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9/11 Then and Now – A Few Memories Shared

Posted in BY THE WAY, Friends, Smooth or Crunchy, tagged , , , , , , , on September 14, 2011| Leave a Comment »

The posts I thought I was going to do did not get done, quite obviously.  And it’s not because I brushed 9/11 aside.  Quite the contrary, Sunday night turned out to be the most emotional 9/11 I’ve had since the 9/11.

I went to a memorial service held in the Great Auditorium and within minutes I was in tears.  Between the solemnity of the occasion, the bagpipers, the flags, the orchestra, the two choirs and the speakers, not to mention the building, I was a wreck.

And why I didn’t think to bring tissues, I don’t know.  The speakers were all great but I have to say I was definitely partial to the Baptist Minister, former Secretary of State New Jersey.  He was quite the preacher man!

As I promised, I would post any memories sent in to me about 9/11/01, please read Heather’s account of that dreadful day, my generation’s day of infamy.

We had left Maine early on September 10th and were planning to stop in NYC to visit our daughter the next day.  We stopped overnight at a hotel in southern Connecticut to allow ourselves a relaxed time the next morning before heading into the city for our lunch date.  As we were getting dressed, my cell phone rang and it was our oldest son calling from his then home in Hatboro, PA asking if we were watching TV.  We had not been but the moment we turned it on, the only images we saw were the scenes of the first plane and then the second plane smashing into the World Trade Center buildings and the attendant misery as a stunned world watched.  Everybody was speechless and most of the hotel guests gathered in the lobby to watch the large TV and perhaps share the comfort of being around others

   Needless to say, we did not go into Manhattan that day but rather, several hours later, skirted around and headed south on the NJ Turnpike.  We were one of the only cars on that road.  The plumes of ash and smoke were clearly visible from the NJ side.  The rest stops were deserted and nearly all food outlets within them were shuttered.  The northbound traffic consisted of fire trucks and emergency vehicles ONLY.  It was a surreal spectacle and a surreal experience.
   To this day, whenever we pass along the NJ Turnpike,  we look over toward Manhattan, and we remember the tragedy of that horrific day.
I’ve blogged about Capt. Timothy Stackpole, whose memorial bracelet I ‘ve  been wearing for 10 years, my recent encounters with a fellow blogger and with Michele, two people who actually knew Captain Stackpole and went to his wake and funeral.  And last year I did a blog about 9/11 Then and Now.  See link below.

https://pbenjay.wordpress.com/wp-admin/post.php?post=2914&action=edit

I featured the photo of the empty shoes which so poignantly spoke to the loss of so lives and how the left behind living try to cope when there’s no one there to fill those shoes.  That memorial display was in New Jersey and in New York City…

empty chairs, Bryant Park

A man remembers his father

photo by Murray Head

Timmy Stackpole, 9-11, memorial bracelet

Memorial bracelet - 10 Years

And Gail sent me this link to one man’s tribute to the wife he lost in The World Trade Center:


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Like a Phoenix rising from the ashes, Orly files AGAIN!!

Posted in Conspiracy Theory Wednesday, tagged , , , , , , , on August 10, 2011| Leave a Comment »

I was rooting around for a conspiracy theory tonight on the internet and look what I found!  A site that proclaims to be the be all end all place to go to read about Obama Conspiracy theories, in fact the title of the blog is Obama Conspiracy Theories.

Gotta give credit where credit is due and this blog has a great post about the latest lawsuit initiated by none other than Orly Taitz and what is she suing and pursuing?  Why she wants to see a certified copy of Obama’s birth certificate.  And I thought this half -ass, half-baked theory had been laid to rest.  Guess the major newspapers are not delivered in Moldova.  Well there’s no reason for me to reconstruct this information, I’m going to re-post it here.

Queen Birther, Lady Liberty or bat-**** crazy, Orly Taitz (pictured right) can still draw a crowd.

Her antics yesterday in Hawaii generated enough traffic at The Fogbow to take the site down, as well as spawn some brief outages here at Obama Conspiracy Theories. The number of visits here doubled from the day before, and what is more significant, “new visitors” achieved pre-long form levels of 50% of total traffic.

Local Honolulu TV station KHON2 even gave a short mention of Taitz on its web site under the “most popular story” section. The station quotes Taitz:

We were able to get to the bottom of Watergate and it’s time to get to the bottom of Obama forgery-gate, or Obama fraud-gate – it’s time,

and Hawaii Deputy Attorney General Jill Nagamine from a letter:

You are seeking disclosure of privileged or other protected matter, and there is no exception that applies to allow disclosure to you.

Visit Dr. Conspiracy at http://www.obamaconspiracy.org/

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President Obama WANTS Medicare to Go Bankrupt!!!

Posted in Conspiracy Theory Wednesday, tagged , , , , , , , on August 3, 2011| 3 Comments »

Official photo of Congresswoman Michele Bachma...

Michele Bachmann

CONSPIRACY THEORY WEDNESDAY

Did you think I had abandoned this subject?  Seems so, I know, but I think it’s just that the flux of conspiracy theories had subsided somewhat.  But not for long…. Michele Bachmann, the erudite congresswoman from Minnesota came up with a doozy in June.  I have been remiss by not bringing this up sooner, sorry about that!

Maybe my timing is perfect, now that for at least the moment, the country isn’t going bankrupt.  No thanks to the Tea Party Republicans, that lunatic fringe group which has engulfed the Republican party.

Michele, a wannabe candidate for the Presidency (oh my dear God!) delivered the following diatribe accusing President Obama of secretly wishing Medicare would go bankrupt because then retirees would be forced to choose Obamacare.

“This hasn’t been talked about very much – the president’s plan for senior citizens is Obamacare,” Ms. Bachmann told party activists here. She added, “I think very likely what the president intends is that Medicare will go broke and ultimately that answer will be Obamacare for senior citizens.”

Are you f_____g kidding me?  I thought Sarah was one of the dumbest women ever to speak in public, shame on the Republicans for allowing her to make a mockery of a campaign for the Vice-Presidency AND now this idiot – HOW did she ever get elected???  You know the old adage, “if you haven’t got anything nice to say, don’t say anything”?  Well Michele should take this to heart and insert the word intelligent for nice.  With that montra, she would’t be able to speak for quite some time. Amen to that!

Steve Benen of the Washington Monthly said the following about Bachmann: “Bachmann’s principal problem is that she combines the worst of two important traits: she’s strikingly ignorant about public policy and she’s paranoid to the point of delusion.”

I literally can’t write anymore about her, she is an affront to my intelligence and that of my readers.

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Got the Bloggy-Blues!

Posted in BY THE WAY, Smooth or Crunchy, tagged , , , , , , on May 18, 2011| 6 Comments »

a chart to describe the search engine market

Seek and ye shall find

Can’t seem to get the blog posts out in the order of topics of my week, for a couple of weeks now…true I’ve been busier than usual;  very busy working on an exclusive listing of mine which is sold ( I hope) and will be more officially sold once the contract is signed AND I did have Finley Ray over the weekend BUT still….

I look at the stats every day and the number of readers is amazing to me HOWEVER, they are not readers of these daily posts, these are people coming to the blog thru a search engine.  Of course if I were just counting numbers I should be thrilled BUT what the majority of visitors are coming to read is not what I’m writing about now!

Every day and I mean EVERY DAY, several people search for, are you ready for this? – CANDYLAND, or CANDYLAND GAME BOARD, and BUNDLING BOARD, and CARCANO, CLUE GAME and ROBIN BIRD. This seems strange to me and like I said if I was just interested in numbers, it would be gratifying.  BUT these readers are just one night stands, guerilla warfare readers.

Perhaps I shouldn’t complain – after all I made a decision early on that my blog would not just be an online diary of my life and I also knew having a structure to your blogs if you weren’t a niche blogger was the only way to keep on blogging and building your readership.  So here I am today, whining about the fact that most of the readers of this blog are one-timers and what they are coming here for is information, not me.  Can I handle this?

I want to write more personally than I have lately, however,  a lot of what is going on in my life I can’t share with the world; first of all this isn’t a personal diary blog, secondly, I don’t feel right about sharing some of the problems/stress I’ve been having for the last several months because it involves a couple of other people who didn’t sign up to have their lives exposed and I’m honoring that as best I can.  AND because if I started to write about a couple of these issues, this blog would become a rant like you wouldn’t believe!  There are things going on around me that are being dealt with in ways that I totally disagree with and find that handling to be ineffective and dumb.  The people that really know me, know how much I abhor stupid behavior, enabling and living in denial.  I’m a pragmatic bottom line person and believe you just do it!  I’ve had to bite  my tongue so many times lately, I’m sure there’s a huge hole in it.

OK, well having even said that much was a bit of a vent and I feel better already.  I also keep reminding myself of one of my favorite montras; people do what they want to do.  It’s so simple and yet so true.  You can talk till you’re blue in the face, you can reason, point out the logic, attempt to persuade and maybe the end result will be okay; However only if that person has come to believe/want to do it.

So now I still have to figure out why I haven’t posted a recipe in a couple of weeks, why my FAB FOTOS are always a day late, why I haven’t had a comment in a week!!! That is the worst of it, my readers…because either you’re not reading or what I’m writing is so banal it doesn’t evoke any comments.  What to do, what to do?? You know in my business which has always been real estate sales, when you are in a slump, the boss would say go back to the basics.

I’m going to try to do that which in my case was more of a mixture of personal satirical observations of my life and the world around me and follow the post schedule to stay on track.   I guess that means I need to look around me and use my creative writing skills to bring life’s every day adventures, foibles and characters to life in print in this blog.  There was a TV station whose slogan was “Characters welcome” – I need to bring in some characters, lol.

Getting back on track, this is Wednesday so I best find a conspiracy theory  that will enlighten us all!

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RED is Dead or so the Rushmeister says!

Posted in Conspiracy Theory Wednesday, tagged , , , , , , , on May 11, 2011| Leave a Comment »

FEMA seal (old)
FEMA is True to BLUE

FEMA is NO’T giving aid to Texas because it is a RED state and Obama knows that they won’t be voting for him! Now, that’s a good one.  I wonder if Rush Limbaugh lies awake at night dreaming this crap up OR does he have writers?  He actually stated this untruth on his show May 5th.  Poor Texas, they are not getting the help they deserve except that they ARE!!

Although FEMA has not issued a disaster declaration which would allow it to provide aid to civilians, it has in fact supported Texas with 22 FMAG – Fire Management Assistant Grant declarations including 15 since the beginning of April.  

The following is from a report by NBC’s  Dallas-Fort Worth affiliate; FEMA has provided aid that “[helps] firefighters pay for things such as equipment repairs, food and shelter.” As The Houston Chronicle states: This aid covers “75 percent of Texas’s costs for emergency response work.”

RED is RED whether it’s pink, wine, cardinal or scarlet and in case Rushie couldn’t recollect which states voted for Obama and those that didn’t, that is, besides Texas, he need only look south.  Obama lost Alabama by 11 points in 2008 but when the tornadoes hit that state, the President signed a disaster declaration for Alabama, that little ole Southern redheaded belle of a state.

Well so much for that Swiss cheesey conspiracy theory – it stinks and is full of holes

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He’s Alive, He Was Dead Years Ago, Where ARE Those Photos?

Posted in Conspiracy Theory Wednesday, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , on May 4, 2011| 2 Comments »

“In fact, Osama bin Laden is a pilot of Americ...

Conspiracy Theory - Osama was really an American Airlines Pilot

Conspiracy Theory Wednesday

Great timing, that’s what I say… at least for me!  It couldn’t have been better timing; Thank you President O’Bama! I do worry that a Conspiracy Wednesday will come and go and no new conspiracy theory will crop up.  AND then I discovered the Tea Party theories which seem to spring forth like the fountain of youth.  AND NOW!!! It couldn’t have been more than a New York minute after the announcement that U.S. forces had conducted a ground attack on a house where Osama Bin Laden was residing/hiding, that the conspiracy theories burst forth.

Where was the body?  Why did they drop the body in the ocean?  Why doesn’t President O’Bama  release the photos?  How can we be sure that the DNA is really Bin Laden’s? OMG, it just goes on and on.  I’ve saved the best for last;  The raid was arranged so as to insure O’Bama’s re-election.  Wow, you gotta have a LONG memory from now to the next election day.

So which one should we explore? I don’t know that it makes any difference because those that believe it to be true cannot be confused by the facts.  Here are the facts as presented by those that should know and do know as opposed to those who don’t know anything for sure but have no compunction about casting aspersions and veiled falsehoods  taking skepticism to art form.

The body of Osama Bin Laden was washed according to Muslim tradition, wrapped in a white sheet, prayers were said, and as Muslims strive to bury the body as quickly as possible after death to avoid embalming, the body was disposed of at sea.

Sounds reasonable to me.  I am one of those people who kind of wish we could have seen the body- NOT because I’m into gore, BUT because I knew they would never believe anything that could possibly put our President in a good light.  Some of them are claiming the glory of the kill should go to George Bush.  And why I might ask?  He said he didn’t give OBL much thought and he wasn’t that important after all!!! Oh but then that must mean that Osama was killed after all.  Well really you can’t have it both ways.

I hate to give SP any air time at all, so suffice to say she tweeted some disdainful remarks  on Twitter.  Well what can you expect from  such a twit?

Let me end this blog with what I consider to be the quote of the day.  It’s from Ari Fleischer, former press secretary for George W. Bush;

“If you doubt he’s dead, no photo will satisfy. For the rest of us, Navy SEALs don’t miss,” Fleischer wrote on Twitter.

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YES! There’s A New Conspiracy Theory…

Posted in Conspiracy Theory Wednesday, tagged , , , , , , , on April 28, 2011| 2 Comments »

Scanned image of Barack Obama's Birth Certific...

Scanned Copy Released During Campaign

At long last the President’s long form Birth Certificate has been found, created, copied, exposed, revealed -WHATEVER!! So my God, what will Glenn Beck and Sarah Palin harp on now?  Never two to leave much to your own imagination, it took a few hours but sure enough here it is!

The only reason President Obama showed the world his Birth Certificate is….are you ready?? Because if you saw it published then you would be distracted from really hearing the news of the day which came from Ben Bernanke!!

Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke held a press conference today to discuss interest rates. And what did we learn today once we got over the SHOCK of seeing the birther conspiracy evaporate into thin air?  Well apparently, the Feds are going to keep interest rates low because although the economy grew by 3% and unemployment rates dropped, the rate of inflation rose 2.7%.  YES, omg, this is just AWFUL and it SO awful that President Obama was able to time the release of his Birth Certificate AND arrange for the Federal Reserve to make this stunning announcement. 

And better yet, guess who was behind this all?  Well in a way, Donald Trump – at least according to Sarah Palin who is quite sure that the Donald bringing up the birther issue forced the President’s hand.  Wowie!  I’ll bet even the puffed up, side-swept head of Trump himself never really believed that HE would be the ONE.  Actually I thought Keanu was The One!  Amazing isn’t it that after all the rallies, the speeches, the harangues, the signs, the chanting about this birth certificate, that it was our (New York’s very own) Donald who brought the house down.  Oh Sarah, you half-term Governor, Vice President wannabee, how sad, how sad you are!

As for the idiot who escaped from his village, Glenn Beck, well I expect nothing less than the mad ravings of a certifiable lunatic.  Let’s see just how far this one can go.

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Peter King and the Rise of Islamophobia

Posted in Conspiracy Theory Wednesday, tagged , , , , , on April 7, 2011| 2 Comments »

Seal of New York.

Shame on Peter King!

This post was supposed to be yesterday’s Conspiracy Theory Wednesday and once again I find myself apologizing for being late.  Oh well….

It’s not that there’s any lack of crazy conspiracy theories out there;  I just have to search and read through to see if it this stuff is even readable.  But no problem this week, because of on New York‘s very own U.S. Representative Peter King has raised Islamphobia to a new level of histrionics.  And with that comes a whole slew of way out there conspiracy theories.

Have you heard of the Shari’ah Conspiracy Theory? No, well then you must read this.  If you regularly read this blog I know you’re probably wondering why does she want me to read about another fringe lunatic thought process?  Wellllll…..because every now and then I have to remind myself that these people actually vote and procreate and omg, you have got to know who is out there beyond your own comfort zone of intelligence.  Scary? Yes! But knowledge is power and in order to fight the craziness, you need to know from whence it came.

http://www.alternet.org/teaparty/150444/welcome_to_the_shari’ah_conspiracy

Welcome to the Shari’ah Conspiracy Theory Industry

I strongly suggest you copy and paste the link and have yourself an enlightening good time reading this.   Here’s a  passage and teaser for you;

“Anti-Muslim diatribe and activity have reached what Marshall Breger, a law professor at Catholic University, an Orthodox Jew and a Republican, has described as a “season of singular national distemper where, for reasons best understood by social psychiatrists, the American people have entered into what can only be described as ‘open season’ on Islam.”  …Alternet.org

There is a cottage industry of anti-Muslim fearmongers among us!

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What’s in a Name?

Posted in BY THE WAY, Friends, New York Speaks, Only in New York, Smooth or Crunchy, tagged , , , , , , on April 1, 2011| Leave a Comment »

The back story to this photograph is that my lovely daughter Chiara got married in June ’08 and although they were living in Boston, Tom and she got married in New York City.  So they weren’t really here much before or after the wedding.  They came in to get the license and left the day after the wedding for a two week honeymoon and returned directly to Boston.

Soooo, Chiara had a New York license from before when she lived here and it was in her maiden name;  It hadn’t expired so she kept it.  Time passes, one child is born, Finley Ray.  More time passes and another child is born, Francesca and still the license had not expired.  Chiara was still in Boston all this time.

This January they moved back to New York City, so she has been here for 3 full months, (can you see where this is going?).   She just had her 34th birthday last week and Tom bought her birthday cake.  I think the message is pretty clear – When the hell are you going to change your name?

Kiki's birthday cake, Chiara is 34, Chiara Berti Clark

Did You Get My Message?

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GIRL SCOUT COOKIES – They’re BAaacckkkk !!!

Posted in BY THE WAY, Smooth or Crunchy, tagged , , , , , , , on March 31, 2011| 2 Comments »

Why oh why did I ever bring those cookies home?  I know why I bought them, I mean really whoever says, “No, I don’t want to buy your cookies”, “Now scram!”  Okay so I bought not one but three boxes (no accounting for lack of self-discipline).  Then I brought them home from the office last night and wouldn’t you know,  the same thing happened that happened last year!  (there’s no accounting for inability to learn from previous mistakes) – I heard them calling my name!  At first I thought I heard a faint voice in the distance and thought maybe it was someone out in the hall.  But then the voice grew stronger and stronger until it was perfectly clear to me that I was being beckoned!  And well you can guess what happened next, do I really have to admit it?  Nine cookies later, three from each box ( I wanted to be fair to all).

They’re evil.  Yes, Girl Scout Cookies are evil even if they don’t have any trans fats in them.  You might find these previous blogs interesting;  https://pbenjay.wordpress.com/2010/03/22/the-ten-retired-girl-scout-cookies-fans-miss-most-divine and  https://pbenjay.wordpress.com/2010/03/17/girl-scout-cookies-are-evil/ – I think you will have to copy and paste, I couldn’t seem to make the  links live.

I have to get them out of this house! So tomorrow, I’m going to invite my daughter and granddaughter over and as the benevolent Gigi that I am, give them ALL to them (well maybe I’ll keep a few lemon cremes).

Girl scout cookies, Girl Scouts, Lemon cremes, Lemon Chalet cremes

Just one more

 

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