Richard Walker, at age seven, lives a privileged life in a Chinese
mansion in Santa Barbara with his mother Sharon and father Nelson. But
when Nelson dies suspiciously, Sharon marries David, a younger man, and
they move to Banana Road and are ensnared in a cult. Four years later,
brainwashed, abused and poor, they escape Los Angeles in the middle of
the night, in secret, and never look back.
Adventures of a Reluctant Cult Observer is a [word count] work of narrative nonfiction.
UPDATE: Suggestion successfully submitted.
Well, I tried to submit this to recovery.gov but it failed. I can only assume it's due to a spike in traffic during Obama's address to Congress.
It's a small thing, but many small things together make a big thing.
I'm so glad "clean coal" wasn't mentioned :-)
An oft-overlooked aspect of energy independence is local food production and distribution.
I just thought I'd point you at a local San Francisco organization that is doing that now, by developing private gardens and distributing organic produce. I am not affiliated with MyFarmsSF, but my sister, a gardener in Ireland, approves of this effort. She was considering similar possibilities during my last visit to Ireland, when the Celtic tiger had recently disappeared and the recession was in full swing.
http://www.myfarmsf.com/Best regards,
Richard Walker
UPDATE: Pat Phelan reports:
Fantastic news from Ken:
Walter Higgins at Sxoop Technologies is making great great use of Twitter’s open API and is now combining it with Zazzle to create Twitter Mosaic to offer personalized goods based on avatars of your Twitter friends or followers
The guys at Sxoop Technologies have made it easy to get all the avatars of your twitter followers.
Start up your browser, clear the cache of all temporary items, and generate the mosaic using this tool:
The tool simply arranges the avatars in a grid on the page.
As a side-effect, you will now have all the avatars in your browser cache.
Find your browser cache. For example, with Internet Explorer, navigate
Tools >> Options >> General >> BrowsingHistory >> Settings >> View Files.
Select all .jpgs and .gifs, or "sort by URL" and find all the images from "s3.amazonaws.com". Copy them all out to an image directory for the twitter mosaic.
Now, fire up Picasa3 and look at the twitter mosaic elements. They should all be 48 pixels square. Select all of them, and navigate to "Create >> Picture Collage." This is what "picture pile" mode looks like:
And this is Frame Mosaic mode where I selected my current twitter background as the center, and skewed the result:
Have fun! It might be nice to sort the images based on content, to go from saturated to desaturated in X and from simpe to busy in Y. Exercise left for industrious hackers and signal processing students.
@walter
You may be surprised to hear my take on this, but I know a little about Liberace and way more than I want to about Ted Haggard. After all, I'm a classically trained pianist, as was Liberace.
All of the sudden I think there may be something to all this channeling nonsense! [Cue spooky Liberace piano music, lots of reverb, and ghostly holograph of Liberace piano playing itself]. Oh did I leave that stage cue in there? I can be such a klutz sometimes!
Anyway darlings, rumors of my untimely and unglamorous death were highly exaggerated by some well-meaning friends in the Hollywood and Vegas press.
But it all turned out just fine, like always my little lambs! Had them over for a huge weekend party in my new secret lair - and they stayed for the redecorating Dinner on Sunday night! More on that later. I think I need a break from Rococo, and crawl back to the comfort of my beloved Louis XIV.
Mother was reading the paper to me yesterday, and there was this rather disturbing news about some religious man and the goings on in his boudoir. Not that his boudoir is disturbing, I'm sure it's nicely appointed.
Instead, the news was about this poor man and his wife and this nasty little trick trying to take the good Christian down into the gutter!
I won't have it. Liberace's fans won't have it! We must start a fabulous media blitz campaign and let everyone know just how good and Christian Ted Haggard is! We can hire lots of nice young men to do the heavy lifting and go door-to-door. I don't have that many bedrooms though, thank heavens. [cue angelic singing]
Am I gay? GAY, you SAY? Heck no, I'm married to Jesus! And he told me to turn the other cheek even though I want to slap you!
Too bad Ted isn't creative like I am. I think his wife gets at least a Rolls and I suggest a nice Throne as well. Works for me! And you put that nasty little trick to work driving you around and cleaning your gutters. America loves you!
Do you like the diamonds and furs, Ladies? They are nice, don't you think? OF COURSE THEY ARE - JESUS BOUGHT THEM FOR ME
My assistant tells me the
Well, Ted, I'm not sure about all of that. When I cry all the way to the bank, it's because I've given my life to showbiz - and she's a b-word if you take my meaning! I certainly don't make a habit of telling my secrets. Antiques and wardrobe are expensive enough as it is!
[yes I tagged Perez Hilton. You gotta problem widdat? ]
