Check out this cult I was invited to - 'the sports club'. Their site has toned down a little since I first saw it but it's still pretty freaky!

A Fishy Story...

A guy who lives at Lake Conroe (50 miles north of Houston) saw a ball bouncing around kind of strange in the lake and went to investigate.It turned out to be a big catfish who had obviously tried to swallow a basketball which became stuck in its mouth!!The fish was totally exhausted from trying to dive, but unable to because the ball would always bring him back up to the surface. The guy tried numerous times to get the ball out, but was unsuccessful. He finally had his wife cut the ball in order to deflate it and release the hungry catfish. You probably wouldn't have believed this, if you hadn't seen the following pictures...

Artist: Pink Album: I'm Not Dead (2006)

Who Knew

You took my hand
You showed me how
You promised me you'd be around
ah huh that's right

I took your words
And I believed
In everything you said to me
yeah huh that's right

CHORUS 1
If someone said three years from now
You'd be long gone
I'd stand up and punch them out
Cause they're all wrong
I know better
Cause you said forever
And ever
Who knew

Remember when we were such fools
And so convinced and just too cool
oh no no no

I wish I could touch you again
I wish I could still call you a friend
I'd give anything

CHORUS 2
When someone said count your blessings now
'Fore they're long gone
I guess I just didn't know how
I was all wrong
But they knew better
Still you said forever
And ever
Who Knew

Yeah yeah I'll keep you locked in my head
Until we meet again
Until we until we meet again
And I won't forget you my friend
What happened

CHORUS 3
If someone said three years from now
You'd be long gone
I'd stand up and punch them out
Cause they're all wrong and
That last kiss I'll cherish
Until we meet again
And time makes it harder
I wish I could remember
But I keep your memory
You visit me in my sleep
My darlin' who knew

My darlin' my darlin' who knew
My darlin' I miss you
My darlin' who knew

Who knew

New Draconian measures

UK plans face-to-face interviews for passports
11:15AM Monday February 19, 2007
By Anthony Barnes

Passport officials have defended a new face-to-face interview system for passport applications in Britain, saying they will be an invaluable tool in fighting identity fraud.
Critics had said the checks, to be introduced for new applicants from April, would pose a "major threat" to individual liberty.

From 2009, the scheme will be extended to those renewing lost, stolen or expired passports.

There are 600,000 applicants for passports each year. The new rules require anyone requesting a passport for the first time to be interrogated about their personal details.
Opponents claim the policy is a back-door means to gather data for use with the Government's controversial identity card scheme.

But James Hall, the chief executive of the Identity and Passport Service, said it was a necessary "inconvenience" that would stop criminals stealing identities: "We all as citizens recognise we have to be inconvenienced by airport security but it's in our collective benefit." The questions were "not particularly intrusive", he said. "We may ask the applicant if they had a mortgage and if so with which company."

Campaign group NO2ID dismissed Mr Hall's justification as "tripe". The national co-ordinator, Phil Booth, said: "The only reason your private life is to be raked over by officials in this way is to collect and connect all official information about you for the National Identity Register.
The real message is clear: if you want to travel, you are a suspect."

- INDEPENDENT

What year do you belong in?

You Belong in 1979

If you scored...1950 - 1959: You're fun loving, romantic, and more than a little innocent. See you at the drive in!

1960 - 1969: You are a free spirit with a huge heart. Love, peace, and happiness rule - oh, and drugs too.

1970 - 1979: Bold and brash, you take life by the horns. Whether you're partying or protesting, you give it your all!

1980 - 1989: Wild, over the top, and just a little bit cheesy. You're colorful at night - and successful during the day.

1990 - 1999: With you anything goes! You're grunge one day, ghetto fabulous the next. It's all good!

What year do you belong in?

Martin Luther King

We could each be Dr. King
TV whitewashes King's legacy; work is not over

Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., would have been 78 on Monday. He has been dead for 39 years, as long as he was alive. As his living memory fades, replaced by a feel-good "I have a dream" whitewash that ignores much of what he stood for and fought against, it's more important than ever to recapture the true history of Dr. King -- because much of what he fought against is resurfacing or still with us today.

King, the man, was, along with Mohandas Gandhi, one of the two most internationally revered symbols of nonviolence in the 20th century. He spent his too-brief adult life defying authority and convention, citing a higher moral authority, and gave hope and inspiration for the liberation of people of color on six continents. MLK Day, the holiday, has devolved into the Mississippi Burning of third Mondays. What started out as gratitude, that they made a movie about it, gradually becomes revulsion at how new generations of Euro-Americans mislearn the story.
King is not a legend because he believed in diversity trainings and civic ceremonies, or because he had a nice dream. He is remembered because he took serious risks and, as the Quakers say, spoke truth to power. King is also remembered because, among a number of brave and committed civil rights leaders and activists, he had a flair for self-promotion, a style that also appealed to white liberals, and the extraordinary social strength of the black Southern churches behind him. And because he died before he had a chance to be widely believed a relic or buffoon.
What little history TV will give us around King's holiday is at least as much about forgetting as about remembering, as much about self-congratulatory patriotism that King was American as self-examination that American racism made him necessary and that government, at every level, sought to destroy him. We hear "I have a dream"; we don't hear his powerful indictments of poverty, the Vietnam War, and the military-industrial complex. We see Bull Connor in Birmingham; we don't see arrests for fighting segregated housing in Chicago, or the years of beatings and busts before he won the Nobel Peace Prize. We don't hear about the mainstream American contempt at the time for King, even after that Peace Prize, nor the FBI harassment or his reputation among conservatives as a Commie dupe.

We don't see retrospectives on King's linkage of civil rights with Third World liberation. We forget that he died in Memphis lending support for a union (the garbage workers' strike), while organizing a multi-racial Poor Peoples' Campaign that demanded affordable housing and decent-paying jobs as basic civil rights transcending skin color. We forget that many of King's fellow leaders weren't nearly so polite. Cities were burning. We remember Selma instead.
And we forget that of those many dreams King had, only one -- equal access for non-whites -- is significantly realized today. A half-century after the Montgomery bus boycott catapulted a 26-year-old King into prominence, even that is only partly achieved.

Blacks are being systematically disenfranchised in our elections, and affirmative action and school desegregation are all but dead. Urban school districts across the country these days are as segregated and unequal as ever, and a conservative majority on the U.S. Supreme Court likely heralds a new era where employers and landlords can discriminate with near-impunity.
But an even bigger problem, as a generation dies off and the historical memory fades, is that Dr. King has become an icon, not a historical figure (distorted or otherwise). History requires context; icons don't. The racism King challenged four and five decades ago in Georgia and Alabama was also dominant throughout the country. Here in Seattle, few whites know that history: the housing and school segregation, laws barring Asians from owning land (overturned only in the '60s), the marches downtown from predominantly black Garfield High School, police harassment of both radical and mainstream black activists, the still-unsolved assassination of a local NAACP leader.

Every city in America has such histories. We don't know the stories of the people, many still with us, who led those struggles. And we rarely acknowledge that the overt racism of Montgomery 1955 is no longer so overt, but still part of America 2007. It shows up in our geography, in our jails, in our schools, in our voting booths, in our shelters and food banks, in our economy, and in the very earnest and extremely white activist groups that often carry the banner on these issues.

If our cities were serious about his legacy, Martin Luther King Jr. Blvd. would run through downtowns, and there would be MLK Elementary Schools in the suburbs. Instead, in just about every big city in the U.S., school districts and city councils put King back in the ghetto, along with both the legions of people who worked with him and the many more who've taken up his work since.

Opponents of affirmative action and racial equality can claim King's mantle and "if he were alive today" approval only because in 2007, pop culture's MLK has no politics. And, for that matter, no faith. For white America, King's soft-focus image often reinforces white supremacism. "See? We're not so bad. We honor him now. Why don't those black people just get over it, anyway? We did."

All that is a lie. Dr. King's vision is today as urgent as ever. While Jim Crow and the cruelties of overt segregation are now largely unimaginable, much remains to be done. And for those who carry King's banner, the challenges of apathy and official hostility remain the same: the FBI and NSA spying on peace groups, listening to phone calls, monitoring e-mails, opening mail. An administration -- voted for by almost no African-Americans -- that reviles nonviolence and labels its critics as treasonous (rather than as communist dupes). And the moral outrage of Americans that made King's work so politically effective? We don't do that any more. We can torture thousands of mostly innocent Iraqis and Afghans, in plain sight, and nobody is held accountable. It'd take a whole lot more than Bull Connor's police dogs to make the news today.
The saddest loss in the modern narrative of Dr. King's career is the story of who he was: a man without wealth, without elected office, who managed as a single individual to change the world simply through the strength of his moral convictions. His power came from his faith, and his willingness to act on what he knew to be right. That story could inspire many millions to similar action -- if only it were told. We could each be Dr. King.

Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., nonviolent martyr to reconciliation and justice, has become a Hallmark Card, a warm, fuzzy, feel-good invocation of neighborliness, a file photo for sneakers or soda commercials, a reprieve for post-holiday shoppers, an excuse for a three-day weekend, a cardboard cutout used for photo ops by dissembling Cabinet members and ungrateful Supreme Court justices. Be sure to check out the Three-Day-Only White Sale at WalMart. Always a better price. Always.

Dr. King deserves better. We all do.

By Geov Parrish
Created Jan 13 2007 - 9:48am
http://www.smirkingchimp.com/node/4700/print