Soxy

I KNEW this would involve the Celtic....... Although I'm surprised it wasn't Ranger's Fans doing the booing.

QUOTE(Texsox @ Apr 10, 2005 -> 10:56 AM) No car is too small. I'm 5'8"--and my motto is many things can be too small for sex. One of them being cars....

wtf just happened here???????

As my mother says, If you can't think of anything nice to say let 'em have it--they probably deserve it anyway....

QUOTE(Jabroni @ Apr 9, 2005 -> 02:21 AM) Oh sweet, sweet Valenstache... Does he pluck his eyebrows?????

Nope, he would have gotten a kiss on the cheek. But if it was the Belgians, well, he would have gotten one better.....

Interesting article. Thanks Cheat.

QUOTE(Steff @ Apr 8, 2005 -> 03:46 PM) I apologize for getting kind of heated on this.. ever since I found out about my friends uncle.. I just get so pissed about this crap. I just don't really read the articles or thread as much any more....Even thinking about the media circus this is (and how demeaning that is to the crime) makes me really angry/sad/frustrating.

Wooo, party Wisconsin style.... Earth's Oldest Known Object on Display By RYAN J. FOLEY, Associated Press Writer MADISON, Wis. - A tiny speck of zircon crystal that is barely visible to the eye is believed to be the oldest known piece of Earth at about 4.4 billion years old. For the first time ever, the public will have a chance to see the particle Saturday at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where researchers in 2001 made the breakthrough discovery that the early Earth was much cooler than previously believed based on analysis of the crystal. To create buzz about an otherwise arcane subject, the university is planning a daylong celebration of the ancient stone — capped with "The Rock Concert" by jazz musicians who composed music to try to answer the question: What does 4.4 billion years old sound like? "This is it — the oldest thing ever. One day only," said Joe Skulan, director of the UW-Madison Geology Museum, where the object will be displayed — under police guard — from 10 a.m. to 3 p.m. "The idea of having a big celebration of something that's so tiny — we're playing with the obvious absurdity of it." With the aid of a microscope, anyone will be able to check out the tiny grain, which measures less than two human hairs in diameter. A concert by Jazz Passengers, a six-piece group from New York hired to compose music for the event, will follow on Saturday evening. In posters hanging on campus, the concert is advertised as "a loving musical tribute to the oldest known object on Earth." Composer Roy Nathanson said the concert will mix humor, jazz music, computer-generated beats, and the occasional rocks being banged together to "follow the geological history of how this zircon came about." "It's an amazing story. The whole thing is something that captures your imagination," said Nathanson, 53, a saxophonist who spent one year composing the performance. Analysis of the object in 2001 by John Valley, a UW-Madison professor of geology and geophysics, startled researchers around the world by concluding that the early Earth, instead of being a roiling ocean of magma, was cool enough to have oceans and continents — key conditions for life. "It's not very much to look at because it's so very small. But to me, the miraculous thing about the crystal is that we've been able to make such wide-ranging inferences about the early Earth," Valley said. "This is our first glimpse into the earliest history of the Earth." Valley found that the planet had cooled to about 100-degrees Centigrade less than 200 million years after it was formed. Before the research, the oldest evidence for liquid water on the planet was from a rock estimated to be much younger — 3.8 billion years old. As part of Saturday's event, Valley will display a brand new, $3 million ion microprobe that he and other researchers will use to analyze tiny samples such as the zircon crystal. The hand-built instrument weighs 11 tons and takes up an entire laboratory. Valley, who has tried to obtain the equipment for 22 years, had to travel to Scotland and Australia while he analyzed the zircon to use equipment there. A federal grant is paying for most of the new instrument. After the festivities the object will return to its native Australia with Simon Wilde, professor at Curtin University of Technology in Perth, Western Australia, who made its discovery in 1984. The sample will eventually be put on display at a natural history museum in that country.

QUOTE(Texsox @ Apr 8, 2005 -> 12:34 PM) While we are discussing Channel 11 for us grown in Chicago types, which was worse Zoom or Electric Company? Zoobalee Zoo.

Not Cool... From the NYT Cardinal Law, Ousted in U.S. Scandal, Is Given a Role in Rites By LAURIE GOODSTEIN Published: April 8, 2005 ROME, April 7 - Cardinal Bernard Law, who was forced to resign in disgrace as archbishop of Boston two years ago for protecting sexually abusive priests, was named by the Vatican today as one of nine prelates who will have the honor of presiding over funeral Masses for Pope John Paul II. To many American Catholics, Cardinal Law is best known as the archbishop who presided over the Boston archdiocese as it became the focus for the sexual abuse scandal involving priests. But to Vatican officials, Cardinal Law is a powerful kingmaker who traveled internationally for the church and whose favorite priests were regularly appointed bishops by John Paul. After he stepped down in Boston in 2003, he was given a spacious apartment and a prestigious although honorary post in Rome as archpriest of the Basilica of St. Mary Major. It is by virtue of this position that he was given the high-profile role of celebrating Monday's funeral ritual, the third in the nine-day mourning period that follows a pope's death. It is expected that most of the cardinals will attend the Mass, which will be open to the public. Cardinal Law will deliver a homily that many Vatican watchers will parse for clues about the cardinals' thinking on who should be the next pope. By permitting Cardinal Law to take the limelight in Rome just when the church is mourning the death of John Paul, the cardinals have reminded American Catholics that their most painful recent chapter barely registered in the Vatican. "It's yet another example of the gap between how the Vatican sees things and how the U.S. church sees things," said the Rev. Keith F. Pecklers, an American Jesuit who is a professor at the Gregorian, a pontifical university in Rome. "This kind of thing can open the wounds for people just when the healing was beginning." Cardinal Law resigned after a judge decided to unseal court records that included a letter from the cardinal commending priests even though he knew they had been accused at one time of abusing children. After saying for a year that he would not resign, he finally stepped down and cloistered himself for a while in a monastery until his appointment in Rome. More than 600 people who say they were victims have come forward in the Boston archdiocese, the fourth-largest in the United States. The church there has paid settlements of more than $90 million, and Cardinal Law's successor, Archbishop Sean P. O'Malley, has had to consolidate parishes and close Catholic schools to cope with the resulting financial problems. In Boston, Bernie McDaid, one of as many as 50 people who have accused the Rev. Joseph Birmingham of sexual abuse, said he and others among them were "infuriated" to learn Thursday of Cardinal Law's prominence in the papal funeral and transition. "He never lost power, even though he stepped down from Boston," Mr. McDaid said. "In any other corporation if you lost your rank and left, you'd lose your power and you'd be stripped of your title." But, "here he is in Rome, still as powerful as he was before." The nine days of mourning begins on Friday, with the requiem Mass, over which the dean of the College of Cardinals, Joseph Ratzinger of Germany, will preside. As a member of the College of Cardinals who is under age 80, Cardinal Law is eligible to vote in the conclave that will elect the next pope. The conclave is scheduled to begin on April 18. In Rome, neither Cardinal Law nor Archbishop O'Malley responded to interview requests. Cardinal Law was among the American cardinals who attended a reception this evening with President Bush and his wife, Laura, at the United States Embassy residence. At a news conference on Thursday, Cardinal Edward M. Egan of New York said he believed that Cardinal Law had been chosen to preside at the funeral Mass because of his status as archpriest in the basilica. He declined to say whether he approved. The list of the nine prelates selected to celebrate funeral Masses for the pope was announced Thursday by Archbishop Piero Marini, master of the Liturgical Celebrations of the Supreme Pontiff. One senior Vatican official familiar with the workings of the College of Cardinals, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said the cardinals approved the list during their meetings this week. When asked whether Cardinal Law's role in the American scandal was taken into consideration, the official said, "I don't think so." He said that Cardinal Law was not acting as a former Boston archbishop in celebrating the Mass but in "another capacity - he's one of the senior cardinals." However, one Vatican expert said that by tradition, the cardinals had no choice but to select Cardinal Law to preside at one of the nine funeral Masses. Dr. John-Peter Pham, author of "Heirs of the Fisherman," a book about papal succession, said it was customary for the archpriest of one of three patriarchal basilicas in Rome, St. Peter's, St. Paul's and St. Mary Major, to celebrate a novemdiales Mass. Two of the archpriests are already celebrating Masses in different ceremonial roles; having them celebrate two Masses would violate protocol, Dr. Pham said.

QUOTE(NUKE_CLEVELAND @ Apr 8, 2005 -> 09:11 AM) A little math. 25 gallon tank 2.50 or so a gallon. $62.5 dollars for a tank of gas 15 MPG ( I'm being generous on the mileage ) You fill up your tank 3 times a month we're looking at 186 dollars a month just to fuel the monster........to say nothing of insurance and payments. Wow, that much gas alone is more than my payments AND insurance....Wow.....

I am doubly glad my new car gets 30/38 mpg.... I honestly cannot imagine driving a big truck or SUV with prices like this.....

I ended up going with an '05 Toyota Corolla that was a program car. It's pretty sweet--and I'll be able to pick it up Monday-ish. Hurray!!!!!

QUOTE(Texsox @ Apr 7, 2005 -> 12:01 PM) Actually don't you have dark blue forChild Abuse, Colon Cancer, and Crime Victim's Rights and what color is sexual assault? I'ts not on the list. Teal (although I have seen green)....

Yes, but not because of the pink jersey thing--but because there's really no meaning to them anymore because they're so common... I do, though, have a child abuse one and sexual assault one on my bookbag....

I'm, uh, looking for a new car and just wondering about what people drive, how they life it. And if anyone one knows some of the cheaper cars to insure please pass that on too.

Don't freak yourself out. On the ACT I think you are supposed to answer everything even if you're guessing (as opposed to the SAT). Go into it with the attitude that you're a really good student--and that will be reflected in your ACT score. And in the end, don't worry too much about it. I know a kid who got a 35 and flunked out of school. And I know someone else that got a 19 and is on dean's list.... If you have a strong overall application that will speak to your credit even with a mediocre ACT. But you'll be fine, so don't worry.

QUOTE(TheBigHurt35 @ Apr 6, 2005 -> 03:40 PM) They're just frustrated because, despite three straight division titles, they've done absolutely nothing in the playoffs during that time and, more importantly, nobody outside of the Twin Cities gives a s*** about them. Not many IN the TC either....Craptacular fans, thy name is Minnesota....

Ears bleeding, pain, pain, pain. Just heard a Tim McGraw cover of Tiny Dancer. I'm going to have nightmares for a week....*shudder*

Link-ish

Saul Bellow passes on... Nobel Laureate Saul Bellow Dies at 89 By HILLEL ITALIE, AP National Writer NEW YORK - Nobel laureate Saul Bellow, a master of comic melancholy who in "Herzog," "Humboldt's Gift" and other novels both championed and mourned the soul's fate in the modern world, died Tuesday. He was 89. Bellow's close friend and attorney, Walter Pozen, said the writer had been in declining health, but was "wonderfully sharp to the end." Pozen said that Bellow's wife and daughter were at his side when he died at his home in Brookline, Mass. Bellow was the most acclaimed of a generation of Jewish writers who emerged after World War II, among them Bernard Malamud, Philip Roth and Cynthia Ozick. To American letters, he brought the immigrant's hustle, the bookworm's brains and the high-minded notions of the born romantic. "The backbone of 20th-century American literature has been provided by two novelists — William Faulkner and Saul Bellow," Philip Roth said Tuesday. "Together they are the Melville, Hawthorne, and Twain of the 20th century." He was the first writer to win the National Book Award three times: in 1954 for "The Adventures of Augie March," in 1965 for "Herzog" and in 1971 for "Mr. Sammler's Planet." In 1976, he won the Pulitzer Prize for "Humboldt's Gift." That same year Bellow was awarded the Nobel Prize in literature, cited for his "human understanding and subtle analysis of contemporary culture." In 2003, the Library of America paid the rare tribute of releasing work by a living writer, issuing a volume of Bellow's early novels. In spite, or perhaps because, of all the praise, Bellow also had detractors. Norman Mailer called "Augie March" a "travelogue for timid intellectuals." Critic Alfred Kazin, a longtime friend who became estranged from Bellow, thought the author had become a "university intellectual" with "contempt for the lower orders." Biographer James Atlas accused Bellow of favoring "subservient women in order to serve his own shaky self-image." Old-fashioned, but not complacent, the author strove to ward off the "Nobel curse," to be softened by literature's highest honor. He kept writing into his 80s and, hoping to make his work more affordable, had his novella "A Theft" published as a paperback original in 1989. His recent works included "The Actual," a sentimental novella published in 1997, and "Ravelstein," a 2000 novel based on the life of his late friend, Allan Bloom, author of "The Closing of the American Mind." Also in 2000, Bellow was the subject of Atlas' acclaimed biography. "If the soul is the mind at its purest, best, clearest, busiest, profoundest," Ozick wrote in 1984, "then Bellow's charge has been to restore the soul to American literature." Bellow had a gift for describing faces, and the author's own looks — snowy hair, aristocratic nose and space between his front teeth — were familiar from book jackets. Bellow's personality was equally distinctive. In "Humboldt's Gift," the narrator's childhood sweetheart refers to him as a "good man who's led a cranky life." His longtime agent, Harriet Wasserman, once described him as being as "deeply emotional as he is highly intellectual and cerebral." He had five wives, three sons and, at age 84, a daughter. He met presidents (Kennedy, Johnson) and movie stars (Marilyn Monroe, Jack Nicholson). He feuded with writers (Truman Capote, Mailer), and helped out writers, notably William Kennedy, on whose behalf he lobbied to get his work published. After teaching for many years at the University of Chicago, Bellow stunned both the literary and academic world by leaving the city with which he was so deeply associated. In 1993, he accepted a position at Boston University, where he taught a freshman-level class on "young men on the make" in literature. Like his characters, Bellow's life was an evolution from the unbearable, but comic passion of the Old World, to the unbearable, but comic alienation of the New World. The son of Russian immigrants, he was born Solomon Bellows on July 10, 1915, in Lachine, Quebec, outside Montreal. He dropped the final "s" from his last name and changed his first name to Saul when he began publishing his writing in the 1940s. When he was 9, his family moved from Montreal to Chicago. Hebrew was Bellow's first language. His family life was one of violence (his father), of sentiment (both parents) and of humor (everyone). Nothing was left unsaid. The classic Bellow narrator was a self-absorbed intellectual with ideals the author himself seemed to form during the Depression. While he would remember the fear most people had during those years, Bellow found them an exciting and even liberating time. "There were people going to libraries and reading books," he told The Associated Press in a 1997 interview. "They were going to libraries because they were trying to keep warm; they had no heat in their houses. There was a great deal of mental energy in those days, of very appealing sorts. Working stiffs were having ideas. "Also, you didn't want to waste your time getting a professional education because when you finished there would be no jobs for you. It seems that the time of the Depression was a suspension of all the normal activities. Everything was held up." Bellow did study at the University of Chicago for two years and then transferred and got an undergraduate degree from Northwestern University in nearby Evanston. He was a contributor to the Partisan Review, along with Kazin, Mary McCarthy and the poet Delmore Schwartz, whom he would re-imagine as Von Humboldt Fleisher in "Humboldt's Gift." He worked on a novel he ended up destroying and eventually debuted with "Dangling Man," in 1944. From the beginning, Bellow was determined to tell a different kind of American story, to depart from the tight-lipped machismo of Ernest Hemingway. "Do you have emotions? Strangle them. To a degree, everyone obey this code," Bellow wrote in "Dangling Man." While the Hemingway hero keeps his problems to himself, Bellow declared "I intend to talk about mine." While the Bellow themes were in place from the start, his prose matured later. As the author himself would acknowledge, his early books were too prim, too careful. Only in 1953, with "The Adventures of Augie March," would readers see another Bellow: the funny Bellow, the immigrant Bellow, Bellow the son of a bootlegger. "Well, `Augie March' was a sort of Niagara of freedom that poured over me suddenly. I thought of myself as an imperfect writer who needed to perfect himself, perfect his language and style, and all of a sudden that was a suffocating project that I had to break with," he said. "There was a way for children of European immigrants in America to write about this experience with a new language. I felt like a creator of a language suddenly and was intoxicated. It was truly intoxicating and I couldn't control it. It took me several books to rein it in." "Augie March" and the books that followed — "Seize the Day," "Henderson the Rain King," "Herzog" — established him as a major writer. In each work Bellow lived up to Augie March's idea of imaginative power, of inventing "a man who can stand before the terrible appearances." Bellow's men stood before the New World, and trembled. Nonbelievers amid the worship of machines and money, they shook with existential despair. They did everything from compose letters to dead people in "Herzog" to running off to Africa in "Henderson the Rain King." "There is something terribly nervous-making about a modern existence. For one thing, it's all the thinking we have to do and all the judgments we have to make. It's the price of freedom: make the judgments, make the mental calls," Bellow said. Among his most personal novels was "Humboldt's Gift," which Bellow described as "a comic book about death," culminating in a graveyard scene as emotional as anything he wrote. The novel was also personal in other ways. The main character, Charlie Citrine, is an aging Chicago writer chasing a younger woman while trying to keep a former wife from ruining him financially. Two years after the book was published, Bellow faced a 10-day jail term for contempt of court in an alimony dispute with his third wife, Susan Glassman Bellow. An Illinois appeals court overturned the sentence. In December 1999, Bellow's fifth wife, Janis Freedman, gave birth to their daughter, Naomi. Bellow, 84 at the time, also had three grown sons from prior marriages, and quipped about finally having a girl: "If I didn't succeed at first, I'll try again."

QUOTE(qwerty @ Apr 5, 2005 -> 03:40 PM) This is from very recent. Hahahaha! I am prettier than Britney Spears!!!! Self-esteem sky-rockets.

Oh Yas, that's awful. I'm sorry. Good thoughts and hugs to you and your family...

QUOTE(whitesoxin' @ Apr 4, 2005 -> 05:34 PM) I'm just that good I win.