The Fredösphere

I was given an excuse to take a quick trip home last night (my friend Alan needed help in retrieving a pickup truck he just bought) so I took some time to photograph buildings in Coldwater, Michigan.  This is the seat of Branch County, near where I grew up.  Coldwater doesn't have the reputation of its neighbor, Marshall, Michigan, but the number of fine old homes located there is simply stunning.  I'll be photoblogging it over the next few days.

Do you know about News of the Weird?  I just discovered it.  Get this:

[I]n Rockport, Mass., a chaired professor of economics at Harvard, Martin Weitzman, was charged with larceny after a farmer said Weitzman has long been trespassing and hauling away manure for his own nearby farm, thus denying the farmer his market price of $35 per truckload.

and this:

According to a February report in the Israeli daily Ma'ariv, Itzik Simkowitz is suing a pet shop owner in Beersheeba for selling him a sickly Galerita-type cockatoo (price: the equivalent of about US$2,000) that died shortly after Simkowitz got him home. As in a classic Monty Python sketch, the shop owner initially insisted that the parrot was merely lethargic and needed time to adjust to his new surroundings, but when the parrot (to use the Python dialogue) was shown to be "a late parrot," "an ex-parrot," "a stiff," and to have "joined the choir invisible," the shop owner still refused to return the money.

But for sheer impossible zaniness, check this out:  a choir concert that sold out a half hour before the performance.

Those of you following the controversy surrounding the opera The Children of Rosenthal will be interested in this update:

The opera's libretto, which was penned by controversial writer Sorokin, tells the story of Tchaikovsky, Mussorgsky, Wagner, Verdi and Mozart, cloned by a scientist in the Soviet Union, who are thrown into poverty after the Soviet break-up, and resort to busking. Three years ago, Sorokin's allegedly pornographic writing led to protests by Moving Together, a pro-Kremlin youth organisation.

Finally:  Hollywood church has reserved parking spaces for celebrities?  What would the Free Methodists think?!