Friday, November 23, 2012

EDUCATION AFTER EDUCATION - RAINBOW RENAISSANCE AGAIN AND AGAIN.

It's great if you finish high school, get into college and enjoy the treasures of a university education.

But what if you don't? Does that mean you are destined for poverty and a life of drugs and crime?

If that's what you choose, that's what you will get.

I left school to go to work in my family's business, Metropolitan News Agency at the Crossroads of the Nation, Peel and St. Catherine in Montreal. My parents expected that my siblings and cousins and I would learn the business and eventually take over the store.

So I learned to roll thousands of pennies by hand, to do the paperwork, do the banking, do the bookkeeping in ledgers with pen and ink. I learned about newspapers from all over the world, magazines, pocket books, pulps and digests. I learned to take the cash and make change without the benefit of any computer.

I learned about English bone china cups and saucers and Beswick animal figurines and fine Irish linens and Chinese embroidered cottons. I sold souvenir pennants and Indian sweet grass canoes and Sterling Silver charm bracelets.

I met people from all over the world. I upset my uncle by spending time talking with them, learning their languages and asking about their cultures and experiences.

My parents did not want me to be deprived of an education, so I was obliged to attend Alexander Business College, across Mt. Royal Avenue at Park Avenue, facing Fletcher's Field. I learned typing on the old style typewriters, and bookkeeping and Gregg shorthand.

Then I followed my dream and attended the Montreal Repertory Theatre School for two seasons, learning voice and diction with Dorothy Danford, stage makeup with Griffith Brewer, history of the theatre - all the way back to ancient Greece - with Ms. Stehle, and drama and Shakespeare with Eleanor Stuart.

Later, I tried my feet at tap dancing with Peter Miller of the Speirs-Miller Studio on Sherbrooke West. By chance, I learned that Peter Miller also taught singing. I had been singing around the house since I was a kid. So I started taking singing lessons with Peter Miller.

One day I saw an article in the newspaper about Madam Pauline Donalda. I dared. I went to see the great international diva in her home on Lincoln Avenue in downtown Montreal. Dreams do come true. Madam Donalda tested me and accepted me as one of her students. Her other students included Joseph Rouleau, Fernande Chiccio and Robert Savoie. And there was I also - about 15 years old, in such incredible company.

My opera career was not ended due to my voice which was developing beautifully: I was undone by solfege and my old nemesis, math. A whole note, a half note, a quarter note. Polka dots on a ladder.

Later, I took adult night courses in English and Journalism and Law at Sir George Williams College - now Concordia - and I wrote articles for the Georgian newspaper, and I was awarded a Silver Medal for Journalism - which was among the treasures stolen from me in 1996, by Dawn McSweeney * (Links below).

And then I took courses in professional photography with Harry Sidel, owner and instructor - Montreal School of Modern Photography. The courses included independent work and studio work - Portraits with a Rembrandt camera, advertising photography, techniques and academic work - a lot of math and some chemistry, darkroom work - fine editing of film negatives, dodging and refining prints. The math involved in setting the lighting for the studio portraits was the most difficult task. The work I did outside and the thrill of seeing my pictures develop were the best part. I am still delighted when I look at the volumes of photographs I have taken.

Everything I learned became a cornucopia from which I have fed all my life. A formal education is certainly to be desired. But, unless illness or accident or some other tragedy limits your choices, there is a world of possibilities for those who choose well.

That is the key to almost everything -

You choose,

You create who you become.

REMEMBERING MME. PAULINE DONALDA http://phylliscartersjournal.blogspot.com/2011/11/remembering-mme-pauline-donalda_01.html

WHY I DID NOT BECOME A DIVA

http://phylliscartersjournal.blogspot.com/2011/11/why-i-did-not-become-diva_04.html

http://phylliscartersjournal.blogspot.com/2011/11/mme-pauline-donalda-as-i-remember-her.html

Thursday, November 22, 2012

TOM LEHRER'S CHRISTMAS CAROL

Christmas time is here, by golly,
Disapproval would be folly,
Deck the halls with hunks of holly,
Fill the cup and don't say "when."
Kill the turkeys, ducks and chickens,
Mix the punch, drag out the dickens,
Even though the prospect sickens,
Brother, here we go again.

On Christmas day you can't get sore,
Your fellow man you must adore,
There's time to rob him all the more
The other three hundred and sixty-four.

Relations, sparing no expense'll
Send some useless old utensil,
Or a matching pen and pencil.
"Just the thing I need! How nice!"
It doesn't matter how sincere,
Nor how heartfelt the spirit,
Sentiment will not endear it,
What's important is the price.

Hark the herald tribune sings,
Advertising wondrous things.
God rest ye merry, merchants,
May you make the yuletide pay.
Angels we have heard on high
Tell us to go out and buy!

So let the raucous sleigh bells jingle,
Hail our dear old friend Kris Kringle,
Driving his reindeer across the sky.
Don't stand underneath when they fly by !

MOTHER DID NOT SIGN THE WILL MADE BY KENNETH GREGOIRE PRUD'HOMME

A total stranger named Kenneth Gregoire Prud'homme made a will in my aged mother's name and gave all of my father's inheritance to Dawn McSweeney and her accomplices - who Dawn calls her "partners in crime" on her own blog.

When I learned about the will the stranger, Kenneth Gregoire Prud'homme, had made in my mother's name when she was about 92 years old, I smelled a rat and I made inquiries at The Montreal Court House.

I was told that my mother did not sign the will made by Kenneth Gregoire Prud'homme in her name, but a notary witnessed her approval.

I was told that my mother had come to the notary and climbed the stairs to the notary's office. They said there was no elevator.

They are saying that my mother was not able to sign her own name - but she was able to climb a flight of stairs.

The Facts:

My mother had been unable to climb up even two steps for decades by the time I was attacked and robbed on October 7, 1996.

There is no way my mother could have climbed the stairs to the notary's office. She was a very heavy woman. She used a walker around the house. She NEVER went out except to the hospital in an ambulance. No one could have carried my mother up to the notary's office. She had trouble breathing for as long as I can remember.

My parents loved each other. They had been together for decades. Pop was in his late 80's when he became ill. He did not want to be a burden to my mother, so he decided to go into the Griffith McConnell Residence.

My father was in the Griffith McConnell Residence for many months. I visited him almost every day. But my mother never left the house. She did not visit my father at Christmas, Hannukah, nor on his birthday, nor at the turn of the century.

My father phoned her all the time, but he never saw my mother again. She would not leave her house.

But one day, my mother disappeared.

In April 2004: I went to see the police again because I found that my mother - who never left her house - did not seem to be in the house when I passed by. Advertising brochures littered the front stoop. There was no sign of life.

I went around to the back of the house. The home of our youth looked like something out of an Alfred Hitchcock movie, doors and windows overgrown with dead vines. So I went to the police station to file a missing person report.

The police learned that Dawn's mother, my sister Debbie, had moved my mother out of our family home. No one knew where she was until she died in June, 2007.

We learned that Debbie had obtained power of attorney from both my parents. Every other member of the family, the CLSC social services, fire protection services and even police detectives, were barred from my parents' home thereafter.

In 2007, after my mother's death, we learned that in 2005, a man I never met or heard of before, Kenneth Gregoire Prud'homme, made a will in my mother's name and gave all of my father's inheritance to Dawn McSweeney and her "partners in crime" and their accomplices.

Prud'homme made himself "liquidator" of my father's estate.

Someone helped Prud'homme pull off this crime.

The CLSC Pierrefonds (Quebec Community Clinic) apologized in writing for their part in these crimes. Who else was involved?

Crimes have been committed and this case will not go away until there is justice.

http://phylliscartersjournal.blogspot.com/2012/11/how-much-did-kenneth-gregoire-prudhomme_1125.html

http://phylliscartersjournal.blogspot.com/2012/11/kenneth-gregoire-prudhomme-and-phoney_7218.html

http://dawnmcsweeney.blogspot.com/2011/07/quebecs-injustice-system-victims-voices_17.html

Wednesday, November 21, 2012

MONSANTO HERBICIDE KILLS - ACTIVIST RECEIVES DEATH THREATS

Sofia Gatica, Argentine Activist,

Faced Anonymous Death Threats

For Fighting Monsanto Herbicide

For 13 years Sofia Gatica has organized opposition to the aerial spraying of agrochemicals that threaten human health and the environment in Argentina -- and for almost as long, she and her children have faced physical threats from anonymous agents.

Gatica, who lives in a working-class neighborhood of 6,000 in central Argentina surrounded by soy fields, began organizing against Monsanto after she noticed a disturbingly high rate of cancer and birth defects in her community. Her own 3-day-old daughter died of kidney failure in 1999, and a neighbor had a baby die of the same uncommon birth defect.

Editor's Note: This story contains explicit language.

"I started seeing children with mouth covers, mothers with scarves wrapped around their heads to cover their baldness, due to chemotherapy," she told Grist in an interview, explaining what inspired her to co-found Mothers of Ituzaingó. The efforts of those half-dozen mothers, who began going from door to door collecting information on health problems in their community, led to the first epidemiological study that showed cancer rates in Gatica's hometown of Ituzaingó were 41 times the national average, with high rates of birth defects and infant mortality as well.

Within a few years of the study's publication, and as her advocacy work gave her a higher profile, Gatica began to receive death threats, culminating in an incident in late 2007.

"I had just come back from the corner store, and I never lock my door," she told HuffPost through a translator. "I always just come and go in our neighborhood, and I came in and he followed behind me and put the gun against my head in my kitchen and said that I needed to 'stop fucking with the soy.'"

Gatica said she held perfectly still and complied with the gunman's wishes. "He made me sit down in a chair," she said. "He said not to leave, and so I didn't leave. I waited until he drove away and then I went to the police."

Despite her careful description, the police were unable to identify the man, and Gatica continued to receive threatening phone calls.

"I was living with my heart in my mouth," said Gatica, after an anonymous caller told her she would soon have "two children instead of three." She asked the police to tap her line and trace the callers, and while they told her they had opened an investigation, she's been told the file is secret.

Other threats, she said, came from neighbors who were angry that the value of their homes had gone down because of her work.

"In one case a woman got on the bus and was yelling at me, saying I had lowered the price of her house and that who was I to be telling people if they were sick or not, if my neighbors were sick or not? She was insulting me personally to the point I got off the bus and walked to my office, and when I got there, I found out where she lived and called the police to get a restraining order. It turned out later that that woman had cancer," Gatica said, "so she was likely having some kind of an emotional reaction."

Gatica said that same woman had threatened her youngest daughter, now 14 years old, when her daughter was riding her bicycle in the neighborhood, and that her other children, a 19-year-old daughter and a 23-year-old son, had also been targeted at school.

Farmers and others in Argentina use weedkiller primarily on genetically modified Roundup Ready soy, which covers nearly 50 million acres, or half of the country's cultivated land area. In 2009 farmers sprayed that acreage with an estimated 200 million liters of glyphosate, the active ingredient in Roundup and other herbicides used around the globe, which critics have argued for decades poses a serious threat to public health.

The Argentine government helped pull the country out of a recession in the 1990s, in part by promoting genetically modified soy. Though it was something of a miracle for local farmers at the time, residents in areas nearby the crops began a few years later to report health problems, including high rates of birth defects and cancers, as well as the losses of crops and livestock.

Gatica said that after she began reporting those problems on local radio in 2006, she was hassled by the local police. "At one point they actually knocked on my door and made me come out on the street," she said through a translator. "The street was filled with maybe 30 patrol men asking her to stop 'lying' about her neighborhood."

"It was very intimidating," she told HuffPost, but she stood by her statements. The police actually took her to the house of a local soy farmer who had been spraying Roundup and asked the farmer to tell Sofia that he hadn't hired them. Then, she said, "they left me there in the farm and I had to walk back and the farmer was letting his dogs out and they were barking at us."

Still, she says, she doesn't blame the police for these actions. "I feel like they were following orders," she said.

While Monsanto avers that glyphosate poses no risk to humans, the work of activists like Gatica and Argentine government scientist, Andres Carrasco, suggest a different story. Carrasco conducted a study in 2009, "Glyphosate-Based Herbicides Produce Teratogenic Effects on Vertebrates by Impairing Retinoic Acid Signaling," which found that glyphosate causes malformations in frog and chicken embryos at doses far lower than those used in agricultural spraying. It also found that malformations caused in frog and chicken embryos by Roundup and its active ingredient glyphosate were similar to human birth defects found in genetically modified soy-producing regions.

"The findings in the lab are compatible with malformations observed in humans exposed to glyphosate during pregnancy," wrote Carrasco, director of the Laboratory of Molecular Embryology at the University of Buenos Aires. "I suspect the toxicity classification of glyphosate is too low."

"In some cases this can be a powerful poison," he concluded.

Another pesticide Gatica has targeted of late, endosulfan, has been banned in 80 countries, and in May of 2011 the Stockholm Convention, an international treaty, added the pesticide to their list of persistent pollutants to be eliminated. Her group's press conferences, demonstrations and data-gathering efforts have yielded some success in recent months, and a countrywide ban of endosulfan will go into effect in July 2013.

Gatica has also succeeded in passing a municipal ordinance prohibiting aerial spraying 2,500 meters from people's homes, and in 2012 she was awarded the distinguished Goldman Prize for environmentalists in South and Central America. She's currently working on a campaign to create buffer zones for agrochemicals throughout all of Argentina, protecting residential areas and waterways.

Her next project, she says, will be pushing for a countrywide ban on glyphosate.

Gatica notes that she's made a lot of enemies, even if she isn't sure who they are.

"I don't know if it's the soy farmers, or the soy industry, or the government because they're all so linked -- and they're all angry about the work I've been doing."

Lucia Graves - Huff Post