Dec. 8th, 2002

sisyphusshrugged: (Default)
NEW ORLEANS, Dec. 7 In a rebuff to President Bush's political power and personal prestige, Louisiana voters today rejected Suzanne Haik Terrell, his hand-picked candidate, and retained Senator Mary L. Landrieu, a freshman Democrat, leaving unbroken the Democrats' 130-year-old monopoly on Louisiana's two Senate berths in Washington.

With 99 percent of precincts reporting, Senator Landrieu had 627,253 votes, or 51 percent, and Ms. Terrell had 591,791, or 49 percent. Ms. Terrell conceded late tonight.

While surveys had shown this $11 million race to be a dead heat, many analysts had believed that Ms. Terrell, whose campaign was engineered and fueled by the White House, had the momentum going into today's runoff election, which was needed because of Ms. Landrieu's failure to win 50 percent of the vote in November.

Aided by warm, clear weather, the Landrieu campaign succeeded in pulling out enough African-American voters to counter Ms. Terrell's overwhelming support among white voters, a strong commitment from the national Republican Party and a last-minute attempt to discourage blacks from going to the polls.

The president put his personal prestige on the line here, unleashing the full strength of the party's apparatus to help Ms. Terrell raise money, organize, make commercials and get out the vote. In addition, he flew here Tuesday on Air Force One to campaign with her, raising $1.2 million and producing a powerful commercial that saturated the airwaves.

...

The White House invested significantly in Ms. Terrell and tried to make voters to see it as a national election. It deployed the most famous names in Republican politics - President Bush and his father and mother, Vice President Dick Cheney, Rudolph W. Giuliani and Bob Dole among them...
sisyphusshrugged: (Default)
what are the odds?

PRESIDENT BUSH takes credit for signing the McCain-Feingold campaign finance reform law, but then subverts the reality of reform. The latest example was his delay in naming a new commissioner, Ellen L. Weintraub, to the Federal Election Commission. Mr. Bush promised Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) to install her swiftly, but he waited until after the commission this week decided the critical problem of how to define and regulate spending coordinated among candidates, parties and interest groups. The delay left in place for that rulemaking a lame-duck Democratic commissioner who has repeatedly joined the three Republican commissioners in weakening key provisions of the law and who once again voted for a weak rule. It takes four commissioners to change the rule, so the three Republicans can now make sure their damage is not repaired.

The new rule effectively turns a provision ordering the FEC to restrict coordination into one that openly permits it much of the time. The subject is important, because the ban on unlimited donations of "soft money" becomes meaningless if candidates and parties can simply get interest groups to run ads for them. People and groups have the right to spend their own money independently on behalf of candidates. But the law needs to ensure that these groups do not become simple fronts. The commission had recently taken too lax a view of what coordination means, so Congress had instructed it to reconsider.

The new rule, however, defines coordination so as to exempt whole categories of advertising campaigns that seem obviously covered by the law's text. No matter how clearly coordinated an ad that runs more than 120 days before an election may be, for example, the rule considers it uncoordinated unless it expressly calls for the election or defeat of a candidate. And no matter how much a candidate and interest group may have cooperated in the days even immediately before an election, the FEC will not regard as a coordinated expenditure any public statement that doesn't mention a party or candidate explicitly. In other words, President Bush could write ads throughout the election cycle for the National Rifle Association and ask the group to run them, so long as those ads did not engage in express advocacy outside of the 120-day limit or mention specific candidates within it. This is not a meaningful restriction. It is a conscious policy to defy congressional will.
sisyphusshrugged: (Default)
At the Toys "R" Us in San Francisco recently, Mia Singletary was shopping with her mother, eyeing the Barbie Travel Train. The inevitable question arose: "Would you use this train to steal lots of intellectual property?"

At first, she didn't answer, almost as if she didn't understand the question. But then she smiled.

"Yes!" she said, bouncing on her toes, as her pigtails bobbed.

"And how exactly would you use it to steal intellectual property?" she was asked.

"I would buy it," she said. Her logic wasn't tracking. Was she realizing that she had been totally busted?

James McMillian, a Toys "R" Us employee who was stocking toys, at first seemed speechless when asked whether the store was selling the likes of crowbars to second-story men.

"This?" he asked as he picked up the Barbie Travel Train box. A moment later, he regained his composure and made a ludicrous suggestion: "Why not just buy a regular recorder?"

The beauty of the Barbie Travel Train was then explained to him: it could be easily smuggled into a rock concert under a pile of several blankets or a large tent. Then the train could be used to record several seconds of a bootlegged song.

"I guess people wouldn't expect you to use this," Mr. McMillian acknowledged.

A few aisles down, a Toys "R" Us saleswoman stood beside one of the more obvious piracy tools - a product known on the street as the "baby monitor." It allows parents to monitor their infants by broadcasting the baby's voice. But it could also pick up and transmit the sound of the television in the background. The saleswoman was asked: "Isn't this a veritable piracy starter kit for infants?"

"You mean like babies?" she asked...
sisyphusshrugged: (Default)
James Agee pinpointed the essence of their comedy: ''Laurel and Hardy are trying to move a piano across a narrow suspension bridge. The bridge is slung over a sickening chasm between a couple of Alps. Midway they meet a gorilla.'' In their more than 100 films together, spanning three decades (1921-51), Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy's impeccably constructed comic mayhem carried them to the highest level of popularity and a fame that easily crossed international borders...

-----

...A lawyer for We Can, Daniel L. Alterman, said that he would challenge the eviction.

"If the city does not help, a lot of working poor are going to be forced back onto welfare rolls," he said.

A spokesman for Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg declined to comment on the situation.

Mr. Polhemus said that We Can could afford to pay up to $3,000 a month for rent, but has been unable to find an affordable garage or warehouse space, or even a vacant lot.

We Can became a model for similar centers nationwide for its innovative method of recycling and helping the poor. The center pays back the full five-cent deposits to collectors and then turns over the containers to the beverage companies, which pay the nickel deposit and a two-cent handling fee.

Mr. Polhemus says the center has paid more than $30 million in rebates and has saved the city from picking up or disposing of 88,000 tons of cans and bottles.

The center has an annual budget of about $750,000, which pays for salaries for its dozen full-time employees, and for materials and other operating costs, Mr. Polhemus said. It gets half its funding from charitable donations and the other half from the handling fees.

On Friday morning, dozens of collectors wheeled their cartloads of containers into the center, shook off the snow and huddled near a space heater before sorting their cans and bottles by brand on large plywood slabs.

"You got hundreds of livelihoods depending on this place," said Michael Mills, 47, who for the past 15 years has made his living collecting containers from the nightclubs and restaurants in the theater district...


-----

WASHINGTON, Dec. 7 - The Republican and Democratic leaders of the Congressional investigation into the Sept. 11 attacks plan to issue a final report next week calling for the appointment of a new cabinet-level director of national intelligence who would outrank the director of central intelligence, government officials say.

But the Congressional leaders have agreed not to assign blame to any individual government officials for the intelligence failures before Sept. 11...


-----

BALTIMORE, Dec. 5 - Microsoft hobbled Sun Microsystems the way Tonya Harding's supporters kneecapped a rival figure skater before the 1994 Olympics, a judge overseeing a private antitrust case against Microsoft said today.

The judge, J. Frederick Motz of Federal District Court here, made the comparison in challenging Microsoft's argument that it should not be forced to include Sun's Java program in Windows, the Microsoft software that operates 95 percent of personal computers. Sun says it is entitled to compensation for the harm that Microsoft inflicted on Java....


-----

...If Browne, 54, has made a name for himself as a high-stakes deal maker, he has also shown that he is alert to the dangers of heading a colossal oil company in a world that - because of climate change, murmurings of war-for-oil and a host of other global crises - may hate oil companies, no matter how profitable they are. More than that, he has shown the ambition to redefine the very nature of Big Oil: pushing BP to confront global warming, candidly acknowledge the company's mistakes (environmental penalties against the company appear on its Web site), enter into dialogue with environmental groups, hire people with strong environmental ethics and opinions. ''John Browne would be the first to say, 'Even on our best day, we're still a big dirty company,''' says one person involved in BP's rebranding effort. ''But aren't there ways to do it smarter, cleaner, in a more surprising and forward-thinking way?''' He adds, ''This guy's swimming upstream...

-----

...F. Scott Fitzgerald's observation that "the very rich" are "different from you and me" is usually taken as a statement about the very rich, who have always exerted a certain fascination on even the most democratic-minded writers and moviemakers. But more revealing, perhaps, is Fitzgerald's implicit assumption that the salient division in American life is between them and us. You and I, in other words, are not very different from each other. We must belong to the default category of the not-very-rich, a generality that, at least in the abstract, transcends region and background or washes them away in the solvent of averageness. Politicians increasingly pander to the middle class - a group of people that is at once universally inclusive (something like 90 percent of us claim to belong to it) and perpetually forgotten, vanishing or neglected...

-----

President Bush's Secretary of Commerce, Donald Evans, told more than 1,000 scientists, economists and other experts attending a conference on global warming last week that their task was to "jump-start" President Bush's new five-year program of research into the causes of global warming and possible responses. The secretary is just a bit behind the times. There is already an enormous body of research on the subject, perhaps 20 years' worth, nearly all of it pointing to the need to adopt exactly the kind of remedial steps that the Bush administration has so far refused to take. What needs jump-starting is not research but policy.

Obviously we could all benefit from research. Sophisticated modeling can tell us more about global climate change and instruct us in how best to adapt. But the world does not need another excuse from Mr. Bush to delay the political steps necessary to begin slowing emissions right away.

The window is closing fast. Even now, nations are making energy investments that will be with us for years to come. The International Energy Agency predicted recently that $4.2 trillion would be spent on new electric generating plants over the next 30 years worldwide - an average investment of $140 billion a year - and that most of these would be using outdated, highly polluting technologies. Every year of delay locks in more outmoded investment, adds to the carbon emissions already in the atmosphere and increases the ultimate costs of protecting the environment...


-----

...The two men who brought the Texas case were arrested in the home of one of them by police officers who were responding to a false report of a weapons disturbance. The men were held in police custody for more than a day and were fined. Having been convicted of what Texas law defines as a crime of "moral turpitude," they can now be disqualified or restricted in practicing dozens of professions that range from doctor to bus driver, and in several states they are considered sex offenders and would have to register with the police.

The men's convictions violate the Constitution's guarantee of equal protection. Thirteen states have laws against sodomy, but Texas is one of just four whose law applies only to gay sex. It punishes gays as a class by criminalizing an act that is central to who they are - in the same way, as the Supreme Court noted in an entirely different context, that a tax on wearing a yarmulke would be a tax on Jews.

A decade after Bowers, the Supreme Court struck down an antigay Colorado constitutional amendment on equal protection grounds. The court ruled that the state amendment, which banned localities from prohibiting discrimination against gays, violated the equal protection clause because it classified gays "not to further a proper legislative end but to make them unequal to everyone else."...


-----

There is something noble about my ferryboat, a Cape Cod whale-watching vessel pressed into service in the aftermath of Sept. 11, when the number of New Jersey commuters needing to get to work by boat doubled overnight. While my boat, the Adventurer, once frolicked in search of marine mammals up north, entertaining camera-toting tourists, it now endures the tightly choreographed drudgery of countless 10-minute Hudson crossings a day.

The fading whale logo on its hull and a brochure for Maine's Stellwagen Bank National Marine Sanctuary, still taped to a wall inside the cabin, are the only signs of the boat's hasty requisition by New York Waterway...


-----

Mr. Bush, who was governor of Texas for six years, named three former governors to federal cabinet positions and declared in February 2001 that he was "a faithful friend" to the nation's governors.

But that friendship has been strained as the states' fiscal problems have worsened. The Bush administration has, for example, opposed bipartisan legislation that would help states with the surging costs of Medicaid, the health program for 40 million low-income people financed jointly by the federal government and the states.

White House officials said the federal government, facing budget deficits of its own, had no money to spare.

Bill Richardson, the Democrat just elected governor of New Mexico, said he worried that two laws signed with fanfare by President Bush - to set federal education standards and to bolster domestic security - were imposing new requirements on the states without money to carry them out.

For years, Republicans have been critical of federal mandates, especially what they call "unfunded mandates." Now, Mr. Richardson said, Republicans appear to be imposing them...


-----

The melting of Greenland glaciers and Arctic Ocean sea ice this past summer reached levels not seen in decades, scientists reported today.

This year's summertime melt, which provides more evidence of recent quick warming in the Arctic, is in part driven by natural climate oscillations, the researchers said. But they added that human-driven changes to the environment like the destruction of ozone and the emission of carbon dioxide could well have accelerated and enlarged the effect.

In September, the end of summer, ice coverage of the Arctic Ocean dipped to two million square miles before it started to grow again. Since 1978, when direct satellite measurements of sea ice started, the average summertime minimum has been 2.4 million square miles. Of the sea ice that survived, most was thinner than usual...


-----

Security guards at the Indian Point nuclear plant did not believe they could protect the plant from an attack, and said their bosses discouraged them from raising security concerns, according to a report written early this year for the plant's owner.

"Only 19 percent of the security officers stated that they could adequately defend the plant after the terrorist event of Sept. 11," said the report, which was completed by a security consultant to the plant's owner last January. It also questioned the training and fitness of the guards.

"Some officers believe that as many as 50 percent of the force may not be physically able to meet the demands of defending the plant," said the report, a copy of which was given to The New York Times by Riverkeeper, an environmental group that wants the plant closed. "The current physical agility test is extremely lax and is not adequate to evaluate the actual physical conditioning of the security force."

Entergy Nuclear Northeast, the company that recently bought Indian Point's two active reactors, said that many concerns raised by the report had been addressed. The company, a subsidiary of the Entergy Corporation, one of the nation's largest power companies, also said that the plant met security requirements set by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, an assessment confirmed by the commission and by the report...


What does that make you question, exactly?

-----

and speaking of Governor Pataki,

...The governor's critics on the right say his current predicament is partly of his own making. Though he held the line on spending in his first two years in office, he and the Legislature let spending grow at nearly twice the rate of inflation over the last six years. The economic boom and the overheated stock market made it possible to do so without raising taxes.

Now, the stock market bubble has burst and income tax collections have plummeted, by $1.5 billion in the first six months of the fiscal year, or 7.5 percent. New York is not alone in this predicament. Most large, rich states face similar straits.

Critics say, however, that when faced with a competitive re-election battle, Mr. Pataki did not cut spending in this year's budget, as other states did. Instead, he balanced the budget with about $4 billion in one-time revenues that will evaporate next year, according to the state comptroller's office...


-----

...For much of the last decade, conservative talk radio hosts built carnivorous empires by gorging on the foibles of Bill Clinton. [geez, Maureen Dowd much? but anyway] Now, two years into the Bush administration, liberals and Democrats are still waiting for a syndicated carnivore of their own.

As Mr. Clinton said in a speech last week, referring to a range of conservative media: "They have a destruction machine. We don't have a destruction machine."

What Democrats do have is a yammer gap...


-----



The date: 1983. The war: Iraq versus Iran. The men: Saddam Hussein and Donald F. Rumsfeld, then the envoy for President Reagan and now the defense secretary.
sisyphusshrugged: (Default)
Why Mr. Meredith is a lawyer and I am not:

The current administration has a demonstrable penchant for secrecy that may permit the spread of the infection of corruption and abuse.

See, I myself would have left out the "secrecy...of" section.

At any rate, more temperate minds than mine (wavewave, Merediths) over at PLA on (some of) what Bush is hiding.
sisyphusshrugged: (Default)
Wil Wheaton has a story from boingboing which links to a story from the Detroil Free Press discussing and earlier Slashdot story about an earlier Detroit Free Press story about a spammer moving in to a $750,000 house in Bloomfield Hills (I should put this in perspective by telling you that my husband's cousins starter house was a three bedroom ranch with finished basement, in-ground pool and fireplace in a "good neighborhood" that they paid $75k for). Plastic also weighs in.

(Note: the comments sections of these articles list the home and office addresses of the gentleman in question as well as his lawyer, another prominent spammer and Admiral Poindexter, which I trust you not to misuse because it would be bad. If you wanted to send a few pizzas to the nice folks at AdPro Solutions and supportdude.com, however, I could probably control my indignation. (No, it would be wrong. Never mind.) The author of the original article is apparently similarly conflicted, based on this:

Ralsky agreed to this interview and the tour of his operation only if I promised not to print the address of his new home, which I found in Oakland County real estate records.

The money quote (although I really wonder at the fact that everyone has picked up this phrase from Andy Sullivan, as it not-terribly-obliquely equates the writing of the quote to, as he would no doubt put it in that marvelous earthy way he has, "shooting a load" in the reader's face) is this:

Ralsky, meanwhile, is looking at new technology. Recently he's been talking to two computer programmers in Romania who have developed what could be called stealth spam.

It is intricate computer software, said Ralsky, that can detect computers that are online and then be programmed to flash them a pop-up ad, much like the kind that display whenever a particular Web site is opened.

"This is even better," he said. "You don't have to be on a Web site at all. You can just have your computer on, connected to the Internet, reading e-mail or just idling and, bam, this program detects your presence and up pops the message on your screen, past firewalls, past anti-spam programs, past anything.

"Isn't technology great?"


Ralsky's life, he says, is also somewhat complicated because he's had to move to foreign servers after he was busted essentially stealing bandwidth from Verizon. Anti-spam crusaders have apparently complicated his life further by informing the chinese government that he donates to the Falun Gong.

The upshot is that Ralsky is now receiving tons of paper-based direct mail delivered to his house daily. (It's hard to feel completely sympathetic, since opting out of paper-based mail is possible, and doesn't simply make your address a more valuable target for direct mailers by confirming that someone lives there).

Of the fine folks at Slashdot who signed him up (one theory is) for the direct mail lists, Ralsky says

They've signed me up for every advertising campaign and mailing list there is. These people are out of their minds. They're harassing me.

Well, yes, but it doesn't seem - politic? - for someone to bring it up who brags that not only does he send out up to 2 billion pieces of junk spam with forged headers a day (using stolen bandwidth if he can), he puts a little chunk of code in his spam so your machine will notify him that you read it.

Happily, the town he lives in requires source recycling.

I wouldn't do it myself, but it's really hard not to feel a twinge of schadenfreude in the face of his voluble indignation.
sisyphusshrugged: (Default)
While Landrieu is set to return to Washington, Terrell's future was a little less clear. Her concession speech was interrupted when somebody yelled out, "Suzie for governor!" That sparked some of the loudest applause of the night.

Later, Terrell said she had not given any thought to her political future but did not rule out a run for governor next year.

"I have to figure out which way the wind takes us," Terrell said. "In my experience, the people of Louisiana put you where you need to go."

Terrell said she had no regrets about the heavy involvement of the national Republican Party or the negative tone of the campaign run against Landrieu. She also said she didn't think the loss reflected poorly on the president, who flew to Louisiana early last week to campaign on her behalf and dedicated resources to her race.

"I don't think it is a referendum on the president. I think the president is very popular in this state," she said.
sisyphusshrugged: (Default)
Forty-five minutes after the polls closed, several high-profile Landrieu supporters watched TV returns in a fourth-floor Fairmont suite. Crowded around a set were former Congresswoman and Ambassador Lindy Boggs, Breaux, John, and former New Orleans Mayor Marc Morial. The mood was pensive as early returns showed Terrell with 52 percent of the vote.
sisyphusshrugged: (Default)
from Sassafras (I do read it, Auntie Em, really I do, doesn't anybody believe me?): Antarctic photos taken by an explorer-scientist with a blog

-----

Josh Marshall, pounding a few more nails in the matter of Ms. Terrell

-----

My povero is back, and he links to King Abdullah's Op Ed piece in the Post (with a way cool shot of the King on Star Trek. So it was Captain Mommy. Nothing's perfect in this vale of tears).

-----

Slate's Today's Papers gives the Landrieu win fewer lines than the construction explosions at Cheney's house or Don Felder's lawsuit against Don Henley, leads with the arms inspections and gives the whole mess the hed Much Ado About Golfing in tribute to the columns the Times is running today.

Please god, they're trying to lure Sullivan away from Salon...

-----

We were listening to the radio at Applebee's yesterday (long story. Indifferent food, radical boneless chicken wings) and this song came on that sampled Gladys Knight's Neither One of Us, over and over and over and over, and the young woman singing had a pleasant enough voice but she wasn't Gladys Knight (so few of us are) and my husband and I were saying that it must get most of its play on stations that You Young Folks listen to, because a wise singer wouldn't take the risk that people hearing the intro would be expecting Gladys Knight and feel really disappointed as soon as they started singing.

I thought about that while I was reading today's thumbsuckers on the turnover in the White House economics team.

Do you suppose the White House really thinks bringing someone in who'll be more effective at accelerating the deficit is what Wall Street is hoping for?

-----

More than 400 agents of the Scret Service have resigned in the past year, and national police groups are paying for ads to tell their members not to take their jobs. Agents are being pulled off the streets and away from embassies to guard the White House, where they work with rookie agents who haven't graduated from training or undergone complete background checks.

Apparently the departing agents have tales to tell about unspecified gross governmental abuses by the people they're set to guard.

I'll have to think about who those might be and get back to you.

In the meantime, US News is still looking into the story, and the Bush administration is conducting a witch hunt for anyone who might have spoken to US News.

US News spends a great deal of the story talking about unverified incidents that did or didn't take place in the Clinton White House, and doesn't explain why the rash of departures only took place this past year. (I don't buy 9/11 - people who deliberately took a job which requires the willingness to take a bullet for the person you're guarding don't leave in droves because there's a risk).

-----

The Esquire article is here.

well that explains:

Sources close to the former president say Rove was fired from the 1992 Bush presidential campaign after he planted a negative story with columnist Robert Novak about dissatisfaction with campaign fundraising chief and Bush loyalist Robert Mosbacher Jr. It was smoked out, and he was summarily ousted.

go figure.

well, that explains something else:

On the night of the vote in New Hampshire, the senator’s senior staff was all gathered at the Crowne Plaza in Nashua. A call came in to the penthouse suite moments after McCain’s big victory was declared by the networks. It was Rove. A junior staffer cupped his hand over the receiver and told Weaver: "Rove says he’s calling to concede."

Weaver was stunned. "Karl’s conceding?" He shook off disbelief, gathered himself, and said, "Tell Karl that he can’t concede. He’s not the candidate. The governor has to bring himself to actually call the senator." Weaver gave Karl a cell-phone number where McCain could be reached, and a few minutes later, the candidates had a brief chat. Then it was off to the showdown in South Carolina, which changed everything . .


-----

It took about three hours for the itty bitty little Landrieu article link below the Wolf Blitzer promo on the CNN front page to move to a text-only news roundup listing and be replaced by an advertorial for tonight's Sopranos.

Which is funny, because they had lots of room for articles about how she was gonna definitely lose.

-----

[female content] and now I'm off to visit my nonna (yes, actually, it is over the river and through the woods) and show her my crocheting [/female content]
sisyphusshrugged: (Default)
a commenter on another blog has at me because "you people" can't do anything but call Our Fearless Leader names.

busted.

So you people know: I am completely ignorant of current events and politics, and I get my information from watching West Wing.

Now, how this relates to the fact that only a thug drives his car into a wall to punish his wife for talking bad about his severe substance abuse problem (or for that matter hires Karl "I'm gonna fuck him" Rove) I'm not sure, but maybe I missed that episode.

peace out, man (oh look. baby ducks).
sisyphusshrugged: (Default)
Nonni's so frail. I dressed her for bed after dinner and her thighs are as big around as my wrists. I lifted her into bed more easily than I lift HM.

Still she said buon notte, cara and hugged my head and I felt about five years old and completely safe.

One day a week, she said, we had a special of the ravioli in the restaurant and I asked if she bought it from [the pasta shop on Houston our cousins owned] and she said she made it herself (nonni's ravioli rocked hard - it had all sorts of obscure stuff in it and it had paper thin pasta she rolled herself and it was wicked good) and there was a man from the pastry shop that isn't there any more but our neighbor on Carmine Street used to work there and it's Rocco's now who came every day when they had ravioli and ate it and he was big as a house when she last saw him.

We showed her the tapestry and she liked it but we could have shown her toilet paper pompoms and she would have liked them because we were there and if we were proud of anything it would have been good enough.

I'm proud of my grandmother. She's 98.

Favorite nonni story:

"I found a purse on the floor of the butcher shop and it was full of money. I asked the butcher if he knew who it belonged to and he said yes, it belongs to someone who was just here and if you give it to me I'll return it to her so I gave it to him and went home. Then my aunt yelled at me because I gave it to him - she said, he's not an honest man, he'll keep the money, you should have kept it, and I said that God wouldn't want me to do that. So she yelled at me and she made me feel bad.

Then I went to the ship to pick up my cousin who was coming from Italy. I went to see my husband who worked at the docks and got the bags from him and we loaded everything into a taxi but I put one bag on the sidewalk and the taxidriver didn't load it, he left it on the sidewalk.

We got home and my aunt and everyone yelled at me for leaving it on the sidewalk and losing it and I said I would go to the dock and look for it in the lost and found but everyone said that it wouldn't be there.

I went and told my husband about it and he took me to the Lost and Found and there was the bag.

I took it home and my aunt said to me "See, I said you should take something and you said God wouldn't like it and here he's rewarding you for doing the right thing"

So I really felt like God was rewarding me for doing the right thing and returning the money, especially since it was during the Prohibition and the bag was full of bottles of alcohol..."

We have a fair amount in common, I think.
Page generated Jul. 14th, 2025 10:31 pm
Powered by Dreamwidth Studios