Stuck in Toronto …
I’m supposed to be in Hartford tonight prepping for a DVD shoot … but thunderstorms have closed the airport.
Which means I’m cooling my heels in a Toronto airport hotel (not literally, it’s muggy here) until tomorrow …
The cameras will have to wait.
Nashville redux
As you’ve undoubtedly noticed if you’ve been reading my blog lately, I’ve been in Nashville attending the NAESP conference. Great city, great conference, and this is a great opportunity to check out the new Wordpress gallery feature.
Some of my Nashville photos, after the link … click on any to see larger versions (and again to get a full-size version.) Oddly, the multi-file upload feature promised in Wordpress 2.5 did not work.
Ishi: Coming together in peace
Just had a great cab ride back from downtown Nashville to the ecological disaster they call the Gaylord Opryville. What an amazing conversation!
I always like to talk to cab drivers and learn something about the city, the people, the milieux of the place I’m visiting. Last month in New Orleans we had a cabbie who was a black gangsta version of Mario Andretti, and we cruised Nawlins with open windows, screeching tires, and rap music blaring out something incomprehensible that included “sojer boy” and “crib on 40 acres.”
This time coming back to the hotel we had Ishi, a black Muslim cabbie originally from Ethiopia. He chatted about war, Eritrea, Ethiopia, and where he was from. Then we got on the subject of religion when I asked if it was true that Eritrea was mostly Muslim and Ethiopia mostly Christian.
Turns out he’s a Muslim. The wonderful thing is that he was very open to talking about religion and other religions … the opposite of the “infidels must die” that we see too often in missives from the middle east. A clue as to why is his name, “Ishi,” which means “coming together.” His father gave him that name because one parent was Muslim and one parent was Christian (I forget which was which).
I told him he was carrying a bunch of Christians in his cab, slapped his shoulder as we both laughed, and then we drove right into a conversation about the Old Testament, New Testament, the Quran, and more. Neither of us converted the other 
but the beautiful thing about the conversation was that we were having it … and no-one was shouting or angry or upset. In fact it was a wonderful conversation in which we shared our beliefs.
It turns out that Ishi has been in America for 17 years, and loves the multi-cultural aspects of his adopted country. He talked about Egypt and Iraq as places where religious differences end in death, and deplored that reality. And he was thankful to God that he’s been give the opportunity to live in a land and raise his family in a country where there is safety, the rule of law (he must have mentioned that 3 or 4 times) and the ability to have conversations where differences are expressed without anger, hatred, and violence.
When he pulled up at Opryland, we stayed in the cab for another 5 minutes, chatting. Finally we paid, I shook his hand, wished him the best of God’s blessings, and departed.
There is hope for peace among people of goodwill.
Light and color in St. Louis Cathedral
I’m in New Orleans for the week for a conference.
The big easy is an amazing place, to say the least. It’s my first time, and I’m enjoying it immensely.
Any city that prioritizes walkers over drivers can’t be all bad, and New Orleans is a great walking city. The art galleries are many, varied, and wonderful, as are the antiques stores.
New Orleans has distinctive smells, too. The ripe musk of the bayou nearby, the cooking spilling out from multiple restaurants in the French Quarter, the alcohol in a thousand hands on Bourbon street … and yes, the vomit on the sidewalk outside on of the thousand bars.
I’ve only started exploring the city in some of the hours not allocated to the conference, and I look forward to more over the next couple of days.
Thinking of Florida
It’s a new year, and it’s January, and it’s cold, with the promise of rain or snow in the next couple of days. That’s life in British Columbia, Canada.
Makes me dream of a trip to Florida a few years ago.
Here’s a pic I took at Cocoa Beach on the east coast of Florida, just up from Cape Canaveral.
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Sparkplug 9 is John Koetsier's blog on life, the universe, and everything,
but mostly the stuff you see big in the tags to the left.
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