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!!> Ebook ➨ The Dead Girls Club ➩ Author Damien Angelica Walters – Tactical-player.co.uk
This is basically Goosebumps for grownups.First and foremost, the description for this book gives away entirely too much of the plot The only thing not covered in the summary is the ending Alright clears throat here it goesThis was an exhausting read for me and I attribute this to the writing style The story is told in the popular Then Now alternating chapter format, of which I m a HUGE fan The worst way this can go wrong is if one of those narratives is unbearable and in this case, it s the Now chapters, told via the adult version of the main character, Heather The MC is OVER THE TOP UNBELIEVABLE in her actions and reactions I couldn t skim through these chapters fast enough As for the Then chapters narrated by tween Heather, there is entirely TOO MUCH DIALOGUE If I wanted to endure tween girls bickering incessantly I d go hang out in a middle school cafeteria There s little to no character development of the four girls featured in this story We re just kinda dropped into their lives and expected to connect with them.The gratuitous pop culture references are annoying It s the 90 s, we get it.The plotline led me to believe this would be a dark, creepy and foreboding read Unfortunately that promise didn t pan out I was provided an ARC by the publisher in exchange for an honest review. Is there any crueler lie we tell kids Regardless of what happens, of how deep the scars might run, we say they ll be okay and they believe it They trust us But what else are we supposed to say Hey, kid, childhood is a bitch and she leaves marksI may have done a monstrous thing, but I m not a monster, I m not I believed that once I wish I could believe it now Dr Heather Cole has a pretty nice life, a thriving practice, offering psychological therapy to kids under 18, a beautiful river front home, and a studly carpenter of a husband who runs his own business But one day she receives an envelope with one half of a matched pair of necklaces, the half that had belonged to her friend Becca, her bff back when they were twelve, the bff whose disappearance had never been solved, the bff she had killed Uh oh.Damien Angelica Walters image from her site credit Justin AshlyeRebecca Lillian Thomas, Becca, had nearly white hair and blue eyes Nicknamed Ghost Girl by her peers, she had a home life that was less than stellar, featuring a mom who had issues with alcohol and self control Becca had the bruises to show for it She had an invisible friend and a particular fixation on someone, or something, called The Red Lady She was into true crime stories, serial killer stuff Her bff was Heather, a fan of horror and science fiction Becca s mother worked in real estate, which allowed Becca surreptitious access to an empty for sale house nearby This is where Becca chilled her friends, Heather and two of the Dead Girls Club, with tales of THE RED LADY, a local legend involving someone who was done dirt by torch and pitchfork sorts and vowed vengeance Becca seemed pretty convinced that she was real, and that she spoke to her Soooo, was Becca in need of anti psychotic meds or was there any reality to her tales And how gullible were her pals Girls of that tender age are in a nether world between believing in fairy tales and knowing how to tell the difference between the real and the imaginary Maybe they have a foot in both realms Lean a bit this way, or turn back the other and you are in or out, with considerable consequences What if they saw, heard, and felt things that suggested something supernatural Can those things be explained materially We know early on that this involvement ends badly How did that come to be Who was responsible The Dead Girls Club flips back and forth between today and the time of the killing, about 25 30 years give or take Becca s mother, Lauren, was convicted of killing her, although that seems a bit suspect, given that Becca s body was never found Nevertheless, Lauren has recently been released from prison, and seems the likeliest source of the items that keep turning up to remind Heather of her dark secret Heather turns PI, and does all she can to track down Lauren and to see if any of the surviving DGC members might be up to no good Her memories keep seeping into her consciousness as she goes about her gumshoe labors Her travails include her dealings with her husband, Ryan He has a client who seems never to pay his bills, and Heather keeps interrupting phone calls he is on that cause him to hang up a bit too quickly What s up with that They have a cute couples game that they play with each other, offering a cryptic one line summary of a movie, for the other to figure out That offers a chance to toss in some nice filmic references I wish there had been of that There are some nice elements in the book that merit mention Memory is given consideration when you recall the event, you aren t remembering the event itself, only the last recollection A memory of a memory And if the mind wants something to be real, it can rearrange facts and circumstances to suit Sometimes we make up stories to explain things to ourselves sometimes we do it to hide the truth This is actually pretty much the case I have memories of concrete events in my past that I know to be completely false Makes me wonder if memories have telomeres, like cells do In cells, every regeneration takes off another telomere, until there are no , at which point, the cell is no longer able to regenerate itself, definitely not a good thing, buh bye cell, at least well functioning cell It may be that memories have a fixed number of repeats before they degrade, as well This introduces the question of how truly Heather is recalling her experience as a twelve year old There is also a question raised of how far would you go to hang on to a treasured friendship These invest the novel with some real world moral, and scientific concerns Heather is also confronted with the cost of living a lie, which adds to the real world perspective.In reading a damaged woman in distress tale of this sort, it is important to feel a connection, to feel sympathy, maybe empathy There is enough in here to like about Heather, particularly her choice of profession But I did not feel for her the sort of interest that would raise the novel above the pack Becca is presented only in the past tense, in a book divided between then and now, so she gets a lot fewer pages, but she is by far the most interesting character in the book, a very powerful presence The portrayal of the relationship between Becca and Heather was a particularly strong element The secondary characters remain just that Heather s husband, Ryan, seemed a plot device and was not much developed as a character Nor were the other DGC members, or sundry supporting players Of course, in a horror book, the main thing is whether it provides chills For me, there were definitely some While there is no question that there is creepiness aplenty here, both in the events of 1991 and in what Heather goes through as an adult, these didn t cost me any shuteye But take that with a shaker of sale Few books do There is ambiguity throughout as to whether there was actual paranormal activity going on back in 1991 How much of what happened can be explained Are there occurrences that cannot One thing about this book is that it is entirely about the females Heather s husband, Ryan, is a secondary character, uninvolved in, maybe even hostile to, her challenges as an adult There are no males of note in the story of 1991, other than as back story baddies No white knights riding to the rescue to fret about Heather is tough enough to take on her personal horrors on her own While I would not put this in the top tier of horror writing, I did enjoy reading The Dead Girls Club, looked forward to finding out what was going on and just what the hell had actually happened when Heather and Becca were kids While it may not keep you up at night, this book certainly offers several hours of escapist entertainment, and if it creeps you out than it did me, then so much the better The lady She looks hungry, like maybe she s not a lady at all but a monster wearing a lady face That s how they trick you., monsters They put normal faces on so you think they re real, but they re not And when you get too close to run away, they show you their real ones, she says, eyes serious and far too knowing Review posted November 8, 2019Publication date December 10, 2019I received an ARE from Crooked Lane And I didn t have to kill anyone to get it Well, I suppose if I had, I would probably not exactly fess up about it here, so, maybe I did and maybe I didn t Thanks, folks EXTRA STUFFLinks to the Walters personal, Twitter, Instagram and FB pagesShe is the author of the 2018 novel Cry Your Way Home, and two short story collections, Sing Me Your Scars 2015 and Paper Tigers 2016 Her work has been included in The Year s Best Dark Fantasy Horror and The Year s Best Weird Fiction, and many anthologies and magazines Interviews Night Worms The Dead Girls Club On Inspiration and What s Hiding in the Dark with Author Damien Angelica Walters by Ashley Sawyers Ginger Nuts of Horror DAMIEN ANGELICA WALTERS INVITES YOU TO THE DEAD GIRLS CLUBItem of Interest ABC News Investigators in Slender Man case discuss chilling interviews with 12 year old attempted murderers by Allie Yang and Sean Dooley The story is told from the viewpoint of Heather, a child psychologist, who is the last person I would ever want to be treating my child or any child Heather has a secret that she has repressed for thirty years and when she receives half of a friendship necklace in the mail, she knows her past has caught up to her When she was twelve, she performed a ritual with her best friend, Becca, which left Becca dead and Heather not remembering how she got rid of the body Becca s mom went to prison for the murder and until now, Heather thought no one knew her role in Becca s death With the appearance of Becca s half of the necklace she knows someone is telling her they know what she did Heather s fragile world and psyche come crashing down as Heather tries to figure out who is targeting her and her past This isn t really a horror story unless you are an impressionable twelve year old with an very active imagination In the THEN portions of the book, Becca, Heather, and two other girls like to tell each other very scary stories and Becca claims the stories she tells about the Red Lady are true The other two girls believe Becca s claims but Heather is sure that Becca is making up the stories about the Red Lady Eventually Becca goads Heather into proving that she believes the Red Lady is real, with disastrous consequences The NOW portions of the book consist of a hysterically paranoid Heather neglecting her patients She doesn t even take notes during sessions because she totally zones out the children she is treating, IF she even shows up for appointments Heather also proceeds to destroy friendships and her marriage as she won t tell anyone why she is going totally off the rails Everybody is a potential enemy to her and it feels to me that Heather must have been stuck at her twelve year old emotional level even now as a forty year old woman The author does a great job of portraying a desperate woman who is out of her mind frantic but Heather is such an unlikeable character that it s hard to have any sympathy for her plight Instead I was feeling sorry for all the people in her current life I did want to get to the end of the book to find out who did what and when and why but if I d had my way, Heather would be on some really strong chill pills while I read the story Thank you to Crooked Lane Books and NetGalley for this ARC. 2.5 starsSomeone, please tell me how this is a supernatural thriller So four 12 year old girls form a Dead Girl s club and one tells a scary story about the Red Lady who is a witch in her story Umm, that s a story Did I miss anything supernatural happening besides story telling That s my first beef with this book My second beef is that I had a hard time connecting with or feeling for any of the characters in this book except for Ryan, the husband of Heather, a child psychologist I mainly felt sorry for him Heather has received a necklace in the mail It is the other half of a necklace she had when she was twelve years old The other half belonged to her best friend, Becca Rebecca who was murdered.This book is told in Then and Now chapters and I have to say I only enjoyed the Then chapters I enjoyed the Red Lady story and how Becca spooked her friends when she told the story to them That was the best part of the book for me I found that storytelling to be brilliant and engaging.Otherwise, in the Now sections, Heather was mainly falling apart and becoming paranoid IS Becca still alive Who mailed her the locket necklace Why is someone doing this to her Plus, why isn t she telling her husband anything Because she has a secret, a terrible dark secretbut still.As Heather begins to grow desperate, those in her life begin to take notice, but can anyone save her from her past This one wasn t for me But check out the other review There are others who are really enjoying this book I can t fault the writing, this just wasn t the book for me Although this book did not work for me, I would be willing to read of this Author s books in the future.Thank you to Crooked Lane Books and NetGalley who provided me with a copy of this book in exchange for an honest review All the thoughts and opinions are my own. The synopsis of this book sounds like it was written just for me Pairing a comparison of Head Full of Ghosts with a creepy rhyme Yes, please. The Dead Girls Club by Damien Angelica Walters will be published on December 10th, 2019 by Crooked Lane Books It is a psychological thriller with a hint of fantasy thrown in to keep you on the edge of your seat The story alternates from 1991 to present day, focusing on the friendship between two teenage girls, Heather and Becca The tale reveals bit by bit, challenging readers to decide for themselves what information is missing and what could be happening It s not possible that the Red Lady has come back to life after centuries to get revenge, is it Heather and Becca form a storytelling club, as the title suggests They meet at an unoccupied house currently on the market with two other friends All four girls love being scared, but one story seems all too real Becca shares the history of the Red Lady, a woman scorned and out for vengeance Dirt in victims mouth Buried alive Multiple random deaths Did it really happen In a teenager s mind, anything is possible but this time, Becca has convinced them the woman is still alive today The dilemma is set quite early on, yet the pertinent details seep out through the subsequent chapters We don t know everything, and when we begin to see Heather break down in the current time period, we know something bad happened years ago.The characters are smart and witty I liked the relationships in the book, even when they were strained or awkward Heather s mother wants her to forget the past Heather s husband has no clue what s going on in his wife s life, but he is generally a doting and loving partner She s just good at hiding things from him because she thinks what s happening around her isn t really happening Yet she s a child psychologist and should know better The dynamics between the past and the present are well presented, allowing us to continue to guess Someone knows something, but we can t figure out who in Heather s life is keeping secrets too Then again, we wonder if she s making it all up, or is it another case of an unreliable narrator who is the guilty party herself I bounced around trying to guess, and even in the end, there s enough room for readers to summon their own interpretation.On the whole, I really enjoyed the story I found the plot captivating, and there were a bunch of red herrings and suspenseful moments where I kinda wanted to meet this Red Lady If you haven t done anything wrong, she s not supposed to hurt you I d be okay to look her in the eyes without dying, right Nonetheless, as an introduction to Walters work, this was great It s well written, concise but strongly descriptive, and full of lovely imagery Minor concerns over plot points had me squinting from time to time, but only the kinds of things that you look the other way on, as it helps make the story creepy Heather was too relaxed at times I would ve called the cops or talked to someone else, rather than just try to solve the mystery myself That s why people are different though we do things our own way, so I m sure someone else might follow Heather s path too.I recommend this one It s got bunches of creepy moments, a few laughs, and tons of head shaking yikes, what s wrong with people scenes Around 4.5 stars for making me a little anxious and obsessive about solving the mystery of a serial killer. Instagram Twitter Facebook Pinterest If I had to describe this book to you in a single sentence, I would tell you that it s like Gone Girl meets Darkness Falls Told in past and present, THE DEAD GIRLS alternates between a group of friends in the 90s who become fascinated by one girl s stories of an evil witch ghost called the Red Lady, and one woman living in the now who is haunted by something terrible and menacing.Heather and Becca were supposed to be best friends forever Then Becca started telling Red Lady stories, which are truly horrific They re about a witch who was murdered by the town and then came back as a vengeful ghost Becca has a lot of reasons to feel vengeful, and she ends up dragging her whole group of friends, including Heather, into her morbid fascination Now, Heather is an adult, has a job as a psychologist, and also married She s haunted by something that happened 30 years ago, and when someone starts stalking her and leaving her morbid clues, she naturally assumes it s someone from her childhood who wants to help her remember what she s tried so very hard to forget.This was really, really fun I m not going to pretend it s high literature, but I don t always go in for that Sometimes I want to be a low brow basic B who reads trashy mysteries on the bus with titles that scare her neighbors And yes, I see you woman who was staring at me and this book from across the aisle with obvious suspicion Welcome to the Dead Girl s Club, population ME No, but seriously, I literally devoured this in a single day I actually read this on my lunch break because I wanted closure and it was scary enough that I didn t want to read it after dark It s the perfect blend of Gillian Flynn esque murder mystery and supernatural horror, even if the twist at the end is a little diet meh.If you love mysteries about dysfunctional women and want to feel a little nostalgic about the 90s, this is a fantastic book It s breezy, fun, and has a gorgeous cover Do you need anything else in a book Probably not, don t be a snob Only I m allowed to be a snob, and even I liked this book Thanks to the publisher for sending me a copy in exchange for an honest review 4 to 4.5 stars A Supernatural Thriller In The Vein Of A Head Full Of Ghosts About Two Young Girls, A Scary Story That Becomes Far Too Real, And The Tragic And Terrifying Consequences That Follow One Of Them Into Adulthood Red Lady, Red Lady, Show Us Your FaceIn , Heather Cole And Her Friends Were Members Of The Dead Girls Club Obsessed With The Macabre, The Girls Exchanged Stories About Serial Killers And Imaginary Monsters, Like The Red Lady, The Spirit Of A Vengeful Witch Killed Centuries Before Heather Knew The Stories Were Just That, Until Her Best Friend Becca Began Insisting The Red Lady Was Real And She Could Prove ItThat Belief Got Becca KilledIt S Been Nearly Thirty Years, But Heather Has Never Told Anyone What Really Happened That Night That Becca Was Right And The Red Lady Was Real She S Done Her Best To Put That Fateful Summer, Becca, And The Red Lady, Behind Her Until A Familiar Necklace Arrives In The Mail, A Necklace Heather Hasn T Seen Since The Night Becca Died The Night Heather Killed HerNow, Someone Else Knows What She Didand They Re Determined To Make Heather Pay Paranormal fiction, Supernatural thriller, suspense thriller, women fiction all in one That all went to hell in a handbasket for me That s pretty ambition in my option for an author to take on and not something I think is easy to pull off and unfortunately, I didn t think it was here with this one Separately I thought the elements were there for each genre but didn t really come together so well The suspense to the story took the hit for that for me I just wasn t feeling it There is some teenage drama and the main character can be annoying with their drama The story starts off with some really great supernatural elements to the story and I was loving the red lady She became an interesting character at first however near the end, I thought things switched to of a thriller I enjoyed the twists and even picked up on a few clues I liked the final reveal but in a whole, it didn t come together for me Even though My Grammarly is giving me a disapproving emoji on my tone for this review I don t want to sway anyone not to read a book because that s just not cool So even though this one didn t work for me, I still suggest giving it a try if you are looking for of a thriller with some creepy elements and don t mind some drama to your story.I received a copy from the publisher. Special thanks to NetGalley and the publisher for a free, electronic ARC of this novel received in exchange for an honest review As young girls on the brink of adolescence, Heather and her friends bond over their mutual obsession with serial killers and the urban legend known as The Red Lady The four girls, who now call themselves The Dead Girls Club , share stories and try and summon The Red Lady , a vengeful spirit who was, supposedly, brutally murdered centuries before Heather knows that these are just stories, but her best friend Becca soon becomes obsessed, convinced the stories are real and that The Red Lady has made contact with her Becca sets out to prove that the Red Lady is real and ends up dead Years later, Heather is a child psychologist, helping troubled children overcome their demons When she starts to receive cryptic messages in the mail she initially brushes it off But when the messages become macabre, and she starts being followed, Heather begins to wonder if somehow, somewhere, there is someone who knows Heather s secret that Becca is dead because of her Damien Angelica Walters has several award winning short stories under her belt, stories acclaimed for being weird and gothic The Dead Girls Club is set to be released in December 2019 The Dead Girls Club is formed as a result of four close friends who share an obsession and meet to perform s ances and tell stories As a pre adolescent girl, I was always forming clubs and secret groups with my friends, desperate to have something we could share with just us, away from the outside worldtoo bad I didn t have friends obsessed with serial killers I would ve been ALL OVER a Dead Girls Club of my ownThat part of the novel is relatable and charming, as the friendships are challenged by angst ridden problems and hormones, typical of any female group of outsiders The story alternates between THEN and NOW, each chapter narrated by Heather as a young girl and as an adult The secrets of the novel are slowly revealed, with just enough suspense in each chapter to keep you hooked When the ending is revealed, and the truth comes out, I was slightly disappointed The twist has been done before, in movies and books both, and it was almost unbelievable and far fetched That being said, there was a definitive ending which provided answers to questions that form throughout the novel I questioned the behaviours and actions of Adult Heather a few times, as she seemed to sabotage her adult life and relationships than she needed to, all to hide a childhood secret The Dead Girls Club is definitely unique and creative, with relatable characters Walters definitely has a thing for the macabrewhich I appreciate, of courseand this novel is well written, compete with a spooky abandoned house and a mysterious could be true urban legend Definitely worth checking out for those who are looking for a nostalgic, gothic read.


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The Raven
Edmund Dulac, 1882-1953
Photographic reporduction of watercolor
Source: Poe's The Bells and Other Poems
[The volume has no pagination, and numbers in both the contents pages and the list of illustrations refer only to the order in which items appear.]
[Click on image to enlarge it.]
Formatting and text by George P. Landow
[You may use this image without prior permission for any scholarly or educational purpose as long as you (1) credit the Internet Archive and the University of California, Berkeley, and (2) link your document to this URL in a web document or cite the Victorian Web in a print one. ]

subset: commoncrawl


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Exciting news for open-source community - we have opened the source code of ONLYOFFICE Desktop Editors!
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by Erik Hubbard
Thanks to efforts by Green in Chestnut Hill (GRinCH) Big Belly Solar Trash Compactors will soon be installed in Chestnut Hill.
Bob Rossman (CHCA), Kate O'Neil (CHBA) and Seth Shapiro (BID), all members of GRinCH, met with Scott McGrath, the Environmental Services Director for the City of Philadelphia, who agreed to place a temporary Big Belly Solar compactor unit in front of the Night Kitchen Bakery (7725 Germantown Ave.) for a trial run.
A Big Belly Solar Trash Compactor is a trash can that works like a trash truck, by forcing a steel ram into the compartment where the garbage is stored, crushing it flat, which results in less over flow of trash, and less frequent trash pick-ups.
The perks of having these units installed in Chestnut Hill are less frequent trash collections, which result in cost and traffic reduction, not to mention carbon emissions reduction as well. Big Belly advocates say the compactors are more aesthetically pleasing too, with a lot less smell and mess than regular trash cans.
The compactors have been installed around the rest of the Philadelphia area, notably in Mt. Airy long Germantown Avenue where they have been a great success.
Linda Raucher, a GRinCH board member, will attend the CHCA meeting Thursday evening to answer any questions about the trash compactors if needed.


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text: Artist: Mac Miller Album: I Love Life, Thank You (Mixtape) Song: I Love Life, Thank You Typed by: AZ Lyrics Alright then, bitch Ha, yeah, uhhhhh A million mothafuckin' fans on that ass, biotch! Feels amazin'! Ladies and gentlemen, I've always been the same kid, but now I'm famous And I ain't even have to change shit [Verse 1] Hey yo, they keep on sayin' this dude back, this dude back But I don't sound like this dude, bitch I'm Mac Now these girls all tryna suck my dick, I rap I may let her if I'm sippin' that yak Yeah, too fly, submarine in the sky Can't go out in public I better get a disguise It's better to be yourself, don't ever just slip a lie While I'm drivin' with the top down, listenin' to Plies Chicken wings and fries, I'm in love with all the simple things Little things, soldiers be around always bickering I got some money, threw some diamonds on a pinky ring That's why your favorite girl probably on my ding a ling Teeth blunts with peanut, standin' on a tree stump Rappers need to keep up, my bitches double D cup She fucks, but she ain't no slut and she know that She freeze up, livin' in the moment get a Kodak Hold that, wait for it to flash, get the picture I ain't doing much, just out on this adventure Bus around the country, but I'm travelin' the world With all these rappers that be hating like I'm battlin' with girls [Hook] Hey yo this where the hook be But I ain't got no hook you pussy I said this where the hook be But bitch I ain't got a fucking hook you pussy Yeah bitch, that could be a hook You know what I'ma rap If it's OK with y'all And you can tell me if it was nice [Verse 2] Hey yo I kinda want a fur coat, kinda want a grill She met me at the party, now she kinda want to chill I ain't on no pills, just a little weed, molly, and lean Yeah I did a couple drugs, now they callin' me Sheen This was all a dream just a week ago, now I got a heap of dough I keep a ho, that always got some weed to roll All these rappers wack but I don't ever see 'em close The illest mothafucka in it we don't need to vote Cause I don't give a fuck what y'all think And I don't give a fuck what that dude on that blog think Yeah I seen hay, been to court in 3 states Had to deal with cheapskates, who always want a free play You hold the weight of the world, I bet your knees break Put my dick in a bitch hand, keepsake You can't keep that, fuck off my case You can keep some residue if I bust on your face I'm just playin', mistakin' this Asian Always been amazin', since days I've been hangin' In ancient places, now the kid famous And he ain't even have to change shit, biatch! A million motherfuckin' fans Just want to take a second to thank y'all, you feel me? Thanks for fuckin' with the kid from day one You know what I'm saying, Blue Slide Park November 8th I'll see y'all then alright Chyaa Suck my dick Hahahahaha We should keep that Ohh shit it worked again! Biotch! So I just threw this fuckin' mixtape together cause I love y'all How nice am I?


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To Boldly Go....
Now that my rewiring is done I have to do all the projects that could wreak havoc on my floor after they are sanded. One such project is cutting an access hole into the ceiling of the extreme "cottage" bedroom so that I can insulate the attic and also run a cable to hard wire a smoke detector. This project involves removing a section of plaster, cutting and removing a few lath strips and about 3 inches of rock wool. The last time I checked it out, gravity was still working. Since this hole has to be made in the ceiling and the best place to be standing in order to make this hole is beneath it, you can guess where the plaster would be falling. Then when I wipe my face it will end up on the floor.
Here is the "Gary" sized hole that I made. Of course I just had to go up there.
Here is the mess I made making this hole. If you ever wondered what a decomposing sheep looks like, this is pretty close. (Hey look, that bathtub is STILL there!)
For all you people doing Google searches for "What does rock wool look like?" this should answer your question.
Oh this was me looking in the mirror after making the hole. The big "idiot" sign on my fore head is covered up by the "Dayton Dragons" hat. Good job I wore that mask, cough, cough!
So I ventured into the black hole in the ceiling to find new life forms and uncovered these
I wondered why the room below had a distinct odor of its very own. Based on the plastic bags used for nesting and the fact that these were above the rock wool, I would estimate their time of death as after 1954.... I suspect the little buggers that get into my third floor are descended from these guys.


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Ben Stiller is more accustomed to making people laugh, but during an appearance on SiriusXM's "The Howard Stern Show" Tuesday he got deadly serious, revealing he was diagnosed with prostate cancer in 2014.
"It came out of the blue for me," Stiller said on Stern of the surprise diagnosis. "I had no idea."
The star of such films as "Zoolander" and "Tropic Thunder," Stiller said the news left him reeling.
U.S. & World
Stiller revealed on Stern he later had surgery to remove his prostate and now every six months is taking PSA test to make sure he stays cancer-free. Stiller posted an essay on Medium further detailing the experience, as he urged men to get early prostate cancer screening.
"I got diagnosed with prostate cancer Friday, June 13th, 2014. On September 17th of that year I got a test back telling me I was cancer free. The three months in between were a crazy roller coaster ride with which about 180,000 men a year in America can identify," Stiller writes.
"Right after I got the news, still trying to process the key words echoing dimly in my head (probability of survival–vival-vival-val…" "incontinence-nence-nence-ence…), I promptly got on my computer and Googled "Men who had prostate cancer." I had no idea what to do and needed to see some proof this was not the end of the world.
Stiller wrote he was encouraged after seeing names he recognized, including Secretary of State John Kerry, former New York Yankees skipper Joe Torre and "Meet The Parents" co-star Robert De Niro were prostate cancer survivors.
"As I learned more about my disease (one of the key learnings is not to Google "people who died of prostate cancer" immediately after being diagnosed with prostate cancer), I was able to wrap my head around the fact that I was incredibly fortunate," Stiller writes. "Fortunate because my cancer was detected early enough to treat. And also because my internist gave me a test he didn't have to."
The test Stiller is referring to is the Prostate-specific antigen test, or PSA. The test measures the amount of protein produced by cells of the prostate gland.
According to the National Cancer Institute "the blood level of PSA is often elevated in men with prostate cancer, and the PSA test was originally approved by the FDA in 1986 to monitor the progression of prostate cancer in men who had already been diagnosed with the disease."
In 1994, the FDA approved the use of the PSA test in conjunction with a digital rectal exam (DRE) to test asymptomatic men for prostate cancer.
"Taking the PSA test saved my life. Literally. That's why I am writing this now," Stiller says. "There has been a lot of controversy over the test in the last few years. Articles and op-eds on whether it is safe, studies that seem to be interpreted in many different ways, and debates about whether men should take it all."
Stiller said he was not "offering a scientific point of view here, just a personal one, based on my experience. The bottom line for me: I was lucky enough to have a doctor who gave me what they call a "baseline" PSA test when I was about 46. I have no history of prostate cancer in my family and I am not in the high-risk group, being neither — to the best of my knowledge — of African or Scandinavian ancestry. I had no symptoms."


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Medieval Work in Progress: Dr Robert Mills on Medieval Art and the Question of the Animal
Although given a rather moderate-sounding title, as soon as Dr Mills started speaking about the bestialisation of the human in the context of medieval torture and martyrdom images, the seminar on the 22nd of May, "Medieval Art and the Question of the Animal," immediately became much more complex than initially expected (and for those of us with darker tastes, much more interesting too). Mills began by addressing theories of "Speciesism" and considerations of how violence is represented from the perspective of the animal, and deconstructed these ideas by considering what actually constituted "animal perspective" in the Middle Ages.
In this context, Mills looked closely at how animals functioned in a symbolic manner in the late medieval period, and how this informed the pedagogical functions of bestiaries, such as the Rochester Bestiary (BL MS Royal 12 F xiii) and another in the British Library, MS Harley 3244. This was but a springboard, however, for Mills' exploration of animality within the category of the human. Drawing upon Aristotle's claims that man is both beyond, yet also within the animal, and that "man is by nature a political animal," he established that the distinction between "human" and "animal" is essentially porous – the foundation of his study of both animal and human slaughter in manuscripts. There were some beautiful examples of this – particularly in Leviticus 1 of the Bible Moralisée (ÖNB Vienna 2554, on folio 27r). On this folio was a richly illuminated, deep vermillion rendering of the flaying of a cow, with the corresponding moralisation equally graphically depicting the skinning alive of St Bartholomew. Here, the flaying of the cow was so vividly conflated with human martyrdom, and the torture of both cow and saint were represented almost identically. Similarly in another Bible Moralisée (Naples, MS Français 9561), the orientation of the humans and the animals undergoing torture was exactly the same, as well as the nature of the torture and the torment on their faces – an interesting revelation, considering the common perception of medieval attitudes towards animal rights. The martyrs are conspicuously dehumanised, heightening the effect of the torture, whilst the animals are simultaneously humanised. The porousness of the distinction is no clearer than here.
What I found most interesting, though, was Dr Mills' idea of medieval books themselves literally representing the word-made-flesh – that the bloody, torturous image of the cow being flayed in Vienna 2554 vividly recalls the production of the parchment that the illumination is painted on; medieval parchment, also called vellum, was itself made from cow or calf skin. The parchment in this context becomes performative, and is an active component of the cow's torture; "the violence on the page," Dr Mills explained, "serves as an uncanny reminder of the violence behind the production of the page."


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Oldspeak: "Since that deal got killed, our data prices have gone up 30%," he said. He also blamed the blocked T-Mobile USA deal, in part, for AT&T's decision earlier this year to impose a limit on the amount of data available to a given customer. However, he said such a move probably would have been necessary regardless of the decision, and that he regretted not imposing the cap sooner." Austerity measures, affect you in more ways than you think. How bout that. The merger doesn't happen, so they jack up prices to increase their perceived lost potential profits. And the argument for corporate consolidation and less choice perfectly crystallizes some of the fundamental flaws with oligarchical capitalism. In the minds of terminal ill Capitalists, More for me, less for you = More for me, more for you. Your basic 2+2-=5 logic. This insatiable lust for more, and the idea that it is good, unbridled greed; it is unsustainable and certainly catastrophic for our planet, and our 'civilization'. Every thing in nature grows, and then stops growing. We've created a civilization in which that basic physical rule does not apply and we are reaping the consequences: ever rapid resource depletion and contamination, mass extinctions, environmental destruction and contamination, drought, starvation, overcrowding, homelessness, poverty… All because a few hundred Oligarchs want ever 'more'. And have conditioned us to believe that we want ever 'more' even though the vast majority of us never will attain Oligarchical levels of it. That simple and insidious idea; 'more' has led us to the brink of collapse on multiple levels, yet we're still being told that everything is ok. Why? We need Barefoot Economics. NOW."
Related Story:
AT&T To Buy T-Mobile: Great For Them, Bad For You
What Does Proposed AT&T And T-Mobile Merger Mean?
By Ethan Smith @ The Wall Street Journal:
The government's decision to block AT&T Inc.'s T -0.76% takeover of Deutsche Telekom AG's DTEGY -0.18% T-Mobile USA unit will result in higher prices to consumers, AT&T Chairman and Chief Executive Randall Stephenson contended during a public interview Wednesday.
Speaking at the Milken Institute's annual global conference, Mr. Stephenson said that the U.S. wireless-telecommunications market can't sustain the current number of competitors because there isn't enough wireless spectrum for all of them.
Based on current patterns, wireless data usage will increase 75% a year for at least five years, Mr. Stephenson said.
"We're running out of the airwaves that this traffic rides on," he added. "There is a shortage of this spectrum."
With or without a deal like the one his company unsuccessfully pursued, he said, competitors will be forced to drop out if they can't find enough wireless capacity to offer more modern data services to growing numbers of customers.
"The more competitors you have, the less efficient the allocation of spectrum will be," he said. "It's got to change. I don't think the market's going to accommodate the number of competitors there are in the landscape."
Many countries in Asia, Europe and Latin America have many fewer companies offering wireless voice and data services, letting them allocate bandwidth more efficiently, Mr. Stephenson contended.
"Since that deal got killed, our data prices have gone up 30%," he said. He also blamed the blocked T-Mobile USA deal, in part, for AT&T's decision earlier this year to impose a limit on the amount of data available to a given customer. However, he said such a move probably would have been necessary regardless of the decision, and that he regretted not imposing the cap sooner.
"I wish we had moved quicker to change the pricing model to make sure the people who were using the bandwidth were paying for the bandwidth," Mr. Stephenson said.


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I didnt see this kind of topic nowhere, so I'll start one.
Here you can tell how your day passed.
My day was one the normal Saturday mornigs. Headache, Cartoons, Breakfast, More cartoons.. Internet.. As the usual weekend. My Devianart account didn't work, I'll guess there was some technical problems.
I went out with my friends, somewhere around 14:00.. We were in the beach, when one of my friends pushed me to the water, by the girls seeing, who are in my school.. I feeled myself so stupid, and chased my friend, when I realised that my phone was in my pocket, all wet.
I didn't get the phone work well, it doesnt ring anymore.
I've gotta say, that I dont got the best friends of the Universum, But What was youre day like? Horrible as mine? Good, or Absolutely Graceful?


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The Paleo Diet- Why Eat Like A Hunter-Gatherer?
The Paleo Diet is a lifetime program of eating, and it is not a quick fix weight loss diet, even though most people following the Pale diet lose weight and become more lean and muscular. A couple of years ago my husband and I followed the Paleo diet as closely as we could. My husband is an endurance athlete, and the whole family do various sports so we used the book, The Paleo Diet for Athletes by Loren Cordain, PhD and Joel Friel, MS for guidance. The book's focus is on the dietary needs of athletes.
According to the book:
"The fundamental dietary principle for the Paleo Diet for Athletes is simplicity itself: unrestricted consumption of lean meats, poultry, seafood, fruits, and vegetables"
We felt great eating according to the Paleo Diet, and after a move across country and somewhat interrupted routines (hm), we recently decided to do our best to eat as close to the Paleo Diet again. Today I cover general information about the Paleo Diet, but more detailed information about Paleo and athletes will be posted shortly on our Naturally Sports & Wellness blog.
By eating according to the Paleo Diet you'll be eating the diet you are genetically programmed to eat. Only 500 generations ago people ate like this:
The Paleolithic people:
- did not salt their food
- hardly ate cereal grains
- didn't eat dairy food
- didn't eat refined sugar, only occasionally honey
- ate lean animal foods and their protein intake was quite high
- ate carbohydrates from non starchy wild fruits and vegetables
- ate monosaturated, polyunsaturated, and omega 3 fats
Why would anyone want to give up processed foods, grains, dairy, salty foods, refined sugars, and legumes for a diet full of lean meats, fish, seafood and all the fruit and non-starchy vegetables one can eat?
Loren Cordain PhD, also wrote the book, The Paleo Diet Lose weight and Get Healthy by Eating the Food You Were Meant to Eat. This book has tons of convincing arguments why you should favor a hunter-gatherer diet:
- by eating the way our hunter-gatherer ancestors ate you can lose weight and regain health and well-being.
- the Paleo Diet is the only diet that fits our genetic make-up. DNA evidence shows that genetically humans have hardly changed at all in 40,000 years.
- before the agricultural revolution 10,000 years ago, just 500 generations ago, everyone on the planet ate lean meats, fresh fruits, and vegetables. It has been only 5-7 generations ago if you happen to be an Eskimo or Native American.
- our Paleolithic ancestors were very lean, fit and free from heart disease and other ailments that plague the Western countries. Cordain has examined thousands of early-nineteenth and twentieth-century photographs of hunter-gatherers and they show indigenous people to be lean, muscular, and fit.
- the hunter-gatherer were free from signs and symptoms of chronic diseases, and the medical evidence shows that their body fat, aerobic fitness, insulin metabolism, blood cholesterol, and blood pressure were superior to modern day people.
- the Paleo diet contain nonstarchy carbohydrates that normalize your blood glucose, promote weight loss, and make you feel energized all day.
- you don't need to worry about about excessive dietary acid causing bone loss on the Paleo diet, 35% of more of your daily calories come from alkaline fruits and vegetables that will neutralize the dietary acid you get when you eat meat and seafood.
- lean meat is about 80% protein and 20% fat.
- protein increases your metabolism. It has twice the "thermic effect" of either fat or carbohydrates, which means it will speed up your metabolism. It also has the "highest satiating value", which will make you feel full faster.
- high protein diets have been shown to improve insulin metabolism, help lower blood pressure, and reduce the risk of stroke.
- high protein diets don't cause damage to the kidneys, which is opposite of what people have been told. Dr. Arne Astrup, at the Royal Veterinary and Agricultural University of Copenhagen proved this in testing.
- the Paleo diet includes all the nutritional elements needed to encourage weight loss while promoting health and well-being. It contain proper balance of plant and animal foods, and the correct ratios of protein, fat, and carbohydrates required for weight loss and excellent health.
- There is no need to count calories and you can eat as much carbohydrates as you like, as long as it is the right kind - low glycemic fruits and vegetables.
The ground rules of the Paleo Diet are:
- All the lean meats, fish, and seafood you can eat
- All the fruits and nonstarchy vegetables you can eat
- No cereals
- No dairy products
- No processed foods
The Paleo Diet is very simple, there are no limitations to what you can do. It is very simple as well, of course, you can make it more complicated if you like. If you want to make it really easy you can use leftover dinner meat for lunch, add a salad, some nuts, and some fruit and there's your Paleo lunch.
The seven keys of the Paleo Diet are:
- Eat a relatively high amount of animal protein compared to the typical American diet.
- Eat fewer carbohydrates than most modern diets recommended, but eat the good kinds that come from fruits and vegetables, not from grains, starchy tubers, and refined sugars.
- Eat a large amount of fiber from nonstarchy fruits and vegetables.
- Eat a moderate amount of fats.
- Eat foods with high potassium content and low sodium content.
- Eat a diet with net alkaline load.
- Eat foods rich in plant phytochemicals, vitamins, minerals, and antioxidants.
There are three levels of the diet in the book The Paleo Diet Lose weight and Get Healthy by Eating the Food You Were Meant to Eat. Each level contains a limited number of Open Meals, and this provides a chance to still eat your favorite foods. An occasional glass of wine or beer is fine. It is a life time program and not a quick- fix weight-loss, which means built-in flexibility to accommodate a little cheating. Well, as my husband and I see it, you should try your best to follow whatever diet fits you the best, but it has to be room for flexibility to enjoy life as well. With that said, I don't mean drinking tons of soda or eating fast food everyday.
We try our best to stick to this way of eating because we feel better, but we do a few modifications to adjust to what we believe in. The book promotes canola oil, I simply replace it with the oils I prefer instead.
Stay tuned for my next post about the Paleo Diet tomorrow. I will talk about meal preparations, shopping for the right foods, dining out tips, snacks, and other good stuff about the Paleo Diet.
Follow Johanna on twitter and facebook for more health tips and information.
This post is linked to Monday Mania hosted by The Healthy Home Economist
and to Real Food Wednesday by Kelly the Kitchen Kop. It is also linked to WMWW hosted by Angie's Healthy Living Blog and to WFMW.


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Vibe Magazine
September 2007
Can the freshman senator from Illinois stick to his ideals and still become the first man to rock Air Force Ones on Air Force One? We're entering the mostly hotly contested election of our lifetime. It's time to decide? Is Barack Obama our man?
On a Tuesday afternoon in May, the lines for a Barack Obama rally are as long as they would be for the rock concerts that are the normal fare here at the Electric Factory, a vast, converted warehouse in North Philadelphia.
Even for this mixed city, the crowd is stunningly cosmopolitan. The orderly line includes a coed reading The Bookseller of Kabul, South Asian engineering majors from the New Jersey Institute of Technology, Arab American law students from the University of Pennsylvania, veteran activists from the National Hip-Hop Political Convention in crisp suits, community organizers in ACORN t-shirts, young white, Black, and Latino parents with kids in strollers, elderly people in wheelchairs, and everywhere, high schoolers—some sporting HOT CHICKS DIG OBAMA buttons, some from North Philly in their school uniforms, others from South Jersey in Abercrombie & Fitch, drawn like the faithful to Mecca.
They have all donated $25 to $50 — star prices for the B-Rock — to be, in Common's words, ignited. Obama pitches himself as the candidate of change, and many here hope he can turn around a nation polarized by George W. Bush, war, the economy, race, religion, political parties, and even hip hop.
Beverly Washington from the Mount Olivet Tabernacle Church is wearing her red Sunday power worship suit and gripping her varnished brown cane. Four generations from her congregation have come on buses. The last time she felt this good about politics was two decades ago. "Jesse was real. But now Barack is coming," she says. "He's fresh, he's new, he's inspiring."
Carmen Mitchell, 14, got her cousin, Anthony Lewis, 17, to ask his mom to write them a fake doctor's note that morning. They dressed in their summer-brite polos, grabbed their black D&G stunna shades, and skipped classes to catch a train from the boondocks of Conshohocken. Then they hiked two miles from 30th Street Station to be the first in line at their first political rally. They want the wars in Iraq and in their old West Philly neighborhood to end. "He makes us feel like he's really talking to us," Carmen says.
Obama arrives backstage, a retinue of Secret Service agents trailing behind. He introduces himself to the employees, looking them in their eyes. On the decks, King Britt cues Aretha Franklin's "Think," and she wails, "Oh, freedom! Freedom!"
Now it really is Obama time. This crowd of 3,000 isn't the biggest he has seen — there were 12,000 in Oakland, 20,000 in Atlanta and Austin — but, as he ascends to the stage, they are deafening. "Spring is here in America," he says in his soothing baritone. "It's time for us to renew the spirit of America, and that's what this campaign is all about."
When he first ran for state office in 1996, Obama continues, "People would say to me, 'You seem like a nice guy.'" The crowd laughs. "'You've got a fancy law degree. You could be making a lot of money. You've got a beautiful family. You're a church-going man. Why would you want to go into something dirty and nasty like politics?'" Obama talks slowly, as if he's unsure whether he's really made up his mind, and when he has an opportunity to go hard, he often gets complicated instead. But while his voice is doing one thing, his body is doing another. He carries his slim 6' 2" frame with a hint of streetball swagger. And when he comes to a money line, he holds his position like he's daring you to charge. His is the opposite of in-your-grill. Obama's game is finesse.
"We feel as if we can't make a difference, and so half of us don't even vote," Obama says, to swelling cheers. "This nation is founded on a different tradition," he says, his voice rising, "a very simple idea that we all have mutual obligations toward each other, that we all rise and fall together, that we can value our individualism and our self-reliance but ultimately we have to lift up this idea that we are connected. And if there are children in Philadelphia right now that are killing each other and shooting each other, and without an education and dropping out, that impacts all of us."
The crowd goes bananas.
When he's done, he comes offstage to shake hands, followed by the men in headsets. A throng of bodies pushes toward the barriers. People hold up copies of his book, The Audacity of Hope. An elderly Black woman fights back tears. Carmen and Anthony reach out to clasp his hand. Aretha sings, "You need me…and I need you."
It's Wednesday afternoon in Washington D.C., the day after the rally and two other fundraisers in Philly. The western end of the seventh floor of the Hart Senate Office Building is humming.
Two young white receptionists field an unrelenting stream of calls on pending votes for the immigration bill and the war supplemental budget. Between rings, they train an eager, racially mixed group of interns how to run the constituent response software. Behind closed doors, aides are working feverishly on a major lobbying/ethics reform bill the Senator has sponsored. Ben Labolt, Obama's press secretary, sighs, "These are the days my coffee pot is full all day."
A sudden whoosh of air, and Obama himself is in the room, stopping everyone dead for a second. He apologizes for the delay and invites me into his high-ceilinged, mustard yellow office. One wall is adorned with pictures of him with his wife Michelle, 43, and his daughters, Malia, 9, and Sasha, 6. There's a small photo of the surf-swept cliffs of Bamboo Ridge at the southeastern edge of Oahu, where the ashes of his mother, Ann Dunham, were scattered. Another wall is dominated by a painting of Justice Thurgood Marshall. There are portraits of Lincoln, Gandhi, John F. Kennedy, and Martin Luther King, Jr., each one Obama's definition of a "uniter not a divider," to borrow the phrase George W. Bush once used to describe himself.
Obama takes a chair and kicks his feet up on the coffee table. He wears a blue pinstriped suit. A touch of gray is creeping into his closely shaven hair, but he maintains a gym rat's physique. When I tell him I went to his rival high school in Honolulu, he can't resist a little trash talk. "We used to wipe the floor with them," he tells Labolt, flashing that marquee smile.
Near his desk is an encased pair of bright red Everlast boxing gloves, signed by Muhammad Ali. Above them hangs a framed poster of Ali towering over a prone Sonny Liston, after the famous "phantom punch" in the first round of their 1965 rematch, when Ali is screaming at the former champion to stand up and fight. Here is the other side of Senator Obama: The baller who still enjoys throwing 'bows on the basketball court. The high-roller who raised $56 million from over 250,000 donors in the first half of 2007 to lead all candidates in the paper chase. The man who could become the first Black president.
Obama's political career has been charmed, some might even say blessed. In 2004, his opponent in the Democratic primary race for the U.S. Senate faded amidst claims of domestic abuse. Then Obama was tapped by Senator John Kerry to give the keynote speech at the 2004 Democratic National Convention. Inspired by his pastor, the Reverend Jeremiah Wright, the speech updated Jesse Jackson and Gil Scott-Heron, invoking "the audacity of hope" to end a "long political darkness". It made him an overnight celebrity.
Obama's first Republican opponent, Jack Ryan, quit after his ex-wife disclosed his sexual perversions in documents related to a child custody dispute. Republicans searched for an African American to challenge Obama. Unfortunately they plucked perennial loser Alan Keyes, who at one point said, "Christ would not vote for Barack Obama." Obama took 70% of the electorate. He is now the only African American in the Senate, and just the third elected since Reconstruction.
But when Obama announced he was running for president, some shot-callers, like the Reverend Al Sharpton, seemed skeptical of an inexperienced candidate who had not emerged from the civil rights establishment. "Right now we're hearing a lot of media razzle-dazzle," Sharpton said at the time. "I think when the meat hits the fire, we'll find out if it's just fat or if there's some real meat there." Sharpton recently told VIBE, "I'm warming up to Obama, but I'm not there yet."
Obama's "blackness" has also come into question. "Obama isn't black," Salon.com columnist Debra Dickerson wrote. "'Black,' in our political and social reality, means those descended from West African slaves." The debate exposed fears that a discussion about race that expands to include immigrants of color and their descendants might thwart continuing attempts to address the terrible legacies of slavery. And could someone who grew up in Hawai'i and Indonesia really be "black"? Obama's Southside-for-life wife, Michelle, plays this line of questioning for laughs on the campaign trail when she talks about her first impressions of him: "I kind of thought any Black guy who was raised in Hawai'i had to be a little off!"
"We as a culture are still confused about race," Obama says carefully. "There's this assumption that there's only one way of being Black. That if you are not conforming to a certain pattern of behavior, that somehow you may not be authentic enough. And those of us in African American culture know that there's as much diversity in the African American community as there is in any other community."
Some took just one look at him to make up their mind. On May 4, CBSNews.com disabled all user comments on its articles about Obama because the website was receiving too many racist posts. That same month, he was granted full Secret Service protection, the earliest ever for a presidential candidate who had not previously served, in part because of racist e-mails to his Senate office. Only Jesse Jackson Sr., during his 1984 and 1988 runs, required similar arrangements. "He is both black and black enough for whatever individual or individuals unnerved his handlers enough to seek Secret Service protection," observed Miami Herald columnist Leonard Pitts, Jr.: "That's a truth that cuts the clutter."
When asked what he thinks of the "Is he Black enough?" discussion, Obama grins. Perhaps it's that bit of Ali in him. "If you go to my barber shop, the Hyde Park Hair Salon, 53rd Street on the Southside, and you ask my guys in there, people don't understand the question," he says. "But it's something I worked out a long time ago. I know who I am. My friends, my family, my constituency know who I am, and by the time this campaign is all over, America will know who I am."
Obama, who turned 46 on August 4th, calls himself a member of the Joshua generation, an heir to the heroes of Selma, but he really falls somewhere between the civil rights and the hip-hop generations. He's too young to have been a Freedom Rider and too old to have worn a Public Enemy t-shirt like a middle finger. He pays respect to the idealism and commitment of the civil rights generation, but he does not belittle the hip-hop generation's skepticism toward politics.
Polls show Obama leading Hillary Clinton amongst the college-age crowd. The internet is awash in rap, reggaeton, and R&B tributes to him. Hip-hop activists across the country stump for him, and Island Def Jam chairman L.A. Reid recently hosted a fundraiser at his Park Avenue apartment that brought in over $350,000 from the likes of Beyonce, Jay-Z, and Jermaine Dupri. Obama's supporters include Andre Harrell, Eddie Murphy, Ludacris, and Oprah Winfrey.
So it came as a surprise when, in the wake of the firing of radio host Don Imus and the subsequent backlash against hip hop, Obama was quoted by the Associated Press as saying that rappers were "degrading their sisters". Many hip hoppers, knowing that the culture has been used as a wedge issue since Bill Clinton attacked Sister Souljah in 1992, were angry that Obama seemed to be lining up on the other side of the battle. Obama says he was misquoted. "I stand by exactly what I said, which was that the degrading comments about women that Imus said is language that we hear not just on the radio, not just in music, "he says. "We ourselves perpetrate this, and we all have to take responsibility for that."
Rather than score easy political points, Obama took fire from both sides. The Chicago Tribune and the New York Daily News hammered him for criticizing hip hop, yet accepting campaign donations from Ludacris and David Geffen. They called on him to return the donations. (When asked if he plans to do so, Obama simply laughs). Russell Simmons attacked Obama as a "mouse," and told the New York Times, "What we need to reform is the conditions that create these lyrics. Obama needs to reform the conditions of poverty." Simmons later apologized.
Obama says that, in part, he agrees with Simmons. "Rap is reflective of the culture of the inner city, with its problems, but also its potential, its energy, its challenges to the status quo. And I absolutely agree my priority as a US senator is dealing with poverty and educational opportunity and adequate health care. If I'm ignoring those issues and spending all my time worrying about rap lyrics then I'm wasting my time."
"On the other hand, I think that there's no doubt that hip hop culture moves our young people powerfully. And some of it is not just a reflection of reality," he adds. "It also creates reality. I think that if all our kids see is a glorification of materialism and bling and casual sex and kids are never seeing themselves reflected as hitting the books and being responsible and delaying gratification, then they are getting an unrealistic picture of what the world is like."
Hard work, sacrifice, empathy, ambition — these are Obama's core personal values, values he says he sees in the most successful hip hop artists and execs. "But," he points out, "that's not necessarily what you see on videos."
Cerebral and casual, Obama offers a new picture of the 21st Century Black Man as a symbol of power. Men's Vogue and Vanity Fair covers have made him something of a style icon, but Obama finds this funny. "Esquire chose me as one of the 20 best-dressed men in the world, and my wife couldn't believe it," he says. "She talked about how there's probably some guys sitting in a café in Milan who spend all their time thinking about the latest Armanis and stuff, going, 'Who is this guy Obama? How did he get there?'"
Sure, Obama has brought sexy back to politics — check the "I Got A Crush On Obama" YouTube video or the Will & Grace episode where Grace dreams she's showering with him and getting her world Ba-rocked. But it's Obama's own redemption song that makes people see in him what they want to see. Black Joshua. Global bridge-builder. New American polyculturalist. "Healer-in-Chief."
His story, told in Dreams From My Father, a memoir written before his political career began, is a familiar hip-hop generation tale about a boy raised by a single mother and his grandparents, trying to reconcile with a mostly distant dad. But the details are new. His father, Barack senior, was a Kenyan student, the son of a Muslim noble who worked as a house-servant for British colonials. His mother, Ann Dunham, was an anthropology student from Kansas in love with the big world. Her parents, Stanley and Madelyn Dunham, were working-class whites from Kansas who raised Obama for much of his early life. They gave him that midwestern accent, which shades southern for Black audiences, enunciates its consonants to whites, and becomes melodious around island Locals.
Growing up a planetary citizen has made Obama an adept code-shifter. He spent his childhood in Hawai'i and Indonesia. In Jakarta, he lived on a dirt road that turned muddy in the monsoon rains, learned to box from his Indonesian stepfather, Lolo Soetoro, kept pet turtles, apes, and crocodiles, and attended both Muslim and Catholic schools. "One of the gifts that was given to him was the fact that he was able to see people in very dire poverty," says his half-sister, Maya Soetoro-Ng, 37, a high school teacher who grew up with him.
"He was able to understand people on both sides of the fence," she says from her home in Honolulu, "and he was able to negotiate the worlds of the relatively affluent with a profound understanding of what it was like to be poor."
In Hawai'i, he was a rare working-class student and one of less than a handful of blacks at the exclusive, missionary-founded private Punahou School. Unbeknownst to his classmates — the diverse descendants of whites, Asians, Puerto Ricans, and Pacific Islanders — and even to his mixed-race family, young Obama seethed over race and class issues, even as he put on an amiable front as a popular scholar-athlete.
For escape, he bodysurfed at Sandy Beach, bought comic books from a blind Filipino vendor, and played a lot of basketball. The court was, he wrote, "turf where blackness couldn't be a disadvantage." He checked out funk and reggae bands at local clubs, and admits inhaling pakalolo smoke frequently—"that was the point", he now jokes—and experimenting with cocaine and alcohol. At home, he sequestered himself with books by Richard Wright, James Baldwin, and Malcolm X.
"He didn't really share any of his struggles," says Soetoro-Ng of her brother's teen years. "He has always been rather independent. And although he had a great many friends, he sort of understood that the most challenging journeys of discovery would have to be undertaken alone."
Obama attended Occidental College in Los Angeles, and then transferred to Columbia University, at a time when Afrocentrism and the anti-apartheid movement dominated campus discussions. When he graduated, he moved to Chicago, the birthplace of modern urban organizing, to earn $12,000 a year working in Southside neighborhoods decimated by steel-plant closings and Reaganomics.
"He had started taking himself very seriously," Soetoro-Ng recalls. "Everything he did touch he was very successful at." His mother teased him, saying he would become the first black president.
Three years later, he entered Harvard Law School and put his game face on. He was elected editor-in-chief of the Harvard Law Review, the first African American to attain the position. James Bernard, a labor union organizer and community activist who helped co-found The Source while at Harvard, says, "I remember one of Barack's roommates was saying to people that he would be president someday."
Although hip-hop was stirring the campus, friends say that Obama was not the type to stay out late at rap shows. In 1990, when Harvard law professor Derrick Bell resigned to protest the denial of tenure to Black visiting professor Regina Austin and progressive law students organized a national protest over faculty diversity, Obama played a background role.
"He was supportive, and spoke at a few rallies, but he didn't really have time," says Bernard, an organizer of the protest. "The image I have is him being on the way to the Law Review building, chain-smoking and joining us for a few minutes before he had to go."
During the summer after his first year of law school, Obama returned to Chicago for an internship at a law firm. His adviser was a gorgeous and brilliant Harvard Law grad named Michelle Robinson, three years younger but already on the fast-track. They fell in love, and were married four years later. Their relationship, Soetoro-Ng says, is full of humor and strength. "[Michelle is] fiercely pragmatic," she says, "and that has helped him to balance out the romantic parts of himself, the ultra idealistic." Michelle recently left her position as vice president of community and external affairs at the University of Chicago Hospitals to campaign full-time.
In 2006, after serving only a year in the U.S. Senate, he was greeted with RUN OBAMA signs wherever he went. He and Michelle began discussing seriously the possibility of him running for president. By October, when The Audacity of Hope debuted on the New York Times bestseller list, the will-he-or-won't-he stories reached fever pitch. On Oprah, flanked by Michelle, he ducked the question again.
He and Michelle finalized their decision during their annual Christmas vacation back to Oahu. In Honolulu, Obama joined his basketball buddies for a holiday streetball outing at their favorite court off Kapiolani Park. Privately, Obama spoke with his grandmother and his sister, and told them that he and Michelle had decided he would run. Soetoro-Ng told him she fully supported his choice, but added, "Once you make a decision like that, you don't belong to the family anymore, you belong to the world."
Traveling to the windward side of the island, Barack and Michelle watched their daughters catching waves, the green-capped Mokulua islets rising gently offshore. "You're sitting on Kailua Beach, watching your kids play in the water," he recalls. "You're realizing, okay, at least for a couple years you're giving this up. And that was, uh…" he looks down, his hand covering his lips, as if he's still picturing the lost moment. After three years of a whirlwind ride into the center of public life, Obama is learning to live with regrets.
To some extent, Obama has been given a pass by a media and a public that's willing to overlook his inexperience and his still paper-thin political program. It's not just that he can grip the mic and tell a story like he was Ghostface, but because his is such an amazing story. He may be the perfect candidate for a post-Reagan, post–Real World environment in which celebrity and politics feed each other.
But Obama's chosen field is not entertainment. Before the primary battles begin in Iowa in January, Obama must clear a lane through a crowded field of Democratic candidates. He will have to take his shot on a wide range of issues. And then he will need to box out his competitors when the media rebound comes.
All the Democratic candidates now oppose the Iraq war, but more than the other frontrunners, Obama has staked his campaign on it—never mind the fact that the next president will still be a wartime president. In January, Obama introduced a largely symbolic bill that called for a drawdown of combat troops in May and complete withdrawal by April 2008. Now he urges his audiences to force Congress to vote for troop withdrawal.
"When we do that," he said at the Philadelphia rally, "as bad as our foreign policy seems right now, there is light at the end of the tunnel." But while Obama has chastised his Democratic opponents for taking the wrong stand on the war, he hardly led the fight against Bush's war supplemental budget, voting very quietly against it in the 11th hour.
The Reverend Al Sharpton says Obama's greatest weakness is that he seems to be a candidate without a cause. "I want to see a strong stand on issues that concern people," he says. "The cause can't be the candidate, the candidate must rally around the cause. The reason for
that is that if they lose, at least we will have advanced the cause."
For two decades, most presidential candidates have avoided addressing two trends that have shaped the hip-hop generation—the widening wealth gap and exploding incarceration rates of people of color. Obama says, "They will be part of this campaign."
In May, on the 15th anniversary of the Los Angeles uprising, Obama warned of the rise of "quiet riots," a term coined in a Reagan-era Commission on The Cities report to capture the despair of abandoned ghetto youths. Obama said he wanted to reach "young men and women without hope, without miracles, and without a sense of destiny other than life on the edge—the edge of the law, the edge of the economy, the edge of family structures and communities." At the third Democratic debate in June, before a largely African-American audience at Howard University, he talked about education, urban policy, and the criminal justice system. But he failed to address the day's biggest issue, the Supreme Court's blow to five decades of school integration.
Onstage in Philly, Obama garnered the biggest cheer of the day when he said: "Listen, when George Bush steps down, the entire world is gonna breathe a sigh of relief." But is Obama ready to stand up? Critics of his performances in the first two Democratic debates—in a word, he bricked—have called him "Obambi". Others say his Senate record already shows him knuckling under to credit card companies on interest rate limits and corporations on class-action lawsuits.
Yet everyone wants to root for the skinny boy with the funny name who grew up to become the Great Black Hope. On some days, like that evening in Philadelphia, his candidacy feels bigger than a presidential campaign or a referendum on the Iraq war, and more like a test of whether America can truly end three decades of culture wars fought across the lines of race, class, gender, and generation. More than any other candidate in recent memory, Obama — who describes himself as a "hopemonger" — seems to embody America's unfinished promise as a multiracial, polycultural democracy. He speaks to the hope — there's that word again — that a new face and a fresh start might finally make things right.
"I think there is the potential," Obama says, "not the certainty, but the potential—that if we are successful we could change how America sees itself and how the world sees America. And that would be worth it."
For the two-part transcript of this interview, visit here and here at Vibe.com!
Can't Stop Won't Stop Extras
- A Can't Stop Won't Stop Q+A By Oliver Wang
An exclusive interview about the book from 2004
- A Tribute To Richie Perez
The story of one of the Bronx greats–a Young Lord and a mentor to many.
- Interviews With The Author
Four years of print, radio, and video interviews with Jeff Chang. You'll laugh, you'll cry, you'll order Chinese.
- Making A Name :: Book Excerpt
It has become myth, a creation myth, this West Bronx party at the end of the summer in 1973…
- Writing The Book, Part 1
From 2003, the first blog post on writing "Can't Stop Won't Stop". Can it be that it was all so simple then?
- Writing The Book, Part 3 or 2.5
Another blog post on writing "Can't Stop Won't Stop" from the eve of release. Bonus angst: that vexing "Asian American question".
The Reader Archive
- Welcome To The Reader
We're working out the kinks in this as we both add more content and tweak the landing page. Please stay tuned.
Most Popular Topics
- 2008 Elections
Links to Jeff's coverage of the 2008 elections for Vibe
- Hip-Hop Activism
Links to some of Jeff's articles on hip-hop activism
- Music Writing
Links to some of Jeff's stuff on music writing. Note: We're currently trying to properly organize this section and upload lots more.
We work with the Creative Commons license and exercise a "Some Rights Reserved" policy. Feel free to link, distribute, and share written material from cantstopwontstop.com for non-commercial uses only.
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PASADENA >> Three lucky locals scored a total of $476 in free cash Friday when the @HiddenCash mystery man brought his social media scavenger hunt to Pasadena and San Marino.
The news came in Friday morning with a tweet saying the next money envelope was hidden in the city where the "little old lady was from," followed by a tweet and picture with the clue "if you were a firefighter who likes to sing, you'd know me."
About 10 a.m., Pasadena resident Cassandra Mercury, 27, and her husband Michael, found a $145 prize at Firehouse Recording Studios on Green Street.
"When I saw it said 'where the little old lady was from,' I'm like that's my town, that's awesome, so we just started walking around Old Town until the next tweet came, and it said firefighters and singing and we Googled that really quick and saw it was on Green (Street), and we were a block away and we just started sprinting," Mercury said.
Keeping with the @HiddenCash mission of "pay it forward," Mercury said she planned to use the money to take her niece out to dinner to celebrate completing her first year of college.
The next two drops on Friday morning were in the parking lot of the Huntington Library, Art Collections and Botanical Gardens in San Marino. There, Soraya Gonzalez, 43, of Azusa found an envelope of $125 stuck into a tree, and Robert Ramirez, 45, of South Pasadena, found $206 in another tree a few feet away.
"I was by myself, I called my son on the phone and I said, 'I found it, what do I do?' He said, 'Scream.' So I did," Gonzalez said.
Ramirez said he plans to spend the money on water polo lessons for his daughter. He said he was "pretty happy" when he found the envelope folded up and stuck into the bark of a tree.
"It was not just the money, it was the fun of the hunt," Ramirez said.
The @HiddenCash Twitter feed, allegedly run by a millionaire trying to give back to the community, has been causing eager scavengers to run through the streets of Los Angeles for the last three days. On Thursday, hundreds of people gathered at Burbank's Empire Center and three people found a total of $545 in cash. On Wednesday night, the scavenger hunt took people through Los Angeles.
According to a post by @HiddenCash, the hunt began last week in San Francisco. The @HiddenCash Twitter account has now reached more than 360,000 followers. The man behind the Twitter handle, who has described himself as between the age of 35 and 45, said he has instituted a "media blackout" for the next few weeks, declining any interviews.
"This is not a promotion for a business. We want to encourage people to be kind, to be generous, and to pay it forward. For those who started similar movements in other cities and countries around the world, we salute you," the post reads.
Among the companies that followed suit was Santa Anita Park, which pledged to hide $1,000 in the track's infield if 1,000 people retweeted their Twitter announcement.
Jason Upright, studio manager for Firehouse Recording Studios said if what @HiddenCash said is true, the money is a positive thing in the community and for his business.
"Once in a while your business gets into the media for one reason or another and I just thought what a nice, positive thing to be associated with," Upright said. "This guy is being a philanthropist with the money and doing good things with it. People are just so happy to be finding it."
But others have raised concerns that the scavenger hunt could get out of hand and cause harm to people or property. Even @HiddenCash cautioned hunters to be more careful after a chaotic hunt in Burbank on Thursday night. Representatives from Pasadena and San Marino Police Departments had officers on hand at both drop locations but said there were no major incidents.
The @HiddenCash benefactor posted on Twitter that there would be more money envelopes in Los Angeles in the future.


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Butter Cookie Snowmen
"It was great fun making these tasty cookies with my grandchildren last Christmas," relates field editor Kathleen Taugher of East Troy, Wisconsin. "The dough is easy to shape."
Total TimePrep: 40 min. Bake: 15 min./batch
Makes2 dozen
- 1 cup butter, softened
- 1/2 cup sugar
- 1 tablespoon milk
- 1 teaspoon vanilla extract
- 2-1/4 cups all-purpose flour
- Red and yellow paste food coloring
- Miniature chocolate chips
- In a large bowl, cream butter and sugar until light and fluffy. Add milk and vanilla. Gradually add flour and mix well. Remove 1/3 cup of dough to a small bowl; tint with red food coloring. Repeat with 1/3 cup of dough and yellow food coloring; set aside.
- For snowmen, shape white dough into 24 balls, 1-1/4 in. each; 24 balls, about 1/2 in. each; and 24 balls, about 1/8 in. each. For bodies, place large balls on two ungreased baking sheets; flatten to 3/8-in. thickness. Place 1/2-in. balls above bodies for heads; flatten.
- Shape red dough into 24 balls, 1/8 in. each, and 24 triangles. Place triangles above heads for hats; attach 1/8-in. white balls for tassels. Place red balls on heads for noses. Divide the yellow dough into 24 pieces; shape into scarves and position on snowmen. Add chocolate chip eyes and buttons.
- Bake at 325° for 13-16 minutes or until set. Cool for 2 minutes before carefully removing to wire racks.
Nutrition Facts1 each: 126 calories, 8g fat (5g saturated fat), 21mg cholesterol, 78mg sodium, 13g carbohydrate (4g sugars, 0 fiber), 1g protein.
Every product is independently selected by our editors. If you buy something through our links, we may earn an affiliate commission.
Recommended Video
Dec 7, 2019
These came out great. Looked just like the picture. Fussy, but worth it.
Dec 17, 2010
This will be my third year to make these treats. The dough is very easy to handle. The time involved is worth the fun of seeing everyone's face light up when they spy these happy little guys. Not only are they cute..they have a great flavor. Everyone looks forward to these taste sensations.
Nov 21, 2008
When I mixed up the dough, it was really dry so I had to add more milk. If I make these cookies again, I would not add any of the food coloring until the white dough balls for the bodies are completed.


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ISO/IEC JTC 1 SC 34 Plenary in London, UK
ISO/IEC JTC 1/SC 34 is the international standardization subcommittee for Document Description and Processing Languages standards and technical reports related to structured markup languages (specifically the Standard Generalized Markup Language (SGML) and the Extensible Markup Language (XML)) in the areas of information description, processing and association.
ISO/IEC JTC 1/SC 34 WG 6 (OpenDocument Format) is concerned with All SC 34 projects and activities relating to the maintenance of ISO/IEC 26300 OpenDocument Format. It collaborates with the OASIS ODF TC in the maintenance of and other work exclusively related to ISO/IEC 26300, in accordance with the maintenance principles and procedures jointly agreed by OASIS and JTC 1. This includes all projects and activities related to ISO/IEC 26300 previously carried out by WG 1 and Ad Hoc Group 3.
The next meeting of ISO/IEC JTC1 SC34 wg6 as well as the ISO/IEC JTC1 SC34 plenary meeting will take place from March 28th 2011 to April 1st 2011 in Prague, Czech Republic.


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Ashley Tisdale & Emma Roberts: People's Choice Awards!
Ashley Tisdale strikes a pose in a Farah Angsana gown at the People's Choice Awards 2011 on Wednesday (January 5) at Nokia Theatre L.A. Live in Los Angeles.
The 25-year-old Hellcats star, who met up with her High School Musical co-star Zac Efron on the carpet, completed her look with Casadei shoes and Swarovski's Reverbere clutch.
Also attending the award show: Emma Roberts, who stepped out in a Dior LBD.
The 19-year-old actress accessorized with Carla Amorim's Planetary earrings, a Rina Limor ring, a Miu Miu clutch, and Brian Atwood's Maniac pumps.
20+ pictures inside of Ashley Tisdale and Emma Roberts at the People's Choice Awards…


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IV. Personal Safety in the Community
INTRODUCTION Working in the community provides many challenges and opportunities. When placed in non- hospital settings as a student nurse or embarking upon a career as a community staff nurse, it is timely to reflect upon personal safety. This chapter is not intended to deter nurses from choosing to work in a community […]Read more


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Q: "My insurer is supposed to take my monthly payment out of my checking account, but didn't do it for three months. Now they want me to pay for three months all at once. Can they do that?"
A: Sorry to tell you, but the short answer is yes, since they provided coverage for those three months. But since they erred by not taking the payments on time, it's worth asking if they'll allow you to pay in installments, so you don't get hit with a triple bill all at once.
When you know that a monthly insurance premium is supposed to come out of your bank account and you notice that it doesn't, don't wait and hope that that means you get free insurance. Call your agent or insurer and find out what's going on.
Wednesday, May 15, 2013
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Ghulam Ishaq Khan Institute of Engineering Sciences and Technology (Urdu: غلام اسحاق خان انسٹیٹیوٹ), also referred to as GIK Institute or GIKI, is an engineering institutes in Swabi, KPK, Pakistan, named after former Pakistani president Ghulam Ishaq Khan. The institute was registered in 1988 by its parent body, the Society for the Promotion of Engineering Sciences and Technology in Pakistan (SOPREST). Ghulam Ishaq Khan, while president of Pakistan, was elected the president of the Society for life and Mr. H. U. Beg was appointed its honorary executive director. The ordinance of the institute was promulgated by the Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa Government in March 1993, and the first batch of students was inducted the same year in October.
Source: wikipedia.org
Source: wikipedia.org
GIK Institute


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Feline thyroid disease has risen to epidemic proportions since it was first diagnosed in 1979. It is a worldwide phenomenon, although it's worse in the U.S. than other countries.
The disease itself, hyperthyroidism (hyper = too much, thyroid = a hormone-making gland) is seen mostly in older cats; usually in cats age 10 or more. Thyroid hormone regulates the body's basic metabolic rate. Too much of it is a lot like drinking too much coffee—it speeds up every reaction in the body. Symptoms are typically related to this excess: excessive hunger, weight loss, restlessness, yowling, vomiting, diarrhea, and heart disease.
(Dogs also develop thyroid disease—but in the opposite direction. They are more prone to _hypo_thyroidism; a deficiency of thyroid hormone.)
Many theories have been proposed to explain the dramatic rise in this new disease. Because it affects so many cats, the focus has been on widespread, environmental causes. Studies have found several suspects in cat food:
- One theory implicates the large excess of iodine found in many cat foods. Humans can develop hyperthyroid disease from too ingesting much iodine; might cats do the same? Iodine is difficult and expensive to test for; instead, pet food makers routinely add plenty of extra, just to make sure that minimums are met. But how much is too much? So far, nobody knows; and nobody is really looking.
- Several studies found an increased likelihood of developing thyroid disease in cats who eat a lot of canned food. Furthermore, there was more hyperthyroidism in cats that ate fish, liver, or "giblet" type canned foods. "Giblet" is another name for organ meats commonly listed on pet food labels as "by-products." High quality, natural cat foods do not contain by-products.
- Further research suggests that one factor may be a chemical (bisphenol A and similar compounds) found in the lining of pop-top cans that can leach out into the food and cause toxicity. However, there are at least 25 different types of can lining, and no answer on which one(s) may be harmful. According to the FDA, the low levels of these chemicals found in some cat foods pose no health risk.
Recently, the media reported that fire-retardant chemicals known as PBDEs may be a factor in feline hyperthyroidism. The authors of a small study noted that PBDEs were introduced at about the same time hyperthyroidism was first diagnosed in cats. Additionally, the rate of feline hyperthyroidism has roughly paralleled the use of PBDEs in other countries.
The main route of exposure in cats is thought to be the PBDEs contained in carpets, upholstery, mattresses, and electronic equipment—and the dust mites that live in these fabrics. Since cats often sit and sleep on carpets, sofas, chairs, and mattresses, their exposure would naturally be high and prolonged. Normal grooming activity would also cause the cat to ingest a fairly large amount of dust. This may explain the increased risk of hyperthyroidism in indoor cats. However, although several cats in the study had high levels of PBDEs, the authors clearly state, "no association was detected between hyperthyroid cats and PBDE levels."
Perhaps the most interesting bit of info to come from this recent study is that PBDEs were also found in cat food. For two major types of PBDEs, high levels were found in canned food, especially in fish- or seafood-based cat foods. High levels of other PBDEs were found in dry cat food.
However, many hyperthyroid cats have never eaten canned food, never gone outside, and have no exposure to any of the other potential "causes" of the disease. But because hyperthyroidism strikes older cats, it is likely that there are multiple factors that come into play throughout the cat's life. There is no "final answer."
What can you do to minimize the risk for your cat? Well, it wouldn't be smart to push your cat outdoors—the dangers outside are far worse, and most of them will kill your cat long before the age of thyroid disease. Ripping out your carpets and throwing away your furniture probably isn't practical.
Diet does seem to be one area where we can make a difference. However, it is not a good idea to feed only dry food. There are many common health issues associated with dry food: obesity, diabetes, urinary tract disease, constipation, kidney disease, and inflammatory bowel disease. A variety of high-quality, natural foods—including at least 50% canned or fresher food (not dry) —is your cat's best bet for a long and healthy life. For fresher foods without the can try dehydrated food such as Honest Kitchen Prowl, freeze dried such as Primal Pet Foods Freeze-Dried Nuggets Dog Food, or frozen raw food for cats.


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Is your name Lagacé, Lagasse, Lagace, Lagassi or Legacy…? Would your great-grandfather be Antoine or Anthony Lagacé or Tony Lagasse, Lagace, Lagassi or Legacy…?
Then this might be your lucky day.
Do you live in New England or know someone who lived in Bristol, Connecticut in 1900?
Then you might have ancestors who knew my great-grandfather or you might be a descendant of André Mignier dit L'Agacé, a French soldier who came to New France to defend the colony against the Iroquois…
My great-grandfather's name is Stanislas Lagacé, but when he moved to Bristol Town, in Hartford county, Connecticut with his family, he changed his name to Dennis Lagassee. His wife Henriette Alexandre became Harriett and his two sons became Adlore and Leo.
This is an image of the 1900 U.S. census.
I came upon this image while I was searching for Eugène Dubé, Lili Lagacé's husband… and lo and behold, I looked down and found a Leo Lagassee with the same birthdate as my grandfather, June 1888.
The rest is history. Adlore was in reality Adélard Lagacé, my grandfather's brother born in 1880 with Dennis being Stanislas and Harriett being Henriette. All the dates correspond. Harriett (Henriette) had 13 children, 6 were still living in 1900.
How I found Eugène Dubé's name in the first place?
And who is this Antoine Lagacé, Lagasse, Lagace, Lagassi, Lagassee or Legacy…?
Come back next time. This is a very long story.


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I hardly ever talk about it. I am not the least bit ashamed, but it is about just me, and I am so much more than a medical condition. Those other parts of myself I can share with others as they too may also share them. However, not all share this commonality we here do. With you, we are a small family who shares this illness and all that goes with it. Not all will belong to this family as in a typical one, not all belong or can relate. When I do talk about epilepsy, I can get rather passionate. Also, in my profession until I have the degrees I want which will allow me to make a difference, I can't afford to talk about it due to the stigma that is still very much alive as some of you may recall from my ordeal a while back. I know a nurse with her PhD who just now is willing to admit it. However, this forum is one place those of us who share epilepsy in our lives in some way can come together to share our experience strength and hope with others who visit.
Sue I wish you the best in your talk and thank you for doing that. We need others like you willing to step up and enlighten the world. You will be great! Tattoo


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Civil War 150 : District of Columbia and Freedom Rising
~ Elisa Babel, MLS
This month marks the 150th anniversary of the Civil War–the opening salvo was at Fort Sumter in Charleston harbor in the early morning hours on April 12, 1861.
The war not only changed the nation–it also changed Washington, DC as a capitol and hometown.
Last month I read Ernest Furgurson's Freedom Rising, a nonfiction book about DC during the Civil War years. Since I work in DC, the 150th anniversary seemed like a great time to discover the city at that time.
Furgurson writes a fascinating and informative story of how the Civil War impacted the city and shaped it to what is today. When President-elect Lincoln arrived for his inauguration in February 1861, there wasn't much about DC to attract people for a visit. As the book progresses through the war years, Furgurson introduces the reader to the people, events, and places in the city as well as what happened officially.
I enjoyed the descriptions of city life and neighborhoods at the time. The landmarks mentioned are either still standing today or long gone. I recognized some of the people who came to DC for one reason or another while others I didn't know.
By April 1865, DC is no longer the sleepy town it once been. Black and white maps of the city are included. I enjoyed this book and learned more about DC along the way.
Around the city and in Maryland and Virginia, you can find Civil War heritage sites to discover and enjoy. The Washington Post is featuring a special section online of the 150th anniversary.
On April 15, Emancipation Day will be observed in the District of Columbia. This city holiday commemorates the signing of the DC Emancipation Act signed by President Lincoln in 1862, freeing all slaves in DC.
This Emancipation was enacted nine months before the more famous Emancipation Proclamation in 1863.
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