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Men then were more alike than they are now. In their alikeness, which the time required, they had a conscientious, replicable beauty–boy cleanliness, haircuts that showed their ears, white shirts, black ties. Fresh handkerchiefs. Shoes whose shine needed vigilance. In winter, imposing overcoats that made them seem like soldiers in the army of seriousness and made it hard to tell them apart, especially from a distance, so that if a child saw her father far down the winter sidewalk she would have trouble knowing for sure it was her father and she would stand in her oversized rubber boots, using one mitten as a gas mask to diffuse the freezing air, until it was him or it wasn't. This was long ago, during the war known as Cold. The early-morning unison of the fathers' departure would have shamed a flight of blackbirds; under the vaults and domes of the Capitol, behind locked doors, at the fathers' gray steel desks, at the ends of their pencils, the war was going well, it was going badly, it was a matter of interpretation, it was work. The daylight absence of the men, the fathers, imbued the suburb with the suspense of desertion. Every blade of grass in every lawn was waiting. Every wife was waiting, every dog with pricked-up ears and metal tags tinking on its collar was waiting, and each blade of grass, each wife, each dog and child, whatever else they did, held still. Whatever else it was for, the suburb was for holding still. Look: black circles have been cut from the lawns and into these circles have been inserted slim upward-striving trees. Against the possibility of their flying away to unite with other trees they are tethered to the earth with wires.
The explaining voice pauses; the pause is not a lull, not neutral, but active and soliciting; the voice belongs to the movie you are watching, and watching is what has been asked of you so far, but you learn from the pause that watching no longer suffices and some other engagement is required, but what that might be, you can't say, there isn't time. Over the Hiroshima of the black-and-white classroom movie, the bomb floats from the belly whose riveted steel plates have a homemade frankenstein crudity: how strange to see how the plane is made; that clouds float by; how serenely, with what destined aplomb, the bomb peels away into the long arc of descent. In its scrolling slowness it's left behind in air; it's smaller and smaller and farther and farther behind; it could almost be forgotten about. Below, between parting clouds, a plain, the city-feeling of a grid, a clutteration of tiny roofs, infinite holding still.
Saturday you might See your dad in a t-shirt, your brother might be asked if he'd like to throw a ball around, and from a corner of the lawn you might sit and watch, wild with the wrongness of being a girl, wild with stoppered grace. Saturdays your dad was his own man, he said. Whose was he when he wasn't his own? Opposing the soft amused handsomeness of his face his glasses had an architectural authority, the naked lenses dominated by the heavy black plastic bridge and earpieces. His hair memorized its side part. On a high closet shelf lived the hats forsaken when Kennedy took his oath of office bareheaded, trusting in his rashness and eloquence, in how young he was and how that was suddenly what was needed, and how it seemed to mean he could face things without the old inhibition and correctness, with, instead, shameless resourcefulness, undeluded cunning; and how fear relented with the bareheadedness of JFK; how fear was no equal for wind rifling the dark hair of a handsome man.
Deprived of my mother's attention my father would narrow his eyes lonesomely and try to set something on fire, some dogma or other, till she faced him to argue. His voter registration was discreetly partyless to insure his survival from administration to administration, but he was a Democrat. Wounded by her Republican convictions, offensive not only in themselves but as the emblem of some ultimate elusiveness in his wife, he persisted in the belief that she could be harangued into converting. Ph.D. or not, he came of a long line of forceful soul-savers, river-dunking, hellfire-extolling Baptists. When troubled, he would take nail clippers from his pocket and excruciate tiny parings from his already short nails. He didn't seem to regard this as a private act, and the fact that he wasn't aware this habit repelled other people filled me with wretched solicitude, as if nothing stood between him and disaster. When he took his glasses off it was as if he lifted away his sly intelligence and left a face naïve as a sleeper's. When he crossed his legs the striptease shock of the white calf with its intimate corkscrews of black hair alarmed us all (my mother wondered aloud sometimes why no shank showed when JFK crossed his legs). He was an avid taker of offense. The word hillbilly overheard by chance–in a joke on TV, say–riled him like a just accusation. His gaucheness wasn't completely lost on him and in the right mood he could mock it with a kidding lightheartedness impossible to reconcile with his prevailing touchiness: my little brother and sister and I longed for these fits of clowning, but they were like weather, immune to coaxing. In the token sartorial task assigned him, his oxfords submitted to the polish-stained shoebrush. The happiness of buffing called for snatches of sinister, lilting Hank Williams. Oh I know a gal lives over the hill. If she won't do it, her sister will.
On the coffee table: glorious oversized magazines whose pages exacted from a usually slapdash child the delicate touch and visual insatiability of a curator. Whose arrival was an event–at dinner: "The new LIFE came today"–and whose disposal elicited an elegiac tone–"Are we done with that LIFE?" There was TV, of course, but TV watching was closely monitored: these magazines were the source of my knowledge of the world beyond the suburb. These pages had held the sullenly unremarkable book depository, the knoll where a father in swiftest reflex had flattened himself against the grass, taking his crewcut sons with him (there was so little touch in our family that I envied those boys, I wanted an instinctive arm to press me down while sirens careened, or maybe just to feel adrenalized protectiveness radiating from a male body–maybe it was Freudian, the wish to be toppled and yanked close while emergency wheeled through the air), Oswald's lean fox face, its expression not much different from the shamed, dissembling insolence of certain boys in my class, boys known for cornering and tormenting, whose meanness was revered. There was Audrey Hepburn in a striped sailor shirt; there was the hammy smile of a chimpanzee in an astronaut suit, harnessed into the padded socket of a space capsule; there was an American soldier, rifle on his knees, watching five slight Vietnamese men, hands bound behind their backs, step barefoot into the narrow boat with him. In those pages Jenny Small and I read that when police entered the apartment of a woman murdered by the Boston Strangler a record was still spinning on the turntable. From the hulking cabinet stereos in our living rooms we knew the grainy hiss and snap of the needle riding that last groove, the diamond of needle with its gliding listlessness and its failure to notice it had come to the end, and it came home to us on the rattly aluminum-framed faded turquoise-and-white plastic-webbing chaise lounge in Jenny's backyard that as girls we were on the way to becoming wanted by rapists. We might feel cunning and self-sufficient and male, but look, none of those things was true. It was as if we had been two boys, till we read that. It was just luck that we read it on Jenny's mother's chaise lounge, me on the rickety end where a sunbather's feet belonged, Jenny sitting close to but not leaning against the cranked-up back support, the magazine spread across her lap, a flexing slippery V of glossy pages with, on each side, an island of brown knee. I seemed to see the left knee with the keenest focus I had ever brought to bear on any object. The horrifying page that rested against it made that knee exquisite in the composed human beauty of bone under skin. What did what we had read do to us? That it was terrible, Jenny and I could discern in each other's eyes. We were in this together, but what did being in it mean? Later, in the hour after supper when nobody cared where children went, we looked for and found each other (we were not best friends, and didn't possess best-friend telepathy) and went to Jenny's backyard again, behind an overgrown lilac where, with the boy scout knife borrowed from her older brother's drawer and singed for sterilization with matches also found there, Jenny and I nicked x's in the palms of our hands and, sitting crosslegged, held our palms together, interlacing our fingers and gazing nobly into each other's eyes while the x's bled into each other. Only they didn't. One of us noticed and said wait, there's not enough and it's not getting into each other. From the edges of the cuts emerged little rubies, bead after luscious bead, but, true, it wasn't flowing, so we rubbed and smeared our palms, and that was the only thing that hurt, the edges of the cuts peeling back, the nervy insideness of one hand in electric contact with another, the streaky fingerpainting mess we were making of our palms, meaning bleeding into each other was not glamorous, but messy and determined, amateur and startling. That didn't matter too much compared to the feeling that this was working–that it was doing what we'd wanted it to, hard though it would have been for either of us to explain.
Set apart: time of mid-morning departure, time of highways' infinity, time of the gritty-glassy echo-y unscrewing of the lid of the red plaid thermos usually reserved for the beach, time of lemonade a-tilt in the red plastic cup-cap. Time of that cup's rim, wiped between turns so no one would die from the other's germs. Time of children's immersion in the atmosphere of their parents' marriage. Time of getting lost and whose fault it was. Time of the hotel swimming pool with its confidence-inspiring stench of chlorine. Time of signs warning there was no lifeguard, of the cement margins where the chaise lounges held sunglassed mothers and fathers whose shy nakedness causes the child's heart to thump in the child's skinny chest from delight at this exposure, which the child feels as a coming closer, a confounding of realities. Every unhappy family is periodically ransacked by joy. It is the way the family haunts itself, through the unknownness that is always, powerfully, in the parents' possession, the unknown whose sudden casual revelation on the chaise lounges on the hot cement margins of the hotel swimming pool in a never-before-seen city causes a child's heart to beat hugely in the first intimation of breaking–of the child comprehending why grownups say of something or other that it is enough to break your heart.
Where was this? The chainlink fence that warned there was no lifeguard, the mothers who called no running, I mean it, no running. The shouted names of other children revealed to us, though our mother, a violent admirer of Jackie Kennedy's widowed composure, would never raise her voice in public. The not-very-distant freeway doing a steady business in semis, cumulus clouds brighter for the level radiance from the west, our shadows' legs marvelously long, our sleek wet heads so alike we were tribal, except within that tribe were the sharper alliances of brother and sister, and in our wet swimsuits we were more brother and sister than we had ever been before, eagerly, competitively, near-nakedly brother and sister, and when he followed me up the 15-foot ladder whose rungs I remember for their wet-metal smell and ascending dangerousness, the flattery of his following so close lit my skin like sunburn and drove my climb to the pinnacle whose galvanized aluminum slide slanted to a glancing, slapping, light-scattering heaven ringed with wavering child-bodies that left an open space for the next slider. My brother was right behind, and right behind him came the oppressive almost-sexiness of other children's wet bodies clambering up the ladder. Maybe he wanted to impress these strange others, maybe too many cartoons whose victims rebounded laughing had led him to believe no real harm would be done (that was to be our parents' theory)–whatever causes converged in his shove, I was off balance, trying to correct the asymmetry of my pose there at the top, and thus went over the metal-pipe railing, the arm thrown in front of my face hitting first, then my knees, and I was slammed flat, silence closing in, circling as if I was a drain it wanted to go down. It was a very quiet thing to be at the heart of an accident. Through wet eyelashes I saw a world peaceful down to the grains of sand or grit on the cement inches from my nose, each grain precisely cherished by its shadow, the grains brightly lit and far apart and astounding as an array of boulders on the moon, and whose meticulousness placed them with this unearthly distinctness–what did that, and did it know about me? Then: voices, grownup voices, grownup feet, confusion, thrilled interrogation, solicitude. Dark fur against gaudy whiteness: those were my father's legs, this was my father crouching to ask questions, but the magnitude of my alertness crushed the desire to answer him. Nobody maintained in those days that you shouldn't move a person who'd fallen, rescue was a more casual prerogative, and I was carried back to our hotel room in my father's arms; this once, his arms. I was left alone on one of the double beds in the air-conditioned gloom while my mother and father conferred outside the door in the gentling heat of early evening, other grownups stopping by, their questions politely deflected, their kids' voices ringing from the pool like clamor from a past life. Standing outside the room in his baggy swimtrunks, assailed by well-meaners, my father would feel humiliated and full of blame, these emotions unrelievable by the surgery he habitually inflicted on his nails, but sufficiently disguised by his charm that only I, listening in the dark room, could detect the hazardousness of his mood, which sought, which had to seek, an object. At 10 I believed nobody else had real insight into my father, not my brother or sister who understood hardly anything, not my mother whose adoration of him outwardly resembled suffering omniscience but who was in fact easily deflected by his contrarieties. Now it was she who intervened. My little brother had not meant to hurt anyone, had he? That tender, harassing spell cast by adults coercing a right answer: it was surprising how instantly we welcomed that (their welcoming it was plain in their voices, and as for my welcoming it, I could feel that). Of all of us, my brother was the only one beloved by the other four, his crying the only heartbreaking crying. Outside the door he was crying now, he was (I closed my eyes and knew this for sure) shuddering, goosefleshed, wet hair sleeked to his skull and pathetic ears jutting out, arms hanging at his sides, shaking his head no, no, no, no, no, no, and in that dark hotel room I was relieved that my mother knew how to manage the questioning by which he could be forgiven, and within relief a doorway opened into sleep.
Enormous suitcases, jade and beige and navy, jammed together in a rattling bulwark smelling of sunstruck plastic, shade a narrow canyon lined with a flannel sleeping bag whose hunters and retrievers alternate with flushed pheasants. The fact that the pheasants are bigger than the hunters and their dogs and if they flew at them instead of away could crush them with a few decisive wingbeats arouses an aesthetic revulsion intense to the point of nausea: I need to correct this, to write a letter to the sleeping-bag people, enclosing a pheasant-setter-hunter drawing so piercingly right they would wonder who this girl is and resolve to find her to hire her to design all future sleeping-bag-flannel vignettes. My forehead sweats, the roots of my hair sweat; sweat runs from between my shoulderblades down my spine with a feeling like being crawled on and not minding, and I close my eyes and coax that sensation to the center where it's the war of slow-sliding creepy arousal versus pain. If you have three children in the back seat one is always in the middle, nudged and bothered and whisper-taunted from the left and from the right. The answer is always no, but every trip begins with someone begging to ride in the rear of the station wagon, called in our family the Wayfarback, sweet as a vacant house is sweet, as only unclaimed spaces ever are, carpeted in clean scratchiness, offering what can be found nowhere else in our life, the ambiguity of being close yet unseen: a child in the Wayfarback can't be surveilled by glances in the rear-view mirror. Can't be seat-belted in, either, making it appealingly dangerous. So why is it mine, this hot rumpled hidey-hole? Attuned to injustice–savage keeners of no fair!–my little brother and sister are quiet in the face of this travesty, gratified by their own quietness, which seems grownup and inexplicable. Mother-and-father silence followed my saying plaintively, two or three times before we left the hotel room this morning, Something's wrong. With my left arm, with the little finger and the fourth finger and the thumb of my left hand–something's wrong it feels really strange. To which no one said even It'll be all right in a little while. Wearing the same clothes as yesterday I was standing there saying look with my whole incredulous body. My mother who didn't like to touch me helped me work my swollen arm out of the sleeve of my t-shirt but even then she didn't do the thing I wanted, she didn't look, and because she didn't look it changed into something not quite mine, my arm, and I got a little divorce from it, like getting distance from a lie you're going to disown before long. I couldn't knot the cowboy bandana I was obsessed with, so she did, though she hated it and was always trying to talk me out of it on the grounds girls didn't look good with rags around their necks. Then astounding license: You can ride in the very back. With the smashing of strictness, the air in the station wagon brightens, my father calls my mother honey, which makes everyone feel as if they've been called honey, my brother and sister trade the Etch-a-Sketch back and forth, and I lie on my stomach in the Wayfarback, turning the pages of Smoky the Cowhorse. It was my rope-callused hand Smoky snatched the apple from, my sunburnt neck the bandana circled, only now (I suddenly saw) the bandana could be used to wrap my forearm–a feverish cowboy would do that if he was shot with an arrow. When the wrapping seemed to help I found the rag used to wipe condensation from the back window and swaddled my hand, figuring out how to encompass the outsize, yammering fingers, too, although the thumb remained an orphan with a big, throbbing heartbeat. I wished I had a scrap for it. Eternity could be broken into bearable slabs by the ritual of loosening the bindings and winding them tighter, the baseball game fading and reviving on the radio and my father calling the glorious salute Attaboy! and the sun lasering between suitcases to ignite hot stripes on my legs while I slept, and I slept a lot, and when I woke there was a fraction of an instant when my old life was back and all was well, and that was snatched away. How wrong I'd been not to have loved my unbroken arm more. My mother unfolded the map of America with every Howard Johnson's on it. My father said Shoes on, kids. The back door swung up, me blinking at the loss of my cave, clambering out to the asphalt where the bare-legged beauty of the other four struck me sharply. Glass doors opened into the mercy of air-conditioning in a circus-bright barrage of orange and turquoise, the gauze bow in the small of the waitress' back led us in single file between tables of families, and I held my scarecrow arm close to my body, but more than one waitress raised her eyebrows and would have inquired if she hadn't, in time, registered my parents' unwillingness to engage. There was another hotel-room night; there was bacon and eggs and Tang that astronauts drank. Look, kids, the Cumberland Gap, your great-great-grandpa rode home through here after he lost his leg at The Wilderness, we'll go there sometime. Rode home one-legged? He could get a prit good hold, his stump was long enough, down to the knee. Bill! Don't go into details! There was prit to evoke the ghost's voice and prove the Civil War had happened; there was fog, the headlights' shafts filled with rolling plumes, the dented guardrail the only thing between us and the abyss; there was my father's tale of the Model A he first learned to drive and the red mud it foundered in, and how it was pulled out with a neighbor's mule who could count and do tricks and would neatly, with its big mule lips peeled back, take an apple from between its owner's wife's teeth; there was my father imitating the mule's grimace and when my mother didn't laugh, doing it again; there was my mother's Yankee reticence and delicacy and irony, about to become drawbacks in the encounter with my father's family. She was hard to make sense of, in Tennessee.
The fraying, dirty mummification of my arm enchanted my cousins as if I had carried a filthy stray cat into their house and then refused to give it up. This was seen as boldness on my part: the lawlessness they imagined for me was an outline I would have poured myself into if I could. They wanted to touch and poke and unwrap, and since that would earn me more reverent attention of the kind boys pay only to what slightly sickens them, I would have let them. But my aunt said Boys. Now you leave it alone. My cousins stuck close, honoring the leprous itness of my arm. Asked by my aunt about the pain, I don't think I was constrained by loyalty to my parents' version, which was that nothing was broken. The doubleness of my vantage point–aware they were wrong but sure they were perfect–wrecked my awareness of them; where what they want belonged, there was a blank, so I was honest with my aunt, and relieved by the distress she let show. Reined in only by my aunt's Southern lady-ness, that distress verged on an indictment of my parents, especially my mother; but my aunt held her tongue and didn't accuse her of anything, not where I could hear, and, I think, not to anyone, because it wouldn't have served any purpose, not really, or made it any easier to accomplish what she right away determined to do, which was get me to a doctor. My aunt had brown eyes so dark they were often described as black, enviable eyes, as hers was an enviable high-cheekboned black-haired drawling beauty that hadn't gotten her into too much trouble, either because she was naturally sensible or had set out to cultivate happiness. She'd married my father's droll, softspoken, easygoing little brother, and their household seemed miraculous to me, so much so that on previous annual visits I had insisted on watching my aunt do every little thing, spellbound by her gentleness and determined to attract as much of it as I could to myself. This greed of mine for my aunt's company didn't go unremarked, and it embarrassed my mother. If she'd liked my aunt less, she might have held it against her, or conjectured to my father late at night when they were finally alone that my aunt was egging me on in my ridiculous infatuation, with the secret aim of making Bill's Yankee wife look bad. My aunt's nature was equable and warm and self-effacing, qualities my restless hypercritical mother did not possess but religiously impersonated. As sometimes happens, two women who seem exactly positioned for mutual loathing ended up forging a spirited conspiracy, whose great staple was discussion of their men, those very different brothers.
At the hospital I was sugah'd and sweetheart'd, endearments good as opium. The dream of benevolence was pierced by my fear when the doctor bent close. I hadn't bathed since the accident and my skin radiated the stench of fever and chlorine, but the possibility that he would be repelled by me did not concern me–that wasn't it, though what I was afraid of was like smelling bad: it was present, like a taint, when the doctor leaned in. It was the possibility of being deeply shamed. With his mannerly Tennessee-slow slightly formal inquisitiveness the doctor might assent to my parents' view that nothing real was wrong, and attention-lover that I was I would be seen as having impersonated brokenness and spun a fable of pain. Could that be, could I have done that? Across a wall, at adult eye-level, ran the sequence of black x-ray sheets, and I gazed up at the frail light of my bones while grownup voices took polite turns, the longest, Southernest turn belonging to the doctor. You know how if you take a little stick and give it a good twist it will splinter out with the strain but not snap clear through? What's called a greenstick fracture. Fractures here, here, and here, too. The truth of x-rayed bone, the lifted-up feeling of rescue, the sensuousness of the expert winding of plaster-soaked gauze, spindly as layers of papier mâché, around and around until the hurt arm vanished.
The opposite of hospital order and clarity and decisiveness is the velvet passivity of sinking into the high-backed seats of a darkening theater, but whose whim was this? Down at the thrilling level where children piece together rumors of what adults find dirty, this movie was a source of joking and awe and backyard reenactment: This bad guy kills women by sneaking in while they're sleeping and painting them gold, all over so their skin can't breathe. They die? If a person's skin can't breathe they die. Wouldn't it wake you up to be painted–you'd feel it? They're just in real deep sleep. The painting happens fast. They used real gold. This one woman, while they were painting they forgot to leave her a patch of bare skin to breathe through and she died. In real life, died, and you get to see her. For my aunt and uncle as evangelicals, the corruption that could attend movie-going wasn't taken lightly; how did they ever agree to Bond? I can't explain it, unless the movie was meant as reckless compensation for the ordeal of the hospital, which had left the grownups in a dangerous state of disenchantment with each other. Maybe some unprecedented enchantment was needed, which could embrace them in its scandalous arms–maybe it had to be scandalous or it wouldn't constitute enough of a break, it wouldn't do the trick. Neither can the adults' decision to sit apart from us children be explained, unless their apartness seemed the route to undistracted calm and unity. So: to the gilding and velvet and shushing of Southern audience voices, to five cousins in thrall to each others' nearness, alert to every flicker of an eyelid in a cousin's profile. The troubling parts are going to go right over their heads, the grownups had decided, a satisfying conclusion all round, for them because it guaranteed them a respite from the strained aura of mutual apology that had overtaken them at the hospital, for us because we fully intended to absorb every bit of sex and violence. In the downfalling twilight I rested my brand-new cast on the armrest and admired its luminous whiteness, the separate aluminum splint that shielded my thumb, the cute pawlike entrapment of my other fingertips showing at the cast's end. Then it was dark. For music there was a moaningly erotic blare of trumpets whose notes were prolonged with anyaaaah nyaaaaaah obnoxiousness well known to children. Bond, too, was gloriously obvious: he did whatever he wanted. We understood! How beguiled we were to find ourselves surfing the shockwaves of a movie for grownups. We grew bolder, also for some reason indifferent to each other, staring without whispering. Deep in the movie, in the silk sheets where Bond had left her the night before, a woman lay on her side, her hair swerving across a pillow, her back to us, what my dad called the cheeks of her ass exposed, just a little string running down between them. Bond came in. Bond sat on the edge of the bed. She was bare bright overpowering gold, the tilt of shoulder declining to the tuck of waist, the hip the high point of a luminous dune tapering to rigid feet. Had she slept through her own death? Or wakened to feel consciousness beat its wings against suffocating skin? How long did it take? What came next? In his white pajamas, his back straight, Bond extended his fingertips to the glazed throat. No thudding, no pulse, only calm metal thingness like a tin can's, a car fender's. We sat there hushed and oppressed and sorry. My cousins hadn't moved a fraction of an inch but they had gotten farther away. Maybe to my cousins, maybe to something else, I directed an inarticulate wish along the lines of Come back, come back. The wish could do nothing. It was a trammelled, locked-in wish beating against other people's unknownness. It wasn't going to work. Aloneness wasn't going anywhere. While my soul hung waiting for the next part of my life I looked down at my arm, emerging into visibility as the lights came up. Under plaster and gauze was the ghost of the x where I had once bled into somebody and she had bled into me, and it worked, that x, and if it worked once it could work again, or something like it could, the x of one body held to the x of another, and this notion stirred me, though I didn't know enough about bodies to make the desire any more authoritative or detailed than that, I didn't know this was sex. But I knew it was a way out. Find Jenny and ask her if she loves you and when she says yes say good because I do too. And like magic, I did. Love her.
They were reality. Like everybody's parents, they were the most real thing there was. It was not possible to blame them, it would not have occurred to me at 10. The truth is I was sickened by myself for being a child they wanted not to know about. I repudiated myself because I could find no way to matter, it was my failure and I understood that another, more beautiful child could have had a hold on them. Yet it seemed possible that by force of will I could become this other, more beautiful child. Was it a thing a non-beloved child could figure out–could replicate? How long would it take? This was an emergency. I was wrong, in my wrongness I was alienating them, and either I was doing things wrong, or I was imbued with wrongness, irretrievably wrong, a wrong self, and that could not be changed, and it could not be borne. Therefore it must be the case that I was doing things wrong, and if I was doing things wrong, then it was only a matter of beginning to do things right, and I could do that, I would, I had to, it was life or death to me to be loved by them, so I would do things beautifully, beginning now.
If they have both been lost to me by death, gone for years, that hasn't changed things: death, it turns out, can't touch the deep aura of waiting, the lifelong spell that is the need for them to see.
Elizabeth Tallent teaches in the writing program at Stanford University. Reprinted from The Threepenny Review (Spring 2013), a quarterly magazine of essays, poetry, and exciting new fiction.


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You need to believe that God can help you become a better person and your life will be meaningful. If you do not have faith you do not have the guts to do what's necessary so as to get rid of your evil self. So, you can't succeed over all challenges. You accept the bad suggestions of your satanic anti-conscience. You don't think that your sense of morality has a significance.
Where is God?
God is living and sends you messages that are insightful in dreams. Your faith in God isn't based solely on your religiosity. You've got evidence that God exists and you can have a direct communication with Him through fantasy messages. Therefore, you have to trust God's wisdom and always respect His commandments. You need to believe that God will help you in the situation you're. Your faith will allow you to be with God. You will believe you're not alone. However, so as to be with God you need to respect His principles in all situations of life, even once you feel that you're in a terrible position.
Sometimes you must accept suffering to be able to be a better person. If you never accept discomfort you have the behaviour of a cruel demon. So, you make lots of men and women suffer. You need to accept suffering when it's essential. You want to secure your greedy and joyful self, but this isn't what you need to do so as to discover sound mental health. You've got to be a balanced individual. If you're indifferent to what is bad because you're selfish and lazy, your satanic anti-conscience will make the most of your irresponsible attitude and create a mental disorder in your conscience. You would like to agree with the doctrine of life of the commercial and immoral world. You don't need to change your character even after verifying that you make many errors. However, you need to follow your physician's guidance so as to be cured.
The intelligent and useful messages found in your dreams prove that God is the physician which you have many negative tendencies. You must change your nature and become a better person until you may attain sanctity. This is the way all your mental health issues will be entirely eliminated forever. You may attain higher consciousness and become a real genius, but you can't arrive to this point with no map. You need to obey your physician to accomplish this goal, though you are usually disobedient because you've got an evil nature. You've got to be an obedient student and individual and just follow God's directions, independently of your own personal opinion.
God's wisdom
It is secure. Your opinion is dangerous as it's based on ignorance and suppositions. This is the reason God sends you lots of warnings in fantasies. You must follow His plan and take to change your character. Your evil self has to be completely eliminated. You have the impression your evil self is essential, but this can be a misleading belief enforced by your satanic anti-conscience. You don't have to be bad in any circumstance. You should be sensitive and wise in all situations of life. You have to respect God's commandments and genuinely want to attain sanctity. Science helped humankind discover the significance of dreams and faith, the presence of God, and the presence of Satan. Now you've got scientific explanations which help you recognize the significance of every religion.

subset: commoncrawl


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With his derisive laughter, zombie eye-rolling, feigned incredulity, exaggerated theatrical gestures, continual interruptions, and over-all condescension, Vice Presidential smirk monkey Joe Biden negated any gains he hoped to make at last night's V.P. debate. Biden's performance sealed the deal for him… as the simpleton from Scranton and America's permanent political huckster. Debate moderator, ABC's Martha Raddatz, failed to control all-show Joe and left many yearning for Jim Lehrer.
Although GOP Vice Presidential candidate 42-year-old Rep Paul Ryan is 27 years younger than 69-year-old Biden, he was resolute, reassuring, and ready to take on the smart-aleck. Ryan was clearly the adult seated at the debate desk in Danville.
Polls from CNBC and CNN revealed Ryan won.
Here's just a sampling of Twitterverse take-aways (comments from FOX News contributors at end of article):
[POLL RESULTS] Who do you think won the VP Debate? Paul Ryan: 56%, Joe Biden: 36%, Neither: 8%. #CNBC2012
— CNBC (@CNBC) October 12, 2021
Check out our CNN Poll on debate winner: Ryan 48%, Biden 44%. on.cnn.com/SVefVK Do you agree? #CNNDebate
— CNN (@CNN) October 12, 2021
Biden doing best imitation of Al Gore 00. Snickers, grimaces, and exaggerated gestures. #debate
— Karl Rove (@KarlRove) October 12, 2021
Biden: Catholic doctrine says we have to take care of the needy. That's why I want to raise taxes but not give to charity myself. #vpdebate
— Kenneth E. Hines (@KennethEHines) October 12, 2021
Trouble is, I don't think this is a good subject to be lethally smirking about. Keep it serious, Joe…. #PMTdebate
— Piers Morgan (@piersmorgan) October 12, 2021
Ryan: "If Catholic Church agreed with you, why do they keep suing you?"
— S.E. Cupp (@secupp) October 12, 2021
Apparently raising your voice & pounding the table is what Grimacing Joe does when cornered. #debate
— Karl Rove (@KarlRove) October 12, 2021
Biden's smirking teeth are beginning to strobe through my TV screen. Disturbing. #PMTdebate
— Piers Morgan (@piersmorgan) October 12, 2021
Ryan just schooled Biden on Syria and the administration's reckless foreign policy. #debate
— Karl Rove (@KarlRove) October 12, 2021
Biden and Obama are circus clowns. One has such contempt he wouldn't even engage & this fool is behaving like laughing hyena. Shameful.
— Tammy Bruce (@HeyTammyBruce) October 12, 2021
Ryan's right. There aren't enough rich people to finance big government. The middle class is the target. danieljmitchell.wordpress.com/2012/08/10/mor…#VPdebate
— Dan Mitchell (@danieljmitchell) October 12, 2021
Biden just said no Catholic institution has to pay for contraception coverage?What planet does he live on? #debate
— Karl Rove (@KarlRove) October 12, 2021
Joe, seriously, STOP SMIRKING. This is serious stuff. Be Vice-Presidential. #PMTdebate
— Piers Morgan (@piersmorgan) October 12, 2021
Brit Hume- Smirking, laughing, smiling, mugging by the VP…. I thought it was unattractive and rude.
— Emily Miller (@EmilyMiller) October 12, 2021
How can anyone look at Biden's stupid grin and then call game show hosts cheesy?
— Chuck Woolery (@chuckwoolery) October 12, 2021
CNN's Gloria Borger: Biden Came Off As Condescending youtu.be/WGsk26Gix_k #CantAfford4More #Debates
— RomneyResponse (@RomneyResponse) October 12, 2021
Biden: I mean what I say? Like "they'll put you back in chains." #debate
— Karl Rove (@KarlRove) October 12, 2021
Someone make Biden stop doing that baby monkey fear grimace. #vpdebate
— Nancy Goldstein (@nancygoldstein) October 12, 2021
Biden said something totally untrue-Romney's brief press Conf was hours AFTER STEVENS DEATH REPORTED.
— Laura Ingraham (@IngrahamAngle) October 12, 2021
#Ryan's response: #Obama came into a difficult situation but "this is not what a real recovery looks like"#VPdebates
— Fox News Latino (@foxnewslatino) October 12, 2021
Paul Ryan is the kid solving calculus problems on the blackboard.Joe Biden is the kid making fart sounds in the back of the room#VPDebate
— GOPMommy(@gopmommy) October 12, 2021
Ryan making true and awesome point:if you confiscated every penny owned by every millionaire, wouldnt pay off debt #VPdebate
— Michael Tanner (@MTannerCato) October 12, 2021
Biden has completely lost his mind.This isn't fighting back.This is drunk flailing. #VPDebate
— Ben Howe (@BenHowe) October 12, 2021
"That's what we get in this administration- speeches. We need leadership." - Paul Ryan
— Emily Miller (@EmilyMiller) October 12, 2021
On Fox, Trippi says Biden was "diminished" by the laughing and smirking
— Tammy Bruce (@HeyTammyBruce) October 12, 2021
Pulled the video on Biden's Libya remark: "We did not know they wanted more security there." Contradicts State Dept. buzzfeed.com/rebeccaberg/bi…
— Rebecca Berg (@rebeccagberg) October 12, 2021
Notice Biden only calls China and Russia out as our allies.
— Chuck Woolery (@chuckwoolery) October 12, 2021
Notice how Biden keeps talking about all of our allies except Israel?
— Chuck Woolery (@chuckwoolery) October 12, 2021
Tom Brokaw, on Biden: "I just don't think you should be laughing during a discussion about thermonuclear war with Iran" @morning_joe
— Tim Alberta (@HotlineAlberta) October 12, 2021
Was Chris Matthews Biden's debate coach? #unhinged
— NRSC (@NRSC) October 12, 2021
On mute I see an earnest Paul Ryan sitting next to a laughing jack wagon
— Tammy Bruce (@HeyTammyBruce) October 12, 2021
How can you have a debate with Paul Ryan in it and virtually ignore debt, deficit and govt spending.#VPDebate
— Michael Tanner (@MTannerCato) October 12, 2021
"a debt crisis is coming…we can't keep spending like this…we have to tackle this before it tackles us" @paulryanvp
— Sean Hannity (@seanhannity) October 12, 2021
Here we go, we killed Osama, no how about Seal Team 6 killed Osama while you sat and watched on TV. Any pres would have taken that shot
— Chuck Woolery (@chuckwoolery) October 12, 2021
I learned that if I shout things over people, Im right. Thanks uncle Joe.
— Oklahoma Adam (@OklahomaAdam) October 12, 2021
You mean to tell me the Obama/Biden camp spent a week preparing for THIS!? #vpdebate
— Sean Hannity (@seanhannity) October 12, 2021
Ryan now having to debate Martha too
— Chuck Woolery (@chuckwoolery) October 12, 2021
"When a wise man has a controversy with a foolish man, the foolish man either rages or laughs, and there is no rest." -Proverbs 29:9
— Mitt Romney Central (@RomneyCentral) October 12, 2021
Al Gore blaming Biden's debate performance on the dew point.
— Ann Coulter (@AnnCoulter) October 12, 2021
Reporters slam Biden's debate giggling… drudge.tw/QgrUTl
— DRUDGE REPORT (@DRUDGE_REPORT) October 12, 2021
The upside of tonight: We never have to watch a Joe Biden debate again.
— Emily Miller (@EmilyMiller) October 12, 2021
Wow. "@alaskan: CNN's David Gergen: "Ryan was more presidential." … CNN's Gloria Borger: "Biden was condescending." #vpdebate"
— Hugh Hewitt (@hughhewitt) October 12, 2021
Dear Democrats: When your candidate is referred to as "Odd," "off-putting," "manic," "condescending" & "over-the-top" by MSM, you lost #TCOT
— Brad Dayspring (@BDayspring) October 12, 2021
Congrats to paul ryan. No question who has the temperament and ideas to be a great VP and next in line to be POTUS
— Tagg Romney (@tromney) October 12, 2021
@seanhannity Tickle me Biden will be the new hot toy this Christmas.
— clark w griswold (@Mr_Yalamanchili) October 12, 2021
Biden SHOULD thank Martha.
— Laura Ingraham (@IngrahamAngle) October 12, 2021
I miss Jim Lehrer. @newshour #debate
— Karl Rove (@KarlRove) October 12, 2021
Romney calls Ryan with congratulations after debate- wp.me/p4HKM-15ks
— CNN Political Ticker (@PoliticalTicker) October 12, 2021
Ed Rollins - Fox News contributor, Republican strategist, former Huckabee presidential campaign manager
President Obama in his debate with Gov. Romney seemed to be missing in action. Vice President Joe Biden should have been. He was rude, talked non-stop and did nothing to further the discussion in a serious way. He was like a Cheshire cat with his inappropriate smile, and it was like a political speech without anybody else in the dialogue.
Paul Ryan was knowledgeable and tried to have a serious discussion on very important issues. Biden insisted on talking over him.
This ended up like being trapped in a bar next to a know-it-all drunk. Biden wasn't drinking but he reinforced why he only got 1 % of the vote when he ran for president four years ago.
Ryan made a favorable impression. Biden reinforced the impression that he's a blowhard! Ryan helped his ticket. Biden hurt his. …
Joe Trippi - Democrat political analyst, former Howard Dean campaign manager, Fox News contributor
Ryan surprised with his grasp of foreign policy… Biden looked confident and in command, but might have come across as condescending at times.
Andrea Tantaros - Co-host of 'The Five', columnist for New York Daily News
While Thursday's vice presidential debate didn't change the minds of voters in either party, independents and women will only remember Biden's bizarre behavior — and not in a good way. Vice President Joe Biden lost on style and likely turned off women with his disrespectful, jerky mannerisms. Congressman Paul Ryan was steady and played it safe.
It was a draw on substance. Ryan won on the economy and entitlements. Biden bungled on Libya, but he won on Afghanistan. But as hard as Biden tried to overcompensate for President Obama's poor performance, the memory of his disaster in Denver wasn't repaired in Danville.
Dick Morris - Fox News contributor, political commentator, author
I think Biden raises serious questions about his ability to be a heartbeat away from the president. His inappropriate conduct is glaring and will backfire with the American people. He had no dignity or presidentiality.
Chris Wallace - host of FOX News Sunday, blasted Biden's antics:
…[I've] never seen anyone be so disrespectful in a presidential or vice presidential debate.
And Wallace said that he'd seen most of them — all but the first four in 1960. He called his demeanor "unprecedented."
"I don't believe I've ever seen a debate in which one participant was as openly disrespectful of the other as Biden was to Paul Ryan tonight," Wallace said.
He added: "It was openly contemptuous and disrespectful."
UPDATE via Hewitt blog:
Congressman Ryan turned in a sober, reassuring and detailed performance, winning new fans and solidifying his ticket's lead, which is growing.
UPDATES: The Wall Street Journal's summary is pitch perfect.
So now we know what Team Obama's comeback plan was following last week's defeat in the Presidential debate. Unleash Joe Biden to interrupt, filibuster, snarl, smirk and otherwise show contempt for Paul Ryan. The carnival act contributed to the least illuminating presidential or vice presidential debate of our lifetimes....
But this 90 minutes wasn't about an exchange of ideas or a debate over policies. It was a Democratic show of contempt for the opposition, an attempt to claim by repetitive assertion that Messrs. Ryan and Romney are radicals who want to destroy "the middle class." Mr. Ryan's cool under assault was a visual rebuttal of that claim, and we certainly know who looked more presidential.
Add to that the growing chorus of "angry old man" conclusions, and there's a disaster developing for the Democrats, the third in a row after President Obama's pratfall and the collapse of the Libyan cover-up. (Stephanie Cutter might be counted as a fourth.)
Follow Jayde Wyatt on Twitter @YayforSummer


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Islandia-based Whitsons Culinary Services has agreed to pay a $1.6 million out-of-court settlement to resolve charges that it failed to pass on discounts from vendors to school districts and other education providers, including nine districts and four nonprofits on Long Island.
New York State Attorney General Eric T. Schneiderman on Wednesday announced the settlement, including $807,000 in refunds and nearly the same amount in penalties, for not passing on savings from food vendors to schools in what he described as a violation of contracts along with state and federal regulations.
Whitsons also agreed to implement various measures to increase transparency in its billing and contracting process, assuring that discounts are passed on and that "off-invoice" payments to vendors aren't used to disguise rebates.
This is at least the second such settlement between food suppliers and the state for failing to pass on discounts to school districts related to the National School Lunch Program.
Sodexo last year settled with Schneiderman for $20 million in a similar case and sources said at least 10 others suppliers are being investigated. The attorney general's newly created Taxpayer Protection Bureau handled the investigation.
Whitsons has grown into one of the region's biggest suppliers of food to schools, corporations and a wide range of facilities. It has about 1,500 employees and $80 million in annual revenues, according to its website.
"On behalf of students, parents and taxpayers, we are pleased that these schools will get their money back," Schneiderman said in a written statement.
Although Whitsons settled, the company denied wrongdoing, saying its actions were based on its, and many other food suppliers', interpretations of a law that went into effect in 2003 regarding the handling of discounts.
"It said if you had a contract with a school entity that used the National School Lunch Program, the district could opt for the rebates on food purchases to be refunded to the district," said Holly Von Seggern, a spokeswoman for the Islandia-based company. "The wording is confusing. Whitsons is one of a dozen companies at least that interpreted it the way we did."
She said the federal government rewrote the law in 2007, clarifying ambiguities and triggering changes in the way companies like Whitsons handled discounts from vendors.
"At that time, Whitsons revisited its accounting practices and made some changes and hired a third party to make sure rebates were correctly allocated," Von Seggern said. "We must now uphold it retroactively back to 2003. We're happy to do that. And we cooperated fully with the investigation."
The attorney general said five Suffolk districts were affected, including East Hampton, South Country Central, Huntington, Bridgehampton and East Quogue. Three Nassau districts were affected, including Hicksville, Syosset Central and Plainview-Old Bethpage.
MercyFirst, the Mill Neck Family of Organizations and SCO Family of Services – The Robert J. McMahon Children's Center in Nassau also were part of the settlement along with SCO Family of Services – Madonna Heights in Suffolk.
The attorney general also found Whitsons entered into agreements with food and materials vendors, "claiming to market services," although they actually consisted of rebates that should have been credited to school districts.


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If her speech at the Golden Globes was merely a warm-up, Meryl Streep swung for the fences tonight on behalf of human rights, in a speech marked by passion, some tears, and a crowd-rousing call to action. She blasted the President who had called her "overrated" and, in an emotion-packed interlude, sang the words written by Emma Lazarus for the Statue of Liberty.
The event was the annual gala for the Human Rights Campaign, a national group that advocates on behalf of LGBTQ rights, where Streep received the group's
National Ally For Equality Award. Among the other honorees and speakers were Senator minority leader Charles Schumer, who was more impassioned and freewheeling than we are used to seeing him on the Senate floor; Moonlight writer Tarell Alvin McCraney; and late-night host Seth Meyers. But it was Streep who carried the night.
Introducing her, documentary filmmaker Ken Burns noted that after Donald Trump tweettacked her following the Golden Globes speech, "she said if she ended up in the East River I would know whodunit.
"But they're too scared of her to do anything," Burns continued, to cheers from the packed grand ballroom at the Waldorf-Astoria hotel. "especially when she reminds us constantly when the emperors of the world have no clothes. They're too embarrassed to do anything but hide in their castles and tweet." And, if her activism needed any justification, Burns added, he recalled words often, but wrongly, attributed to Abraham Lincoln: " 'To sin by silence when they should protest makes cowards of men.' It wasn't said by this man, Lincoln, but by a woman, of course. A fierce and courageous one like our honoree, she was a poet; her name was Ella Wheeler Wilcox. Please remember her."
Then it was Streep's turn. She spoke of the early and powerful influence of teachers when she was growing up in suburban New Jersey, and particularly of Paul Grossman, her music teacher when she was in sixth and seventh grades. He had taken the class on a field trip to the Statue of Liberty, she recalled.
"I can't remember what I did Tuesday, but I remember that," Streep said of the song on Liberty Island sung long ago.
"Our whole class stood at the feet of that huge, beautiful woman and we sang a song that he had taught us with the lyrics taken from the poem by Emma Lazarus engraved at the face of the monument." Streep paused as if considering her next move, and then began to sing. "Give me your tired your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, the wretched refuse of your teeming shore Send thee the homeless tempest toss't to me. I lift my lamp beside the golden door."
At one point she turned away from the audience, her eyes red with tears before continuing, and when finished, she half-whispered, "I can't remember what I did Tuesday, but I remember that."
Streep said that Paul Grossman later became Paula Grossman and was promptly fired, never seeing a classroom again. But her example and those of others, including many in the room, brought them all to today.
"So here we are in 2017 and our browsers have gone down," Streep said. "And we're in danger of losing all our information and we seem to be reverting to the factory settings. But we're not, we're not going to go back to the bad old days of ignorance and repression and hiding who we are. Because we owe it to the people who have died for our rights, and who have died before they even got their own. And we owe it to the pioneers of the LGBTQ movement, like Paula Grossman, and to the people on the front lines of all civil rights movements, not to let them down." She continued, making the speech more and more personal as she went along, even referencing Trump's insults.
"I am the most overrated and the most overdecorated…and currently I am the most over-berated," she said. "The weight of all my art is part of what brings me here to the podium. It compels me. It's against every one of my natural instincts, which is to" – and again she lowered her voice to a near whisper – "stay the fuck home.
"It compels me to stand up in front of people and say words that haven't been written for me, but that come from my life, from my convictions, and I have to stand up. It's embarrassing and it is terrifying to put the target on your forehead, and it sets you up for all sorts of attacks by armies of brownshirts and bots and worse. And the only way you can do it is to feel you have to, you don't have an option you have no option is to stand up. Be up. Act up!"
The last was of course, a purposeful reference to the post-Stonewall riots era of LGBTQ activism, and no one in the room missed the point. "We have the right to live our lives,," she concluded, "with God or without, as we choose. There is a prohibition against the establishment of a state religion in our Constitution, and we have the right to choose with whom we live, whom we love… and who and what gets to interfere with our bodies. As Americans, men, women, people, gay, straight, L, B, G, T, Q, all of us have the human right to Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness. And if you think people got mad when they thought the government was coming after their guns? Wait'll they come and try to take away our Happiness!"
Streep adjourned, to roaring cheers from the crowd.
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Toward the end of their terms, every President turns to thoughts of their 'legacy'. Naturally, as one enters the end of the term of office, thoughts turn to how they will be remembered and what parts of their time in office will live on after them. Now that it is roughly a month after President Obama left office, it's only fitting that we look back at his legacy.
If asked, I would imagine that former President Obama would list Obamacare, and likely the impetus for increased regulation of the banking industry including the Dodd-Frank law as his major domestic policy achievements. In the international arena, he has spoken of his pride with the Paris Climate Agreement, signed by over 120 nations.
So what will be President Obama's legacy? Regardless of what you think of his Presidency and his policies, the short answer is "probably not much".
So let's step back to the beginning of his Presidency. For all of the promise of his election, President Obama rode to office on a wave of growing dissatisfaction. The economy was in decline and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan were starting to drag on. Obama was a fresh, young face. But among the things he lacked were executive and legislative experience. The combination meant that he had little experience creating coalitions to drum up support for legislation.
It was clear the country wanted change. President Obama took that to hear and moved quickly to make major changes in line with his view of what was most needed. Most noticeably these were in the area of healthcare and reform of the banking industry.
Passage of the Affordable Care Act, commonly known as Obamacare, and Dodd-Frank and several related federal regulations happened relatively early in his Presidency when Democrats also controlled both houses of Congress. In the move to get that legislation passed, the President and Democrats in Congress did not want to compromise and so Obamacare passed without any Republican support. Similarly with Dodd-Frank, there was little Republican support in passing the legislation. Both of these landmark pieces of legislation became law almost exclusively with support from the President's own party.
Later is the Obama Administration, control of Congress had switched parties and the Republicans controlled the House of Representatives. To get something done, the President would have to work on a bi-partisan basis. However, he became frustrated that his agenda wasn't moving as he wanted. The President, who was a former constitutional law professor, famously said "I've got a pen…and I can use that pen to sign executive orders" and said he would go around Congress if they wouldn't pass the legislation he thought was needed. And he did so, attempting to induce change through several sweeping executive orders.
Most notably to his legacy was the Paris Climate Agreement. In a questionable move, President Obama—the former constitutional law professor–said he could implement the treaty by executive order rather than getting approval of the Senate as outlined in the Constitution (which requires that any international treaty be ratified by the Senate with a 2/3 vote) and worked to make it government policy. Again, because the President decided to move forward and not compromise or limit the goals he saw as necessary to reach this international agreement, he did so without getting bi-partisan support.
So, fast forward to last month when President Obama left office and a new President took up residence at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. What will be President Obama's policy legacy? What will endure from his time in office?
Very little. Republicans have long made the repeal of Obamacare their goal and campaign issues. Similarly, with the regulations and myriad of government agencies created with Dodd-Frank. Because those were passed with little Republican support, now that Republicans are the majority in both the House and the Senate, there are few on the Republican side of the aisle that have any interest in trying to preserve something they had no part in passing. Because there was little compromise, and little need or desire to broaden support when that legislation was passed, there is no one left with much incentive to preserve it when elections being another party to power, as always happens from time to time. The lack of legislative experience in building coalitions and because compromise was not needed to get Obamacare passed originally means that it will get repealed likely without much compromise now that another party is in control of Congress.
Similarly, most of the executive actions taken by the President and his Administration in the latter part of his term of office will get repealed. Even if one accepts that the Paris Climate Treaty could be implemented by executive order of President Obama, then it can be undone by executive order of President Trump. And President Obama's bold statements, born out of his frustration, to go around Congress with the stroke of his pen when he could, will be undone with the stroke of a pen now that he is out of office.
Sometimes the checks and balances of our system of government can be frustrating and sometimes things move ponderously slow. But the masterful part of that is when it does move and the moves are done with broad support, at least 'meeting in the middle' enough to get a cross section of support from across the political spectrum, then there is real action. Unfortunately for President Obama, years ago his legacy's lifespan was sealed to last only as long as Democrats remained in power. Though passing laws without having to compromise means you get more of what you want, getting little to no support outside his party also meant that there were few who had any interest, much less desire, to defend those same laws once President Obama and Democrats no longer were in control of the White House and Congress. As a result, there won't be much left of President Obama's policy legacy in four years.


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Let us all raise a glass:
"Zounds, lad, no need to kill yourself now!" a phantom from the 19th century tells the central character in Dick Wimmer's first novel, "Irish Wine," reassuring the struggling artist that someday his paintings will hang in the Tate Gallery in London.
But while the fictional painter, Seamus Boyne, was dismayed because of a poorly received art exhibit and had parked his car on railroad tracks when he heard that ghostly voice, Mr. Wimmer was the epitome of persistence.
"He was never going to give up," his son Ceo said. "Very driven."
Mr. Wimmer, who after 25 years of submissions and more than 150 rejections finally got that book published — to very positive reviews — died on May 18 at his home in Agoura Hills, Calif., his son said. He was 74.
Saying that agents and publishers had spurned him 162 times, Mr. Wimmer laid claim to being the most-rejected published novelist in history. Finally, in 1989, "Irish Wine" was published by Mercury House.
(Via The New York Times; photo credit: Spencer Weiner/Los Angeles Times.)


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A 15-year-old girl grabbed from behind while jogging in Fairfax County this weekend was able to fend off her attacker using pepper spray.
According to police, the teen was jogging in the area of Hayfield Road approaching Old Telegraph Road in Alexandria at approximately 10 p.m. Saturday when an unknown man grabbed her from behind.
The woman used pepper spray against her attacker.
"When he grabbed her, she was able to physically defend herself," Eddy Azcarate with Fairfax County Police told News4's Erika Gonzalez.
The suspect and the victim fled the scene in different directions.
"She's knowledgeable and she's aware, good for her," nearby resident Maritza Lagares said. "Unfortunate that it happened, but good for her."
The suspect was described as wearing a dark, long-sleeved shirt and cream colored pants at the time of the incident.
Washington, D.C., Maryland and Virginia local news, events and information
If you have any information on this crime, contact police at 1-866-411-TIPS.


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On Valley Edition: Rim Fire; Congressman Costa; Book Club; 'Home For The Holidays' Jazz Concert
This week on Valley Edition we take a look at the effect of fires on the Sierra Nevada. FM89 reporter Ezra David Romero visits multiple groves scorched by fires - caused naturally and by the human hand - and speaks with ecologists about the future of the forest burned by the Rim Fire. Gray George, a reporter with the Calaveras Enterprise joins Valley Edition Host Joe Moore in a discussion about logging in the Rim Fire burn area.
Also in the show, Moore speaks with Congressman Jim Costa about logging, the farm bill, the budget and more.
Later in the program FM89 Reporter Rebecca Plevin interviews Dinuba native Manuel Munoz about his book 'What You See in the Dark." The interview is part of KVPR's Book Club 'Homegrown.' The novel follows a director and actress who arrive in Bakersfield in the late 1950s to film a movie at a motel along the old Highway 99.
Ending the show, Moore speaks with Fresno Philharmonic Executive Director Stephen Wilson and local jazz singer Karen Marguth about the Fresno Philharmonic jazz inspired Home for the Holidays concert. The show takes place Saturday Dec. 7 at 7 p.m.


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Gen Alpha-Z by Various Authors
Paperback ISBN:978-1999300685
ABOUT: Gen Alpha-Z is a powerful little book that packs a massive literary punch. The sequel to the successful debut, The Originals, Gen Alpha-Z is a breath-taking collection of incredible short stories written by talented young writers aged between six and 21 years around the world. These hugely authors entered The little BIG Book Competition run by The Lil' Author Skool in 2018-2019. Judged by an independent panel, eight stories selected to be in this new anthology won and a further 16 were chosen as stand-out stories that merited publication. Launching on Universal Children's Day - 20th November 2019 - #GenAlphaZ is set to be a huge success that showcases the astoundingly high quality of writing by today's children and teenagers - the next generation of authors are already showing what they're capable of and it's incredibly excited for the future of literature!
ABOUT THE AUTHOR: The Lil' Author Skool is a not for profit organisation. It was founded in 2016 by London born author A. Bello, who wrote her debut novel 'Emily Knight I am...' at aged 12! .We are passionate about encouraging young people to read and write and want to give them as many free and affordable opportunities. The Lil' Author Skool is part of The Author School (GB Entrepreneur Awards Finalists 2016) and we help young writers aged 5-21 years old. The little BIG Book Comp started in 2016 and The Originals is our first book.
For more on The Lil' Author Skool
Twitter: @lilauthorskool
Instagram: thelilauthorskool
Website: www.thelilauthorskool.com


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Keeping children safe in schools in Somalia
Internal conflict and repeated humanitarian disasters have impacted Somalia's people for many years, severely constraining the development and the welfare of Somali children.
In June 2019, Keeping Children Safe invited 'Formal Education Network for Private Schools' (FENPS) to join our international child safeguarding network. FENPS became the first Somali organisation to join the network and since then they have actively advocated the adoption of child safeguarding measures with their peers, partners and government institutions.
Using our resources and toolkit, FENPS has conducted multiple child safeguarding workshops within their network and, working in collaboration with the UN Education Cluster, is encouraging more Somali organisations to join the KCS members' network. Through FENPS alone over 20,000 children are now better protected from harm.
Championing safe sport for girls in Kenya
Keeping Children Safe member Moving the Goalposts (MTG) is a sport-for-development organisation in Kenya that uses football as an entry point to reach out to girls and young women (9-25 years) through reproductive health and rights education, life skills and economic empowerment initiatives.
MTG works with over 9000 girls and young women in Kilifi, Kwale, Mombasa and Tana River counties. In 2016 this community-based organisation was given the 'Sport for Good' award by the Laureus Foundation, for its innovation in child protection and safeguarding.
To make it easier to identify and follow-up concerns about exploitation and abuse, a special group of volunteer girls called Safeguarders are trained in how to protect and safeguard participating in sports activities.
The girls are commissioned to act as child protection champions in their communities by passing on the skills they have learned to other girls and young women involved in football. By doing so, they are not only able to identify potential incidences of child abuse, but also help to create a safe environment where fellow girls and young women can report issues that affect them without fear of intimidation.
Safeguarding children with HIV/AIDS in Sub-Saharan Africa
HIV and AIDS-related illnesses are the leading cause of death in Sub-Saharan Africa, leaving a trail of destruction, families bereft, and many thousands of children orphaned and vulnerable. More than 80 percent of children orphaned by HIV/AIDS live in this region and four in five young people (aged 10-19) affected by new HIV infections are girls (UNAIDS 2019). Most children directly affected by HIV/AIDS continue to live with their extended family (source). As the world's largest donor, responding to the needs of orphans and vulnerable children affected by HIV/AIDS, the US President's Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR) is committed to supporting these children with the clinical and social services they need to survive, thrive, and to become healthy and productive adults. The organisation's main partner is the US Agency for International Development (USAID).
Keeping Children Safe delivered child safeguarding training to USAID partners throughout Sub-Saharan Africa, from Ethiopia to South Africa to Nigeria. Since then, scores of local organisations have developed or strengthened their safeguarding measures, thereby better-protecting tens of thousands of African children from violence and other forms of abuse.
We are here to help
If your organisation works for and with children, then it is high time to check if you have put rigorous child safeguarding measures in place – starting from the top of the organisation, right down to your field staff and outside suppliers. Prevention, after all, is better than lives destroyed because of abuse.
If you have already used our free self-assessment tool and would like to discuss details of the results with a team member, do get in touch as soon as possible.


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Wellspring Digital
Digital Marketing that Gets Real Results
We are a strategic AND tactical digital marketing agency: we provide digital marketing strategy and then we will execute on chosen channels using our in-house team. You do not need to hire a strategist and then find vendors to make your digital campaigns work: we have the appropriate skills sets, tools and experience in-house. Our core strengths include: • Website design and development • SEO • Marketing Automation (all platforms including HubSpot, Marketo, Pardot etc) • PPC (Google Ads & Bing Ads) • Social Media Ads (all platforms) • Social Media organic & community management • Content Marketing • App Store Optimization (ASO) • Influencer Marketing • Reputation Management • Data Analytics • Ecommerce Working with us you will quickly find we live and breathe our Core Values: Integrity, Transparency & Results. We position ourselves as a trusted partner, providing advice, recommendations and support as our clients require. Our team includes several industry leaders and is 15 strong, based primarily in the United States (in Frederick MD, Naples FL and Austin TX) with staff in the London, UK and Eilat, Israel.
$1,000 +


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In-store signings well underway….
Thanks to everyone who came to meet the band on release day last Friday (queueing up the road!) at Fives in Leigh On Sea, Essex, and HMV Oxford Street!
Don't miss a chance to meet the boys, snap up an album and get it signed on the in-store signing tour!


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Look out 2014 Mercedes-Benz S-class and BMW 7-series. And you too, Lexus LS There's a new limo in town, and it's the long-wheelbase Range Rover. In previous years we've noticed that Range Rovers have become a popular alternative to traditional plutobarges, and lately Land Rover has noticed this as well. And at the 2013 LA Auto Show the company has debuted a long-wheelbase version of their popular SUV (feels wrong to call it a truck, doesn't it?) It may be a little late to the party, but in some ways it's right on time, as a number of automakers are suddenly fielding full-size luxury cars, and automakers that have been fielding full-size luxury cars are planning even grander luxury cars.
The newest Range Rover had its wheelbase stretched by 7.8 inches, with 7.3 of those inches benefiting rear passenger legroom. The concept of a long-wheelbase Range Rover is actually nothing new, as a long-wheelbase model existed for a time in the 1990s, and also added a few extra inches to the rear doors. Though that was in the days before Range Rovers forced their way into the segment of chauffeured personal luxury cars.
On offer in the long-wheelbase Range Rover will be the executive seating package, an alternative to the bench seats which will be offered as standard. As most long-wheelbase Range Rovers will be chauffeured, we'd imagine that this box will be ticked in a good percentage of long-wheelbase orders.
Land Rover has also simultaneously rolled out the Autobiography Black trim for the Range Rover, which on this side of the pond will be available only in the long-wheelbase Range Rover.
"The Range Rover Autobiography Black is our most luxurious specification yet," said Phil Popham, Jaguar Land Rover Group Marketing Director. "It epitomizes sophisticated design with immaculate attention to detail. The subtle, elegant and luxurious finishing touches combine with a first class experience for both driver and passengers to deliver new levels of exclusivity to our customers."
The Autobiography Black will be set apart by unique grille and side vents, along with different tail lights and auxiliary vents. Two special seven-spoke 21-inch and 22-inch wheel designs will be offered, featuring a high gloss polished finish. Executive Class seats will come standard in Autobiography Black, and will include a redesigned center console along with 10.2 inch rear screens fitted to the rear of the front seats, along with a Meridian Audio system. Autobiography Black will feature a center console with USB charging ports and electrically folding leather-covered tray tables, as well as swank new massage seats which will be able to recline up to 17 degrees. A chiller compartment will also come standard in Autobiography Black trim.
The long-wheelbase Range Rover Autobiography Black is expected to start at $185,000 -- out of range of the standard Mercedes-Benz S-class and BMW 7-series, but just in the neighborhood of where the upcoming extra-long-wheelbase S-class is expected to retail. Call it a preemptive strike.
The Los Angeles Auto Show has long served as a spotlight for "green" cars, and a popular place to unveil new hybrid and electric vehicles. We'll have photos, video and complete coverage of all the manufacturer reveals and top news from this year's LA Auto Show right here, so check back often.


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Confusions road signs
When taking the Highway 23 exit off the west 101 Freeway, a combination of two confusing signs await the driver.
The first one says you're on the way to Simi Valley and Filmore. Filmore? You have quite a drive off the 23 to arrive there. What happened to Moorpark? The 23 takes you right to it before eventually becoming the 118 into Simi Valley. How did Filmore get a place on the sign and not Moorpark?
The second sign says "Your Tax Dollars At Work." An "End Of Road Work" sign a appears a short distance later with absolutely no construction of any kind going on.
It would seem we're being misled in both cases.
Nick Larsen, Simi Valley


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Jonathan Farrington
Jonathan Farrington is a keynote speaker, business coach, mentor, author, consultant, and sales strategist, who has personally guided hundreds of companies and more than one hundred thousand frontline salespeople and sales leaders towards optimum performance levels.
He is the CEO of JF Initiatives, the parent company of Top Sales World, Top Sales Magazine, Top Sales Awards, Top Sales Futurists, Top Sales Articles and soon to be launched, Top Sales Leadership. Jonathan is also Director of Research for the Sandler Research Center.
Formerly, Jonathan was the CEO of The JFA Group, which he established in 1992 and sold in 2007.
Prior to that, he earned his spurs in some of the most demanding and competitive market sectors – IT, Telecommunications and Finance. Outstanding achievement at an early stage in his career provided a 'fast-track' passage to several board level appointments, working with a number of the largest and most successful international corporations including: IBM, Wang, Legal and General, Andersen Consulting, Litton Industries and The Bank of Tokyo.
Jonathan's written work has been republished by a host of journals including The New York Times, The Washington Post and The London Times. He is consistently named amongst the top most influential sales and marketing experts in the world.
His personal site is at www.jonathanfarrington.com
Jonathan's LinkedIn profile can be found here: www.linkedin.com/in/jonathanfarrington
And you will find him on Twitter – @topsalesworld


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A boy – could he have been 7? – called by his adult to look at Aphrodite, walked straight past her to a vitrine full of small Hellenistic masterpieces.
Aphrodite Anadyomene (rising), marble, late 2nd century BC; thought to be from Rhodes.
Metropolitan Museum of Art, NY
There, hands in his pockets, his feet positioned in the manner of a ballet dancer, poised, he studied the figurines.
Aphrodite, pensive, inclines her head towards the boy and thinks: 'What race of people is this?'
The boy is one of the lucky ones, of course, to be so comfortable in a museum. And this musuem full of wonders.


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Present Situation :-
- Women are subjected to various forms of violence such as eve-teasing, sexual harassment, domestic violence, marital rape, cyber harassment, psychological harassment, discrimination, human trafficking, genital mutiliation, sexism, honour killings etc.
- Reporting of crimes against women is on the rise year by year. Rapid growth of technology and rising modernization could not help in improving the situation.
- The age-old discrimination against women has deep roots in the various religious norms, cultures and especially our patriarchial society.
- A young girl going to the school, a teenage girl partying late nights, a student wearing short skirts, a stay at home mother are all equally vulnerable to harassment and molestation.
Steps taken by Indian Government :-
- To curb the crimes against women, Indian government deployed PCR vans with GPS system to ensure the security of women in Delhi NCR region.
- Telangana government introduced "SHE Teams" to tackle crimes on women. This program is a huge success inspiring all the other Indian states.
- 'Ministry of Home Affairs' allotted the number "112" for Nationwide Emergency Response System.
- To protect child brides and to eradicate child marriages, Government forbids marital sex with the bride under 18 years of age and would be considered rape if not followed.
- Prenatal sex discernment is banned, preventing determination of sex of the child before birth and lowering the rate of female infanticide in India.
- Media is not allowed to reveal the victim's name and details, thus encouraging the harassment victims to report the crime.
- "Domestic violence act" enforced on 26th of October (2006), hinders the male dominance over their wives.
- IPC Section 498-A obstructs the husband and relatives subjecting women to any sort of criminal act and makes women feel respected at their homes.
What still needs to be done :-
- More patrolling vans should be deployed to ensure the safety of women.
- Movies that show eve-teasing and harassment as love should be censored.
- Gender sensitization programs should be conducted on a regular basis at schools and collges.
- Uneducated Indian politicians pollute the entire reputation of government officials. A social media hashtag #AintNoCinderella received popularity among teenagers mocking politicians who feel women must not roam on the streets after 12 AM. Politicans who are against gender equality should be stripped of power.
- Rapid misuse of Dowry harassment law forced Supreme Court to dilute the law to some extent. This discourages victims in genuine cases to report the harassment. Steps should be taken to deter false cases, thereby genuine victims can be rescued.
- Andhra Pradesh is the state ranking first with a maximum number of cases reported every year addressing gender discrimination and crime against women along with Bihar, Uttar Pradesh, and West Bengal. Special care must be taken in these states to reduce the crimes.
Conclusion :-
To transform India into a developed country, gender equality and crimes against women are the most important things to be focused on. Legends like Malala Yousafzai have repeatedly inspired women all over the globe and left an inevitable imprint on the human race. The country now demands a dire need for the upliftment of the basic mentality of looking at women differently.


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Today, I'm offering a snippet from my work in progress, a cross-over paranormal romantic suspense with BDSM elements, entitled Second Chance Succubus. CSI Chayse Wolffe and his twin Nik have followed Lady Aislynn down into her club. They've walked into a 'playroom' and are watching a scene.
Chayse has been pretty vanilla (for a werewolf). He just got a whole new education. ;) There are several great authors on the Weekend Writing Warrior list and a few of my favorites are Sarah Ballance, Charmaine Gordon, Goran Zidar, Karla Doyle, and Monica Enderle Pierce. Thank you all for stopping by and happy reading! :)


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The Seoul of the South
Myung Ga Won
We all have our late night cravings, and for some there is nothing as satisfying as a good bowl of hot soup. In particular, galbi tang which is a long stewed beef shortrib soup. This dish is a specialty at Myung Ga Won.
This comforting dish starts with USDA choice beef shortribs simmered for hours with radish, leeks, mushrooms and Korean dates. Galbi tang is not only hearty, it is believed to offer health benefits through vital nutrients and minerals. For many Koreans, it is as chicken soup is for Americans—just feel good comfort food. This dish is great anytime of day, but there is something really special about digging into a bowl in the early morning hours. It is a good thing that Myung Ga Won is open 24 hours.
Myung Ga Won, also known by foodies as MK1, is a long-standing establishment in Duluth and conveniently located almost immediately off the exit to Pleasant Hill Road. The two story venue offers a range of dining options from Korean BBQ tables to more classic tables for those wishing to dine on something other than grilled meat. Upstairs offers private rooms for various sized parties that are perfect for meetings or celebrations. The decor is simple, but with a definite Korean flavor. Everything from the seats to the tiny ornaments located on display throughout the restaurant take you back to Korea.
Aside from galbi tang, Myung Ga Won offers really good BBQ options and a number of popular homestyle dishes including galbi jjim, a slow braised short rib dish with either a soy or spicy chili sauce base. For those craving lighter fare, there are also options for seafood and tofu soups. And as with any good Korean restaurant, these entrees are accompanied by a variety of side dishes that range from kimchi to small salads and pickled vegetables. Definitely make your way over Myung Ga Won and try a variety of dishes from their extensive menu!


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503 Pueblo Vista
San Antonio, TX 78258
- Details
- Map it
This beautiful, well maintained home in the popular Hills at Sonterra offers incredible landscapping and a sparkling pool. This 4 bed 3.5 bath home has an office, family room with wood floors and custom built-ins. There are two fireplaces with one in the over-sized master bedroom. The master also features a balcony that overlooks the pool along with a huge shower and jetted tub. There is also a water softener, slab ready for outdoor cabana with parking on the side of the house. This home has everything you want.
503 Pueblo Vista, San Antonio TX 78258


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I recently ditched the roommates and started living on my own. That meant I didn't have to clean up after someone else's disgusting bathroom habits, but it also meant I had to buy my own living room furniture—the essential part of home theater gear that interfaces with your butt as you play games, watch movies, and HDTV. After field testing nearly 50 couches, this is the one I went with. And after the jump, why.
Nearly a decade after the event, most of my college-level instincts are still intact. Naturally, I thought it would be really cool to have a couple of bean bag chairs scattered through the new place. Leopard skin patterned. The girlfriend vetoed that idea in about half a second. Then we got into the car and went looking for something I could sit on that retained the enveloping qualities of a giant vinyl sack of Styrofoam peanuts, with the appearance of something respectable. We eventually spent a few weekends sitting in the cheapies at ikea, the outrageously-priced and jokingly-named stuff at Design In Reach, and everything in between. As it turns out, a lot of the fancy stuff just feels like shit to sit on. And a lot of the comfy stuff looks like it belongs in grandma's house, covered in plastic. Then I found the Bee Lounge, in SF's SOMA district, at this store called iExpress.
It is fucking huge, at 96 inches by 48 inches deep, so I fall right into it. There is no sitting on this thing. Its dimensions explicitly invite slouching as far as the human frame can go without actually lying down, and at this point, my legs are still only hanging off it. And covered in Microfiber, it feels like suede, but wipes clean after an uh-oh. It still cost as much as a small plasma, but no regrets here. I will park my ass on this thing 12 hours a day, between work, play, and nap time, for the next 8-10 years. That is what we call value, considering the TV would last only 1/3 that long before I would be whining for a new one. I almost got it in orange, too, but was talked down to a more sober graphite. Probably a good call, as I enter my 30s.
What are you sitting on while you watch TV?
Bee Lounge [iExpress SF]


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Drop-in Fun | Parties | Day Programs
Pre-booked or drop-in fun, engaging and educational activities for children. Stay and play for an hour or two!
Keep little hands busy and little minds active while you are shopping, at an AMG healthcare appointment, or taking some time for yourself. (Please note: we are a drop-in centre – not a daycare.)
Themed-linked, inventive and engaging activities often shared with the seniors upstairs, Safe, enclosed, outdoor playground. Mini-Gym, Mini-Trampoline and Media Centre. Customized Birthday Parties, P.A. Day Programs.
Tiny Treasures is happy to host your child's birthday party. A themed event or a fun party with activities and games, your child will be sure to have a memorable experience – and you don't have to deal with the mess in your home!
Let us entertain your school-age children while you wind down at the Bistro with Wine-Tasting + Tapas. Everyone will have some downtime before the busyness of the weekend.
Ask us about the ballet, Taekwondo and gymnastic classes held in our fitness salons. The residents of the Manor Village love to watch these young people show off their new found skills.
See some of the fun we have while caregivers utilize the services within our building.
Call Tiny Treasures today to book your appointment.
Mon–Fri: 9am – 5pm; extended hours for special event parties like birthdays!
At The Advanced Medical Group it's all about the family.
We hire only the best medical professionals to provide quality support and care for you and your needs.
Stephanie has 30 years of experience as an Early Childhood Educator working with infants up to school-aged children. She is also a published children's author and operated a children's party planning business.


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Browse Newsroom
- 4 results found
- (-) Processed Food Products
- (-) Near East
- (-) Japan
- (-) South Korea
- (-) Taiwan
- Clear all
February 8, 2022
American Agricultural Exports Shattered Records in 2021
The American agricultural industry posted its highest annual export levels ever recorded in 2021, Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack announced today.
November 16, 2017
U.S. Farm Exports Hit Third-Highest Level on Record
Contact: USDA Press Phone: (202) 720-4623 Email: email@example.com WASHINGTON, Nov. 16, 2017 – U.S. agricultural exports totaled $140.5 billion in fiscal year (FY) 2017, climbing nearly $10.9 billion from the previous year to the third-highest level...
February 14, 2013
Ambassadors of Cheese
For 80 years, Rogue Creamery has been passionate about the art of cheese making. This small company located in Oregon's scenic Rogue River Valley produces a variety of handcrafted artisan cheeses using milk from its dairies. Its blue cheeses are...
After more than two decades of exporting U.S. agricultural products, Good Life Foods is thriving internationally with support from USDA's Foreign Agricultural Service (FAS). Before starting the company, Good Life Foods' president Emil Font served as...


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It was like getting head from an anaconda
You must be Logged in to post a comment
Is that because she was swallowing you whole, or because she only had two teeth?
Anacondas have 100 rear-facing teeth. They're like a living R4pe-Axe condom
"I'm sick of these mothafuckin snakes on my mothafuckin dick!"
And she thought it was like giving head to a garter snake
As in, she can unhinge her jaw? Or as in, you had no way of removing your dick from her mouth because she was holding on to it so tightly? Either way, awesome!
This is beautifully ambiguous
Have you ever seen a snake eat? It's pretty crazy. This could either mean: she had a tiny mouth and he had a huge dick; she can unhinge her jaw; she can deep-throat like a champ; or something else my imagination can't think up.
Seeing as how this is Ohio I can imagine she only has 2 teeth. And maybe she bites too.
Kind of surprised with the negative comments this sounds like it is a good thing to me.
I can't tell if this is a win or not...
how do you know what getting head from an anaconda feels like?
Forked tongue?
Awesome deepthroat!
Not as bad as having your boob bit by one
Maatt daaamon FTW!
with just a little less teeth, I imagine. Not so good
Strong hand!
Sounds like a compliment to the girl!!!
I love this because I can't tell if a guy or girl said it or if it's bad or good...... I applaud you.
Im not sur if this is good or bad
I don't think that's healthy..
that cant be pleasant
Haha good thang.!!


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Direct travel between Cuba, Orlando takes flight in July, GOAA says
Flights to Havana begin July 8
Central Florida residents will soon be able to take direct flights from Orlando to Cuba, according to the Greater Orlando Aviation Authority.
GOAA announced Thursday that Island Travel and Tours will take passengers on non-stop flights from Orlando International Airport to Jose Marti International Airport in Havana beginning July 8.
"With the changing dynamics in the relationship between the U.S. and Cuban governments, we are pleased to offer these flight options to residents in Central Florida," said GOAA executive director Phil Brown.
The 90-minute flights will carry 120 passengers at a time and will be offered once a week, on Wednesdays.
The company plans to use Boeing 737-300 aircraft with 112 coach seats and eight first-class seats.
A second weekly flight will be added on Sundays later in the summer, travel officials said.
The starting cost for the trip is $429. Baggage fees are $35 for the first bag and increasing after that.
Travelers to Cuba will need to get prior approval from the U.S. Customs and Border Protection Agency
While general licenses for travel are not granted for tourism, passengers in 12 categories, including family visitation, religion, professional research, athletics, journalism or public performance are granted permission.
"It is an opportunity that (Island Travel and Tours) saw that was unserved, so many times the carrier, or the tour operator in this particular case, saw that there was no one serving it from Orlando, and so obviously they jumped on it," said Victoria Jaramillo, of the Greater Orlando Aviation Authority.
Beginning next week, people will be able to go online and review the different reservation packages.
Late last year, the United States and Cuba announced they were re-establishing diplomatic ties after a half-century of Cold War hostility.
Also see: Time to start planning your trip to Cuba? Not so fast
Charter flights to Cuba already go out of airports in Miami and Tampa.


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One of several cannon facing north near the visitor center at Antietam National Battlefield in western Maryland. We hired a guide via the National Park service and enjoyed the tour and discussion so much that a three hour tour turned into 4 and a half. Maybe a bit more. The kids were great, they definitely drifted in and out of the conversation but were clearly listening and asking questions throughout much of it.
I can't accurately describe the feeling of standing in some of these battlefields where tens of thousands of men died fighting. In the case of Antietam it was over twenty thousand in one day. Gettysburg was more, over three days.
|Union Cannons, Antietam Battlefield, Maryland, USA


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