Posted on 12 March 2010
This week’s fresh hell came via the Town Crier: Yahoo.com’s home page. In the interest of cutting costs, meat inspectors in Indiana are scheduled to join the throngs collecting unemployment checks. Anyone so moved to read the entire story may do so by backtracking it via Yahoo. I feel compelled to add my two cents [...]
Tags: food safety, food safety concerns, meat inspection, meat inspector layoffs
Posted on 05 March 2010
The economy troubles me; no doubt about that. So does this second Vietnam (the war in Iraq and Afghanistan), and the bailout of industries whose heads I’d prefer to see on stakes. I have a full metal jacket of other issues ripe for baring in a blog whose writers are adults and desirous of exercising [...]
Tags: Bono, Clive Davis, Eric Clapton, ieem.com, indie artists, indie music, indie music artists, U2
Posted on 24 February 2010
On a bleak, 3-degree New York winter’s day several weeks ago, I buried a relative by marriage. As my husband was a pallbearer, I drove to the cemetery with my brother-in-law, who muttered repeatedly under his breath, like a mantra, “Please, let them not take us up right up to the hole.” My own family [...]
Tags: bereavement, burial customs, grief, Italian burial customs, Italian-American families
Posted on 08 February 2010
Some sage once said, “There’s a sucker born every minute.” Be sure you’re not one of them, when trawling the Internet in search of gainful employment!
Among the ever-widening sea of job hopefuls, Internet job searches have increased by 7% in a two-year period (73% in 2007 versus 66% in 2005 as per The Conference Board). [...]
Tags: identity theft, job search scams, scam artists, work-at-home scams
Posted on 03 February 2010
If you were hoping for a racy article a la its title, all hope dies aborning. This isn’t the stuff of which blue movies are made. It’s an examination of a disturbing issue whose tentacles are far-reaching, as it concerns the recent, alleged kidnappings of a group of Haitian children by American Baptist ministers who’d [...]
Tags: Haitian orphans
Posted on 02 February 2010
Up in the Air, the latest George Clooney film currently showing in theaters, is contemporary, deeply introspective, and at its bottom-most line, highly disturbing. If you don’t like a mirror being held up to your life, I’d suggest you skip this flick as well as this article — which is not a review of the [...]
Tags: examining your life, George Clooney, life's baggage, personal baggage, Up in the Air
Posted on 29 January 2010
Oddly enough, just shortly before I read Thomas Petruzzelli Sr.’s article, “The Fear Factor,” I recalled a dream that I had had many years ago. I thought of sharing it here, in the hope that it might help someone, but it seemed so personal that I hesitated. Tom Sr’s. article was a sign that I [...]
Tags: fear, fears
Posted on 21 January 2010
In writing this article, I am inviting bushels of rotten tomatoes to be hurled at me through cyberspace. Having had the real-life versions, and worse, tossed at me because I chose to voice my convictions peacefully and legally, I can deal with Internet insults from strangers.
I am a longtime proponent of Roe versus Wade. I [...]
Tags: National Organization for Women, NOW, Pro-Choice, reproductive rights, Right to Choose, Right to Life, Roe v. Wade, Supreme Court, U.S. Supreme Court
Posted on 17 January 2010
She cries, “Where have all Papa’s heroes gone?”
(David Bowie, Young Americans)
Recorded in 1974, Bowie’s incisive take on the American landscape included references to racism and Rosa Park’s renowned ride. In penning that song, and particularly the line above, Bowie may very well have had Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. in mind. By 1968, we had [...]
Tags: Bobby Kennedy, David Bowie, Dion, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Martin Luther King Jr., Robert Kennedy, U2
Posted on 13 January 2010
In age when Americans hurled themselves willingly from skyscrapers and stood on interminable lines for free bread and milk, two industries not only survived, they thrived: cosmetics and the film industry. A frivolous waste of money? Actually, it was anything but.
In times of economic want, people spent a few hard-earned dollars to be uplifted. In [...]
Tags: Art Pride NJ, Count Basie Theatre, New Jersey State Council on the Arts, Peters Valley Craft Center, Shakespeare Theatre of New Jersey, The Count Basie Theatre