Saturday, October 31, 2009

Kids' Costumes

(Ding-dong.... blog editor grabs a candy)

"Trick or Treat!"

Wow, look at what great costumes!!!!


Count Dooku

"Arise, Sir Dracula! Actor is knighted" by Associated Press | June 13, 2009

LONDON - Christopher Lee, whose sonorous voice and burning black eyes made him a memorable arch-villain: "Star Wars: Revenge of the Sith."

Among the others receiving royal honors:

Tony-award winning actor Alan Cumming, for his work in films such as "X2: X-Men United" and his gay rights advocacy; celebrity hairdresser Vidal Sassoon, who lent his name to a worldwide brand of shampoos and salons....

Hey, they get candy, too!!!

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I have a full Darth Vader outfit (with helmet and mask), and people love it.

I'll be wearing it tonight, but not for long because it gets hot and stuffy in the suit.

Now if I only had the same ability with the Force....

:-)


Titanic Princess

"Millvina Dean, 97; was last survivor of Titanic disaster" by Meera Selva, Associated Press | June 1, 2009

Millvina Dean was 2 months old when the Titanic hit an iceberg on the night of April 14, 1912. She was one of 706 people - mostly women and children - who survived.
Millvina Dean was 2 months old when the Titanic hit an iceberg on the night of April 14, 1912. She was one of 706 people - mostly women and children - who survived. (Nancy Palmieri/Associated Press/File 1998)

LONDON - Millvina Dean, who as a baby was wrapped in a sack and lowered into a lifeboat in the frigid North Atlantic, died yesterday, the last survivor of the 1912 sinking of the RMS Titanic.

She was 97, and died where she had lived - in Southampton, England, the town her family had tried to leave behind when it took the ship's ill-fated maiden voyage, bound for America.

She died in her sleep early yesterday, said her friend Gunter Babler. It was the 98th anniversary of the launch of the ship that was billed as "practically unsinkable."

I know it's real life, but it does bring up those feelings from the end of that darn movie. You see its rank on the right!

Also see: Naomi Watts' Next Movie

Miss Dean was 2 months old when the Titanic hit an iceberg on the night of April 14, 1912. The ship sank in less than three hours. Miss Dean was one of 706 people - mostly women and children - who survived. Her father was among the 1,517 who died. The pride of the White Star line, the Titanic had a mahogany-paneled smoking room, a swimming pool, and a squash court. But it did not have enough lifeboats for all of its 2,200 passengers and crew.

Miss Dean's family were steerage passengers setting out from the English port of Southampton for a new life in the United States. Her father had sold his pub and hoped to open a tobacco shop in Kansas City, Mo., where his wife had relatives. Initially scheduled to travel on another ship, the family was transferred to the Titanic because of a coal strike. Four days out of port and about 380 miles southeast of Newfoundland, the ship hit the iceberg. The impact buckled the Titanic's hull and sent seawater pouring into six of its watertight compartments.

Miss Dean said her father's quick actions saved his family. He felt the ship scrape the iceberg and hustled the family out of its third-class quarters and toward the lifeboat that would take them to safety. "That's partly what saved us - because he was so quick. Some people thought the ship was unsinkable," Miss Dean told the BBC in 1998.

This is better than a movie, and I have the tears to prove it.

Wrapped in a sack against the Atlantic chill, Miss Dean was lowered into a lifeboat. Her 2-year-old brother Bertram and her mother, Georgette, also survived. "She said goodbye to my father and he said he'd be along later," Miss Dean said in 2002. "I was put into lifeboat 13. It was a bitterly cold night and eventually we were picked up by the Carpathia."

Maybe I need to smoke a joint now.

The family was taken to New York, then returned to England with other survivors aboard the rescue ship Adriatic. Miss Dean did not know she had been aboard the Titanic until she was 8 years old, when her mother, about to remarry, told her about her father's death. Her mother, always reticent about the tragedy, died in 1975 at age 95.

She beat out the old lady by two years, huh?

Born in London on Feb. 2, 1912, Elizabeth Gladys "Millvina" Dean spent most of her life in the English seaside town of Southampton, Titanic's home port. She worked as a secretary and never married, retiring in 1972 from an engineering firm. She moved into a nursing home after breaking her hip about three years ago.

That didn't help her; she probably could have kept sailing well past 100 if not for that.

She had to sell several Titanic mementos to raise funds, prompting her friends to set up a fund to subsidize her nursing home fees.

WTF?

Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet, the stars of the film "Titanic," pledged their support to the fund last month. For most of her life, Miss Dean had no contact with Titanic enthusiasts and rarely spoke about the disaster. She said she had seen the 1958 film "A Night to Remember" with other survivors, but found it so upsetting that she declined to watch any other attempts to put the disaster on celluloid, including the 1997 blockbuster "Titanic."

What I will say is this: When the computer graphics turned the end of that boat perpendicular to the sea before it sank you felt the awesome terror of what must have occurred. When you wrap the accurately-researched film around the love story script....

I did not expect myself to react to Titanic that way, either, readers, just as King Kong caught me by total shock. Sith was the pinnacle. How could anything be better than that, and so soon after?

She began to take part in Titanic-related activities in the 1980s, after the discovery of the ship's wreck in 1985 sparked renewed interest. She opposed attempts to raise the wreck 13,000 feet from the sea bed....

*****************************

Charles Haas, president of the New-Jersey based Titanic International Society, said Miss Dean was happy to talk to children about the Titanic. "She had a soft spot for children," he said. "I remember watching as little tiny children came over clutching pieces of paper for her to sign. She was very good with them, very warm."

She was active well into her 90s, but missed the commemoration of the 95th anniversary of the disaster in 2007 after breaking her hip. The last survivor with memories of the sinking was Lillian Asplund of Worcester, Mass., who was 5 at the time. She died in May 2006 at age 99.

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Their hearts will go on, won't they?

What a sappy, weepy old man I am!

"Titanic survivor’s ashes put into sea" by Associated Press | October 25, 2009

LONDON - The ashes of the last Titanic survivor have been scattered at Southampton, the English port where the ship began its voyage in 1912. Millvina Dean, who was 9 weeks old when her parents took her aboard the ship, died May 31 at age 97. Her ashes were scattered on the water yesterday by her partner.

Gay, straight, who cares? Not me.

That is a good CODA, though.

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No candy for this clown.

Good costume, though!

Bernie Madoff

"GREENFIELD -- A woman from Gill is facing felony charges in the alleged theft of about $100,000 from Temple Israel.

Hey, Greenfield's own Bernie Madoff !

You got enough candy already!

Trying to get a second-helping! What chutzpah!

Theresa M. Peffer, 52, of 20 Oak St., Gill, has been charged with embezzlement, forgery of a check and passing bad checks. Peffer has not yet appeared before the court. The police complaint next goes before a district court magistrate for a probable cause hearing. If the magistrate finds probable cause a crime was committed, the case goes on to district court for trial.

According to Greenfield Police detective Lt. Joseph Burge, his investigation indicates that the misappropriation of funds at Temple Israel went back to 2001, he said. Burge says that, before the matter was brought to the police, the governing board of Temple Israel had worked out a deal with Peffer that she would make restitution of $131,000, but she paid only part of the amount and so the board called in the authorities. ''She was the accountant for Temple Israel for many years,'' he said.

Jews really are in a different class when it comes to cop treatment.

The lieutenant said that Peffer also worked for the Gill Water District and is being investigated by other agencies for alleged discrepancies in accounting there.

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Okay, let's get going little ones, and get your bags filled -- and BE CAREFUL!

Lot of PERVERTS running around....

"DA seeks to alter offender laws; Wants process for civil commitments in hands of juries" by Jonathan Saltzman, Globe Staff | October 27, 2009

Middlesex District Attorney Gerard T. Leone Jr. plans to urge lawmakers today to change the state law for civilly committing individuals as sexual dangerous persons, five days after a convicted sex offender freed from jail over prosecutors’ objections allegedly attacked a woman at Massachusetts General Hospital.

I don't see "conspiracy" here; however, it does show you how authorities RUSH RIGHT IN to TAKE ADVANTAGE of ANYTHING!

Leone, in a previously scheduled appearance before a legislative committee, intends to promote a bill he helped craft that would make it more likely that juries rather than judges would decide whether to indefinitely commit sex offenders to a treatment center. He says Middlesex judges are more lenient than juries in such cases, which involve keeping offenders locked up after they have completed their prison sentences.

Now, I don't want to be seen a defender of perverts, but there is something called the RULE of LAW in this nation! IF you SERVED YOUR TIME you should be LET GO!! WTF is with the LIBERAL FASCISM in this state? It shocks you!

Of course, if I post a guillotine or something that is some sort of hate or incitement, right? Pffft!

Michael F. Farrington, the Mattapoisett lawyer who recently persuaded a judge to not civilly commit the man who was arrested in Thursday’s attack at Mass. General, characterized Leone’s measure as cynical grandstanding. He said most convicted sex offenders who overcome prosecutors’ efforts to have them civilly committed do not commit new sex crimes, regardless of whether it is a judge or jury that determined they were not sexually dangerous.

Unless they are a politician, priest, rabbi....

“The United States Congress and our state Legislature are all under the false impression that these fellows have a high rate of recidivism, and it’s just the opposite, but they don’t want to listen to that,’’ Farrington said....

Well, I KNOW THAT FEELING!!! Not on this issue, far from it, but I KNOW the FEELING of NOT BEING LISTENED TO!!

Leone’s measure may gain more traction after last week’s attack on an unidentified 27-year-old female employee at Mass. General.

Cui Bono?

At 3 p.m., David Flavell, a 40-year-old homeless man who is designated a Level 3 sex offender because of a long history of exhibitionism and other sex offenses, allegedly grabbed a woman he followed into the women’s bathroom at the hospital. Boston police said he threw her to the floor, punched her in the face, repeatedly slammed her head against the floor, and ripped her pants before she managed to escape. Police arrested him moments later....

********************

John G. Swomley, a Boston lawyer, said he has defended about 15 convicted sex offenders in such hearings, and he almost always prefers juries to determine his clients’ fate. Contrary to conventional wisdom, he said, Swomley has found that juries are less apt to be swayed by fears of freed defendants committing new sex offenses than judges.

Ah, pass his law then. I love backfires when it comes to authorities. It exposes them for the filth they are.

“The reality is that everybody [on juries] does actually believe that when you’ve done your time, you shouldn’t be put in jail prospectively for something you haven’t done,’’ he added.

Yeah, I'm one of 'em sitting there!

He said the disparity in Leone’s statistics might reflect the fact that many court-appointed lawyers in such cases are inexperienced, which can be a particular liability in jury trials.

Yeah, ANYTHING the STATE DOES SUCKS!

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