A man who donated his kidney to his wife is suing her.  He said "Give me my kidney back or pay me $1.5 million."

I heard this story on the radio last week and thought it was funny, but here's a man who saved his wife's life and she cheated on him with her physical therapist.  Guess she didn't like his other organs!

Puts a whole new meaning to those songs that cry "When you left, you took a part of me..."

http://www.nydailynews.com/ny_local/2009/01/07/2009-01-07_long_island_doctor_richard_batista_to_es.html

Last night there was a Chanukkah celebration in town with the lighting of the candles, songs & dancing.  I didn't ask the people around me enjoying the festivities if they were Jewish or Christian, and nobody asked me to show an ID when I began to clap to the music or nosh on a latke.

Treating people with respect & kindness is important, but political correctness should never take away our ability to spread love & cheer. 

It's Christmas in America and around the world, a time to reflect on our past and look foward to the coming year.  If you want to live in a world where people don't kill one another, there is a meal on every table and a toy for every child, then we all want the same thing.

So it really doesn't offend me at all if people in stores wish me a Merry Christmas..as long as they mean it!  

Peace & Love to Everyone!

Shalom,

Nancy

Just in case this hasn't been mentioned, I want to tell people a way to earn some extra money working part-time.   You can be retired, in school or between jobs.  Even if you work full time, it's possible to work in the evenings and on weekends. 

The U.S. Census Bureau is now accepting applications for 2009-2010 and will provide paid training.  The hourly rate depends on the area.  I'm not sure where they need people, but you can call the toll free number 1-866-861-2010.   

http://www.census.gov/2010censusjobs/index.php

I do advise taking the online practice test.  It's not very difficult, but I got 3 wrong out of the 28 questions because I answered too quickly or didn't read the question carefully.   Most of the questions are testing your ability to pay attention to detail & think logically.    Ex:  What doesn't belong in this series?   

(a) ABC

(b) EFG

(c)  IJK

(d) DUH

The answer is (d)   

Good luck! 

Has anyone here ever been a census taker?  Comments & suggestions are welcome!

This was on Fox News this morning.   I don't think I need to add anything.  I'm speechless. 

http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,458744,00.html

Black Friday took a grim turn when a Wal-Mart employee in New York died after bargain hunters broke down the doors to the store.

The 34-year-old male employee was pronounced dead one hour after shoppers broke down the doors to the shopping center in Valley Stream, N.Y., and knocked him down at around 5 a.m. Friday, police said.

"He was bum-rushed by 200 people," Jimmy Overby, the man's 43-year-old co-worker told the New York Daily News. "They took the doors off the hinges. He was trampled and killed in front of me. They took me down too ... I literally had to fight people off my back."

A 28-year-old pregnant woman was also taken in for observation and three other shoppers suffered minor injuries during the incident, police said.

Wal-Mart Stores Inc., in Bentonville, Ark., would not confirm the reports of a stampede at the Valley Stream outlet but said a "medical emergency" had caused them to close the store.

"Local authorities are looking into the situation," said Wal-Mart representative Dan Fogleman. "Until such time that they've completed their assessment it would be inappropriate for me to share any additional information."

Shoppers around the country lined up early outside stores Friday in the annual bargain hunting ritual known as Black Friday. It got that name because it's historically been the day when stores broke into profitability for the full year.

Many stores open early and stay open late. The Valley Stream Wal-Mart usually opens at 9 a.m.

Nassau County police were at the scene investigating.

(also on Yahoo news)

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20081128/ap_on_re_us/wal_mart_death

This story was on the 11:00 news tonight.

In these tough economic times, people are turning to alternative ways to make money.  The number of women selling their eggs has increased by 30% this year.  Some qualified donors are paid as much as $7,000.  A more drastic measure is to become a surrogate, which can pay up to $25,000.  However, the most common way to use your body to make a quick $20 to $50 (legally) is to sell your blood.  One session will fill up your gas tank.   Being a test subject for medical research is another way to pay some bills.   

Selling a vital organ like a kidney will get you $50,000 but that's not legal. 

http://www.miamiherald.com/news/southflorida/story/770459.html

Since I'm blocked from commenting, I only want to point out that the hoax, which was reported on MSNBC and then retracted, was not about the McCain campaign worker who leaked some negative information about Palin.

The hoax was that the man who said he was the source of the leak doesn't exist.  There's a huge difference.  There is no Eisenstadt Group or Harding Institute for Freedom and Democracy.  He is a sock puppet who played a joke on the media.

This only proves that people rely too much on blogs and the internet.  I honestly don't care whether or not Sarah Palin knew that Africa is a continent.  I do know that Alaska's largest newspaper, the Anchorage Daily News, endorsed Obama and said she wasn't qualified.  I do know that many Republicans shared that view, including the Mayor of Fairbanks, Jim Whitaker.  Eagleburger said, "Given time, Palin would be "adequate."   When a former Republican Secretary of State states that someone isn't ready to serve in the Oval Office, why is that the fault of the MSM?

When Fox reported that an unknown source accused the Democrats of trashing flags after the convention and later reported they couldn't verify the source, I don't remember anyone here apologizing or saying Fox was unfair to target Obama. 

I do believe Gov Palin has been treated unfairly in many cases and have even defended her.  However, the story about the blogger isn't proof that the negative stories about Palin aren't true.  What's amazing to me is that there have been hundreds of vicious rumors spread about Obama for over a year.  Nobody who is defending Palin seems to feel they were mean-spirited or racist.  Yet anytime people criticize Palin it's because they're jealous or because she's a woman.  It was Palin who called Hillary Clinton a whiner for even mentioning sexism or accusing the media of being biased. 

By the way, it was Fox's Carl Cameron who first aired the story about Africa, not MSNBC.

CAMERON: "There was great concern in the McCain campaign that Sarah Palin lacked a degree of knowledgeability necessary to be a running mate, a vice president, and a heartbeat away from the presidency."

CAMERON: "We are told by folks that she didn’t know what countries were in NAFTA — the North American Free Trade Agreement. That’d be Canada, the U.S., and Mexico. We’re told that she didn’t understand that Africa was a continent, rather than a series — a country just in itself. "

As you already know, someone who claimed he was a plumber planning to purchase a business approached Obama while he was campaigning.  Since that's old news, I'll only review this briefly.  (a) he was not a plumber or even a licensed contractor (b) the most he ever earned was $40K and he does not have the savings or credit to purchase a business (c) there is a lien on his home for non-payment of personal income tax  (d) the business was not for sale  (e) his boss makes about $100K a year which means that the $280K "Joe" was projecting would be more than 2-1/2 times what the current business owner makes.  (f) both Joe and his employer would benefit with Obama's tax plan much more than McCain's.  This is not liberal rhetoric, but facts stated by economists after analyzing both tax plans. 

Just a side note:  I always wondered how this "plumber" could be working the 12 hour days he talked about while appearing on TV and traveling around the country.  Who is paying his mortgage?  By the way, although citizens from around the country have sent this man lots of money, according to news sources, the lien is still unresolved.  Joe just doesn't sound like someone I'd want representing me as the average, hard-working middleclass citizen.  But, as I already wrote, that's old news.

Oh yeah.  Then there's a 2007 civil filing that shows a record for a $1,200 bill owed to a creditor, St. Charles Mercy Hospital.  So Joe doesn't even believe in paying for medical expenses, yet he speaks negatively about Universal Healthcare.  I guess what he really means is that we should just not pay our bills!

Oops!  Sorry.  That's also old news.  So what's new?  On Fox (not exactly the left, liberal media) Joe was recently questioned about his family history that shows he's been on Welfare & Food Stamps.  In fact, his family lived on Welfare for some time. 

Joe said that "he paid into it" which shows he doesn't understand how it works.  Welfare is not unemployment, it is not Medicare or social security.   Welfare is government assistance paid to needy families.

Now, if anyone on LP is on Welfare or gets Food Stamps, please do not think for a moment I am judging you.  We all need to put food on the table so our children aren't malnourished.

However, what this does prove is that, not only is Joe a hypocrite, but I sense some racism here (and some very poor vetting by the Republicans!)  Anyone who knows me understands that I absolutely hate it when a White person (like yours truly) is called a racist just because he or she has different viewpoints.  I've gotten into many debates about Affirmative Action, but that doesn't mean I'm a bigot. 

In Joe's case, he seems to feel that it's acceptable for him to receive Welfare but, as he put, there's "too much abuse" by other people.  I would like someone here to tell me who these other people are?  The bigotry is so blatant he might as well come right out and say it. 

http://www.kcentv.com/news/c-article.php?cid=12&nid=1356

Watch the video. 

At Baylor University, the largest Baptist College in the world, White students became enraged after Obama won the election.  Tempers flared as they burned Obama signs and began yelling racial slurs at Black students.  Nooses were left hanging from trees, according to the police.

MASSACHUSETTS VOTES YES ON QUESTION 3
Voters passed Question 3, which phases out greyhound racing by
2010 at the few remaining Massachusetts racetracks. Racing dogs
endure lives of terrible confinement, kept in small cages barely
large enough to stand up or turn around for 20 or more hours per
day. The dogs also suffer serious injuries in high-speed
collisions on the track, including broken legs, head trauma and
heart attacks. Fortunately, there's now a light at the end of
the tunnel for these gentle dogs.

CALIFORNIANS VOTE YES ON PROP 2

California voters passed Proposition 2 by a resounding margin.

As a result, 20 million animals in California will soon be spared the worst abuses of factory farms.

On Jarasan's blog I quoted 88 year old Doris Lessing, a British author, who won the Nobel Prize in Literature last year.   Here is an article she wrote in 1992.   Just some food for thought. 

I remember when Peter, Paul and Mary recorded Puff The Magic Dragon which was from a poem about the loss of childhood innocence.  To this day there are many who still insist that the song was about smoking pot.  This all started when a reporter at Newsweek wrote about coded messages in songs and used the song as one example.  As someone once humorously pointed out, an analysis of the Star Spangled Banner could prove the same thing.  I remember when Peter Yarrow said at a concert "If I wanted to write about marijuana, I would have just written a song about marijuana."  Anyway, it's getting really tough to say what's on your mind these days without committing a faux pas.   

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/13/opinion/13lessing.html?_r=2&oref=slogin&oref=sloginor   

While we have seen the apparent death of Communism, ways of thinking that were either born under Communism or strengthened by Communism still govern our lives. Not all of them are as immediately evident as a legacy of Communism as political correctness.

The first point: language. It is not a new thought that Communism debased language and, with language, thought. There is a Communist jargon recognizable after a single sentence. Few people in Europe have not joked in their time about “concrete steps,” “contradictions,” “the interpenetration of opposites,” and the rest.

The first time I saw that mind-deadening slogans had the power to take wing and fly far from their origins was in the 1950s when I read an article in The Times of London and saw them in use. “The demo last Saturday was irrefutable proof that the concrete situation...” Words confined to the left as corralled animals had passed into general use and, with them, ideas. One might read whole articles in the conservative and liberal press that were Marxist, but the writers did not know it. But there is an aspect of this heritage that is much harder to see.

Even five, six years ago, Izvestia, Pravda and a thousand other Communist papers were written in a language that seemed designed to fill up as much space as possible without actually saying anything. Because, of course, it was dangerous to take up positions that might have to be defended. Now all these newspapers have rediscovered the use of language. But the heritage of dead and empty language these days is to be found in academia, and particularly in some areas of sociology and psychology.

A young friend of mine from North Yemen saved up every bit of money he could to travel to Britain to study that branch of sociology that teaches how to spread Western expertise to benighted natives. I asked to see his study material and he showed me a thick tome, written so badly and in such ugly, empty jargon it was hard to follow. There were several hundred pages, and the ideas in it could easily have been put in 10 pages.

Yes, I know the obfuscations of academia did not begin with Communism — as Swift, for one, tells us — but the pedantries and verbosity of Communism had their roots in German academia. And now that has become a kind of mildew blighting the whole world.

It is one of the paradoxes of our time that ideas capable of transforming our societies, full of insights about how the human animal actually behaves and thinks, are often presented in unreadable language.

The second point is linked with the first. Powerful ideas affecting our behavior can be visible only in brief sentences, even a phrase — a catch phrase. All writers are asked this question by interviewers: “Do you think a writer should...?” “Ought writers to...?” The question always has to do with a political stance, and note that the assumption behind the words is that all writers should do the same thing, whatever it is. The phrases “Should a writer...?” “Ought writers to...?” have a long history that seems unknown to the people who so casually use them. Another is “commitment,” so much in vogue not long ago. Is so and so a committed writer?

A successor to “commitment” is “raising consciousness.” This is double-edged. The people whose consciousness is being raised may be given information they most desperately lack and need, may be given moral support they need. But the process nearly always means that the pupil gets only the propaganda the instructor approves of. “Raising consciousness,” like “commitment,” like “political correctness,” is a continuation of that old bully, the party line.

A very common way of thinking in literary criticism is not seen as a consequence of Communism, but it is. Every writer has the experience of being told that a novel, a story, is “about” something or other. I wrote a story, “The Fifth Child,” which was at once pigeonholed as being about the Palestinian problem, genetic research, feminism, anti-Semitism and so on.

A journalist from France walked into my living room and before she had even sat down said, “Of course ‘The Fifth Child’ is about AIDS.”

An effective conversation stopper, I assure you. But what is interesting is the habit of mind that has to analyze a literary work like this. If you say, “Had I wanted to write about AIDS or the Palestinian problem I would have written a pamphlet,” you tend to get baffled stares. That a work of the imagination has to be “really” about some problem is, again, an heir of Socialist Realism. To write a story for the sake of storytelling is frivolous, not to say reactionary.

The demand that stories must be “about” something is from Communist thinking and, further back, from religious thinking, with its desire for self-improvement books as simple-minded as the messages on samplers.

The phrase “political correctness” was born as Communism was collapsing. I do not think this was chance. I am not suggesting that the torch of Communism has been handed on to the political correctors. I am suggesting that habits of mind have been absorbed, often without knowing it.

There is obviously something very attractive about telling other people what to do: I am putting it in this nursery way rather than in more intellectual language because I see it as nursery behavior. Art — the arts generally — are always unpredictable, maverick, and tend to be, at their best, uncomfortable. Literature, in particular, has always inspired the House committees, the Zhdanovs, the fits of moralizing, but, at worst, persecution. It troubles me that political correctness does not seem to know what its exemplars and predecessors are; it troubles me more that it may know and does not care.

Does political correctness have a good side? Yes, it does, for it makes us re-examine attitudes, and that is always useful. The trouble is that, with all popular movements, the lunatic fringe so quickly ceases to be a fringe; the tail begins to wag the dog. For every woman or man who is quietly and sensibly using the idea to examine our assumptions, there are 20 rabble-rousers whose real motive is desire for power over others, no less rabble-rousers because they see themselves as anti-racists or feminists or whatever.

A professor friend describes how when students kept walking out of classes on genetics and boycotting visiting lecturers whose points of view did not coincide with their ideology, he invited them to his study for discussion and for viewing a video of the actual facts. Half a dozen youngsters in their uniform of jeans and T-shirts filed in, sat down, kept silent while he reasoned with them, kept their eyes down while he ran the video and then, as one person, marched out. A demonstration — they might very well have been shocked to hear — which was a mirror of Communist behavior, an acting out, a visual representation of the closed minds of young Communist activists.

Again and again in Britain we see in town councils or in school counselors or headmistresses or headmasters or teachers being hounded by groups and cabals of witch hunters, using the most dirty and often cruel tactics. They claim their victims are racist or in some way reactionary. Again and again an appeal to higher authorities has proved the campaign was unfair.

I am sure that millions of people, the rug of Communism pulled out from under them, are searching frantically, and perhaps not even knowing it, for another dogma.

There are several articles & videos on the web about the kite surfer in Florida who was severely injured after a wind gust slammed his body into a concrete building.  I saw it last week on my local news. Ouch!

http://www.wkrg.com/hurricane/article/caught_on_tape_wind_blows_kite_surfer_into_building/17014/

When interviewed, his mother was crying and kept saying "He's in shock" (when he said he'd do it again) because he was badly bruised and suffering from internal injuries. 

I guess the reporters are a lot kinder than I am.  Nobody asked "Do you realize you raised an idiot?" 

Here's a YouTube video showing how the gust of wind suddenly picked him up into the air.

http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=xYuTdPviA3Q&feature=user

Of course I feel sorry for this 26 year old, but the reason for my rant is that we see this disregard for storm warnings all the time.  In 2005 there was an emergency evacuation along the coastal areas when Wilma was on her way to Southwest Florida.  So what did some people do? They drove to the beach or the Naples Pier to have fun.   The only people who were killed in Punta Gorda in 2004 when Charley, a Category 4 hurricane, devastated the area, were 2 elderly people who refused to leave their mobile home although the park was evacuated.   

By the way, I'm not only talking about Florida.  People just don't listen. 

On the anniversary of my father's death, I send all of you this prayer for the friends & family you have lost as their souls gather in Heaven.  Shalom. 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5hQ0OkcLKuE

Well, here I am sitting in front of my laptop going "ooh, ouch, what the *&%?   I just got 2 bites, one on my ankle and another on my hand - right on the vein too.  I hope I got the little sucker, but maybe it wasn't the same mosquito that bit my foot.  This just happened, because the welts are starting to swell as I type.  They must have sneaked in when I was feeding some cats early this morning.  OMG!  There are 2 more on my feet.  Where are they coming from?  Oh, I just swatted another one on my leg. 

Excuse me, I can't finish this blog.  I need to jump into the shower after I do a little dance.  This is getting to be painful.

I wonder what an apartment in Point Barrow rents for these days.