"'God our Father, God our Father, we thank you, we thank you,' he sang. 'For our many blessings, for our many blessings, Amen, Amen.'"

Child at the Waffle House.

Jesus calling: You can't just eat your waffle.

"Afghan rapper escaped teen marriage by singing about it."

From Public Radio International. There's a skimpiness to the story and doesn't quite support the drama of the headline:

�One day my mom told me, �You have to return to Afghanistan with me. There�s a man there who wants to marry you. Your brother�s engaged and we need your dowry money to pay for his wedding.��

Sonita [Alizadeh] was devastated. So she wrote the song "Brides for Sale." The song starts �Let me whisper, so no one hears that I speak of selling girls. My voice shouldn�t be heard since it�s against Sharia. Women must remain silent� this is our tradition.�...

Sonita was worried what her parents would think about the video � but they actually loved it � and they also told her that she didn�t have to get married....

The attention around Sonita�s music landed her a full scholarship to an arts academy in Utah, and that led to the concert here in the San Francisco Bay Area.

PRI is giving her publicity and extracting a fair amount of criticism of America. The photo captions are: "Afghan rapper Sonita Alizadeh narrowly escaped a forced marriage at 14 by writing the song 'Brides for Sale.' She recently visited West Oakland, California, and was surprised that the US, like Iran and Afghanistan, has poor neighborhoods and homeless people." And: "Sonita was shocked by this neighborhood in West Oakland. 'Are you telling me in America there are places where you can�t walk alone at night?' she asked."

"I beg the Lord to grant us more politicians who are genuinely disturbed by the state of society, the people, the lives of the poor."

"As long as the problems of the poor are not radically resolved by rejecting the absolute autonomy of markets and financial speculation, and by attacking the structural causes of inequality, no solution will be found for the world's problems or, for that matter, to any problems."

Said the Pope.

That was back in 2013. I'm noticing it today reading the Twitter feed #ResistCapitalism.

"By glamorizing a limited budget in a piously frugal 'look what you can do with it' sort of way, it suggests that people who aren�t eating as beautifully are doing it wrong and deserving of additional scorn."

"This isn�t an exercise in actually eating what SNAP recipients can eat, and it creates false impressions of what this lived reality actually is, making it easier for people to make false comparisons to their own situation."

A former nutritionist named Stephanie Jolly told Darlena Cunha, a home-based parent and former television producer. Cunha has an article in WaPo titled "How Gwyneth Paltrow hurt America�s poor and hungry/Her uber-privileged food stamp challenge obscures the many obstacles low income people face."

We were just talking about Paltrow's food-stamp challenge here. There are lots of good comments in there. And Dan from Madison has his own blog post, here:

I decided to go to my local grocery store to see if I could get enough food to live on for one week for $29.... Vegetables, frozen, are a great deal.... The chicken thighs were an easy choice for protein.... The mayo cost us $1.59 - but that will help stretch all of that tuna that only cost us .625 per can (there was a deal at 4 for $2.50).  I would plan on tuna fish sandwiches or that PB and J for lunches at my job, and would bring an apple or banana along.  The bread was only .89 for the loaf.  For breakfast I could imagine a fried egg atop toast with a little yogurt and/or fruit on the side.  The cans of chicken noodle soup were an astounding .49 each.  For dinners, I imagined rice (.99 for the bag - and that is a lot of rice), and chicken with vegetables.... So the total for all of this food above was $23.99...

To that, Dan added a "flask of Shellback Spiced rum... $4.19." He declares: "I think I pretty conclusively proved that one person could easily eat for $29 for a week and still have money left over for bad habits like drinking."

Does that count as the "scorn" Stephanie Jolly was talking about? And, more importantly, will Dan be "eating beautifully"?

Misunderstood word of the day: Yardy.

I was reading a Guardian article titled "Can Oregon's tiny houses be part of the solution to homelessness?"

The 30 dwellings at Opportunity Village[, in Eugene, are] made of prefab donated materials, cost �around $3,300 a unit.� The savings come from the fact that they are basically detached bedrooms, with no utilities or running water....

[And] Dignity Village, two hours� drive north, on the outskirts of Portland... began in 2001 as a �tent city�, and a protest against the city�s harassment of homeless people... From 2003, the tents were replaced with tiny homes. Since then, the village has successfully offered housing on the communalist model that Opportunity Village is patterned on.

A commenter named RoughSleeper:

They look like sheds on allotments. In which case, can we have chickens and grow our own food? Will there be some kind of community policing to stop a yardy culture growing?

Chickens and growing your own food? I assumed "yardies" were something like "foodies" and filed away the new slang to use the next time Meade fantasizes about putting a chicken tractor and greenhouse in our backyard.

But that's not what RoughSleeper was talking about. Urban Dictionary says � I'll quote the more polite definition � "Yardy is another word for a Jamaican, specifically one from a difficult socio-economic area. The term stems from the slang name given to occupants of government yards in Trenchtown, a neighborhood in West Kingston, Jamaica. Trenchtown was originally built as a housing project following devastation caused by Hurricane Charlie. Each development was built around a central courtyard with communal cooking facilities. Due to the poverty endemic in the neighborhood, crime and gang violence became rife, leading the occupants of Trenchtown to be in part stigmatized by the term 'Yardie.'"

The San Francisco cathedral with a sprinkler system to repel human beings who sleep in its doorways...

... has given up the practice � apparently because it violated the city's water-use regulations (and not because the church got scourged in social media).