Y'All, readers: please visit the site at the end of this posting, and lend your voice to this important, lubricative cause. - Cedric le flaneur, parched

Recipient: parksinfo@seattle.gov
From: custsurvy@cityofseattle.net
Subject: Email the Superintendent
http://www.cityofseattle.net/parks/contact/superintendent-reply.htm
Green Lake drinking fountains: I wonder if you have any plans to add drinking fountains at Green Lake. For such a much-used park,
it has very few, at the moment, and those often are not working. I'd think about 10 drinking stations would be a good number. (I wish, by the way, that people would not let their dogs drink directly from the nozzles of the existing fountains. Yuk!)

Hi Peter: We have no current plans to add water fountains around Green Lake, though you bring up some great points. I'll be sure to pass along your suggestions to maintenance or planning staff in case they have anything to add.
Thanks for writing to Seattle Parks and Recreation.
David Takami
Executive Assistant, Superintendent's Office
Seattle Parks and Recreation

Visit our web site

Will these morons kindly shut the fuck up!

The Rt. Revd. Richard Harries,
Anglican Bishop of Oxford, England

Bishop Harries: Thank you for your wisdom in the matter of the appointment of Bishop John. In time, you will be proved correct and humane. With any luck, your critics will come around to seeing the simply humanity of your honorable decision, and the courage of your conviction.
Sincerely,
, Seattle USA

To whom it may concern, Landmark Theatres, Inc.:

I often attend films at Landmark Theaters here in the Seattle area, and would like to request, urgently, that you stop - PLEASE - stop broadcasting your "Film is a universal language..." promotion. I ask this because the promotion's key claim is utterly, plain-and-simply, categorically, and diametrically WRONG. If you cannot see that film is an utterly cultural phenomenon, and that cultural distinctions underlie all films and set them apart from each other, then I really think you're in the wrong business.

Well...I suppose what business you're in is your business. Perhaps you will be able to excuse my exasperation. After all, I am one of the filmgoers who must suffer your promotion over and over and over, and it really is inane.

Sincerely,

Seattle

test

I was wrong about bloody John Howard, Australian Prime Minister (see below, May 7, 2003), says his flak:

Office of the Prime Minister, Canberra
10 June 2003
Dear Mr. ...
Thank you for your correspondence of 8 May 2003 to the Prime Minister regarding the Governor-General. The Prime Minister has asked me to reply on his behalf.
As you know, on 25 May 2003, Dr Hollingworth announced his resignation as Australia's Governor-General, citing the continuing public controversy and its potential to undermine and diminish his capacity to uphold the importance, dignity and integrity of the office of Governor-General.
In a statement to the Parliament on 26 May 2003, the Prime Minster acknowledged the Governor-General's resignation.
Dr Hollingworth's commission was revoked with effect on and from 29 May 2003. The Governor of Tasmania, the Hon Sir Guy Green AC KBE CVO, will continue to administer the Goverment of the Commonwealth of Australia for the time being.
Thanks you for bringining your views to the attention of the Prime Minster.
Yours sincerely
Stephen Brady
Senior Adviser (Government)

Bishop Thomas O'Brien, who had faced allegations of covering up for sexually abusive clergy and now has been charged in a fatal hit-and-run accident, resigned Wednesday. Pope accepts resignation of Phoenix bishop charged with leaving scene of fatal accident; Associated Press, 6/18/2003.

Very sad news

Today’s New York Times reported that the Roman Catholic bishop of Phoenix, Thomas J. O'Brien, “has signed an agreement admitting that he knew of accusations of sexual abuse by priests but transferred them without telling their new superiors or parishioners.” Further, “in exchange for his admission, the bishop will avoid prosecution” for failing to report the abuses over his 22-year tenure, according to Maricopa County prosecutor Richard M. Romley.

The NYT reported: “The bishop revealed late last year that at least 50 church leaders in the diocese has been accused of inappropriate sexual contact with minors. The bishop then vowed to play an active role in cleaning up the diocese in the face of the scandal. But Mr. Romley said yesterday that despite the bishop's promise of cooperation, his response to requests for information was slow and grudging. He said that though he had uncovered evidence of obstruction of justice... Mr. Romley said that he had evidence that Bishop O'Brien had counseled families who had contended abuse, and told them not to report their suspicions to the authorities. He had promised to deal with the accused clergy internally. That did not seem to happen, Mr. Romley said.”

Under the provisions of the agreement, the NYT said, an independent youth protection advocate “will oversee accusations of sexual misconduct past and present and report them to the appropriate civil authorities.”

I sent the following letter to the bishop, at communications@diocesephoenix.org.

Congratulations, Bishop O’Brien! As news reports today make plain, you have achieved a rare highpoint in Catholic hypocrisy. Your decision to hang on tightly to your bishopric, despite your admitted, disgraceful actions, speaks of levels of arrogance and corruption that have rarely been attained since Luther and his fellow reformers confronted the scamming, soul-selling satans then running the Christian church.

Fortunately for your freedom, but hardly for your soul, you have been able to conspire with a complicit legal system that considers it “not constructive” to seek prosecutions against your kind, and that is, as a result, content to allow people like you to cop pleas. You have -- no doubt, correctly -- calculated that the cultural accommodation of child sexual and physical abuse equally excuses church and state agencies, not to mention the self-blinkering parishioners who for decades turn their blind eyes to the oh-so-obvious, and who then sputter their short-term surprise and dismay.

No one, of course, wants to hear from the children. Yesterday, in self-indulgent self-exoneration, you stated: “Experts, including law enforcement, have changed their views about how to deal with the problem.” Oh, really? And what about raped children? Which of them, in 1980, 1970, or 285 BC, thanked trusted elders for shuffling pederasts around to facilitate their crimes and to maximize their numbers of victims?

Your actions speak of a great variety of hypocrisies, but one particularly striking one relates to your pastoral letter of February 27 of this year, read to all the credulous church-going masses in the diocese on March 18. There, you stated: “I believe cohabitation before marriage is immoral, sinful and scandalous.” It was “of grave moral and pastoral concern to me.” You decried the cultural mentality that “sexual relations outside of marriage seem acceptable.” You claimed that your views were biblically authorized. Leaving aside the ahistoricity of such an argument, one can focus on how at odds your letter’s piousness was with the moral relativism of your legal maneuvering this week. Unless, I suppose, one is to conclude that the words of Jesus that you quoted - “A man must leave father and mother, and cling to his wife and the two become one body” - have consistently been mistranslated, and that the original Greek said not “man....and...wife” but “man...and...defenseless minion”?

You say, Mr. O’Brien, “I serve at the pleasure of the Pope, and not the County Attorney.” Another evasion! The Pope and the County Attorney aside, does “I” have any moral autonomy and acceptance of responsibility? Your fretful flock may huddle and find ways to excuse you, but do you not, as a matter of conscience, wonder how Jesus Christ would view you?

Sincerely,