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Rampage of the Innocents - My Historical Romance Novel (now, with more sex and violence for my teenaged readers)
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The Frisky Mole Boy of Groton
Norman Rogers recounts the summer he spent hiding from the stern love of his father and living as the world-famous "frisky mole boy" in the Groton, Connecticut sewer system.
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These are the kinds of track suits that will get you thrown out of restaurants and off of planes, sir.
A track suit? You wore a track suit on a plane and expected to be able to sit in First Class?
~
Anyone who expects to be treated with deference by an airline should dress accordingly. If you’re a goombah who can’t get tickets to see Wayne Newton, you wear a track suit. But if you dress in a fine suit, you should be treated professionally. If you’re a laid-back raconteur and a gentleman bounty hunter/badass like myself, you can wear the blue dress shirt, untucked, with tan duck pants, boat shoes with no socks, and a boonie hat. The women seem to love it when I stroll around looking like I just got through kicking someone’s ass and didn’t mind it a bit. My look is legendary—legendary. I see it everywhere now. I make casual wear look good, you see.
I generally wear cotton pants and a casual shirt, along with casual loafers. Everything under $40 each, so it’s not a serious investment. The use of natural fibers is simply in case there is an emergency and I have to go down the slide. Flip flops wouldn’t be the best in that situation either. On business trips I add a navy blazer - the extra pockets are nice and I fill them with stuff before going through security - easier than emptying a bin.
If I’m hoping for an upgrade on a business trip I’ll throw in a tie, but then I’m an old fart who thinks that can work now and then - and it does.
Regardless of where I’m sitting I don’t pay that much attention to how people around me dress. I prefer that they have focused on taking a bath or shower within the last day or so. Next in line of importance to me would be manners and personality. I’ve had some great flights sitting with some very interesting people and some real duds who never said a word - which is why I always take a good book with me.
Thank you, Ken777—your incessant navel-gazing always makes me feel better about myself.
More than 40 lawmakers vowed to oppose the final healthcare bill if the House language on abortion is not removed.
Reps. Diana DeGette (Colo.) and Louise Slaughter (N.Y.) led the group of Democrats in writing to Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) threatening to withhold support for a final conference report if it strictly prohibits federal funding for abortion services.
“We will not vote for a conference report that contains language that restricts women’s right to choose any further than current law,” reads a draft of the letter.
DeGette and Slaughter, who is the chairwoman of the powerful Rules Committee, also wrote President Barack Obama requesting a meeting on the issue next week.
Obama indicated that his aim is to maintain the current federal limitations on funding for abortions, not expand them, and he hinted the language adopted by the House may go too far. “There needs to be some more work before we get to the point where we’re not changing the status quo,” Obama said during an interview that will air on ABC News.
How is abortion even an issue here? How do you go from having to reform the system of how Americans pay for health care and how employers need a viable option to provide health care to their employees in order to stay in business to making this about some blue haired old lady with her post-feminism hangups and some sweaty old white man and his pathological fears of a plastic fetus floating in formaldehyde? I’m a sweaty old white man, and even I’m confused as to why abortion is being discussed in public right now. Didn’t we settle that? Isn’t it the law of the land? Did I fall asleep and wake up in 1973 again? Who’s been giving me pills? Is there a way that I can time travel back to 2009? I’m confused as hell and I’m not remembering why we have to yap about abortion in order to ease the burden on small businesses in this country.
Is this just a misdirection play, making us think that they can’t do their jobs because everyone suddenly cares about abortion for the first time since whenever? If so, I’m not falling for it.
Democrats, you still don’t get your “ic” back with me. You are failures. You were handed everything but the cherry on top and you still couldn’t get anything done. The American people were with you, and you blew the game. You blew a 56 to nothing lead and you’re about to end up losing it all.
Correct me if I’m wrong, but didn’t 218 of you (save that opportunistic fool from Louisiana) just vote for a tax increase? How’d that work out the last time you did that?
Are all those markups from some weird computer programming language? Is that HTML? I have no idea.
The author clearly expresses a disdain for technology, and the editorial Poindexters left her hanging out to dry. Where were they when this blog post was put up by the author? Do they think that those of us in the creative field have all of the time in the world to sit and fuss with obscure markup languages? They intentionally “broke” this post to make a point about how technology rules our lives, and we should obey our Poindexter masters.
Not me. I fight Poindexter. I may be old, and really confused about why my blog does what it does sometimes, but I don’t let the Poindexters get to me. I stand up to them. I shake my fist at them. I get in my car and I run over those Star Trek action figures and those Macbooks for a reason—I’m in charge. I’m a businessman, a former CEO, and a man who took his family’s own company away from his own Father in just three short months of intriguing and maneuvering. That’s right, me. I’m the boss. And if Poindexter ever tried to make me look bad, I’d give him a snuggy. I’d make that Poindexter pine for the days of thongs and trash can lid hats.
If you have spent time on the water in the blue water part of the oceans on this Earth, you’ll know what I’m talking about when I speak of debris. I have never seen what is described here, but it sounds awful:
In this remote patch of the Pacific Ocean, hundreds of miles from any national boundary, the detritus of human life is collecting in a swirling current so large that it defies precise measurement.
Light bulbs, bottle caps, toothbrushes, Popsicle sticks and tiny pieces of plastic, each the size of a grain of rice, inhabit the Pacific garbage patch, an area of widely dispersed trash that doubles in size every decade and is now believed to be roughly twice the size of Texas. But one research organization estimates that the garbage now actually pervades the Pacific, though most of it is caught in what oceanographers call a gyre like this one — an area of heavy currents and slack winds that keep the trash swirling in a giant whirlpool.
Scientists say the garbage patch is just one of five that may be caught in giant gyres scattered around the world’s oceans. Abandoned fishing gear like buoys, fishing line and nets account for some of the waste, but other items come from land after washing into storm drains and out to sea.
Plastic is the most common refuse in the patch because it is lightweight, durable and an omnipresent, disposable product in both advanced and developing societies. It can float along for hundreds of miles before being caught in a gyre and then, over time, breaking down.
These giant whirlpools are where the garbage itself becomes encrusted with organisms and turned into floating carriers. As the organisms grow and multiply, their weight sinks the debris slowly, causing it to go down far enough to kill what it is on it and shed what is on it and then pop back up to the surface to do it all over again:
There are researchers trying to do comparative analysis of this problem:
Charles Moore found the Pacific garbage patch by accident 12 years ago, when he came upon it on his way back from a sailing race in Hawaii. As captain, Mr. Moore ferried three researchers, his first mate and a journalist here this summer in his 10th scientific trip to the site. He is convinced that several similar garbage patches remain to be discovered.
“Anywhere you really look for it, you’re going to see it,” he said.
Many scientists believe there is a garbage patch off the coast of Japan and another in the Sargasso Sea, in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean.
Bonnie Monteleone, a University of North Carolina, Wilmington, graduate student researching a master’s thesis on plastic accumulation in the ocean, visited the Sargasso Sea in late spring and the Pacific garbage patch with Mr. Moore this summer.
“I saw much higher concentrations of trash in the Pacific garbage patch than in the Sargasso,” Ms. Monteleone said, while acknowledging that she might not have found the Atlantic gyre.
Ms. Monteleone, a volunteer crew member on Mr. Moore’s ship, kept hoping she would see at least one sample taken from the Pacific garbage patch without any trash in it. “Just one area — just one,” she said. “That’s all I wanted to see. But everywhere had plastic.”
Yes, it is everywhere. It sounds like the Pacific Ocean truly has a problem with this trash. Finding a way to clean it up and turn the plastic into something that can be safely disposed of is a problem we could try to solve with better technology. An organization called Project Kaisei, cited in the article, is looking for a viable way to study this debris and use the material positively and wisely.
The remains of a mighty Persian army said to have drowned in the sands of the western Egyptian desert 2,500 years ago might have been finally located, solving one of archaeology’s biggest outstanding mysteries, according to Italian archaeologists.
Bronze weapons, a silver bracelet, an earring and hundreds of human bones found in the vast desolate wilderness of the Sahara desert have raised hopes of finally finding the lost army — 50,000 strong — of Persian King Cambyses II, buried by a cataclysmic sandstorm in 525 B.C.
“We have found the first archaeological evidence of a story reported by the Greek historian Herodotus,” Dario Del Bufalo, a member of the expedition from the University of Lecce, told Discovery News.
According to Herodotus (484-425 B.C.), Cambyses, the son of Cyrus the Great, sent 50,000 soldiers from Thebes to attack the Oasis of Siwa and destroy the oracle at the Temple of Amun. Alexander the Great had famously sought legitimization of his rule from the oracle of Amun in 332 B.C., but according to legend, the oracle would have predicted the death of Cambyses.
The owners of this hotel, who also run a hotel on the Red Sea, offer desert camping and exploring services that look professional from their web site [the link is now dead], but one shudders to read of their plan to convert tourists into “archaeologists” looking for the lost army of Cambyses.
Signor Miglietti, 38, who runs an electrical components business, was so fascinated by the king’s ill-fated journey that he decided to try it.
Before setting off a week ago, pulling a 200lb cart loaded with supplies, he was warned by Tuareg desert nomads that his plan was madness.
Five days, 23 hours later, with blistered feet and severe stomach cramps, he arrived at Siwa.
A man of few words, he said simply: “I’m satisfied. I’m quite well and I went faster than I expected.”
Needless to say, he found no trace of Cambyses’s army.
The legend, as well as inspiring archaeologists to mount many fruitless searches in the desert, has come to symbolise the perils of the Great Sand Sea.
The region in the western Sahara is a massive expanse of dunes, continually beaten by wind and sand storms.
Even the Tuaregs avoid it because of the lack of water and its utter isolation.
Whether or not the items found were planted there (a distinct possibility) or looted and moved (another possibility) or that of a different military detachment (some possibility there) is up to scientists and archaeologists to determine. A lot army of poor soldiers in the terrible desert conjures up all sorts of possibilities, so I hope what has been found puts the mystery to rest.
I can scarcely recall how many times I have faced death. Not counting the seven times I have ingested antifreeze, and the five times I have broken up bum scuffles that involved pitchforks, shovels or knives, or the dozen or so times my brothers and I used short fuses with old dynamite, I think I have faced death at least twenty-five times, if not more. I am not indestructible. I am not easy to kill. In fact, I used to tell people, you can’t kill me—I’m a Republican.
When you’ve faced death so many times, it becomes routine. I am accustomed to the rush of adrenaline. I know that hot sensation in my cheeks and in my elbows. I can feel my body begin to tense above the waist, and that’s when I know I’ll probably have a heart attack if I don’t take a few Bayer aspirin. My mind clears, the sounds in the background disappear, and everything becomes focused. Often, I am running when the sensation arrives, and my pace quickens, my knees ache but they carry me forward, obediently. My hands don’t sweat, but my forehead becomes moist fairly quickly. That’s what sleeves are for, I suppose. I know what it is like to hear the roar, to feel the rocks and the dirt rain down, and I know what it means to be alive. It’s second nature to me. What some call the Pucker Factor, I am not acquainted with. I have never felt any puckering, nor have I felt loose bowels come flying out at inopportune times. I feel nothing below the waist, actually. That’s why people can kick me in the nuts and not stop me.
John Geiger has sifted through the survival stories of people like Sevigny for six years. Adventurers, sailors, prisoners of war and pilots, they all tell strikingly similar stories of being saved from death by a mysterious presence, he says.
In the book “The Third Man Factor: Surviving the Impossible,” Geiger attempts to solve the mystery of that presence.
Most of the people who’ve encountered the Third Man aren’t mystics, says Geiger, a senior fellow at the University of Toronto and governor of the Royal Canadian Geographical Society. They include a NASA astronaut, aviator Charles Lindbergh, polar explorer Ernest Shackleton (he coined the “Third Man” term) and atheists.
Third Man encounters aren’t restricted to exotic locales, either, Geiger says: He experienced a Third Man-like encounter in the study of his home while writing his book.
“When I give talks about the book, there are always a few people who will come up afterward to say they have similar stories,” Geiger said. “The debate around the book is not ‘are people actually encountering an unseen being’ but rather, ‘what is it?’ “
I don’t know if there is a Third Man in my life. As I have said, everything goes silent when I am running from an exploding car or throwing evidence into an old rock quarry or launching myself into the air after a semi-nude Eastern European porn star who is balancing atop an out-of-control jet ski.
Recently, we hired a delightful man named Peej who has become indispensable to me. Whenever I find myself about to dip my finger into a radiator and have a slurp, he is there, whispering in my ear, “no, Norman. That’s going to put you in hospital again.” Whenever I find myself challenging bikers to a game of tennis, he is there, whispering in my ear, “no, Norman—they have guns.” Whenever I’m about to take Father’s wheel chair and push it down nineteen flights of stairs, he is there to hold my arms, lock the brake with his right foot, and save Father’s life by using all of his weight to keep me from lifting my free arm and using the remote control to bring down the robotic arm that would hit Father’s wheelchair from the other side and send it flying.
He’s a good man, this Mr. Peej. I’m hoping he works out.
It’s hard to find the words to describe phony outrage. I know it when I see it, but it doesn’t reveal itself to me like it used to. Phony outrage is a misdirection play, an argumentative form of the wildcat play they’re using in football this season, and it is designed to make you think someone cares about x when they really care about y.
I believe the marketing people at Fox News know that when people stop talking about them, that’s when the problems will really start. The histrionic ways in which they react to criticism are designed to keep people talking about Fox News, and this is not because they really want people to think it is a fair-minded and balanced network. No, that would kill off their hardcore viewership. They’re smarter than that. They’re engaged in working the refs, which is a way to get a more favorable amount of coverage. The media hates that, so they become more unhinged and make sharper attacks, which blow up in their face. The truth is, they want people to amplify the real message that they’re trying to get out, which is, if you want to drive liberals nuts, come watch Fox.
There’s nothing wrong with that—everyone should get a chance to test their ideas in the marketplace, unless of course they are reprehensible or deranged. Fox News has subjected itself to the marketplace, and lots of people are buying. It doesn’t get any more difficult to understand than that.
[PBS Ombudsman Michael] Getler writes in his blog that he received some negative correspondence following the October 29th broadcast of the children’s show. In this episode, Oscar the Grouch — the founder of the Grouch News Network (GNN) — receives a phone call from what appears to be a female muppet (or Bret Michaels from Poison) complaining that GNN isn’t grouchy enough.
“I am changing the channel,” she says to Oscar. “From now on I am watching ‘Pox’ News. Now there is a trashy news show.”
It sounded so much like FOX News that even he was fooled by it.
“Everybody who wrote to me heard this as “Fox News,” and I can’t really blame them,” Getler writes. “When I went and watched the tape for the first time, I thought I heard “Fox” as well, perhaps because of the association one assumes when you hear “news” right after the word.”
Getler said in one respect the joke worked, but overall it was too close for comfort.
“Pox News as an alternative and competitor to the Grouch News Network would seem to be a clever and appropriate title,” he wrote. “But you would have to be anesthetized as a producer not to assume that many parents will hear this, or assume this, to be a clever shot at Fox News.”
“I don’t know what was in the head of the producers, but my guess is that this was one of those parodies that was too good to resist. But it should have been resisted. Broadcasters can tell parents whatever they think of Fox or any other network, but you shouldn’t do it through the kids,” he added.
Later in the episode, Anderson Cooper from 4th place CNN, guest stars as a reporter for GNN. He interacts with “Walter Cranky” and “Dan Rather-Not” — Muppets representing real-life liberal news personalities — and they talk about “Meredith Beware-a” and “Diane Spoiler.” But no affectionate nicknames for Fox News personalities; no Spill O’Reilly or Brittle Hume — nope, and the only disparaging characterization of real-world news is reserved for Fox: Fox is a POX. It is trashy. They didn’t even attempt to try “MessyNBC.”
If Mom and Dad watch cable news, it’s better than 50/50 they watch “POX News.” So what gives? PBS — a network partially funded with my tax dollars — has the right to tell my kids that their parents watch “trashy” news? The message is clear, I can’t even sit my kids in front of “Sesame Street” without having to worry about the Left attempting to undermine my authority. And don’t tell me, “If you don’t like it change the channel.” There are no channels left! It’s everywhere. Just last week I had Obama’s service and volunteerism promoted on every single major network, including Disney and Nickelodeon.
…by the way, why SHOULD I change the channel? This is MY channel, I’m paying for it!
The fact that this is a re-run from an episode written during the Bush Presidency only reinforces that this is nothing new. The Left has been doing this for years now. All of us have seen it and felt powerless to mention it, because if we do, we’re ridiculed and dismissed (thank you, Mr. Alinsky).
No, this is nothing new. In Julia L. Mickenberg’s book “Learning From the Left” the history is plainly spelled out. Radicals drummed out of mainstream culture in the late 1940’s turned to children’s entertainment for opportunities not just to work, but to influence. In her introduction, she quotes folk singer Pete Seeger about those artists: “I think many of them are thinking more on the lines of, ‘If we’re going to save this world, we’re going to have to reach the kids’.”
Now this is always a slippery argument for us to make from the right, because we run the risk of being caricatured in the way the late Jerry Falwell was in the infamous “Tinky-Winky” incident.
Okay, that’s unhinged, to say the least, and it only goes to prove that the Tinky-Winky episode has manifested itself in a complaint about how the parodists did not give that idiot Cavuto his own lame nickname, although without the obvious Tinky-Winky shenanigans. If you want to be taken seriously, drop the argument that the news anchors have to have “affectionate” nicknames. That goes well past reasonable. No reasonable person is looking to Sesame Street for witty or urbane political commentary, snark notwithstanding. The nickname “Diane Spoiler” is nowhere near as affectionate or as clever as the woman deserves, by the way. A spoiler is a bad thing, sir. Way to blow past the obvious. It was harmless parody, and “Walter Cranky” took a body blow worse than Fox News did, because he recently died. How would you like to be immortalized by a children’s show as “Walter Cranky?” As to the name “pox,” well, go sell crazy somewhere else. It’s a rhyming play on words. Pox, being a Middle English word for a disease resulting in pock-marking of the skin or skin eruptions, just happens to rhyme with Fox. Should they have used Box or Cox or Sox or Rox? My reaction to that is, so what? I believe that one of the necessary ingredients for parody is to find a clever bit of wordplay upon which to hang your hat. Fox News created this problem by branding itself with that particular name. Next time, call yourself Orange News.
The world at large should just lighten up. I don’t understand or engage in parody—it’s never funny, it never works, it makes you a miserable person (or so I have been lectured), and the kids don’t get it. I don’t know. I might engage in it at some point. Right now, I’m busy being fabulous.
U.S. intelligence agencies were aware months ago that Army Major Nidal Hasan was attempting to make contact with people associated with al Qaeda, two American officials briefed on classified material in the case told ABC News.
It is not known whether the intelligence agencies informed the Army that one of its officers was seeking to connect with suspected al Qaeda figures, the officials said.
One senior lawmaker said the CIA had, so far, refused to brief the intelligence committees on what, if any, knowledge they had about Hasan’s efforts.
CIA director Leon Panetta and the Director of National Intelligence, Dennis Blair, have been asked by Congress “to preserve” all documents and intelligence files that relate to Hasan, according to the lawmaker.
On Sunday, Senator Joseph Lieberman (D-CT) called for an investigation into whether the Army missed signs as to whether Hasan was an Islamic extremist.
“If Hasan was showing signs, saying to people that he had become an Islamist extremist, the U.S. Army has to have a zero tolerance,” Lieberman told Fox News Sunday.
Investigators want to know if Hasan maintained contact with a radical mosque leader from Virginia, Anwar al Awlaki, who now lives in Yemen and runs a web site that promotes jihad around the world against the U.S.
In a blog posting early Monday titled “Nidal Hassan Did the Right Thing,” Awlaki calls Hassan a “hero” and a “man of conscience who could not bear living the contradiction of being a Muslim and serving in an army that is fighting against his own people.”
According to his site, Awlaki served as an imam in Denver, San Diego and Falls Church, Virginia.
The Associated Press reported Sunday that Major Hasan attended the Falls Church mosque when Awlaki was there.
The Telegraph of London reported that Awlaki had made contact with two of the 9/11 hijackers when he was in San Diego.
Now, Hasan may not have been organized into a terrorist organization, but the attack he carried out was an act of violence in order to make a political statement, and that makes him a terrorist and his act a terrorist act against the United States. I said this on the day it happened and I knew then that there would be an attempt to claim that it wasn’t an act of terrorism, using the phony benchmarks of intellectual dishonesty employed to prop up a political viewpoint that doesn’t take these things seriously enough. If there wasn’t a terrorist threat to this country, and given all that went on during the Bush Administration, then there would be hundreds of former officials from that administration in jail right now now, wouldn’t there? Think that will happen? No, of course not. Hence, we need to reacquaint ourselves with the risks we face. This was a wake-up call, one we had better heed.
Anything that has the name “Brian Ross” attached to it should be read with a healthy dose of skepticism. If this information is true, it changes how we must deal with those who are ready to take up arms against innocent people and commit terrorist acts. While it is true that you can’t stop terrorists, you can hold people accountable for not doing a better job of dealing with someone like Hasan, as appears to be the case here.
It’s now time to heal the victims, deal with Hasan as a terrorist, and figure out why our government failed to deal with this man appropriately. Fire the people who passed the buck and did not do their job. Getting this fixed, and then applying these lessons learned to other examples that might be serving in the ranks or on the periphery is critical.
Finally, we must address the fact that Islam itself had nothing to do with what happened here. There are over a billion people who belong to this religion, and they should not be singled out or mistreated because of Hasan’s despicable actions. Islam is the marketing strategy, not the reason for the extremism practiced by a miniscule number of criminal fanatics. They could just as easily have chosen Scientology or Buddhism, but they went Medieval because that’s where all of the blood flowed. I can go back and come up with a Catholic fundamentalism that would justify everything that radical Islam supposedly justifies, and I wouldn’t even have to bring up the Spanish Inquisition.
Freedom of religion is a cornerstone of American freedom, and that freedom should never be challenged. Ignore the ignorant screechings of whoever says you cannot follow the Muslim faith and be loyal to the United States. That’s what an uninformed kneejerk reaction looks like.
Hasan perverted the Islamic faith to justify his own inability to deal with the responsibility he was handed and the career he had chosen. Islam became the excuse, not the road map.
I would like to add this. There is clearly something wrong with the image of Hasan as a devout Muslim, although you have to give him credit for finding a strip club that didn’t have a license to serve patrons alcohol. A few sips of light beer won’t get you into hell, will it? I hope not. Seriously, though. He has emotional and social problems that go well beyond his religious issues:
Starz is a strip club located just down the road from the main gate entrance to the Fort Hood Base. It does not serve alcohol, but customers bring their own beer and liquor and buy ice buckets and mixers at the club.
Hasan sat at a table in the back corner of the club, to the left of the stage on which strippers dance around a pole, employees said.
Jennifer Jenner, who works at Starz using the stage name Paige, said Hasan bought a lap dance from her two nights in a row. She said he paid $50 for a dance lasting three songs in one of the club’s private rooms on Oct. 29 and Oct. 30.
“I remembered his face because it was the first lap dance I [gave] to a customer while working here,” she said. “When I saw his face [Friday] on TV, I jumped out of bed, I knew it was him.”
Jenner, 31, said Hasan was dressed casually both nights he came to the club - in jeans and a T-shirt the first night and then wearing a baseball cap the next. She recalled that he arrived at about 6:30 p.m. and stayed until 2 a.m. She said he brought in a six pack of light beer, took only a few sips from one can and gave the rest to the strippers.
“He preferred the blondes,” said Jenner, whose hair was dyed blond at the time. “He said he was a medic and that he was being deployed soon, but mostly he wanted to ask us questions.”
“He asked us why we were working at the strip club, if we liked the lifestyle, if we had any kids,” she said. “It was right before Halloween so he asked what our kids were dressing up as. He just wanted to know a lot about us.”
Jenner said she asked Hasan why he liked coming to Starz instead of another of the roughly half a dozen other clubs nearby, all about an 8-minute drive from the Army base.
“I like it here because no one I work with is here,” she said Hasan replied.
Want to boost your spending power? Try giving your wallet a break by shopping at a dollar store. Americans have embraced the four leading chains — Dollar General, Family Dollar, Dollar Tree and the 99¢ Only store — in droves during the recession.
This year, Dollar General’s sales were up almost 10 percent quarter-over-quarter, and they’re opening 450 new stores, according to The New York Times. Dollar Tree, meanwhile, planned to open 235 new stores this year. And Family Dollar’s early 2009 numbers pointed to sales being up 6.5 percent year-over-year.
But despite the booming sales, Consumer Reports’ Money Adviser has taken a close look at this hot retail segment and found that not everything is a deal.
Before I tell you what they say to stock up on and what to pass on, I want to clarify something. There are important distinctions to note among the chains. Dollar General and Family Dollar both price the majority of their items at $1, but they also offer some merchandise at higher price points. Dollar Tree and the 99¢ Only chain are the only true dollar stores where everything is $1, with no exceptions.
So what did Consumer Reports find? Cotton rounds, gift wrap, birthday candles, paper bags, composition notebooks, plastic cups, security envelopes, napkins, foam plates and tissue paper are among the best deals.
That’s all well and good, but one box of security envelopes lasts me sixteen to eighteen months. What am I going to do when I’m flush with security envelopes and I need a bargain? I don’t use paper plates. One bag of cotton balls will last a grown man four and a half years. One set of birthday candles will last me eight years. Eight years! I subscribe to the theory of your bad is my good. I don’t see the upside for me when you people shop at a “dollar” store. I don’t own stock in any of them.
Here in Maryland, we go to Five Below. If you don’t have one where you live, then maybe you should start thinking about upgrading your lifestyle. It’s modeled on the concept of the “dollar” stores, but it actually sets the bar at FIVE dollars, hence, Five Below. This is where Byron gets nearly all of his action figures and where we get pretzels and lemon drops for the mink in his mink farm. Any time we find ourselves short of soccer balls, an extra triangle for the pool table, or mechandise tie-ins from the Pixar film Wall-E, we go to Five Below. I realize that the economy is bad, but that’s no reason to be down. Buying crap one does not need is the American method of dealing with depression. Cheer yourself up and go buy some crap. Make sure you keep the receipt—when you get hungry later, you might have to take back some of that crap and beg for cash instead of store credit.
What we really need in this country is a music store called Ten Below and an electronics store called Twenty-Five Below.
Tue, November 10, 2009 
These are the kinds of track suits that will get you thrown out of restaurants and off of planes, sir.
Norman Rogers
