By Michael Kaufman

The people who hijacked my email account last week got a virtual earful from some of my friends. I’ll share a few of their responses in a moment, but first a word about Jolly Widows, the Korean soap opera, which ended its run last week, and its successor, Happiness in the Wind, which began its run Tuesday night on cable channel WMBC.

Frankly, I am beginning with this subject and putting the title in the headline for one simple reason. Fans of the Korean soap operas (I prefer to call them “dramas”) will find Zestoforange when they do a Google search that includes the title of the show. This can help us pick up some new readers. I know this because of an email I got this week about Jolly Widows:

Hi Michael,
I came across your blog! Did you see the final episode? What did you think?  I was so torn!!!! This soap was as good as The Long Road Home and You Are My Destiny – quite possibly better!!! I have a question. Do you know if there’s a way to order the soundtrack? Also I can’t wait for the new soap!!
Thanks,
RM

I replied truthfully that I had never seen You Are My Destiny but I loved The Long Road Home and Jolly Widows. I was ambivalent about the final episode of Jolly Widows because I could never forgive Mrs. Na for the way she had treated Suhyeon and Jinwu while she was trying to keep Mr. Kang from recovering his memory, or for conspiring with Cheol to force Nayun to marry him against her will. As far as I’m concerned Mr. Kang should have gone back to his old family and Najeong could have stayed with Mrs. Na. She could have still  had frequent visitation with her grandmother, father, sister, and cousins! Yunjeong deserved better for all she went through…even if the ending implied that she and Junwu would be getting back together.

Like RM, I couldn’t wait for the new one to begin….but when we tuned in Thursday night there was a documentary about the discovery of an ancient sword found buried under a sidewalk in Seoul during a construction project in 1975. Fascinating as it was, I was disappointed. When would the new drama begin? Not Friday night. They showed a documentary highlighting the heroic resistance waged by Korean guerilla fighters against the Japanese invaders in 1906. (That one was fascinating too.) Monday? No dice: They showed part two of the Friday documentary (not so fascinating).

By Tuesday morning I couldn’t take it anymore. I called the WMBC headquarters in Newton, NJ, and asked the woman who answered the phone if she could tell me when the series that will replace Jolly Widows will begin.

“Jolly Widows? Hold on, please…” I was kept on hold for at least as long as when I called the unemployment office last year. I hung up without getting through, assuming that WMBC was swamped with callers asking the same question.

And our question was answered that night. Happiness in the Wind is on the air! I love it already. You can find it on Cablevision channel 20 Monday through Friday from 9:20 to 10 p.m. (Some clips from Jolly Widows can be found on Youtube.)

Okay, so last week my Yahoo email account was hacked by the so-called Russian Mafia and everyone on my address list received an email purporting to be from me, stranded in the UK and asking for money. Replies went directly to the hackers, who responded in my name. When Hal Davis, once a classmate of mine at SUNY New Paltz, posed a question that only I would be able to answer, the fake me responded, “I have been anticipating your reply…it s been a hell of a day,  just believing God for a miracle.” Then followed instructions to wire $920 via Western Union to an address in Bristol, England. Hal, a veteran newspaperman, was not fooled. He knows I’m an agnostic Jew who doesn’t expect miracles from God.

“You think i will seeking assistance from you if this was not serious?” they replied to Peter Knobler and Mikhail Horowitz when they couldn’t answer their questions. “Asking you to send the money to me directly is enough proof…” Mikhail had some sharp words for them, which he thought better of sending. But you can hear sharp words from him in person starting at 2 p.m. Saturday (April 17) when he joins Ed Sanders for a poetry reading at The Gallery at R&F Handmade Paints, 84 Ten Broeck Avenue, Kingston (for directions call 800-206-8088 or 845-331-3112).

Tony Seymour had some poetry of his own for the hackers (adapted here for publication):

“Listen up……whoever the [BLEEP] you are…….send me one more answer and its going directly to the US ATTORNEY general,  ya dig!!! get the [BLEEP] out of my friend’s accounts you little TWERP ASSED MOTHER[BLEEPER]!” He signed it, “Poet, Tony Seymour.” (You can find Tony reading his “rocket poetry” to Jeff Beck’s music on Youtube.)

My brother was not fooled by the hackers but he emailed me to say he thought “the part about losing the passport and wallet gave it all a personal touch of authenticity.” I wonder what he meant by that.

“Emairjancy, Emairjancy,” wrote Jack Radey, “everyone is to get from strit!! ” That was Jack’s way of letting me know he wasn’t fooled.  But then he added,  “Come on, Michael, fess up, at your age you actually DID lose your credit cards, command of the English language, and good sense.” I refuse to dignify that with a reply.

Don’t forget to tune in tonight to Happiness in the Wind.

Michael can be reached at Michael@zestoforange.com.

By Shawn Dell Joyce

“May there only be peaceful and cheerful Earth Days to come for our beautiful Spaceship Earth as it continues to spin and circle in frigid space with its warm and fragile cargo of animate life.”  — United Nations Secretary-General U Thant, 1971

       April 22, 1970, the first Earth Day, came on the heels of the Vietnam peace movement. This was a volatile era of monumental social change fueled by sit-ins and teach-ins, demonstrations, rallies, and a changing political consciousness. Wisconsin Senator Gaylord Nelson modeled the first U.S. Earth Day as an environmental “teach-in.” Over two thousand colleges and universities, roughly 10,000 primary and secondary schools and hundreds of communities across the United States participated.
  

  It was also the first time we saw the famous picture of the Earth from the moon taken by the Apollo astronauts. It was then that many of us first saw the earth in its entirety, and likened it as Secretary General U Thant did to a spaceship.  Or even more eloquently by astronomer Carl Sagan who remarked:
“… every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every “superstar,” every “supreme leader,” every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived (here)  —  on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves.”
   

“Earth Day worked because of the spontaneous response at the grassroots level,”  Nelson said. “That was the remarkable thing about Earth Day. It organized itself. Earth Day has become the largest secular holiday in the world, celebrated in 175 countries by more than 5 million people.

      Earth Day is a day for envisioning how we humans want to interact with our mother planet. Imagine what our world would look like if all of us 5 million people put our minds together; we could afford to live and work in the same community, our groceries would be local farm products, our buildings would be ultra-energy efficient and even generate their own power, cars would be traded in for bicycles as local economies thrive, Asthma would be a disease from the past as air quality improves.

     Want to celebrate Earth Day locally? Grab some gloves and join “Operation Clean Sweep” sponsored by the Walden Rotary on April 24. Meet at 8 a.m. at the Firefighter’s Museum, Maybrook Village Hall, Walden Village Hall, or Town Hall on Bracken Road to get road assignments and orange litter bags. Bring your children and teach them that we are all stewards of the land. If Montgomery is out of the way, stop along any roadside and pitch in and keep our spaceship clean.

 Shawn Dell Joyce is an award-winning columnist and founder of the Wallkill River School in Montgomery. shawn@zestoforange.com

Photography by Rich Gigli

The Old Farm House - In the dooryard fronting an old farm-house near the white-wash'd palings, Stands the lilac-bush tall-growing with heart-shaped leaves of rich green, with many a pointed blossom rising delicate,with the perfume strong I love, With every leaf a miracle - and from this bush in the dooryard, With delicate-color'd blossoms and heart-shaped leaves of rich green, A spring with its flower I break. Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass, 1865

By Bob Gaydos

Well, it’s been nearly a week now and I still haven’t heard about any smug, condescending reply from Fox News to Oklahoma Sen. Tom Coburn’s comments at  a town hall meeting. If, like me, you avoid Fox like the plague, let me tell you that Coburn, a Republican whose arch-conservative bonafides include attempting to stop an extension of unemployment benefits and trying to kill the health reform bill, cautioned the hometown crowd not to depend on Fox News for the facts of any story and actually had the guts to call House Speaker Nancy Pelosi — Beelzebub incarnate in female form to Fox and its far-right followers — “nice.”

Nice. As in just a hard-working family woman who happens to be two heartbeats away from the presidency.

Coburn, a doctor, dropped the “N” word on the crowd as he was discussing his differences with the speaker over the health reform bill. Thus brought boos and hisses. “Come on now,” Coburn said, “she is nice – how many of you all have met her? She’s a nice person. Just because somebody disagrees with you doesn’t mean they’re not a good person. I’ve been in the Senate for five years and I’ve taken a lot of that, because I’ve been on the small side –- both in the Republican Party and the Democrat Party.”

In addition to his lecture on civility, Coburn actually corrected a woman who said she might actually be thrown in prison for refusing to acquire insurance under the new health reform law. “The intention is not to put any one in jail,” he said. “That makes for good TV news on Fox, but that isn’t the intention.”

Wow. This is virtually unheard of today in the Republican Party, where all members seemingly must pay total obedience to whatever inane utterances or lies emanate from Fox News or fear a verbal onslaught from its staffers and questions from Tea Partiers about their patriotism. For proof one only has to look at the shell of a candidate Sen. John McCain has become as he seeks re-election in Arizona by walking a few steps behind Sarah Palin’s leather jacket coattails.

McCain may have finished near the bottom of the pack at the Naval Academy, but he knows what he knows and what Palin doesn’t know and yet he puppy dogged around her in hopes her conservative glamour aura — a phenomenon which he unleashed on the planet — would translate into another term for him. In the process he has disavowed every principled position he ever took in the Senate, positions that were often at odds with fellow Republicans, and actually said he never considered himself a maverick. What was all that stuff about then, John?

This was the presidential candidate of the GOP two years ago, a war hero, the de facto leader of the party, which today has none, the party which today takes its lead from the blabbering heads of Fox News, who reap ratings and money from their distortions and fear-mongering without having to worry about running for election.

Spake Coburn: “What we have to have is make sure we have a debate in this country so that you can see what’s going on and make a determination yourself. So don’t catch yourself being biased by Fox News that somebody is no good. The people in Washington are good. They just don’t know what they don’t know.”

Coburn told the audience to “stay informed on the issues.” Don’t “just watch Fox News or CNN — watch ’em both.” He said, “I do a lot of reading every day (The New York Times, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal)” to “get a perspective” and “know what other people’s thoughts are — not just what I hear through a pipe channel. I’m disturbed that we get things like what this lady said and what others have said on other issues, that are so disconnected to what I know to be the facts. And that comes from somebody that has an agenda that’s other than the best interests of our country.”

Coburn happens to be friendly with President Obama, from their shared days in the Senate, despite having starkly different political philosophies. Once upon a time, this was normal in Congress, where disagreements over policy did not have to descend to character assassination. The Just Say No Crowd has made it difficult for politicians of character to stand up and speak the truth, at least in the GOP. They’ve hammered this message home on Fox for two years now, or ever since Obama, the champion of bipartisan governing, became a serious candidate for president. There’s no drama in his approach, nothing on which Fox can exaggerate and profit. Only news it can report, if it so chooses, which it does not.

Coburn called them on it and, so far, Fox hasn’t called him a socialist, commie-sympathizer or anything else. (If you’ve heard or read otherwise, please let me know because, as I said, I don’t watch Fox News. Meanwhile, I’ll be on the lookout for any other Republican with the guts to speak the truth about the emperor’s clothes.

Bob can be reached at bob@zestoforange.com.

By Jeffrey Page

I want to say something nice about Bill O’Reilly, a man whose typically loud, boisterous, and right-wing protestations usually annoy the hell out of me.

But first some background. In 2006, the Rev. Fred Phelps and some of his acolytes picketed the funeral in suburban Maryland of Lance Cpl. Matthew Snyder, a Marine who died in a vehicle accident in Al Anbar Province in Iraq. He was 20 years old.

Picket a funeral? Phelps’s people carried signs with incendiary messages such as “God Hates Fags” and “Thank God for Dead Soldiers.” None of the Phelps gang had any knowledge of the life or death of Matthew Snyder. Their reasoning for terrorizing the mourners at a small cemetery in suburban Maryland was this: America has allowed itself to be subsumed by gay culture. Matthew Snyder and other fallen soldiers enlisted in the armed services to defend and protect America. So it follows that Snyder and the others must have been gay. And therefore they are despised by the Lord.

The cruelty and the ignorance are monumental.

But not only does God despise the dead soldiers, Phelps says. He also hates their families and their friends. He hates their ministers. He hates their military commanders. He hates everybody who ever had anything to do with them.

Phelps is good at naming all the people God hates, but you start to wonder how he can ignore the guidance of 1 John 4:8: “He that loveth not knoweth not God; for God is love.”

Phelps’s disgrace at the Snyder funeral was just one of hundreds of similar demonstrations. I first came in contact with Phelps and the people from his Westboro Baptist Church in Kansas four years ago when I wrote columns for The Record in Hackensack. It was Phelps’s daughter, Shirley Phelps-Roper who informed me that God hates not only the individual soldiers but everyone associated with them.

After speaking with several of Phelps’s victims – relatives of fallen soldiers – I finally understood the extent of his savagery. He visits a cemetery where a soldier is being interred, makes his God-awful noise and then prances happily back to Kansas, leaving the soldier’s family devastated and at a loss to understand the degree of his hatred.

Most people try to get past it.

Not Matthew Snyder’s dad, Albert Snyder. He sued Phelps for intentional infliction of emotional distress, and won a $5 million judgment in a federal trial court. But Phelps appealed and not only had the judgment against him reversed, but got an order from the appellate judges requiring Albert Snyder to reimburse him for $16,510 in costs.

Enter O’Reilly. “That is an outrage and I will pay Mr. Snyder’s obligation,” O’Reilly said on March 31. “I am not going to let this injustice stand.” Bravo for a man who puts his money where his mouth is.

Incidentally, the case has been accepted for review by the U.S. Supreme Court.

Regarding O’Reilly: This my second gentle encounter with him. Several years ago I was writing a series of columns about an epidemic of child murders in New Jersey. It seemed to me there wasn’t as much outrage over the killings as you’d expect. The news stories seemed to come and go, and I don’t recall any especially passionate opinion pieces on these wretched felonies.

But there was O’Reilly on the Fox News Network displaying admirable rage at people who would kill an infant. He yelled. He slammed his hand on his desk. At least in that one area, I was a fan.

Our agreement on Phelps is not complicated: A family has a right to grieve its loss without a bunch of yahoos celebrating the death. Can it be any plainer than that?

Albert Snyder had the guts to sue and he got screwed. Cheers to O’Reilly for offering to write a check. A Snyder family spokeswoman told me that any money left over from what Albert Snyder has to pay Phelps would go toward a scholarship in Matthew’s name.

I decided to send my own check to Barley Snyder at 100 East Market St., York, Pa. 17401.

Jeffrey can be reached at jeffrey@zestoforange.com

By Michael Kaufman

Dear Friends and Family,

Thank you for your concern. As you have probably figured out by now I did not make a “quick trip to the UK” nor did I lose a bag that contained my passport and credit cards. Someone (I’m told it’s the “Russian Mafia”) has hacked into my email account and sent everyone on my address list a bogus message.

“I know this may sound odd,” I supposedly wrote, “but it all happened very fast. I’ve been to the US embassy and they’re willing to help me fly without my passport but I just have to pay for my ticket and settle some bills. Right now I’m out of cash and my credit cards all gone.” (Right there you can tell it isn’t me. I would have written, “…my credit cards are all gone.”)

“I have contacted my bank but the process of getting new cards is far too long. I’m just gonna have to plead with you to lend me some funds right now?” (Hah!  Anyone who knows me  would know I would never put a question mark there.)

“I’ll pay back as soon as I get home.” (Excuse me, Mr. Russian Mafia guy but didn’t you mean to write,“I’ll pay you back as soon as I get home?”) “I need to get on the next available flight home.” (A little redundant are we, da?)
 
“Please reply as soon as you get this message so I can forward the details as to where to send the funds. You can reach me via the hotel’s desk phone if you can, the number is, 011447135987030.” (If anyone actually called this number, please let me know what happened.)

“I await your response…you can reach me via my alternate email (michael10990@aol.com) as am logged onto AOL via my black berry.” (Nooooooo, you cannot. That is not my alternate email address and I don’t own a “black berry.”)

Those who replied to the fake email address seeking verification received this reply: “Asking you to send the funds to me directly is enough proof you really want to assist..am sorry i wont let  you put me through all this crap all in the name of wanting to help…do you have an idea of what i have been through already..Never mind..thanks for trying to help though…i appreciate.” (There, that should convince the skeptics. Kaufman is just the kind of guy that asks his friends  and relatives for money and then accuses THEM of putting him through crap.)

To add a touch of authenticity, the email ends,  “Sent from my Verizon Wireless BlackBerry” (No “black berry” and no “Verizon Wireless BlackBerry” either. I have enough trouble just figuring out how to use my cell phone.)

Unlike the ubiquitous “Nigerian” scams, this one isn’t mainly about getting people to send money. The “Russian Mafia” is looking for email addresses that will lead them to big bank accounts….and to the big banks themselves. That’s where they do their real hacking. So they come to the wrong guy when they picked on me.

But for the time being they have wiped out all my saved incoming and sent email messages. Feel free to write to me here at Zest if you don’t know the real alternate address. I’ll keep you posted. Dasvadanya!

Michael can be reached at Michael@zestoforange.com.

By Shawn Dell Joyce
It is very difficult to avoid eating genetically modified organisms (GMO’s) in our country, because they are so pervasive in the food system and unlabeled in the grocery stores. Part of the reason for this is biotech giants fought to keep GMO foods unlabeled.

Some 200 million acres of the world’s farms grew biotech crops last year, with over 90 percent of the genetically engineered (GE) seeds coming from US-based Monsanto. Scientists have taken genetic materials from one organism (like a soil bacterium), along with an antibiotic resistant marker gene, and spliced both into a food crop (like corn) to create a genetically modified crop that resists specific diseases and pests.

There has been no long term independent testing on the impacts of these “franken-foods” on the ecosystem or human health.  Instead, there is a long litany of concealed truths, strong arm tactics and even outright bribery by the world’s biotech giants. Most recently, the growth hormones from GE organisms known as rBGH, which is given to cows to make them produce more milk, were banned in Europe and Canada after the authorities found out about the health risks resulting from drinking milk from cows treated with rBGH hormones.  Some American milk producers started labeling their milk “rBGH and rBST free.” Monsanto, which sells bovine growth hormones under the brand name Posilac, began suing dairy producers to force them to stop labeling their milk.

In addition to most milk products, GMO’s can be found in most commercially-farmed meats, and processed foods on store shelves. In our country, 89 percent of all soy, 61 percent of all corn, and 75 percent of all canola are genetically-altered. Other foods like commercially-grown papaya, zucchini, tomatoes, several fish species, and food additives like enzymes, flavorings, and processing agents, including the sweetener aspartame (NutraSweet®) and rennet used to make hard cheeses, also contain GMO’s.

To complicate matters, GMO’s move around in the ecosystem through pollen, wind, and natural cross-fertilization.  The Union of Concerned Scientists conducted two separate independent laboratory tests on non-GM seeds “representing a substantial proportion of the traditional seed supply” for corn, soy and oilseed rape. The test found that half the corn and soy, and 83 percent of the oilseed rape were contaminated with GM genes, eight years after the GM varieties were first grown on a large scale in the US.

The reports states that “Heedlessly allowing the contamination of traditional plant varieties with genetically engineered sequences amounts to a huge wager on our ability to understand a complicated technology that manipulates life at the most elemental level.” There could be “serious risks to health” if drugs and industrial chemicals from the next generation of GM crops were consumed in food.
What can you do to avoid GMO’s?

• Know how your food is grown by buying directly from local farmers.
• Support organic agriculture, and food producers who label their ingredients, particularly dairy farmers.
• Eat pastured meat raised on organic feed-the only way to ensure this is to buy from someone you know.
• Support farmers who are a sued by biotech giants. Monsanto has set aside an annual budget of $10 million and a staff of 75 devoted solely to investigating and prosecuting more than 150 farmers for a total of more than $15 million.
• Demand labeling on all GMO-containing products so that we at least have a choice!

Shawn@zestoforange.com

Photography by Rich Gigli

PRAIRIE -The formation of the North American Prairies started with the upwelling of the Rocky Mountains. The mountains created a rain shadow that killed most of the trees. Most prairie soil was deposited during the last glacial advance that began about 110,000 years ago. The glaciers expanding southward scraped the soil, picking up material and leveling the terrain. As the glaciers retreated about 10,000 years ago, it deposited this material in the form of till. (From Wikipedia)

Himalayan

By Carrie Jacobson

Easter Sunday and I am renewed, revived, reawakened.

Saturday brought a church service, a baptism in the midst of an Easter celebration. For me, unaccustomed, the event shines, stands alone in a raft of Sundays, a raft of churchless Easters.

The day has never passed without my recognizing it. Never passed without my sense of rebirth, or a quickening of the breath of faith. But this Easter dawned on the heels of celebration, oflight shining deep into the darkness, of voices raised together in joyous song.

I made this painting earlier in the day, in the sunshine on the sidewalk outside of Center Framing & Art in West Hartford, Conn. The gallery represents me, and this month, the owner has given me the front window! If you’re interested in the painting, shoot me an email.

From left, in front of the gallery window stocked full of my stuff, is my niece Larkin, brother Rand, me, and friends Lizzie and Al.