ho ho ho
Now Playing: enjoy


Christmas Cookie Recipe

'Tis the season to enjoy this again:

Christmas Cookie Ingredients

1 cup water
1 tsp. baking soda
1 cup sugar
1 tsp. salt
1 cup brown sugar
lemon juice
4 large eggs
1 cup nuts
2 cups dried fruit
1 bottle Absolute vodka

Sample the Absolute to check quality. Take a large bowl. Check the
Absolute again, to be sure it is of the highest quality. Pour 1 level cup
and drink. Turn on the electric mixer. Beat 1 cup butter in a large
fluffy bowl. Add 1 teaspoon of sugar, beat again. At this point it's
best to make sure the Absolute is still OK, try another cup, just in case.

Turn off the mixerer thingy, break 2 leggs and add to the bowl and chuck
in 1 cup of dried fruit. Pick the frigging fruit off floor... mix on the
turner. If the fried druit gets stuck in the beaterers, just pry it loose
with a drewscriver. Sample the Absolut to check for tonsisticity. Next,
sift 2 cups of salt or something. Who giveshz a sheet. Check the
Absolute. Now shift the lemon juice and strain your nuts. Add 1 table.
Add a spoon of sugar, or somefink. Whatever you can find. Greash the oven.
Turn the cake tin 360 degrees and try not to fall over. Don't forget to
beat off the turner. Finally, throw the bowl through the window, finish the
Absolute and make sure to put the stove in the dishwasher.

CHERRY MISTMAS!!!!!!

in the future
Now Playing: is this what we are coming to....


check out maddock's shirt......

The great SNL sketch,
Mood:  a-ok
Interviewer: Alright, Mr. Wilson, you've done just fine on the Rorshact.. your papers are in good order.. your file's fine.. no difficulties with your motor skills.. And I think you're probably ready for this job. We've got one more psychological test we always do here. It's just a Word Association. I'll throw you out a few words - anything that comes to your mind, just throw back at me, okay? It's kind of an arbitrary thing. Like, if I say "dog", you'd say..?

Mr. Wilson: "Tree".

Interviewer: "Tree". [ nods head, prepares the test papers ] "Dog".

Mr. Wilson: "Tree".

Interviewer: "Fast".

Mr. Wilson: "Slow".

Interviewer: "Rain".

Mr. Wilson: "Snow".

Interviewer: "White".

Mr. Wilson: "Black".

Interviewer: "Bean".

Mr. Wilson: "Pod".

Interviewer: [ casually ] "Negro".

Mr. Wilson: "Whitey".

Interviewer: "Tarbaby".

Mr. Wilson: [ silent, sure he didn't hear what he thinks he heard ] What'd you say?

Interviewer: [ repeating ] "Tarbaby".

Mr. Wilson: "Ofay".


Interviewer: "Colored".

Mr. Wilson: "Redneck".

Interviewer: "Junglebunny".

Mr. Wilson: [ starting to get angry ] "Peckerwood!"

Interviewer: "Burrhead".

Mr. Wilson: [ defensive ] "Cracker!"

Interviewer: [ aggressive ] "Spearchucker".

Mr. Wilson: "White trash!"

Interviewer: "Jungle Bunny!"

Mr. Wilson: [ upset ] "Honky!"

Interviewer: "Spade!

Mr. Wilson: [ really upset ] "Honky Honky!"

Interviewer: [ relentless ] "Nigger!"

Mr. Wilson: [ immediate ] "Dead honky!" [ face starts to flinch ]

Interviewer: [ quickly wraps the interview up ] Okay, Mr. Wilson, I think you're qualified for this job. How about a starting salary of $5,000?

Mr. Wilson: Your momma!

Interviewer: [ fumbling ] Uh.. $7,500 a year?

Mr. Wilson: Your grandmomma!

Interviewer: [ desperate ] $15,000, Mr. Wilson. You'll be the highest paid janitor in America. Just, don't.. don't hurt me, please..

Mr. Wilson: Okay.

Interviewer: [ relieved ] Okay.

Mr. Wilson: You want me to start now?

Interviewer: Oh, no, no.. that's alright. I'll clean all this up. Take a couple of weeks off, you look tired.

[ fade ]


Richard Pryor. Dead December 10th 2005

To the rage, vuknerability and painful honesty of Richard pryor's comedy. It changed Americam culture forever.

A great write-up of the Ice Harvest.
Unholy Humbug: The Ice Harvesthttp://www.mcnblogs.com/pride/

Fargo took a few heaps of critical support to get crowds in the door to appreciate its mix of loopy good-heartedness and noirish convolution. The Ice Harvest, an exquisitely sleazy twenty-first century proto-noir, hasn't been as lucky with its bracing brew of the deadpan, implacable, inexorable, and downright cruel. Most reviewers don't get it. Some hate it. And audiences, based on weekend returns, don't seem to cotton to movies with "Ice" in the title. But Harold Ramis' The Ice Harvest (from a script by Richard Russo and Robert Benton, based on Scott Phillips' 2000 novel), is a marvel, tautly paced, immaculately crafted. It's also as misanthropic as Bad Santa, as effortlessly bleak as It's A Wonderful Life, and as cynical of the human condition as the output of novelist of Jim Thompson (The Grifters, Pop. 1280). Which, in some ways, makes it a remarkable effort in a world where the word "cinema" has long since been supplanted by "marketplace." (It's so brutally precise that it almost makes me want to go back and watch Stuart Saves his Family, a Ramis film esteemed by Manohla Dargis in her lukewarm New York Times notice.)

It's Christmas Eve in Wichita. Charlie Arglist (John Cusack, ably playing a puffy, middle-aged loser) is a mob lawyer with a warm spot in his cold heart for strip-club majordomo Renata (Connie Nielsen, playing an ambiguously European femme fatale, part Barbara Stanwyck, part Jessica Rabbit). Business associate Vic (Billy Bob Thornton, all glint and threatening smiles), convinces Charlie that robbing his boss (Randy Quaid) of over $2 million and skipping town on the holidays is a swell idea. Let the triple-crosses double over and the mayhem begin. Oliver Platt, playing the husband of Cusack's ex-wife, rolls his own substantial charm into the most sustained nightlong drunk in recent movies, a Falstaff-meets-Toby Belch modern man who's also nursing an uncommonly unhealthy death wish. (Charlie is an even more frightening drunk, downing shot after drink after shot with little visible effect.) Alar Kivilo's (A Simple Plan) lighting is gritty without murk (as opposed to the smeary look Stephen Goldblatt used to light Rent), with the movie's succession of bars harking back to the parched squalor of John Huston's Fat City, and framing often as punchy as Weegee's crime photos. (And as the noose draws tighter, classical photographic elements are more pronounced, such as bars of light slashing across a scheming female's eyes.)

Of the script co-written by Benton, one of the writers of Bonnie and Clyde, Ramis jibes that it's an "existential noir new-wave thriller," but he's not really joking. The script came to him from producers Ron Yerxa and Albert Berger (Election, Cold Mountain), after Benton decided he didn't want to make a relatively low budget film late in his career. "They're like two college professors, they're like no other producers I've ever met," Ramis, whose wrists swell with prayer beads, says. Of the script: "It was so well-written, I wouldn't have to write anything. By nature, I'm a lazy and reluctant writer. The word 'mature' kept popping into my head. Ninety percent of the screenplays come from two generations younger than mine. It's not yet mediated by life, but by the movies they've seen and liked."

Ramis' sets are known for their collegiality. "I consider it my real goal in life, to be happy." Of direction, he says he has little ego. "The real job is to gather all the good ideas from everybody." It's a job he's still learning. "Oddly enough, at 60 years old, ten films, directing for twenty-five years, I still feel like a beginner."

The Second City/SCTV alumnus envies actors. "Actors perform a remarkable kind of ritual service for all of us. It's a very brave kind of groping they do, and they do it on camera in front of everybody. I told [Second City's original director] Bernie Sahlins that I couldn't invest my self-esteem in how others seem me. And Bernie said, 'You can quit acting but that won't change anything.'"

Ramis' conversation is compulsively professorial, apothegms formed as jokes. "My ex-wife called me 'The Rabbi,' which maybe is why she's my ex-wife." Before getting the script, he says he'd been doing extensive reading, "processing it all, the Torah, Buddhism, CNN." Focus Features' co-president topped Ramis at one point, sending a memo regarding a (rejected) bleak ending drawn from the novel. "It was like a tutorial," Ramis says, quoting the bow-tied screenwriter-executive, "'The audience doesn't need you to tell them they're going to die."

PRIDE: Isn't suspense timing a lot like comedy timing? Something about economy?

RAMIS: That's probably true. But you know, I'm wiling… I'd go out on a limb and say that timing is timing for anything. I've always thought that editing a film is like, is like music. And I'm a singer, I actually play and sing. You're always trying to figure out how to hold that note, how long is long enough and how long is too long. So, uh, yes, the timing in suspense seems to be like comedy, because you want to produce a real result, you're building toward some release. In suspense, it's what's going to be behind that door. How do you time the reveal of something? It's a lot like timing the punchline of something. There's a wonderful moment in the film, Mike Starr, the actor, is inside that trunk, his character, Roy Gelles, he tells John's character, "When I get out of here, you know I'm going to kill you, don't you?" And then Billy Bob says, "You're one fucking optimist if you think you're going to get out of that trunk alive." And Mike says, "Let me out! Listen, I'm your only hope!" "I thought you just told me you were going to kill me, Roy." And there's a long pause. The camera's just on the trunk. And he goes, "I didn't mean it." The question of how long to hold that pause [had] nothing to do with how the actors played it. It didn't matter. In the editing room, you get to control those pauses. And our editor cut it sort of the way you would cut it normally; he's not a comedy guy, Lee Percy. But I said no, no, no, hold that for a while. Let's actually feel Mike Starr thinking about it. For me, it was a great object lesson in comedy timing.

PRIDE: How dark is too dark for your tastes, as opposed to what an audience might expect?

RAMIS: This is not a script I wrote. I chose to do this because I loved the script so much. And when you have a script that calls for someone plunging a hunting knife into someone one's foot, well, you've got to deal with that. It's obviously not going to be a laugh riot at that moment. The question becomes how painful, how graphic, how much blood, what's John's response to it? How do I do the fight that's swirling around them without making it cheesy or fake? I didn't want it to look like stunt men fighting. Those moments had to be played, all the violence was real and [it was] indicated as real. And yet we knew, we expected, people to be laughing at certain things in the film. So ehhhh… Everything's discovered. You make all the plans you can. You get it on film, [you hope], from many different angles. [Ramis chuckles.] And many different kinds of distances. And then you start looking at it. And I always say you don't know where the top is until you go over it. People are always wondering, how do you avoid going over the top? Well, you don't. You push it and push it and push it and push it and [hope] you have actors who will go there with you. And then you, "Oh no, that's actually too much, I'm not buying that, let's pull it back a little." In the editing room is where you find out what film you've made.

PRIDE: The script is strong stuff; I'm thinking of how the death of someone close to a major character is dealt with.

RAMIS: Pretty dark moment. As vile a line as you'll ever hear. That's the wisdom and talent of Richard Russo and Robert Benton. I don't think that moment was in the novel exactly that way or with that dialogue. But y'know, Billy Bob just delivered it well and it's so nicely written. And there's not a single punchline in the movie. The actors don't deliver comedy lines. They just say what the characters say and there's no winking at the audience. Everyone means what they say and it's deadly serious.

PRIDE: Oliver's consistently big.

RAMIS: Oliver, yeah, he is big. I think I first said to him, y'know, my fear… Drunk characters were a staple of the 1940s. Someone talked about [how] we haven't seen a character this drunk for that long in a film [since then]. How different is… We saw Cheech and Chong, it was different substance abuse, but they played stoned all the time. So we have this souse, and I think for me, he's written like a Shakespearian buffoon almost, y'know, he's not just a comic relief. He's in touch with a deep, deep sadness and frustration that has all of these kind of philosophical ripples. He talks about society-"There's nothing left for men in this society." Oliver was deeply engaged on that level. I knew there was a wonderful intellectual process going on for Oliver when he started to play it. I got scared, going over the top. I went back to an old acting cliche: when you play drunk sometimes… Real drunks try to act sober, y'know. And he went, "I know, I know." But Pete's all over the place. And like real drunks, and I've been with some really great drunks. I don't drink myself, but… They go in and out. For a while, they're more lucid and then get a little more tired or have another drink, they're back where they were before. So he's all over the place. It seemed appropriate somehow. He was doing it so well and it seemed so endearing. In a movie that's just so bleak, y'know, as an audience I think we want to feel something good for somebody. I think he's a terrible man in a lot of way, he's weak, his flaws overwhelm his assets, but you still like him. And that's part of the wonderful thing about Oliver as an actor and also John as an actor.

PRIDE: It gives his character leave to deliver hilarious but scathing lines like about the Christian bartender's boyfriend being on the Campus Crusade for Cunnilingus… only a drunk or a child gets that.

RAMIS: I learned courage from actors.

PRIDE: So what are the big ideas in this one?

RAMIS: I'm always wrestling the whole idea of meaning in life. As I get older it's become a more important question. When you're young, you know what life is about. It' s about making a career, about finding the right woman… or women. It's about money and power. It's pretty clear. That's the map when you're young. And then you get it or you don't. You get those things or you don't. And then you have to… Even if you get them and you find out no one of them or the combination of them is the answer. Right? There isn't enough money, sex, y'know, good food, champagne, whatever it is, to make you happy. Buy you a little time, maybe, but as you get older, the big questions just keep coming back. And then I started reading more and more in the history of religion and theology and philosophy and psychology. I got real interesting in existential psychology as a result of doing Analyze This, ironically. So my whole worldview started to change. And then along comes this movie. It shows what life can be like if you live without values, without discovering personal meaning in life. And I don't think meaning is something that can be given to you or that is derived externally from religion or someone else's rules. Conventional moralities, y'know. It's something that every person has to discover for themselves all of the time.

PRIDE: There's an emerging tradition of bitter holiday movies. Is this an odd Christmas movie?

RAMIS: Well, Christmas is odd, isn't it? It's a festival of family dysfunction. It just points out the ironies of everything-people return to the families of origin that damaged them in the first place and everyone pretends it's okay. Or they don't, which is even worse like the Christmas dinner in our film A lot of people are just sick at Christmas. And the ironic contact of, the overindulgence of children, the excessive gift giving to drive the capitalist consumer machine in a world where billions of people can't find water to drink or anything to eat. It's kind of amazing.

PRIDE: What's your advice to aspiring screenwriters or filmmakers?

RAMIS: I'd say "Dump her, she's no good for you."

**********

I loved it and wondered how many would think it's merely the Cusack imput that drug me in. That might be but still...I loved it.
So many great lines. Still it's not for the mary poppins lovers out there. I'd advise ya to see it.
As for me, it's one of my favs. of all time.

later
sass

John Cusack's blog today on Huffington
Mood:  a-ok
Now Playing: Joe Strummer
On Bush, the Dems, Jon Stewart, Hunter Thompson, Bill Moyers, and King (not Don)
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/john-cusack/on-bush-the-dems-jon-st_b_10485.html

Murder is a crime. Uunless it is done...by a poooollliiicceeeman. Or an ariissssstoocrat -- Joe Strummer

Bush 2. How depressing, corrupt, unlawful and tragically absurd the administration's world view actually is...how low the moral bar has been lowered...and (though I know I'm capable of intellectually lazy notions of collective guilt) how complicit our silence as citizens is...Nixon, a true fiend, looks like a paragon of virtue next to the criminally incompetent robber barons now raiding the present and future.
But where are the Dems? American foreign policy is in chaos. We are now left in the surreal position of having to condemn American-sponsored torture as official policy while a deranged President Bush orders his staff to attend ethics briefings -- a "refresher course" -- from the White House counsel. The very idea of America is in chaos and this chaos has created a vacuum.

One question for any Democrat: Who will have the balls to get us out of Iraq?
If the Democrats don't step up and fill this vacuum, the Republicans will. They will take us out of Iraq. And then the Democrats will be left holding the bag -- first as the enablers who let the Republicans take us into an unnecessary and immoral war, and then as the whipping boys who stood by while the Republicans kept justifying what was clearly an unnecessary and immoral war. They were so worried about positioning themselves as hawks, not being seen as soft on terror and war, that they lost the capacity for outrage when the person responsible for a legal memo that denied the validity of the Geneva Conventions was appointed Attorney General. And it was downhill from there.
The Republicans, especially leading up to the 2006 elections, with the Bush administration crumbling, KNOW they have to find a way out of Iraq. So they will basically find a way to declare victory and do something that looks like a withdrawal, and the Democrats will be left as passive bystanders -- because they don't have the courage to suggest that people who lied to get us into war should not only not be in office, they should be in prison.

Last Tuesday, Harry Reid demonstrated wonderful signs of life. The question now is, are they going to build on this, or is it going to be an isolated episode that doesn't lead to a fundamental shift? Will enough Democrats now be willing to admit that voting to authorize the war was a mistake? Whether they were genuinely misled, they bought into it, or they were too cowardly to vote for what they believed was true, it was a mistake. Will they now have the courage to say, "This was wrong, and that we need to get our brave troops out of Iraq now."
Are the Democrats going to offer an alternative plan to get us out of Iraq? Are they going to fill this vacuum created by the chaos in Iraq and a scandal-plagued administration in tatters, or are they going to wait for the Republicans to do it their way, reap the political diviedends, and leave the Democrats sniping outside the palace gate?

All this makes me think of Jon Stewart, and the tricky position he finds himself in...I love the man. He is the most important media watchdog right now. As Bill Moyers said "If Mark Twain were back today, he'd be at Comedy Central."
But I hope we're not putting too much pressure on Mr. Stewart. There should be a lot more like him, but right now he's all we've got. He's the vanguard. And therefore when Republicans, who were the ones who led us into this war, and the ones whom he's so rightly skewering every night, sit across the table from him -- there is some kind of unspoken message being given that they are not part of the problem, that they can wink and laugh with Jon and the things he is making fun of. That they are not them, when in fact, they are...

And they are getting a free pass to sit next to someone who speaks truth to power. They get reflected hipness just by sitting across the table from him, and the irony is that they share a laugh over the same things that he rails against. As an example, look at the jokey appearances by Bill Kristol, or David Frum. These are not dutiful soldiers standing by their president (which would be bad enough), these are the intellectual architects of the the invasion. Bill Kristol, the editor of the neocon house organ The Weekly Standard, came on and could barely keep a straight face when he said that Bush was a good president. And as anyone knows, reflected hipness on these types of men is a truly ugly thing. I would suggest each Republican must face a press conference, or a gauntlet perhaps, of Daily Show correspondents...or at least Lewis Black.

Yes, there is a difference between the McCain/Hagel Repubs and the neo-con/White House Iraq Group lunatics. But it's also good to remember: no matter what he does from here on out, McCain stood by the president, a man (and his machine) who smeared him viciously on the 2000 campaign trail, and then, at the GOP convention four years later, campaigned for him when we were well on to this disastrous course. And thinking men -- of which McCain is surely one -- knew the neo-cons were exploiting 9/11 for their hideous misadventure in Iraq, and knew this was an administration that would not allow photos of the dead. Etc. etc. etc. Every man who stood by Bush should be forced to answer for it.

The problem isn't with Jon Stewart, who's a hero. The problem is that he's the only one (with ratings at least; none of the right-wing heavyweights are going on the Al Franken show, are they?). And we are pouring too much concrete under his pedestal. But I must admit that he's far too polite to the architects and enablers of the tragic last five years. If I hear one more asshole say, "The issue isn't whether I would send my own children to Iraq, this is an all-voluntary army...National security is at stake... There are monsters in this world."
Well, thanks for telling us that -- and for lying about the war and profiting from it. And trying to privatize Iraq so corporate interests could have a free-market laboratory without all those pesky questions about "who owns what" and "who gets a piece of the action." (See Naomi Klein's excellent Baghdad Year Zero.)

This is indeed a league of bastards -- these men are human scum. There were many who would have given their life to fight al-Qaeda. Many parents would have sent their children on that cause. It is the issue...of course that is the issue... Here's an American thought: Arab life has as much intrinsic value as American life. We are SUPPOSED to be better than the horrible regimes we must fight (not choose to fight). Due process is a fundamental tenet of civilization. The law is supposed to be better than us.

We have veered so badly away from sanity that re-reading an Eisenhower speech or two puts him to the left of Howard Dean.

I miss Hunter S. Thompson. We need him -- but he isn't gone...

"We have become a Nazi monster in the eyes of the whole world -- a nation of bullies and bastards who would rather kill than live peacefully. We are not just Whores for power and oil, but killer whores with hate and fear in our hearts. We are human scum, and that is how history will judge us. No redeeming social value. Just whores. Get out of our way, or we'll kill you.

"Well, shit on that dumbness, George W. Bush does not speak for me or my son or my mother or my friends or the people I respect in this world. We didn't vote for these cheap, greedy little killers who speak for America today -- and we will not vote for them again in 2002. Or 2004. Or ever.

"Who does vote for these dishonest shitheads? Who among us can be happy and proud of having all this innocent blood on our hands? Who are these swine? These flag-sucking half-wits who get fleeced and fooled by stupid rich kids like George Bush?

"They are the same ones who wanted to have Muhammad Ali locked up for refusing to kill gooks. They speak for all that is cruel and stupid and vicious in the American character. They are the racists and hate mongers among us -- they are the Ku Klux Klan. I piss down the throats of these Nazis.

"And I am too old to worry about whether they like it or not. Fuck them."

I always thought he was too loose with the Nazi analogy, but I always got his point: if you're on the dying end of this madness, they might as well be monsters. It is interesting to remember what Churchill said:
"The power of the Executive to cast a man into prison without formulating any charge known to the law, and particularly to deny him the judgment of his peers, is in the highest degree odious and is the foundation of all totalitarian government whether Nazi or Communist."

I guess the exception is when and if Dick Cheney thinks we have a good reason to torture and deny due process. If these men are not impeached and thrown in jail, we truly are approaching the end of days.

Thank God Bill Moyers is still around.
Here he offers a very good and very compelling cry from the heart of a citizen who finds himself deeply disturbed, but unbowed by this wave of collective insanity. He is one of the best we have left. My own parents had deep faith, they saw the earth as a gift from God. They took Christ seriously -- the gospel, his words and acts -- and thought it their Christian duty to speak out against the desecration of God's great gifts: life, earth, freedom, and civilization. Nowhere could they find any endorsements of "wars of choice." Jesus was a radical to be sure, but in an opposite way from the war mongers and profiteers who use his name today. I can't get past "thou shalt not kill" and look at this carnage and see any rational way one could say these men follow Jesus Christ. Alas, the money lenders have well and truly invaded the temple.

So Moyers:
"One of the biggest changes in politics in my lifetime is that the delusional is no longer marginal. It has come in from the fringe, to sit in the seat of power in the Oval Office and in Congress. For the first time in our history, ideology and theology hold a monopoly of power in Washington. Theology asserts propositions that cannot be proven true; ideologues hold stoutly to a worldview despite being contradicted by what is generally accepted as reality. When ideology and theology couple, their offspring are not always bad but they are always blind. And there is the danger: voters and politicians alike, oblivious to the facts."


And, finally, Dr King:

"A time comes when silence is betrayal. Some of us who have already begun to break the silence of the night have found that the calling to speak is often a vocation of agony, but we must speak. We must speak out with all the humility that is appropriate to our limited vision, but we must speak."

*****

Sorry I copied it word for word. Just felt it needed to be presented anywhere and everywhere it could be.
Kudos to Cusack.


later
sass

MadTV's Stuart.
http://smithappens.com/video_madtvstuart.php




Who doesn't love Stewart?

later

sass

be afraid....be very afraid.
Mood:  don't ask
http://www.johndavidson.com/

If you can stand it. Go ahead, I dare you.
What is with these old stars? Just RETIRE, already.


later
sass

Tally-"Ho"

There's a joke in here somewhere, involving the ranch, horses, new action figures of totally ineffective and uncharismatic leaders of the free world. It's early. Let me finish my coffee and it will come to me.


sass

action figure #1: 'Well, FINALLY! Is the view worth it?..........................................................Not really.
action figure #2: 'How the fuck did I get here? ....if it only there hadn't been that accident...I could have....been someone, gone somewhere...married well,....HELL, married human....'
action figure #3: ' '
action figure #4: "How does she take to the bit, Charley......uh? uh....uh...tee-hee....uh?"

And now for something REALLY scary
Mood:  don't ask
Now Playing: check out these headlines
Dems Criticize GOP Over Energy Prices
Oct 29, 11:07 AM (ET)
WASHINGTON (AP) - Democrats chided congressional Republicans on Saturday for failing to do enough to stem high energy costs that have resulted in huge oil industry profits."What was the Republican answer to the hurricanes? More subsidies to the oil industry," Rep. John Dingell, D-Mich., said in his party's weekly radio address.
Government to Unveil Super-Flu Strategy
Oct 29 10:51 AM US/Eastern
By LAURAN NEERGAARD
The Bush administration's long-awaited plan on how to fight the next super-flu will likely include beefed-up attempts to spot human infections early, both here and abroad. Expect recommendations on how to isolate the sick. Governors and mayors are on notice to figure out who will actually inject stockpiled vaccines into the arms of panicked people.
Christian girls beheaded in grisly Indonesian attack
October 29, 2005 - 7:01PM
Three teenage Christian girls were beheaded and a fourth was seriously wounded in a savage attack on Saturday by unidentified assailants in the Indonesian province of Central Sulawesi. The girls were among a group of students from a private Christian high school who were ambushed while walking through a cocoa plantation in Poso Kota subdistrict on their way to class, police Major Riky Naldo said.

Increasingly, Football's Playbooks Call for Prayer
By JOE DRAPE
Every preseason for 30 years, Coach Bobby Bowden has taken his Florida State football players to a church in a white community and a church in a black community in the Tallahassee area in an effort, he said, to build camaraderie. He writes to their parents in advance, explaining that the trips are voluntary, and that if they object, their sons can stay home without fear of retaliation. He remembers only one or two players ever skipping the outing.

After Upheavals, President Seeks to Steady Course
WASHINGTON, Oct. 29 - After weeks of political turmoil, capped by the indictment of a senior administration official, President Bush will try to give his second term a fresh start by naming a new, conservative nominee to the Supreme Court and intensifying his drive to cut government spending, White House officials and other Republicans said. But he appears to see little need for the wholesale housecleaning that previous administrations tried during times of upheaval to rebuild credibility, those officials said.


WHAT THE HELL IS GOING ON?


Anyone see Bill "Real Time" last night? Honestly the only thing worth watching anymore. (Swear to GOD I am in love with that man.) I remember when horror stories like these simple headlines were shocking and upsettling. Are we immune? Are we all insane? (Note: the Bobby Bowden news items is in reference to the "overly Christian turn going-on....
Maher talked about the home-schooling shit last night........)

I'm confused? When did everything go to hell in a hand-basket?


Oh! OH! The true horror......


Cusack mum, but wedding rumors are swirling
October 27, 2005
BY BILL ZWECKER SUN-TIMES COLUMNIST
Is one of Our Town's most famous bachelors finally planning to give up the single life? While John Cusack's people won't comment (as usual) on the actor's personal life, the rumors are flying Cusack is planning to walk down the aisle with actress Jodi Lyn O'Keefe. Some Cusack fan Web sites actually claim the couple already are hitched -- and have been for some time -- though that seems highly unlikely.

(WELL, DUH!!!!)

O'Keefe is probably best known for her long-running role as Don Johnson's daughter on ''Nash Bridges'' and for playing Freddie Prinze Jr.'s bitchy ex-girlfriend in the 1999 hit flick ''She's All That.'' More recently, the brunette beauty has had featured roles on ''Two and a Half Men'' and ''Boston Legal.'' The notoriously private Cusack, 39, and New Jersey native O'Keefe, who turned 27 earlier this month, have been dating for a couple of years.















A very freaky..... HALLOWEEN-EVE!!!!!
later
sass

Congratulations Sox


Feel any better BUCK?

It's been a long, long time.


later
sass