green

Dear Tom, I am writing to join with the rest of the gang by wishing you a happy birthday. Birthdays are pleasant when you are very young but there does come a time when they are not and I often wonder why we persist in celebrating them instead of ignoring them altogether. Mine falls on the 4th of July and it is invariably hellishly hot, horribly humid and there is a smog advisory. My ideal way of dealing with it would be to wear a morphine patch and listen to the A/C purr. Nobody ever, ever gives me pharmaceutical assistance of this nature and so I spend a cranky, miserable day. Then it is all over for another year. Your birthday will soon pass for it is, afterall, only one day. Birthdays were so much fun when we were small. Today I was listening to my physiotherapist describe his son's fifth birthday. There were a dozen kids and Power Rangers seemed to be the big item. Remember them? Well, they're back! The birthday food was the usual and there was a lady wizard who entertained the kids with tricks and jokes. It was Bette Davis who said that growing old 'ain't for sissies.' She is right. I know that I said in an earlier post that the alternative to growing old is worse and that BJean questioned this. I replied with a flip answer. (Sorry, BJean, perhaps we should discuss how old is too old.) Anyhow, you and your wife are in your early 60s, you still have each other, your son and his family, and you still have all your marbles, too. You and your wife also have your separate and shared interests and you, TOM, have your on-line family. It could be a lot worse and it will get worse as you continue to age. Enjoy what you have and where you are right now, and make hay while the sun shines, eh. Oh and by the way, I am a depressive: the above is the pep talk I routinely dish out to myself.:phanvan Happy Birthday, TOM, from Green

I'm a liberal atheist with many, many homosexual friends of both sexes. And my husband and I marched in our local Gay Pride parade a few years ago (long story - lol). That's the best I can do. :phanvan I hope it helps.

I agree as well but I am keeping very quiet these days. This is because I did totally and completely lose it the other evening.:think (Green has anger issues when it comes to dealing with people who have 'dealing with the facts' denial problems.) Bravo to Morsaille!:clap2: :clap2: :clap2:

"April is the cruellest month..." wrote T.S. Elliot, the poet.

How about an atheist Canadian who is a member of a trade union? And who has a lot of gay friends and whose tenant is a lesbian?

Yep, I've seen Very Bad Things and loved it! Susannah, I am really horrified by what happened to your grandfather. My father's side of the family is Jewish. Most of them died in the Holocaust. Nevertheless, I found Borat to be one of the funniest movies I have ever seen. This is because I have a juvenile sense of humour. I also used to like Howard Stern and I loved the Dave Chappelle Show.

I am sorry for the extremely foul mouth! I really do deeply appologize to those of you who regularly read my comments and expect cleaner air. I did, however, become most terrifically annoyed with this pair of fools - fools who seem to be absolutely incapable of absorbing factual information and persist in hugging to themselves the irrational made-up kind.:tired The foul language I learned on the shop floor when I built aircraft. :phanvan

Oh, please don't engage in cuntish behaviour, Cusano. No one is trying to win points here, eh. Certainly these folks are behaving in a fashion which is monstrous and certainly the lovely and talented green would be more than happy to smack 'em down. All that I am saying is this: Green figures that it it is important to examine actions within a larger framework is all. (You all might be amused to learn that green is not all that knee-jerk left-wing-nut sweet. The old fartess has an eye focussed on the nasty side and that ain't all that pleasant or politickally correct, is it?)

Well, dude, as it happens I used to build planes, eh. Yup, I literally built aircraft. And I still travel a lot by aircraft, by the way. It seems to me that we have got to figure how to get freed up from up the control of outside forces with respect to fossil fuels. We can quit our bitchin' and start fixin' - don't you think? You can be bitter or you can be better with your respect to your attitude towards the current pile o problems in which we now find ourselves stuck.

Dudes - are you idiots? Do you really think that the raggedy-ass third-world Islamic forces of the Middle East have the wealth, the technology, and the man-power to cross the Atlantic Ocean and overrun a continent whose manpower numbers more than three hundred million indivduals? You might be interested to note that these cats are not (like) even able to consider shifting north into continental Europe, eh??? As your Ann Flounders would say, you must wake up and smell the goddam fucken coffee, eh. An individual like Cusano or that other ill-educated goof, the cat who chooses to display himself by numbers (396) and and by an inability to master grammar and spelling, and this always irritates Green, may easily and foolishly view the vast and wealthy North American chunk of territory as being under immediate attack by a rag-bag gang o frustrasted third worldists. Oh, yah.............. Green is always amused by this biz of paranoia, eh.:rolleyes

Ahhh, grrl, I am pleased that you have enjoyed my input. The truth is that you have created a very special environment for folks who are or who were chubbly-wubbly to frequent. This is cool, you know, and how could it not be, eh....huh...and or whatever,... whatever....:rolleyes The truth is that it is powerfully important for us to be able to be able to connect with our community.

Disg/cay is never disgusting ,eh, is it?

Green is always annoyed by Christians. She gets really pissed off by their messy grammar, their bossiness, and the over all lack of intellectual rigor with which they take care of business. She figures that there has got to be a sweet, sweet standard and that those Christ-lovin folk have got to spend their time under the same microscope as the rest of us.

The simple truth is this, is is it not? - and that is that we must all be sufficiently freed from our own personal fears of being viewed as racists, and of course we must be sufficiently loosened up that we can feel comfortable with being aggressive and with noting the difference between humour and cruel bloody racism.

Ah, Cusano, my kinda sorta old friend! Once again I would argue with you because you have chosen to take refuge - in a thoughtless and knee-jerk fashion - behind a certain political position. This is never a wise nor an interesting approach sez the lovely and bi-ethnic green. Oy, yah, she looks awful damn white on the outside and yet the grrl throws off occasional knee jerk twitches of life from time to fuckin time. There is a kinda halo of DNA which we all leave, do we not?

396, I realise from the quality of your posts that you don't get out much and so here are a few facts of which you are unaware: those terrorists of which you speak are religious fundamentalists and many, if not most, have ties with al-Qaeda. This is a group which has its roots in the Wahhabi approach to Islam, a fundamentalist approach to religion which has its roots in Saudi Arabia, an oil-rich country and also a so-called friend of BuSh America. It should also be noted by your own fine self that Osama bin Laden, the leader of al Qaeda, is a member of a very wealthy and powerful Saudite family. You should be interested to know that Iraq was the only Muslim state in the region which was controlled by a modernist non-religious type government at the time that George Bush da 2nd chose to invade the country. Yes, Iraq, thanks to her horrible leader, had certainly been behaving badly, that is for sure. At the same time it is crucial to your understanding of the complexities of the Middle East that you recognise that Iraq - a modernist and secular nation - had nothing to do with either the philosophies or activities of the al Wahhabiist al Qaeda activities. Iraq's bad behaviour vis-a-vis its expansionist behaviour into Kuwait in the early 1990's was an act which was largely devoid of either political or emotional cant.

Yep, that's the one. Razzie is short for raspberry as in 'blowing a raspberry' or making a farting sound with your mouth.:biggrin1: That Jenny McCarthy movie was another one that I really liked. It had the funniest menstruation scene I have ever seen - totally tasteless but it tapped into all my menstruation fears from back when I used to be bothered with that kind of thing.... I think I have a real appreciation for tasteless comedies. I loved Borat! :heh: I wonder if there is a support group for people like me other than teenage boys.:phanvan

I loved that movie White Chicks! None of my friends got it or me for that matter. Did you know that it won a Razzie for being super bad?

I've always wanted to go to Myrtle Beach. Lucky you! How was the shopping?

When younger people ask me how I feel about growing old, I tell 'em that it is not that pleasant but better than the alternative.:phanvan

I got married to a musician when I was 22 and we split up 5 years later. Then I spent a period of time trying on a number of men before I met my better half. He is a guy that I would have overlooked when I was younger: too quiet, and not as well-educated as I am. Sometimes a grrl has to kiss a lot of toads before she gets it right.....:tired

Al Sharpton is a racist in that he is an individual who has two sets of optics; he will judge your bad activities based on the colour of your skin. With respect to the Imus situation he was up front and central but I have never heard of him engaging in issues to do with rap language and as we all know it has been rappers who have been floating the concepts and language of violence over the past few decades including the term ho. Of course this indicates that this individual carries with himself a vivid double standard. It is for this reason that this fellow strikes me as being a racist, an opportunist, a gas-bag, and an anti-intellectual. Imus certainly did f!!k up and this is where your country has the opportunity to engage in something more than meaningless rhetoric in the style of Sharpton. It would be far more noble of this man to take a low-key approach and to open up a discussion into the issues hingeing on racial damage. The plain truth is that Sharpton is none too bright and he is a political opportunist who is playing the racist card. Also true is that his approach of stirring up Blacks against Whites is not useful given that both Blacks and Whites live in America and will continue to do so. Nor is it a Christian love yer brothers kind of philosophy, is it?

I suspect that the issue here is one of love. Carlene and her husband were friends with the original couple, and had known them for a very, very long time. They had come to see the marital relationship of this couple as being both profound and loving. Certainly this couple had had an unusual start and one that was, well, powerfully romantic. (See Carlene's earlier commentary.) It is certain that this relationship seemed to be a solid one and one which would undoubtedly last a lifetime. That this woman's mate so easily unhooked himself from his dying wife while she was in extremis and then so quickly transferred his allegiance to another woman would be painful for any friend of this couple to watch. How could it not be? Well, this was the position in which Carlene found herself while her friend was dying. That her friend's husband had suddenly shown himself to be utterly careless, insensitive, egotistical, and libidinous in the face of this loss must have been both appalling and painful. That her husband had appeared to sanction this by continuing to remain friends with Mr P cannot have been reassuring to Carlene for the offense is two-fold: not only has the so-called loving husband of the newly dead woman both betrayed her and treated her like trash; but the carelessness with which other folk approach Mr P's behaviour both indicates a degree of sanctioned disrespect towards this maltreated dead woman and also holds the threat of a sanctioned disrespect towards all of us who die first. Let me speak quite bluntly. It is not a pleasant thing to consider that you will be casually dumped into the nearest garbage bin once you cease to be emotionally, financially, and sexually viable. Loving mates who leave first are supposed to be quite happy to find that their partners have found solace and company. They do, however, want to be properly grieved over and given their dues. That is their proper right, is it not?

Neither LBT nor a doctor's office is an appropriate venue for any of the following: a shock jock's schtick, a rapper's terminology, or a South Park approach to the issues which we discuss here. We come from a wide range of backgrounds and we hold a wide range of values dear to ourselves: we come here for serious discussion and the employment of such language in this context is obviously entirely inappropriate. But again I will go back to this issue of provenance/context. Black people have decided to own or take back the 'N' word; this doesn't permit White people to make use of it, too. Certainly some taboo words are more no-go than others and I guess that the N-word is the most powerful of those which are taboo. Other words which are deeply offensive are in the process of being taken back or apart or forcibly deconstructed by comedians these days. It might be argued that Lenny Bruce was the comedian who first wandered into these waters. Of course there has been a comedic history of exploration into this whole business of loaded language: George Carlin has been at this for ages and Dave Chapelle and Chris Rock are two other notable comics who investigate this zone. Of course there are many others.... The taste for this type of comedy is not for everyone, just as the taste for middle of the road rock or American Idol is not for everyone. Nevertheless, I do appreciate humour which pushes the envelope for this is often the fashion in which we finally figure out the hidden hypocrisies and paradigms of our societies. Humour is iconoclastic: it has to break the rules. Oh, for sure Imus went way too far. Those girls did not merit that cheap throw-away comment and the dude should certainly be required to do some serious public grovelling as well as suffer some serious financial loss but as for having his career ended, I disagree. You see, sensitive, refined, middle-aged and middle-class women are not Imus's target audience and he should not be required to pay their price. When the choice comes to listening to a shock jock, rap, country, or listening to Celine Dion/Whitney Huston/or whatever, we do have certain options, have we not? We can twiddle with the radio dial until we find something appropriate to our personal needs. Young white males like listening to shock jocks. Most women prefer to listen to country or to soft rock and to the current array of divas. Well, this grrl only likes jazz, classical, and shock jock and so she is in a minority, go figure, eh. And like everyone else she would be comfortable in defending her tastes as being the most valuable and therefore the only ones worthy of respect. Imus had a mandate from his owners and his advertisers to play up to a certain audience. He certainly did f!!!k up big time with his fuzzy-headed wisecrack but this was not due to his own racism: rather the poor bastard took what he thought might be an amusing quip far too far and now he is being publickly smacked for this. This is certainly warranted but is he a racist? No. Does he deserve to lose his job? No.

It is true that widowers tend to remarry extremely quickly after the death of their wives and that this may be seen as an act of homage to the first wife for it indicates that the widower found great happiness in the state of marriage, but in this case it does seem as though the wealthy Mr P did run willingly into the arms of a conniving broad some considerable time before his wife was actually dead. Now she has managed to get her granddaughter on the payroll, too, by getting the old guy to adopt her even though the kid has a father who is alive and well. Carlene had reported earlier that Mrs P had been pretty much abandonned by her mate once he became involved with her caretaker. It seems that Mrs P was ultimately warehoused in a facility and this is where she died. A further affront was that Mrs P, a Catholic, was not given a proper funerary Mass and burial. Her importance to her mate, indeed the very fact of her existance, was more or less tidied away and brushed under the rug. It is very painful for a friend to observe such a death.