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\"I don't care about any silly play, or any stupid decorations,\" he thought. [Arthur Blaine] displayed this attitude towards any religious holiday. While his teacher was talking, he remembered back to last year, the day he found out that his mom was Jewish and his dad was Catholic. It meant they didn't celebrate all the same holidays. They told him their family celebrated Catholic holidays when Arthur was little, but now that he was a \"big boy\" things would be different. His parents explained that they still loved each other, but they had different beliefs. His mom asked him how he felt about celebrating Christmas with his father, and Hanukkah with her. Arthur did not like the idea. Arthur didn't know anyone else who was Jewish. Feeling more confident, he decided to meet with [Monica] after school. First he told Miss Carls of his similar predicament. Arthur left and found Monica heading down the street. \"Monica, I didn't know you were Jewish. Me too.\"

Blaine Arthur Strunk of Perkasie, Pa., died Tuesday, September 19, 2006, in Beverly Health Care Center, Doylestown, Pa. He was 77. He was the husband of Elizabeth Liz (Docimo) Strunk. The couple had celebrated their 37th wedding anniversary on July 11. Born in Pen Argyl, Pa., he was the son of the late John Myers and Lesbia Jane (Powell) Strunk. He was a graduate of Lehigh University, Bethlehem, Pa., where he went on to receive his masters degree in education. An Army veteran of World War II, he served in Japan from 1946 to 1948. He was a member of V.F.W. Forrest Lodge 245, Sellersville, Pa. An educator, Mr. Strunk was employed by the Pennridge School District, Perkasie, beginning in 1963, where he first worked as assistant principal and director of athletics.

He graduated from Ben Lomond High School where he was active in all athletics and Vocal music. He graduated from Weber State University with a degree in business. He was a member of the Weber State Singers. He completed 20 years with the Mormon Tabernacle Choir. He was employed by the LDS Church in Welfare Services. He enjoyed helping those who needed direction in their lives, and he got great satisfaction out of helping others.

Who were the convicts who were discharged onto the ''fatal shore''? While it is hard not to think of most of them as in some sense victims -whether of their circumstances, or of a ferocious penal code - that doesn't necessarily mean they were innocent victims. Contrary to what Mr. [Robert Hughes] calls a ''stout and consoling fiction'' of later times, the majority had previous convictions, and only around 1 in 50 could be considered a political prisoner (though the proportion was at least twice as high among the Irish, who constituted nearly a quarter of the convict population as a whole). Yet the horrors represent only part of the story. Employers slowly learned that they got better results from their convict laborers when they treated them well. Many emancipists prospered (a few even made large fortunes, especially in whaling and sealing). The emancipists' children, the ''Currency lads'' and ''Currency lasses'' - the term implied local currency, with a limited circulation, as opposed to sterling - grew up thinking of Australia as a homeland, not as a jail, and one in which for most of them prospects were rosier than they would have been back in Britain. Nor is ''The Fatal Shore'' a depressing book, painful though much of it is. It has its heroes as well as its ogres; it resurrects some strange personalities and extraordinary careers; there is material in it for 20 different movies, from the tense account of an abortive uprising among the convicts on Norfolk Island - how you want it to succeed! - to the adventures of Mary Bryant, ''the Girl from Botany Bay,'' a prisoner who in 1790 led an escape party that sailed a stolen boat all the way from Sydney to Timor.

Toward the end of last year, I talked with a supremely calm gentleman named King Logan, an officer of the krewe called Rex. When I dropped by Logan's public relations firm, I already knew this much: Krewe is a term coined in 1857 by a group called the Mistik Krewe of Comus. They staged the first New Orleans themed parade, complete with floats and masked men in costume. Komus, in Greek, means \"to revel,\" and the theme was John Milton's \"Paradise Lost.\" The Krewe of Rex hit the streets in 1872 and managed to tame previously rowdy Mardi Gras celebrations into a relatively orderly fete. Its king, Rex, became monarch of all Mardi Gras. It designated a special set of Mardi Gras colors - purple, gold and green. Purple for justice, gold for power and green for faith. Rex could exercise enough clout to get Mardi Gras declared an official government holiday. No school on Fat Tuesday! The Rex procession would be the highlight of Fat Tuesday from 1872 onward. Yes, I could learn that much and a lot more from Arthur Hardy's excellent \"Mardi Gras in New Orleans: An Illustrated History\" (Arthur Hardy Enterprises, $24.95), but I figured King Logan might fill me in on what would be happening just before Mardi Gras 2005. King, by the way, is his real first name, from a family tradition that goes back many generations. I had come to New Orleans in November expecting the krewes would be all in a dither. Instead, this was more like sleepy time down South. 1) Chicago Tribune Photo / Nancy Stone - Mark Olivier, right, works on a Mardi Gras float in New Orleans; 2) KRT Photo - bottom, some of the colored strings of beads that float riders throw to crowds lining the parade route. 3) NewOrleansOnline.Com Photo - Exuberant revelers jam downtown Bourbon Street during parade festivities for Mardi Gras Chicago Tribune Photos / Nancy Stone - 4) John Marchiafava, above, shaves Styrofoam for a float at Mardi Gras World in New Orleans, the field's largest company, 5) which features the cartoon heads shown at top; Mardi Gras madness In New Orleans, where the party never ends [Blaine Kern]'s Mardi Gras World Photo - A gigantic float of a jester supported on the back of a dinosaur is prepared for this years Mardi Gras parade in New Orleans.

The Krewe of [Rex] hit the streets in 1872 and managed to tame previously rowdy Mardi Gras celebrations into a relatively orderly fete. Its king, Rex, became monarch of all Mardi Gras. It designated a special set of Mardi Gras colors -- purple, gold and green. Purple for justice, gold for power and green for faith. Rex could exercise enough clout to get Mardi Gras declared an official government holiday. No school on Fat Tuesday! [Blaine Kern] said Mardi Gras accounts for only 30 percent of the company's revenue. Guided tours and parties bring in 40 percent. The other 30 percent comes from non-Mardi Gras floats commissioned by the likes of Red Baron Pizza and Capt. Morgan's Rum for appearances in parades around the country. Other figures go to theme parks and Las Vegas enterprises. Kern workers built the giant motorcycle jutting from the Harley Davidson Cafe on the Strip and exaggerated forms that decorate the Luxor, Harrah's and Rio casinos. Only a few other people toured the museum, but videos of Mardi Gras parades past filled the halls with noise: excited crowds yelling \"throw me somethin',\" marching bands, singers, sirens and air horns. The recorded cacophony blended nicely with the live musicians performing down below in Jackson Square, and I suddenly felt a strong sense of anticipation -- as if I were going to show up on the Friday before Mardi Gras and proceed to have the best time of my life. Maybe I shall. If not this year, then another, because Mardi Gras isn't going away.

The Krewe of [Rex] hit the streets in 1872 and managed to tame previously rowdy Mardi Gras celebrations into a relatively orderly fete. Its king, Rex, became monarch of all Mardi Gras. It designated a special set of Mardi Gras colors -- purple, gold and green. Purple for justice, gold for power and green for faith. Rex could exercise enough clout to get Mardi Gras declared an official government holiday. No school on Fat Tuesday! [Blaine Kern] said Mardi Gras accounts for only 30 percent of the company's revenue. Guided tours and parties bring in 40 percent. The other 30 percent comes from non-Mardi Gras floats commissioned by the likes of Red Baron Pizza and Capt. Morgan's Rum for appearances in parades around the country. Other figures go to theme parks and Las Vegas enterprises. Kern workers built the giant motorcycle jutting from the Harley Davidson Cafe on the Strip and exaggerated forms that decorate the Luxor, Harrah's and Rio casinos. Only a few other people toured the museum, but videos of Mardi Gras parades past filled the halls with noise: excited crowds yelling \"throw me somethin',\" marching bands, singers, sirens and air horns. The recorded cacophony blended nicely with the live musicians performing down below in Jackson Square, and I suddenly felt a strong sense of anticipation -- as if I were going to show up on the Friday before Mardi Gras and proceed to have the best time of my life. Maybe I shall. If not this year, then another, because Mardi Gras isn't going away.

In a Facebook message [Blaine Cooper] said [Michael Lewis Arthur Meyer] and two men entered the refuge Wednesday night and assaulted a disabled Vietnam veteran. They then \"stormed into the refuge\" and assaulted Cooper. \"I do believe Lewis (Meyer) is a Paid Provocateur by the Fed's (sic) to divide and destroy,\" Cooper wrote in the post.

The nice thing about a leisurely film project, too, is that it can be governed by accidents some of the time. [Blaine Allan] first started collecting some of the footage that would wind up in You Are Not Alone during a 1986 road trip across the Southwestern U.S., before he had so much as a treatment in mind. A friend invited him to his wedding in Los Angeles, and Allan got talked into driving the distance with another friend who was living in Alabama at the time. On the chance that he might get to use it on something interesting, Allan brought one of the Queen's movie cameras along on the four- day drive. Home is Canada, and there is a classic subtext at work here about the mouse's search for an identity relative to the elephant. Looking at the plot (which is really just a collection of ideas, minuscule actions and impressions conveyed through a script that reads like a long Imagist poem) it could almost be considered a perfect expression of this theme of the Canadian in search of him- or herself. It is, after all, a \"detective story about a missing person, told from the point of view of the missing person,\" as Blaine Allan describes it. And there's another rub: the missing person winds up getting confused with the detective, so that finally we're not sure who has been looking for whom, who has returned home or who is staying away. An opening monologue by detective Politzer (Kingston stage actor and teacher Gord Love) lets us know just how important the idea of 'searching' is to the movie. Sitting on a hotel bed in the middle of nowhere, recording a taped message for his boss back in Canada, Politzer traces the origin of the word investigate by breaking it down into its Latin elements: \"In-and vestigare. Vestigate. That means to track, or trace. Vestigium. Trace. Like 'vestiges' or 'vestigal.' Like your appendix, a vestigal organ. The traces left behind. Following tracks. Looking for traces. Now 'searching.' Searching. That's something different. Like 'chercher,' in French. Search. Circare. Circare. Exploring. Not like looking for something, but like going around the world. Going around.\"

\"It's such a tragedy, Colorado,\" [Robert Bentley] said of the murders that occurred during a midnight showing of a new Batman movie in a Denver suburb. \"It could happen anywhere in the United States. Just the other day you had a random shooting in Tuscaloosa. I'm very thankful that we only had some injuries and hospitalizations but we didn't have anybody killed.\" \"I'm a strong believer that people have a right to bear arms,\" he said. \"I'm not going to change my stand on the Second Amendment. I believe in the Constitution and the right to bear arms.\" [Leland Avery]'s attorney, James Anderson, said he'll file a lawsuit seeking to remove Arthur Crawford Sr. as the party's nominee. Crawford won the April 24 runoff by 80 votes, but Avery contends that Crawford did not file campaign finance disclosures in accordance with state law, disqualifying him as a candidate.