Killer Owls, Zombie Plants and Marbled Murrelets
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Final Score: Santa 1, Grinch 0
in a division game with post-season implications. Inclement weather, short rest, and a long flight to Whoville had led odds makers to tab St. Nick’s North Pole squad as a two point underdog. At first it seemed the bookmakers had called it correctly as the Grinch had strong showing in the first half and seemed poised to claim the division title with either a win or a tie in front of a joyous hometown crowd. However, late in the second half, Santa Claus team captain Kris Kringle slipped around a distracted defender and laid a gift for Cindy Lou under the Who family tree.
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Silent Night? We Should Be So Lucky
music, which they don’t typically play in elevators anymore, and thank your lucky stars for that, especially if you’re even remotely claustrophobic), but do they have to ratchet it up a holy notch by putting a liturgical spin on it? Can’t I just sit here, in this normally atrocious atmosphere, eating this beastly awful food and not be subjected to a parable about some kid with a drum? I was 18. I was a little more indignant back then. The irony of my 20s and cynicism of my 30s were still ahead of me. Now, in the graying haze of my 40s, it’s no longer about the religious message in the music, which is largely irrelevant to me. It’s about the music itself, and boy does it suck.
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Welcome Back My Friends to the Season That Never Ends
garish clothing made by exploited Indonesian children; a stern, Teutonic St. Nick who really did keep two lists, who never dreamed of offering punch-card guarantees on the latest electronic do-dads, whose ire manifested itself in the form of coal lumps, who demanded to be placated not only with modesty and obedience but also with offerings of milk and cookies, and who seemed to more closely resemble a red-robed Karl Marx than some jolly, docile servant whose fetching and offering was at the beck and call of screaming, sugar-crazed children. But that was then. Things were different. During World War II there was rationing. Before that, expectations were understandably minimal as people slogged through during the Great Depression.
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The Heater from Van Meter
old as I feel some days, I’m still young enough to have been Bob Feller’s grandson, and of course I never saw him pitch during his eighteen year career with Cleveland. But he’s always been there, part of baseball lore, a living legend whose tales of mighty prowess preceded television and must be cobbled together from scraps of footage and tall tales. He signed a Major League Baseball contract when he was only 16 years old. His signing bonus was $1 and an autographed baseball. He is estimated to have thrown a 104 mile per hour fastball. He was such a sensation that his high school graduation was broadcast on national radio.
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The Legal Case Against WikiLeaks
degree should that even matter? And then there are the third party financial intermediaries: Visa, Mastercard and Paypal have practically tripped over each other accommodating government requests to prevent their customers from donating to WikiLeaks. And finally there are WikiLeaks’ vigilantes, collectively known to the media as Anonymous, some of whom have taken down, by denial-of-service attacks, the websites of Wikileaks’ adversaries, including the aforementioned financial groups, Joe Lieberman, Swiss bank Post Finance, and Assange’s Swedish prosecutors.
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Arm Chair Assassins
Igarashi, was stabbed to death. Later that month the Italian language translator, Ettore Capriolo, was stabbed and seriously injured. The Norwegian publisher, William Nygaard, narrowly escaped an attempted assassination in 1993. And on July 2nd of that year, an angry mob surrounded a hotel in Sivas, Turkey where Aziz Nesin, the Turkish language translator, was attending a conference celebrating a 16th century poet; learning of his presence, the mob set fire to the hotel. Thirty-seven people died. Nesin escaped the fire, though he was set upon by firemen and seriously beaten. Now, some of the same people and publications who have decried the fatwa as barbaric, and who have defended Rushdie in the name of democracy, tolerance, and freedom, are calling for the murder of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange.
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