Lucky

Ditto!

Well, call me shocked. SPOILER ALERT FOR WEST COAST!!! DON'T READ PAST HERE: Only one man standing, and it's not mine!

This NY Times article points out how hard it is to have a cheap weekend in Rio- unless you just want to hit the beach! $100 Rio

After meeting Lady GaGa last night, Idol contestant Scottie McGreery felt the need to kiss his crucifix, apparently to ask god for forgiveness for having met with the sinner. The right wing Christian vote, as well as the redneck vote, is his. The question becomes whether the fans of real music will actually vote for the proper winner, James Durbin, whose voice can easily contest with Adam Lambert's. The voting is closed, and the result will be known tonight. My thinking is that the younger girl will be sent home tonight, then Scottie next week, leaving a finale of Haley Rineheart and James Durbin, which Durbin, of course, will win. (Don't blame me if I screwed up a name...I did it from memory at 730 in the morning!)

He left an indelible mark on my face:

Hold on, guys. Minutes from now he is turning his back to me, and sitting down!

Congressman John Boehner, Speaker of the House of Representatives, is known to have been raised as a devout Catholic. But now, Catholic professors have united to inform him that his policies violate basic teachings of the Catholic Church. Boehner is to give the commencement address at Catholic University of America, but the professors there are the ones who lead the letter-writing effort. Attendees at the event hope that they will see the famous Boehner tears as the Congressman, notorious for crying in public, will feel shamed by his own church.

I sure like the thread title.

Feeling guilty, are you? Trying to deflect the blame to BN. For shame!

Mystery deaths plague Thai hotel Did a three-star Thai hotel inadvertently kill six of its guests while trying to poison bed bugs? Between January and March, six people suffering from virtually the same medical symptoms died after staying at the Downtown Inn in Chiang Mai or using its facilities. Authorities maintain the deaths are just a coincidence. But an investigation by New Zealand's "60 Minutes" news program discovered high levels of the pesticide chlorpyrifos, a chemical used to kill bed bugs, in the hotel room where New Zealand backpacker Sarah Carter, 23, died in February. Reporters pretending to be guests took samples from the room. The UK Daily Mail reported that Thai police recently raided the company in charge of eradicating insects at the hotel. "I think (Carter) has been killed by an overzealous sprayer who has been acting on the instructions of the hotel owner to deal with the bed bugs," United Nations chemical expert Dr. Ron McDowall told the Daily Mail. McDowall said the symptoms experienced by Carter were consistent with chlorpyrifos poisoning, which causes headache, nausea, dizziness, muscle twitching, weakness, increased sweating and salivation, unconsciousness and convulsions. He explained that it's difficult to confirm poisoning from blood samples because chlorpyrifos is quickly absorbed by the body - "it only has a half-life of a day or so." The symptoms shown by all six victims - severe chest pain, vomiting and fainting - are often associated with food or water poisoning. Indeed, police initially dismissed the deaths as food poisoning from eating toxic seaweed. Shortly after Carter's death, a retired British couple, George Everitt, 78, and his wife, Eileen, 73, were found dead in their room. They had eaten seaweed at a street food booth, but another guest had a different meal there and also got sick. She recovered. The death of Bill Mah of Edmonton - found in his hotel room in January - was attributed to "suspected natural causes." A young Frenchwoman and a Thai visitor also died at the hotel between January and March. A report that a Berkeley woman died after staying at the hotel was incorrect. Mariam Soraya Vorster, 33, did suffer the same symptoms before she died while visiting Chiang Mai in January, but she was staying at a guesthouse in the city. Her husband blames the food she ate - sushi and seaweed. The Downtown Inn remains open, with rooms starting at $41 a night. 'Bed bug pesticide poisoning' killed Californian woman and six other tourists in Thailand (UK Daily Mail) Read more: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/blogs/hottopics/detail?entry_id=88696#ixzz1LzfecEwD

So I went to gaythailand.com and saw that someone else had used your same exact post! You must have a doppleganger!

He probably thought at first that it was an April Fool's joke, but poster Four Aces must have won bigtime since he has not been posting here since April 2d. I know he didn't share any of it with me.

JKane, thanks for the link. RonP608, welcome to the boards!

Now I have firefox 4, even though only 2 days ago I was upgraded to a newer 3. something. I have lost control of my computer as the firefox page won't do anything I want. The address bar is hidden, I added the Google toolbar but Firefox refused it. Why? The OP was correct, Firefox 4 is a piece of shit.

At least now we can quit pretending to be a friend of Pakistan and let India have a go signal to nuke the country. We can do that, can't we?

Thanks. Things got worse as apparently I now have Firefox 4 which I hate and have switched over to Chrome. Firefox would not even let me install the Google toolbar, and somehow my address bar got lost and I just gave up. So far Chrome has not added the AVG toolbar.

Many times when a program updates, they sneak in a toolbar, such as yahoo. You have to uncheck the box to keep the toolbar from installing along with the update. Recently my free AVG antivirus started updating and I unclicked the box to add the AVG toolbar. I like the one I have. Well, they ignored my request and installed it anyway. So I went to toolbars and clicked restore default settings. That got rid of the AVG toolbar...until the next update, when it reappeared without notice to me. I prefer Google search, but they put their own search box more prominently. So, I completely uninstalled AVG, but the toolbar remains, even when I click restore default settings. What now?

A headline in today's New York Times: Justice Dept. to Continue Policy Against Same-Sex Marriage

I debated adding that little qualifier- war, that is- and in retrospect would probably have received more than the ten views I got if I did. It does seem clear that Politics is not the reason most visit this site!

Every single person I know who has been to Costa Rica raves about it.

I'd like to be back. Thailand makes one forget all about the heat. It's just the humidity you can't ignore!

Last year was the first year that we did not escape the desert heat for a couple of weeks. We suffered it out, staying inside during the worst of the day. At the end of the summer, we thought "that wasn't so bad." This after 4 years of escaping to Rio for a couple of weeks. But now, with summer upon us again, I don't look forward to the heat. No doubt several trips to San Diego will be in order for relief. But, if Oz can't afford to go to Brazil, do you think I can? Maybe we should set up a Palm Springs Weekend in August. Hotels will be cheap!

From yesterday's LA Times, that's where! Of course there is no smoking gun, but that's why I summarized it as I did. She writes one book in her lifetime, then refuses to talk about it? "There is also material involving Lee's friend Truman Capote — who, jealous of her Pulitzer Prize, claimed he had helped write the book — and speculation as to why Lee never wrote another novel (fear of failure after a monster debut is one possibility)." And, of course, the second possibility? Can you imagine Capote NOT being pissed that she got a Pulitzer for his book?

The LA Times is one of the few major newspapers that give big play to soldiers killed in action in one of the many wars this country wages. We know that it's a mix of people who serve, of all races, men and women, fat people, ugly people, cute people, tall, short, thin... ...and very cute. Why is it that the obituary with the picture of the cute guy is the one I notice? Today they wrote of a 19 year old Asian Marine, cute as a button, killed after only 2 months in Afghanistan. And for why? Why do we hurl so many of our young into the face of death, give them post traumatic stress if we allow them to live, and fail to provide them with the best equipment and medical care? Why do we send them at all? So jerks like Karzai and his family can get richer? end rant

Lots of hullabaloo lately about the novel, To Kill A Mockingbird, written by Truman Capote some 50 years ago as a present for his friend, Harper Lee, who never seemed to be able to put a novel together herself. But even without Capote's name on the title, the book went on to sell some 30 million copies, and now the jubilee year is coming up. Harper Lee, however, could not care less. "After all," she said, "everyone knows that Truman really wrote the novel. I've been trying for the 50 years since and haven't even got two pages out!" Truman did, in fact, once claim that he "helped" write the book. Since Lee won't talk, even after 50 years, we seem left, along with that statement, with the simple logic that Truman Capote could write. His friend Harper, apparently could not. After all, where's the sequel in these 50 years since? "To Kill A Poster?"