now all of you go tell her too J

I'll be here when you get back...

it's a day or two late, or more, but still, celebrate a life, a beautiful, wonderful, precious life... let me tell you a bit about her...

our birthday girl came home with a night's pay and decided the best thing she could do with it was help Nicole with her dream to be an EMT... amazing kindness, generosity, and caring... I am so happy such a beautiful person found me online...

so maybe that's one reason I am exploring the blog exchanges more lately... I finally found a link to Blog Explosion and I joined cuz I check things out for myself in spite of what anyone might say... I scrolled through the conversation in what they call a shout box (SB) and read the twenty or so posts and found grammar and spelling police acting as if there was a rule about how to express yourself and even mocking someone's way of writing... not a great first impression...

anyway, time will tell what they're about...

I browsed a bit and after a dozen or so sites the computer froze up and I shut down... when I rebooted I decided to give the other blog communities a try (though I got a bit distracted as you'll soon see)...

I like the fact that when I went to the blogadvance site today I found a banner for bleedingright and an ad for soap (with buttons that looked a lot like chocolate to me) because it gives me the sense that the blog exchange may be open to any point of view, which is how I prefer to be and the mindset with whom I prefer to associate...

my first find there is Jer... wait, start here... it seems that Jer decided to take a five month hiatus from spitting his guts up on the internet due to the reaction of some offline folk he knew, especially co-workers...

alas, some people just can't take a joke... or get one either... or even respect another person's opinion, sense or humor, or privacy... you might even know some people like that yourself... I don't of course...

anyway, after reading Jer's welcome back entry I smiled and related well and moved on to the next entry and fell in love with the words (and sure Jer, you are great too)...

shifting gears back to the community, I clicked the ad banner forthe bleedingright site and the entry did inspire me to leave a comment and ponder:

Why is it that supposedly intelligent caring people on either side of the political aisle do the same thing they accuse each other of doing and deny the fact that they are doing it?

what it comes down to for me (what is right for me, not necessarily for you) is that I just do not see much validity or sense in judgmental perspectives or people... no matter how right (as in correct) right is, it is wrong (and arrogant) to assume you know better than someone else what everyone should think, how everyone should act and be, and what everyone should do...

and then, in an apparently unrelated story that suggests that a certain town in England desperately needs a visit from the ghosts of Christmas past, present, and future...

the New York Times definition of chavs:

Male chavs wear tracksuits and baseball caps; female chavs pull their hair tightly back in buns or ponytails, a style known as a "council house facelift," from the term for public housing.

Chav behavior - outrageous spending sprees, drunken brawls, inappropriate public displays of affection, screaming matches with loved ones in bars, destruction of property, late-night stumbling and/or vomiting - provide celebrity magazines here with much of their material.

it would seem, at least according to the NY Times, that the British have a new word for snobbery, it's called chav (the link is to a NY Times article about a guy who happens to be a millionaire because he won a lottery and who also might be labelled white trash with money in the USA (because snobbery knows no national boundaries}... I am not sure which is funnier, the British reaction to the guy, the guy, or the fact that the NY Timnes felt this was news that was fit to print for the whole world needed to know... you'll need to register at the NY Times to read the article... it's painless and free)...

in case you do not wish to register there at the NY Times website to read the whole article, I'll provide some highlights... as an unbiased observer, of course:

"Mr. Carroll won �9.7 million (about $15 million at the time) in the national lottery three years ago and showed up to collect his prize while wearing a police-issued electronic ankle bracelet. "

Michael Carroll is 22 years old... he won the lottery at 19... apparently Michael was a normal average wild teenager who would pull pranks and get somewhat destructive at times and suddenly winning millions of dollars allowed him to make (and pay for) bigger and better teenage parties, pranks, and the occasional drunken destructive behavior... but he's not a rock star and chooses to remain living in his small town, for now at least, so he's called the town lout...

"I personally have nothing against him," said Terry Drake, a prominent local businessman who owns a hardware store on the main street of this busy old market town. "But a convicted criminal shouldn't be in a position to do something that children are supposed to look up to."

apparently Michael made the mistake of offering to pay for the town Christmas display and lights this year...

"After a huge public outcry, the town has rescinded the invitation and will probably have no holiday display at all this year"

the sad and humorous thing is they appear to be painting this kid as some sort of sadistic mass murderer or something mostly because he's still living a party lifestyle and doesn't clean his room, or yard...

"Before he won the lottery, he was a nuisance," Charles Joyce, a local official, said. "He decided to carry on being a nuisance."

some of the alleged facts from the article, and this is the New York Times, after all, so we must believe it is true, right?...

"he has appeared in court more than 30 times in the last three years. He has spent three months in jail on drugs charges, paid thousands of dollars in fines for vandalism and been evicted from several hotels after, for instance, ripping a chandelier from the ceiling while trying to swing from it.

damn cheap hotel chandeliers...

"He was recently ordered to perform 240 hours of community service - later increased to 300 - after shooting ball bearings through 32 car and shop windows with a catapult as he drove around in the middle of the night.

He has been issued with two antisocial behavior orders in two local jurisdictions forbidding him to threaten, harass or intimidate anyone in a 400-mile radius. He has been told by local government authorities to stop throwing raucous late-night parties and to stop holding demolition derbies on his land.

And he has been told to clean up the yard of his house, strewn as it is with tires, beer cans, food wrappers, wrecked furniture and the hulks of half-smashed-up old cars."

Eddie Godden, Swaffham's honorary town crier, who is responsible for organizing the display this year and accepted Michael's generous offer to sponsor the town's Christmas lights this year, had this to say about the lad:

"He has misbehaved, but he's done what most teenaged boys would do in winning that sort of money," Mr. Godden said of Mr. Carroll. "He's 22 and he's had a lot of bad publicity and he's already been to prison. This is the first conscious public thing he's done to give some money to a good cause. I think he was ready to make amends."

alas, no good deed goes unpunished...

"But after receiving letters of protest from across the country, the council not only decreed that Mr. Carroll was to go nowhere near the [Christmas] display (if there is one) but also removed Mr. Godden from his post."

is this the town where Scrooge is from?...

Mr. Carroll recently participated in a charity boxing match with a television gladiator named Rhino, but Mr. Meacham declined to comment on the latest rumor: that his client is negotiating to star in a reality television series about the chav lifestyle.

I would say only the British, but I can see it happening just as easily in the USA or most civilized countries where jealousy and conformity are the standards by which human behavior are judged...

alas, humanity, you make your own bed...

and lie (as in deny, deceive, be untrue) in it...

and then, from the how stupid are we really files:

and my next reading simply invoked a wow (as I wonder, still striving to be the apolitical child asleep in the back of the car, has it really come to this?)...

finally, or almost finally, I return to The Misadventures of Jer who got me thinking about something, well, a couple of things, with this thought:

so I wandered around the Boobie website with curiosity and not minding at all if something might have got my libido (libbo, remember?) in a drooling lather because there was just too much serious thought ponding on my brain cells already...

and now I will let you in on just how different (strange, you might say) my personal taste in female breasts can be... I found not one image of breasts on the Boobiethon site even remotely titillating... maybe it's cuz I was never breast fed (at least not to my recollection)... whatever the reason, find absolutely no incentive to give $50 for access to more of them...

I did give a little though, cuz it is a good cause...

so now you know more about me than my mother ever did (or wanted to know) and I am going to lay down and pass out now (at least I hope unconsciousness is fast in coming) because I do not recall sleeping since Friday and I've got to be at work in about five hours...

the happy pill box is open and hoping for some of your thoughts (yes, I'll even discuss politics or religion, that's how lonely I'm getting... surely desperation and madness will follow me all of my days if the one doesn't get here soon, aye?)...

this world is quite challenging to understand, how it came into being, how it got the way it is... humanity is one of the most obvious confusions, I think, and surely there's more than enough reason to stress and strain our brains over it... so give yourself a big hug today... cuz you deserve some love... extra special love for my wonderful friends and give yourself a hug even if you are not a birthday girl (or boy)...

or a chav, even J

. o O ( NOTES ARE THE NEW HAPPY PILL ) O o .
(just let me know you were here)