Dear Friends,
Last week I was raving to you about Scottish fiddler Alasdair Fraser and cellist Natalie Haas. They have since gone on to play shows on the west coast and made the apparent mistake of stopping in Portland. Yesterday Alasdair posted this:
Sigh. Portlandia was once a shining rainbow utopia—they even made a TV show about it. Now it seems a giant den of meth heads and thieves. I don’t even want to know what that custom violin and four elite bows are worth. More than my mortgage balance, and I am not even remotely kidding.
That reminds me; I need to call my insurance company and make sure my instruments are fully covered.
Long time “online” friend Roman Kozak, a follower and subscriber dating all the way back to the early Dead Reckoning days, is running for the Pennsylvania House of Representatives. If you live in House District 14 (Beaver County), he’s your man. We need a lot more like him.
That’s a great immigrant story, and that’s a great looking family!
This week brought some joyous news. Human rights activist Ayaan Hirsi Ali announced that she is now a Christian. It has been a long journey for the native-born Somali. As a teen she fled her Muslim family to escape an arranged marriage and took asylum in the Netherlands. She chronicled her journey in two of her bestselling books, Infidel and Nomad. She was eventually forced to flee Holland after her film collaborator Theo Van Gogh was butchered on the street in broad daylight by Muslim terrorists. They left a note stabbed into his chest: “Ayaan, you’re next.” Eventually the Dutch government essentially kicked her out of the country because they couldn’t protect her.
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