There are a number of people both in my family and not who wonder why I live in Maine. Coming from the Pittsburgh area is a long, long way from Maine not just in distance but in the style of life. Pittsburgh was and remains a sort of blue collar community proud of it’s roots in the mines and mills that surrounded and supported the area. Second and third generations continue to be those hardworking, nose-to-the-grindstone individuals who made the area what it is. They play hard as well and raise their families with their good solid family values. It sounds great so why leave?
Even as a child I was drawn to places near water. I spent a lot of my childhood with friends hanging around the Allegheny River. We swam in it, we rode on things that floated on it, we jumped from bridges that crossed over it and it was all good. I just loved the three rivers but felt drawn to the ocean for some unknown reason.
Over the years we made quite a few family trips to Erie, Pennsylvania. I was fascinated by Lake Erie. It looked like an ocean to me but later after checking a world map I discovered it was only a mud puddle compared to the oceans. I attended college very near to Lake Erie and made dozens of trips to the lake to party and relax. It was about then I decided that being landlocked in Pittsburgh held no future for me.
Jump ahead six years and I’m still working in Pittsburgh at a job with a national company. I was offered a promotion which required a move to Boston and I jumped at it. The mere thought of living in Massachusetts and being near Cape Cod and the ocean made the decision for me.
Jump ahead ten more years and I found myself newly divorced and looking for a new place to live. I purchased a small cottage no more than fifty yards from the ocean in Kingston, Massachusetts and I was in heaven. For three years I was in the water every day except for winter of course and life was good. I’d swim far out into the ocean at night, float on my back for an hour, staring up at the stars. It was unbelievable.
Jump ahead three more years, my company declares bankruptcy and I’m again forced to move to find work. Looking at my choices Maine was my only answer. I loved the style of life there, the lower population, and the anticipation of no traffic jams. I also would be within minutes of the ocean. I made the move, bought a new home and settled in. I was twenty minutes from the ocean but still was able to go there as often as I needed. Standing on the shore, listening to the water, had a calming effect on me like nothing else.
Jump ahead nine more years, I’ve met the love of my life, I sold my house, and we settled in to make a life together. Also, we now lived directly adjacent to the Nonesuch River, ten minutes from the Atlantic Ocean, and fifteen minutes from Sebago Lake and a number of local beaches. These days I’m able to walk the beach in the summer and winter to relax and take photographs. I can visit a nearby cove and watch the lobsterman loading up and going to work. I can then return later to watch them bringing in their catch and mooring their boats.
I think I was meant to be here. Many years ago my late grandmother suffering from dementia sent me many letters when I lived in Massachusetts that were always addressed to ME instead of MA. I kept telling her I lived in Massachusetts but she continued to send me letters until she passed away addressed to Maine with a Massachusetts Zip code. Maybe she knew something I didn’t.
You hear the term used here often and it still remains true. Maine is "the way life ought to be."
What better way to start my day. I’ve been awake for no more than ten minutes just lying here trying to motivate myself into facing the day. Since my better-half has two days off we decided to sleep in an extra few minutes and relax a little, or at least I did. What’s the first thing I hear? Is it "Good morning honey" or "Wake up sunshine", of course not. She calmly rolls over, looks me square in the eye and says "I think I’ll help you with the compost pile tomorrow." I’m lying in bed looking out the window at the sunshine and thinking about how I’ll miss the warm weather and she’s thinking of a huge pile of compost. There has to be some sort of message there but I haven’t a clue as to what it might be.
Days off. When I was one of the working drones eking out a living I relished my days off. I waited patiently for them to arrive so I could just kick back and enjoy myself. They were crucial to my mental health and well being and I honestly forced myself not to think about work and the stresses involved there.
My better-half has yet to figure out how to enjoy a day or two without stress. She just can’t seem to grasp the concept of relaxation. Even on her days off she’s driven by her list of things to do. She spends all day accomplishing tasks and if at the end of the day they all haven’t been accomplished, she’s disappointed and upset. She has a work, work, work attitude and I’ve been trying to convince her to develop the ability to turn off the work mindset as soon as she arrives home. She’s improved a great deal over the last few years but there’s still a lot room for improvement.
I normally set aside about twenty minutes after she arrives from work for her to vent her frustrations, have a beer, and talk it out. Once that’s been taken care of she can then move on to her real life and possibly enjoy herself. I guess I was lucky. I was always able to turn off the work as soon as I entered my car to go home each night. I gave almost no thought to it until the next morning when I had no choice but to deal with it again. My jobs were always stressful and if I took all of that baggage home with me every night I would have lost my mind.
Well, she’s wandered off to get us some coffee but I refuse to leave the bed just yet. She’s already scurrying around the house to begin her To Do list for the day. I’ll try to coerce her into coming back to bed with my magnetic personality and huge amounts of sex appeal and charm. Don’t you dare grin or laugh, it’s all true. I hear the washing machine being turned on so maybe I’ve already waited too long to make my move. I guess that’s the real story of my life.
Oh no, here she comes now, my own little energize bunny sweeping through the bedroom, dumping out the hamper, and then gone in a swirl of dirty clothes and the smell of laundry detergent. Too late again. I’ll try one more time to slow her down but it could get ugly. I can see an extended middle finger in my future.
Here’s a little heads up for all of you. I just checked the national observances for September and was somewhat disappointed. I guess it’s official, September has nothing to offer, it just sucks. Contact your local politicians, write letters to Obama, alert the effing media because September needs an official designation besides being "Suck Month".
I guess I sound a little cranky today because I am. I’m in my seventh week of my new exercise and diet program and I’m hungry enough to eat the southbound end of a northbound mule. I’ve come to realize in the last seven weeks that an addiction to sugar is even worse than my former addiction to cigarettes.
I wasn’t a believer until I began this program which requires me to eat as little sugar as possible. I’ve always been a choc-o-holic with a sweet tooth that kept me eating huge amounts of sugar as often as possible. Life was good as long as I got my daily dose of chocolate, candy, or pastries.
After being advised by my doctor to eliminate sugar from my diet completely I never expected it to be so difficult. He directed me to start reading the labels of the things I’d been eating as well as the things I planned to eat. Ignorance was bliss to be sure. Every damn thing has some kind of sugar in it and it’s almost impossible to eat something healthy and actually sugar free. The cravings started almost immediately and increased with each passing day. It was making me a little crazy and I turned into a cranky and mean SOB that my better-half was ready to kill. I was forced to withdraw a little from her because I was on edge and picking fights with her about really stupid stuff. I knew it was happening but couldn’t really control it very well. It took almost five weeks before I physically began to feel a little better.
When I quit smoking in 1985, I did it "cold turkey" after being motivated by a panic attack I thought was a heart attack. Even then the worst of the physical cravings for nicotine passed within two or three weeks. I guess the solution to my problems is to take up smoking candy cigarettes.
I’m doing well now and have learned to almost not hate my treadmill. I’ve walked at a good pace for more than thirty-five miles and am starting to feel physically better. I’ve lost almost seventeen pounds so far but still have a ways to go before I’ll be satisfied.
It’s going to be a long winter but at the end of it I will be thinner, trimmer, and healthier. In my opinion that’s a pretty good trifecta.
Our best friend has finally arrived to spend the winter with us. It’s about this time every year that this friend arrives and is welcomed with open arms by us both. This friend is warm and loving like no one else and my better-half and I are looking forward to sharing our bed for the next few months with this visiting friend.
Now that you’ve all read that last paragraph and had a few of those off-color thoughts I know you were having let me explain further. Our best friend is a soft, fuzzy, green, and electrified blanket. With Fall in the air and Winter on the way this friend makes living bearable while the seasons change. To keep our house heated is the biggest expense of the year other than the mortgage. Every degree we can lower the level of heat in the house is money in our pocket. We haven’t even turned on the heat yet and I suspect we won’t until sometime in mid October. By delaying that long we’ll save approximately $350.00. We’re willing to wear more clothing for a few weeks during the day and to turn up the electric blanket a bit at night each night to accomplish that.
I’ve never had the luxury of living in an area of the country that has mild temperatures for most of the year. While I really love the season change and the cold and snow I occasionally envy people living in those areas. Living here is like having to lead two lives. Hot weather, time on the beach, and tourists over running the area. Shorts, T-shirts, flip flops, and sun tan and sun burn. Within a few weeks that all disappears and out come the parka’s, gloves, wool socks, and skyrocketing heating costs. We’re used to it but I feel bad for any of those southerners who may relocate here. It would be a huge shock to their systems and their wallets.
We can hope for a few more weeks of Indian Summer but that doesn’t always occur as planned. By this time next month all of us Mainer’s will have made the mental transition from Summer to Winter and will be prepared to move on down the road as usual. The next six months will be all about, snow, sleet, wind, crushed mail boxes, car accidents, and a general malaise caused by being house bound. For some of the more hardy folks it will be all about plowing snow, ice fishing, hunting, and snowmobiling. The kids as always will be throwing snowballs, building forts, snowmen, and praying for a heavy snow fall that will cancel school. Some things just never change.
After six months of Winter we’ll make the transition back to Spring and Summer with a real appreciation that most southern folks don’t have. The memory of every minute that I spend sitting in the sun on my deck and every time I walked the beach in my swim suit this summer will carry me through the winter. It’s all a big mind game that I play with myself. When I’m out in the driveway using the snow blower and dressed liked a freaking Eskimo I’m actually thinking about that warm beach and those pretty young things in their skimpy bikinis.
Don’t tell my better-half my little secret or there’ll be hell to pay for sure.
For two years I spent a great deal of time learning the do’s and don’t’s of blogging on my Anti-Stupidity Blog. I was on a continuing rant against stupidity in all of it’s forms. It made some people laugh and others scream at me in not a very nice way. Although I retired that blog in favor of this one, the continuing growth of stupidity still bugs me. There’s just so much of it to identify and talk about, it’s maddening.
Apparently it’s been the subject of discussion by thousands of philosophers, politicians, and so-called intellectuals for hundreds of years. I guess I shouldn’t let my frustrations about it get the best of me but unfortunately they do at times. Let’s let a few of those experts spit out some of their own truths about stupidity.
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"Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity."
-Anonymous
"Unless one pretends to be stupid and deaf, it is difficult to be a mother-in-law or father-in-law."
-Chinese proverb
"Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I’m not sure about the former."
-Albert Einstein
"Nothing in the world is more dangerous than sincere ignorance and conscientious stupidity."
-Martin Luther King, Jr.
"Men are born ignorant, not stupid. They are made stupid by education."
-Bertrand Russell
"Only the wisest and stupidest of men never change."
-Confucius
"A stupid child is ruin to a father, and a wife’s quarreling is a continual dripping of rain."
-The Bible: Hebrew, Proverbs 19:13
"Stupid is as stupid does."
-Forrest Gump
"The stupid neither forgive nor forget; the naïve forgive and forget; the wise forgive but do not forget."
-Thomas Szasz
"There is no cure for stupid wives and willful children."
-Chinese proverb
"The only thing that ever consoles man for the stupid things he does is the praise he always gives himself for doing them."
-Oscar Wilde
"It is dangerous to be sincere unless you are also stupid."
-George Bernard Shaw
"Between a fellow who is stupid and honest and one who is smart and crooked, I will take the first. I won’t get much out of him, but with that other guy I can’t keep what I’ve got."
-Gen Lewis B Hershey, Director, Selective Service System
"I like to think of my behavior in the sixties as a ‘learning experience.’ Then again, I like to think of anything stupid I’ve done as a ‘learning experience.’ It makes me feel less stupid."
-P.J. O’Rourke
"A clever wife often sleeps with a stupid husband."
-Chinese proverb
"Only in Britain could it be thought a defect to be ‘too clever by half.’ The probability is that too many people are too stupid by three-quarters."
-John Major
* * *
Some of these quotes are priceless, some are humorous, but all seem true to me. I also find it amazing just how on target so many of the ancient Chinese proverbs seem to be. I guess they’ve had many more years to suffer from and define the hundreds of stupid idiosyncrasies of the human race. Sometimes that’s not such a good thing.
I found this article a few days ago filled with suggestions and recommendations for women on how to please their man. Of course this was published in a 1955 issue of Housekeeping Monthly and the term "You’ve come a long way baby!" wasn’t yet in everyday use as you can plainly see. Read on ladies so you can see what you’ve been missing. I hope my occasional comments don’t bother you too much. I just could stop myself.
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Have dinner ready. Plan ahead, even the night before, to have a delicious meal ready, on time for his return. This is a way of letting him know that you have been thinking about him and are concerned about his needs. Most men are hungry when they come home and the prospect of a good meal (especially his favorite dish) is part of the warm welcome needed. (I can’t read this without laughing my ass off).
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Prepare yourself. Take 15 minutes to rest so you’ll be refreshed when he arrives. Touch up your make-up, put a ribbon in your hair and be fresh looking. He has just been with a lot of work-weary people (Just answer the door naked, same thing).
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Be a little gay (not today’s gay) and a little more interesting for him. His boring day may need a lift and one of your duties (this is now considered a bad word) is to provide it.
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Clear away the clutter. Make one last trip through the main part of the house just before your husband arrives (They’re joking, right?).
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Gather up schoolbooks, toys, paper, etc. and then run a dust cloth over the tables (Don’t hold your breath guys).
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Over the cooler months of the year you should prepare and light a fire for him to unwind by. Your husband will feel he has reached a haven of rest and order, and it will give you a lift too (If she believed this she’s crazy). After all, catering for his comfort will provide you with immense personal satisfaction (Not lately).
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Prepare the children. Take a few minutes to wash the children’s hands and faces (if they are small), comb their hair and, if necessary, change their clothes. They are little treasures (OMG) and he would like to see them playing the part. Minimize all the noise (No way). At the time of his arrival, eliminate all noise of the washer, dryer or vacuum. Try to encourage the children to be quiet (Utter BS).
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Be happy to see him (50% of the time if he’s lucky).
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Listen to him (Not going to happen). You may have a dozen important things to tell him, but the moment of his arrival is not the time. Let him talk first – remember, his topics of conversation are more important than yours (Not for decades).
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Make the evening his. Never complain if he comes home late (Mistress) or goes out to dinner, or other places of entertainment (Strip Clubs) without you. Instead, try to understand his world of strain and pressure and his very real need to be at home and relax.
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Your goal: Try to make sure your home is a place of peace, order and tranquility where your husband can renew himself in body and spirit (Ha Ha).
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Don’t greet him with complaints and problems (I’m sure this will happen).
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Don’t complain if he’s late home for dinner (Strip Club again) or even if he stays out all night (Mistress again). Count this as minor compared to what he might have gone through that day.
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Make him comfortable. Have him lean back in a comfortable chair or have him lie down in the bedroom (Old wives tale). Have a cool or warm drink ready for him.
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Arrange his pillow and offer to take off his shoes (OMFG). Speak in a low, soothing and pleasant voice (No effing way).
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Don’t ask him questions about his actions or question his judgment or integrity. Remember, he is the master of the house (In his dreams) and as such will always exercise his will with fairness and truthfulness. You have no right to question him (Wanna bet?).
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A good wife always knows her place (Not these days).
Now you guys know why they were called the good old days. But just a reminder, those effing days are gone forever.
I spend a lot of time on the Net these days and have done so for many years. It’s become an integral part of my life and indispensible in a number of other ways. It’s hard to believe than just over thirty years ago I was a subscriber to the Genie Electric Network and received text-only Internet on a 300 baud modem. The changes have been huge and relatively fast and I’m glad to have experienced the Net in all of it’s changing incarnations.
I decided to do a little surfing today and to collect a few facts about the all-seeing Internet in it’s current form. I was more than a little shocked at what I found because some of the numbers were almost impossible to wrap my head around. Here is a short list of some amazing stats. Unbelievable is probably more accurate.
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Google estimates the Internet at about 5 million terabytes of data, or 5 trillion megabytes.
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The human brain can hold between 1 and 10 terabytes.
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Using an average of 5 terabytes per human brain, it would take a million human brains to hold the entire Internet.
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212 DVD’s will hold one terabyte or 1,000,000,000 to hold the Internet.
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40 Blue-ray discs will hold a terabyte and it would take 200,000,000 to store the Internet.
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American makes up 76.2% of the Internet population but only 5% of the worlds population.
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There are 247 billion emails sent every day and 81% (200,000,000) are spam.
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There are 90 trillion emails sent each year.
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Teenagers spend an average of 31 hours per week on the Internet and only four hours doing homework.
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There are 234,000,000 web sites and 126,000,000 blogs.
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Every second 28,258 Internet users are watching pornography.
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There are 600 tweets a second.
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924 videos are watched on Hulu each month in the US.
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Twenty hours of videos are loaded onto YouTube every minute.
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Facebook has 6,000,000 page viewers a minute.
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2,500,000 images are loaded onto Facebook each month.
Some of these facts are mind-blowing but a number of others are more than a little scary. I’m not sure I could survive my raging paranoia if I had teenage children to raise now. I can’t imagine the difficulties there must be when in most cases the kids are more knowledgeable about the Net than most of their parents. What will this all become in another thirty years?
I’ve just about made myself cross-eyed today. I’ve been putting off for months what I’m in the middle of doing. I decided that I’ve procrastinated long enough and the review of almost fifteen thousand photographs has begun. Once all of them has been reviewed and the duplicates eliminated I can then do a complete backup which will go into safe storage at another location. It took me almost ten years of hard work to take these photos and I’m finding it difficult to discard any of them. It’s the perfect Fall season job where I can sit back, relax and do things properly.
I take everything in high resolution mode and as you know that requires a great deal of memory for storage. I thought three years ago that having a terabyte of hard drive memory would last me for many years. I underestimated a little and now find my drive almost fifty percent full. I may be forced into buying a large removable hard drive or signing up for one of those off-site backup systems through one of the those companies offering that service.
Winter is always the perfect time for such projects. A few years ago I spent a great deal of my winter converting my extensive music CD collection to MP3’s. It took a long time but was well worth the effort. I find doing time consuming projects very relaxing and the more difficult the better. I know it sounds stupid but it’s true none the less.
I’ve also decided that reindexing all of the photos is necessary because during my first years using an DSLR I was a newbie to digital photography and did what I consider to be a haphazard job. I’ll now spend a good portion of this Winter going back and redoing each and every one. If my estimate is correct it should take me well into January to get it done right once and for all.
It should go a long way to help me in the creation of a number of photo books I’ve been considering. I discovered that without a thorough indexing job it’s possible for me to lose photo’s I remember taking. It can frustrate the hell out of a person when your forced to manually search through thousands of pictures because you indexed one photo improperly.
Well, I have a lot to do over the next five months and I should get started. No idle hands for me this Winter.
Fall has officially arrived here in Maine and I can tell because it’s six in the morning, I’m sitting in the living room and I can see my breath. We normally wait until October to turn on the heat and this year will be no different. With the cost of heating oil being what it is we’re forced to suffer with some cold temperatures for a few more weeks. We actually covered what was left of our garden last night due to the anticipated frost that our expert weather people are calling for. For a change they were spot on.
I’ve always been adamant about not liking hot weather and that hasn’t changed much over the years. The worst part for me is the short periods of time between the seasons where I’m forced to adjust to the change. I’m sitting here this morning fresh from my bed where my ever so popular electric blanket continues to keep my better-half warm and toasty. I was finally forced to get it out one morning last week when I woke up at three AM with with my feet freezing and my teeth chattering. Transitions can be a large pain in the backside but what can you do?
In another week the garden will be finished and I’ll begin storing things away to prepare for the first snowfall. I’m looking forward to that as I usually do because believe it or not I enjoy the coziness of winter. It’s a quieter time that allows us to snuggle in and to enjoy each other’s company. It’s a time to take care of long delayed projects and for reflection on the past year and the beginning of expectations for the next.
With the tourists out of the picture we can start visiting many of our favorite places that we’ve avoided for the last few months. No more ridiculous parking fees and never ending beach traffic. We can now bundle up and return to walking the beach to enjoy Mother Nature without gangs of visitors clogging up the area.
Hopefully within the next hour or two the sun will come out and warm things up a little. We’re anticipating temperatures today nearing seventy which is nice but not long after sundown the temperature will drop suddenly into the high thirties and low forties. We’ll eventually make the adjustment and in no time be ready to sit back for a few months and enjoy the season.
I know it’s really Fall since my arm is stiff and sore from that damn flu shot I got yesterday. I guess I’m ready for just about anything. We’ll be taking lots of photographs in the coming month which is always enjoyable and the Fryeburg Fair is just weeks away. It will be the last big get together for the state of Maine this year and my better-half loves reconnecting with all those farm animals she hasn’t seen since last year. She’s what you might call a closet farmer with a passion for piggies and a secret wish that she’d been born a hundred years ago on a farm.
I’m almost completely awake now and after one more cup of hot coffee I’ll be ready to face the day.
I’ve always loved slamming celebrities and today will be no different. I do it fairly by just simply using their own words against them. Many of these so called celebrities insist on disturbing my calm by being in my face at every turn on both TV and radio. They’re determined to explain to me how much smarter they think they are about politics, the environment, and any other effing cause they are promoting. It became tiresome more years ago than I care to mention. Since I can’t tell them in person what I think about them without being accused of being a stalker or paparazzi, I’ll use this blog to at least vent enough to make me fell better.
You can take the Bill Maher’s and the Susan Sarandon’s of the world and all of their wack-job friends and ship them wherever you’d like. Just get them out of my face. Here are a few quotes that I’m sure these geniuses wished they’d never made. Here we go . . . .
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Question: If you could live forever, would you and why?
Answer: "I would not live forever, because we should not live forever, because if we were supposed to live forever, then we would live forever, but we cannot live forever, which is why I would not live forever."
– Miss Alabama, 1994 Miss USA Pageant
- "Researchers have discovered that chocolate produces some of the same reactions in the brain as marijuana. The researches also discovered other similarities between the two, but can’t remember what they are."
– Mat Lauer, Today Show, NBC
- "I haven’t committed a crime. What I did was fail to comply with the law."
– David Dinkins, New York City Mayor answering accusations that he failed to pay his taxes.
- "Smoking kills. If you’re killed, you’ve lost a very important part of your life."
– Brooke Shields
- "We’re going to turn this team around 360 degrees."
– Jason Kidd, Dallas Mavericks
- "I’m not going to have some reporters pawing through our papers. We are the president."
– Hillary Clinton
- "Outside of the killings, Washington has one of the lowest crime rates in the country."
– Marion Barry, Washing, D.C. Mayor
- "It isn’t pollution that’s harming the environment. It’s the impurities in our air and water that are doing it."
– Dan Quayle, U.S. Vice President
I will admit that celebrities make writing this blog easy at times. They are the proverbial “gifts that keep on giving” and I for one appreciate it.
And as a final thought, thanks to Fred Thompson and his celebrity buddies trying to convince all the seniors in this country that reverse mortgages are the best thing since sliced bread. What a giant load of crap.
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