green

I think that the reason that the west is the best is that open debate is the real deal here. It may be true that many of you find dissenting opinions to be awfully fatiguing; well, I do, too. But this is the price that we pay for living in an environment which values debate and dissent. And don't ya find it kind of fun, kind of stimulating, you know, to be exposed to an array of opinions, many of which are presented by idiots, moonbats, fundies (of all stripes), lunaticks, moonaticks, et al, and at times by thinkers who are both better educated and more subtle than you or me?

It is true that those of us who are winters do have an advantage in so far that black, white and grey can easily be accessorised with just about anything and these colours always do look chic if handled properly. On the other hand, not all folks look great wearing black and white. My mum-in-law and one of my closest grrl friends, anotha blondie, look awful in black. They look sallow and close to death. This particular grrlfiend (har har) is often mistaken as my sister by the folks in my ethnically diverse neighbourhood but apart for our age and our weight issues and our shared sense of bitchery we have few things in common. We wear our lard differently. And she is a grrl who can, much to her horror, wear maroon, pastels, cream, navy blue - and will look utterly deathlike in white and black. Of course black and white do tend to be the standard downtown urban colours. And of course Green, that is to say me, did squeal "ohmigawd, those are Walmart colours!" The poor kid wept along with me myself about this biz. On the other hand, because I am a reddish blonde people tend to assume that I will look fab in fall colours. I don't and so I find myself palming off really nice stuff which looks pretty damn nasty on me. I did have a friend, a true brunette with dark eyes and a pale skin who was a true autumn. Goes to show that you never can tell what will look good without doing a little bit of dragging swatches of material up to your face and getting your friends to react to this. My ma-in-law is also a child of the fall.

My mum was a wonderful flirt. She met my dad, a Polish Jew, a displaced person who was in England during the Second World War, and although he had been cleared by the British government and was already active in the British army he had not been granted anything further than provisional identification papers as a foreign national. It was for this reason that my mum and my dad lived together for a year before they got married. My mum, you see, was afraid of losing her status as a citizen and it was only when my dad was about to be shipped back to Europe and then went AWOL, refusing to return until he received some sort of protection from the British Home Office, that he was granted citizenship. And so they married and then in 1947 they immigrated to Canada. Imagine my mother's shock when her family dentist showed up on her door step here in Canada in the early 1950s in order to tell her that he had always loved her and that he wanted her to be with him. By this time she was a young suburban housewife in a new country with a couple of infant brats clawing at her ankles. My dad was out at work at the time.

Grrl, I understand what you are saying. This forum has been and still is my life line, too. Do try to wear more nice at home. You can easily do this and it will make you feel very fine about yourself. I am now at goal and I have recently had my face reno-ed. I am also retired. This means that I am at home most of the time but I do make a point of wearing cute slobby comfortable clothes. This means nothing in pink, baby blue and certainly nothing with a stripe up the pant leg. I am a winter and so I mostly wear black, white, grey, and jeans. Sometimes I will wear a white or black top and a loose and colourful skirt or colourful baggy pants when I am doing nothing. My husband likes to see me in a skirt and he likes seeing me in colourful baggy pants. Usually I wear jeans or leggings. The trick is to discover what colours really do suit you and stick to those. I see far too many women (and men) opting to stick to the so-called safe colours which in truth don't necessarily look nice. The truth is that brown, beige, orange, marroon, baby blue and baby pink don't look very nice on most people. You can either pay to have your colours done or you can do it the cheap way; you can bring a gang of your closest friends shopping with you and you can hold various colours up to your face and ask them for their reactions. I still do this when I am shopping. And if you love colours which look lousy on you, well, do what I do: wear them as accessories. I am a winter. I can't wear colours. This is why I wear colourful pants, socks, pants, shoes, gloves, and carry colourful bags. I just gotta keep colour away from my face is all. This has been an awfully long post but the point of it is that the mechanics of being a slob and yet still looking great are fairly simple to master, I believe. By the way, I guess my only street cred for sounding like a know it all is that I used to live in France, for what that's worth. :phanvan Apart from that, well, my husband is nine years younger than I am, he dotes on me, and he has always been the babe in our couple. Have fun looking great and understand that this does not hinge upon extreme make-up and important clothes. You can do this all the time and in the privacy of your own home, ya know.

I second Marjon's response. I have posted about this at some length elsewhere but I will recap: it seems to me that Bhutto's candidacy held out enormous hope to the west. She was well-educated, she was a woman, she was a modernist, and she was a candidate who held an enormous fan base. This was why she was assassinated. We in the west could have worked with her but now she is gone. This is a bummer for us and a real tragedy for Pakistan, a country which is, I believe, sliding backwards into feudalism.

Hmmm....this moonbat is now thinking that she will PM with her blog site address. Ya might be amused.....:kiss2: Eh.

It could be worse. My psycho neighbour put poo on our garbage cans. He has done a lot of other very bad things as well. But poo..........!

Pakistan certainly is much more fcked up than its neighbour, India, and it is being left increasingly behind in the economic development of this subcontinent. Pakistan has nuclear capabilities and this is disturbing. It is already caught up in a long standing brawl with India over the question of who owns Kashmir. And the original partition of the subcontinent of India, something which was decided upon by the departing British Raj in 1947, into Muslim Pakistan and Hindu India, turned into a blood thirsty nightmare where families were forced to move depending on their religion and where millions of people were brutally slaughtered. (For people who want to know more there are a few good and utterly heart-breaking movies made about this era.) At present Pakistan is under martial law and its current government is friendly to the west. However, Pakistan, unlike India, is not economically prospering, is not a successfully developing country but is in fact a country which is drifting backwards towards feudalism. This brings Pakistani people emotionally much closer to Afghanistan, and this should be of concern to the west. Bhutto was of enormous value to the west. She was educated, a woman, and a modernist. She also had a serious fan base which was why she was assassinated. The issue of her being part of the elite and an insider is, I think, entirely irrelevant when viewed in the context of the Realpolitik of this nation. The truth is that no outsider would be considered seriously by the local folks unless he was a charlatan, some kind of magic-talking imam or whatever. Such an individual would be immoderate and impossible for the western nations to work with. Bhutto would have brought some corruption with her regime but not so much.......

This is interesting news. I have never watched Fox news. As you know, I live in a foreign country, a country where there are plenty of moonbats. Up here we get Canuck news coverage, CNN, and many of us get the BBC. It has, however, been received wisdom that Fox news tends to slant towards the right and thus it is interesting to learn that it does not. I myself have a tendency to dress to the left and it for this reason that the only two newspapers to which I subscribe are centre-right and right wing. This dismays some of my moonbat friends but these papers offer up a valuable counter-weight to my leftist tendencies and they also happen to be much more intellectually stimulating. I do, however, believe that anyone who is seriously interested in the news and in current ideas should make a point of reading the foreign press. This can be done on line. This exercise would be particularly valuable for Americans, I think, and this is only because your country is such a large and powerful one that your news coverage is likely to be self-focused, an inevitable result of your size. Minor countries, such as Canada, really have nothing much going on internally, comparatively speaking, and so much more of our news coverage is focused on global affairs. And as a sidebar I would like to mention that I have a close friend who now lives in Germany. She gets the Euro version of CNN which she watches regularly. It is, I suspect, her chief source of news since she is a Canuck and not all that comfortable functioning in German. She was exposed to the American version of CNN during a visit back here in Canada. She told me that the Euro version sure was different: much less hyper, more in-depth coverage, and a lot less make-up. It seems that CNN figures that Europeans have longer attention spans than we do....and are less into the Tammy Fay Bakker look.

I have always loved to shop and now that I have lost weight and have had a face lift and have inherited money it became even more fun but I believe that I am finally hitting the wall with this particular recreation. I have recently been finding that although I still enjoy looking I am not too interested in buying anymore. :faint: Finally!!! :whoo:This is because I like the stuff I already have as much as or better than any of the stuff that I am seeing in the stores. My mate and I went out for lunch and a little recreational shopping yesterday - he likes to shop, too - and all I came home with was an arm load of books which were on sale. This was after looking at clothes, boots, bags, belts, etc. My husband bought himself some dark chocolate. We actually found ourselves whining to each other that everything looked the same and that there was nothing new to buy! :phanvan Dealing with alcohol has always been an issue for me. I am a depressive and we do tend to want to self-medicate whenever we are feeling lousy. :help:

No, I think that you are right and I was wrong. I now think that it does mean original poster and not what I thought it meant - which was "other poster." I'm telling ya, I can be very ditsy at times.... :faint: (and isn't this much more fun than picking on each other? )

Oops! I think I made a booboo in my last post. I thought OP meant other poster. :faint: I gather from context it actually means opening poster. Sorry about that. I am old and I am blonde! :phanvan Life can be difficult at times, eh. :tired

This is a good question. It will be interesting to watch what goes on over the next few months. The latest news that I heard is that the election in Pakistan will still take place in January but to what effect? The head of a major party has been assassinated. Pakistan does have nuclear capabilities and it does share a porous border with Afghanistan and it is an Islamic country. It is not, economically speaking, a developing nation in the same way that India is; it is far less healthy. The U.S. has, I have heard, been pumping a lot of money into Pakistan in order to shore the country up; this money is also to assist the government of Pakistan in blocking the Taliban from entering the country from Afghanistan as well as stopping all Taliban activities on their own soil. I have heard that the stock markets have reacted negatively to this news of Bhutto's death and oil prices have already gone up. The coming months will be interesting ones.

:clap2::clap2::clap2::clap2::clap2:

Ladies, this discussion has become utterly nuts, and not in a good way! Let me recap: this thread was opened by an interesting and, as I understand it from my own reading on the issue, accurate commentary on the pagan roots of the Christmas festival. When one of the OPs chose to post what I felt was an off-the-wall description of pagan practices I wrote a response to this. (By the way, thanks for all the nice words y'all said, eh.) Since then this discussion has degenerated into a counter productive and, worse yet, very boring she said she said brawl. This has been happening a lot on this site recently. There seems to be some kind of pissing match between a number of individuals going on and from what I am able to understand some of this has been imported from OH. Stop it! Cut it out! It is boring for the rest of us and it is futile. You know that nobody is gonna win here in cyberland. Get a forken grip, will ya! We have so much to discuss in the way of our own personal issues with fat, with the cultural expectations placed on larger people, with understanding more about why some of us are fatties and some of us are not.... We have here a forum where we meet and can talk about everything, be it ageing, plastic surgery, shopping, kids, pets, abortion, religion, the weather, the economy, politics, unwanted hair, recipes,...you name it and you can post it! This in-fighting is idiotic. And, like I said, it is very boring. And you can stop it! Each and everyone of you can refuse to go there.

One of my very best friends is my ex-husband's wife, now his widow. He introduced us to each other many years ago and we went on to develop a very close friendship. I rented out my house to them while I was living in France. We are regular shopping and lunching out mates and we spend a lot of time yapping on the phone. I was one of her emotional supports during the time her husband/my ex was dying of cancer. I was present at all the memorial celebrations and she made sure that everyone understood that I was both her friend and her wife-in-law. Her daughter and her family live within walking distance from my house. We have tons in common. You see, my ex chose another woman who is very much like me; the biggest difference between us is that she is a lot nicer. We love each other, as close friends do. Her friendship was a pretty nice divorce present, I think. It has always been my policy to try to make friends with my boyfriends' exes. Sometimes this works out. Sometimes this works out for awhile but then jealousy and other weirdness gets in the way, and sometimes it doesn't work out at all. One of my close friends had a brief fling with my husband while we were split up. She doesn't know that I know. She would be mortified, and I would lose a good friend. The point of my post is to express that the individual whom you now love or did love is/was unlikely to pick only monsters to be his soul mates - apart from you yourself of course - and thus you might want to try at least seeing if you can get to know these people. Like I said: you know that you yourself are not a monster, you know that you are a nice human being. Perhaps these monsters are also only human, too. You might end up with a really close friend. At the very worse you will feel more comfortable telling everyone that she is an a$$hole! :heh:

:faint::heh:

My feet and hands have always been bony. This is why I was surprised that I had to get my rings resized; they were literally slipping off my fingers. Sadly, my feet are still boat-sized.... :phanvan 10.5 or 11

Hijabi Girl, I am very sorry to hear that you are experiencing such terrible problems and my thoughts are with you. I wish I had some useful advice to offer but sadly I don't.

I'd like to hear your adventures In Russia too, gadget. I did take a trip to the USSR during the time of glasnost but the only Russian cities I spent time in were Moscow, Sochi, and Leningrad. Lousy food!!! :omg: and once again we were usually sequestered in hotels for foreigners. The rest of the time we were in the USSR we were in some of the Muslim states and Georgia. Much better food there. The trip was my turning 40 consolation gift to myself. We should start a Commie country thread.....:ranger:

Aw shucks. :embarassed: And thanks. :eek::)

Wow! Now that's really pushing the envelope on academic idiocy! :phanvan Reading your post has reminded me to take my antidepressant. Thanks for posting this. :ranger:

Now, do you seriously think that pagan folks were in the habit of chucking their children into fires on a regular basis in order to satisfy some kind of Supreme Being, be He alive or dead? Uh, I think not. Use your tiny brain. People tend to rebel when asked on a routine basis to sacrifice their children. One or two kiddies might be toasted for the common good but no tribe will accept sacrificing an entire kindergarten's worth of kids. Has it not occurred to you that some of the early missionaries may have invented some pretty lurid stories in order to attract folks to their brand new religion? There were no governmental laws in place at that time about truth in advertising, you know.

Elena, the pleasure is all mine. I have derived great value from our conversation and you have given me a great deal by permitting me to revisit that very strange Cuban experience. I now have a sense that I am beginning to unknot some of this thanks to you. I want to tell everyone on this excellent thread that I am very, very sorry for hi-jacking the conversation. I have been loving the letters.

Not necessarily. If you had done your homework as a curious layman by reading up on your latest scientific research for dummies, as I continue to do, you would be aware that the planet is billions of years old and that the eye is in fact the end result of many trials and failures as, indeed, is each and every aspect of us: our limbs, our brains, our neurochemistry, etc. In short, any animal born with non-functioning or poorly functioning eyes will not perform well in the race for survival. And certainly these poor handicapped creatures will not be attracting mates and thus will not be bearing young. In the billions of years old tale that is evolution the deal was this: the weaker, the handicapped creatures end up in the food bowls of the more powerful. Evolution was never something which moved smoothly heavenward in an easily graphable path. There were always other factors at play. There were a series of global catastrophes which mixed things up. You should also be aware that there is another, entirely alien form of eye which was another environmental option. That would be the insect eye. I take the opposite view from you. I believe that Darwin would be enthralled by the results of the research into DNA. He would find the fact that so much of this genetic material is shared by just about all living forms to be a further argument in favour of his theory. He would consider that it is the fact that it is only those miniscule differences in our genetic script which control our destinies - that we live out our lives as humans, not as monkeys, nor mice, nor pigs, nor, for that matter, as genetically handicapped men or women - to be a sign that we have indeed developed through an evolutionary process. I believe that even creationists will acknowledge that there are certain tragic diseases which are the result of a genetic misfiring. If these tragedies could be argued to be a manifestation of a kind of devolution then certainly the opposite also happens. Evolution is only best in show as it continues over billions of years.