Jan 30, 2009
My face aches from smiling
I had a major incarceration in 1996. It humbled me and taught me the importance of personal freedoms. Since than I have learned to smile when I don't feel like it, say "Yes, ma'am" and "No sir" to people in positions of authority. My head hurts from all this smiling. I am a person who loves a good belly laugh and enjoys making others laugh as well. It angers me when I am not being true to myself. Fake. In a work situation it is a necessity. Otherwise, it is just putting on my life game face. The one you use at the department of motor vehicles. The same smiling face you use when you are at the Social Security offfice after they failed to send your husbands check. The happy face I put on when I go visit the VA hospital to spread some cheer to some forgotten heroes. The older I get the harder the smile hurts when it is false. I make a point to keep anger from getting etched in my face, probably due to personal vanity. It exists though. I grew up in the land of watching All In The Family, with commercials of people grouped together singing how they would like to teach the world to sing. I watched The Jeffersons movin' on up. That era and that mentality is gone. I don't see people moving anywhere. They are staying stagnate, afloat, but moving up they are not. They are spiraling downward. Freezing to death, while people shuffle amongst the homeless with arrogant impunity. I am a believer in karma. I might not have a dollar to throw in someone's cup, but if I have a quarter, I do. Four quarters and bam, at least someone can eat a burger off off of dollar menu. I wonder how many people in our country truly knows the meaning of being hungry. Literally hungry to the point of having no strength. I shall continue to smile even if it only makes a difference with one human being.
Jan 29, 2009
Jan 28, 2009
A disgrace to our nation.
How the hell can this happen in the United States in this day and age? I am disgusted. This man survived a war, fought for his country and dies a miserable death alone in his frozen home. Sorry folks, this is unacceptable. My husband said there is a saying in the military, "you give so much and get so little"..Well this sure seems to be a testimony to that. What happened to neighbors checking in on the elderly and infirm? This man had noone. He died frozen and alone in the United States of America. I wonder if the utitlity company CEO sleeps well at night in his nice toasty warm home.
Jan 27, 2009 12:15 pm US/Eastern
Man, 93, Freezes To Death; Owed Huge Utility Bill
Medical Examiner: Marvin E. Schur Suffered 'Slow, Painful Death'BAY CITY, Mich. (AP) ―
Click to enlarge
Officials in Bay City, Mich., said a 93-year-old World War II Vet froze to death inside of his home where the local power company had restricted his use of electricity. He was found on Jan. 17, 2009.
CBS
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Bill (11/18/2008)
A 93-year-old man froze to death inside his home just days after the municipal power company restricted his use of electricity because of unpaid bills, officials said.
Marvin E. Schur died "a slow, painful death," said Kanu Virani, Oakland County's deputy chief medical examiner, who performed the autopsy.
Neighbors discovered Schur's body on Jan. 17. They said the indoor temperature was below 32 degrees at the time, The Bay City Times reported Monday.
"Hypothermia shuts the whole system down, slowly," Virani said. "It's not easy to die from hypothermia without first realizing your fingers and toes feel like they're burning."
Schur owed Bay City Electric Light & Power more than $1,000 in unpaid electric bills, Bay City Manager Robert Belleman told The Associated Press on Monday.
A city utility worker had installed a "limiter" device to restrict the use of electricity at Schur's home on Jan. 13, Belleman said. The device limits power reaching a home and blows out like a fuse if consumption rises past a set level. Power is not restored until the device is reset.
The limiter was tripped sometime between the time of installation and the discovery of Schur's body, Belleman said. He didn't know if anyone had made personal contact with Schur to explain how the device works.
Schur's body was discovered by neighbor George Pauwels Jr.
"His furnace was not running, the insides of his windows were full of ice the morning we found him," Pauwels told the newspaper.
Belleman said city workers keep the limiter on houses for 10 days, then shut off power entirely if the homeowner hasn't paid utility bills or arranged to do so.
He said Bay City Electric Light & Power's policies will be reviewed, but he didn't believe the city did anything wrong.
"I've said this before and some of my colleagues have said this: Neighbors need to keep an eye on neighbors," Belleman said. "When they think there's something wrong, they should contact the appropriate agency or city department."
Schur had no children and his wife had died several years ago.
Jan 27, 2009 12:15 pm US/Eastern
Man, 93, Freezes To Death; Owed Huge Utility Bill
Medical Examiner: Marvin E. Schur Suffered 'Slow, Painful Death'BAY CITY, Mich. (AP) ―
Click to enlarge
Officials in Bay City, Mich., said a 93-year-old World War II Vet froze to death inside of his home where the local power company had restricted his use of electricity. He was found on Jan. 17, 2009.
CBS
1 of 1
Close
Bill (11/18/2008)
A 93-year-old man froze to death inside his home just days after the municipal power company restricted his use of electricity because of unpaid bills, officials said.
Marvin E. Schur died "a slow, painful death," said Kanu Virani, Oakland County's deputy chief medical examiner, who performed the autopsy.
Neighbors discovered Schur's body on Jan. 17. They said the indoor temperature was below 32 degrees at the time, The Bay City Times reported Monday.
"Hypothermia shuts the whole system down, slowly," Virani said. "It's not easy to die from hypothermia without first realizing your fingers and toes feel like they're burning."
Schur owed Bay City Electric Light & Power more than $1,000 in unpaid electric bills, Bay City Manager Robert Belleman told The Associated Press on Monday.
A city utility worker had installed a "limiter" device to restrict the use of electricity at Schur's home on Jan. 13, Belleman said. The device limits power reaching a home and blows out like a fuse if consumption rises past a set level. Power is not restored until the device is reset.
The limiter was tripped sometime between the time of installation and the discovery of Schur's body, Belleman said. He didn't know if anyone had made personal contact with Schur to explain how the device works.
Schur's body was discovered by neighbor George Pauwels Jr.
"His furnace was not running, the insides of his windows were full of ice the morning we found him," Pauwels told the newspaper.
Belleman said city workers keep the limiter on houses for 10 days, then shut off power entirely if the homeowner hasn't paid utility bills or arranged to do so.
He said Bay City Electric Light & Power's policies will be reviewed, but he didn't believe the city did anything wrong.
"I've said this before and some of my colleagues have said this: Neighbors need to keep an eye on neighbors," Belleman said. "When they think there's something wrong, they should contact the appropriate agency or city department."
Schur had no children and his wife had died several years ago.
Jan 27, 2009
Past presidents admitting mistakes
I takes a big man to admit his mistakes and this piece intriguiged me. Hopefully the new administration can listen and not repeat the same one.
(CNN) -- Two former presidents reflected on their greatest regrets in office Monday, each looking back to issues that continue to plague the nation years later.
Former presidents and political rivals Bill Clinton and George H.W. Bush now share philanthropic efforts.
Former Presidents George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton appeared together at a question-and-answer forum before the National Automobile Dealers Association in New Orleans, Louisiana.
Asked his biggest regret after leaving office, Bush said he now wonders whether he should have tried to get Saddam Hussein to leave office at the end of the first Gulf War in 1991.
He told the gathering, "I've thought a lot about it, but at the end of Desert Storm, the question was should we have kind of kept going on that road to death and all this slaughter until Saddam Hussein showed up and laid his sword on the table, surrendered. And the common wisdom was he wouldn't do that."
But he said a conversation with an FBI agent who interrogated Saddam after he was captured has made him reconsider.
Bush recalled their talk, "I said, 'What if we just say he has to come to surrender, would he have done it?' And this guy said, 'I'm absolutely convinced he would have.' My experts tell me he wouldn't have."
Bush said, "We ended it the way we said we would" as a military success, but noted a cleaner ending "would have been perfect."
Don't Miss
George H.W. Bush says goodbye to White House
Historic meeting of an elite club
He added, "If we had tried to get Saddam Hussein to come and literally surrender and put his sword on the table, I think it might have been avoided some of the problems that we did have in the future from him."
On a day that President Barack Obama dispatched George Mitchell to the Middle East as the latest U.S. envoy, Clinton discussed the failure to achieve peace between Israelis and Palestinians.
"My No. 1 regret is that I was not able to persuade Yasser Arafat to accept the peace plan I offered at the end of my presidency that the Israelis accepted.
"If he had done that ... we had had seven years of progress toward peace. We had one year in 1998, the only year in the history of Israel where not a single soul was killed in a terrorist act. The Palestinians had more control over West Bank then than they do today," Clinton said. "And if he had taken that deal, we would have a Palestinian state and we would have had, I think now, normal peaceful relations with Israel and all of its Arab neighbors."
Clinton said a deal would have helped the U.S. handle other issues in the region, saying, "We'd be much better positioned to deal with the problem of Iran, and we would have taken away about half the arguments of terrorists around the world by giving the Palestinians their state and creating a cooperative, positive interdependence in the Middle East, not a negative one. And so, I think that would have done more good to save more lives and help more people, and I wish I had been able to do that. "
Clinton also said he regretted not doing more to "stop the Rwandan genocide," and succeeding on a new health care plan.
He said "presidents should share freely ... the mistakes they made" with historians, because it teaches lessons. He said he shared problems during the lunch with Obama and the four living presidents, saying, "You want each new president to make new mistakes, not the same ones."
Clinton added, "all of us know if you make enough decisions, you're going to make a few of them aren't right."
(CNN) -- Two former presidents reflected on their greatest regrets in office Monday, each looking back to issues that continue to plague the nation years later.
Former presidents and political rivals Bill Clinton and George H.W. Bush now share philanthropic efforts.
Former Presidents George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton appeared together at a question-and-answer forum before the National Automobile Dealers Association in New Orleans, Louisiana.
Asked his biggest regret after leaving office, Bush said he now wonders whether he should have tried to get Saddam Hussein to leave office at the end of the first Gulf War in 1991.
He told the gathering, "I've thought a lot about it, but at the end of Desert Storm, the question was should we have kind of kept going on that road to death and all this slaughter until Saddam Hussein showed up and laid his sword on the table, surrendered. And the common wisdom was he wouldn't do that."
But he said a conversation with an FBI agent who interrogated Saddam after he was captured has made him reconsider.
Bush recalled their talk, "I said, 'What if we just say he has to come to surrender, would he have done it?' And this guy said, 'I'm absolutely convinced he would have.' My experts tell me he wouldn't have."
Bush said, "We ended it the way we said we would" as a military success, but noted a cleaner ending "would have been perfect."
Don't Miss
George H.W. Bush says goodbye to White House
Historic meeting of an elite club
He added, "If we had tried to get Saddam Hussein to come and literally surrender and put his sword on the table, I think it might have been avoided some of the problems that we did have in the future from him."
On a day that President Barack Obama dispatched George Mitchell to the Middle East as the latest U.S. envoy, Clinton discussed the failure to achieve peace between Israelis and Palestinians.
"My No. 1 regret is that I was not able to persuade Yasser Arafat to accept the peace plan I offered at the end of my presidency that the Israelis accepted.
"If he had done that ... we had had seven years of progress toward peace. We had one year in 1998, the only year in the history of Israel where not a single soul was killed in a terrorist act. The Palestinians had more control over West Bank then than they do today," Clinton said. "And if he had taken that deal, we would have a Palestinian state and we would have had, I think now, normal peaceful relations with Israel and all of its Arab neighbors."
Clinton said a deal would have helped the U.S. handle other issues in the region, saying, "We'd be much better positioned to deal with the problem of Iran, and we would have taken away about half the arguments of terrorists around the world by giving the Palestinians their state and creating a cooperative, positive interdependence in the Middle East, not a negative one. And so, I think that would have done more good to save more lives and help more people, and I wish I had been able to do that. "
Clinton also said he regretted not doing more to "stop the Rwandan genocide," and succeeding on a new health care plan.
He said "presidents should share freely ... the mistakes they made" with historians, because it teaches lessons. He said he shared problems during the lunch with Obama and the four living presidents, saying, "You want each new president to make new mistakes, not the same ones."
Clinton added, "all of us know if you make enough decisions, you're going to make a few of them aren't right."
Jan 26, 2009
Editorial from across the pond
A friend forwarded this piece of news to me today and it is interesting to me to see others who live across the pond, their views of our politics. I must admit to finding certain truths in this man's editorial, about the celebrity hyperbole and how it is now intertwined with politics. I don't agree with the rest of what he wrote, but I do like to hear other views and respect the right of people to have their own opinion. I also am of the belief that our news is censored, they just have the mass majority believing otherwise. The same folks that don't question or ponder the status quo. Below is what was sent to me and I thought it was worthy of sharing.
An editorial from the London Daily Mail :
OBAMA'S VICTORY:
A victory for the hysterical Oprah Winfrey, the mad racist preacher Jeremiah Wright, the mainstream media who abandoned any sense of objectivity long ago, Europeans who despise America largely because they depend on her, comics who claim to be dangerous and fearless, but would not dare attack genuinely powerful special interest groups.
A victory for Obama-worshippers everywhere. A victory for the cult of the cult. A man who has done little with his life but has written about his achievements as if he had found the cure for cancer in between winning a marathon and building a nuclear reactor with his teeth. Victory for style over substance, hyperbole over history, rabble-raising [sic] over reality.
A victory for Hollywood, the most dysfunctional community in the world. Victory for Streisand, Spielberg, Soros and Sarandon.
Victory for those who prefer welfare to will and interference to independence. For those who settle for group-think and herd mentality rather than those who fight for individual initiative and the right to be out of step with meager political fashion.
Victory for a man who is no friend of freedom. He and his people have already stated that media have to be controlled so as to be balanced, without realizing the extraordinary irony within that statement. Like most li beral zealots, the Obama worshippers constantly speak of Fox and Limbaugh, when the vast bulk of television stations and newspapers are extremely liberal and anti-conservative. Senior Democrat Chuck Schumer said that just as pornography should be censored, so should talk radio. In other words, one of the few free and open means of popular expression may well be cornered and beaten by bullies who even in triumph cannot tolerate any criticism and opposition.
A victory for those who believe the state is better qualified to raise children than the family, for those who prefer teachers' unions to teaching and for those who are naively convinced that if the West is sufficiently weak towards its enemies, war and terror will dissolve as quickly as the tears on the face of a leftist celebrity.
A victory for social democracy even after most of Europe has come to the painful conclusion that social democracy leads to mediocrity, failure, unemployment, inflation, higher taxes and economic stagnation. A victory for intrusive lawyers, banal sentimentalists, social extremists and urban snobs.
Congratulations, America!
An editorial from the London Daily Mail :
OBAMA'S VICTORY:
A victory for the hysterical Oprah Winfrey, the mad racist preacher Jeremiah Wright, the mainstream media who abandoned any sense of objectivity long ago, Europeans who despise America largely because they depend on her, comics who claim to be dangerous and fearless, but would not dare attack genuinely powerful special interest groups.
A victory for Obama-worshippers everywhere. A victory for the cult of the cult. A man who has done little with his life but has written about his achievements as if he had found the cure for cancer in between winning a marathon and building a nuclear reactor with his teeth. Victory for style over substance, hyperbole over history, rabble-raising [sic] over reality.
A victory for Hollywood, the most dysfunctional community in the world. Victory for Streisand, Spielberg, Soros and Sarandon.
Victory for those who prefer welfare to will and interference to independence. For those who settle for group-think and herd mentality rather than those who fight for individual initiative and the right to be out of step with meager political fashion.
Victory for a man who is no friend of freedom. He and his people have already stated that media have to be controlled so as to be balanced, without realizing the extraordinary irony within that statement. Like most li beral zealots, the Obama worshippers constantly speak of Fox and Limbaugh, when the vast bulk of television stations and newspapers are extremely liberal and anti-conservative. Senior Democrat Chuck Schumer said that just as pornography should be censored, so should talk radio. In other words, one of the few free and open means of popular expression may well be cornered and beaten by bullies who even in triumph cannot tolerate any criticism and opposition.
A victory for those who believe the state is better qualified to raise children than the family, for those who prefer teachers' unions to teaching and for those who are naively convinced that if the West is sufficiently weak towards its enemies, war and terror will dissolve as quickly as the tears on the face of a leftist celebrity.
A victory for social democracy even after most of Europe has come to the painful conclusion that social democracy leads to mediocrity, failure, unemployment, inflation, higher taxes and economic stagnation. A victory for intrusive lawyers, banal sentimentalists, social extremists and urban snobs.
Congratulations, America!
Jan 25, 2009
Work Update
Well things have a way of working out. Went out on an interview this morning and they called me and hour later and told me to come in at 10am tomorrow to start. This is more my speed. No buffet's, just a good old fashioned American Steak House. The owners are from New Jersey which means no more damn Yankee jokes. I felt like I hit it off with the owner and since she called me right back as soon as I got home, I have a good vibe. Everything isn't just for everyone, and I don't think I am cut out to be a buffet waitress. Not knocking it, but there is no challenge in it. To me it is more like being a glorified busgirl with the added joy of refilling beverages. I like greeting my customers and suggesting a nice meal, and than seeing the satisfaction of them enjoying it. That is what being a waitress is all about to me. So tomorrow begins day numero uno at Steakhouse. New days and new beginnings. That sounds like the beginning of a rather shitty wedding toast. We've only just begun and all that...so have a great night.
2129
These lyrics are poetry to me..courtesy of Alabama 3
When I saw you in the garden of Gethsemane
Drunk when you realised the plan
You fell into the arms of Mary Magdalene
The stain of stigmata on your hands
When the sky fell down on Calvary
I saw the light shining in your eyes
Cos you and me baby we were born 10,000 years ago
I know it sounds crazy but we got 10,000 more to go
We followed behind the sisters to La Hegera
Saw Ramos kiss like Judus on the wire
When they cut his hair and laid him out like Jesus
I know October '67 John Lennon lied
Sgt Pepper could not help us
When the flowers died I realised
Chorus
In 2129 I'm gonna meet you in a cantina in Carleta
I'm gonna put Bessie Smith on the jukebox all night long
When the Spanish sun comes up on our empty cups
Gonna take you dancing deep down into the dawn
One bright morning when we meet St Peter
I aint gonna give a damn if he don't let us in
When I saw you in the garden of Gethsemane
Drunk when you realised the plan
You fell into the arms of Mary Magdalene
The stain of stigmata on your hands
When the sky fell down on Calvary
I saw the light shining in your eyes
Cos you and me baby we were born 10,000 years ago
I know it sounds crazy but we got 10,000 more to go
We followed behind the sisters to La Hegera
Saw Ramos kiss like Judus on the wire
When they cut his hair and laid him out like Jesus
I know October '67 John Lennon lied
Sgt Pepper could not help us
When the flowers died I realised
Chorus
In 2129 I'm gonna meet you in a cantina in Carleta
I'm gonna put Bessie Smith on the jukebox all night long
When the Spanish sun comes up on our empty cups
Gonna take you dancing deep down into the dawn
One bright morning when we meet St Peter
I aint gonna give a damn if he don't let us in
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