Soxy

Happy happy birthday!!!!

QUOTE(SnB @ Jun 15, 2006 -> 04:20 PM) Hey guys, say a prayer for my cousin. She's 16 years old, and i guess 2 weeks ago she wrecked my uncle's car, was illegally released from the hospital, then took a bus and ran away to LA with her friends. At first everyone was worried, but just thought it was an act of teen rebellion i guess. But it's been almost 2 weeks now, with my aunt and uncle searching for her in LA the entire time, and nothing has come of it. I never was really close to this side of the family, so I don't know all the facts and what was going on at the time. Hopefully something happens soon, Thanks guys. http://www.missingkids.com/missingkids/ser...earchLang=en_US I sure will. I hope they find her soon.

QUOTE(SoxFan101 @ Jun 15, 2006 -> 03:44 PM) she is pretty dumb but in general... but when a woman thats not muslim marries a man who is the woman is expected to convert. So I dont see what was the point of bringing it up? I agree with your second point. And on your first point I disagree, impulsive, yes, but dumb no. She got a passport, a ticket, shows a lot of planning. She isn't dumb she's just irresponsible and a teenager.

QUOTE(FlaSoxxJim @ Jun 14, 2006 -> 03:18 PM) How could I forget about that son of a GOB?!? I think he's actually a graduate student, but I cracked up when I saw the name at the bottom of the e-mail. On a side note, I love the band name The Dandy Warhols. I'm not as fond of their music though, but I love the name.

QUOTE(NUKE_CLEVELAND @ Jun 14, 2006 -> 10:42 PM) http://www.cnn.com/2006/WORLD/meast/06/14/...e.ap/index.html Update. This chick was going to convert to Islam and marry this clown. LOL!!! What a stupid bimbo. She's 16, there's a reason 16 year olds can't make legal decisions on their own: they're stupid. Bimbo is a little rich.

Hahaha, I just got an e-mail from Steven Holt. STEVE HOLT!

QUOTE(NUKE_CLEVELAND @ Jun 13, 2006 -> 07:11 PM) You got that right. It ( I cant tell if it's really male or female ) looks like a drag queen. Now that's just rude. Drag queens are way hotter.

QUOTE(bmags @ Jun 13, 2006 -> 11:32 PM) i started to read the fall, like 10 pages, but i miscalculated how much time i would've had to read when it was finals week and i had to return it. I went to the library by me, but i guess its the western branch of the aurora public library, and their selection was so small...but i saw this and grabbed it. on second thought maybe it wasn't the fall...it was...lets see, it was a conversation but you only read one side of it...does that ring a bell That sounds like the fall, with the lawyer in the bar?

QUOTE(EvilMonkey @ Jun 13, 2006 -> 10:53 PM) You do this every day? Your students must hate you , having to turn in a 3-page paper every day. And don't you prepare the basics of your lesson plan earlier than the day before you need it? And what are the actual hours you are working at the school? My older kids classes run from 7:45 until 2:15pm. That's 6.5 hours. That includes 'lunch', and 'study hall'. I work almost twice that every day. I guess it is your turn for the small violin to play. Lesson plans cannot always be fully anticipated. Some (seemingly easy concepts) can take students an entire lesson to grasp, while other (seemingly difficult) concepts they get quickly. Granted my teaching experience is at a university, but I would say that for every hour I am in class teaching I spend 4-5 hours prepping (when I am lecturing only I usually spend between 8-10 hours writing and researching my lecture). So, don't act like teaching isn't a real full-time job.

QUOTE(bmags @ Jun 13, 2006 -> 07:10 PM) i just ordered that from the library... just started the stranger by camus Awesome book, but The Fall is better (and one of my all-time faves)

QUOTE(minors @ Jun 13, 2006 -> 12:26 PM) Such a good move by our president. He bolsters our troops and caught the liberals off guard. With all eyes on camp david waiting for another vulnerable GOP spin to come out of it, Democrats were once again outsmarted by President Bush. Dems were stammering in disbelief when next they saw Bush strolling the marble halls of Saddam's old Palace greeting Iraq's new leader of a fresh government. With their tears of mourning barely dry from Zarqawi's untimely death at the hands of the murderous Bush, Democrats have the rest of the day to make the case as to how Bush made a big mistake by visiting Iraq and hosting a video conference from a totally surprising end of the screen. But they were outclass :headshake

I'm afraid I won't get much reading done until July, but. . . I've had Gilead and Housekeeping (Marilyn Robinson) on the top of my list for a couple of months now.

But you never know who may be looking at your profile. . .

QUOTE(FlaSoxxJim @ Jun 13, 2006 -> 10:35 AM) It's certainly legitimate news. I'm not debating that.

QUOTE(YASNY @ Jun 13, 2006 -> 10:31 AM) You won't hear much about it. I'm curious as to what page that NYT story was on. On the website it's right below the Bush in Iraq story. On a side note, how sad is it that we have to have a news story saying that government members WON'T be indicted?

QUOTE(SnB @ Jun 12, 2006 -> 01:38 PM) I've got color to my name now Congrats and long overdue.

QUOTE(NUKE_CLEVELAND @ Jun 11, 2006 -> 04:49 PM) I think its totally disgraceful. I think the KKK is a low-rent, redneck bunch of idiots. I also think that despite their stupidity they have rights to free speech and free assembly. Its up to people who know better to counter their message with a more reasonable one. Nuke agrees with Balta and the ACLU! The end is nigh people!

QUOTE(FlaSoxxJim @ Jun 10, 2006 -> 12:03 AM) It's actually a Biblical name, from way back in Genesis. Christians believe it either referred to the coming of david in teh future, or possibly even a Messianic foretelling of Jesus. Jews believe it refers either to a time of peace or a savior who has not yet come. [/catechism] Or it's a beagle in children's story. . .

QUOTE(LosMediasBlancas @ Jun 9, 2006 -> 10:07 AM) The second image was in color for only like a second, then it went to B & W. Did everyone have the same experience? How hard you stare at the first image (and how long) will affect how long the after image lasts.

Actually, it's not an illusion, it's an afterimage. Take a perception course and you'll learn the psychophysics behind it.

Looks like a nose job to me.

QUOTE(FlaSoxxJim @ Jun 8, 2006 -> 12:04 AM) The secret of every teenage girl's best friend?? Amazingly, it's. . . the 220V to 110V international stepdown voltage convertor. No, I don't know what that means either. That's funny, most women in their twenties have AAs as their best friends. . .

Good piece in Salon Who's afraid of the big bad gay marriage amendment? Bush's feeble "family values" ploy is just a dutiful payoff to his base -- and it won't make much difference in November. By Michael Scherer June 6, 2006 | WASHINGTON -- There is something queer about this week's Senate crusade to outlaw gay marriage. If you listen closely, the leaders who oppose single-sex unions refuse to talk about gay people. They talk about activist judges, welfare rolls, the rights of voters and the birthrate of single mothers in Scandinavia. But there is not a gay man, a lesbian woman or a bisexual teenager in the mix. Kansas Republican Sam Brownback, a 2008 presidential contender, led the charge for a constitutional amendment on the Senate floor Monday, dominating the debate with a handful of blue-and-white charts that he said showed the need for a constitutional amendment to ban same-sex marriage. He had line graphs, bar graphs and circle graphs. He spoke about French law and Dutch sociology. He went on about the benefits of two-parent families. "It's important that a child be raised between a loving couple," Brownback declared, a phrase that seemed, at first, to be an argument in favor of gay marriage. "Developmental problems are less common in two parent families." He said that welfare encourages out-of-wedlock births and called for more research on marriage. But the Republican senator made no real mention of men who love men or women who love women. In fact, the principal argument mounted by social conservative leaders like Brownback has more to do with the fragile state of heterosexual marriage than homosexuality. Their convoluted logic works like this: If society approves of long-term homosexual monogamy, then the "institution of marriage" will be weakened. This will lead straight people to abandon monogamy and harm the welfare of the nation's children, who benefit from stable, two-parent families. "Our policies should aim to strengthen families, not undermine them," explained President Bush in his Monday address to amendment supporters. "And changing the definition of marriage would undermine the family structure." This is why Brownback has been spending so much time studying Nordic marriage trends. He believes there is a direct (albeit inverse) correlation between gay marriage and heterosexual fidelity. "Where gay marriage finds acceptance, marriage virtually ceased to exist," he said in the Senate, reading aloud from one of his big blue-and-white posters, this one labeled "Scandinavia." "The institution no longer means much of anything." These straight-marriage-in-trouble arguments are everywhere in the current debate. Just a few hours earlier, they had dominated a Monday press conference in the Capitol, just a few feet off the Senate floor. "When marriage declines, children and society suffer," explained Matt Daniels, the founder of the Alliance for Marriage, an umbrella group of churches and synagogues that wrote the anti-gay-marriage amendment. "Violent crime, youth crime, welfare dependency and child poverty track more closely with family breakdown than with any other social variable, including race and income level." Daniels, who describes himself as the child of a single welfare mother, had gathered black pastors, Hispanic leaders, rabbis and a Mormon elder to make the case against lasting homosexual bonds. But rather than talk about gay marriage, a dozen speakers, including Colorado GOP Sen. Wayne Allard, took turns expounding on the importance of loving, two-parent homes for children. They talked about the damage done by deadbeat dads in the inner city, and the importance of family in minority communities. As the Rev. Eve Nunez, an Arizona pastor put it, "America has been wandering in a wilderness of social problems caused by family disintegration." The press corps who had gathered for the event appeared universally baffled by the argument being made from behind the microphones. "How would outlawing gay marriage encourage heterosexual fathers to stick around?" asked the first wire service reporter to be called on for questions. "Why not outlaw divorce?" another scribe asked Allard later. In many ways, the institution-of-marriage argument is tailored for sound bites, not serious debate. It appeals directly to those Americans who already believe in a wave of secularism that is destroying the country's moral fabric. But it may also be an argument of last resort. As it stands, the polls say about three in five Americans oppose gay marriage, though only two in five support amending the Constitution to ban it. That said, almost all the trend lines point in a liberal direction. Last month, the Gallup Poll reported that 54 percent of Americans believe that homosexuality should be considered an "acceptable lifestyle," up from 34 percent in 1982. In the same time period, the percentage of Americans who think homosexual relations between consenting adults should be legal has risen from 45 to 56 percent. Young Americans are the most likely age group to support gay marriage and the least likely group to consider it a make-or-break issue, a fact that should make Republican political strategists wary. Furthermore, the American Psychological Association has concluded that gay and lesbian parents are as likely as straight parents to provide supportive healthy environments for their children. There is no scientific evidence that children of homosexual parents are more likely to suffer abuse, psychological hardship or homosexual tendencies. Gay couples have been found to be just as happy -- and just as unhappy -- as heterosexual couples and similarly committed to long-term relationships. Despite significant social stigma, the APA describes multiple surveys that show between 40 and 60 percent of gay men and 45 and 80 percent of lesbian women are currently involved in romantic relationships. Given these facts, it is perhaps understandable that activists who argue against gay marriage focus their fire on the failures of heterosexual marriage. It is also understandable that journalists, who are themselves largely baffled by the paucity of data behind the argument, focus on reporting about the politics of the issue. As it stands, there is no hope that the marriage amendment will pass Congress. This has led Democrats to cry foul, as if it is a great outrage that a political party would attempt to score political points in Congress. But both Republicans and Democrats say there is little evidence that the ploy will have any real impact on the 2006 election. "These kinds of issues, they may affect the national atmospherics, but in terms of how we run elections, we are focused on local issues," said Ed Patru, a spokesman for the National Republican Congressional Committee, which is coordinating the GOP's 2006 House effort. Religious groups are also not treating it as a partisan issue. James Dobson's Focus on the Family has taken out radio and print ads in 13 states, claiming that 16 senators do not "believe that every child needs a mom and dad." But of the group Dobson has targeted, most of them are not up for reelection this year and six of the senators are Republicans, including popular stalwarts like New Hampshire's John Sununu and Pennsylvania's Arlen Specter. A separate ad in USA Today, paid for by Dobson's group and its ally, the Family Research Council, attacked both Democratic Sen. Hillary Clinton and Republican Sen. John McCain for opposing the amendment. Despite predictions to the contrary, the current debate does not appear to be another stroke of Machiavellian brilliance from presidential advisor Karl Rove, but simply a dutiful payoff to the president's base voters. "He couldn't not do it," explained Richard Viguerie, a prominent conservative activist who believes that gay marriage will not have much of an impact in 2006. "He's got an election coming up and he is 30 percent in the polls. Nothing, Dr. Samuel Johnson told us, focuses the mind like an impending hanging." Whatever its role in the 2006 campaign, the debate on gay marriage will continue. At the Monday morning press conference, Allard announced that he hoped the current debate over amending the constitution will become an annual rite in Congress. "It takes a while, I think, for the Senate to realize how the Americans feel," said Allard, whom Time magazine described last month as one of the five worst senators. "It takes a while for the American public to realize what has happened." He was referring, yet again, to the continued erosion of stable, heterosexual, two-parent homes in America. Time, of course, will tell if he is right. But it's a long shot, to say the least. The American people are not given to amending the Constitution to punish one group of people (committed gay and lesbian couples) for the sins of another group (uncommitted straight couples). The last time it happened was the 18th Amendment in 1919, when the United States decided that the danger of alcohol abuse for some outweighed the pleasures of an evening drink for many. Fifteen years later, the American people realized the error of their ways and ended Prohibition. Despite predictions to the contrary, our union remained strong.

QUOTE(whitesoxin @ Jun 7, 2006 -> 06:33 PM) I've seen an instance of it, so I am not embarassed for thinking that. Not every situation is the same, and it is the reason that some people do it. It really is not an ignorant comment because I have seen it happen to people I know. Wow, AN instance of it. . .

What a cutie, congrats!