than we received.
I know that CarolinaGirl has put great videos up on vSocial, so I’ve contacted her to see if I can use extracts from one of her videos. Hopefully, she’ll get a chance to extract a piece I’m looking for and share it with me.
I think that represents the real challenge. Can we work together, to share ideas, scripts, video clips or anything else so that we can come up with an even stronger message reflecting why we believe John Edwards is the person we need in the White House? I’m up for it. I might even be able to get Fiona make a clip for people if you need it.
