Archive for August 5th, 2019

Here’s an odd clipping for you…

Monday, August 5th, 2019

Odd because:

1) I don’t like talking about religion.
II) I don’t like linking to ESPN.
c) I don’t like basketball.

With those stipulations: Shelly Pennefather was one of the great women’s basketball players.

She scored 2,408 points, breaking Villanova’s all-time record for women and men. She did it without the benefit of the 3-point shot, and the record still stands today.

After college, she played in Japan for a while. But she felt a calling, so in 1991…

…she became a cloistered nun.

The Poor Clares are one of the strictest religious orders in the world. They sleep on straw mattresses, in full habit, and wake up every night at 12:30 a.m. to pray, never resting more than four hours at a time. They are barefoot 23 hours of the day, except for the one hour in which they walk around the courtyard in sandals.
They are cut off from society. Sister Rose Marie will never leave the monastery, unless there’s a medical emergency. She’ll never call or email or text anyone, either. The rules seem so arbitrarily harsh. She gets two family visits per year, but converses through a see-through screen. She can write letters to her friends, but only if they write to her first. And once every 25 years, she can hug her family.

Don’t really have much more I want to say about this, other than I recommend you read the linked story.

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Obit watch: August 5, 2019.

Monday, August 5th, 2019

D. A. Pennebaker, noted mostly as a documentary filmmaker. (“Don’t Look Back”, “Primary”, “The War Room”.)

His political films are now part of the canon, but the scenes from Mr. Pennebaker’s catalog that still circulate most widely are of pop culture figures in action: Jimi Hendrix lighting his guitar on fire in “Monterey Pop”; Elaine Stritch in “Original Cast Album: Company,” exhausted and straining to record “The Ladies Who Lunch” while Stephen Sondheim and others look on in despair; Mr. Dylan showing up the softer-edged singer Donovan in a hotel room crowded with their hangers-on; and the actor Rip Torn attacking Norman Mailer with a hammer at the end of “Maidstone” (1970), one of three eccentric movies directed by Mr. Mailer, for which Mr. Pennebaker served as a cameraman.

Nuon Chea is burning in Hell.

“Who?”

Known as Brother No. 2 — he was second in command to the movement’s founder, Pol Pot, who died in 1998 — Mr. Nuon Chea was convicted of, among other crimes, directing the forced evacuation of perhaps two million people from the capital, Phnom Penh, and overseeing the torture and killing of more than 14,000 people in a notorious prison, Tuol Sleng.
Often described as the movement’s chief ideologist, he was accused of laying out a “master plan” for the transformation of society that included the abolition of money and religion, the extermination of the educated class and the killing and expulsion of ethnic Vietnamese.
In the words of the court’s formal detention order, he planned or directed crimes including murder, torture, imprisonment, persecution, extermination, deportation, forcible transfer and enslavement.

Mr. Chea and Khieu Samphan were the only leading members of the Khmer Rouge who were convicted of any crimes. A third man, Kaing Guek Eav, who ran a prison (and reported to Mr. Chea), was also convicted: two other Khmer Rouge leaders died during the trial.

Mr. Nuon Chea denied involvement in the widespread killings. But in video recordings played to the court, he was heard acknowledging the purges, saying, “If we had shown mercy to these people, our nation would have been lost.”
He added: “We didn’t kill many. We only killed the bad people, not the good.”

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