green

@TrueBlue: I always appreciate your posts but never more than when you touch upon the religious and cultural life of the Semitic peoples. I am very envious of your educational background, your knowledge and your life experiences. I trust that you will continue you to share your knowledge with the rest of us.

I think I need a fill. Last night I had dinner at the in-laws and then ate a whole hamburger on the way home. I was starving!

Thanks for letting me know, Wootsie. You should know that the entire population of Canada agrees with your assessment of Karla Homolka. She is a sociopath and should have been locked up for life. Unfortunately the Crown cut a deal with her before the tapes were discovered and for some reason wouldn't nullify this even though evidence of another crime which she committed later came to light. She was, however, required to spend her entire sentence in prison; there was no parole time for her.

Yah, I quite enjoyed my little shopping binge of last week. In fact I haven't got around to hanging any of the stuff up yet. I am enjoying looking at the pile of new clothes too much, I guess.:scared:

@Wootsie: In fact Karla Homolka is living in the Province of Quebec under the informal scrutiny of both the local police and the media. It would be impossible for her to cross the border unless one of your border guards was extremely inattentive. Where did you get your info from? I am curious.

And lo! His noodly juice is marinara sauce and His meat is hot Italian sausage and meat balls. And the words al dente shall be spoken by all of ye who dine here. Green has been a practising Pastafarian for many, many years now. It is this that has made her fat!

The FSM originated as a satirical website response to a debate as to whether Creationism/Intelligent Design should be taught in a local public school system. The dude who started the site said that he wanted his theory, that of the FSM, taught in addition to Creationism should this be allowed in the state school system. The site and the Noodly Dude Himself were achieving some underground degree of reknown even before those fabulous South Park boys ran with the FSM. (By the way, Green loves South Park. She continues to be a fan. She has also converted two Frenchies to the joys of South Park.)

LMAO Thanx for posting this.:biggrin1: I am very fond of this series of videos.

If you call being presented with the facts as being immoderate....well then, you may be right.:cry

Looking very good, grrl! Congratulations from Green, eh.

Have fun in China. I am so envious, grrl! As for the scale thing, I decided to stop weighing myself when I was 25 years old and since then I have become a wee bit phobic!!!!!! LOL

Up here in Canada we had abolished the death penalty a long, long time ago. We haven't seen anyone executed for the past 5 decades. This has proven to be a good thing; we have seen a number of long term prisoners released as new evidence, usually to do with advanced forensic techniques, comes to light. Of course the average citizen will find him or herself at times regretting the lack of the ultimate penalty. This is when we are confronted with an individual whose crimes have been truly monstrous, truly unfathomably grotesque. But detective work is not always, despite what we see on television, flawless. Sometimes the police settle on a likely suspect and make the facts of the crime fit the suspect. In rural areas and small towns the local police force may not have the same access to sophisticated methods or be as comfortable with sophisticated methodology as the urban forces are. This is often just a dollars and cents issue and nothing more but there may also be pressures exerted by the locals to find and convict and that might cloud the ability of the local force to function in a clear-headed and detached manner. In the mid 1990s we had a high profile case where an innocent man - Guy Morin - was found guilty of abducting and murdering a child. In his case the local police force felt that his profile filled the bill. He was a shy and sensitive man who still lived with his family. It was only later, much later in fact that it was discovered that a family member may have done it. It was forensics which cleared this individual. The aftermath of this botched affair was that the Province of Ontario paid him a whack of cash and gave him a formal apology. They didn't tell him that life can suck. Please note that although this is the case which I have chosen to describe there are a number of others which are similar. There is, for instance, the case of David Milgaard who had been in prison for 3 decades for a crime that would have earned him the death penalty in certain jurisdictions.

Completed Jew. Hmmm...I wonder what the survivors of the Holocaust would think of that terminology.

I have to agree with TommyO. I wasn't alive until He was born. This has shaved 10 years off my age. Yippee! Thanks, TommyO. You're the best.

Green was very, very naughty. She used the putz-word.:phanvan

BJean, you always give good post. Don't be so quick to cut yourself down, grrl.

Yep, you are right. Although 57 has its bad points it also has its good points and I am content with my age. It is pretty interesting being 57. That is sad news about your best friend dying through his refusal to engage in his weight problem. I feel for you. I really, really feel for you. My kid brother recently died at the age of 48 of bowel cancer. He didn't like doctors and had refused to see one for ten years before his death. I still miss him deeply.

That's brilliant! It took me a lot longer to lose that amount of weight but then I am 57! :cry Congratulations.:clap2:

And up here in Canada our provincial governments are concerned about enterprising Americans who come up here and buy our cheaper drugs in bulk for re-import to the U.S. We are afraid that the pharmaceutical companies might start charging us American prices. This would be mighty nasty for us and our medicare system. We pay higher taxes and our dollar is weaker. Go figure, eh.... Seems to me that the pharmaceutical companies could start by cutting your prices and giving your citizens a break. Of course it also seems that eliminating big business from your medical system - which is what Canada, Australia, New Zealand and all of Europe has done - would trim back your medical costs by an average of $2,000 a year per person and eliminate the financial ruination of American families but that raises the spectre of socialism, doesn't it? I continue to be surprised by the antagonism that so many Americans feel towards nationalised medicare. Your poor are covered and your wealthy have no problems whatsoever. It is the middle class which is oppressed by the high cost of medical insurance and it is the big business middle men and the shareholders who are earning a living off your cancer, MS, or heart attack. All of the countries that I have listed above function on the democratic, capitalist model and yet they have nationalised medicine. In Canada doctors and nurses belong to national and provincial professional organizations and they can and will go on strike if they feel that their working or pay conditions are unsatisfactory. Doctors bill by the patient. It is the province, not the patient, that reimburses them. The province, unlike the patient, is never a deadbeat. Because an insurer whose primary concern is the bottom line is not involved this frees up the patient's doctors to choose an approach that is not hindered by financial considerations. My brother who is a doctor in Virginia has often told me that he must choose his approach according to what the dollar men will or won't allow him to do. On the other hand, my meticulous GP is comfortable about schlepping me over to see specialists whenever she feels that there is any ambiguity concerning the functioning of my innards.:phanvan

Oy! *shrugs* I know, I know. I just really like the joke is all....

LOL You will be able to feel your port and a drumstick!:omg:

Aw shucks, kid. A little hot headedness can happen to anyone of us and is quite different from persistent and wilful meaness. Although we Rant&Ravers have wildly divergent views we rarely get into slagging each other. This is a civilized and respectful site. It is true that we have been pushing each other to defend what we each believe in on some of the threads in R&R and we have been pushing the boundaries of polite discourse at times but we have all stopped ourselves from going over the edge. And that's a good thing. I also suspect that we may often feel a lot of affection and respect for those of us who hold a divergent view point. Afterall, we are all thoughtful folk who are willing to put ourselves and what we believe in out there. And we are all bandsters too and so have been sharing that array of problems together, eh.:phanvan I frequent another site, an atheist site, and the brawling there does get low down and dirty. Ooh, talk about an ugly barroom brawl. There's bad language, folks cracking chairs over other folks' heads, stabbings in the alley, and no cops in sight (or should I say in site?).

Re torture and all that: There is still some concern outside of the United States concerning the Maher Arar case. He was the Canadian national of Syrian origin who was deported from the States, not to Canada, but to Syria where he was emprisonned, interrogated and tortured. He is now back home and has been declared clean by our specialists on terrorism but is still on your no-fly list. Your ambassador called our Public Safety Minister "presumptuous" for repeatedly asking that his name be removed. It might be considered that your officials were presumptuous by removing a Canadian citizen to a third country, one that would use torture as an interrogation technique. It seems that this policy of shipping suspicious folks off to these countries is called extraordinary rendition and while Arar has become the poster child for this, he is not the only one to whom this has happened. It also seems that European airports are used as stopovers in order to refuel for the CIA planes carrying these individuals. In Arar's case the stopover was made in Italy. But the European Union's parliamentary committee has been looking into this practice and they have now issued a report condemning the practice as "'an illegal instrument used by the United States.'" They also say that this "'damages and undermines regular police and judicial procedures against terrorism suspects.'" Amnesty International been observing these developments closely by the way. Now, it is true that the Canadian government is also on the hook for the Arar mess. It apparently had faulty intelligence concerning this man, too. Where the U.S. screwed up was by not sending this individual back to his own country, Canada, but instead opting for the unilateral move of shipping this individual to a country where torture is an approved conversational technique. You might be interested to know that Senator Patrick Leahy (Dem) is attempting to force Attorney-General Gonzales to shed a little more light on this affair. I mention this because European Union report would seem to indicate that extraordinary rendition has not been limited to Maher Arar. This means that the American government has been deliberately sending other individuals to countries where torture is considered to be inside the rules.

A Jewish guy who has lead a very bad life - he has denied the faith of his fathers, been unfaithful to his wife, and cheated his partners - is killed in a head-on collision while driving one day. To his surprise he wakes up in the most beautiful environment he has ever seen. Eventually he gets around to asking where he is. "Why, you are in Hell," is the reply. Death continues to be a pleasure for him and one day while on his rambles he notices a mountain in the distance and decides to hike there for a closer look. When he gets to the top he sees that it is in fact a volcano and looking in he see the most horrifying sight. He sees men and women being burnt and tortured by devilish looking creatures. Terrified, he runs away. Many hours later he describes that chamber of horrors and asks, what was that?!? "Oh! That's Hell for the Christians. They seem to prefer it that way."

This is going to sound weird but for years now I have wanted to try working as a waitress. I've wanted to see how people would tip me.