I hear silences crashing, like shattering glass. Philly's own Aishah Simmons shows her film NO! Tues, 14 Nov (evening) at Washington, DC's Howard University (Crampton Auditorium).

Tuesday, Nov 7th means it's time for Americans to vote. Some of us vote regularly or even always, as though our lives depend upon it... which in many ways they do.

Issues collide again in the terrible, execution-style shootings of little schoolgirls in rural southern Pennsylvania. I spent my adolescence not far from rural and semi-rural Lancaster ("LANK-uh-ster") - near the historic Susquehanna River.

For me this is a departure but (for reasons I won't go into now) I feel the need to share something about hairdressers. Now, hair and its dressing often is a very cultural thing. So while surfing around I realised this issue seems to cross just about every group. Then I found Ani Moller's blog where she posted an entry titled "I hate hairdressers." Ok. Maybe it's not that extreme but ya have to wonder. From where does the apparent breakdown in communication come between a head of hair and its owner, and so many hairdressers?? Or 'hairmessers' says Ani Moller's reader named Pam. You can scroll to Pam's comment where she says she and another reader - Missy - met because of mutual "hair hell." Pam writes eloquently: "...I had highlights done. Well the moron of a “stylist� put bleach on my head (I wanted color used) and sat me under a dryer for 40 minutes. I think she forgot about me while doing her friend’s hair. ... The idiot turned the top of my head an ugly blonde. This looked lovely with the rest of the hair dark. ... [i]t also felt like straw. The only way to fix this is by cutting it off. ...I’d rather have no hair than a bad haircut. That just brings you down and keeps you in a bad place. ...there are a lot of bad people out there doing hair. ...This is our hair, people. We have to wear it. It’s time to hold these idiots responsible. I’m sick of paying for what I don’t want. ..." >>> Can we give Pam & Ani an amen???

You have to search hard and then read between the lines to find anything about the tens of thousands of African women - mostly Ethiopian - currently trapped in Lebanon in the midst of the humanitarian disaster caused by Israel's overwhelming and prolonged military assault. Just to interject a piece of traditional wisdom about this deadly turn in the "Mideast (read Palestinian) conflict": Two wrongs don't make a right. What I find just as sad as whole-scale cross-border fighting is that even before these missile and rocket attacks began these women already were trapped in a largely ignored humanitarian disaster - in Lebanon and elsewhere in the Middle East. What other African countries likely have citizens trapped in Lebanon's man-made tragedy? Somalia, Burundi, and probably even Nigeria. On Wed., 19 July from relative safety in a Beirut underground parking garage, BBC News showed the unidentified face of a lone displaced Ethiopian woman. She appeared to be 40ish and seemed to be wearing a blue maid's uniform. Obviously distressed, she stood against a cement pillar, covering her mouth with her hand. In that moment my impression was she seemed alone, even among the people - mostly Lebanese - also sheltering there and milling around her.