Merry Christmas! I hope you have a wonderful day with family and friends!

Cereal Dust

Early one morning a few days ago I chose Cheerios for my healthy and nutritious breakfast. I grabbed the first box I saw in the cabinet . Shook it. About 75 Os in the box. You know. 75 Os in the bottom of box covered in that highly toxic and undesirable cereal dust. The challenge was on. I am DAD and I am SO above worrying about cereal dust in my bowl. I carefully and artfully poured those lonely, left for the trash O's into my bowl with only a small trace of dust.

Lucky for me we were well stocked. A full, fresh box was waiting for me in the cabinet. Grab and shake....another 75 O's smothered in their own crumb dust. Ugh! Emptied that box in my bowl with the same artful pouring skill. Best to be careful. That dust can really kill you if you eat it, right?

A slight bit of panic as I returned to the cabinet desperate to fill my bowl. I found a THIRD box already open and waiting for me. Grab and shake...half full. Good deal. A full bowl of Cheerios. No cereal dust to turn a tasty bowl of cereal to ruin. Someone tried to poison me with the dust but I escaped the horror of that nasty stuff in MY bowl of Cheerios!

Three boxes = One bowl

Success!

Technorati Tags: cereal dust

It's Personal. part 1

A four minute, unique story told from the perspective of Chris Ames, a guy who became an atheist after believing God didn’t exist.

Technorati Tags: north point ministries,atheist,Jesus

Africa Pays Homage To U2

 

CMJ

2007-12-05 10:42:24.310,
Story by: Jennifer Miller

Under the auspices of producers Shawn Amos and Paul Heck, Grammy Award-winning and up-and-coming African artists have come together for a tribute album to U2. In The Name Of Love: Africa Celebrates U2 (Shout! Factory) will be out April 1 and feature 12 covers of the Irish quartet's favorites and rarities from the likes of Angelique Kidjo, Les Nubians and Soweto Gospel Choir.
The project was inspired by Amos' work in South Africa with the Quincy Jones Listen Up Foundation, in addition to being an avid fan of both U2's music and Bono's philanthropic efforts with the ONE campaign and(RED), which have addressed the financial crises across the continent.
Tracklist For In The Name Of Love: Africa Celebrates U2:
01. Angelique Kidjo - Mysterious Ways
02. Vieux Farka Touré - Bullet The Blue Sky
03. Ba Cissoko - Sunday Bloody Sunday
04. Vusi Mahlasela - Sometimes You Can't Make It On Your Own
05. Tony Allen - Where The Streets Have No Name
06. Cheikh Lô - I Still Haven't Found What I'm Looking For
07. Keziah Jones - One
08. Les Nubians - With Or Without You
09. Soweto Gospel Choir - Pride (In The Name Of Love)
10. Sierra Leone's Refugee All Stars - Seconds
11. African Underground All-Stars - Desire
12. Waldemar Bastos - Love Is Blindness

Technorati Tags: U2,Africa,RED

World Aids Day: the battle has only just begun - U2

Last year, a special issue of The Independent, edited by Bono, introduced a new way of raising money to fight HIV/Aids. Since then, the (Red) initiative has raised more than $50m and helped more than one million people. In an exclusive interview, Bono tells Paul Vallely why people in rich nations can make a difference to the Aids disaster

Published: 01 December 2007

In a world of calibrated cynicism here's something unabashedly positive to celebrate today to mark what is the 20th occasion that people across the globe have commemorated – if that's the right word – World Aids Day. The words come from the man who is now as honoured as a campaigner against extreme poverty as he is as front man for the world's biggest-selling rock band.

"Three years ago," says Bono, the lead singer of U2, "there was virtually no one in Africa on antiretroviral drugs. Now you'll have two million by the end of this year."

Two million is, of course, only a fraction of those affected by the disease which has to date killed more than 25 million people – making it one of the most destructive epidemics in human history. Another estimated 40 million people are now living with HIV. But the international community is, for the first time, showing real signs of progress in combating the disease on a significant scale.

That fact is, in no small measure, down to the campaigning of the impassioned Irish vocalist, who has lobbied governments for action and corralled some of the world's biggest businesses into playing their part – which is why this newspaper, for the fourth time, turns itself (Red) today.

Since it was founded 20 months ago, (Red) has donated an extraordinary $50,005,410 (£24,324,379) to the Global Fund to fights Aids, TB and Malaria. "Do the maths," says Bono. "It costs about $5 a week to pay for the two pills a day it takes to keep someone with HIV alive."

Aids is no longer a death sentence. Antiretroviral medication will bring someone who is at death's door back to virtually full health. Doctors call itthe Lazarus effect.

More than 20 per cent of all funding to fight Aids now comes from the Global Fund. An extra $50m in its coffers means that a million people who would previously have died have are being kept alive, day in day out, seven days a week, 52 weeks of the year. That is in addition to the extra anti-Aids drugs being provided by governments under the Gleneagles promises. It is nearly double the numbers treated by the Global Fund the year before. "That's what readers of The Independent helped kick off and there's a lot more where that came from."

Finish the article in The Independent

Technorati Tags: U2,World AIDS Day,antiretroviral,Lazarus effect

Animator v. Animation

Really clever Flash animation project.

Animator vs. Animation by *alanbecker on deviantART

AIDS leaves Africa's grannies to raise children

By Barry Moody
NAIROBI, Nov 28 (Reuters) - Skinny and gap-toothed, her nose smudged with black dust, grandmother Kanotu Mumo sorts charcoal into small pots for sale on the stoop of her slum hut.
Mumo is an "AIDS granny" in Kibera, one of Africa's biggest slums. Like grandmothers all over Africa, they have been left to fend for orphans after their own children and husbands died.
Her hut, stacked with sacks of charcoal, measures 10 by 8 feet (3 by 2.5 metres) and is too dark to see more than a few inches (cm) even in the middle of the day.
Somehow she shelters four grandchildren, two great grandchildren and the child of a dead relative, who sleep on mattresses and two beds. There is no toilet or running water.
According to U.N. figures, at least 12 million children in Africa have lost one or both parents because of AIDS. This is 80 percent of all AIDS orphans in the developing world.
The number of orphans in Africa has increased by 50 percent since 1990 while falling in other regions. The United Nations says there will be 53 million by 2010, some 30 percent of them bereaved by AIDS.
The burden of this disaster is borne by extended families, most often grandmothers, who might have otherwise dreamed of returning to their home villages for retirement at the end of a tough life.
Kanotu Mumo moved to Kibera, home to 800,000 people, when her husband died about 25 years ago in eastern Kenya. "I can't remember. It has been so long. When my husband died the relatives threw me out and sold the land."
Unlike many of the grandmothers, doleful and worn down by their fate, Mumo smiles and jokes. She says she cannot remember her age. As she talks, two teenage granddaughters come and go.
Her story is typical of the everyday tragedies of Kibera. Two daughters and a son died of AIDS. Another son was stoned to death by a mob after he was caught stealing. "I am embarrassed to talk about it but it was due to the unemployment."
She lives close to the railway line that runs through the sprawling slum, acting both as a pedestrian thoroughfare and place for traders to lay out shoes and clothes.
She sells her charcoal -- the slum's primary fuel -- for a few shillings profit, after buying from a nearby wholesaler who carries it to her hut.
SCHOOL
Like other grandmothers interviewed by Reuters, Kanotu Mumo comes to the Stara school in Kibera to clean twice a week. Their grandchildren attend the school and are fed from huge vats of steaming maize porridge and beans.
The project, supplied and funded by Dutch charity ChildsLife International, the U.N. World Food Programme and Kenyan aid agency Feed the Children, was started seven years ago by a group of Kibera mothers, after friends died and left them to look after their children.
The school on the edge of Kibera houses more than 500 lively children, 70 percent of them orphans, dressed in green uniforms.
More than 30 of the children are HIV positive and receive anti-retrovirals from a nearby clinic in the slum, supplied against vouchers from the school.
The small size of the premises means classes are noisy and overcrowded, with up to 80 children of mixed ages. The school, headed by dynamic Kibera resident Josephine Mumo, has proven skilful in raising support.
Singer Harry Belafonte, Barbara Bush, mother of President George W. Bush, and actress Drew Barrymore have been backers.
Without their grandmothers and projects such as Stara, many more orphans in Kibera and elsewhere would end up as glue-sniffing street children or child prostitutes.
Josephine Mumo says that when the mothers started the school, they brought in children who had been raped as they went door-to-door begging for food.
SURVIVE FOR THE CHILDREN
Many of the grandmothers are themselves weakened by HIV as well as old age, making it even harder for them to feed their charges.
Peris Owuor, 50, is a Kibera grandmother looking after seven grandchildren. "Sometimes my body does not feel good and I cannot go to look for food," she said.
Owuor, whose husband died of AIDS in 1998, washes clothes to make money, at 150 Kenya shillings ($2.25) a day, and tries to help feed her three surviving children who have no jobs.
"But when my body is not good I just have to stay at home."
Another grandmother, Antonina Mujenge, also HIV positive, cares for five of her own children and four grandchildren. She also sells charcoal.
"I try to look after them like other children but it is very difficult because of my low income. Sometimes there is not enough for all of them," she said.
"My main aim is to stay around long enough to make sure the kids can get an education and find jobs," said Mujenge, who has lived in Kibera for 20 years.
She would love to return to her village in western Kenya. "But I am an outcast at home. They say I can infect others. I cannot go back."
Grace Atema, 65, looks after three grandchildren and her daughter, mother of two of them. She washes clothes twice a week to raise money.
"I put everything I get towards the children. But I worry what would happen if I died. How would they survive?" she said. (Editing by Sara Ledwith)

original article: http://www.reuters.com/article/latestCrisis/idUSL27322409