Northside Associated Ministries
GoodNewsLetter - July, 2009



Northside Presbyterian Church - Job Currently Available

St. Aidan's Episcopal Church - The Rev. Susan McGarry, Rector

Ann Arbor Wiki -St. Aidan's Episcopal Church

Northside Associated Ministries
Cooperating in Ministry
Office Phone: 734-663-5503
Administrative Assistant:
Ellen Magee

St. Aidan's Officers
Senior Warden
Fran Board
Junior Warden
Alan Vayda
Recording Secretary
Cindy Pierson
Secretary
Len Coombs
Treasurer
Shirley Coombs
Financial Secretary
Gail Graham
Liturgical Readers
Len Coombs
Acolytes
Susan McGarry
Choir
Noel McRobbie, director; Susan Wyman, coordinator
Evangelism
Michael Earl
Collar Industry

Finance
Alan Vayda
Altar Guild
Susan Pfoutz
Vestry
Fran Board
Len Coombs
Alan Vayda
Marian Kummerl
Jim Pierson
Shirley Coombs

Northside Officers
Clerk of Session
Brian Spolarich
Financial Secretary
Mary Ann Wilson
Treasurer
Nancy Renner

Session Members
Joan Penner-Hahn
Debra Davies
Kristin Klevering
Bruce Westlake
Caroline Richardson
Don Wilson
Tom Weeks

Ministry Contacts
Choir
Joseph Kozma-Cruz
Membership/Nuture
Joan Penner-Hahn
Social Justice
Matt Keefe
Nominating
Kristen Klevering
Personnel
Tom Weeks
Prayer Group
Jean Loup
Stewardship
Joan Penner-Hahn
Worship
Pat Hodges

NAM Officers
President
John Board
Vice President
Brian Spolarich
Secretary
Joan Penner-Hahn
Treasurer
Dill Howarth
Children and Youth Ministries
Marian Laughlin
B>Bldgs. and Grounds
Jim Pierson
Communications and Publicity

Adult Education
Debra Davies
Social Stewardship
Ann Grosse
Reehill Gallery
Sue Stanton



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Pastor's Corner:

[In the absence of a more formal Pastor's Corner, we offer up this note from Susan to St. Aidan's It should be of use to Northsider's as well.]:

Tomorrow is my last official Sunday before my Summer Sabbatical. If you are in town I hope you plan to come to church. You may see me in church with my children some Sundays and I will be visiting other churches other Sundays. I will do that to hear other people preach and to get ideas about welcoming others into our churches. I would ask you to do the same on your vacations this summer.

So if you are willing:

1) On Sundays, please go to church and be our scout.

2) See what you like about other services and what you don't like. Are they welcoming to you? How?

3) Please note any music you like, especially if it is from a source other than our Hymn Books. If you like a piece of music, take time to ask about it and find out where we can get it. Our copyright license lets us copy most music from established publishers.

4) Note creative ways they welcome children or offer them educational opportunities.

5) Bring back other ideas that you think will strengthen St. Aidan's.

Susan

In the News this month:

This is July,a time for hot dogs, and "National Ice Cream Month" .

The more memorable days this month are

Question of the Month: How many PhD's does it take to remove a Lazy Susan from a cabinet?

Answer to Last Month's Question: Which major league pitcher had the greatest repertoire of pitches?

The answer is Don Drysdale, the great Dodger pitcher of the '50's and '60's. It was said that he had nine pitches: a fastball, a curveball, a screwball, a change-up, a forkball, a spit-ball, a brush-back, a knock-down, and a bean-ball.

Now back to the news.

A Word From Ellen
Dear St. Aidanites: I thought you might like to know that my husband David just got back from Biloxi MS where he was working on a Habitat for Humanity house for a week. The place they stayed and the group that organized all of this is a combination of ERD (Episcopal Relief Development) & ELCA Lutheran outreach (I assume LWR). He said it was amazing and a whole subdivision of homes that had been built and they were beautiful.

We are members of King of Kings Lutheran Church in Ann Arbor, a congregation of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America

Ellen Magee, church office secretary

Book Group
The NAM Book Discussion Group Summer Info: Dates for the summer are set. The book for the July 14 meeting (at Melody McCormick's, 1710 Packard) is Louis L?Amour?s western Showdown at Yellow Butte. The Aug. 6 meeting will be at Angela William's, (1730 Longshore), and is the yearly time to share your favorite books.

Who Ya' Gonna Call?
Note to St. Aidanites: Susan is going to be on sabbatical. Please contact Fran Board (734-424-0104) or Alan Vayda (734-981-1785) for emergencies.

Meanwhile, the emergency pastoral contact for Northsiders for the weeks of June 29th & July 6th is Linda TerHaar 429-8221 (h)

July Schedule
There will be an 8:30 service of Holy Communion every week in July.

On July 5th, there will be an Episcopal led service of holy communion led by The Rev. James Graham at 10:00.

On July 12th there will be a Presbyterian led service at 10 AM. (No communion)

On July 19th the second service will be Episcopal holy communion led by the Rev. Jean Curry.

And on the 26th will be a Presbyterian led service at 10 AM. (No communion)

The Health Care Debate: Two Tables
In all the discussions on how this country is going to pay for health care, there is one question that I have not yet heard raised. Being that sort of guy, I naturally decided to do it here. First, we present two tables (all numbers taken from a 2009 brief from the Henry Kaiser Foundation . The first breaks total U.S. spending by type:

Health Care Category % of 2007 U.S. Costs
Hospital Care 31.1
Physicial/Clinical Services 21,4
Pescription Drugs 10.1
Nursing Home Care 5.9
Home Health Care 2.6
Other Personal Care 12.7
Other 16.2

And the second is a rough cut at who spends what (should really be a pie chart):

Percent of Population Percent of Spending
50 3
39 13
10 63
1 21

(In other words, 89 percent of the population account for 16 percent of the spending, and 21 percent of the spending is done by just one percent of the population. Unfortunately, which category someone falls in varies from year to year).

Here are the questions no one wants to ask: In the first table, which group is going to take a pay cut? For, it is not possible to reduce expenses without someone taking a pay cut.

Technical Talk
Some of you haven't been getting you normal dose of the GoodNewsLetter; I hope that this is at least partly fixed this month. Inspired by this, I'm going to say a few words about how e-mail gets transmitted, including a few remarks which you may find useful if you are overwhelmed with SPAM.

While modern software (and even some brain-dead operating systems) try to make it look like e-mail goes directly from sender to receiver at the speed of light, nothing could be further from the truth. The steps are something like this:

  • You type your message using the help of a mail client. The earliest ones had names like 'mail' and 'pine'. If you know what I am talking about, you probably can skip directly to the Wacky Video
  • The mail client attempts to connect to a mail server. If it succeeds, it communicates your message using a simple set of commands. If you have heard the term 'SMTP' and wonder what it means, it is the protocol your mail client uses to hand your message over to the mail serever.
  • SMTP specifies the format for the message. The start of the message consists of a number of 'header' lines. If you set your mail reader to 'show all headers' you can see them for yourself. Some have obvious names, such as 'To :' and 'From: '. Others are more esoteric.
  • If you are Real Lucky, you are sending the message to someone who is also served by your mail server. In that case, that someone uses something called a mail reader (some of the more popular ones are named 'gmail', 'thunderbird', 'evolution',and 'outlook') to retrieve the message from the server using one of two protocols.
  • But most of the time the message must go somewhere else. In that case the mail server adds a few headers of its own, and uses the TCP protocol to find a host which might know where it has to go
  • This process of adding headers and sending it on continues until it finally gets where it is supposed to go.
Now, the point is that this whole process can break down at any of these steps. And if it does, there may be no easy way to tell that it has broken down.

The easiest failures to identify and fix are when your mail server simply refuses to accept your message. Usually, this is caused by an improper client configuration, and you will know right away if something is wrong. And, if it is, you won't be reading this anyway.

Another problem is that the destination server may refuse to accept your mail. This can happen for any of a number of reasons, but the most common one is that it regards you as a spammer. And it is important to note that guilt by association is at work here: you may not be a spammer, but the receiving mail server regards your ISP as being used by spammers. If this is the case, there may be nothing you can do. Remember that I mentioned that it might take multiple hops for your message to get to its destination? At each hop, the relaying server might decide to reject or ignore your message.

Adding to the complexity are things known as 'List Servers'. A better name would be 'Mailing List Servers'. Someone with an account on one can include a number of email addresses; then, when email gets sent to that account, it gets relayed to those addresses. These list servers can also refuse to accept mail. The GoodNewsLetter uses two of these (one for St. Aidan addressees and one for Northsiders). These appear to be refusing to forward mail Since we sort of aren't supposed to legally be supposed to be using the St. Aidan one, it is difficult to figure out exactly what is going on. If you are reading this, then Plan B has worked.

Wild and Wacky Videos
As part of our continuing attempts to present all sides of an issue, we take you inside the offices of H.A.A.R.M (Healthy Americans Against Reforming Medicine).

The Usual Suspects

Lectionary Readings for July
Calendar for July
Worship Schedule for July