Hey folks,. I've noticed that some of you have been dropping in and leaving feedback on here, and I apologize for not noticiing it sooner.  I don't post at this site anymore, escept for the week of Thanksgiving, though I am still around reading and adding subscriptions through here. 

You can find my current page at http://melancholics.typepad.com

Thanks for reading!

I'm sitting here listening to my mother and sisters complain about my dad's side of the family which they rarely have any interaction with anymore.  They're accusing the Grabers of thinking "if you don't dress like they do and live like they do, well then you're just not living right." 

Irony is not dead. 

I'm hoping I don't grow up to be old and cynical.  Not looking very good at this point...

I was particularly partial to the extended scene in Ithillien where Faramir takes the hobbits captive.  They extended the scene to give Faramir the dialogue that belongs to Sam in the books musing over the dead Southron that's been shot off the oliphaunt and fallen at their feet.  (Of course, this is partially personal preferrence since I wrote a poem called "The Southron" that fit in very well with that paragraph, somewhat unwittingly since I had forgotten about it when I was writing, but later found it again.  When I saw that they had added it into the extended edition, it was all I could do to stop myself from bouncing up and down gong "ee! ee!") 

It's also interesting to note that PJ's Southrons are light-skinned. 

"Give him some medicine, boys!"

Welcome back to the exhibition.  We are sorry for the circus clowns being late, they have not been performing up to capabilities of late.  We have sent them to be lectured on giving the audience more bang for their buck.  It seems of late that their noses haven't been giving the people what they paid for. 

You have to understand that being a circus clown requires that you cannot harbor any feeling of inadequacy.  Being caught up in your own pity is only going to make this job rougher than it already is.  The paying hordes don't want to see your sorry timid hide quivering in your rubber boots; they came to laugh at your hapless bungling, and laugh is what they're going to do.  Not everyone appreciates us though, those stone-faced academics, but you know, you can't get them here. 

The big story in the county this week was a second-grader who got left on the bus and stayed there all school day long.  Let the speculation begin, whatever happens, the parents are bound to see what kind of cash is in it for them. 

Then there was the death of the man who owns the cornfield the separates our house from the highway.  Apparently he fell in his silo into a sea of corn and couldn't get his way out.  You ain't heard nobody cuss like his brothers when they found 'em, somebody told me. 

Frozen prayers upon my lips,
Inside the blood runs hot,
He was reviled, yet He reviled not.

When everyone in your own family doesn't expect you to make much of yourself, what expectations of anyone else could you possibly expect to meet?  What solace is there in knowing they're right?  What relief in understanding how your own simplicity and naivete and ignorance is what got you in this mess to begin with? 

Can you get out?  Can you reach? 

My old grandfather whose mind is given to wandering occasionally says that my cousin is getting married, but he's not sure he's supposed to say that.  Hey, did you read in the newspaper where your former classmate is getting married?  Everyone knows you don't have it put together to get to that point.  Who wants a braindead and twisted old drifter?  They've got it all right, right about me. 

All the wisdom of men is vanity. 

Happy thanksgiving folks. 

I'll be around to post a bit later on. 

I have to try and remember how ta use this durn thang.  (Got your Southern Indiana on?)

The U.N. says world hunger is getting worse., not better.  But the U.N. is just a puppet for special interest right?  Hm, perhaps that was someone else.

The report, "The State of Food Insecurity in the World 2003," found that after falling steadily during the first half of the 1990's, hunger grew in the latter half of the decade.

Between 1999 and 2001, the report found, more than 840 million people, or one in seven, went hungry. Most alarming of all, between 1995 and 2001, the number of malnourished people across the developing world grew by an average of 4.5 million a year.

The agency said the findings would make it impossible to meet its goal of reducing world hunger by half by 2015. That goal, set first in 1996, was cited as a top priority by the United Nations Millennium Summit meeting in September 2000.

The rise in hunger came even though the world produced ample food, and in 22 countries, including Bangladesh, Haiti and Mozambique, the number of undernourished declined in the second half of the decade. "Bluntly stated, the problem is not so much a lack of food as a lack of political will," the report declared.

Hmm, these Xtools aren't all bad; let's see how many posts this computer eats this weekend.