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The following is an excerpt from David "The Masked Man" Shoemaker's new book, The Squared Circle: Life, Death, and Professional Wrestling. It has been slightly modified for this publication.
If you tuned in to the WWF on Saturday morning in the late '80s, or watched an episode of Hulk Hogan's Rock 'n' Wrestling, it was hard not to notice the cultural and ethnic diversity the cast of brawlers represented. But despite the diversity, the characters' vocabulary wasn't exactly progressive. Though his English was faltering, Mr. Fuji threw around terms like "yard ape" and "lawn jockey" and "honky" in his prime. His protégé Don Muraco called Pedro Morales "a dirty Mexican pepper belly," and when it was suggested to him that Morales was actually Puerto Rican, he said, "Who cares? They're all the same." (He later attempted a more accurate bit of racism when he called Morales "a Puerto Rican hubcap thief.") He was one of a few wrestlers for whom "Mexican wetback" was a throwaway descriptor of Tito Santana. (Here he is calling Santana an "ignorant garbage picker.")
If the acts weren't always bald-facedly racist, their matches were often peppered with the patently offensive bad-guy shtick of legendary color commentator Jesse "The Body" Ventura. At various times Ventura reacted to a Junkyard Dog interview by saying JYD had "a mouth full of grits," called his rope-a-dope in-ring routine "a lot of shuckin' and jivin'." He commonly referred to fan favorite Santana as "Chico," dubbed his finishing move the "flying burrito" finisher, and, when Santana was getting pummeled at WrestleMania IV, Ventura said, "I betcha Chico wishes he was back selling tacos in Tijuana right now!" He similarly referred to black wrestler "Birdman" Koko B. Ware as "Buckwheat" until eventually Vince McMahon himself put a stop to it.
"Rowdy" Roddy Piper, a Canadian who was billed to be from Glasgow, Scotland, was a one-stop shop for racial insensitivity. He became a top-tier villain in California early in his career by insulting the region's Latino community. He once insisted on making amends by playing the Mexican national anthem on his bagpipes, but he played "La Cucaracha" instead. In the WWF, Piper exhibited a similar false apology when he invited Jimmy Snuka onto his "Piper's Pit" interview segment to apologize for Snuka not getting a chance to speak on his previous appearance. Piper decorated the set with pineapples and coconuts and eventually smashed a coconut over Snuka's head. (Piper's indiscretion didn't end there; he once talked soul food with Tony Atlas, said that Mr. T's lips looked "like a catcher's mitt," called T's fans "monkeys," mock-fed bananas to a poster of Mr. T, and told him that he would "whip him like a slave." At WrestleMania VI, he was wrestling Bad News Brown, who was presented as a black street thug but who was actually half black; Piper — who, it should be said, was the good guy in this feud — came to the ring with his body painted half black, down the middle.) Piper's racist grunts may have been part of a larger heel character, but it's likewise a part of a broader history of villains gleefully playing up racist tropes to get easy boos from the crowd. There were virulent racist personas like Colonel DeBeers, the AWA heel known for his pro-apartheid politics, and John Bradshaw Layfield, the conservative Texan in the WWE who briefly railed against illegal Mexican immigrants. Michael "P.S." Hayes, ringleader of the Fabulous Freebirds, often resorted to race-baiting to intensify feuds: The Freebirds' feud with Junkyard Dog turned on Hayes calling JYD "boy," and the Freebirds once came to the ring in a major match against the Road Warriors at Comiskey Park with the rebel flag painted on their faces. In 2008, Hayes was suspended from his backstage duties with WWE for supposedly telling African American wrestler Mark Henry, "I'm more of a nigger than you are." He was said to have used the N-word casually over the years without causing a stir. He is also credited with the notion that black wrestlers don't need gimmicks because being black is their gimmick.
With the exception of The Junkyard Dog,1 whose dog collar, chains, and postmatch shuck-and-jive routine were almost fully subsumed in the triumphant magnetism of his persona, perhaps no gimmick is as renowned — or as straightforward — as "The Ugandan Headhunter" Kamala, a ridiculous tribal boogeyman from "Deepest, Darkest Africa," who was created by Jerry "the King" Lawler based on a reductive Frank Frazetta illustration. (So yes, it's fair to call Kamala a stereotype of a stereotype.) His mannerisms and grunts were inhuman, and his cannibalism was a calling card, and with his face- and chest-paint, his leopard-print loincloth, and his spear, Kamala was such a sensation that he headlined every major promotion during the '80s and '90s. He often appeared alongside his "handler," Kim Chee, who wore a pith helmet and tan wrestlers mask. Any offense tendered by Chee was lost in the voluminous shadow of denigration Kamala cast.
When you consider the recent history of African American wrestlers in pro wrestling, to simplify a performer's character to his race isn't as offensive as what's come when promoters try to give black wrestlers personas with more, shall we say, idiosyncrasy. In 1987, a small-time wrestler once known as "Soul Train" Jones in Memphis was introduced to the world as the "Million Dollar Man" Ted DiBiase's bodyguard-cum-manservant, Virgil. (In their debut video, he says he owns Virgil, and Virgil responds "Yessuh!") Over the years, DiBiase bought the services and the souls of numerous wrestlers, but Virgil wasn't just a sellout; he was a slave, almost unabashedly. His name, purportedly coined by Bobby "The Brain" Heenan, was a subtle jab at NWA showrunner and star Dusty Rhodes, born Virgil Runnels, who was known for "acting black" in speech and mannerism. Similarly, in 1988, a famous villain named the One Man Gang, who sported a mohawk and denim vest and generally looked and acted like a monstrous Hells Angel, was repackaged with minimal explanation as Akeem the African Dream, a white man of African descent who dressed in a dashiki and spoke in jive while sluicing his forearms through the air like a '70s-movie pimp. This character too was supposed to be a joke aimed at Rhodes, who counts semiforgotten African American Sweet Daddy Siki among his greatest influences (Siki's bleached-blond hair, "Siki strut," and verbal style are direct precursors of Rhodes's affect). Rhodes was raised in poverty in Texas and pegged his accent more on socioeconomics than race, but he was nonetheless the subject of racially charged ribbing, though, as with Virgil, targeting Rhodes was more a general shot across the bow at the Crockett promotion than anything. Anyway, Akeem (whose real name was George Gray) suddenly was announced as being from "Deepest, Darkest Africa" and was speaking in a parody of a parody of a "black accent." Managed by Slick — who was known as both the "Jive Soul Bro" and the "Doctor of Style," dressed in polyester suits and pageboy hats, and later became, in real life and exploited on-screen, a reverend — the duo seemed to embody every sketchy African American stereotype in one middling act.
If one perhaps thought that the introduction of a white African nationalist signaled some sort of postracial era of racial insensitivity, one would be wrong. When late–Territorial Era megastar "Black Superman" Tony Atlas came to the WWF in 1991, he was recast as tribal headhunter Saba Simba. (Atlas credited the Saba Simba character for rescuing him from poverty and saving his life, for whatever that's worth.) The year 1992 saw the WWF debut of Papa Shango (real name: Charles Wright), a voodoo witch doctor who cast diabolical black-magic spells on his opponents. (Wright would later become even more famous as the Godfather, a wrestling pimp who came to the ring with a bevy of hookers and who implored everyone to take a ride on the "ho train.") When the famous WCW tag team Harlem Heat (made up of brothers Booker T and Stevie Ray), who had previously gone by the moniker the "Ebony Experience" in the GWF, came to WCW in 1993, they were originally presented as a pair of convicts who had been won in a card game by Col. Robert Parker, a Mark Twain villain of a wrestling manager, who came to the ring as if straight off the plantation, in off-white three-piece suits and a cowboy hat, chomping a cigar and demeaning his foes in a syrupy drawl. They tried out the gimmick at a couple of house shows, with Booker and Stevie in jumpsuits and leg shackles before it was determined that this might be slightly offensive. In the end, Harlem Heat was presented sans Parker and sans chains (though in their earliest appearances they were still clad in prison-issue tops), and the team became incredibly popular. Booker T went on to be a world champion in both WCW and WWE, which is a long way from cartoon slavery. Nonetheless, in 2003, while feuding with Booker T, Triple H called out Booker's (legitimate) criminal past, referenced his "nappy" hair, and said that "people like [him]" couldn't win championships in WWE and that they were just there to "dance" and "entertain" people.
Even in the modern WWE, where the Rock's numerous championship reigns were seen as evidence of a postracial wrestling world, there have been plentiful steps backward for every step forward. The first African American champion, Ron Simmons, was feuding with Vader and his manager, the legendary Harley Race, when Race said to him, "When I was World Champion, I had a boy like you to carry my bags!" Simmons would later end up in the WWF, repackaged as a bad-guy black nationalist as the leader of the Nation of Domination. Black gangsta and rapper personalities persist, from R-Truth to the tag team Cryme Tyme. When black wrestlers weren't broad stereotypes, they were subtle ones, playing ominous thugs with hip-hop entrance music or slam poets with hip-hop entrance music or comic relief with hip-hop entrance music — or, in the case of Mark Henry at various points, all of the above.
There's enough material for another whole chapter on the Latino experience in the modern wrestling world. The luchadors of those early days of WCW Monday Nitro were simplistic, but their portrayal was only offensive in its oddity. Once the dam opened, though, offensiveness poured out. As the wrestling promotions tried to integrate their Latino hires more fully by giving them characters — and, often, by removing their masks — they followed the rest of the history of racial identity in the wrestling world down the rabbit hole of straightforward racial stereotype. Before long, Konnan, a superstar in his home country, traded in his colorful tights for Dickies, a wifebeater, sunglasses, and a bandanna: the superhero devolving into a common thug. It was a caricature we were unfortunately comfortable with. And that became the norm: A team of unmasked luchadores called the Mexicools were ferried to ringside on a riding lawnmower. Los Guerreros, two scions of a proud wrestling family, garnered their greatest fame by "lying, cheating, and stealing" and riding around in hydraulics-boosted cars.
The Asian contingent followed a similar trajectory, as the line between ethnic slur and Hollywood stereotype became increasingly indecipherable: Mr. Fuji's bow tie and bowler begat a million deadly karate chops and judo kicks. In the late '90s, a stable of established Japanese wrestlers called Kai En Tai, led by a flashy caricature named Yamaguchi-San, were embroiled in a feud with a wrestling porn star named Val Venis; their beef culminated in a scene where Yamaguchi attempted a castration via samurai sword while shouting "I choppy-choppy your pee-pee!" If the treatment of Latinos in modern pro wrestling has been driven by the perceptions of fearmongering news reports, the depiction of Asians has followed an out-of-date Hollywood template. It says a lot when you can look at such storylines and say, "At least the black wrestlers aren't suffering this sort of indignity."
Reprinted by arrangement with Gotham Books, a member of Penguin Group (USA) LLC, A Penguin Random House Company. Copyright © David Shoemaker, 2013.


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HP said in a legal filing Thursday that the U.S. Department of Justice is investigating its $10.3 billion acquisition of enterprise search company Autonomy, which HP alleges inflated its value through accounting tricks.
HP also said it has provided information to the U.K.'s Serious Fraud Office and the SEC related "to the accounting improprieties, disclosure failures and misrepresentations at Autonomy" prior to the acquisition, according to HP's 10-K filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC).
The company said last month it had shared its allegations with those agencies, urging them to open civil and criminal investigations. The DOJ advised HP on Nov. 21 of its investigation, the filing said.
HP disclosed an $8.8 billion write-down in November, around $5 billion of which was attributed to accounting improprieties by Autonomy. The write-down was for impairment of goodwill, a term covering intangible assets such as the value of a brand and good customer relations.
Autonomy's founder, Mike Lynch, who left the HP in May, has fiercely contested HP's claims. He published a stern rebuke on Friday.
"We continue to reject these allegations in the strongest possible terms," Lynch wrote. "Autonomy's financial accounts were properly maintained in accordance with applicable regulations, fully audited by Deloitte, and available to HP during the due diligence process."
Lynch wrote that he and his Autonomy colleagues have not yet been contacted by regulators. "We will cooperate with any investigation and look forward to the opportunity to explain our position," he wrote.
HP looked closer into the Autonomy acquisition, completed in October 2011, after a senior member of its former management team came forward following Lynch's departure.

subset: commoncrawl


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1683: Yaoya Oshichi, fire horse
April 25th, 2014 Headsman
On this date in 1683,* Yaoya Oshichi gave her life for her red-hot love … and the want of a little white lie.
The greengrocer's daughter Oshichi (English Wikipedia page | Japanese) legendarily fell in love with a priest of the nearby temple while taking refuge there during one of Edo's many fires (Japanese link), and in a truly adolescent outburst proceeded to start another fire in the hopes of meeting him again. (Alternate version: it was Oshichi's gesture that actually started the linked conflagration.)
As a 16-year-old, Oshichi was just barely eligible to suffer the full weight of the law for a capital crime.
In an age of scanty documentation, however, the pitying magistrate (Japanese link) hearing her case is supposed to have asked her in a hinting sort of way, "you're 15, right?"
Either not catching his drift or else honest to a fault, Oshichi replied that, no, she was 16, thank you very much, and reiterated the point when it was followed-up … thus dooming herself to the stake.
A few years after this outstandingly tragic demise, poet Ihara Saikaku popularized the tale in his Five Women Who Loved. She's been waxing immortal ever since in every manner of artistic interpretation, and remains a popular figure for joruri and bunraku and kabuki.
(When next in Tokyo, pay your own respects at her tomb.)
Meanwhile, Yaoya Oshichi's apparent birth in the zodiacal "fire horse" year of 1666 — fire horses are supposed to be an especially passionate, impulsive bunch — followed by her unfortunate fiery end helps make such cycles superstitiously inauspicious for prospective parents, especially prospective parents of girls.
The year of a fire horse only rolls around once every six decades; in the last one, in 1966, Japanese "fertility dropped by over 25%;" even "the fertility rate of Japanese Americans in California and Hawaii also dropped by 3.3% and 1.8%, respectively, in the same year."** The abortion rate in Japan for that one year spiked nearly 50% above expected without any other apparent cause.† It's something to watch for when the next batch of little fire horses are due, in 2026.
* "The 29th day of the 3rd month" is widely cited as "March 29", but it actually appears to refer to the 29th day of the 3rd month of the third year of the "Heaven's Blessing" era. That third month spanned the Gregorian dates of March 28 through April 26, 1683.
** Jungmin Lee and Myungho Paik, "Sex Preferences and Fertility in South Korea during the Year of the Horse," Demography, Vol. 43, No. 2 (May, 2006).
† Kanae Kaku, "Increased induced abortion rate in 1966, an aspect of Japanese folk superstition," Annals of Human Biology, Vol. 2, No. 2 (1975).
On this day..
- 1328: Pierre de Remi, royal treasurer - 2020
- 1804: Hans Jakob Willi, Bockenkrieger - 2019
- 1827: Blue Jimmy - 2018
- 1859: Oscar Jackson lynched, precipitating the Wright County War - 2017
- 1952: Lloyd Edison Sampsell, the Yacht Bandit - 2016
- 1864: Thomas Dawson, manhood sealed - 2015
- 1900: Bill Brown, Sonnie Crain and John Watson - 2013
- 1945: Ewald Ehlers lynched - 2012
- 1938: Yakov Peters, Siege of Sidney Street survivor - 2011
- 1644: Looters in conquered Beijing - 2010
- 1649: John Poyer, the lucky winner - 2009
- 1792: Nicolas Pelletier, Madame Guillotine's first kiss - 2008
Entry Filed under: 17th Century,Arson,Arts and Literature,Burned,Capital Punishment,Children,Common Criminals,Death Penalty,Execution,Famous,History,Japan,Popular Culture,Public Executions,Sex,Women
Tags: 1680s, 1683, april 25, dance, edo, ihara, love, march 29, saikaku, theater, tokyo, yaoya oshichi
2 thoughts on "1683: Yaoya Oshichi, fire horse"
LOL I'm a Fire Horse, as was my grandfather, who I am told again and again I am most like in the family, and not in a way that seems complimentary 🙂 woo rock on fire horses.


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If You Wear Google's New Glasses You Are An Asshole
Atlantic writer Ta-Nehisi Coates has developed a brilliantly concise definition of an asshole: "A person who demands that all social interaction happen on their terms." He was inspired by the assholes who talk in Amtrak's quiet car, but this reasoning also perfectly explains why those who use Google's new wearable computer are assholes, by definition.
Google Glass is the gadget all techies at South By Southwest are talking about this week. Glass is a wearable computer eye piece, which allows you to snap photos, read the news and do Google searches all while looking like an extra from the dance club scene in the Matrix. Glass is not yet publicly available, but Google is graciously allowing select geeks to purchase it early for $1,500, if they write them an essay about why they deserve one.
Glass has sparked much excitement and controversy. Having a computer strapped to your face is the second-greatest geek dream after robot sex. Critics have pointed out the privacy implications of Glass, for which one of the first apps is a program that lets you identify your friends in a crowd based only on what clothes they are wearing. A Seattle bar has already banned Glass, half in jest. Is Glass The Future of Computers or a Privacy Nightmare? I am not concerned with these questions. Instead I'm concerned with a much finer point: People who wear Google Glass in public are assholes.
Wearing Google Glass is functionally the same as living with a smart phone held constantly at eye-level. I've never seen it done, but I think most of us would be comfortable labeling anyone who walked around holding their smart phone at eye-level an asshole, and not just because it looks even stupider than Glass. The smartphone eye-level guy is an asshole because most of us 1) value the undistracted attention of those we're speaking to and 2) don't like to be filmed or photographed without our knowledge. If you come up to me with a smartphone held at eye level and demand that I interact with you like you're not being an asshole, you are an asshole. You are demanding social interaction on your wholly weird and unsettling terms. This does not change if the smartphone is tiny and strapped to your eye and made by Google. In fact, you thinking that this excuses your asshole behavior just makes you that much more of an asshole.
Google's defenders will suggest that this is the ranting of a backwards luddite. They will point to cell phones, another relatively new technology. Would you call all cell phone users assholes? No, just the ones who talk in public restrooms when there's a long line. But in the early days of cell phones, the loudmouth on his brick of a Motorola cell phone was very much shorthand for asshole. This stigma did not arise because society was not "ready" for cell phones, it came from the fact that the early cell phone adopters blabbing in public were disproportionately assholes. They were willing to trade other people's discomfort for their own technological convenience. They demanded social interaction on their terms. Now that everyone uses cell phones, we retroactively imagine that they were the trailblazers and everyone else a dumb luddite. But it doesn't change the fact that, at the time, these people were assholes. What if cell phones had flopped, like, say, the Segway? We would all be laughing about those dumb assholes who used to talk on cell phones in the 80s.
The utter asshole-ishness and disregard for others of the Google Glass wearer can be seen clearly in the arguments of its defenders. Take future expert Jeff Jarvis, who has made a great career out of telling people they are stupid for caring about internet privacy. His rationale for why we should not be afraid of Google Glass' head-based, internet-enabled cameras is that nobody ever uses their cell phone cameras to take creepy pictures of people. This is not my glib simplification of his argument, it's literally what he believes:
This is the fear we hear most: That someone wearing Glass will record you—because they can now—and you won't know it. But isn't that what we heard when cell phones added cameras? See The New York Times from a decade ago about Chicago Alderman Edward Burke:
But what Mr. Burke saw was the peril.
"If I'm in a locker room changing clothes," he said, "there shouldn't be some pervert taking photos of me that could wind up on the Internet."
Accordingly, as early as Dec. 17, the Chicago City Council is to vote on a proposal by Mr. Burke to ban the use of camera phones in public bathrooms, locker rooms and showers.
His fear didn't materialize. Why? Because we're civilized. We're not as rude and stupid—as perverted—as our representative, Mr. Burke, presumed us to be.
(Emphasis mine.)
For someone who seems like he would be happy to have his brainwaves patched directly into Google's servers via skull socket, Jarvis is curiously unaware about what actually goes on online. There are of course many, many people who have had photos of themselves taken and/or posted to the internet by creeps.
If anything, the cell phone camera example shows why we should be extra vigilant about new forms of surveillance, even if it's from private citizens. Because of the rush to embrace that new technology we now have outdated privacy laws that are unable to deal with the problems posed by the explosion of tiny cameras. So we have revenge porn that flourishes because its victims have little legal recourse to get naked pictures of themselves posted to the internet without their consent taken down. I believe that someday something like Google Glass will become accepted and normal, but that doesn't mean we should just blissfully boogie-board down the wave of Progress and hope it's not going to deposit us into a shark's mouth. It also doesn't change the fact that people have good reason to be creeped out by Glass, and by brushing them off as clueless technophobes you are being an asshole.
It's no surprise that Google would create a product so imbued with assholishness. Glass is just the latest in a long line of asshole moves from Google. Google's aborted project to scan and upload all books in existence to the internet without the publishers' permission? Asshole behavior. Sending cars with cameras around to take pictures of everyone's houses for Google Streetview? Asshole behavior. Much of Google's assholishness ended up producing very useful products (I love Streetview), but this doesn't change the fact that they rest on an act of colossal assholery, an arrogance that says your privacy/copyright doesn't matter because Google wants to make a new thing that happens to demolish it.
By donning Google Glass, you, the Google Glass user, are volunteering to be a foot soldier in Google's asshole army. (In fact you're paying for the privilege.) You are saying that anyone who comes into your line of sight must agree to be possibly filmed, photographed, or otherwise data-mined, not just for your own convenience but to further Google's quest for total world domination. Wearing Google Glass automatically means that all social interaction you have must be not just on yours, but Google's terms.
The only way around the Google Glass asshole trap is if Glass users take a pledge to only interact with other Glass users. Maybe they could move to an island.
[Image via AP.]


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Here's the situation: You walk out of the supermarket with three bags in each hand and it already feels like your arms are gonna fall off. We've all felt like a pack mule at some point, and one company is hoping to change that with its personal cargo robot, Gita.
The bot was created by Piaggio Fast Forward, a sister company of Piaggio Group, most famous for creating the Vespa. Piaggio Fast Forward describes Gita (pronounced "jee-ta") as an "autonomous vehicle that extends a person's cargo carrying abilities."
The vehicle is 26 inches tall and can carry up to 40 pounds of goods at speeds as high as 22 mph. It can either follow a human operator or move about autonomously in pre-mapped areas. A number of sneak-peek videos on the company's YouTube page show potential uses for Gita including picking up and delivering a package, carrying someone's purchases at a market, and even walking a dog.
According to a company press release, Gita will debut on Feb. 2 in Cambridge, Massachusetts, at which time more details about the robot will be made available. Piaggio Fast Forward says it will deploy Gita in a number of different business-to-business pilots in the near future with an eye toward future consumer applications.


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The upcoming Game of Thrones RPG would like to remind you there's more to it than music and combat. There's also a story, and dialogue, and sadly dialogue that isn't being spoken by the amazing James Cosmo.
Baldur's Gate 3's Karlach Actor On Playing The Beloved Barbarian
Cosmo, who plays Jeor Mormont in HBO's Game of Thrones TV series, is one the best of a quality group of actors roped into the adaptation, so his presence in this game lends it an air of respectability.
One that almost every other character falls well short of. Seriously, if you didn't hear his voice and know already this was a Game of Thrones RPG, would you even know this was Westeros? It just looks like Generic Fantasy Game (of Thrones) RPG.


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SSR 68-11: SECTIONS 217(a), 217(d), and 217(e). -- VETERANS -- MILITARY SERVICE WAGE CREDITS -- PRESIDENTIAL PARDON AFTER DISHONORABLE DISCHARGE
20 CFR 404.116(b) and 404.1307
- Where a worker was in the active military service of the United States from January 14, 1941, through August 16, 1947, received therefrom a dishonorable discharge and subsequently was granted a full presidential pardon, after which he filed application for disability insurance benefits but lacked disability insured status without credit for his military service, held, the granting of a presidential pardon to the worker does not alone change the character of discharge initially issued nor does it operate to correct his military record under section 1552 of title 10, United States Code; therefore, military wage credits may not be granted because his discharge was not "under conditions other than dishonorable," and accordingly, the worker does not have a disability insured status.
P served on active duty in the Armed Forces of the United States from January 14, 1941 through August 16, 1947, when he was dishonorably discharged following a conviction by court-martial of a military offense. On June 9, 1966, he was granted a full and unconditional presidential pardon. In December 1966, P filed application for a period of disability and for disability insurance benefits. However, P does not have disability insured status without credit for his period of military service.
Sections 217(a) of the Social Security Act provides in pertinent part as follows:
- For purposes of determining entitlement to and the amount of any monthly benefit * * * payable under this title on the basis of the wages and self-employment income of any World War II veteran, and for purposes of section 216(i)(3) [insured status for a period of disability], such veteran shall be deemed to have been paid wages (in addition to the wages, if any, actually paid to him) of $160 in each month during any part of which he served in the active military or naval service of the United States during World War II * * *.
Section 217(d)(1) of the Act defines the World War II period as beginning September 16, 1940, and ending with the close of July 24, 1947. Section 217(d)(2) further provides in part that:
- (2) The term "World War II veteran" means any individual who served in the active military or naval service of the United States at any time during World War II and who, if discharged or released therefrom, was so discharged or released under conditions other than dishonorable after active service of ninety days or more * * * (Emphasis supplied.)
Section 217(e)(1) of the Act provides for military service wage credits of $160 per month for post-World War II service. Section 217(e)(4) of the Act defines the term "veteran," under this subsection, as any individual who served in the active military or naval service of the United States at any time on or after July 25, 1947, and prior to January 1, 1957, and who, if discharged or released therefrom, was released or discharged under conditions other than dishonorable after active service of 90 days or more.
The issue to be decided is whether by reason of the presidential pardon with respect to the worker's conviction of a military offense he may be considered to have been discharged from active military service "under conditions other than dishonorable," as required for the crediting of military service wage credits under section 217.
There is statutory authority (section 1552 of title 10, United States Code) for a military service department to correct any military record of that department when necessary to correct an error or to remove an injustice. Where a military record is so corrected, it replaces the original record as of the date the correction was made effective. See SSR 62-13, C.B. 1962, p. 90. In the case of presidential pardons, administrative proceedings with respect to a pardon are conducted by the Department of Justice, rather than by a military service department. While generally such pardons are granted with respect to convictions of ciminal offenses in Federal civil courts, they are also granted with respect to convictions by military courts-martial. The pardon attorney, in the Department of Justice, is empowered to recommend that a presidential pardon should be granted. This recommendation is based upon such factors as an appeal by the defendant, completion of his sentence, his character, and whether there has been any subsequent conviction since discharge. While a presidential pardon may be considered to relieve the individual of certain consequences of the conviction for the particular offense, the fact of conviction remains on the record. See People ex rel Prisament v. Brophy, 287, N.Y. 132, 38 N.E. 2d 468 (1941), cert. den. 63 S.Ct. 62, 317 U.S. 625 (1942). The pardon does not change the character of discharge initially issued to the veteran.
Moreover, there is no real basis for concluding that the presidential pardon, of itself, would relieve the veteran of the condition in section 217 of the Act that a discharge be "under conditions other than dishonorable" in order that military service be creditable for social security purposes. First, it is not the conviction of the military offense itself (upon which the pardon acts) which precludes the crediting of military service terminated by dishonorable discharge. Rather, it is the concomitant dishonorable discharge, the character of which is not changed by the pardon, which precludes that crediting. Also, section 217 of the Act contains no provision that a pardon relieves the person concerned of the requirement of a discharge "under conditions other than dishonorable." In this respect it differs from section 202(u) of the Act (which concerns the effect of a conviction for subversive activities) which has a provision that a presidential pardon will relieve the person of the penalty imposed under that section.
While the military record of the veteran is not affected by the granting of a pardon by itself, such pardon may constitute evidence on which to base a request for correction of his record. The Board for Correction of Military Records is empowered by the Secretary of the Service Department to change military records. The authority granted under title 10, United States Code, section 1552 extends to changing the type of discharge from military service received by an individual. Thus, an application for this change by the Board must be made with the service department involved. After the testimony has been heard and the evidence weighed by the Board, a decision is then made. If the Board decides that the military record i.e., discharge, should be corrected to "remove an injustice" or to "correct an error," the changed record i.e., changed discharge, will replace the original discharge ab initio. However, no such action has been initiated by P in this case.
Accordingly, it is held that military wage credits may not now be granted to P because his discharge was not "under conditions other than dishonorable;" therefore, lacking disability insured status, P is not entitled to the social security benefits for which he applied.


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The Indicator II line has been designed to cast indicator rigs with ease whether for trout or steelhead. The thick diameter, high floating easy viz tip and short front taper easily turns over the largest of indicators, while the ultra long head is easy to mend and control the fly at long range.
RIOs acclaimed DualTone load locating system makes it simple for anglers to find the ideal casting area of the fly line. It is the perfect line for fishing indicator rigs.


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Jay Caliendo is a Medical Intuitive that through his gift of insight, allows him to conduct health readings on individuals. He is the first and only Medical Intuitive to be published in peer-reviewed medical journals. His first publication made history by appearing in the December of 2000 medical journal, Society of Integrative Medicine. He is one of the few in his field to have earned the trust of physicians which has led him to this publication, and in January of 2005, Jay Caliendo achieved even greater status within the medical profession by being published in a second medical journal, The American Academy of Medical Acupuncture.
Jay Caliendo's God-given gift as a medical intuitive allows him to be one of the few to work with conventional medical doctors and naturopathic physicians, acupuncturists, alternative healers and Doctors of Oriental Medicine. He works extensively at helping these physicians diagnose some of their more complicated cases by reading the patients energy fields, some of these readings have been published in his first book.
Even though Jay's ability to see and read human energy fields is considered to be integrative, he is considered among traditional medical doctors as one of the finest and most accurate mainstream medical intuitives.
The Way I
See It
Mr. Caliendo's gift of insight has aided thousands of individuals, like you, in their pursuit of better health. He focuses on the source behind your illness rather than on the symptoms that drive your pain. Jay Caliendo believes that the energy within us is the most important link in determining the cause behind our illness.
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text:
Home | Ancient History Sourcebook | Medieval Sourcebook | Modern History Sourcebook | Byzantine Studies Page
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Medieval Sourcebook:
Salimbene: On Frederick II, 13th Century
From the Chronicle of Salimbene, thirteenth-century Italian Franciscan, as translated and paraphrased by G. Coulton
To Salimbene, as to Dante, Frederick was a man of heroic proportions in his very sins. "Of faith in God he had none; he was crafty, wily, avaricious, lustful, malicious, wrathful; and yet a gallant man times, when he would show his kindness or courtesy; full of solace jocund, delightful, fertile in devices. He knew to read, write, and sing, to make songs and music. He was a comely man, and we formed, but of middle stature. I have seen him, and once I loved him, for on my behalf he wrote to Bro. Elias, Minister-General of the Friars Minor, to send me back to my father. Moreover, he knew to speak with many and varied tongues, and, to be brief, if he had been rightly Catholic, and had loved God and His Church, he would have had few emperors his equals in the world."
[Salimbene] goes on to enumerate several specimens of the Emperor's "curiosities" or "excesses," though for sheer weariness he will not tell them all. Frederick cut off a notary's thumb who had spelt his name Fredericus instead of Fridericus. Like Psammetichus in Herodotus, he made linguistic experiments on the vile bodies of hapless infants, "bidding foster-mothers and nurses to suckle and bathe and wash the chidren, but in no wise to prattle or speak with them; for he would have learnt whether they would speak the Hebrew language (which had been the first), or Greek, or Latin, or Arabic, or perchance the tongue of their parents of whom they had been born. But he laboured in vain, for the children could not live without clappings of the hands, and gestures, and gladness of countenance, and blandishments. "
Again, "when he saw the Holy Land, (which God had so oft-times commended as a land flowing with milk and honey and most excellent above all lands,) it pleased him not, and he said that if the God of the Jews had seen his land of Terra di Lavoro, Calabria, Sicily, and Apulia, then He would not so have commended the land which He promised to the Jews."
Again, he compelled "Nicholas the Fish," whom his mother's curse had condemned to an amphibious life, to dive and fetch his golden cup a second time from the very bottom of Charybdis: in which repeated attempt the poor man knew that he must perish. Fifthly, "he enclosed a living man in a cask that he might die there, wishing thereby to show that the soul perished utterly, as if he might say the word of Isaiah 'Let us eat and drink, for to-morrow we die.' For he was an Epicurean; wherefore, partly of himself and partly through his wise men, he sought out all that he could find in Holy Scripture which might make for the proof that there was no other life after death, as for instance 'Thou shalt destroy them, and not build them up': and again 'Their sepulchres shall be their houses for ever.'
Sixthly, he fed two men most excellently at dinner, one of whom he sent forthwith to sleep, and the other to hunt; and that same evening he caused them to be disembowelled in his presence, wishing to know which had digested the better: and it was judged by the physicians in favour of him who had slept. '
Seventhly and lastly, being one day in his palace, he asked Michael Scot the astrologer how far he was from the sky, and Michael having answered as it seemed to him, the Emperor took him to other parts of his kingdom as if for a journey of pleasure, and kept him there several months, bidding meanwhile his architects and carpenters secretly to lower the whole of his palace hall. Many days afterwards, standing in that same palace with Michael, he asked of him, as if by the way, whether he were indeed so far from the sky as he had before said. Whereupon he made his calculations, and made answer that certainly either the sky had been raised or the earth lowered; and then the Emperor knew that he spake truth."
Yet Salimbene is careful to note that Frederick's cruelties might justly be excused by the multitude of his open and secret enemies, and that he had a saying sense of humour. "He was wont at times to make mocking harangues before his court in his own palace, speaking for example after the fashion of the Cremonese ambassadors," at whose tediousness and outward flourishes our good friar laughs again later on. "Moreover, he would suffer patiently the scoffings, and mockings and revilings of jesters, and often feign that he heard not. For one day, after the destruction of Victoria by the men of Parma, he smote his hand on the hump of a certain jester, saying 'My Lord Dallio, when shall this box be opened?' to whom the other answered, ' 'Tis odds if it be ever opened now, for I lost the key in Victoria.' The Emperor, hearing how this jester recalled his own sorrow and shame, groaned and said, with the Psalmist, 'I was troubled, and I spoke not.' If any had spoken such a jest against Ezzelino da Romano, he would without doubt have let him be blinded or hanged. . .
From G. G. Coulton, St. Francis to Dante, (London: David Nutt, 1906), pp. 242-43
Unless otherwise indicated the specific electronic form of the document is copyright. Permission is granted for electronic copying, distribution in print form for educational purposes and personal use. If you do reduplicate the document, indicate the source. No permission is granted for commercial use.
(c)Paul Halsall Jan 1996
[email protected]
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Medieval Sourcebook, and other medieval components of the project, are located at
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the institutional owner, and is not liable as the result of any legal action.
© Site Concept and Design: Paul Halsall created 26 Jan 1996: latest revision 6 October 2023 [CV]


text:
Sometimes, adding chalkboards and whiteboards can seem handy, but there is more than you can do to improve your office space. Here are just a few office design tips to help improve your overall productivity.
1. Idea Storage
One of the worst things that can happen for creative people is that they have a great idea but do not have anywhere to write it down, and they lose it. There is also the chance that you will end up doing a huge amount of research on a topic that you are not going to use. Whiteboards and notebooks are a great option for writing your ideas down, so you can continue to work on your main task for the day.
2. Remove the Clutter
It is important that you are regularly cleaning your office. Clutter comes from your creative mind working, but it can make focusing and getting your work done difficult. You should make sure that you have enough storage for all your items and that you have access to your most used objects.
3. Bring in Some Nature
We are biological creatures, so we should be spending some amount of time outside every single day. However, being inside all the time has a huge effect on our work. While it would be nice to spend a lot of time outside, for most jobs, this is not really possible. If you cannot take your work outside, why not bring nature to you? Try opening the shades and letting fresh air. This could help you feel more energized and help you get more done. Plants can also be a great option to add to your office, you just have to remember to water it.
4. Table and Chairs
We have all experienced having to sit at a table and having to consistently having to readjust to be comfortable, so we could focus on our work. This is why you should take the time to find a desk and chair that both fits your body and the way that you sit. This can take some adjusting to if you are working on an office where you do not have control over when items are ordered. If you are working at home, try to sit in chairs that you are thinking about buying for around 30 minutes to find out if they are comfortable for you.


text:
I'm racist?
A huge fag hating racist. >:
BiggieMclargeguy: cause liars go to hell
RamFan2803: :eek
BiggieMclargeguy: Rev. 21:8
RamFan2803: :eek
BiggieMclargeguy: ok
RamFan2803: murderers go to hell, too
BiggieMclargeguy: so?
RamFan2803: so do people who masturbate
BiggieMclargeguy: so?
RamFan2803: just saying
BiggieMclargeguy: lol i am jerking off and killing a hobo right now :)
BiggieMclargeguy (11:15:53 AM): i am going to block you now and never talk to you again
BiggieMclargeguy (11:15:55 AM): ok?
RamFan2803 (11:15:59 AM): :-(
BiggieMclargeguy (11:16:03 AM): bye
RamFan2803 (11:16:09 AM): you're my best friend
BiggieMclargeguy (11:16:14 AM): TOO LATE
Previous message was not received by RamFan2803 because of error (11:16:17 AM): AOL Instant Messenger cannot send this message because you have blocked the recipient. You can change this setting on the Privacy tab of the Preferences dialog.
Biggie you bastard, you blocked me too. >:
I'm glad Rog is gonna ban your ass. >:
He was my best friend... in the entire world. :tear
I blocked you cause you were all, "I DONT WANT TO TALK TO PEOPLE ON THE INTERNET ANYMORE, I WANT TO TALK TO REAL PEOPLE :(" so i was just helping you out :(
I never said that. :(
Sorry Biggie, I'm not as cool as ArrowX, I sometimes get pissy & mad. I apologise if I upset you. :(
Apology accepted :(
Photobucket is down, so hardly anyone's avatars are working. :lol
Use Interceptors to destroy the missiles. Missiles must be destroyed before they reach this debri field.
Poor Sajuuk, maybe one day you'll be as cool as ArrowX. :(
Ladies and gentlemen, now the moment you've all been waiting for. The world famous Jack Rabbit Slim's Twist Contest. Now let's meet our first contestants here this evening.
Yeah I muche bandwith off of a site that we never built so I think my stuff is cool
GODDAMNIT GUYS USE http://www.goonse.cx >:
This is the first time I've seen photobucket down. :/
& apprantly Rog doesn't read PMs from me, so there'll likely be no banning today. :(
unless he bans you for sending PMs :(
Aw snap
I keep on getting prank calls on my cell phone whenever i use it. Jim duncan, you faggot
This is DJ Mad mothafuckin' Max in tha Hizzouse, and I can see that the fucktards are in tha mood for some mothafuckin' gangsta shit! HELL YEAH!
Right about now we're gonna be kickin' old skool with a little hit from that old mothafuckin classic by NWA, Straight Outta Compton!
Straight outta Compton, crazy motherfucker named Ice Cube
From the gang called Niggaz With Attitudes
When I'm called off, I got a sawed off
Squeeze the trigger, and bodies are hauled off
You too, boy, if ya fuck with me
The police are gonna hafta come and get me
Off yo ass, that's how I'm goin out
For the punk motherfuckers that's showin out
Niggaz start to mumble, they wanna rumble
Mix em and cook em in a pot like gumbo
Goin off on a motherfucker like that
with a gat that's pointed at yo ass
So give it up smooth
Ain't no tellin when I'm down for a jack move
Here's a murder rap to keep yo dancin
with a crime record like Charles Manson
AK-47 is the tool
Don't make me act the motherfuckin fool
Me you can go toe to toe, no maybe
I'm knockin niggaz out tha box, daily
yo weekly, monthly and yearly
until them dumb motherfuckers see clearly
that I'm down with the capital C-P-T
Boy you can't fuck with me
So when I'm in your neighborhood, you better duck
Coz Ice Cube is crazy as fuck
As I leave, believe I'm stompin
but when I come back, boy, I'm comin straight outta Compton
City of Compton, City of Compton
Yo Ren
Tell em where you from!
Straight outta Compton, another crazy ass nigga
More punks I smoke, yo, my rep gets bigger
I'm a bad motherfucker and you know this
But the pussy ass niggaz don't show this
But I don't give a fuck, I'ma make my snaps
If not from the records, from jackin the crops
Just like burglary, the definition is 'jackin'
And when illegally armed it's called 'packin'
Shoot a motherfucker in a minute
I find a good piece o' pussy, I go up in it
So if you're at a show in the front row
I'm a call you a bitch or dirty-ass ho
You'll probably get mad like a bitch is supposed to
But that shows me, slut, you're composed to
a crazy muthafucker from tha street
Attitude legit cause I'm tearin up shit
MC Ren controls the automatic
For any dumb muthafucker that starts static
Not the right hand cause I'm the hand itself
every time I pull a AK off the shelf
The security is maximum and that's a law
R-E-N spells Ren but I'm raw
See, coz I'm the motherfuckin villain
The definition is clear, you're the witness of a killin
that's takin place without a clue
And once you're on the scope, your ass is through
Look, you might take it as a trip
but a nigga like Ren is on a gangsta tip
Straight outta Compton...
City of Compton, City of Compton
Eazy is his name and the boy is comin...
...straight outta Compton
is a brotha that'll smother yo' mother
and make ya sister think I love her
Dangerous motherfucker raises hell
And if I ever get caught I make bail
See, I don't give a fuck, that's the problem
I see a motherfuckin cop I don't dodge him
But I'm smart, lay low, creep a while
And when I see a punk pass, I smile
To me it's kinda funny, the attitude showin a nigga drivin
but don't know where the fuck he's going, just rollin
lookin for the one they call Eazy
But here's a flash, they never seize me
Ruthless! Never seen like a shadow in the dark
except when I unload, see I'll get over the hesitation
and hear the scream of the one who got the last penetration
Give a little gust of wind and I'm jettin
But leave a memory no one'll be forgettin
So what about the bitch who got shot? Fuck her!
You think I give a damn about a bitch? I ain't a sucker!
This is the autobiography of the E, and if you ever fuck with me
You'll get taken by a stupid dope brotha who will smother
word to the motherfucker, straight outta Compton
City of Compton, City of Compton
Damn that shit was dope!
That's what I'm mothafuckin' talkin about! We gotta take a commercial break, but we'll be comin back at cha wit some more gangsta shit later on! This is DJ mothafuckin Mad Max and you're listenin to WFTARD! HELL YEAH!
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text:
Jasson Urbach is an Economist and director of the Free Market Foundation.
Publish date: 20 December 2007
Views: 1 004
The views expressed in the article are the author's and are not necessarily shared by the members of the Foundation. This article may be republished without prior consent but with acknowledgement to the author.


text:
Good news and terrible news, pet owners. The good news is that even if your pet gets lost by an airline, there's a chance that it will be found alive, living in the ventilation ducts months later. The bad news is that once your pet gets found, it might be almost dead. And if your pet's never found, it might be because some asshole stole it and sold it to a lab. There is literally a petpocalypse happening right this minute.
Two months ago, the owner of Jack, a handsome, long haired cat, was bringing her furry companion with her as she relocated from New York to the West Coast. Rather than fly with him in the cabin, she checked him as special luggage. And then, he disappeared from American Airlines' special handling area. A Facebook group sprang up. Now, he's been found scurrying around the airport's ventilation system. Hooray!
Unfortunately, today his owner received some bad news. Jack's got a pretty serious liver condition that causes fat to build up in the organ. Veterinarians say that the kitty has about a 50/50 chance of survival. Even though Jack's teetering on the precipice of death, his owner is flying back (for free) to see him, and once he's healthy, the airline will fly him (for free) to her in California.
But JFK airport isn't the only scheming entity trying to separate you and your fur child. The American Kennel Club estimates that pet thefts have risen 50% in the past year. Often, when people think their pet has escaped from their yard, their animal has actually been deliberately nabbed and then sold to a lab, although regulations around labs acquiring animals from "random sources" has significantly decreased the number of dogs sold to labs since the 1960's.
Some pet thieves in urban areas sell stolen animals to dog fighting rings. Other thieves resell the pets in their neighborhoods and pocket the profits, as purebred animals are valuable on the secondary market.
But don't totally despair; if your pet's lost, there's another alternative: perhaps she ran away to live with the neighbors, like my family's cat Norman did. She wandered into our yard one day as a smallish kitten, stayed for about 10 years, and suddenly, she just left. Weeks later, I saw her sunning herself in the neighbor's driveway, not a care in the world. I walked up to pet her and she ran away. It was like she had soap opera style amnesia. We continued to see her until she was a very old cat, donning the collars that the neighbors had bought her, and then, my parents stopped seeing her. Well I hope she and that other family were very happy together. Remember: if a pet will cheat with you, they'll cheat on you.
Pet Theft Up 50 Percent Since Last Year [AlternaNet]
Jack the Cat May Have Been Found, But He's Got Liver Disease [Gothamist]
Image via Michael Pettigrew/Shutterstock


text:
Have you seen them? The guides for how to talk to your family about Obamacare over the holidays.
That's right—Organizing for America (OFA), President Obama's campaign group, has a big push called "Health Care for the Holidays" that urges people to "have the talk" with their loved ones about getting health insurance. The Washington Post also published a "Guide to Surviving Obamacare Debates at Thanksgiving."
Obama's group encourages you to "Integrate the talk into family time: Take advantage of downtime after meals or between holiday activities to start your talk."
It goes on: "Get creative: Think about what matters to your family member. Make it memorable!"
The OFA website features images of Christmas wreaths alongside pills, snowflakes beside a Band-Aid, and a doctor's kit next to some turkey legs. Yep, these go together like…your health care and government control.
Thanks to Obamacare's disastrous rollout and sinking polls, the activist group is desperate to have people tell their family members happy thoughts about the new regime:
- "You get to choose the plan that's right for you."
- Fact: Obamacare's new exchanges actually offer very limited choice.
- "You can find a plan that fits your budget."
- Fact: Premiums will be more expensive for health insurance exchange shoppers in at least 42 states. See your state here.
The Washington Post's guide gives possible examples of different family members and their concerns. For the relative who insists everything would be working better if we had gone straight to a single-payer, completely government-administered system, the Post's Sarah Kliff notes that "we do at least have some evidence that building a government-run insurance system isn't exactly an easy lift."
Right. And for that brother who has insurance through his workplace—should he be worried? Kliff says no: "We're really not seeing much in the way of employers dropping workers into the marketplaces." But Obamacare dramatically changes the incentives for employers offering health coverage, and the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office projects that 7 million people with employer-sponsored coverage will lose it due to Obamacare.
Kliff sums it up pretty well when she writes, "This is probably the most obvious question to come up on Thursday: How busted is this law?"
It's very, very busted. That's why Congress should start over and implement health care reforms that are patient-centered and market-based—the opposite of Obamacare.
In the meantime, we agree with OFA that your Thanksgiving greetings can be creative and memorable. So check out our Thanksgiving e-cards and send one to a friend.
Read the Morning Bell and more en español every day at Heritage Libertad.
Quick Hits:
- This working mother lost her health plan, but won't take a government handout.
- Heritage told you about one HealthCare.gov security breach in North Carolina. Here's another in Vermont.
- Why was this coastal New Jersey town denied rebuilding funds from FEMA after Hurricane Sandy?
- Fox News host tells the gripping story of how the Culper Spy Ring saved the American Revolution.
- How should we fix the U.S. housing finance system?
- One-half of the unusual team behind The Christmas Candle says he appreciates the "low expectations" for the new movie.
- Find out the crazy reason why the Chevy Camaro is being recalled.


text:
Jill Barber - Chansons (Physical CD)
This product is currently sold out.
The 2013 CD release from Jill Barber.
"Wisely opting for stripped-down chamber-jazz arrangements, Barber, an avowed francophile, approaches material associated with Piaf, Gainsbourg, Salvador and others with reverence, but retains enough sexy playfulness and gentle self-awareness to make them her own." - The Montreal Gazette
Learn more about Jill Barber at http://www.jillbarber.com.
Learn more about Outside Music at http://www.outside-music.com.
Previews - Chansons
01. Petite Fleur -
02. J'attendrai -
03. Mélancolie -
04. La Javanaise -
05. Sous Le Ciel De Paris -
06. En Septembre Sous La Pluie -
07. Je Cherche Un Homme -
08. N'oublie Jamais -
09. Quand Les Hommes Vivront D'amour -
10. Les Feuilles Mortes -
11. Plus Bleu Que Tes Yeux -
12. Adieu Foulards -
Hear all samples at once - Listen!
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text: Dear Community, Andre Gide once said, "Man cannot discover new oceans unless he has the courage to lose sight of the shore." Sexism aside, I can't think of a better way to describe our adventures this past year. Around the end of March, we were three months behind schedule. Critical hardware bugs were being discovered almost weekly. I had just returned from an exhausting trip around the world. Harald landed in Taiwan the following week. One look at his face and I knew he was in basically the same depleted state I was in. But, we were both dedicated to keep pushing forward. We've come to realize, largely because of your support, that failure is not an option for this project. For the people pushing this project, an open phone is not really even a product. It's the very embodiment of our vision of technology. We absolutely, passionately, believe that something as fundamental to our lives as the mobile phone must be open. OpenMoko has become far bigger than just a small group of people trying to build an open mobile platform. I can tell you for sure, things will never be the same again inside FIC. To their credit, whole departments and divisions have been reorganized to maximize the opportunity for OpenMoko. This is the reason for my absence from this list for so long. The people inside FIC are amazingly open-minded. Our CEO and Chairman are the two greatest supporters inside this company. Earlier this month they did something courageous and support of the communities commitment. The entire mobile communications division was restructured to build devices for OpenMoko. And OpenMoko -- the project will officially become OpenMoko -- the company. This is how much they believe in us. This is how much faith they have that we will be successful. What does all this mean to us as a company and community? In one word: focus. We now have full control over the future of OpenMoko and the resources needed to give it every possible chance of succeeding. Behind us (well actually still in the same building :-) sits an supportive 800 pound gorilla in the OEM/ODM world, eagerly waiting to work with us to make our dreams a reality. OpenMoko -- together with all of you in the community -- will design, from the ground up, open devices and write the free software platform that powers them. FIC will build the hardware and help us set phones free around the world. This is about the most perfect relationship we can think of. Sure there will be rough times ahead. If it were easy, you know who would have done this long before. Making new things is never easy. But we're in this together. This project has changed me, changed you, and changed FIC. Hopefully, one day, this project will change the world. Now that OpenMoko is officially a company inside the FIC Group, blueprints of our office modifications cover the desk and walls where I'm sitting. Writing this letter to you all is finally giving me time to reflect on this thrilling roller coaster ride. Sorry for putting so many bits into your inbox. But I just can't help it. It's been months that we could hardly step back and see things from a big picture. Now, I really don't think I've been this excited since the day I got my first set of Lincoln Logs. For those of us that love to build new things, Taiwan, especially now at FIC and OpenMoko, is a great place to be. So here's the point of this email, finally after more than one year, we're entering into a new ocean. In our factory in China, 400 Neos are waiting for you all. Another 600 will be ready before next week. More are queued up waiting for us to say go. We've had a particularly challenging time trying to setup the online infrastructure and figure out how to ship these phones. Sometime later today or early tomorrow we're going to make another announcement asking for some advice. (Here come the details.) Starting July 9th, we will launch openmoko.com and start taking orders. We're going to have two configurations: Neo Base -- everything the mobile application developer needs to enjoy the benefits of the first freed phone, the Neo 1973: * Neo 1973 (GTA01B_v4) * Battery * Stylus * Headset * AC Charger * Phone Pouch * Lanyard * SanDisk 512MB MicroSD Card (2x) * Micro USB Connectivity Cable Neo Advanced -- everything the mobile device hacker wants to get down and dirty with the first freed phone, the Neo 1973: * Neo 1973 (GTA01B_v4) * Battery (2x) * Stylus * Headset * AC Charger * Phone Pouch * Lanyard * SanDisk 512MB MicroSD Card (2x) * Mini USB Connectivity Cable (2x) * USB Host Mode Cable * Debug Flex Cable * Debug Board v2 (JTAG and serial console) * Ruggedized Toolbox with shoulder strap * Guitar Pick (for opening case) * Torx T6 screwdriver The delays have been expensive for us and annoying for you. We've decided that instead of setting up a complicated return or tracking system to remember who gets a discount for GTA02, we going to give you _all_ a discount on GTA01. We're going to sell the Neo Base for $300. The Neo Advanced will be $450. GTA02 (AKA: The Mass Market Neo 1973) is on schedule to go on sale in October. It will have the following new hardware components: * 802.11 b/g WiFi * Samsung 2442 SoC * SMedia 3362 Graphics Accelerator * 2 3D Accelerometers * 256MB Flash We will sell this device through multiple channels. Direct from openmoko.com, the price will be $450 for the Neo Base and $600 for Neo Advanced. We have three more mobile devices planned for next year (not including GTA02). During the next few months we will be adding serious resources to both FIC and OpenMoko to support these projects. I will update you all after we stabilize GTA02. Right now we must collectively focus everything on turning the Neo into mass marketable device that proves, once and for all, the power of an open phone. Finally, more than a few of you have complained about a lack of transparency during the past few months. You have my word that we will always best to be as open as possible. But sometimes we must make compromises. I had to make a choice: keep up my travel schedule building support for this project and tend to this list, or fix these real issues. Ignoring this list was one of the hardest things for me to do. All of your comments give us our drive to keep pushing. But if we didn't keep the project on track and make the necessary organizational changes this project would be even later. And I knew that when I could come back to explain this to you all, you would understand. Thank you. We're back now. I can tell you like nobody else can, this project is stronger than ever. We've got a whole new ocean in front of us just begging for exploration. Sincerely, OpenMoko and FIC. P.S. It seems that in all this restructuring, someone has been eavesdropping on us. It could be a spy. Or it could be a ninja. Only time will tell. So stay tuned ;-)


text:
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text:
Tom Engelhardt: As another August 6th approachesRoundup: Talking About History
As a young man, I was probably not completely atypical in having the Bomb (the 1950s was a great time for capitalizing what was important) on my brain, and not just while I was ducking under my school desk as sirens howled their nuclear warnings outside. Like many people my age, I dreamed about the bomb, too. I could, in those nightmares, feel its searing heat, watch a mushroom cloud rise on some distant horizon, or find myself in some devastated landscape I had never come close to experiencing (except perhaps in sci-fi novels).
Of course, my dreams were nothing compared to those of America's top strategists who, in secret National Security Council documents of the early 1950s, descended into the charnel house of future history, imagining life on this planet as an eternal potential holocaust. They wrote in those documents of the possibility that 100 atomic bombs, landing on targets in the United States, might kill or injure 22 million Americans and of an American"blow" that might result in the" complete destruction" of the Soviet Union.
And they were pikers compared to the top military brass who, in 1960, found themselves arguing over the country's first Single Integrated Operational Plan for nuclear strategy. In it, a scenario was laid out for delivering more than 3,200 nuclear weapons to 1,060 targets in the Communist world, including at least 130 cities which would, if all went well, cease to exist. Official, if classified, estimates of possible casualties from such an attack -- and by then, nuclear weaponry and its delivery systems had grown far more powerful -- ran to 285 million dead and 40 million injured (and this probably underestimated radiation effects).
From the National Security Council and the Pentagon to a teenager's nightmares, an American obsession with global annihilation undoubtedly peaked when President Kennedy came on the air on October 22, 1962, to tell us that Soviet missile sites were just then being prepared on the island of Cuba with"a nuclear strike capability against the Western Hemisphere." Listening to his address, Americans everywhere imagined a nuclear confrontation that could leave parts of the country in ruins. Nuclear fears, however, began to fade (even as the superpower arsenals grew) when the Cuban Missile Crisis was defused and, along with atomic tests, went underground after the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty was signed in 1963. Then, of course, the Vietnam War seemed to swallow the world.
In 1979, after the reactor core of a nuclear plant at Three Mile Island in Pennsylvania partially melted down, the bomb returned to me in an odd way. Then a book editor, I went out to lunch with a potential author who had been on one of the investigatory panels created by the President's Commission on the Accident at Three Mile Island which Jimmy Carter had set up. She told me of a Japanese journalist who testified before her panel. He had interviewed the mothers of young children and pregnant women belatedly evacuated from the potential danger zone to an iceless ice rink in the state capital, Harrisburg. None of them had heard of Hiroshima or Nagasaki.
This so startled me that I decided to search for a book to publish on what had happened on those August days in 1945 when two Japanese cities were wiped out by a new weapon and the nuclear age began. With the help of a historian and friend, I finally came across a Japanese book of images drawn by Hiroshima survivors, few of them artists, sometimes with school materials borrowed from their own grandchildren. Each drawing caught a moment experienced on that terrible day when Hiroshima was wiped out and was accompanied by a little personal description. Many of images were in pastels, or even crayon, and looked invitingly sprightly until you read the horrific accounts that accompanied them. The book was called Unforgettable Fire and it played a small role in the massive anti-nuclear movement that arose in those years. Unfortunately -- and this tells us something -- it's now long out of print.
A couple of years later, I was invited by Japanese publishers to visit their country. Only on arriving did I discover that the man who had shepherded Unforgettable Fire to publication -- and who was surprised to discover that an American editor wanted to publish it in translation -- planned to take me to Hiroshima.
As a former atomic dreamer, who now knew a good deal about the history of the dropping of the bomb, and was, above all, the editor of possibly the only mainstream visual record in the U.S. of what had happened under that mushroom cloud, I was touched by the gesture, but somewhat bored by the idea. After all, Japan was then dazzling. It was the era of"Japan as Number One" mania and there was so much to see in a few brief days -- and I, of course, knew pretty much what there was to be known about the experience of the first A-bombing. That's just how plain dumb I was.
The trip to the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum with its caramelized children's lunchbox and permanently imprinted human shadows was, to say the least, unspeakably horrifying. In fact, it left me literally speechless, so much so that, although I returned to New York babbling about Japan, I found, for a long time, I couldn't talk about what I had seen in Hiroshima.
And that, mind you, was only the museum, which means it was next to nothing compared to what actually happened that long ago day. When American strategists in the 1950s confidently began, in Herman Kahn's famous phrase,"thinking the unthinkable," they, too, undoubtedly had no idea what they were incapable of imagining. By and large, they still don't. As TomDispatch regular Frida Berrigan points out, the weapons that devastated Hiroshima and Nagasaki are the equivalent of BBs compared to what's now in the major nuclear arsenals on this planet. So sweet dreams this Hiroshima Day.
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Randll Reese Besch - 8/25/2009
Most of them have not direct communications with each other including those who could launch on warning if they so choose. China, India, and Pakistan are all such candidates for starting nuclear war in at least a sizable chunk of the planet. With the Coriolus force would spread it far and wide and much of it to us first!
Maybe 27,000 in all estimated in the 9 countries arsenals and in various sizes too. Tick, tick, tick...1 minute to Atomic Midnight.
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Abraham Lincoln (February 12, 1809 – April 15, 1865) was the 16th (1861 – 1865) President of the United States, and the first President from the Republican Party. He is well praised for successfully restoring the federal unity of the nation by defeating the secessionist Confederate States of America and along the way, playing in an important role in ending chattel slavery in the United States. However, a number of states' rights supporters continue to view Lincoln as a tyrant who suspended civil liberties and suppressed the "legitimate right" to secede.
|16th President
|Term of Office:
|March 4 , 1861 – April 15 , 1865
|James Buchanan
|Succeeded by:
|Andrew Johnson
|Date of Birth
|Sunday , February 12 , 1809
|Place of Birth:
|Larue County, Kentucky
|Date of Death:
|Saturday , April 15 , 1865
|Place of Death:
|Washington, D.C.
|First Lady:
|Mary Todd
|Political Party:
|Vice President:
Born on February 12, 1809, in Kentucky , he moved at a young age to the area near Springfield, Illinois . He served as a captain in the U.S. Army during the Black Hawk War . He later tried his hand at several business and political ventures. Lincoln served four terms in the Illinois State Legislature, was twice elected to Congress (1847 and 1849) and had a successful law practice in Illinois both before and after his two terms in the House of Representatives. It is commonly held that Lincoln had turbulent mood swings alternating between grandiosity and depression, which greatly moderated after his marriage to Mary Todd Lincoln in 1842.
First elected to the House of Representatives , Lincoln spent most of his time in Washington, DC alone and made less than a spectacular impression on his fellow politicians. During his unsuccessful campaign for the United States Senate against Stephen A. Douglas , it was Lincoln's well-known gift of oratory that brought public support to an otherwise unimpressive candidate. Lincoln debated Douglas in a series of events which represented a national discussion on the issues that were about to split the nation in two. The Lincoln/Douglas debates presaged the Presidential election of 1860 , in which Douglas and Lincoln were once again opponents.
Shortly after his election, the South made it clear that secession was inevitable which greatly increased tension across the nation. President-elect Lincoln survived an assassination attempt in Baltimore, Maryland and on February 23 , 1861 arrived secretly in disguise to Washington, DC . The South ridiculed Lincoln for this seemingly cowardly act, but the efforts at security may have been prudent. At Lincoln's inauguration on March 4 , 1861 , the Turners formed Lincoln's bodyguard, and a sizable garrison of Union troops was always present, ready to protect the president and the capital from rebel invasion.
During his presidency, Lincoln is credited with freeing the slaves with the Emancipation Proclamation , though this only freed the slaves in areas of the Confederacy not yet controlled by the Union. However, the proclamation made abolishing slavery in the rebel states an official war goal which became the impetus for the enactment of the 13th and 14th Admendments of the United States Constitution which respectively abolished slavery and established the federal enforcement of civil rights . During the Civil War Lincoln held powers no previous president had wielded; he suspended the writ of habeas corpus and frequently imprisoned Southern spies and sympathizers without trial.
He showed tremendous leadership to the Union populace during the war as evidenced by the Gettysburg Address , a speech dedicating a cemetery of union soldiers from the Battle of Gettysburg in 1863 . While most of the speakers at the event spoke at length, some for hours, Lincoln's few choice words resonated across the nation and across history, defying Linoln's own prediction that "The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here." While there is little documentation of the other speeches of the day, Lincoln's address is regarded as one of the great speeches in history.
The war was a source of constant frustration for the president, and it occupied nearly all of his time. After repeated frustrations with General George McClellan and a string of other unsuccessful commanding generals, Lincoln made the fateful decision to appoint a radical and somewhat scandalous army commander: General Ulysses S. Grant . Grant would apply his military knowledge and leadership talents to bring about the close of the Civil War.
When Richmond , the Confederate capital, was at long last captured, Lincoln went there to make a public gesture of sitting behind Jefferson Davis 's desk in Davis's own chair, symbolically saying to the nation that the President of the United States, and the U.S. constitution, held authority over the entire land. He was greeted at the city as a conquering hero by freed slaves whose sentiments were epitomized by one admirers quote, "I know I am free for I have seen the face of Father Abraham and have felt him."
The reconstruction of the Union weighed heavy on the President's mind. He was determined to take a course that would not permanently alienate the former Confederate states.
Lincoln met frequently with Grant as the war ended. The two men planned matters of reconstruction, and it was evident to all that the two men held one another in high regard. During their last meeting, on April 14 , 1865 , Lincoln invited General Grant to a social engagement for that evening. Grant declined (his wife was not eager to spend time with Mary Todd Lincoln).
Without the General and his wife, the Lincolns left to attend a play at Ford's theater. The play was Our American Cousin , a musical comedy. As Lincoln sat in the balcony, John Wilkes Booth , an actor and Southern sympathizer from Virginia , aimed a single-shot, round-slug pistol at the President's head and fired. He shouted " Sic semper tyrannis! " (Latin: "Thus always to tyrants" and Virginia's state motto) and jumped from the balcony to the stage below, breaking his leg in the process.
Booth managed to limp to his horse and escape, and the mortally wounded president was taken to a house across the street where he lay in a coma for some time before he quietly expired. Booth and several of his companions (some of whom were later shown to be innocent) were eventually captured and either hanged or imprisoned.
Lincoln's body was carried by train in a grand funeral procession through several states. The nation mourned a man who many viewed as the savior of the United States and protector and defender of what Lincoln himself called "the government of the people, by the people, and for the people." Critics say that it was in fact the Confederates that were defending the right of "government for the people" and Lincoln who was suppressing that right. They further insist that Lincoln only preserved the union in a geographical sense while destroying its voluntary nature.
One of the most respected and beloved presidents, Lincoln has been memorialized in many city names, notably the capital of Nebraska , with the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C. , and on the U.S. $5 bill and the 1 cent coin.
On February 12 , 1892 Abraham Lincoln's birthday was declared to be a national holiday in the United States.
USS Abraham Lincoln was named in his honor.
Supreme Court appointments
- Noah Haynes Swayne – 1862
- Samuel Freeman Miller – 1862
- David Davis – 1862
- Stephen Johnson Field – 1863
- Salmon Portland Chase – Chief Justice – 1864


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Tapa tapa magica
Might & Magic: Clash of Heroes is one of the best puzzle RPGs to come out of a generation full of puzzle RPGs.
Capybara Games had a huge hit on its hands when the studio combined the addictive qualities of Critter Crunch with a highly reputable existing IP, and added a few tweaks. Instead of focusing entirely on attacking the enemy, defensive capabilities were built into core gameplay, which forced you to think about multiple strategies on a constant basis.
The departure from the one-sided style of gameplay wasn't the only ace in the hole, however, as the amazing artwork was also a huge plus. But now, that artwork is on a tiny screen, without the aid of a stylus for precision movements, without the direct developmental work of Capybara. The results…are a bit mixed.
Might & Magic: Clash of Heroes (Android, iPhone [reviewed on an iPhone 4])
Developer: Tag Games
Publisher: Capybara Games
Released: January 24, 2013 (iOS), TBA (Android)
Since Jordan already did a great job explaining the basic game mechanics in his full review, I'll mostly stick to the pertinent details of the mobile version here.
For those who haven't experienced this franchise yet, but recognize the "Might & Magic" moniker, the setup is pretty simple. This game is a prequel for the game Heroes of Might and Magic V, which follows the Ubisoft continuity for the franchise, after they took over for New World Computing.
To be clear, this version is not a full-on Capybara Games joint — this is a port by the mobile developer Tag Games. For the most part, the actual content of the original is pretty much 100% intact. You'll find all of the dialogue, characters, story, artwork, and other happenings untouched.
Combat functions pretty much the same, with players selecting units to switch up in battle, and tapping a button to call in reinforcements. While it's not a major issue for me, keep in mind that the game has to be played in landscape mode.
Since the core gameplay is turned-based, control mishaps in this sector are a bit more excusable. Although it can be a bit difficult to grab and move units around at will, you have all the time in the world to do it, and for the most part, it works. It would have been nice if there were an "undo" function though, for people that have issues acclimating to the touch environment.
The portion of the game where the controls are most frustrating is everything outside of combat. Simply put, the hitboxes for menus are extremely small. You basically need to take your nails (if you have any), and precision tap exact hitboxes to select menu options consistently.
When you're moving around the map, and in just about every menu in the game, your taps are extremely inaccurate. One of the most frustrating things I encountered is the pause button, which almost never works in battles if you need to set your phone aside or exit your current game. Choosing options when starting up a game can also be a nightmare.
You might also notice frame-rate issues from time to time, like I did on my iPhone 4. Although it's easy to blame a lack of the latest hardware, Clash of Heroes is supported as far back as iPhone 3GS, so it's just something to be aware of.
Outside of the main campaign, there's also Quick Battle, Pass & Play, and online play options. Quick Battle is basically a one-on-one with the AI, and functions essentially the exact same as an end-game fight in the main story. Pass & Play is just how it sounds, and lets you rock out a 1v1 fight locally, Advance Wars-style. The game's online mode is about what you'd expect as well, but one has to wonder how long the mobile version's legs are compared to say, Xbox Live, or Steam.
In typical mobile fashion, an in-game store is available where you can buy extra content for real money. Thankfully, it isn't really an issue of taking advantage of people through pay walls, as all in-app purchase options are for unlocking different factions in multiplayer — which can also be unlocked entirely by progressing through the game. Additionally, this mobile version also supports Ubisoft's uPlay ecosystem, if you're into that.
Although outsourcing to Tag Games was probably a smart business move, I can't help but think how picture-perfect Clash of Heroes would have turned out if Capybara had done it themselves. With a lot of polish in terms of the controls through a future update, this could be one of the finest games on the App Store. Otherwise, just stick to the other incredible versions if possible.


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tisdag 8 april 2014
Spring at last! Biking outside the Grand Hotell in Lund
Upplagd av olof blomqvist kl. 10:31 Inga kommentarer:
tisdag 29 januari 2013
Suprise Post at MLCC Flickr Group
I found this photo in the MLCC Flickr group. It was posted some time ago by Flickr signature joda317. I must say IT IS GREAT! Enjoy!
Upplagd av olof blomqvist kl. 18:31 1 kommentar:
måndag 20 augusti 2012
A picture from earlyer this summer
Upplagd av olof blomqvist kl. 15:31 Inga kommentarer:
fredag 17 augusti 2012
Tandem Bicycle
A tandem bicycle is something you do not se everyday. Here is Jenny and Ronja riding their Cresent tandem in Lund.
A bike for two is a bike for friends!
A bike for two is a bike for friends!
Upplagd av olof blomqvist kl. 15:22 Inga kommentarer:
Etiketter: Lund, tandemcykel
onsdag 1 augusti 2012
måndag 23 juli 2012
In memorial
Upplagd av olof blomqvist kl. 21:52 2 kommentarer:
Etiketter: Malmö
måndag 11 juni 2012
tisdag 29 maj 2012
onsdag 23 maj 2012
Excelent article on cycling, bicycle helmets and traffic safety
The conclusion is simple and you might have heard it before; biking should be kept simple! No helmet, More simple!
In addition the article also shows this interesting diagram (from Trafikanalys):
It is very clear that the risk of getting killed per kilometer traveled is much higher when biking than when driving a car (4 times higher). However the risk of dying when walking is actually much higher, times higher (almost double compared to biking). Yet, no one would argue that you should wear a helmet walking. The contrast to the travel modes where helmets are currently requested by law in Sweden is stunning. It is so much more dangerous to drive a moped or motorcycle than even to walk...
However, if we look not at risk of dying by traveled kilometer but by time spent driving a car, biking or walking that kilometer we see that each of these transport modes is about equally safe while driving a motorcycle or moped is much more dangerous.
Upplagd av olof blomqvist kl. 15:30 7 kommentarer:
torsdag 10 maj 2012
Prenumerera på: Inlägg (Atom)


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"Cholesterol is a molecule found in all animal cells and serves as a structural component of cell membranes," said Salman Hyder, the Zalk Endowed Professor in Tumor Angiogenesis and professor of biomedical sciences in the College of Veterinary Medicine and the Dalton Cardiovascular Research Center at MU. "Because tumor cells grow rapidly they need to synthesize more cholesterol. Scientists working to cure breast cancer often seek out alternative targets that might slow or stop the progression of the disease, including the elimination of the cancerous cells. In our study, we targeted the production of cholesterol in cancer cells leading to death of breast cancer cells."
Previous studies suggest that 70 percent of breast cancers found in women are hormone dependent and can be treated with anti-hormone medicines such as tamoxifen. Although tumor cells may initially respond to therapies, most eventually develop resistance which causes breast cancer cells to grow and spread. Cholesterol also can contribute to the development of anti-hormone resistance because cholesterol is converted into hormones in tumor cells. Therefore, these cholesterol-forming pathways are attractive therapeutic targets for the treatment of breast cancer.
Using compounds initially developed by Roche Pharmaceuticals for the treatment of high cholesterol, which reduces cholesterol in a different manner than the widely used statins, Hyder and his team administered the molecule to human breast cancer cells. They found that the compound was effective in reducing human breast cancer cell growth and often caused cancer cell death. Most interestingly they found that the cholesterol lowering drug they tested destroyed an estrogen receptor, a protein which encourages the tumor cells to grow.
Equipped with this information, Hyder and the team tested the results in mice with breast cancer. Following injection of the compound, Hyder found that the molecule was effective at killing breast cancer cells by reducing the presence of estrogen receptors in tumor cells, Hyder said.
"The compound exhibited anti-tumor properties in both human samples, which were outside the body, and in samples that were administered by injection into the mice," Hyder said. "In both cases, the proteins that cause tumors to grow were eliminated, leading to more aggressive cell death."
Hyder believes that further clinical testing can lead to a drug that has the dual purpose of fighting high cholesterol and cancer.
Researchers involved with the study included Yayun Liang, research associate professor at Dalton Cardiovascular Research Center; Cynthia Besch-Williford, professor of veterinary pathobiology at MU; Benford Mafuvadze, post-doctoral fellow at Dalton Cardiovascular Research Center; Matthew Cook, pre-doctoral fellow in Biomedical Sciences; and Xiaoqin Zou, associate professor of physics and biochemistry and a researcher at the Dalton Cardiovascular Research Center. Johannes Aebi from Roche Pharmaceuticals also contributed to the research.
The study, "Cholesterol biosynthesis inhibitors as potent novel anti-cancer agents: suppression of hormone-dependent breast cancer by the oxidosqualene cyclase inhibitor RO 48-8071," was published in Breast Cancer Research and Treatment and was funded by a grant from the Department of Defense Breast Cancer Program.


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Bond (James Bond) Week: How to Roll
By BY
And finally, for our aspiring Bonds, here's where to go (and where not to go) and how to get there:
* "Unless you have something like 5,000 pounds to throw around [editor's note: not adjusted for inflation], you'll have to stick to talking about your car but somehow never actually producing it -- because, for instance, it needs very thorough repairs after running into a carpet of steel spikes dropped in front of it by a Russian agent you were pursuing along a French road. However, whether you really have it or just say you have it, your car is a 1954 Continental Bentley with the 'R' type chassis, the big 6 engine and a 13:40 back-axle ratio."
* "Although, characteristically, you know everything worth knowing about where you've been, you haven't been everywhere. You go where you're sent, as you smilingly remind anybody who looks surprised at your ignorance of St. Tropez or Copenhagen or Bethnal Green."
* "You have been known to stay at the Ritz, but only in exceptional circumstances: when pretending to be a diamond smuggler, or after being brainwashed by the K.G.B."
* "You have cordially disliked Paris since the war. It has pawned its heart to the tourists, to the Russians and Romanians and Bulgars, to the scum of the world who have gradually taken the town over. And, of course, to the Germans."
* "Istanbul: Your instinct tells you, as it has told other travellers, that you'll be glad to get out of the place alive."
* "Avoid St. Petersburg, Florida -- full of oldsters trying to keep alive until 90. it frightened the life out of you."


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I can't believe I did it again. They tried to tell me—all of them did—but I didn't heed any of their warnings. Why do I have to be so stubborn? Why won't I just take every single person seriously?
My best friend, Sheila, she's been telling me that I should really start taking the advice of any of the practically hundreds of people who offer it to me on a weekly basis, but do I listen to her? Of course not.
So here I am, too ashamed to admit to each individual that I've ever encountered in my entire life that I was wrong.
See, I've somehow made a habit of turning a deaf ear to virtually everyone. Like the time I didn't listen to Bob, or Uncle Steve, or Grandpa, or Grandma, or Bob's wife. They had good advice, and I ignored it. All they wanted was to help. Them and Tom and Gloria and Roy and the guy at the donut shop and Huang and Colonel Davidson and the doctor on TV.
No matter how many times they all tell me, I keep going around thinking I'm some big shot who knows better than, almost to the number, every member of the human race. I just wish I'd paused a moment, taken a deep breath, and actually listened several thousand times to those around me! My coworker Neil, Barbara from Sacramento, those online survey results, my psychic, anyone.
I always do this to myself and those who live, work, or are casually associated with me!
If only I'd listened to my parents when I was young. Or a guidance counselor. Or the spelling team coach in seventh grade. Or that priest after my first marriage. Or to that one guy I met on the street, never learned the name of, and only spoke to for five minutes. All of those people had more common sense than I ever did.
And how many were there? Hundreds, perhaps thousands? Any sentient being within earshot could have told me my crazy schemes couldn't possibly work, would fail miserably, and would leave my life in total disarray.
But did I pay them any mind? Nope.
I didn't listen to Gail, or Becky, or Mr. Haverscham, or his lawyer, or the salesman at the used car lot who actually tried to stop me from buying that Corolla with 400,000 miles on it. I didn't listen to my accountant, my ob-gyn, or my anesthesiologist. I didn't listen to my college roommate, or the tour guide at the Lincoln Memorial, or the Secret Service agents.
Grrr! I never listen to everybody!
My earliest memories, from age 4, are of people trying to talk some sense into me, and me not paying any attention. Is it any wonder I fell down that well? Played tetherball with that downed power line? Did I take them seriously when they said there was no market for open-toed dress shoes for men? Or when the entire population of the United States agreed a nationwide pasta-burger franchise had no chance of succeeding? No, I didn't. And here I am today, totally out of luck with nothing but these stupid orange parachute pants and 1,400 chinchilla embryos to show for it.
Why didn't I listen to Jill? And then to Jill again, two months later? And then to Frank, Amanda, and that one gay couple whose names I always get confused? And then Jill again? Why do I always think I'm right all the time, when everyone—I mean everyone from Albert Einstein to the playground full of developmentally disabled children down the block—keeps trying to set me straight?
"No," said Greg, Cindy, Joe, and even some of the smarter dogs I've met. "That's just a bad idea all around, Simone! Don't do it!" And yet, what did I do? It. Ad infinitum.
I simply don't pay anyone or anything any mind: not the IRS, not the NRA, not any traffic cops, ever, not that supermarket checkout girl or the roomful of Chippendales dancers. Not the Bible, the Talmud, the Koran, or the Necronomicon. Not even that book of cartoon penguins I had when I was 8.
Why? Why does this keep happening to me? I'm such an idiot! Such a stupid idiot! And if you don't agree, keep it to yourself, because I honestly do not want to hear it right now.


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MF85ZZ Flange Ball Bearing 5x8x2 mm
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