Since 1915, we have set aside the second Sunday in May to honor our Mothers. Although there are several opinions as to how this day came about, the one that has lasted is the story of Anna Reeves Jarvis.
Jarvis asked her minister in West Virginia to give a sermon in memory of her mother in 1907, after her mother’s death in May of 1905. On the same Sunday, the minister at a church in Philadelphia, Pa., where Jarvis’s dad had formerly ministered, honored Mrs. Jarvis and all mothers with a special Mothers’ Day Service.
Jarvis began to write to congressmen, urging that they set aside a day to honor Mothers. In 1910, West Virginia Gov. Glasscock proclaimed a statewide Mother’s Day. The next year every state celebrated it. In 1915, President Woodrow Wilson signed into law a resolution making the second Sunday in May the national Mother’s Day.
Anna Marie Reeves Jarvis, Anna Jarvis’s mother, had been instrumental in forming the Mother’s Day Friendship Clubs to work with women to teach the importance of sanitation. The women who belonged to the group refused to take sides during the Civil War and provided nursing service and taught sanitation methods which have been accredited to saving many soldiers’ lives.
In 1872, Julia Ward Howe began the Mothers Day for Peace celebration in Boston. The day set aside for honoring peace, motherhood and womanhood was celebrated for 10 years.
There is also a claim by a service organization that one of their own was responsible for getting Mother’s Day as an official holiday.
Regardless of who gets the credit for bringing this day about, it is a good day to remember our mothers. Some will bring gifts, others will call, and yet others will write poems.
This year, Hallmark expects 155 million cards to be sent. They have been producing Mother’s Day cards since the early 1900s.

journal-advocate.com

The Twins have never been a team that relied on big hits to score their runs. When Justin Morneau hit 30 home runs in 2006, it was the first time in nearly 20 years that the Twins had a player hit that many.
Even then, that team was known for the nickname White Sox manager Ozzie Guillen gave them: The Piranhas. Nick Punto, Luis Castillo, Jason Bartlett and Jason Tyner consistently got on base, got into scoring position via the hit-and-run or sac bunt, and then scored on one of Joe Mauer's many singles. No more power needed than to hit the ball just out of the infield.
The Twins reputation for fundamentally sound small ball is well known, and its games like tonight's that reinforce it. The Twins took a big lead early, thanks to a four run second inning that featured: two walks, a steal, a wild pitch, two singles, and Carlos Gomez's double.
Nothing was hit very hard, but everything fell where it needed to to continue the inning, and best of all, every run was scored with two outs. The Twins had more two out RBI than runners left in scoring position with two out, a vast change from a few of their earlier losses.
The Twins iced the game the very next inning when Justin Morneau led off the inning with a long home run. As nice as it is to manufacture runs, there is a lot to be said for instant offense.
The game also featured two of the biggest surprises for the Twins so far this season: Matt Tolbert and Livan Hernandez.
Tolbert continued his superb hitting out of the #2 spot in the order going 3-4 with a walk. While he probably won't continue to hit .556 all season, if he can be an effective hitter, he is likely to steal some ABs from both Harris and Everett, especially if the latter continues to make errors.

bleacherreport.com

Slashdot’s own Roblimo has an interesting introspective on what makes us so prone to liking one window manager over another. More than likely it’s just the inherent laziness of most users that precludes change. “I used KDE as my primary desktop from 1996 through 2006, when I installed the GNOME version of Ubuntu and found that I liked it better than the KDE desktop I’d faced every morning for so many years. Last January, I got a new Dell Latitude D630 laptop and decided to install Kubuntu on it, but within a few weeks, I went back to GNOME. Does this mean GNOME is now a better desktop than KDE, or just that I have become so accustomed to GNOME that it’s hard for me to give it up?”
Without JavaScript enabled, you might want to use the classic discussion system instead. If you login, you can remember this preference.
I use Gnome on my main desktop, but I really like xfce on pretty much every other machine. It’s not very flashy, but I always found it an easy to use desktop. I still do most things with the CLI, and a GUI that doesn’t get in the way is nice. Most of the time I just have a ton of ssh sessions going into other machines, and the GUI just makes hopping between them easier (normally about 3-4 shells, and I usually have screen running on the machines I’m ssh’d into.)
OK. Now that I’ve read that entire article, I want to ammend my statement. The next Roblimo contribution doesn’t need to be Vi vs. Emacs: he’s already covered Kate vs. Gedit and Thunderbird vs. KMail. He even went so far as to drop into why he prefers Linux over Macs and Windows machines. Talk about trying to get 5 flamewars going at once

slashdot.org

The neighbors are huddled together in the wan light of a street lamp at the corner of 10th and Wood in West Oakland. They’re here on this chilly winter evening, as they are most Friday evenings, warding off the cold with thermoses of hot chocolate and the comfort of each other’s presence.
It’s a neighborhood of stately trees and crumbling Victorians. It’s one of the oldest neighborhoods in Oakland, steeped in railroad history. The corner where these folks are gathered is a half dozen blocks from the old Southern Pacific passenger station, now an abandoned brick building. Three blocks from here, on 7th Street, labor organizer C.L. Dellums ran the western outpost of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters. His nephew, Ron Dellums, grew up two houses down from this corner.
It is a mixed group of 15 neighbors: black and white, young and old, each with stories: Barbara Lafitte-Oluwole, 55, lost her son four years ago in a cold-blooded killing at 27th and Telegraph. Francine Crockett moved from Lake Merritt to Wood Street two years ago, attracted to the neighborhood’s “cool history” and the “shabby elegance” of its Victorians. Dion Nelson, 42, is the group’s earnest, soft-spoken leader. He moved here five years ago to start a family; in the midst of a neighborhood crime wave last year, he began knocking on doors and bringing these folks together.
Last summer a corner grocery store opened. Corner stores in West Oakland tend to attract drug dealers because of increased foot traffic. Soon, there were not only drug dealers, but a rash of auto thefts and home break-ins, as well as a machine gun battle at the corner.
Nelson, who lives half a block from the corner with his wife, Whitney, and two young children, felt he had to do something. He began an outreach effort with not only his immediate neighbors, but also the store’s owners, their landlords and the police. The immediate result was the decision by a core group of neighbors to begin meeting on the corner every Friday evening.

sfgate.com

The Georgia General Assembly is again considering legislation that would allow Sunday sales of alcohol, but with certain restrictions. Would you support certain types of sales of alcoholic beverages in Georgia?
Ninety-one-year-old Vi Jester, a retired teacher from the Decatur County Schools now living in an assisted living home in Marietta, recalls her adventures of St. Patrick’s Day 2007.
On that day she was living alone in Bainbridge and preparing to go to lunch with her good friend, Jean Attaway. This was something they did regularly-three times a week.
As she prepared to take a shower, she badly scalded her hand, fell in the tub and was unable to get out.
Her friend, Attaway, arrived at the home and honked the horn waiting for Jester to come out. When there was no response to the second honk, Attaway realized there must be a problem.
She was unable to get into the house, and when she went to call 911, she realized she had forgotten her cell phone. She ran back home for the phone and immediately called 911.
Ambulance and Bainbridge Public Safety officers responded to the call and rescued Jester. She was taken to the emergency room before being transferred to the burn center in Augusta, where she was treated for severe burns. She has had two successful skin grafts on her two middle fingers and happily reports that her hand is completely healed today.

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