women usa connect

Image from the Greenham Common Trust, 1996

Can it have been 5 years? She blew into our downtown Detroit Episcopal parish like a mighty wind during the summer of 2003, and that fall she was to have been the Sunday School teacher for my (then) 4th Grade son. But what I didn't know at the time was that the cancer that was to claim her life on June 15, 2004 was already present and active in her body. As it happened, Mary Jo only taught Eliot's Sunday School class one time, but even after knowing him for all of 45 minutes, she was able to "read" his spirit and his faith and give us valuable feedback about God's work in him. Shortly after the wind of the Holy Ghost swooped down and picked her up into the life of the world to come , a memorial service was held at St. John's, Detroit . The nave was packed, and even though we were early, our family got the last few seats in the balcony. It was a Friday late in June in 2004, and the transom windows on the Epistle side of the nave were cranked open, giving a vie

Rachel is not the only one with a lifelong love of a particular Mercury automobile ... I have another such story right in my own family. We brought home our very first Mercury Meteor almost 15 years ago, the exact same day that we finalized our adoption of our son Eliot. Eliot immediately fell in love with the old black 1963 Mercury, which we named "Mr. Venables" after the Anglican rector in Dorothy L. Sayers' 1934 mystery novel, The Nine Tailors . Here is Eliot, wrenching on "Mr. Venables", at a very early age: And, here he is, practicing his driving ... Time and Michigan winters were not kind to Mr. Venables, however, and he died from "rust cancer". It was one of the saddest days of Eliot's life when we dismantled Mr. Venables and had him towed away ... But, Eliot's love for this car never faded, and now we are pleased to say that Mr. Venables II, which is Eliot's first car, is now a living, breathing reality, and out on the streets of

This images is a Google Earth model of the airspace over the island of Foulness on the Thames estuary. I built it recently as a means of visualising the following Civil Aviation Authority (CAA) Danger Areas: D136 (alt 10,000 ft), D138 (alt 35,000 ft), D138A (alt 35,000 ft), D138B (alt 5,000ft). The image also accompanied a paper presentation titled, The Shoeburyness Complex, at the Miltarized Landscapes conference, Bristol University on the 6 th September 2008.

Model of a Watchkeeper UAV (Unmanned Aerial Vehicle) taken at the Salisbury Plain Airspace Change public consultation drop-in session at the Bowman Centre, Amesbury on Thursday 11 June, 2009.

Domestic Drone Space. In a move away from the complex questions surrounding the application of UAVs within the battle space, it is worth addressing their integration into training exercises in domestic airspace. For me this raises a whole new set of problems that relate to a continued blurring of the distinction between military and civil space. The land owned by the Ministry of Defence for training and defence in the United Kingdom has remained steady for the last ten years at around 1% of the countries total landmass (with another ½ % being leased to them more or less whenever they need it). In most cases this land is relatively clearly defined but where ownership and use is more ambiguous there are the familiar flags, temporary barriers and stop gates employed to restrict entry to these flexible zones. In addition to this, however, are the intangible and barely quantifiable spaces such as transit routes, three dimensional ballistics hazards, the radial spaces defined by noise

The entire car hobby segment of the Internet is abuzz with the story of Rachel, the cute elderly lady who has gone over 540,000 miles in her car "Chariot" - a 1964 Mercury Comet Caliente, which she bought new. Aside from being one of those great "feel-good" stories, Rachel's lifelong love of a single car is an indictment of our entire throw-away society. Hot Rodders: think " true love "! "Enviro-Wackos: think " incredibly low life-cycle cost ". You might not like the instantaneous efficiency of Rachel's carbureted Caliente, with its antiquated ignition points, but think of how she has been saving the planet for 45 years by not causing 15 new Hondas or Toyotas to be produced! I've been a Mercury man since 1994, and the Caliente is as hot as its name, but that is obviously not the only captivating thing about this story. Her faithfulness to a single car, a single idea ... the awesome stability of that love ... well, it is a

If ever it needed proving that form does not always follow function, the 2009 Formula 1 cars show this quite nicely. Obviously, the cars function well - amazingly well. But just as obviously, they are completely ugly. From some angles, the things look like freight trains. From the front, they look like anteaters. I can barely stand to watch an F1 race this year, because of the sheer failure of form displayed by these cars. However, sometimes form does (beautifully) follow function. BEHOLD, IFBB Fitness Pro, Mindi O'Brien !

There is an utterly brilliant article by P. J. O'Rourke today, about the failure of the American automobile industry. In actuality it is, as O'Rourke posits, a failure of Romance. Not only does this article contain Truth, but the writing itself is spectacular. Politicians, journalists, financial analysts and other purveyors of banality have been looking at cars as if a convertible were a business. Fire the MBAs and hire a poet. The fate of Detroit isn’t a matter of financial crisis, foreign competition, corporate greed, union intransigence, energy costs or measuring the shoe size of the footprints in the carbon. It’s a tragic romance—unleashed passions, titanic clashes, lost love and wild horses. Foremost are the horses. Cars can’t be comprehended without them. A hundred and some years ago Rudyard Kipling wrote “The Ballad of the King’s Jest,” in which an Afghan tribesman avers: Four things greater than all things are,— Women and Horses and Power and War . Insert another “power