About In God We Trust, it should be changed to more accurately reflect what is going on with the current administration (and its special friends). That flag could be changed to one of those new peach-colored twenty-dollar bills....
Joy's post reminds me of a girl I grew up with, whose given name was Margaret, and who was universally known as Peggy. She wound up marrying a man whose last name, I kid you not, is Legg.
We had a GP named Peter Davidson at one point. We liked to speculate as to what had happened to the Doctor's stalk of celery....
Completely unrelated (this is the open topic, right?), except that it may offend the health-conscious, here is the breakfast my mother never even dreamed of giving me.
http://www.x-entertainment.com/articles/0744/index.html
Dr. Travis Doom? Is he Victor's son? Why doesn't anyone ever tell me these things! Do Reed and his family know?
Theresa, old chum,
You are the "must read" for all,
No matter the count.
A different war, and a different country.
When I was fifteen my family went with my father to a medical conference in what was then Leningrad. One of the activities available to attendees and their families was a trip to the World War II memorial for the city. Please bear in mind that I am, on purpose, doing this based on memory, because it's the emotional impact I want to remember--not the precise physical details.
After a fairly long bus ride, we got out in a peaceful country setting. We were just off a quiet back road, and the major elements outside the wall were trees, wind, birdsong, and a hint of classical music. When we went inside, there was a small museum where one could also buy postcards. Not much in the way of what we usually think of as souvenirs.
Beyond that was a large space, with a wide path progressing between regularaly spaced mounds toward a monument. The monument was a pretty spectacular piece of Soviet art. I remember that it probably should have impressed me more, in some way. Maybe for being pretty, or ugly, or depressing, or something. But I don't remember it at all clearly. I do remember the eternal flame in front of it.
And I remember the moment, after I'd been walking for a minute or so, when I realized that each of the mounds I was walking past, each about fifty by a hundred yards, was marked off by a marble block with a year on it. And that these mounds went off for some distance to either side of the central path. And that, after having walked through several rows of these mounds, they still said 1942. And that each of these mounds was a mass grave. And that there were still two more years of graves to walk through.
Inside the walls, the only sounds were wind and the classical music that was quietly piped through the entire memorial. Even the Intourist guides were quiet here. The bright sun and blue sky seemed utterly inappropriate.
The memory still makes me cry.
No people should ever have to create such a memorial again. Why does the human race keep doing this to itself?
Jim,
they learned fencing style the old-fashioned way. They watched Douglas Fairbanks in The Mark of Zorro, and Errol Flynn in Robin Hood and Captain Blood. There were other early swashbucklers that had decent fencing in them. And some kids learn more than how to wave a stick around from them.
The gun range in Manchester is about an hour from downtown Boston (barring snow or excessive stupidity in the general driving population). They've got a nice variety of weapons for rental.
Nancy had a great time there with Theresa, and I've been there once when Nancy had her second visit. Based on her experience on that second visit, Nancy might be inclined to vote for a Casell (sorry--ought to check spelling) .454 as a large but really great accessory.
You know all those movies in which there is a firing range, with people doing their normal practice, and someone fires off some astonishing weapon that makes everyone else stop what they're doing? Well--the Casell is one of THOSE pistols. Lots of noise and kick, but a good barrel length and stable shape. Nancy loved it.
I'd fired .22s before, and a .45 semiautomatic once. I was a little surprised to find that I had a lot of trouble with the sight view for a Browning Hi-Power 9mm, but that a S&W .44 revolver settled into my hand as though it had always lived there.
If a party should happen, I'd enjoy trying some other pistols. And I think it can be a social occasion, especially if people are willing to share experience and observation--and learn from each other. Being willing to accept the note that one is flinching, holding the pistol improperly, or jerking the trigger, will make the whole thing more fun in the long run.
Way sorry to hear about all the hurling and chucking and chunkin and ralphing. The pumpkin-projection technology encounters, however, are seriously neat stuff. Thank you for letting us know about them! (And continue with the feeling-better thing! No repeat of last Thanksgiving's aftermath, okay?)
Now, now. How can anyone call him ignorant? He does all the research he needs to in order to confirm whatever it is he already believes to be true.
(I wonder whether he's using the Weekly World News headline stories about Saddam and Osama's gay wedding, and their adoption of a shaved ape, to track down these enemies of freedom-loving people everywhere. His other well-planned efforts haven't produced any better results than these would be likely to.)
"Him am totally healthy. Him look happy. Me make dead!"
"Bizarro Jesus Loses!"
Re: Operation Wild Badger. None of the names I've run across have been quite as succinct as my personal name for all the alarums and excursions in Iraq: Operation Testosterone Storm.
Sue, it's called discalcula, and I know this because my wife has it.
What I've found scary as I've trained my proofreading eye is that I can not only find spelling, punctuation, or grammar errors while scanning blues, but I've found continuity flaws that were ten pages apart.
The mind is a strange thing.
Brian,
after the Republicans in Congress called for and got a $60M investigation of Clinton, they managed to prove that he had trouble keeping his pants zipped with one person. Hard as they tried, they couldn't come up with proof of financial misdeeds that benefitted him or his friends. Legal costs associated with all this cost him a lot of money too, though not as much as the US taxpayers collectively got hit with.
Clinton worked pretty well with the rest of the world. He supported some things like international legal reciprocity, respect for the world's environment, and international consensus that the current administration shows no interest in supporting. Bush has done his bit to make a lot of his and Cheney's friends richer, protect himself from any possible war crimes charges, and roll back environmental and disease-fighting initiatives here and abroad.
Oh, yes, Bush has destroyed two foreign countries and is so far failing utterly to restore any sense of order or civilization in either. Both are danger spots in which US soldiers are being killed regularly, and there's no sign yet that things are getting any more organized. Now, what did Clinton destroy that thoroughly? Other than his ability to be seen in public with a cigar?
If Bush is getting whacked here, it's because there are a bunch of people here who read a lot of news, from a lot of sources, and who remember what they read. And, when the stuff they read doesn't add up, they point out the tiny little flaws. Also the flaws you can fly a C5-A through.
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| 2003 | 35 |
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