Normally I link the new stories, but there are so many of them out there, just search on “Dubai Ports“. For those who don’t know the story, the English company that manages six of our biggest sea ports has been sold to a company from Dubai named Dubai Ports World. They will take over all the aspects of operating these major commerrace centers. Democrats and Republicans alike feel this is a dubious idea at best since two of the 9/11 hijackers came from the country of Dubai.
Ok, here’s my take…I could care less if the company was Canadian, no foriegn country or company should be running our ports. I was not aware a company form England was doing it before now, I’m not even in favor of that. This is not xenophobia speaking, this is the idea that the sea ports are an amazingly important aspect of our commerece and security, and it should not even be an American company running them, but the goverment itself. I am not one for huge goverment, but this is just one of those things that should be watched over very closely in my opinion.
While I know the goverment won’t be taking over, I think there have to be better alternatives.
What in the world is going on? Teacher after teacher after teacher is sleeping with their students, and the newest one is the worst yet. The boy is 11 years old.
Before I say anymore, let me state for the record that I have the utmost respect for teachers and I know that 99.99% of them are good people who are just as disgusted with this as I am.
If you are a teacher, and you think for even a milisecond that one of your students is sexually appealing to you, step back, take a deep breath and remind yourself who you are and that you are entrusted with these children.
If you are a teacher, and you think for even a milisecond that you should act upon these feelings for your student, seek therapy immediately.
You are violating one of the most sacred trusts there is, that of a teacher and student. Parents entrust you to educate their children, to make them better people and prepare them for the world. They do not expect you to mentally scar them for life. They do not expect you to abuse your position of power over them. They do not expect you to take advantage of them.
For the life of me I can figure out how anyone can look at a 15 year old boy, or in the 11 year old in the newest case, and think “Wow…I really want to sleep with him!” I’ve been a teenage boy! I know how disgusting we are! Our hygiene sucks! We’re gangly and awkward, and believe me, have no clue what is going on!
And what really surprises me is why we hear so many cases about female teachers doing this, are the men really that well behaved?
So come on folks, I know there are people out there reading this, what do you think. Why are there seemingly so many cases of this? Why does it seem to be so many women teachers? What is their possible logic behind it?
(Title of this post comes from “The Wall” by Pink Floyd)
I have come to the conclusion the first 5 – 6 weeks of any Surivior are wasted on me because Survivor Exile Island is only mildly interesting me for now. Oh well, on with the show.
After the Tribal Council outing of Misty, Sally comes back to camp feeling she is a marked woman. She vows to try to save herself, so the next morning she just sits around bemoaning her lot in the tribe. Meanwhile Ruth Marie is thrilled as she has been asked to the fifth in the alliance because Dan has sung her praises as someone he feels will be loyal, while he is sure Sally would turn on them after the merge.
Over at Casaya, Bruce, Shane and Aras spend the morning gathering snails for breakfast, only to come back to the camp to discover that the first has gone out and everyone is just laying around and doing nothing. Aras is fed up and decides to confront the tribe on their lazy attitude when it coems to the camp and the work that needs to be done. Courtney tries to defend herself, and admittadely she was working on the fire when they returned, but it should have never gone out in the first place. The only person happy about all this is Cirie, who knows she is still a marked woman.
The tribes gather for Reward Challange and Jeff Probst explains it all. Oh explain it to us all wise Jeff!
Each tribe gets six floating puzzle pieces. One tribe member at a time will swim out, dive down, unclip a puzzle piece, and bring it back to the puzzle frame. Once the piece is placed in the puzzle frame, the next person can go out. When all six of the puzzle pieces have been collected, the tribe may start assembling the puzzle by matching corresponding symbols on each side of every piece. First tribe to get it together correctly wins the Reward: Casa de Charmin: a full-service bathroom courtesy of Charmin.
Casaya wins and the only notable moments of the competition was how Sally outshined Ruth Marie for La Mina. What a shocker there. As the winners, Casaya got to choose who from La Mina would be going to Exile Island. As they felt Terry was the leader of that tribes alliance, it was best to send him.
Well…it seems they may have been so wise. Everyone will learn at some point that while there, Terry studied the four clues to the hidden immunity idol and found it. Yep, he has the powerful hidden immunity that can used up to, and including the final four. I had a feeling the first clue about “why” would give it away, and sure enough, it did. There was a tree shaped like the letter Y, and it was hidden under some rocks surrounding the tree. As far as we were shown, he did not tell anyone, which is probably wise.
Back at Casaya, the fire had yet again gone out. They decided to move the fire pit closer to the shelter in hopes it would help them keep it sustained. As Danielle just stood there watching the pit being dug, and offering no help, Shane exploded. I know…what a shocker. Again, this did not disappoint Cirie in the least as she saw more cracks forming in the allaince of four that had told her she would be the next to go. They also had a minor meltdown over the bathroom they won. Some of them wanted to use it to store firewood to keep it dry. Bobby wanted to use it right that very minute to go to the bathroom…and he did. You know, considering how much fire wood you could “store” in there…just use it you morons. Who enjoys leaning against a tree?
Things weren’t exactly cheerful over at La Mina as they had gone 11 days with almost no food. Sally worried the lack of nutrition would weaken the team for the coming Immunity Challange as it was her that would be going at the next Tribal Council.
As the teams arrived at the challange, Terry we reunited with his tribed, and Jeff explained the challange:
“…the Challenge will test the tribes’ balance, teamwork and patience. One person is seated in a chair attached to a pulley, while another person is situated directly above them in a crow’s nest, where an empty water drum hangs. The other four remaining tribe members are together in pairs, which will race across a balance beam carrying buckets. Once they reach the water, they must dip their bucket in, get water, race back and empty the water into a larger pail. The person in the crow’s nest will pull that pail up and empty the water into the drum. As the drum takes on water, it will lower, but the person in the chair will rise until they’re high enough to pull a pin releasing their tribe’s flag. First tribe to release their flag wins Immunity.”
Danielle took the seat for Casaya and Ruth Marie for La Mina. The teams remained neck-and-neck, and even finished virtually at the same time, but Austin decided to pour the last water for La Mina slowly so he wouldn’t spill any. His hesitation is what cost them the win, and once again sent them to Tribal Council.
Back at their camp, the politicing was in full swing, and with Dan’s word that she was in the alliance, Ruth Marie felt safe. The twist came from Austin feeling that Sally would do better in challanges and they were better off keeping her. Since everyone seems to listen to Terry, Austin talked to him and convinced him it was for the best. Dan was warned and told it would be fine if he voted for Sally since they didn’t want him to break his word. So, in a vote of 4 – 2, Ruth Marie was sent home.
The lesson here boys and girls, never think you are secure in this game….ever.
Celebrity deaths always seem to come in sets of three. Today we lost two greats in one cycle.
Don Knotts passed away last night at the age of 81. He passed away from pulmonary and respiratory complications at the University of California, Los Angeles Medical Center. Knotts was best known as Barney Fife on The Andy Griffith Show, a role he won 5 Emmy awards for. In 1979 he joined the cast of Three’s Company, bringing him even more recognition.
Where I always loved him was in his G Rated films such as The Apple Dumpling Gang and The Reluctant Astronaut were two of his best known, but my favorite was always The Incredible Mr. Limpet. He even worked up until very recently lending his voice to the character of “Turkey Lurkey” in Chicken Little and appearing in an episode of “That 70′s Show” as Fez and Jackie’s landlord.
The second passing was more sentimental to me…Darren McGavin. One of my earliest memories is watching his short-lived, but important in so many ways, series, Kolchak – The Night Stalker, but to most people he is known as “the old man” in A Christmas Story. He passed away of natural causes in a Los Angeles area hospital earlier today.
Darren had such a long career though, but never was a break-out success. He was a “character actor” who was brought in for lots of numerous parts, but those of us who loved him were loyal beyond description. It didn’t matter what he appeared in, if we knew he was in it, we watched it. My father’s love of him even extended to the books on tape he read.
What a contrast in their passings though. An actor everyone knew and adored, and one that most people said “Oh yeah, that guy.” Personally I loved them both, but Darren stings a bit more.
Well, the war of words between Martha Stewart and Donald Trump picked up more steam on Friday as Martha went on daughter Alexis, Sirius Satellite Radio Show.
Martha informed the listnerers that the Donald’s open letter had been sent to the press before it went to her. She is now referring to him as “juvenile, evil, unethical and immoral”. Tell us Martha…how do you REALLY feel?
My fave part of the article has to be the following:
When Alexis declared, “A normal businessman doesn’t really behave this way,” and described Trump as being “busy riding around town seeing if your name is polished properly on the front of all the buildings you don’t really own,” Stewart replied, “Donald is not a normal businessman. Remember Donald was born with a silver spoon in his mouth. He’s a spoiled brat.”
Alexis went on to attack Trump even further, expressing her sympathy for his daughter Ivanka, saying, “I feel sorry for her. She seems like a nice girl. It must be hard to have such a freak for a father,” and also suggesting he shove a silver spoon “up his a*s”.
In response, Trump says, “Nice. What a crude statement. But then Alexis is used to making crude statements.”
Ok, first off, Alexis is correct, Trump does NOT outright own all those buildings. It’s not even possible. He may own controlling shares, but he is not the sole-owner of that much Manhatten property. They are also correct in that he is nto a normal businessman. Everyone sooms to conveniately forget his various divisions have gone in-and-out of bankruptcy several times.
Trump just needs to get over this. Martha did not attack him at the Newsweek article, but in typical Trump fashion, he is blowing this up far bigger than it is. He is the mast of self-promotion, but this is just insane. And trust me, the fact The Apprentice 5 premiers on Monday is not lost on me. I am sure he isn’t use this to boost attention in the least. Mmhmm. No way.
According to this article, president Fred Gilbert of Lakehead University, in Thunder Bay, Ontario, has come to the conclusion that Wi-Fi is dangerous to your health.
Here is the important part of the article:
“The jury is still out on the impact that electromagnetic forces have on human physiology,” Gilbert told a university meeting last month, insisting that university policy would not change while he remained president.
“Some studies have indicated that there are links to carcinogenetic occurrences in animals, including humans, that are related to energy fields associated with wireless hotspots, whether those hotspots are transmissions lines, whether they’re outlets, plasma screens, or microwave ovens that leak.”
Ok, so…when are removing the outlets, plasma screens and microwave ovens? This really makes no sense to me folks. The article also says they are leaving Wi-Fi in the areas that don’t have fiber optic cables. Oh, well, alright then, we’ll leave SOME of the “cancer causing” items because we are too cheap to run the fiber optic lines there, but it will just be the rest of the campus that will be cancer free. Makes perfect sense to me.
But then get a load of this part:
But the president’s stance has prompted a backlash from students and from Canadian health authorities, who say his fears are overdone.
“If you look at the body of science, we’re confident that there is no demonstrable health effect or effects from wireless technology,” said Robert Bradley, director of consumer and clinical radiation protection at Canada’s federal health department.
He said there was no reason to believe that properly installed wireless networks pose a health hazard to computer users.
Oh ok, so president Gilbert knows better than the health department good to know. I mean, obviously he has figured this all out and he is the expert on Wi-Fi over anyone else. For some reason this smells to me more of a president that doesn’t want to pay to have the Wi-Fi put in, but that is purely my speculation.
According to this news story, it seems Donald Trump took exception with some things Martha Stewart said in a Newsweek interview this week. Martha said that she felt her version of The Apprentice failed because there were two versions on at the same time and that the original plan for her to fire Donald Trump had been changed. In her defense, I had heard of the plan to fire Trump, I also think two versions at once was not wise and they put her up against the monster known as Lost.
In normal Donald Trump fashion, he decided to make his reply to Martha in to a big production. First he sent her a nasty letter on Tuesday. The letter read:
Dear Martha:
It’s about time you started taking responsibility for your failed version of The Apprentice. Your performance was terrible in that the show lacked mood, temperament and just about everything else a show needs for success. I knew it would fail as soon as I first saw it — and your low ratings bore me out.
Between your daughter, with her one word statements, your letter writing and, most importantly, your totally unconvincing demeanor, it never had a chance — much as your daytime show is not exactly setting records.
Despite this, I did nothing but positively promote you. Your only response to your failed show was that, “I thought that I was supposed to fire Donald Trump!” You knew this was not true — NBC would never fire me when The Apprentice was, for a good period of time, the #1 show on television and my recent finale, where I hired Randal, was the #2 show for the week, easily beating the competing finale of Amazing Race and others. Even Mark Burnett said, “Thank God that didn’t happen,” when asked about firing Donald Trump.
Essentially, you made this firing up just as you made up your sell order of ImClone. The only difference is — that was more obvious. Putting your show on the air was a mistake for everybody — especially NBC.
In any event, my great loyalty to you has gone totally unappreciated.
Sincerely,
Donald J. Trump
P.S. Be careful or I will do a syndicated daytime show, perhaps called The Boardroom, and further destroy the meager ratings you already have!
Martha replied later Tuesday with:
The letter is so mean-spirited and reckless that I almost can’t believe my long-time friend Donald Trump wrote it. I am very proud of the work we did with Mark Burnett Productions and Mr. Trump, who was an executive producer, on The Apprentice: Martha Stewart. Many young entrepreneurs learned so much from the show and enjoyed it. Many families sat their children down weekly to watch it. We are even more pleased with our excellent daytime show Martha – syndicated by NBC Universal – which has just been nominated for six daytime Emmys (including best show and best host), was touted by The New York Times as one of the best shows on television, and has been embraced by our wonderful audience throughout the country.
All of this was followed on Wednesday by Trump doing multiple interviews about the new season of The Apprentice. He continued to attack her on Wednesday, and she made a statemant on her daytime show about how she is saddened by this turn of event.
So why do I bring all this up? Well, I have never been a huge fan of Martha Stewart, but my respect for her has grown. She was asked why she thought her show failed, she gave an answer that in no way insulted Donald Trump. For some reason he decided to turn his reply attacks personal. There was no reason to attack Martha, or her daughter, and to bring up her legal problems was just low.
If Trump was truly an Executive Producer in more than name, why didn’t he try to iron out these problems he saw with the show? Why does he insist on calling his show “The #1 show on television” when it’s not even close? Why does he insist on having no class what-so-ever?
I am sure we have not heard the end of this little war of words, but I am hopeful Martha will continue to be the classier one in the fight and let Trump show himself for the classless bag of wind he seems to be.
Well, I was enjoying the new ABC sitcom, Crumbs. The series, based on a true story, was starring Fred Savage and Jane Curtain, and now it is questionable if I will ever enjoy it again.
According to this article, a 2 week hiatus seems to now be a bit more final. My question is why? It is currently ABC’s highest rated sitcom, beating The George Lopez show by 3 million viewers. Some are theorizing it is because it is after Dancing With The Stars and is losing around half of it’s lead-in audience. Fine, move it elsewhere then!
I swear the networks don’t make sense to me half the time. Pulling shows after a few episodes, but keeping drek like Hope & Faith on for multiple seasons, oh yeah, that makes sense. (before anyone bites my head off, I actually like the actors in Hope & Faith, I just think the writing is an exercise in torture.)
I love it when you see stories like this. With my DirecTV, and where I live, I get both East and West coast channels, so sometimes I get to see news stories “travel” across the country. One coast will create a story and then you watch it creep it’s way across the country until it hits the other coast, and then it usually dies. Once in awhile though, one will get “legs” and just keep going even bouncing back again and up to national levels. This story has done the bounce and is now spreading like a virus.
MySpace.com has become an easy target for news stories about sexual predators because, well, it has happened and journalists are lazy. The story that is getting the reported the most is multiple girls in Middletown, CN have been molested. Don’t get me wrong, sexual molestation is never a good thing, and I am not defending the scum who do this, but for parents and journalists to blame the website is just silly, lazy and stupid.
No matter where a child goes, it is the parents responsability to know what is going on and educate them about how to avoid problems. The problem is you are having more and more parents getting lazy and not wanting to spend the time with their kids they should. It is far easier to yell and scream after the event then trying to prepare your kid for all the eventualities. And journalists are just feeding this “fad” by blaming MySpace for these child victims and not asking why didn’t the parents do a better job. And add in the fact there are now over 57 million registered users on MySpace, how can you condemn the entire site for the actions of a few? Do you blame an entire city when a child gets abducted from a mall? Do you condemn every citizen of that city as evil because of the actions of a few? Doubtful.
So this is a double condemnation. Parents need to pay more attention to what their children are doing and for journalists not to be so quick to fall for whining parents.
Survivor Exile Island episode 3 opened with Casaya reutrning from Tribal Council with Bruce, who replaced the now outsed Melinda. Bruce immediately set about trying to make himself useful when he discovered the tribe had no fire currently and also was in need of water to drink. My quick question, they had not been drinking water when they did have fire? Guess not. Bruce explained to them he had taught backpacking for 20 years and there is way to use three t-shirts to make a filtration system that will get rid of 90% of the impurities. Courtney, who has also done backpacking work was skeptical…so was I, and still am Coutrney. They are filtering bacteria filled water through dirty shirts…yum!
La Mina was using their fishing equipment they won, but they kept catching Puffer Fish, which are poisionus. Terry finally caught a tiny little fish they could eat. A few comments are mumbled about how much better they would be doing if they had their spear. Gee Sally, might want to watch your back.
The tribes head to Reward Challange where Jeff Probst, and the CBS website, explain the game.
Using a giant slingshot, three tribe members will be the launchers, while the other four will stand on a balance beam over the water. One tribe member will launch a ball to the other four, who must catch it before it hits the water. The first tribe to catch five balls wins the Reward.
They were playing for blankets, pillows, large water containers, ropes, a tarp and oil lamps. The score went back and forth with La Mina finally winning 5 – 4. Here was the twist though, for this weeks person to go to Exile Island would be chosen by the winning tribe. La Mina decided to send Bruce because Casaya had touted how much he had helped them since joining them. Here’s a good idea, never tell the other tribe your strong points. Poor Bruce had to go back to the little island again and suffer through a horrendous rain storm. He should really blame the rest of his loud-mouthed tribe for that little bit. Meanwhile, La Mina enjoyed putting a tarp on their shelter that kept them dry. Write those love letters Bruce! He also mentioned the rain rolled in so fast he had no time to search for the hidden Imunity Idol.
Back at the Casaya tribe, feeling the sting of the loss of the reward, and the fact Bruce had been taken from them, the morale was low and the in-fighting was high. Shane was exploding over people sitting on his “thinking stump”. Courtney and he argued ofer the best way to move a boiling pot of water. Aras was wondering what sort of alliance he had gotten himself in to.
Misty and Sally tried using their sexuality to win over Nick and Austin. They thought it would help them, but it was unclear if it was getting through to the guys.
As the teams headed to the Immunity Challange, Bruce returned in time to hear the rules:
Each team will compete in varying match-ups, racing head to head to five circles in the sand. Buried within each circle is a bag. The tribes must dig and find the bag, and then get back to the finish mat. To score, there must be at least one hand on the bag while any part of the body touches the finish mat. First tribe to score three wins Immunity.
As you can imagine, it turned violent fast. Most of the fights starting before the Survivors would even reach the rings. It was tied 2 – 2, and on the fifth, it looked like La Mina might win it. Ruth Marie had the bag and was running her little heart out, but at the last second, Bobby grabbed her by the back of her shirt and dragged her and the bag to his mat all at once. It was quite amusing. This caused the recently reorganized La Mina to go to their first Tribal Council.
At first it looked like Ruth Marie would go as Misty and Sally campaigned against her, but at the same time Terry was trying to convince everyone else Misty was a mental threat. At some point he got through to everyone and Misty was ousted in a vote of 5 – 2. Jeff did ask her if she had the hidden Immunity idol from Exile Island, and no she did not. We know Bruce didn’t have time to look, so it is still on the smaller island somewhere.
PCWord.com has published a great article on 10 reasons why you should upgarde to Windows Vista when it comes out later this year, as well as 5 reasons you shouldn’t. I’m not going to reprint the whole article, but I want to touch on some of the things itmentions Vista will do.
Security – They are saying this is the most secure version of Windows yet with bidriectional firewalls and the whole 9 yards. Here’s the problem though, the second you say something is “the most secure” ever, it makes the hackers sit up and say “Oh they think so huh?” Guess what, this is like throwing a bloody body into a pool of crocodiles, they will attack, and if hackers have proven anything over the years, were there’s a way. So yes, Vista will be safe for a few weeks and then all bet’s are off.
Internet Explorer 7 – Whopee. Basically it’s going to finally catch up with my much beloved Firefox. They will be adding tabbed browsing, and if running on Vista, you will have extra security, but IE7 will be avaiilable to Windows XP users also. Not worth the upgrade just for IE7, that’s for sure.
Eye Candy – The article actually things the fact Vista will be “prettier” is a selling point. Um…who really cares? I’m sorry, but if you are more concerned with how your system looks to how it runs, I really don’t care about your thoughts any way. And the article even says later to get all the pretty stuff requires high-end graphics cards and it’s a resource hog. Seriously folks, just run it in basic mode and save yourself the resources.
Desktop Search – What a concept, they are finally building in something like Google Desktop…gee…why not just use the free,and proven, Google Desktop instead? Anything will be better than the glacier like search Windows XP currently sports.
Faster Updating – Meaning faster addition of security holes!
More Media Friendly – A stramlined Windows Media player and more MP3 friendly. In other words “Please stop using Quicktime and Real Player to watch videos, and while you are at it, drop iTunes.”
Parental controls – If deployed correctly, great. I’m not holding my breath for it to work right though.
Backups – Again, if it works right, yay! The question is though, backup to where? With the ever increasing size of primary hard drives, are we all going to have second harddrives? The vast majority of people will never use this.
Peer-to-peer collaboration – The ability for people to work together one project, great. I reserve judgement on this until I see it work for myself. I want to know how far apart the people can be.
Quick setup – Not sure how I feel about this one. My thoughts on changing your Operating System on an existing PC is that you don’t do it. The analogy I always use is imagine you’ve set a table for dinner with a white tablecloth. At the last minute you decide you want a checkered tablecloth so you try changing the tablecloth without taking the plates off. Not going to work too well. That’s what it’s like changing your OS on a PC. All your programs are set to work with the current one, you will have some compatiability issues if you change. And note I am stressing this on PCs, Macs don’t have this problem.
My recommendation is wait on Vista until you get a new computer, but the changes aren’t enough to warrant pulling your hair out to do it on an existing system.
