This is our 15th year of peace blogging. Blog4Peace (aka BlogBlast For Peace) is held annually on November 4
I still find my own peace in the sanctuary of silence, meditation and prayer. Over the years, many of you have written about what personal peace and world peace means to you. Alarms are screaming PEACE PEACE PEACE all over the globe in the year 2020. There is so much noise you can barely hear yourself think. The chatter is visceral, urgent, alarming. But in this year of remarkable metanoia, we will speak from a place of revolutionary turning and change – because that’s how the world feels to me at this moment. No matter how dark the darkness has been, we still have an obligation and more importantly, a desire to speak for peace. We are peace bloggers. It’s what we do. The atmosphere, the environeent, the rivers, the seas, the planet all need to hear words of cohesive oneness said in one accord – Dona nobis pacem – Grant us Peace.
If you’ve never blogged for peace (or tweeted, or posted on Facebook, Instagram!) this is your year to join us. I feel it in my bones. This is your year! Peace Bloggers come from 214 countries/territories and all seven continents. Over the years we’ve collected thousands of inspiring “peace globes” (like the one you see on this page) created by people from all walks of life, all nationalities, every tribe and race – the old, the young, the in-between.Students. Doctors. Teachers. Parents. Children. Cat bloggers galore! We write and draw our hopes for peace on a blank canvas (like the one above). We write our thoughts on the state of the world on blogs, vlogs, and social media pages. We share our words with each other. We inspire each other. We love each other. We uplift each other. It goes round and round in a beautiful chant though the hills and valleys of the Internet: Peace to you. Shalom. Blessings. Pacem. Dona nobis pacem. Grant us peace. Each year is more powerful than the last. This year I can feel an explosion of peace happening already. Not ripples. Not droplets. An explosion of fiery PEACE. The world is crying out for it. Peace bloggers always raise the bar to a higher plane. You.make.me.proud IN THIS GALLERY you will find thousands of examples of the work we’ve done since 2006. You will read words that take you to places you’ve never been before.You will find something in common with your neighbor who lives across the globe.You will feel part of a dedicated and honest tribe of people who simply want peace.You will want to become part of us. I promise.All are welcome. Our theme for 2020 is Peace in the Time of Quarantine.Get your peace globes ready and fly them NOVEMBER 4th from all over the world.Then write a post for the day or simply change your FB/Twitter/Instagram status to “Dona nobis pacem”See what magic you can spin out of this peculiar chaos we find ourselves in. This is the year to dig deep. Don’t you feel it? How do you find your peace in the middle of a global pandemic? Please join us.There are links below and at the top of the page to show you how.HOW TO GET YOUR PEACE GLOBE PEACE GLOBE TEMPLATES to USEMY PEACE STORIESWhat started it allFACEBOOK PAGE – Like us
Use this blank globe to make your own “peace globe” to display on NOV 4OR go to Blog4Peace and choose one of the many designs we have to offer. We would be honored to have you join us. Follow Me
The revelation that nearly 80 percent of workers surveyed at Veterans Affairs believe there is widespread racism throughout the federal agency has prompted an investigation by the U.S. Government Accountability Office into the reports of discrimination.
The revelation that nearly 80 percent of workers surveyed at Veterans Affairs believe there is widespread racism throughout the federal agency has prompted an investigation by the U.S. Government Accountability Office into the reports of discrimination. The GAO is a non-partisan congressional watchdog body charged…
In Russia, the second wave of the coronavirus epidemic has already begun. Every day, the country is registering approximately 500 more cases than the day before. The majority of Russia’s regions are experiencing similar increases, including in Moscow — on October 2, the capital recorded 2,704 new cases of COVID-19. Many doctors have returned to working in “red zones” in hospitals — including those who went back to providing routine medical care after the end of the first wave. In their own words, healthcare workers treating coronavirus patients tell “Meduza” what’s happening inside Russia’s hospitals amid the pandemic’s second wave.
Saturday, Oct. 3 marks the 40th anniversary of Somewhere in Time, a film that took one of the longest, weirdest journeys to popularity. It was savaged at the box office for being stodgy, overly romantic, and out of touch. But today, it’s a cult favorite, beloved for the very qualities it was panned for. Its fan base includes retired 4-star General Colin Powell, a couple of FilmWeek critics, and me.
Here’s the thumbnail: An elderly actress shows up at the premiere of a young playwright’s new production. The playwright becomes obsessed with her and wills himself back in time 67 years to meet her as a young woman. They’re kept apart by her manager, but get one perfect day and night together — before he gets cruelly pulled back to the present and dies of a broken heart. They reunite in Heaven.
Christopher Reeve, fresh from Superman, is the playwright. Jane Seymour, then of Battlestar Galactica, is the actress. And Christopher Plummer, who had just killed as Sherlock Holmes in Murder by Decree, is her controlling manager. The bestselling score was by John Barry, and it was directed by Jeannot Szwarc — who had just saved Universal’s butt by taking over Jaws 2.
The TV and movie veteran — whose directing credits range from a 1968 episode of Ironside to a 2019 episode of Grey’s Anatomy — is almost 83, and retired last year to France.
When I reached him there this summer, he said, “What I loved about Somewhere in Time was that there was very little sex, but there was a lot of love. It was really what the French call l’amour fou, a crazy love. You know, they don’t make pictures like that anymore.” When I responded, “They weren’t making pictures like that in 1980,” he laughed and said, “I know.”
The screenplay is by Richard Matheson, adapted from his novel Bid Time Return, which he set at the Hotel del Coronado in San Diego. It would have been convenient to Hollywood — but because of the power lines, traffic noise, and modern buildings, Szwarc would have needed a time machine to shoot the 1912 scenes at the Hotel del.
Enter an actual time machine: Mackinac Island, off Michigan’s Upper Peninsula. Once the center of the fur trade, they had buried their power lines, preserved their Victorian architecture, and banned cars. People get around by horse carriage and bike.
My dad was doing PR for the Island back then, so I grew up spending much of the summer there. But unlike pretty much everyone else on the Island, I didn’t get to be an extra in the film.
Mackinac also has a giant Victorian hotel — Grand Hotel, built in 1887. Back in the day, wealthy Chicagoans went there in the summer to escape the heat. But of course, the Somewhere in Time team had to do their site visit in February. During one of the coldest winters on record. With the Great Lakes frozen from shore to shore.
Dan Dewey, location manager for Somewhere in Time, leads a location tour at the 2019 SIT Weekend. The group is in front of Grand Hotel, the co-star of the movie. (John Rabe/KPCC)
Szwarc and producer Stephen Deutsch (now Stephen Simon) were being towed around the Island by islander Dan Dewey, who went on to become location manager for the film. At one point, he drove 100 yards out onto the ice so the two men — who he said looked like they were wearing the entire stock of an Eddie Bauer store — could get a good look at the Grand
Szwarc turned to Dewey and Simon and asked innocently, “Where is the water?” Both of them say nothing, but point down to the ice. “Oh,” says the director, realizing he’s standing over 100 feet of 32.1-degree water. “Can we go now?”
Even under a blanket of snow, they can see that the Island is the perfect location for the movie — but they’re still 2,400 miles from Hollywood.
“We were about to leave and Jeannot and I were talking,” Simon said. “We can’t shoot the rooms in the hotel,” because they will be occupied by guests. “That needs to be a set. There’s no place to build a set here!”
“Well you might be wrong about that,” Dewey said.
Islander Trish Martin picks up the story:
“There was an organization that had its world headquarters on Mackinac Island known as Moral Re-Armament. You may not have heard of them, but you might’ve heard of some of their offshoots, including Alcoholics Anonymous and Up with People. They made a lot of films, along with doing roadshows and so on, and they had a full film studio: editing rooms, a big soundstage, and the whole bit.”
Trish was actually in a crowd scene in Decision at Midnight, an MRA production with Martin Landau that was shot on the island in 1963.
The complex also had enough rooms for the cast and crew, solving another of the headaches from when you make a movie on a remote resort island in the middle of high season. It was kismet, and with the exception of a few early shots in Chicago, where the movie starts, the rest was shot on Mackinac from late May to late July of 1979.
They wrapped the production only 9 days over schedule, and went back to California. Everything had gone so well; nobody anticipated the cruel fate awaiting the little romantic picture they put so much love into.
Christopher Reeve, in front of Grand Hotel, riding one of the bikes Universal provided for cast and crew. They were eventually auctioned off to benefit the Mackinac Island Medical Center. (W.T. Rabe)
But before we go there… let’s talk about how the movie handles time travel. As he’s obsessing about the actress, Reeve is told by a professor — played by George Voskovec, who was one of the jurors in Twelve Angry Men, — that you can will yourself back in time.
Getting namechecked in the biggest movie of the millennium was such a big moment for us Somewhere in Time fans, I had to call up Avengers screenwriters Christopher Markus and Stephen McFeely.
Were they big fans? No — McFeely says it was just a list of time travel movies they included in a reshoot.
“We found that we really needed to just spend something like two minutes having the Hulk tell people that’s not how it works in this movie. We just called out the elephant in the room: other time travel movies, which were sort of getting in the audience’s way.”
“We got all tangled up in whether there were consequences or no consequences. If it’s all in your head there’s no consequences, you can do what you want,” Markus said.
The two — the most successful screenwriters in history — actually sounded a little jealous that Somewhere in Time‘s time travel method could be sketched out on a cocktail napkin, while you need a spreadsheet for Endgame.
Let’s time travel ourselves, back to 1980. When last we left our heroes, they had just wrapped what was by all accounts a very happy shoot, and it seemed like the stars were aligned for a success for Somewhere in Time. On the strength of two rapturous previews, Universal gave it wide release.
But because of a strike, the stars couldn’t support the film they made. And then came the reviews.
Leonard Maltin: Stilted dialogue, corny situations, pretty scenery.
Roger Ebert: The movie surrounds its love story with such boring mumbo jumbo about time travel that we finally just don’t care.
Vincent Canby:Somewhere in Time … does for time-travel what the Hindenburg did for dirigibles.
And that would have been that. Except for two men. The first, says Stephen Simon, was Jerry Harvey, who programmed the Z Channel — which was the first paid movie channel in Los Angeles.
“Jerry was in love with Somewhere in Time. Not only did he run it, sometimes he ran it twice in the same night. That started the ball. And then, HBO in their early early days were not buying blockbusters because they couldn’t afford it. So, what did HBO program? Movies that hadn’t worked out well at the box office.”
A Z Channel program guide shows Somewhere in Time showing 16 times in one summer week in 1981. It became one of their most popular movies. And not only were people watching it on cable, but huge numbers of people were buying the movie on VHS and the soundtrack on LP.
The second man was Bill Shepard, whom producer Simon says did more for Somewhere in Time‘s eventual success than any other person. Bill told me how he discovered the movie that would change his life.
“I was going with a very nice lady from Saint Paul,” Shepard said. “She was actually the one who suggested going to the movies. I sat there for 103 minutes literally enchanted. I’d never seen a movie like that before that affected me like that. And as the two of us were walking out of the theater, she turned to me and said, ‘Well, that didn’t do that much for me. How about you?'”
The lady soon left Shepard’s life, but the movie stayed in his heart. In 1990, he started INSITE: the International Network of Somewhere In Time Enthusiasts. And the next year, realizing the huge number of people who wanted a deeper experience, he organized the first Somewhere in Time weekend on Mackinac.
Attendees at the 2019 Somewhere in Time weekend in their 1912 finery. (John Rabe/KPCC)
In a story filled with time travel, this weekend gathering is yet another time machine. Think of it as a Comic-Con, but where cosplayers get to actually be in Hyrule on the hunt for Ganon, or ride in a real Totoro cat bus. At the end of October each year, Somewhere in Time fans take the ferry to Mackinac, dress in period-correct clothes, act out scenes from the movie, and see the shooting locations — led by our old friend the snowmobile driver, Dan Dewey.
This is not like a con where a grumpy Lou Ferrigno charges for autographs. The cast and crew love the weekends at the Grand just as much as the fans. As Steve Hellerstein, the movie’s transportation captain, told me, “this has made my film career complete. I finally did a film that is recognized… and I’m recognized.” Just like the stars, he’s invited to and feted at the Somewhere in Time weekends.
Jane Seymour attended last year, for the third time — and her co-star, Christopher Reeve, came in 1994. There’s video of the event, and you can see him practically bouncing on the stage taking questions from the audience.
And when someone asks him where “Somewhere in Time” ranks among all the movies he made, he delivers an off-the-cuff monologue that sums up an actor’s life.
“This holds the prime place by the fireside in my heart. This is the one that I have the greatest gratitude for. It’s very hard to perform and do your work, where you put your emotions forward for the camera, for people to see… and then have it greeted officially by the sound of one hand clapping. And that people found this move and said, ‘Wait a minute! It didn’t deserve the fate that it got. It didn’t deserve to be treated that way.’ It moves me more than you can know.”
For my podcast Call Back Yesterday, I don’t pretend Somewhere in Time is another Citizen Kane. And neither does FilmWeek critic Tim Cogshell, who first saw the movie — let’s call it “Somewhere in Tim,” long before he became a professional critic.
“I romanticize this movie ridiculously,” he said. “My wife and I saw the movie for the first time in 1981 [the year they got married]. We loved it because we looked at it and I think we saw ourselves in it. Just married and bananas in love, and passionate about each other the way they are in the film. So that colored what I felt and thought about the film my entire life. I watched it again recently and it made me tear up in all the same places, and it made me long for my wife, who I lost in 2013 to cancer.”
Justin Chang, critic for Fresh Air and the L.A. Times, told me, “One of the reasons Somewhere in Time has endured is because it has the courage of its absurd convictions.” As he wrote in Variety in 2013:
Ludicrous and irresistible, Somewhere in Time belongs to a long and glorious tradition of love stories … in which time travel serves as a crucial narrative element and structuring device. It is a genre whose charms I’ve found myself unusually susceptible to in recent years. … Wildly romantic, brazenly paradoxical and stubbornly resistant to the rules of logic, these films rely for their effect on a blissful surrender of reason. To dismiss them as ridiculous or implausible is to miss both the point and the pleasure.
Call Back Yesterday host John Rabe poses before Arch Rock on Mackinac Island. (Julian Bermudez)
For me, Somewhere in Time is a touchstone to a golden summer from my youth. Back then, everyone in my life was still alive except my Grandma. My folks were alive, and all their friends, and all my friends. I never had a love affair or broke up, had never been in a car wreck or gotten drunk. I wasn’t paying my own bills, holding down a job, or really doing anything but running errands for my dad on Mackinac that summer.
As Shakespeare wrote in Richard II, “O call back yesterday. Bid time return,” because all the “life” stuff eventually happened to me — some of it quite brutally. And as the years passed, more and more I appreciated the corny themes of Somewhere in Time. And more and more I understood why older people tell and retell the stories from their past.
In his memoir Hand to Mouth, the novelist Paul Auster wrote, “Reach a certain moment in your life, and you discover that your days are spent as much with the dead as they are with the living.” To that, I would only add, “And I’m OK with that.”
KPCC’s John Rabe is the host of the new podcast Call Back Yesterday, which explores how the themes of Somewhere in Time intersect with the lives of his guests and him. The first episode features FilmWeek’s Tim Cogshell.
Irina Slavina, the editor-in-chief of Koza.Press, set fire to herself outside of the police headquarters in Nizhny Novgorod on Friday, October 2. She died at the scene from the resulting burns, the Telegram-based news outlet Baza reports. Slavina’s self-immolation and death was also reported by the Telegram channel 112.
L.A. County vote center worker Ryan Richard in Palmdale, CA on May 3, 2020. Coronavirus precautions were in place for in-person voting during the special election for California’s 25th District congressional race.
As the largest voting jurisdiction in the country, Los Angeles County needs an army of election workers to run voting sites and process ballots for 5.4 million registered voters.
For the general election, the L.A. County Registrar-Recorder’s Office estimates it will enlist 16,700 workers, mostly to operate vote centers during the 11-day period when Angelenos can cast a ballot in-person. The first centers will begin to open Oct. 24, but the majority will be available during the following weekend, through Election Day.
As of last week, the county had recruited roughly 15,000 election workers. “Those [people] have applied … have engaged in training, have been contacted to engage in training, and have been provided training options,” said L.A. County Registrar-Recorder spokesman Mike Sanchez. The goal is to finish the hiring process by Oct. 16, he added. “We are extremely grateful for the strong community response.” Poll workers in L.A. County receive a stipend of $100 per day and $80 for mandatory training days. There’s been a surge of interest this year in the usually un-sexy job of election administration. The spectre of a contagious virus, protests for racial justice and a tumultuous 2020 campaign season inspired manycivic–mindedgroups to launch efforts to draft young people to become poll workers.
Laura Mueller-Soppart says she founded her organization, Work The Polls, to galvanize people in their 20s and 30s after her own frustrating experience in the New York primary, which was rife with technical problems and long lines.
“We’re in a very precarious situation in terms of how we administer our elections this year,” Muller-Soppart said. “The goal is to diversify the poll worker corps, so the burden doesn’t just sit on those over-60 like it usually does.”
With that in mind, L.A. County has focused more of its recruiting efforts on local college campuses, said L.A. County Supervisor Janice Hahn.
“We are making a much more concerted effort this year to recruit young people to be election workers, and it is paying off,” Hahn said. “We wanted to recruit 3,500 college students and we have already far surpassed that goal with 4,500 applications coming in from local students so far.”
L.A. County vote center lead Steven Toro sanitizes pens to keep voters safe in Palmdale, CA on Sunday May 3, 2020. (Libby Denkmann for LAist)
Another major pipeline for election workers? County employees who will be on the clock.
[If you prefer to vote by mail, every registered voter in California should get a ballot in their mailbox starting the week of Oct. 5. Learn more through our Voter Game Plan.]
In August, Los Angeles County Supervisors took an emergency step to ensure vote centers would have the necessary staffing. They voted to invoke the “Disaster Service Worker” program, which lets the county reassign its employees to different jobs in extreme situations such as an earthquake — or a global pandemic.
The plan includes “mandatory thresholds for each [county] department in order to fill all crucial positions,” said Lisa Garrett, Director of Personnel for L.A. County.
The county is in the process of identifying 7,400 employees who will serve as vote center staff or reservists.
The emergency measures mean they’ll be paid differently, too. In the past, county workers who chose to become election workers were paid their usual salary for the day, plus the stipend for vote center staff.
This year, as Disaster Service Workers, county employees won’t receive the stipend. Instead, many will be eligible for overtime pay (usually time-and-a-half) for working extra hours on top of their normal schedules — which is typical of long shifts at vote centers that can range from 12-to-16 hours on Election Day. “County departments will pay the regular salaries of their employees assigned as [Disaster Service Workers] during the election and all overtime costs will be funded by the Registrar-Recorder/County Clerk,” Garrett said. “The County continues to pursue additional funding and reimbursement sources for this assignment.”
That will include at least some CARES Act money to help local governments hold elections under threat from the coronavirus. Earlier this month, the Secretary of State awarded L.A. County $16 million in federal grant funding for election administration.
DISAPPOINTED VOLUNTEERS
If you’re still waiting to hear back about your L.A. County poll worker application, you’re not alone, according to Mueller-Soppart of Work the Polls. She says the majority of people who pledged to become election workers here through her organization haven’t heard back from L.A. County.
A possible bottleneck: the county implemented a new data management system to track poll worker applications, and that included introducing a new online portal for applications on Sept. 3.
Mueller-Soppart says the new system went into effect after a flood of applications came in from Work the Polls and other groups, which were active over the summer. She only became aware of the new portal, Mueller Soppart said, after several of her pledged workers grew concerned about a lack of response to their applications and called the county.
Members of the media got a preview of the Dodger Stadium vote center, opening up to the general public Oct. 30, 2020. (Libby Denkmann for LAist)
“We learned that because of that shift, any new applications that did not already receive a login would have to reapply [through the new portal],” Mueller-Soppart said. “And when asked if there was going to be any kind of notification, or any kind of heads-up, the county let our pledges know that L.A. County would not be letting anybody know.”
The Registrar-Recorder’s office acknowledged there are cases where would-be poll workers are being asked to re-apply, but said that’s generally because third party applications didn’t have enough of the information the county needed for recruitment and placement.
“As we work through those applications requiring more information — or as individuals reach out to us for follow-up — we are filling those data gaps,” Sanchez said. “In some cases, we are encouraging interested workers to complete the data on our new portal to have a complete record.”
Mueller-Soppart says she doesn’t want young people trying to get involved in civic life for the first time to be discouraged.
“We have gotten nothing but excitement back from L.A. County and from every county’s office across the country,” Mueller-Soppart said. “I really encourage everyone to meet their county halfway and just get [the application] done.”
For those who have missed the rush of watching powerful men get shamed on national television for their abject greed, wait no longer: Rep. Katie Porter is back with her whiteboard of shame.
On Wednesday, the president of people who openly root for the Proud Boys brand of whatever the hell it is they do now claims that he doesn’t know the far-right group or why they dress like they attend a private school.
On September 29, the Karelian Supreme Court considered an appeal in the case of historian and human rights activist Yuri Dmitriev. The court ended up overturning his previous three and half year sentence and sentencing him to 13 years in prison. This decision is unprecedented, even among Russian courts — the historian’s defense lawyer has already announced plans to challenge the verdict. Meanwhile, human rights defenders and Dmitriev’s colleagues are calling the sentence the “system’s revenge” for his research on the Soviet Gulag. In a (not so successful) attempt to discuss the political dimension of Dmitriev’s case, Meduza spoke to his defense lawyer, Viktor Anufriev, and attorney Igor Perov, the representative for the victim in the case, Dmitriev’s foster daughter.
The organizers of the Moscow International Film Festival have pulled Armenian director Jivan Avetisyan’s film “Gate to Heaven” about the conflict in Nagorno-Karabakh from the festival’s non-competitive program.
Bem Vindos a este espaço onde compartilhamos um pouco da realidade do Japão à todos aqueles que desejam visitar ou morar no Japão. Aqui neste espaço, mostramos a realidade do Japão e dos imigrantes. O nosso compromisso é com a realidade. Fique por dentro do noticiário dos principais jornais japoneses, tutoriais de Faça você mesmo no Japão e acompanhe a Série Histórias de Imigrantes no Japão. Esperamos que goste de nossos conteúdos, deixe seu like, seu comentário, compartilhe e nos ajudar você e à outras pessoas. Grande abraço, gratidão e volte sempre!
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