HAPPY HALLOWEEN

http://www.funnybunch.com/hal/starrynight.swf

BILLS WORDS, NOT MINE

Well to say the least, I found him interesting and he certainly doesn't mince words does he. Have a look.

Bill Maher's New Rules:

New Rule: The world has to wake up and do something about Darfur.

New Rule: Men don't care how expensive your bra is. They just need to know if it unfastens in the front or the back. The Victoria's Secret Christmas catalogue features a $6.5 million diamond-studded bra. And, guys, it's the perfect bra for mistresses because she's almost guaranteed not to leave it in your truck.

New Rule: Restaurants can't make you wait until the rest of your party has arrived. Any restaurant that makes you wait is calling you a liar. They're saying, "You have five friends?" "Yeah, we'll see." Listen up, Miss Drunk-with-power-restaurant-hostess, when I say my friends are on the way, they're on the way. So either show me to a table, or this is the last time I celebrate my birthday at Chuck E. Cheese.

New Rule: If you think the worst thing Congress doesn't protect young people from is Mark Foley, then wake up and smell the burning planet. The - the ice caps are cracking, the coral reefs are bleaching, and our poisoned groundwater has turned spinach into a "side dish of mass destruction." Read the labels on your food. It turns out the healthiest thing you can put in your body is Mark Foley's penis.

But that's America for you: a red herring culture, always scared by the wrong things. The fact is, there are a lot of creepy, middle-aged men out there lusting for your kids. They work for MTV, the pharmaceutical industry, McDonald's, Marlboro, and K Street.

And recently, there's been a rash of strangers making their way onto school campuses and targeting your children for death. They're called military recruiters. More young Americans were crippled in Iraq last month than any month in the last two years. And the scandal is that Mark Foley wants to show them a good time before they go?

When will our closeted gay congressmen learn, our boys aren't for pleasure, they're for cannon fodder? Why aren't Democrats and the media hammering away every day about who we're supposed to be fighting for over there, and what the plan is? Yes, Mark Foley was wrong to ask teenagers how long their penis was. But at least someone on Capitol Hill was asking questions.

You know who else is grabbing your kids at too young an age? Merck, Pfizer and GlaxoSmithKline. By convincing you that your kids are depressed, hyperactive or suffering from ADD. In the last decade, the number of children prescribed anti-psychotic drugs in America increased by over 400%. Which means either that our children are going insane-which we might look on as a problem-or more likely, we have, for profit, created a nation of little junkies.

So, stop with the righteous indignation about predators. This whole country is trying to get inside your kid's pants, because that's where he keeps his wallet.

I don't care - I don't care if Mark Foley had been asking boys to describe their penis because I have some sad news for you: your kid is so larded out on Cheetohs and YooHoo, he can't even see his penis. So many of our kids are fat drug addicts nowadays, it's almost as if Rush Limbaugh had puppies!

So we can pretend that the biggest threat to our children is some creep on the Internet, or we can admit it's us. Because when your son can't find France on a map, or touch his toes with his hands, or understand that the ads on TV are lying, including the one where the Marine turns into Lancelot-then the person f***ing him...is you.

Your can read more on Bill Maher at 'HBO: Real Time'.

THE TEST

True story, I was happy. My girlfriend and I had been dating for over a year, and so we decided to get married.
My parents helped us in every way, my friends encouraged me, and my girlfriend? She was a dream! There was only one thing bothering me, very much indeed, and that one thing was her younger sister.
My prospective sister-in-law was twenty years of age, wore tight mini skirts and low cut blouses. She would regularly bend down when near me and I got many a pleasant view of her underwear. It had to be deliberate. She never did it when she was near anyone else.

One day little sister called and asked me to come over to check the wedding invitations. She was alone when I arrived. She whispered to me that soon I was to be married, and she had feelings and desires for me that she couldn't overcome and didn't really want to overcome.
She told me that she wanted to make love to me just once before I got married and committed my life to her sister.

I was in total shock and couldn't say a word. She said, "I'm going upstairs to my bedroom, and if you want to go ahead with it just come up and get me." I was stunned.
I was frozen in shock as I watched her go up the stairs. When she reached the top she pulled down her panties and threw them down the stairs at me. I stood there for a moment, then turned and went straight to the front door. I opened the door and stepped out of the house. I walked straight towards my car.

My future father-in-law was standing outside. With tears in his eyes he hugged me and said, "We are very happy that you have passed our little test. We couldn't ask for a better man for our daughter. Welcome to the family.

"The moral of this story is:"

"Always keep your condoms in your car."

THE LETTERS

There are e-card, e-books and e-mails, and although they all have their place and their convenience, I feel they are all over used.

There is nothing nicer then owning a good book or getting a card from a friend or loved one, or a letter to read and tuck away just for the sake of having it, to be brought out later to take a walk down memory lane with.

I fear the day of the written letter seems to be almost over.

Unlike a picture being taken, to save for all times for future generations to find and no longer wonder what great, great grandfather looked like, one day there might not be a letter for future generations to find, to document that we were here.

No finding a letter of love hidden away by a great, great grandmother, or from someone writing home to say how much they miss being with the family.

For one looking through the past these little things are like a treasure.

To find an old picture of a relative that someone has told you stories of, is of course a wonderful find, but to find something hand written by them, years and years after the fact, is a great find.

Think of it. Something to go along with that picture, something to help you feel like you know them. Something to relate to. To give that picture a soul.

Whether it is a love letter, secretly hidden away or a letter to or from a dear friend of theirs, it gives you an insight into that person.
A persons writings can tell you so much about them. Their happiness, their sadness, their kindness, their life. It can give you an understanding of who they really were, what they were really like. It adds meaning to that picture.

I find it sad that one day they may all disappear. That one day a letter or a book may become something that is viewed only in a museum. Perhaps even paper as we know it, a thing of the past.

When I was very young my father had an uncle that used to come to visit us and my Aunt Mary. We lived in California.
He was very old, but every once in a while Uncle Louie would make the drive from Arizona to California to visit. I loved it when he came to visit. He would tell stories of his past and even of his present.
Outrageous stories about his adventures through life. He was a detective, so he said.
We often wondered which stories were real and which ones where fantasy's of his imagination.
I remember the first time he told me about his old dog that he claimed had an eye that would fall out and just hang there, I gasped in horror and he said it's o.k. when it happens I just put it back in and he's fine.

As far as I know Uncle Louie was never married and had no children.
Alas, one day he died by hiself, all alone.

To our surprise he had planned for this day and had left instructions as to who to notify in case of his death. It was to be my Aunt Mary and so she left to take care of things.

When she arrived she found his home to be nothing more then a modest little broken down shack in the middle of nowhere, but upon entering, she found it to be his kingdom of treasures.

Inside she found a large trunk and in the trunk she found out more about Uncle Louie then any of us ever imagined.
The trunk was full, of his life. Everything in it told a story. There was old bank notes and old bonds, commendations (for what I never found out) and credentials,(he had been a detective) and correspondence lots of it.
Letters, lots of letters, from important people and government officials and presidents long since gone.

I still think about this small built, grey haired little old man from time to time and how I missed the visits and the stories.

Oddly, the stories that he told were fun to hear but nothing of any great importance . He never bragged on the things that were found in the trunk.

We never would have known the truth if no one had ever found -- the letters.


Inspired by 'Shirazi' .

THE LAST WEEK IN SEPTEMBER

September 23-30, 2006, the 25th Anniversary of Banned Books Week. Celebrated every year since 1982 in the last week of September.

"Until I feared I would lose it, I never loved to read. One does not love breathing."—Harper Lee, "To Kill a Mockingbird"

The quote comes from a Pulitzer Prize-winning book that's been denounced for so-called racial slurs and profanity, and banished from school library shelves.

The American Library Association keeps an accounting of objectionable reads.

Can You believe this, here are just a few.

1."Harry Potter" (Series) (J.K. Rowling)
2."To Kill a Mockingbird" (Harper Lee)
3."The Color Purple" (Alice Walker)
4."The Outsiders" (S.E. Hinton)
5."Lord of the Flies" (William Golding)
6."Of Mice and Men" (John Steinbeck)
7."Goosebumps" (Series) (R.L. Stine)
8."How to Eat Fried Worms" (Thomas Rockwell)
9."The Catcher in the Rye" (J.D. Salinger)
10."The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn" (Mark Twain)
11."The Giver" (Lois Lowry)
12."Brave New World" (Aldous Huxley)
13."The Adventures of Tom Sawyer" (Mark Twain)
14."Captain Underpants" (Dav Pilkey)
15."The Anarchist Cookbook" (William Powell)
16."Carrie" (Stephen King)
17."Flowers for Algernon" (Daniel Keyes)
18."The Dead Zone" (Stephen King)
19."I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings" (Maya Angelou)
20."Go Ask Alice" (anonymous)
21."American Psycho" (Bret Easton Ellis)
22."The Chocolate War" (Robert Cormier)
23."James and the Giant Peach" (Roald Dahl)
24."The Pigman" (Paul Zindel)
25."A Wrinkle in Time" (Madeleine L'Engle)
Read the article here and some of the comments made 'A Long Shelf Life' .


Read more here:'100 Most Frequently Challenged Books'.

"Often challenges are motivated by a desire to protect children from “inappropriate” sexual content or “offensive” language. Although this is a commendable motivation, Free Access to Libraries for Minors, an interpretation of the Library Bill of Rights (ALA's basic policy concerning access to information) states that,
“Librarians and governing bodies should maintain that parents—and only parents—have the right and the responsibility to restrict the access of their children—and only their children—to library resources.” Censorship by librarians of constitutionally protected speech, whether for protection or for any other reason, violates the First Amendment. "
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Books are no longer called banned they are called challenged or objectionable. hmmm
Shouldn't the parent be the one to decide what their child /teen, is mature enough to read.

I am so grateful for all of the librarians who fought to keep certain books on their bookshelves and these other great people of wisdom.
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As Supreme Court Justice William J. Brennan, Jr., in Texas v. Johnson, said most eloquently:

“If there is a bedrock principle underlying the First Amendment, it is that the government may not prohibit the expression of an idea simply because society finds the idea itself offensive or disagreeable.”
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If we are to continue to protect our First Amendment, we would do well to keep in mind these words of Noam Chomsky:

“If we don't believe in freedom of expression for people we despise, we don't believe in it at all.”
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Or these words of "Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas (The One Un-American Act." Nieman Reports, vol. 7, no. 1, Jan. 1953, p. 20):

“Restriction of free thought and free speech is the most dangerous of all subversions. It is the one un-American act that could most easily defeat us.”
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My Thanks, to every author who's books have taken me to places, I have never been before.