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HelenaHandbasket

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Albany Devil

Albany Devil (3/11)

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  1. The "under God" part wasn't added until the Cold War as one of many inane things that were done to prove we were different from the godless Communists. I don't say it, I consider myself a traditionalist. Anyway, I don't see why people get so fussed over Chistmas. I think Christmas trees are pretty, and I like the music and the presents, but I haven't been to Mass in many, many years. On Christmas Day, I go to my relatives' house, where the Jews outnumber the lapsed Catholics, because otherwise I would never see them. The true meaning of Christmas is marketing and always has been. The early Christians saw an easy way to incorporate winter solstice celebrations and ease conversions. Faced with the same challenge today, they probably would have picked, like, Super Bowl Sunday. Jesus was almost certainly not born in December, but who cares? There are AWESOME parties! It's the same reason why Hanukkah rose to such outsize prominence. BRING ON THE PRESENTS! More importantly, Christmas is not at all an important Christian holiday from a theological perspective. The only one that is is Easter. You believe Christ was the son of God and rose from the dead, or you don't. Whether Jesus was born in a manger or a five star hotel or 20,000 leagues under the sea is incidental. But the roiling, evil hordes of atheists, agnostics, Jews, Muslims, Zoroastrians, and what have you don't worry so much about Easter hams and Jelly Beans, because the LouLams of the world don't get all up in our faces about it. My favorite political irony is that conservatives have a reputation for being all tough, but they are actually bed wetting babies who fear anything different from them and consequently lash out. Like my family and I are on their lawns burning Bibles. Whatever.
  2. In my neck of the woods, a group of students is suing TurnItIn for violating their intellectual property rights, since the selling point of the company is their database, but the students are not compensated for their work. Maybe you could find some resources through them?
  3. I agree with Leeds in the political forum for the first time ever. Yikes. Ron Paul is a crazy person. He knows enough to not be talking about the New World Order and the gold standard and the rest on the national stage, but the nuts over at Storm Front love him for a reason, folks. Anyhow, how many of y'all went out and voted on Tuesday? The whole New Jersey state legislature was up, along with a significant number of county and municipal level seats.
  4. For some of your less nice clothes, I used to know of a women's organization that, among other things, gave clothes to rape victims in emergency rooms to wear home, since they would either have their clothes damaged beyond repair or have to give up them up as evidence. This was in Chicago, not sure if there would be people doing the same thing near you. There is also generally a big demand for donations of outerwear, especially this time of year. I'm sure google would turn up something in your area. And there's always the Red Cross. I think they will even come to your house to pick the stuff up. This is less standard charitable, but do you have anything that isn't right for dress for success that could still be considered dressy? My mother gave a bunch of her clothes to our local high school's drama club one year, and got a big kick out of seeing her clothes on stage for the next 10 years or so.
  5. 731, I'm not sure you understand how loose campaign finance laws are. The restrictions are that the donor must be an individual (no corporate money) and a US citizen. You can't make a donation in someone else's name (something that is hard to prove), and if you want to contribute in cash, it must be under $100. Overall, you can take $2,300 from anyone for each the primary and the general, and an individual is subject to aggregate limits (just under $60,000 per person, per cycle, to all candidates and parties). That's it. A campaign could take money from Hsu today if they wanted to, assuming he hasn't hit his aggregate limit; it would just be bad form. Campaigns vet their donors to some extent, but what this guy is in trouble for would have been hard to find. It seems like what he was doing is something big corporations do all the time since campaign finance reform was passed, but in a larger scale. Say a company would have written a $25,000 check to a campaign back in the heyday of soft money. Now, they'll spend that $25k to pay their employees a little more, then direct them to give that money to a campaign, and all of a sudden you've got secretaries who have never given before maxing out. Strictly speaking, this violates the spirit, but not the letter of the law. When you hear about someone bundling contributions (like Bush's Rangers and Pioneers), sometimes this is what is going on. If he was reimbursing these Paw people, that's a felony, but we can't prove it happened yet. Since it came to light, the campaigns that took his money have been falling over themselves to give it to charity, which is par for the course in these situations, not because it was illegal to take it, but because they don't want to be connected to Hsu. If it turns out the money had illicit origins, (which so far as we can prove right now, none of it was, though it looks plenty suspicious), but was not given illicitly (outside the boundaries outlined above), then it will be a very good day for the Boys and Girls Club, but no candidates will get in trouble. And he's not the Democratic Abramoff. Jack Abramoff is smack in the middle of the biggest Congressional corruption scandal of our time, which is why he's in jail with a dozen other people, including a Congressman. It is apples and oranges.
  6. I lurk, it happens. I am just totally unqualified to say anything about the Devils right now. I also moved again, so at least I am in the Eastern Conference, which makes it slightly more likely I know what's going on. But it's not fun to work the pole, you just click on it and the person dances. You can actually give yourself 36-D's right out of the gate. And be a furry or an anime character. The question is, do you want to spend money on genitalia. I understand they can be bought second hand.
  7. I checked it out after I read something a while back about an attack on a group that may have been flouting their TOS in terms of hate speech. It involved exploding pigs and I had to know. It was not so great. Technically, you don't need any money to join, but practically everything, including the actions you can perform, has to be bought. I think you can get a few game dollars for giving them just your credit card number, but it's pretty non-awesome. It's also kind of hard to walk and chew gum at the same time in the game, literally. Trying to set up a series of actions, let alone talk to anyone else while you do it, well, it's not the most user friendly game ever. Then there's what goes on in the game. It seemed like a lot of it was dominated by sex. Not just strip clubs, but a whole heck of a lot of prostitution. I'm not a prude, but I didn't want to spend my time earning money to buy new clothes by working a pole, which was an option. And like the sims, a lot of the game aside from the sex, is dominated by builders. I'm not tech-y enough to design objects, and I wasn't going to fork over all that money to build houses, so I stopped playing pretty quickly. Why yes, I AM avoiding the job that has prevented me from following the Devils adequately right now. Why ever do you ask?
  8. I am so sorry for your loss. My family's cat died the day before Thanksgiving. We found his body under the porch, and I was just relieved that he came home to die. My parents couldn't catch him to bring him to the vet and find out just what was wrong, so we were spared the decision you had to make, but we've been in your shoes before. Once with an elderly dog, once with a kitten with a fatal abdominal disease. I still can't bring home a kitten without wondering if they have what did our little guy in.
  9. I've had the same thoughts cross my mind. The Canadian immigration website says I probably have dual citizenship. My friends and I were looking at it after the 2000 election. "Could you be Canadian and not know?" And I was and I didn't. We also discovered you can bring your life partner with you, and I spent the rest of the year telling my friends, "If you don't help me with X, I won't bring you to Canada as my life partner when we all have to flee." But I digress. You're wrong about their healthcare system though. Better than ours, but not among the best in the world. Law school is awful no matter where you go, but a lot cheaper in Canada, which is the biggest bouns by far. But full on leaving, I don't know. Kind of flaking out on our problems, in my opinion. There are lots of options that are decidely not flaking out, some more strident than others, and the end of 2007 and all of 2008 will be an excellent time to explore them. If you are interested in sticking around and working to change what you don't like, even temporarily, PM me.
  10. Ya'll can bite me with your indoor jobs and time to sit at home in the ac. My pets are the ones enjoying my AC since it gets so hot in my apartment I'm afraid they'll die without it. I have to be outside regularly for my job, and it's disgusting out. Usually hotter and more humid than it is in NJ. Never thought I'd miss a NJ summer until now. Blech.
  11. I thought they filmed Mallrats in Minnesota (Eden Prairie Mall, like that's in NJ), so maybe one of the other two. Excepting Dogma, I feel like Smith has gone down hill with each successive movie, but I'm guardedly optimistic that this will be good. But didn't he say that Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back was supposed to be the end of them and the whole universe his first few films were set in? I guess Jersey Girl put an end to any ideas he had about transitioning into other kinds of movies. My list would be: 1. Clerks 2. Dogma 3. Mallrats 4. Chasing Amy then a huge gap 5. Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back 6. Jersey Girl
  12. Ugh. I need to stop this "working 70 hours a week" thing. The exhaustion is messing with my reading comprehension.
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