green

Test rides. Rides. Hmmm. Now that sounds very Epcott Centre or Walt's Disney World. "I'd like the romantic man ride for one, please. "Oh. You say it is going to cost me my heart and 20 years of my life?!? "Well, I'll have to think about it. Maybe I'll come back after lunch."

I have never met any goats except for dirty old goats (which are finally starting to look attractive!) but from what I hear they are interesting and feisty animals. The current anarchist cat, a teenage stray grrl cat, is interesting, feisty and destructive. I am crazy about goat milk cheeses. Yum.

Naw, you can't fool the Green. Limbo is where good folk who haven't met Jesus go when they croak. I learned all about this when I was in nun skule. Everyone who was good and who was born pre-Jesus will be found there. As will a number of those heathen who were outside the reach of the missionaries.

With respect to grammar usuage, I am always annoyed by the lay~lie business. Lie is an intransitive verb and thus one should say I was lying down after I lay my burden down but few individuals honour this practice anymore. *sigh* :phanvan And I am ever so fed up with stupid reality shows. I find being forced to watch real people and being subjected to advertising a real one-two sucker punch. Um, you know, receiving a punch meant for suckers.... And rich and famous entertainers weighing in on complex political, environmental, and social issues are getting on my last bluddy nerve. Bono and his bluddy whining about Africa makes me want to cough up a furball. Sean Penn's visit to the Middle East gave me a severe skin rash. I am still expecting that I might yet experience hair loss due to Paris Hilton's strange jailhouse conversion, what with all that Bible reading and all. Ugh! These folks should stick to acting, making music, and in the case of Hilton, drinking, f...ing, making videotapes, and whatever else it is that she does. Venting sure is fun. :biggrin1: Thanks for giving me this opportunity.

In countries like France the tip is folded into the bill in all restaurants. And you really don't have to tip when on those all-inclusive vacations but my husband and I will sometimes tip when we feel that we have received especially attentive and caring service and we are inclined to leave a little something every day for the room maids. I am personally uncomfortable with tipping but it is entrenched in our system and so I feel that I must tip since the tip is part of the hospitality worker's wages. I will stiff a waiter/waitress/cabby or whomever for his or her tip when I have received lousy service and I will sometimes give an explanation for this. I won't stiff a waiter for his tip when the food is bad because this is something over which he has no control and it is not fair to punish him. I simply never return to the restaurant is all. As for those toilets where you have to tip an attendant, well, many foreign countries have this set-up and it was a nasty shock to me the first time I encountered a Madame Pipi, as the French call these attendants. Still, I guess it does keep people employed though it is not an attractive career path. Australia's tip-free approach sounds like commonsense heaven to me.

I thought Lindy Boggs was a dance that was popular during the 1920s. ?

Oh, Green is very, very sports illiterate. Why, she has only recently discovered what NASCAR is thanks to this site. She does enjoy opera and experimental films and Howard Stern, however.... It is probably a good thing that she has never been a boy; she would get beat up a lot, eh? :heh:

Laurend! You're back and you've crossed over to the other side!! :clap2::clap2::clap2::clap2::clap2::clap2::clap2::clap2:Congratulations, eh, sez Green. :kiss2: At the next hawg fest you can PB on all your least fave relatives. :heh::heh::heh: And then tell us all about it. :ranger:

I think my current and not very nice cat is an anarchist - this is the most destructive animal I have ever lived with! She is still young. I am hoping that she will grow out of it.

Not true, universal health care works well in the many advanced post-industrial economies which have it. You may wish to examine the health care systems of western Europe....

lizrbit: I am most amused to hear that your dog is a Buddhist. I once had a tank full of guppies who were Roman Catholic, a cat who was a Baptist, and a goldfish who was Jewish. I named him Reuben Goldcarp. The guppies were called the Joes and the Renes after my parents. :heh: My father was did not find this adorable. :phanvan For the past many years my cats have been heathen atheists; in this they follow myself. It would be lovely to have a Buddhist dog around the house. Lucky you.

I was supposed to go on a modified pre-op diet and give up smoking for 2 weeks before my op. :help: Well, instead I went on the Blonde Ambition Food Court Tour - I figured that I would never be able to eat again and I was in mourning - and I smoked up until the day before. :paranoid In fact I washed my hair the morning of the op so that it wouldn't stink of tell-tale smoke. I was very, very bad. This is my true confession, sez Green. Anyhow, it is 10 months later and I am pretty much down to target weight but my face looks older. It is official. My husband told me. My cute little fat cheeks are gone. Ho hum. :straight

Pete Moss? Doesn't he have something to do with sports? Green never watches sports.

Universal health care is not free health care. The cost is covered in the tax structure. It is simply cheaper because big business is edited out of the equation and it does allow medical personnel more options when treating their patients as they are not constrained by the dollar and cents factor which the business enviroment will inevitably impose. It seems to me that the poor are covered by free clinics paid for by your tax system and the rich can pay for whatever they want with respect to their medical treatment. It is the middle class and the working class who are vulnerable to the high costs of private medical coverage and to being dropped by these same insurers when the costs of treating their illnesses become unattractive for their insurers. This is what we read about your system of health care. I am inclined to agree with you that we do live in a society of entitlement; these days it certainly seems that everyone likes to think of themselves as a victim. This is quite different from the attitude of my parents, people who survived the Second World War and who believed in standing up on your own hind two feet and dealing with the world with dignity and humour. Nevertheless, I am one of those people who do find the results of research and, yes, even anecdotal evidence to be of value when attempting to gain a better understanding of a situation. I wonder whether you have become hardened because of the people whom you see daily in your free clinic. I suspect that you are seeing the very poor and these people are much less likely or even capable of taking the same care of themselves in the same way that the better educated and more affluent folks are. For one thing it takes a certain amount of stability, cash, and education to eat healthily, to cut out those carbs and eat fresh vegetables and quality protein, to feel hopeful enough about yourself and your life to want to give up alcohol, drugs, and smokes, to join a gym, take up jogging, to have any sort of motivation or interest at all in fact. If this is the case, then you are seeing people at less than their best and this is bound to leave you feeling cynical. I have met cops who suffer from much the same thing; they spend much of their waking lives dealing with people who are behaving badly....

Yup, marnie is right. The economy is booming.

@ elena and lindaa. You must first of all understand, elena, that all medical systems will make mistakes in their treatments of their patients from time to time. This means that the advanced affluent indutrialised western nation which does operate on the universal health care system will occasionally screw up. This also means that the business-driven health care system will also screw up. This is human nature, is it not? It can be argued that the two systems are likely to screw up for different reasons. In the case of the financially driven system the screw-up may stem from a cutting off of further funding. In the case of the universal health care system in an advanced industrial nation the screw-up is likely to be a question of dumb human error. It certainly will have nothing to do with the cash flow being cut off. As for you, lindaa, I am inclined to persist with my initial assessment of you as being someone who is both mean-spirited and judgemental. You see, I have been spending a fair amount of my past blonde 10 to 20 years reading up on such issues as morbid obesity, addictive personalities, depression and other forms of seemingly self-indulgent psychological misbehaviour, and, within this framework, a host of other questions upon which hinge the individual's emotional and psychological life. The latest genetic and neuro-chemical studies are kind of fascinating. They would seem to indicate that many of the behaviours which you have categorised as falling within the framework of moral failures are not; they are medical issues and these individuals certainly do not need someone like you deciding as to who will or who will not qualify for help. Let me explain. Research has been done on a genetically pure Amerindian tribe who suffers from obesity. These folks are desert people and their ability to survive on little food was extraordinarily valuable in their remote past. Now this means that everything this gang eats translates to lard and the tribe is troubled by morbid obesity. Of course there are horrible health problems which come on the heels of this. I read about this study 15 years ago and over 50% of this tribe were morbidly obese, were suffering from diabetes, cholesterol, and heart-related problems. Are you going to say to these individuals that you have brought this on yourself? You've been eating too much? Are you going to kick these people to the curb? People who suffer from mental illnesses are more likely to self-medicate. Indeed this is now considered to be a response to feelings of psychological distress and is an indicator that the abuser should be assessed for emotional problems. But it looks like you are ready to kick a drug abuser or an alcoholic to the curb, does it not? You should be aware that mental illness is something which is outside the individual's choice and is often a genetic issue. I really cannot see that there is anyone who wakes up and says to themselves that their goal in life is to become an overweight, dysfunctional, chain-smoking, drug addicted alcoholic. I do believe that very bad things can and will happen to all sorts of families and that this is due to bad genetic luck or tragic family circumstances or whatever.... I also believe that the rich are insulated from the financial fall-out of these tragedies because they have the bucks. The rest of us are not insulated and that this is the generous philosophy which the affluent industrialised counties which do have universal medicine operate on. You must remember that you as a single individual will never be required to pay the entire tab of someone's lung transplant, you know. You should also know that hospitals are not in the habit of giving away valuable spare parts to those folks who have treated their own equipment carelessly.

I don't think that it is so much as those individuals won't learn English but that in many cases the older folk simply can't. This would be for reasons of natural inability to pick up another language, age, or, in the case of many immigrants, both legal and illegal let it be noted, these folk tend to or are forced to remain within their own protection/comfort zone; they stay with people of their own tribe. Their kids, however, learn English and integrate into the host society. I see this where I live. Our new citizens will sponsor older family members, their parents and grandparents, to come over to live with them. These folks will likely never learn English, will remain fearful of our culture, and will never assimilate. The ones who have sponsored them will speak English with an accent and may have great difficulties with the language depending on their natural abilities. It is the children who seamlessly blend into our culture. As for unwanted immigrants, there are a number of European countries who are going through similar problems at this time. These are those countries who have had colonies and who are now find themselves on the hook and must accept immigrants from their former colonies. The formerly very white Britain has been receiving an influx of immigrants from India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, certain African nations, and its many colonies in the Caribean for the past 50 years or so. France now has a sizable Muslim population, one which is primarily drawn from its former North African colonies. These folks are different from the French both in terms of race and religion. The French call them les arabs and this group currently occupy a position in France which is roughly analogous to the position traditionally occupied by Blacks in America. Germany has been hosting a sizable population of Turkish people for generations now. They call these people gastarbeiter - guest workers - even though these families have been living in Germany for some generations now, long enough that they really are no longer Turkish, and yet their status in Germany is ambiguous. These are just a few examples of the social upheavals which are currently going on in Western Europe. You see, all of these nation are old nations with deep roots and a fairly rigid sense of nationhood because of this. These are European nations which, historically speaking, have had trouble dealing with other Europeans. I believe that we who live on this side of the Atlantic are ahead of the game in certain respects. We are accustomed to welcoming variety. Democratic ideals have always been the treasured norm and the new world has been built upon immigration and impure - hooray! - genetic blood lines. I don't know how many times that I have read a poster say well, I am part Cherokee or my background is Italian but my mate's family is .... I have lived in France and I have European relatives and let me tell you that one does often not run into these blends which over here are considered to be the norm. People over there are more insular in some respects. In other respects, however, they are a lot cooler than we are. The establishment of the European Common Market has meant that anyone who lives in any of the member countries has the right to treat all member countries as his or her home. Member citizens can choose to live and work anywhere they want inside the European union. This means that a Portuguese can move to England and a Brit can move to Italy without any beaurocratic stress. This should be viewed as legally sanctioned uncontrolled immigration or migration within mainland western Europe and Great Britain. This block is growing: certain former east European countries have or are about to be added. Poland is now a member of the Union; Britain is now flooded with cheap Polish labour as a result. Turkey is agitating to become a member. I think, and I might be wrong or wrongish, that we are operating from both a position of strength and weakness. We are ahead of the game in that our history has been based on democratic and inclusive ideals. We are used to living in an egalitarian and pluralistic society, one that recognises that we were once all immigrants. This means that we are more open and accepting of our fellow humans and their differences. Indeed we tend to prize individuality. Our strength is that we are more open, more interested in others who are unlike ourselves, less racist and less bigoted. On the other hand, our geographical isolation has often acted against us. Those European nations (which are for many of us our parental roots) are all geographically jammed up against each other and have had for this very reason a long and bloody history. At the same time there has been a great deal of intellectual cross pollination and most Europeans do end up speaking fragments of a number of other languages just because they are in the vicinity. (My own father spoke 7 languages.) All of these countries have within modern times experienced the experience of dreadful wars fought on their own soil. The Second World War lasted from 1939 to 1945. From all that I have read on the subject France never did recover from the effects of the First World War, a war which was fought on her property, by the time that the Second War was underway. The above paragraph may seem in the way of a digression but my point is that we who live over here are used to feeling pretty much isolated from the rest of the world thanks to our geographical situation and our affluence. But the world will intrude in one way or another and the world is complicated business. (Something which George W and his gang of white hat-wearing gang of cowboys didn't realise when they went charging into the Middle East. Forgive me for this digression, eh.) Anyhow, it does strike me that there are oil and gas reserves on this side of the hemisphere (and here I am thinking of Venezuela, at least I think that it is Venezuela???:help:) and that it might be an interesting approach for us on this side of the Atlantic to think outside the box. Perhaps we could structure a union which would be more along the lines of the European model. Certainly this would permit for the free flow of personnel between member countries but, on the other hand, all migrant workers would be street legal and thus required to pay into the local, state/provincial, and federal tax pools. This would also mean that highly trained personnel or, for that matter, retirees who wanted to shift from the northern American or Canadian (ugh!) climate to the member nations of the Americas' member block which are south of the American border are entirely free to do so and will not be subject to any local penalties, limitations, or fines. I suggest this because I see that the globe has fractured into trading blocks and into emerging economies. The emerging economies are those hugely populated nations which are able to provide us with cheap goods. The European Common Market is a trading block. NAFTA, a trading alliance which encompasses Canada, the U.S., and Mexico, is a flaccid immitation. Canada is now attempting to become a member nation of the European Common Market I believe; of course I may have misread the newsreport but I kinda hope not. I am, afterall, a Canuck, eh. What I would like to see is a pan-American economic and social structure, one which would eventually parallel the European Common Market. Our neighbours to the south have the manpower and they have the raw materials, including fossil fuels, which we are anxious to secure. And certainly these nations are anxious to be invited to the feast. What this means to Americans, for it is you who are bearing the brunt of this unchecked immigration which is destroying your local infrastructures, is that your government must take the giant leap and step outside the current box. It is certain that Canada would follow. Canadians are big on supporting these kind of initiatives, eh. Quite frankly, I would stop dumping money into the middle east and Africa. Iraq was an exceptionally dumb idea and the only real attraction there was gaining access to those fossil fuels. As for Africa, the food aid goes directly into the pockets of the local dictators. The Central and South American countries do understand the idea of democracy. Fossil fuel reserves do exist on this side of the Atlantic. The Americas are also rich in precious metals. And you will note that there is little terrorist activity indigenous to the Americas. A president can invest his country's money wisely, you know. As for Anglo-speakers learning Spanish....ugh! and why shouldn't they? I am Canuck and so I was subjected to years of French. I had a succession of lousy teachers and the language irritated me even though I had a certain feel for languages. I did brilliantly in German and in Latin and I barely passed my ass in French. Years later I washed up in the south of France and it was then that I started to really learn how to speak French, a most annoying language. I am under the impression that most people will not trouble to learn anything unless they are forced to do so. This is the role that school is supposed to play in our lives when we are young, is it not? The whole school thang is designed to stuff as much learning as possible down our gullets as the system can get away with before we choose to bail. Up here in Canada there has been this vague hope that all Anglophones (English speakers) might successfully learn our other official language. This has been our politically correct hope since the centennial of Canada's existence, July da 1st, 1967. This hasn't been all that successful but we do still live with all items which are available for consumption in Canada available only in a format which is bilingual. This worked to my advantage when I did find myself, an English-speaker, living in the south of France. I had lousy grammar but I sure did have a surprisingly extensive vocabulary en francais and this is how I was able to rabbit on about my problems with my hemmorhoids. Of course I did eventually acquire facility in the language because I was forced to. Listen up! When I was young I hated learning French, a language for which I felt no natural kinship, from a gang of truly lousy teachers. Now I hear that some of you are bitchin' about your kids being forced to learn Spanish. In my opinion any knowledge is better than no knowledge. And the acquisition of Spanish as a second language is much more useful than the acquisition of French. This is a question of global economics of course. To be forced to learn another language is a privilege. This is how my father learned how to speak 7 languages; he was forced to learn most of them. Knowledge, however ya get it, is both power and a privilege. The reason that so many children are overtaking American kids with respect to academic performance is because they are housed in school systems where kids are expected to learn. That is their job. Nobody is fussing about the Spanish language crap. Once again, an overly long post. Sorry.

@BJean: yes, you are right. North of the border we do have a large middle class. This may be in part due to the power of the unions for many blue collar workers earn what might be considered to be "white collar" money. It is also true that these jobs are as available to new Canadians as they are to anyone else and this improves the general cash and social flow throughout the community. People buy more. They go out to restaurants more often. Their kids get involved in local soccer and hockey clubs. The parents get involved with these events. Our large middle class may also be due to the fact that our immigration laws are now very strict. Though many of our applicants are from under developed countries we only admit the cream: the healthiest and best educated ones. Of course once they get here we don't necessarily recognise their qualifications, especially if they are doctors or lawyers. There are many Canadians who feel that Canada is doing a bad thing by robbing those countries of their much needed elite. Of course what America is receiving in terms of a new work force is the opposite; you are receiving an uncontrolled flood of the hard-scrabble poor and desperate. I am filled with sympathy for them but I also filled with sympathy for the American citizen. As I have noted in previous posts, this flood is placing unmanageable stress on your local financial and social infrastructures. This is a very, very serious business.

@ Derrick: both my husband and I are pro-union types and I was in the same union as he is before I retired. I used to build aircraft and that is how we met. North of the border you will find a number of strong unions and this is part of the British tradition which has been imported here. The teachers have a very, very powerful union and a huge investment arm which manages their retirement fund which can and does affect our financial sector. Public employees also belong to a powerful union, as do the police, the workers in some of our grocery store chains, the Toronto public transit workers.... You get the idea. When Walmart opened up here there were isolated attempts to unionise certain stores but Walmart either threatened to or did close down these stores; they figured that the Walmart customers would shop at the next nearest store. The only Walmart employees who were successful at unionising were ones at a store in a remote region of Quebec, I think. It was the only Walmart in the region. The union to which my husband and I belong is a powerful one but unfortunately the aircraft industry has got our local by the short and curlies; you see our company has been busy shifting our work between its many international operations for sometime now. Its latest stunt is to develop new plants in those countries where the workers come cheap and so my husband has spent a month teaching Mexicans how to do what was formerly Canadian work. He told me that the Mexicans do have a union but that it is very weak. This is to be expected; there are a lot of people in Mexico who want those jobs and a strike would likely be ineffective. Sad....

:biggrin1:Thanks, kiddo, for them kind thoughts.:kiss2:

The continued "infidel" presence in the mid-east enrages extremist muslims and is likely to only aggravate terrorist activities at home and abroad. They view these lands as theirs and don't welcome the presence of the infidel. As we know, these people are riled up these days. Their behaviour is almost incomprehensible to most of us....

We're still living together before marriage and we have been together for over 22 years. We don't want to jinx the relationship, eh. LOL

Most of health care is not about handing out replacement parts. It sounds to me like you are a very judgemental and mean-spirited individual. Anyone can get cancer or heart disease, have a stroke or be badly damaged due to a car accident or because of some other kind of bad luck. Not every seriously ill individual is a hard-drinking, morbidly obese alcoholic on welfare with a drug problem. There are a huge array of genetic and environmental factors at play, as well as blind bad luck, when it comes to who will fall seriously ill and who will not. My ex-husband fell ill with non Hodgson's lymphoma when he was 13 years old. He was hospitalised for a year and was expected to die. He was not a smoker. He did receive radiation and chemotherapy. Chemotherapy was a brand new treatment at the time and it was this which saved his bacon. He was still undergoing preventive chemo when we were married in our early 20s. He died when he was in his mid-50s from cancer caused by the radiation which he received as a 13 year old. He was never a drinker or a smoker. His medical costs during his year long fight as a kid with cancer were covered under our system; had they not been they would have bankrupted his lower middle class parents.

By the way, my mum, who was born in 1918, did a little bit of test driving. Nothing wrong with making sure all the equipment - emotional and physical - works, eh. :eyebrows: I myself kissed, or, er, whatever, a number of frogs before I found the one who turned into my prince.

Oh, but this made me laugh! Your story reminds me of the experience which one of my closest girlfriends had. She had been living with a guy whose idea of intimacy was to roll on top of her, thrash around for a few minutes, and then roll off. After he brutally dumped her by driving her to her parents' house and leaving her there she finally started dating again. Well, for the first time in her life she got some foreplay. As the guy was kissing her belly she freaked out, grabbed him by his hair, and shrieked "what is this, this...HOLLYWOOD SEX!?!" :faint: Yep, you have definitely got to test drive 'em.