Received in email today.  Good for a chuckle or two to start your day.  A tad risque in spots but not bad.

_________________________________________________ ______________

Received in email today.

Why am I having to sign in every time I post?????  Am I in trouble?  Do I need a time out?  Am I on restriction for going to Disneyland without permission?

http://sports.aol.com/fight...

 

 

 

 I ran into a cousin at breakfast this morning and she told us (motopoet,  their Dad, the grandkids and me) that the clan was meeting at El Sombrero at 6.  There's only one aunt left and we hadn't seen the cousins in ages so we met them for dinner.  There were 33 of us. and I think the waitress almost had a coronary when she walked into the room.  The five of my bunch were unexpected and the clan was surprised since we normally have our family reunions at funerals ..... this time it was a happy occasion.

Every time a member of the family would pass on, we would all stand around at the gravesite and talk about how we should have a real family reunion instead of waiting until another member had died.  We just never got around to it.

Years ago Mark and one of the cousins made up a list, got phone numbers, and that's as far as it got.  One by one the aunts, uncles, and a few cousins left us and still we didn't plan a reunion.  I think most of us take families for granted.  After all, they've always been there haven't they?  Even when you lose some, in a family a large as ours, there are still more cousins.   I try not to regret too much since I can't go back and fix it.  On the other hand, I CAN stay in touch with the family that I do still have.

My aunt Essie is the last of the "older" generation and when she leaves us, my sister will become the oldest in our family and I'm second.  It's a strange feeling to know that the ones who came before us, like umbrellas over all us kids, have moved onto another place and left us to steer our ships without them.  They've passed the baton on to us in the hopes that we will move farther on than they  did.  One day we'll pass that baton on to our kids and they to their kids.  And so it goes.  A never ending cycle of life.

Seeing my aunt as our matriarch tonight...and seeing the youngest of the grandbabies, was truly an awe inspiring experience.  To see ourselves in our children and their children is a memory I will treasure.

And so it goes........

 

Have you seen this young girl skate with rollerblades?  She is amazing. In fact, I didn't know one could be so versatile with them.

http://www.funnyordie.com/v...

Something disturbing happened on my way home from work tonight.  I decided to stop at the Burger King near the Flying J truck stop north of town.  I saw a dog come limping across the road from the main truck stop and it was holding it's left front paw in the air.  When I got a better look, I saw it was a chow...beautiful red dog.  Well, it would have been beautiful if it hadn't been scruffy and uncared for.  When I called to it, it stopped and watched me.  I followed it (in my car) out into the parking lot and it went to the far side where there was a very muddy puddle.  It stood in the water and drank for a long time whild I tore parts of my burger off.  When it came out I tossed food to it but it wouldn't come near the car.  Teh poor thing wandered around and at one point when a car drove in, it trotted the best it could after the car which made me think it looked familiar.  I kept trying to make contact but although it would stand and watch me, it wouldn't come near.  I finally got to where I could see a collar of some sort but it looked as ragged as the dog.

Things like that just break my heart.  When I saw the collar all I could think of is how lonely that dog must have felt and wondred what could have happened to make that dog lose trust in humans and still look for it's owner.

The parking lot was full of trucks from overflow from the main lot across the road so all I could hope is that one of the truckers would feed the dog..and maybe one would be able to take it home.  If I could have, I would have brought it home but it wasn't about to let me near.....not mean...just leery.

Lordy I hate that.

This may have been around but I hadn't seen it.  It tipped over my giggle box.

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Two old guys, Rodger and Chuck, met in the park every day to feed the pigeons, watch the squirrels and discuss world problems. One day Rodger didn't show up.
Chuck didn't think much about it and figured maybe he had a cold or something. But after Rodger hadn't shown up for a week or so, Chuck really got worried.
However, since the only time they ever got together was at the park Chuck didn't know where Rodger lived, so he was unable to find out what had happened to him.
A month had passed, and Chuck figured he had seen the last of Rodger. But one day, Chuck approached the park and lo and behold there sat Rodger!
Chuck was very excited and happy to see him and told him so.
Then he said, "For crying out loud Rodger, what in the world happened to you?"
Rodger replied, "I have been in jail."
"Jail?" cried Chuck. "What in the world for?"
"Well," Rodger said, "Judy, that cute little waitress at the coffee shop........."
"Yeah, yeah!?" said Chuck.

"Well, one day she filed rape charges against me and, at 89 years old, I was so proud that when I got into court, I pleaded guilty. The Judge gave me 30 days for perjury."

Alabama

Alaska

• Contrary to public opinion roof racks are not specifically designed for skis, snowboards and cocker spaniels. Or at least not in Alaska, where authorities have found it necessary to declare it illegal to tether a dog to the roof of a car.

Arkansas

• Think twice while in Arkansas if you harbor an unflagging passion for cold cut sandwiches and honking your car horn. Arkansas authorities have deemed it illegal to blare a car horn where ice cold beverages or sandwiches are served after 9 p.m.

California

• No matter how luxuriously comfortable that divided highway may look, it is illegal in Eureka, California, to use a road as a bed.

• In order to save money on having to crop dust their streets, officials in Chico, California, have made it illegal to plant rutabagas in roadways.

• Officials in Glendale, California, no doubt, caved in to insurance lobbyists when they inexplicably decided to make it illegal to jump from a car at 65 mph.

• Don’t expect to find any salt-rimmed curbs in Hermosa Beach, California. Officials there have made it illegal to spill your Margarita on any street.

Connecticut

• No need to get your Lexus Sport Luxury Sedan painted blaze orange. Hunting from cars in Connecticut is illegal, even during deer season.

Georgia

• Going on an intuitive hunch that teeter-totters and cars don’t mix, officials in Dublin, Georgia, have made it illegal to drive through playgrounds.

Illinois

• Beware if you own a bicycle in Galesburg, Illinois. The police there have no tolerance for “fancy riding.”

Iowa

• Throw it and they (police) will come. In Mount Vernon, Iowa, it is illegal to throw your Red Ryder onto the highway.

Kansas

• In Derby, Kansas, it is considered a misdemeanor to screech your tires while driving. This abominable act can cost you 30 days in jail.

• In Topeka, Kansas, it is unlawful to transport dead poultry along Kansas Avenue. Lesson: look elsewhere for a KFC.

Kentucky

• Make sure your canine does not harbor a weird fetish for tailgate lights or trailer hitches while in Fort Thomas, Kentucky. You’ll be fined if your pet molests a vehicle.

Maine

• Be careful about Jonesing for a Bavarian Cream while in South Berwick, Maine. You’ll be ticketed if you park in front of Dunkin Donuts.

Maryland

• Keep in mind while traveling through Rockville, Maryland, that the streets there are rated G. If you possess a PG-17 vocabulary, take the bypass. Swearing from a vehicle in Rockville is considered a misdemeanor.

Minnesota

• In Minnetonka, Minnesota if you drive a truck that leaves mud, dirt or sticky substances on any road you will be considered a public nuisance that is harming the peace, safety and general welfare of the town.

Missouri

• If you are a horn-honking hooligan you better be carrying your vehicle’s bill of sale if you have the nerve to toot your horn while in University City, Missouri. Officials there have wisely made it illegal to honk the horn of someone else’s car.

Nevada

• To prevent any literal interpretation of Reno’s No Standing signs, authorities there have made it illegal to place a bench or chair in the middle of the road.

New Jersey

• Don’t be feeling all fuzzy-warm about New Jersey residents if you’re driving through the state with a “Honk if You Love Skippy the Kangaroo” bumper sticker soldered to your vehicle’s trunk. New Jersey residents are required by law to honk before passing.

• Arbor Day requires careful planning in Blairstown, New Jersey, for local officials there have made it illegal to plant trees in the middle of the street.

New York

• Be sure to enter your vehicle feeling sartorially content while in Sag Harbor, New York. Officials there have made it illegal to disrobe while in your car.

North Carolina

• Officials in Dunn, North Carolina, apparently harbor no faith in the intuitive powers of common sense:

• First, they have made it illegal to play in traffic. So if you’re a parent make sure your kids play Candyland on the floor of a living room rather than on the asphalt of a passing lane.

• Second, it is illegal to drive through a cemetery if you’re not there to dig a grave or bury someone. So if you intend to visit the grave of a loved one bring really powerful binoculars.

• And third, even if you are considerate enough to yell “On your left,” officials still deem it illegal to drive on sidewalks.

Ohio

• In Canton, Ohio, people wearing roller skates cannot share the streets with cars. And yes, this applies even during the “couples only” skate.

Oregon

• In Oregon you need to be not only alert for state troopers with speed guns, but also with stop watches. For you can be ticketed if you leave your car door open longer than is deemed necessary.

• You will be slapped with a Class A traffic violation if you use your car on an Oregon highway to prove your physical endurance.

• If you opt for driving on a sidewalk while in Oregon, be sure to not attract the wrath of the law by not yielding to pedestrians.

Rhode Island

• In Scituate, Rhode Island, it is illegal to drive with beer in your vehicle even if it is unopened. So, in other words, if you’re a beer delivery driver you’re screwed.

South Carolina

• There’s a good reason why automakers don’t manufacture models named the Dodge Dumpster or the Lexus Litterbin. For in Hilton Head, South Carolina, it is illegal to store trash in your vehicle due to rat problems.

West Virginia

• Virginia may be for lovers, but West Virginia is for meat lovers. Officials in the Mountain State have deemed it perfectly legal for anyone to scavenge road kill.

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Seen floating around the internet...author unknown.

You Ain't Gonna Like Losing

President Bush did make a bad mistake in the war on terrorism. But the mistake was not his decision to go to war in Iraq.

Bush's mistake came in his belief that this country is the same one his father fought for in WWII. It is not.

Back then, they had just come out of a vicious depression. The country was steeled by the hardship of that depression, but they still believed fervently in this country. They knew that the people had elected their leaders, so it was the people's duty to back those leaders.

Therefore, when the war broke out the people came together, rallied behind, and stuck with their leaders, whether they had voted for them or not or whether the war was going badly or not.

And war was just as distasteful and the anguish just as great then as it is today. Often there were more casualties in one day in WWII than we have had in the entire Iraq war. But that did not matter. The people stuck with the President because it was their patriotic duty. Americans put aside their differences in WWII and worked together to win that war.

Everyone from every strata of society, from young to old pitched in. Small children pulled little wagons around to gather scrap metal for the war effort. Grade school students saved their pennies to buy stamps for war bonds to help the effort.

Men who were too old or medically 4F, lied about their age or condition trying their best to join the military. Women doubled their work to keep things going at home. Harsh rationing of everything from gasoline to soap, to butter was imposed, yet there was very little complaining.

You never heard prominent people on the radio belittling the President.

Interestingly enough in those days there were no fat cat actors and entertainers who ran off to visit and fawn over dictators of hostile countries and complain to them about our President. Instead, they made upbeat films and entertained our troops to help the troops' morale. And a bunch even enlisted.

And imagine this: Teachers in schools actually started the day off with a Pledge of Allegiance, and with prayers for our country and our troops!

Back then, no newspaper would have dared point out certain weak spots in our cities where bombs could be set off to cause the maximum damage. No newspaper would have dared complain about what we were doing to catch spies.

A newspaper would have been laughed out of existence if it had complained that German or Japanese soldiers were being "tortured" by being forced to wear women's underwear, or subjected to interrogation by a woman, or being scared by a dog or did not have air conditioning.

There was a lot of things different back then. We were not subjected to a constant bombardment of pornography, perversion and promiscuity in movies or on radio. We did not have legions of crackheads, dope pushers and armed gangs roaming our streets.

No, President Bush did not make a mistake in his handling of terrorism. He made the mistake of believing that we (most of us)still had the courage and fortitude of our fathers. He believed that this was still the country that our fathers fought so dearly to preserve.

It is not the same country. It more resembles a cross between Sodom and Gomorra and the Land of Oz. We did unite for a short while after 911, but our attitude changed when we found out that defending our country would require some sacrifices.

We are in great danger. The terrorists are fanatic Muslims. They believe that it is okay, even their duty, to kill anyone who will not convert to Islam. It has been estimated that about one third or over three hundred million Muslims are sympathetic to the terrorists cause...Hitler and Tojo combined did not have nearly that many potential recruits.

So...we either win it - or lose it - and you ain't gonna like losing.

A CITY VOTED, AND HISTORY TURNED ON ITS HINGE

By Jeff Jacoby

The Boston Globe

 

Wednesday, November 7, 2007

 

http://www.boston.com/news/...

 

     No historical moment could ever capture in its entirety the promise of American equality. But if you had to choose just one date, you could do worse than pick Nov. 7, 1967. It was on that Election Day in Cleveland 40 years ago that Carl B. Stokes, the great-grandson of a slave, became the first black mayor of a major American city by defeating Seth Taft, the grandson of a president.

 

     Today, the National Conference of Black Mayors has close to 50 members, including the chief executives of Philadelphia, Detroit, Washington, Atlanta, and Columbus. At a time when a black US senator is running for president, the State Department is led by its second consecutive black secretary, and the incumbent governor of Massachusetts is a former black kid from Chicago's South Side, the election of a black candidate to a Rust Belt mayor's office may seem like decidedly small potatoes.

 

     In 1967, it was huge.

 

     American blacks were still second-class citizens 40 years ago. Landmark civil-rights laws had been passed, but racism still ran deep and millions of blacks lived in unspeakable squalor. In one city after another, racial rioting turned "long, hot summers" deadly; Cleveland's black Hough district had exploded in the summer of 1966, and the Glenville neighborhood would blow up in 1968. Here and there, black politicians had been elected to legislative or judicial office. But none had managed to win the top job in a significant American city.

 

     Stokes was an urbane and charismatic lawyer, "stage-handsome," as Time magazine described him in a 1967 cover story, and given to "expensively tailored, double-breasted pin-stripe suits, monogrammed shirts, and Antonio y Cleopatra cigars." But he had grown up in grinding poverty in a Cleveland slum. He was a toddler when his father, a laundry worker, died, and "for the next 11 years," Time recalled, "Carl, his older brother Louis, and their mother shared one bed and one bedroom with the rats. While Mrs. Stokes . . . worked as a maid by day, their grandmother reared the boys. But Mother Stokes managed to get across one important message: 'Study, so you'll be somebody.'"

 

 

     It took Stokes a while to decide that what he wanted to be was a politician. A stint in the Army was followed by turns as a liquor inspector, a probation officer, and a assistant prosecutor. In 1962, he made his first run for office, becoming the first black Democrat elected to the Ohio Legislature. Three years later he ran for mayor, and, in a four-man race, came within a whisker of defeating the incumbent, Ralph Locher.

 

     It was the first time any black candidate anywhere had come close to taking power in a predominantly white city -- Cleveland, then the nation's 10th-largest municipality, was 65 percent white -- and the effect on the black community was exhilarating. During a parade, Stokes later wrote, he and his wife rode in a convertible past Central High School, where "a group of black kids yelled and waved at us. . . One of the smaller boys jumped up in the air and shouted, 'He's colored, he's colored!' Then he ran down the street, skipping and clapping his hands, yelling, 'He's colored, he's colored, he's colored!' That little boy felt, perhaps for the first time in his life, black pride."

 

     Two years later, when Stokes challenged Mayor Locher in the Democratic primary, his strategy was to generate a massive black turnout, while reassuring white voters that "this is not a Black Power takeover." In 1965, he had campaigned almost exclusively in black wards on the city's East Side; this time he went out of his way to speak to voters on the nearly all-white West Side. Black militants helped too, spreading the word to "cool it for Carl" so there would be no repeat of the violence in Hough a year earlier.

 

     Democratic reactionaries, on the other hand, were alarmed. The Cuyahoga County Democratic Committee distributed flyers warning that if Stokes won, Martin Luther King -- a "noted racist" -- would "actually be the mayor of Cleveland." Stokes wasn't above playing a version of the race card himself. His campaign ran full-page ads proclaiming in large type: "DON'T VOTE FOR A NEGRO." In smaller type underneath, the message continued: "Vote for a man. Vote for ability." On primary day, Stokes breezed past Locher, setting up the general election race against Taft, a gentlemanly Republican and scion of a distinguished political family.

 

     It was a closely fought race that went down to the wire on a snowy Election Day. As expected, Stokes drew more than 90 percent of the black vote, but nearly one in five whites went for him too. When the final tally was in, Stokes had won by just 1,644 votes -- but he had won. A troubled city voted, and history turned on its hinge: Voters black and white had chosen to put an African-American at the helm of a largely white US city. "I can say to you," Stokes told his followers, "that never before have I known the full meaning of the words 'God Bless America.'"

 

     Then as now, the journey to a more perfect union was far from over. But 40 years ago this week, it took a powerful step forward.

 

(Jeff Jacoby is a columnist for The Boston Globe.)

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Any clues?

A young doctor had moved out to a small community to replace
a doctor who was retiring. The older doctor suggested the  
young one accompany him on his rounds so the community could
become used to a new doctor. At the first house a woman  
complained,

"I've been a little sick to my stomach."


The older doctor said, "Well, you've probably been overdoing
the fresh fruit. Why don't you cut back on the amount  
you've been eating and see if that does the trick?"


As they left the younger man said, "You didn't even examine  
that woman. How'd you come to your diagnosis so quickly?"


"I didn't have to. You noticed I dropped my stethoscope on  
the floor in there? When I bent over to pick it up, I  
noticed a half dozen banana peels in the trash. That was  
what was probably making her sick."


"Hmmm," the younger doctor said, "Pretty clever. I think  
I'll try that at the next house."


Arriving at the next house, they spent several minutes  
talking with a younger woman. She complained that she just  
didn't have the energy she once did.


"I'm feeling terribly run down lately."


"You've probably been doing too much extra work for the  
church," the younger doctor told her. "Perhaps you should  
cut back a bit and see if that helps."


As they left, the elder doc said, Your diagnosis is almost  
certainly correct, but how did you arrive at it?


"Well, just like you did at the last house, I dropped my  
stethoscope and when I bent down to retrieve it, I noticed  
the preacher under the bed."