In my neighbor hood

There is a guy in my neighborhood that I see riding his ten speed bicycle around my city wearing nothing but a speedo.Not even a helmet. I have seen him many many times.Normally I think that speedos are goofy looking. He is not a bad looking guy. He wears next to NOTHING. I don't at all mind. I can even see that he is a rather well endowed guy. I think he may know that he gives the ladies in town a show.He has nice long brown hair and he is fairly well muscled and is pretty tanned. He disappointed me the other day while I was driving home from work the other day. He was on his bicycle as usual, but was wearing cut off shorts and a tee shirt. He was so close to me I wanted to yell 'Hey-BRING BACK THE SPEEDO'! But I didn't.I just look at him and smile really big:)

Still running on PISSED

I am still running on pissed from the last post I made here. I am sick and tired of the constant bitching by others on the AOL message boards about President Bush. I mean, I am not a huge fan of the guy either, but seems that some people want to blame Bush for every damn societal problem this country has. I just wanna reach through my computer and slap the ever lovin shit outta them and tell them,'hey if you are that miserable here in this country THEN YOU ARE FREE TO LEAVE IT'!I have told them that a few times, but they still whine and bitch, so I have to put them on ignore. My iggy bin is full of these whiny , bitchy morons. I am watching 'Mind of Mencia' right now. That guy is hilarious.

Fed up

I am fed up. Fed up with BOTH major political parties. I am sick of both of the parties giving boxed, pat, stock answers to serious political questions. For instance, when the Democrats are asked what should be done about our troops in the Middle East, they usually say something along the lines of ' bring our troops home'.Well, ok, EVERYONE wants that! But it DOES NOT ANSWER THE QUESTION! What would you do to solve the problems in the Middle East? I have yet to get an answer from them. I am a registered Republican, but I am almost as fed up with them as I am with the Democrats. Republicans 'stock' response: 'stay the course'! Ugh. I feel like banging my head against the wall.Stay the course ? Ok fine. But just remember that eventually, it may take years and years and years, but we might have to 'pull out'(ugh-another stock word). I say to the people who say 'stay the course': Then after we do that, then WHAT? They usually have no answer.Don't get me wrong, I love voting and I love being an American and I support the troops, but sometimes I feel like the major political parties are something like my folks, and each side is pulling me like taffy to their side because 'they know what is best for me'. I feel that sometimes the troops are in the same position I am. I know that when they get orders, they HAVE to obey them. Completely understand. Sometimes I get sick and tired of all of the political bickering. The Democrats (it seems to me anyway) try to blame Bush for all of society's problems, call him a hate monger, stupid, etc. I am just sick of that.It is just NOT true. And I am sick of the Republicans preaching at us about 'responsibility' especially when some of them do not practice what they preach. Ok, my rant is nearly over. LOL. Bottom line is, I guess that there are jerks on all sides .

From Yahoo.. and I could not agree more

Grieving parent: Remember our children By VICKI SMITH, Associated Press Writer
1 hour, 22 minutes ago



BLACKSBURG, Va. - Peter Read wants you to make a choice.

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He asks that you turn away from the face of the deranged gunman glaring at the camera. Gaze instead at the face of a bright and bubbly brunette who smiled even when she was unhappy, a face always in the middle of a crowd.

It is the face of Mary Karen Read, the daughter he will now see only in scrapbooks.

Hers is just one of 32 promising lives cut short at Virginia Tech — the life of a musician, an aspiring schoolteacher, a doting big sister to five siblings. A 19-year-old freshman who had just filed her first tax return and learned, the day before she died, how to make a pumpkin pie.

When you think of the massacre that befell this quiet college town, those are the memories Peter Read wants you to remember.

"We want the world to know and celebrate our children's lives, and we believe that's the central element that brings hope in the midst of great tragedy," Read said Thursday, with his wife, Cathy, at his side. "These kids were the best that their generation has to offer."

As the Reads left Blacksburg on Thursday for their home in Annandale, they were exhausted, pale, heartbroken — and furious. On television, the overwhelming image of the tragedy was the face of Cho Seung-Hui — a killer whose name Peter Read cannot bring himself to speak.

"I want to issue a direct personal plea, to all the major media," he told The Associated Press. "For the love of God and our children, stop broadcasting those images and those words. Choose to focus on life and the love and the light that our children brought into the world and not on the darkness and the madness and the death."

Several networks have already heard Read's message loud and clear — from disgusted viewers. Fox News Channel announced it would no longer run the disturbing audio and images of the gunman. NBC, which aired the material first, and cable outlet MSNBC said they would "severely limit" their use.

Read hopes the focus will swing back to the children. Children such as Paul Turner's daughter Maxine, a 22-year-old chemical engineering major from Vienna who loved beaches, swing dancing and her close-knit circle of friends. She would have graduated soon, and she had already lined up a job in Elkton, Md.

At Virginia Tech, Maxine Turner co-founded a sorority and earned a red belt in Tae Kwon Do. She loved the German band Rammstein and signed up for a language class to understand the lyrics.

It was there that she died.

On Thursday, her body rested at a morgue in Roanoke, where state and U.S. flags were lowered and access was heavily guarded by police. A hearse will arrive sometime this week to carry her home, a scenario that will be repeated many times as parents hold funerals.

Like so many today, the Read family is blended: Peter Read, a 44-year-old Air Force veteran, married Yon Son Yi, of Palisades Park, N.J., who gave birth to Mary Read. But the couple later divorced.

Yi remarried and had a second daughter, Hannah, 4 1/2. Read remarried too, and he and his wife had four children: Stephen, 11; Patrick, 4 1/2; Brendan, 2 1/2; and Colleen, 10 months.

The Reads live in a quiet cul-de-sac in Annandale, where they moved in 2001 from Virginia Beach.

Mary Read made friends fast. She joined the French honor society, the National Honor Society and the marching band. She played lacrosse for two years and moved easily between the cliques that fill high school hallways.

She wanted to teach math and science to elementary school students, and she enrolled at Virginia Tech.

In her dorm room were scrapbooks filled with hundreds of photographs — at summer band camp, at Myrtle Beach, on the arm of her father as part of the homecoming court.

The end of her freshman year was just weeks away, and she had planned to spend the summer at home, working at a deli and helping care for her siblings.

She came home Easter weekend, staging practice egg hunts for her brothers. Then, the weekend before her death, she came home again.

She divided her time between her friends and her family those two days but was inseparable from her laptop. She sat on the stairs, where the wireless reception was best, to instant message and e-mail her friends. A brother sat nearby, toy computer on his lap.

"He wanted to be like Mary," Peter Read recalled.

On Sunday, Read's wife showed his daughter how to make her favorite dessert, a pumpkin pie. And when Read took her to the bus stop at 4:30 p.m., she had a slab of the pie and a container of Cool Whip in a plastic bag.

Mary Read never called to check in when she reached Blacksburg, but her parents know what she did that night: She had recorded her favorite TV show, "House," on DVDs and watched them on her laptop during the 4 1/2-hour ride.

The next morning, she had French class in Norris Hall, where gunman Cho Seung-Hui took her life.

When news of the shootings broke, Peter Read started calling his daughter, hoping she would pick up. Then he called her roommate. The hours wore on, without word.

When Read learned that the parents of his daughter's longtime friend Danielle Waters were driving to Blacksburg late that afternoon to find their daughter, he asked to ride along.

On the drive, Olga and John Waters learned their daughter was alive. Around 9:30 p.m., Read's cell phone rang. It was his wife, and the state police were at their door.

The Reads won't talk about their grief over these past few days. It's too painful, too personal. The time is not yet right.

But they share the photos and drawings from their daughter's dorm room, which was just as she had left it.

In a plastic bag was the empty container that had held her pie. And on her desk was a calendar Mary Read's grandmother had given her years ago, each day offering a quote from a famous woman.

On April 16, the words were from a teacher, Helen Keller:

"When we do the best we can, we never know what miracle is wrought in our life, or in the life of another."

___

Associated Press writers Sue Lindsey in Roanoke and Kristen Gelineau in Blacksburg contributed to this report.

Took a spill

After I had some xrays I went home for a bit then went to work. I took a pretty hard fall, scraped up my hands and hurt my knee. I cried, and two guys had to come and help me up. I was embarrassed! I cried, because of the physical pain. When my mother called later I told her what happened and we both laughed! I am going to have bruises and be sore for a few days. As far as the bloodwork and exrays go, I will know the results on Thursday. I will watch a comedy central show or shows tonight to take my mind off of being embarrassed!

Physical

I had a physical last Friday. Dr took a pap smear, pelvic exam, weighed in and such. I have to go back in for a chest x-ray on Tuesday. Glad that I got the bloodwork out of the way and should have the bloodwork tests then. The dr was nice and didnt lecture me like I was afraid he would. In a few weeks, I have to go to the dentist and then the podiatrist.

Zorn

Our new baby pup is very ill. He was not feeling well on Easter Sunday, but was still somewhat peppy. Monday he took a turn for the worst and my mother, who was frantic, took him to the vet. Turns out that his kidneys were failing . We did not know why. He was given an IV to clean out his kidneys which has helped a LOT. He was switched to a different hospital last night and I went to pick him up this am to take him back to the regular vet where he will stay for at least the next few days, and he was clearly feeling much better and was his usual peppy and active self. We don't know what he got into to cause the kidney problems( have not ruled out the dog food, but have not seen his food on the list of contaminated dog food) and he goes back to the emergency animal hospital tonight for observation and will go back to the reg vet in the a.m. I believe that Zorn will pull out of this. My family is cautiosly optimistic.

This is horrible

Unprovoked beatings of homeless soaring By TODD LEWAN, AP National Writer
Sun Apr 8, 7:20 PM ET



ORLANDO, Fla. - It was a balmy night, the sort that brings the homeless out from the shelters, when the police were summoned to America Street. On the driveway of a condo, just a few paces from the gutter, lay a man. A dying man.

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He looked to be 50-ish, and a resident of Orlando's streets, judging by the moldy jacket. And he'd been bludgeoned — so badly bludgeoned that he could hardly move.

Before being rushed to the hospital, where he died of his head injuries, the man, August Felix, described his attackers. Young fellows did it, he whispered to the officers who got to him first. Kids.

Within three months, two 16-year-olds and three 15-year-olds had been charged with second-degree homicide in the March 26, 2006, attack. The motive? "I don't think there was a motive," Sgt. Barbara Jones, a police spokeswoman, said, "other than, 'Let's beat someone up.'"

That high-schoolers had turned — allegedly on a whim — into executioners brought pause to city officials and advocates for the homeless, not just because the killing was unprovoked, but because it fit into a trend larger than Orlando: a nationwide surge in violence largely by teenagers and young adults against some of America's most vulnerable citizens.

A 2006 report by the National Coalition for the Homeless found 142 attacks last year against homeless people, 20 of which resulted in death — a 65 percent increase from 2005, when 86 were violently assaulted, including 13 homicides.

By comparison, 60 such attacks were reported in 1999, the year the coalition — the only entity to gather such data — began to study the problem.

And these numbers are likely low because they only reflect the most egregious attacks reported in newspapers or by agencies that serve the homeless and some victims themselves, according to Michael Stoops, acting executive director of the Washington-based coalition.

The trend is particularly troubling, he says, because such attacks no longer occur just in major cities on the East and West Coasts, as was the case in the 1980s.

In its most recent study, "Hate, Violence, and Death on Main Street USA," the coalition documented attacks against the destitute in 62 communities last year alone, in 26 states. Since 1999, such violence has occurred in 44 states and Puerto Rico, and in 200 communities nationwide.

An overwhelming majority of the attackers — 88 percent — were 25 or younger; 95 percent were male. No less than 68 percent of those accused and convicted in attacks were between the ages of 13 and 19.

This pattern of violence, in Stoops' view, hasn't gotten the attention it deserves from the public or law enforcement.

"Homeless people are the newest minority group in America that is 'OK' to hate and hurt," he said. "It's as though, somehow, they're viewed as less deserving, less human than the rest of us."

Americans did pay attention to the story of 58-year-old Jacques Pierre, a homeless man who'd been sleeping on a bench on a college campus when three teenagers woke him up, taunted him, then nearly killed him with baseball bats.

Why?

That Jan. 12, 2006, ambush in Fort Lauderdale was filmed by a surveillance camera, and broadcast worldwide.

"For once," says Sean Cononie, who operates a homeless shelter in that seaside city, "Americans saw with their own eyes how kids hunt down and kill homeless people as though it were a sport."

Such "sport" has occurred elsewhere:

_In Toms River, N.J., five high-school students were charged with beating a 50-year-old homeless man nearly to death with pipes and baseball bats — throwing hockey pucks at him for good measure — as he slept in the woods.

_In Butte, Mont., a 53-year-old homeless man was killed at a Greyhound bus depot because he refused to give another man a cigarette, according to court records. The victim's skull was fractured. The 22-year-old assailant received a 50-year prison sentence.

_In Spokane, Wash., a one-legged, 50-year-old homeless man was set on fire in his wheelchair on a downtown street; he died of his burns. Police charged a 22-year-old man with first-degree murder.

_In Nashville, Tenn., a 32-year-old homeless woman sleeping on a boat ramp was shoved into the Cumberland River, according to witnesses. Two men, ages 21 and 22, were charged with homicide in her drowning; authorities say the attack was unprovoked.

Cononie, who also publishes a monthly newspaper, "The Homeless Voice," reported another trend:

"Kids are even starting to videotape themselves hurting homeless people. That's something we never saw before."

He was referring to an February incident in Corpus Christi, Texas, in which a 22-year-old, a 16-year-old and a 15-year-old describe on camera how they are going to assault a homeless man, then do so.

On the tape, the attackers kick the man in the back, grab him, and flip him around to show off his injuries, according to police. The camera, which had been stolen, was recovered by the owner, who called police once she saw the footage.

Police have arrested one of the teens, and are looking for the other two suspects. The victim suffered a concussion but survived.

Some perpetrators are even younger. In late March, a homeless day laborer was walking at night through a neighborhood of Daytona Beach, Fla., when three boys on bicycles attacked him, striking him with a concrete block.

Two of the boys were 10 years old; the third was 17. Each has been charged with aggravated battery. "For a 10-year-old to pick up a cinder block and smash somebody's face with it, that defies logic," Michael Chitwood, Daytona's police chief, later told a reporter.

Though for the past decade assaults on the homeless have dotted the U.S. map, Florida is the state where such attacks are most frequent by far, the coalition's February report says.

Last year, the coalition documented 48 attacks in Florida, where 60,867 of the state's 17.8 million residents are homeless, according to federal figures. By comparison, 11 attacks were counted in California, where 170,270 of that state's 36 million people are homeless.

While some investigators believe the attacks are random, Sgt. Richard Ring, who investigated the murder of August Felix in Orlando last year, sees "a more deep-seated problem here."

As he puts it, "Our young people get prejudices from their parents in regard to homeless people. They don't identify with the homeless, and they don't seem to see them as important." With Felix, Ring adds, "the juveniles targeted him because he was easy prey."

Homeless advocates also link the trend to the popularity of "Bumfights," a video series created in 2001 and sold on the Internet. The videos feature homeless people battering one another for money.

A Bumfights DVD was cited as inspiration by a 19-year-old who pounced on a homeless man as he slept on a Los Angeles sidewalk, then pummeled him with an aluminum baseball bat. The 2005 beating put Ernest Adams, 56, into a coma for three weeks and cost him the sight in one eye.

Last July, a jury found his attacker, Justin Brumfield, guilty of assault; he is serving an 11-year prison sentence.

Internet site Bumfights.com, which sells the videos, says the purpose is to call attention to poverty and violence. "Please do not miss the point of these videos! Educate yourself. Help those who are less fortunate. Spread love not hate," the Web site says.

In 2002, Donald Brennan and Rufus Hannah, two homeless, army veterans, filed suit against the Las Vegas producers, alleging they were paid small amounts of money to bash their heads into walls, light their hair on fire, attack each other, and to tattoo "Bumfights" in bold letters across their hands and foreheads.

Later, the Bumfights producers agreed to pay an unspecified amount in damages and to no longer use Hannah and Brennan's images for promotional purposes.

The shock-video producers also pleaded guilty to charges of conspiracy to stage an illegal fight for their videos in 2003, and were ordered to perform community service. (In 2005, they were sentenced to six months in prison for having failed to complete the community service.)

The Associated Press sent an e-mail to Bumfights.com seeking comment for this story, but got no response.

A number of local governments have adopted ordinances that restrict where and when the homeless can sleep, stroll, beg, eat, bathe, or do laundry. And this trend may have an unintended effect — reinforcing negative stereotypes of homelessness, which contributes to the violence, some advocates say.

"When cities pass laws that target homeless people, they send a message to their communities that the homeless are not as valuable in the public eye as those with homes," says Tulin Ozdeger, a civil rights attorney at the National Law Center on Homelessness & Poverty.

Of late, there have been signs that lawmakers may be ready to crack down harder on those who assault the homeless without provocation — one being a recent push to categorize such attacks as hate crimes.

Currently, gays, along with racial, ethnic and religious groups, are covered by various hate crime laws around the country; convictions under these statutes usually carry harsher sentences than other types of crime.

Brian Levin, a criminologist and hate crimes expert at Cal State San Bernardino, says attacks on homeless people "fit the category like a glove," and should be punished as severely.

Hate crimes, he says, bear similar hallmarks: stereotyped victims, offenders who act on latent prejudices, offenders who seek thrills or feel superior to their victims, and a mob mentality that sweeps away caution.

"And on all these points," says Levin, "the attacks against the homeless are really indistinguishable from other hate crimes except for one difference — there are a heck of a lot more of them."

Between 1999 and 2005, 82 people were killed in America because of their race, ethnicity, or religious or sexual orientation, according to the FBI, which has been collecting data on hate crimes since 1990.

There were 169 homeless people murdered during that same period, the National Coalition for the Homeless says — a statistic that Levin describes as "astounding." It has caught the attention of some lawmakers.

Twenty-six members of Congress have asked the Government Accountability Office to determine whether attacks on the homeless should be classified as hate crimes under federal law.

In the meantime, homeless hate-crime bills are moving through the legislatures of six states: Maryland, California, Massachusetts, Nevada, Texas and Florida.

Here

Hi there. Well, things are going well for me, I am finally starting to see a light at the end of the tunnel on my finances. I have no mortgage. I paid off my house about two years ago. I only have 6 more car payments and the Toyota is mine.I will have my credit cards paid off by the end of next month. Then I will start saving like mad for my retirement! I will start putting money into my Roth IRAs and such. I have taken a complete and total interest in the subject of finance. I have been posting on the finance boards on AOL quite a bit. Those are very interesting, and not too many trolls over there. I just kinda got tired of the abortion boards. I have made some new friends, and gotten some great ideas on how to save money. I think that most of the posters over there are older than I am, but I think that is cool. Money is a great subject, it always interests everyone.

Hello again

Something that I have been dreading, something that has been in the back of my mind lately which is this: I have a doctor's appointment coming up , and that is going to be a physical. Yuck, I can tell that the doctor is going to chew me out for being oevr weight. I just know it. I also have type two diabetes. I control it with meds and I stay fairly active, working alot lately(this week I will have worked about 60 hours) . The appoint ment is a week from Friday. It will probably include a pap smear , a pelvic exam, and bloodwork, at least. I will be glad to get it over and done with. On the bright side, my personal war against poverty, I am finally winning. I am nearly out of debt. By the end of this Spring, I will have all of my credit cards paid off. I already have some decent funds in the bank. By the end of this Summer, I will have my car paid off, therefore, I will be COMPLETELY debt free! I have been so intense about paying off all of my debt, and I see a light at the end of the tunnel. My debt was not as big as most peoples, but it will be nice to be completely debt free and not even 39 years old yet! I will certainly be a rarity . .. now if I could just find a man. On that thought, on attracting the opposite sex, I don't really have any problem in that area. I have not had any trouble getting dates. I would like to get married someday.