Linda Z

I was put off by your sarcasm, too, GT. I know it was directed at twi and not at the people who experienced the fire, but it didin't seem fitting. I'm also glad no one was hurt and that the kitty cat knew where to hide. Pretty prophetic name for a cat, considering this incident!

It might be real, Krys, but I'd bet it was a planned shortage, at best. Even if it wasn't, once more of them hit the market, the inflated prices will come down.

I fondly remember Thanksgivings when everyone in my family was still around--grandparents, aunts and uncles, the whole fam-damly, as my grandma used to say with a twinkle in her eye (that was soooooooooooo naughty for her--she never swore). Grandma was always clad in a floral apron, and I remember her hands always in motion, usually shooing us kids out of the kitchen or out from underfoot. My two younger cousins who lived in town got in trouble every year for sneaking a bunch of olives before dinner was ready and putting them on their fingers. My grandfather would sit on the couch until time to eat, sometimes asking one of us kids to come sit beside him and read to him from a Benett Cerf book. Mom and Dad and my aunts and uncles were younger then than I am now, and they were busy laughing and talking. We had to put all the leaves in the table so everyone would fit around it. Grandma had these padded things that folded out to the size of the table top that she put under the tablecloth to protect the table. Her kitchen was small, now that I think back, but she turned out a whole lot of good food. We're a very traditional family at Thanksgiving. The menu seldom varies from what we ate back then in the 1950s: turkey, mashed potatoes and gravy, sweet potatoes with marshmallows melted on top, two kinds of stuffing ("regular" and cornbread), a relish tray with pickles and olives and celery and carrots, cranberry sauce (both the jellied kind and the whole-berry kind), freshly baked rolls, some kind of fruit salad, a veggie that hardly gets eaten, pumpkin pie and, for a family member who's allergic to eggs, apple pie. This is making me hungry!!

You're not the only one, Abi! Especially in my Toyota Matrix. It's got a high hood and I have a lot of trouble visualizing distances at ground level in it. That video makes me shudder.

Tom is right. The price will drop after the artificial "shortage" is over. You don't want to get stuck with a Beanie Baby "investment." :)

One of my first memories as a small child in Oregon was catching smelt in a lake or river up in the mountains with my parents and their friends. They brought back tons of the slimy little things and couldn't give 'em away. I think I can still remember the smell. There were so many of those little fish that you could just walk up to the edge of the water and pick 'em up. Later we lived in Ohio. My favorite regional food memory is my mom's blackberry cobbler. We kids would take all the plastic containers we could carry and pick blackberries for hours, just to be rewarded with that yummy cobbler. Lake Erie perch is another fave. It's got much better flavor than ocean perch. We have a lot of Polish folks in Cleveland, and they know how to cook! Kielbasa and pierogies and stuffed cabbage. I used to go to a big depression glass show every year--not because I collect depression glass because I don't, but because the little old ladies at the Ukrainian church where they held it made the most incredible pastries and roast beef sandwiches. My regional food "sense" comes more from my mom's upbringing in Arkansas and later California than from Ohio, though. On one end of the spectrum we ate things like kidney beans with sugar sprinkled over them (weird, huh?) and on the other end we ate tamales and enchiladas. My dad's mother was English, so at her house we ate very plain meat and potatoes meals. In fact, neither my grandmothers nor my mother (Brits on both sides of the family) used much in the way of spices. I don't think I had fresh garlic until I left home!

Hold up, guys. I didn't remember Terence Stamp being in that movie, so I checked it out on idmb. Bzzzzt. No dice. Back to To Wong Foo. You can do it, Raf. It had a huge cast!

Dooj, want I should hold him while you spank him?

Dirty Dancing Patrick Swayze To Wong Foo Thanks for Everything, Julie Newmar

HAP, check out the debate about this news story going on in "About the Way." The thread title has something to do with PFAL being wrong. Oh yeah, it's "Talk about something that turns PFAL on its head." Had to go look.

OFM, I'm glad you're out of the mud and glad your wife's out of the hospital and doing better. Thanks for keeping us posted. BTW, I have a question: They have mud in Iraq??? It always looks so dusty there.

Hahahahaha Chas. But I don't drink coffee. Actually, it only took me about 30 minutes of Googling to dig up that stuff. It was fun, because I wasn't sure when some of those things took place. Some of them really surprised me.

Since I love trivia and since I knew some of these items were wrong (and since I obviously have too much time on my hands on a Saturday morning!), here are dates for some of these inventions, mostly taken from about.com. This list has to be a few years old, if "Grandpa" is only 59. :) July 2, 1928: Charles F. Jenkins begins broadcasting the first regular telecasts designed to be received by the general public; July 12, 1928: First televised tennis match. The first thing I remember ever seeing on television was professional wrestling, at my grandparents' house. it was about 1950. Their TV had a little round screen. I hated professional wrestling even then. In 1943, the required clinical trials were performed and penicillin was shown to be the most effective antibacterial agent to date. Penicillin production was quickly scaled up and available in quantity to treat Allied soldiers wounded on D-Day. Up until this time, soldiers died from infections in their wounds as much as from the wounds themselves. In 1955 Jonas Salk became a medical hero for developing a vaccine that helped conquer polio. I still remember all of us children lining up in the gym/cafeteria of our elementary school to get our polio shots! The first quick-frozen vegetables, fruits, seafoods, and meat were sold to the public for the first time in 1930 in Springfield, Massachusetts, under the tradename Birds Eye Frosted Foods®. God bless old Clarence. Fresh is best, but frozen beats the heck ouf of canned! Xerox Corp. was founded in Rochester, NY, in 1906 but under a different name. It was named Xerox Corporation in 1961. In 1936, William Feinbloom, a NY optometrist, fabricates the first American-made contact lenses and introduces the use of plastic. In 1945, the Amer. Optometric Assn. formally recognizes the growing contact lens field by specifying contact lens fitting as an integral part of the practice of optometry. The Frisbie Baking Company (1871-1958) of Bridgeport, Connecticut, made pies that were sold to many New England colleges. Hungry college students soon discovered that the empty pie tins could be tossed and caught, providing endless hours of game and sport…. In 1948, a Los Angeles building inspector named Walter Frederick Morrison and his partner Warren Franscioni invented a plastic version of the Frisbie that could fly further and with better accuracy than a tin pie plate. The birth control pill was introduced to the public in the early 1960s. In the 1920s, a shopper's plate - a "buy now, pay later" system - was introduced in the USA. It could only be used in the shops which issued it. In 1950, Diners Club and American Express launched their charge cards in the USA, the first "plastic money". I remember in the 1950s, my mom having a little metal "Charge-a-Plate" with her name and address embossed on it. It was good in all the major department stores downtown. The invention of the laser, which stands for light amplification by stimulated emission of radiation, can be dated to 1958 with the publication of the scientific paper, Infrared and Optical Masers, by Arthur L. Schawlow, then a Bell Labs researcher, and Charles H. Townes, a consultant to Bell Labs. The first man to actually develop and launch a ball-point pen was the Hungarian László Jozsef Bíró (1899-1985) from Budapest, who in 1938 invented a ball-point pen with a pressurized ink cartridge. I do remember, though, when the first felt-tip pens came out. Remember the "Bic Banana," anyone? In 1959, Glen Raven Mills of North Carolina introduced pantyhose -- underpants and stockings all in one garment. They were invented by a man. Figures. In 1902, only one year after Willis Haviland Carrier graduated from Cornell University with a Masters in Engineering, the first air (temperature and humidity) conditioning was in operation, making one Brooklyn printing plant owner very happy. In 1886, Josephine Cochran proclaims in disgust "If nobody else is going to invent a dishwashing machine, I'll do it myself." And she did, Josephine Cochran invented the first practical (did the job) dishwasher. Josephine Cochran had expected the public to welcome the new invention, which she unveiled at the 1893, World's Fair, but only the hotels and large restaurants were buying her ideas. It was not until the 1950s that dishwashers caught on with the general public. Josephine Cochran's machine was a hand-operated mechanical dishwasher. She founded a company to manufacture these dishwashers, which eventually became KitchenAid. Electrical clothes dryers appeared around 1915.

Sorry 'bout your satellites, RR, but I love meteor showers, too. Best place I've ever watched them was on a little island in the middle of Lake Erie, away from all the city lights. It was like fireworks! I didn't hear 'em, though, Belle. What do they sound like? :)

Sudo, I'm not so sure in this case it's hyperbole. I still contend that pulling dead children from a collapsed building very well might have been "as bad as it gets" to the person who had to do it. Drama and emotion are what catch people's attention. The man made a dramatic statement, and the MSNBC reporters reported it to get the viewers' attention. I'm really curious: How would you word your headlines on a Web site or in a newspaper for a story like this if you were in charge?

Couple of points: "As bad as it gets" is in quotation marks; I suspect in the live feed, those words came from the man with his hands over his face, because the caption that goes with his photo reads: I would imagine that pulling dead kids out of a skating rink pretty much is as bad as it gets. It doesn't have to be about 100s or 1000s killed to be a horrendous event. Now, I know how popular it is to bash the media, and I also know it's sometimes well deserved. But not always. Newspapers and magazines aren't published and news on TV isn't broadcast purely as a public service. These entities are in business, and they sell what people will buy. Plain and simple. The question, "Why is there no good news?" has been asked for decades that I know of, and probably longer. The answer is simple. If that headline had said, "It rained a little bit in Alabama yesterday," it wouldn't have gotten anyone to watch the newscast (and subsequently buy sponsors' products).

And here's my 15 seconds of fame (drum roll, please): I met Wavy Gravy (Hugh Romney) in the late 60s in Los Angeles, along with others from his Hog Farm (which, by the way, was a real place).

Leave it to My-tilde to get wind of a scuffle on the playground. Hey kiddo! How goes it?

What great news! Hooray!

What's that you say, Tom? Rocky needs to be committed??

But being a veteran merely means you were in the military. It does NOT connote service in war. Memorial Day commemorates those who lost their lives in service to their country. Veterans Day is for all vets, period.

I hope I can get in here without getting slimed with somebody's testosterone.... Skyrider, if I'm not mistaken, you were still in twi when these books came out, correct? If I'm right about that, then there's a factor that you might not have been aware of. In the late 80s many Corps and many others were in a state of panic about not being able to get ahold of PFAL tapes and books, taped teachings of VPW, etc. So there was a huuuuuuuge demand for the posthumously published books coming out of Scotland. I have no idea what Geer's motives were for publishing them, but I can attest to the fact that there was an eager audience, sucking up anything by VPW that they could get their hands on. People were duplicating VPW's teaching tapes and passing them around in a frenzy. And they (I'll say "we," because I was in that category very briefly) were waiting expectantly for news about CG getting the copyright to PFAL so that we could have access to it. After that, many of us settled down and realized God was still God and the world hadn't stopped spinning without access to "class materials." I pretty quickly got to the point where I thought I'd have to sock the next person who said, "You gotta hear this!" Some have continued to try to accumulate anything ever taught by VPW, and that's their privilege. It's not for me to judge; I got plenty of good out of many (not all) of his teachings, but I've just sorta moved on.

It's a giggle for me to look back (to the distant past, in my case) and reminisce about getting stoned, but on a serious note, I'm glad I gave it up--OMG, before some of you were even born!!

A military veteran isn't the only kind of veteran there is (look in any dictionary). I don't see why it should be an affront to a military veteran when someone is referred to as a veteran of something else. Of course, most of us want to honor those who have served in the U.S. military. But it seems perfectly logical to me what LAE posted. It's not about victimhood. It's about survival and endurance. God bless us, every one.

I also agree with Sir Elton. Give me disorganized religion every time--the living and spontaneous kind, where God works in people's hearts and they go around being kind and loving and helping each other.