A while back I heard a segment on This American Life about Gene Cheek and his book The Color of Love: A Mother's Choice in the Jim Crow South. His is an amazing, sad, and tragic story. It caught my special attention because it occurred in Winston-Salem, NC where I grew up. I ordered the book and and read it during our vacation in the mountains of NC. I think the book would have been more powerful had I not already known the basic outline of the story from the radio show...I knew what was coming. So, if you're gonna read the book, I recommend not listening to the radio bit first. It was kind of a shock to me that in 1972, the year when I was born, inter-racial marriages were still illegal in NC and that Gene Cheek's story was happening in the previous decade. I'm so thankful that my parents raised me such that I wasn't taught any of the racism that was the norm when they were growing up and still wasn't nearly dead when I did.

From a NY Times article of the same title by Virgiania Heffernan:

EIGHT months ago a mysterious image showed up on YouTube, the video-sharing site that now shows more than 100 million videos a day. A sinewy figure in a swimming-pool-blue T-shirt, his eyes obscured by a beige baseball cap, was playing electric guitar. Sun poured through the window behind him; he played in a yellow haze. The video was called simply "guitar." A black-and-white title card gave the performer's name as funtwo.

The piece that funtwo played with mounting dexterity was an exceedingly difficult rock arrangement of Pachelbel's Canon, the composition from the turn of the 18th century known for its solemn chord progressions and its overexposure at weddings. But this arrangement, attributed on another title card to JerryC, was anything but plodding: it required high-level mastery of a singularly demanding maneuver called sweep-picking...

I was able to trace funtwo's video to Jeong-Hyun Lim, a 23-year-old Korean who taught himself guitar over the course of the last six years. Now living in Seoul, he listens avidly to Bach and Vivaldi, and in 2000 he took a month of guitar lessons. He plays an ESP, an Alfee Custon SEC-28OTC with gold-colored detailing.

Here's the video. I had seen it and was pretty amazed but wondered if it was a real peformance or just an elaborate job of pretending to play something completely pre-recorded:

It's easy to complain about the state of TV content these days, but last night I watched episodes of Real Time and Bill Moyers on Faith & Reason. Now that was some interesting television! Last week I also watched When the Levees Broke: A Requiem in Four Acts, Spike Lee's documentary about Katrina and New Orleans. Sad and disturbing. New Orleans...Iraq...someone, not knowing better, might mistake us for utterly incompetent.

The LA Times today ran a long article of the same title examining possible motivations for Mary Winkler killing her husband, a church of Christ preacher in Tennessee. The AP reported on a possible source for the financial problems that precipitated the murder:

A woman accused of shooting her preacher husband to death after they argued over money may have been taken in by a remarkably common scam that strained their finances and their marriage.

Mary Winkler, who is charged with murder, had gotten tangled up along with her husband, Matthew, in a swindle known as an advance-fee fraud, in which victims are told that a sweepstakes prize or other riches are waiting for them if they send in money to cover the processing expenses, her lawyers say.

``They were always kind of living on the edge of their budget," defense attorney Steve Farese said, ``so I'm sure this would have just wrecked their budget."

The Christian Chronicle reported that she made $750,000 bail and that her trial is set to begin October 30.

From todays LA Times article by Peter H. King:

She complained to investigators about constant carping from her husband, criticisms about "the way I walked, what I ate, everything." She mentioned financial pressures, which she described as "mostly my fault, bad bookkeeping." It was, she said, "just building to a point. I was just tired of it. I guess I just got to a point and I snapped."

Certain details about her journey from adored preacher's wife to accused husband slayer Mary Winkler did not share with the Tennessee investigators in that initial interview. She did not tell them, for instance, about the bad checks she'd been passing through a web of bank accounts, transactions that had prompted a concerned call from the bank the day before her husband was shot.

Nor did she tell them about her apparently related entanglement in what is known as a Nigerian scam, a common and often ruinous form of fraud that preys on those naive enough to believe they are about to come into big and easy money, if only they play along.

The name of Midland's new single A minor league baseball team was unveiled yesterday...the Great Lakes Loons. The poll on the teams web site indicates a disapproval level of 45 % concerning the name, but my informal poll of people from church today was more like 100 % against.