Secret Santa Lives On

KANSAS CITY, Mo. - Susan Dahl had spent four months homeless in Colorado and just been on a harrowing 10-hour bus trip through sleet and snow. Hungry and broke, all she wanted to do was get back to family in Minnesota.

That's when a tall man in a red coat and red hat sat next to her at the downtown bus station, talked to her quietly and then slipped her $100 on that recent December afternoon.

The man was doing the work of Larry Stewart, Kansas City's original Secret Santa who anonymously wandered city streets doling out $100 bills to anyone who looked like they needed it. Stewart died of cancer at age 58 earlier this year, but his legacy lives on.

Christmas is just a day

As Christmas draws near, John Foster won't be decorating a tree, shopping for last-minute gifts or working on a holiday sermon for his flock. After all, it's been 50 years since Christmas was anything more than a day of the week to him.

He's one of very few American Christian pastors who follow what used to be the norm in many Protestant denominations — rejecting the celebration of Christmas on religious grounds.

Five Realities

Gautama awakened to five realities, which are significant in negotiating our life process. They are the truth of suffering in life; the principle of interdependence, the essence of life; the middle path of balance and moderation as the style of life; and the understanding that nothing has a fixed nature or value but is constantly changing. Finally, there is the eightfold noble path focused on realizing these truths within our own experience.

Ziggy Marley's religion

“My No. 1 issue is love and people not having the ability to love each other,"says Ziggy, the founder of U.R.G.E. (Unlimited Resources Giving Enlightenment), a charitable organization that benefits a wide range of children’s causes in Jamaica. “This is what causes everything else to happen - poverty, starvation, wars. It’s caused by us not loving each other. If we could learn that lesson, that would be the solution.So my biggest problem is people not loving each other and not understanding that within the concepts of religion, which controls so many people’s mentality on this earth, and which causes so much strife and negative energy. If we could get across to them that the message is love, it’s not about what religion you are or how you practice it. The hypocrisy and confusion of religion is common because every religion thinks it’s right. And in every religion, most people want to change somebody into their religion. But love don’t change nobody. Love is something that makes you change yourself.”

Akaka and Abercrombie defend the Akaka Bill

Washington Post columnist George F. Will's distasteful column on the Akaka Bill, published in the Star-Bulletin Friday, demonstrates a complete misunderstanding of Hawaiian history and insensitivity to the rights of native people in Hawaii and across the nation. It is disappointing and outrageous to compare the systematic atrocities of the Nazis against Jews to the efforts of our host culture to exercise control over their culture and their destiny.

Hawaiians, like our nation's other indigenous people, share a history as political entities, exercising governance on lands which later became the United States.

The U.S. government played a key role in this sad saga in 1893, when U.S. Minister to the Kingdom John Stevens formally supported Westerners seeking to overthrow Queen Liliuokalani by ordering armed U.S. troops to land in Honolulu and take up military positions at key government buildings to intimidate the queen. To avoid bloodshed, she agreed to step down temporarily, believing that the United States would restore her to the throne when it learned what had happened. And, in fact, after incoming President Grover Cleveland received a full accounting of the facts, he characterized the action of Minister Stevens and the U.S. troops as an "act of war" and called for restoration of the kingdom.

chained dogs

Question: My neighbor chains his dog in his back yard. I am on good terms with him; what can I do to help the dog without causing tension between our families?

stem cells from skin cells?

Separate teams of scientists on two continents revealed Tuesday that they have created stem cells from human skin cells - a development that eventually could allow researchers to sidestep the contentious moral issues that have hobbled early studies in a promising field.

The startling breakthrough was hailed by parties on all sides of the stem cell debate because it raised the prospect that the controversial destruction of human embryos and the need to harvest eggs from women donors might one day no longer be needed.

Marvel Comics online

[12/5/10] I notice in the latest Edward R. Hamilton catalog, they are featuring some of the Marvel Masterworks volumes for $9.95. I was especially interested in Avengers and X-Men, so those were comics I bought when I was first starting to buy comics and I missed buying the earliest episodes. I still hope to sell my old issues on eBay (maybe... I'm hoping they don't disintegrate when I take them out of storage). Then I'll still have the issues and can sell the originals. That's the plan.

Apparently there were both hardcover and paperback versions of these. And there's a pretty comprehensive website devoted to these books.

The Avengers might become pretty popular now with the upcoming movie. There's also a new cartoon series now running on DisneyXD with a lot of the characters/plots adapted from the early days.

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LOS ANGELES, California (AP) -- Marvel is putting some of its older comics online Tuesday, hoping to reintroduce young people to the X-Men and Fantastic Four by showcasing the original issues in which such characters appeared.

It's a tentative move onto the Internet: Comics can only be viewed in a Web browser, not downloaded, and new issues will only go online at least six months after they first appear in print. Still, it represents perhaps the comics industry's most aggressive Web push yet.

... The publisher is hoping fans will be intrigued enough about the origins of those characters to shell out $9.99 a month, or $4.99 monthly with a year-long commitment. For that price, they'll be able to poke through, say, the first 100 issues of Stan Lee's 1963 creation "Amazing Spider-Man" at their leisure, along with more recent titles like "House of M" and "Young Avengers." Comics can be viewed in several different formats, including frame-by-frame navigation.

Ring expects Marvel's effort to put a slight dent in the back-issue segment of the comic shop industry, where rare, out-of-print titles sell for hundreds of dollars on eBay and at trade shows.

Though most comic fans are collectors, some simply want to catch up on the backstory of their favorite characters and would no longer have to pay top dollar to do so.