Ron Pierpaoli Lives!!

A year ago yesterday my father died of prostate cancer. My relationship with my dad was the most complicated and difficult relationship of my life; some of it was my fault and some of it was his, but the reality was that we barely spoke or saw each other for the last fifteen years of his life up until the final weeks when he was dying in hospital. At his wake and funeral it was very clear that he had aspects of his life I knew nothing about; he had been a basketball coach for years, a side of him I never saw or knew much about. In death it became obvious that we were both bigger than the things we always fought about and I was able to put a lot of hurt aside to write a eulogy for him. I am a writer, something he was often ambivalent about, and I have spent years dealing with my own issues of depression and repressed anger that keep me from writing as often as I’d like to or should. But the night before his funeral I found myself able to put any negative feelings and hurts aside to write about him in a way that I hoped would bring people together rather than drive them apart. The following is the eulogy I wrote for him and one of the few things I wrote in the past year that I actually feel good about. It took his death to prove to myself that I really did love him a lot more than I could admit during all those years I was mad at him. Unlike my younger siblings, as the firstborn & oldest, I found I had a lot of really vivid and positive memories from my childhood of him, things that really helped shape me into who I am today. He was a very spiritual guy and he certainly inspired a sense of spirituality and the eternal in me. In many ways I’ve realized that he will never really be gone from me as there is so much of him I still carry with me. I love you, Dad and I still miss you.


Ronald Joseph Pierpaoli
8/10/47-2/20/08

Fathers loom large over the lives of sons and daughters. Whether present or absent, the role and position of father in any family is that of primacy; in numerology the father is represented by 1. Paternal energy is synonymous with maleness and the life-giving radiance and energy of the sun.
Ron Pierpaoli loomed large as a father. He had two families, two sets of children and he straddled the gap, passing between them, sharing stories and meals, many meals.
Ron loved food. He was quite proud of that. He’d broadcast his thoughts on eating at Bridgeport Air Center beside his soapy-wet airplane, N2571 Quebec.
“We should probably start thinking about lunch.” He’d pat his belly loudly.
There were certain foods that elicited specific stories.
Sometimes the stories were serious stuff.
Polenta? Polenta is not just some porridge made of corn. Polenta helped conquer the world.
When eating polenta my father always told of how the Roman soldiers were able to carry corn meal in their packs. When they camped they would add water and over a fire they could cook and eat polenta right out of their helmets. It was part of how one of the largest most successful armies in history drew their strength for each military campaign and kept on moving across Europe all from the carbohydrate corn.
You could get a connection to the history of the world just by sharing a meal with this guy.
He was a great and expansive man. His mind and stories stretched out across continents and through millennia.
I have vivid memories of places I have never been from the richness of his stories.
I can see all the way to Papua, New Guinea; Daddy swimming in a river, wearing just his skivvies, minus his glasses, splashing and shooing away some large unknown serpent that had swum up to him with malevolent intent.
He told stories of aborigines and saltwater crocodiles. When he returned from The Philippines there were tales of Jeepneys, outrigger canoes and the Metro-Manila Aides.
My Dad wasn’t into a lot of typical hobbies, no NASCAR or fishing for him. Ron Pierpaoli was into ologies. Archaeology, theology, provolone-ology.
Did he ever tell you about Diatryma?
On every trip to the Peabody museum in New Haven my father would marvel at the bones of Diatryma; a giant bipedal bird who ate early dog-sized horses. My Dad loved Diatryma. This creature lived during the Age of Mammals, the Miocene Epoch to be more accurate, about 20 million years ago. Diatryma was this seven-foot heavy bodied flightless bird with a terrible parrot-like beak and powerful clawed legs. I have to think these things would have been pretty scary. But he loved them.
Maybe he imagined eating one.
He encouraged imagination in his children. When I was six, he took us up into the steep woods beside Laurel Ledge School in Beacon Falls, Connecticut in search of Bigfoot.
I can remember a lot of apes in my childhood.
There was a Tarzan cartoon we watched on Saturday mornings and in it Tarzan was friends with several gorillas and they would help him out when he needed some muscle. Mangani. That’s what Tarzan called his ape friends. My father adopted that word and often referred to his offspring as his mangani.
Ungk ungk mangani that’s what Tarzan would say to set his gorilla-buddies into action. My dad used it in basically the same way.
Ungk ungk mangani could mean get up and go to bed, get your toys cleaned up, or get in the car, or let’s get going, whatever.
He was often dramatic and sometimes prone to hyperbole.
Let's face it, the family boat was really a dinghy, just slightly larger than my outstretched arms but it became the HMS Biz; Her Majesty’s Ship Biz. He named the boat in honor of his wife.
His wife, Elizabeth Ann Ajello; in part she ceased being just an aka Betty-Ann when she met my father. She became The Biz. Ron dubbed her Biz and it was so.
He changed things with his words, his proclamations, and his advice.
He dreamed big, he made a lot of announcements; asked grand rhetorical questions.
“This could be it, Biz.”
“You can’t possibly be fighting!”
“I’m gonna need quiet in this car, this is a dangerous merge”
He liked silence for merging onto highways, whether he was driving or not.
“Ok, let’s turn off the radio. You’ve got this merge coming up.”
He could be rough to work for. My dad wanted your full attention even if he was the one working on something. He wanted you to be ready beside him in case he dropped a screw or wobbled on a ladder.
“Stand by one, huh?”
Stand-by-one; the concept was very clear.
Ron was unique and he did things big. Even snacks; maybe especially snacks. Keebler cookies, fig newtons, grapes, chestnuts; a snack was rarely just one item. There was usually a selection; a multitude of options in the cookie, nut or fruit department.
Ron Pierpaoli was a learned man.
He valued good old fashioned book learning from scores and scores of books. He taught me to read bibliographies, to always consider your sources.
He made me value language; to choose words sometimes by their pop and pow, not just their meaning and significance.
“In the beginning was the word…”
He loved the Gospel of John and he impressed upon me the power words have to conjure images and meaning beyond any of the five senses. Ron believed in the mystery of ritual and in the sanctity of words prayed.
The night he died we left Columbia Presbyterian and overhead the full moon had a little bite taken out of it.
A lunar eclipse.
It had just started, couldn’t have been more than 15 minutes into it.
I couldn’t help thinking my father timed that.
There were so many cultures he had studied and admired that were all so big on eclipses. The Toltecs, Incas, Mayans, Aztecs, Phoenicians; they were all into eclipses of the sun and of the moon.
I really think Ron wanted to check out in time to catch the eclipse. He probably wanted to soak it in from the new view; a celestial vantage point.
It’s gotta be something. It’s gotta be some view.
In so many ways I keep telling myself he must be so happy right now because he was looking forward to this, he has all the answers now. He was always aware of and deeply concerned with the eternal and with the spirit-body. He looked to ancient texts for their descriptions of the after-life and the pathways our souls are destined to travel. The Egyptian Book of the Dead, the Nag Hammadi Gospels, the Codex Mendoza and the Dead Sea Scrolls; my father studied and examined these ancient texts looking for their reflections in our times and their echoes in our modern lives.
He often told me there is a banquet in heaven and I’m sure that’s right up his alley.
I hope that is where he is right now. He is there with Alessandro, his grandfather that he loved so much, for whom I was named. Maybe Dawn and Penny are there too, tails wagging, under the table or sitting near him waiting for table scraps. Maybe they’re serving polenta today and Ron can tell his grandfather about how the Romans used corn to conquer the world and Alessandro will listen smiling, so happy to see him again and share his stories. And Renzo is there too. Father reunited with son. And it is beautiful. I am sure of that.
But there will be sadness here.
This man who was so much larger than life is passing from it.
I cannot Stand-By-One anymore.
This is it, Biz.
Ungk ungk mangani

Pre-Order Evil Awakening: The Slash is Back!

Pre-Order Evil Awakening: The Slash is Back!
X Posse Press Release – May 21, 2008

The American Slasher film has returned. On August 19th, Evil Awakening will be released, bringing back the horror film that the people have demanded. X Posse Productions presents a film that has been called a “classic slasher film,” (Heidi Martinuzzi, Horror Post), and “Highly Entertaining,” (Josh Agnew, Evil Klown.com). This is a must for any fan of horror.

Synopsis:

Ludlow, a small and quiet town, was once terrorized by an insane serial killer. The townspeople brought him to justice, but true evil does not die. He will return and when a group of youngsters looking to party and have a good time in the very woods where he was killed, they will have to deal with the Evil Awakening and the bloodbath that ensues. Ludlow has a legend, and it carries and axe.

Now it is your chance to own the next great American Slasher Film, featuring music by Bitchslicer, Joe Becker, and Northern Liberties, and the gore and horror that you crave.

Pre-Order At Amazon.com Link: http://www.amazon.com/Evil-Awakening-Steve-Joseph-Adams/dp/B0019SKMPK/ref=sr_1_12?ie=UTF8&s=dvd&qid=1211419924&sr=8-12

Anti-Intellectual & Anti-Rational Right Winger gets roughed up

Chris Matthews beats up on one of the numerous and clueless right wing radio hosts who knows his talking points but none of the facts or history behind them. Last night Matthews had guests on reacting to Dubya's asinine allusions to Nazi appeasement on the floor of the Knesset yesterday and things got heated, and especially revealing, as Matthews held his guest's nose to the mess he made on Hardball's rug. Kevin James of KRLA, this right wing radio host that works in the LA market has gotta be sharp and ready with his smears in that liberal left coast region, but this clip proves he might be very good at doing his duty for the White House in smearing Barack Obama but the guy's got no sense of history. What may be even more comical is when he uses the movie "Pathway to 9/11" as supporting evidence that the Clinton Administration did too little to catch Osama bin Laden. And he uses it to deflect Air America Radio's Mark Green's reference to reading Richard Clarke's book Against All Enemies. Ah, do you get the feeling Kevin's not a big reader? Matthews, in shock at his guest's lack of any sort of knowledge basis, makes an appropriate association in remebering White House Press Secretary Dana Perino's admission that she didn't know the difference between the Bay of Pigs and the Cuban Missile Crisis.
Perhaps the most striking element of this video for me is that it really makes me wonder how many of these mad-dog right wingers with so much venom to spew actually have very little rational or factual basis for their arguments, smears and talking points. Would Rumsfeld, or Dubya himself, have been able to stand up to persistent questioning on what exactly they are alluding to when they raise the Nazi comparisons and analogies? Do they even know? These are folks that saw FDR and his New Deal as a great satan; comparing extremist Islam to Nazis belies a profound misunderstanding of both subjects. Plus, I have a feeling authoritarian types like most in this administration would get increasingly angry and increasingly awkward in trying to explain themselves. Sadly, our media simply doesn't question them. Instead we have the media asking whether Bush was actually referring to Obama with the smear? Huh? Come on. Bush is the most divisive, venomous politician who has ever disgraced our capitol, of course it was about Obama, and Carter and Pelosi and to whomever else sees the world and its inhabitants as more nuanced and more similar in our desires for coexistence than the shitheel from Crawford, Texas can comprehend. We've had enough of these liars and distorters. They don't know what they are talking about. They are loud and forceful and wrap themselves in false-patriotism to win arguments but they have very little knowledge or factual basis for so many of their arguments. These are a lot of the same folks who are thumping the drums for war with Iran right now. And, frankly, I'm not convinced many of them could even find Iran on a map of the world. But I guess that's what we have those expensive GPS satelites for, our bombs can probably find Iran, and that's enough for so many of them.
Enjoy the clip...

The Media isn't asking about WMD when they're eating BBQ

The video below is illustrative of a major problem in our 21st century excuse for a Republic. The press was meant to be the Fourth Estate which keeps the powerful honest and in check with the facts the public demands and deserves. We are simply not getting that today and the Iraq War was facilitated by media that didn't scrutinize anything and took what powerful people said as truth without challenging it or questioning it. Our media can't be in it for the popularity and the chances to rub elbows with powerful people. They need to get to the bottom of things and challenge these fucking politicians we've given the reigns to and they can't do that when they're helping the candidate season flesh for the barbecue and frolicking on the grounds of the Senator's palatial pad. Black coffee should be more than enough in the perks department for a true journalist. The point is to investigate, question, dig, prod, probe; and spending R & R time with the Senator simply doesn't help our democracy, in fact it does quite the opposite. If you share a nice sunny afternoon with a guy and his family and maybe schmooz with some really important folk you've always wanted to meet at his party, then the next time it matters, aren't you going to be a lot softer on the guy? Won't you be a helluva lot less likely to have the balls to ask your charming host who made those terrific ribs any tough questions? Our democracy depends on bold investigative reporting and fearless journalists seeking truth from the powerful. Maybe it's nice to see a Senator roll up his sleeves and eat some BBQ but there are far more important things at stake here and these party-with-the-press shin-digs do not serve the public at all.

KAYO Quick Bucks League Now Open to New Gyms!

Hello, Fight Fans!

KOFantasyBoxing's Fourth Kayo Quick Bucks League begins Friday February 1st and it's sure to be the best yet! More fights, more interactive, and more prizes!!
This season will feature a Grand Prize of 200 dollars and larger second and third place prizes! The site is ready to accept new members right now so don't waste any time!

Check out KOFantasyBoxing's new league now!

Hillary turns on the waterworks!

Here's Hillary speaking softly and getting desperate in New Hampshire. She's a panderer and a calculating career politician who doesn't like to lose. The latest polls have her way behind Obama in New Hampshire so we get the traditional ice-woman turning on the sprinklers.
I just don't buy that the choking back tears in this video is genuine at all. Hillary Clinton is part of the problem, not the solution and after Iowa I think that fact hasn't quite sunk in for her yet.
We were an empire long before the war in Iraq. The Clintons weren't liberals; they were labelled as such because of their stance on a few social issues that the Right Wing loves to scream about: gays and abortion. Aside from those issues the Clinton stance on corporate profiteering and American militarism are almost identical. Americans seem to be waking up to that and so we get Hillary scrambling to show a human side to out charisma Obama and Edwards.
Well, I doubt it'll work in New Hampshire tomorrow.

Ron Paul supporters chase and harangue Sean Hannity

If you don't think this country is headed for a change this video might make you want to re-think that.
Ron Paul, a candidate for the Republican Presidential nomination, was excluded from Fox News' forum of Presidentials hopefuls which aired last night and was moderated by Chris Wallace. Allegedly Wallace's set was designed only to house 5 candidates and the moderator and Fox decided to allow Rudy Giulianni, whom Paul had defeated in Iowa by 3 points, to take up one of those precious five chairs.
Well, check out the video below and see how a crowd of Paul supporters react when they spot Sean Hannity walking along in New Hampshire.
They are a bit scary that's for sure; angry mobs tend to be. But I'm certainly not one to weep for Hannity. What's that saying? The enemy of my enemy is my friend Seems appropos somehow.
But seriously, Ron Paul has been the only candidate on either side to bring up the issue of Blowback and American militarism. Gravel and Kucinich talk about it on the Dems side but Paul has been a lot more vocal it seems.
Ron Paul has gone toe-to-toe with McCain and Giulianni on the concept of blowback in the debates and he has been eloquent in describing the perils of our American Empire.
What Fox did by excluding him last night was insure that their viewers would not have access to the one and only Republican candidate talking about non-interventionist foreign policy and de-militarizing our economy.
Plain and simple, liberal and conservative Americans are sick of this war and we don't want to continue sewing the seeds of future blowback. Fox News clearly doesn't want Americans to hear that viewpoint echoed in a candidate.

Perhaps we can ask Sean Hannity about potential blowback from Fox' decision. Well, we don't have to ask, just watch...

Time is running out...

Happy New Year, Fight Fans!

KOFantasyBoxing's Fourth Grand Prize League begins this Friday January fourth and it's sure to be the best yet! More fights, more interactive, and more prizes!! I am currently updating fighter records and the rankings and they'll be ready to go on Friday. This season will feature a Grand Prize of 500 dollars and larger second and third place prizes! The site is ready to accept new members right now so don't waste any time!

Check out KOFantasyBoxing's new league now!