Billy Pilgrim's Bunkmate
- Written by: Doug Matthews
- Category: History
Billy Pilgrim's Bunkmate
The professor seemed bursting with quirks: ramrod erect though middle-low in height, thinning hair, full suit, top rim glasses, a nasal yet precise voice, the epitome of a square to any clutch of students. He introduced himself to the 
class—as he introduced himself in all of his classes—with the personal revelation of being a P.O.W. during World War 2. He explained further being billeted in a former meatpacking complex in Dresden, Germany called Schlachthaus fünf, or Slaughterhouse Five, made famous by fellow prisoner and novelist Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. So it goes.
International Blasphemy Day
International Blasphemy Day holiday was created in response to laws the world over that attempt to curtail what can be said, sung, drawn, painted and filmed based on arbitrary rules from one or another of the so-called holy books. The disrespect, mockery and ridicule are intended to provoke as a way of pointing out how ridiculous such laws and morays are.
NYMA
In 1966 my mom was having problems with my asshole step-dad. She decided that I needed some positive male influence and spoke to my father who had his own concerns about my being brainwashed by parochial school into wanting to become a priest. Their solution was to send me to military school, New York Military Academy was the choice.
School Daze
- Written by: Bonnie Bertelson
- Category: Education
Remember that old limerick that went, “No more pencils! No more books! No more teachers’ dirty looks!”? I sure do – it’s a traditional rhyme I learned when I was in first grade. And in my memories, I can still hear the older kids chanting it on the bus on the last day of school, as the driver (happily) completed his final route for the year.
Oh Ohio! (Part 2)
- Written by: Bonnie Bertelson
- Category: Business
“A-tisket, A-tasket, I lost my yellow basket. And if that girlie don't return it, don't know what I'll do” - Ella Fitzgerald (1938)
About 33 miles east of Columbus in Newark, Ohio, sits an empty basket. Tami Longaberger, whose father founded the Longaberger Company, an Ohio-based manufacturer of hand-made goods for the home, lost her yellow basket while leaving the city of Newark holding the bag. (You may remember her from 2005, when George W. Bush appointed her chair of the National Women’s Business Council, or from Mitt Romney’s 2012 campaign as co-chair of “Ohio Women for Mitt”.)
RED, WHITE, BLUE and the, "GREEN BOOK," TOO
- Written by: Curtis W. Long
- Category: History
(Elie Wiesel has died. He survived a Nazi concentration camp, and ever since spread the Jewish mantra, “Never Again!” He added, “Never remain silent in the face of oppression.”
Wages and Voices
- Written by: Deborah Baron
- Category: Business
Dear Boss,
Please accept this as my letter of resignation. I have come to the conclusion that I am ‘not a fit’ for the company. I know that you will file this letter in my file which will then be stored in a cabinet to be moved to a box in a dark room where it will sit until it passes the cut off period and you can legally destroy the record but formality dictates that I submit it to you. It will occupy about 1 millimeter of space in your mind and will be purged as soon as you finish reading it. It would be nice if you absorbed the information but you are too busy so you won’t and let’s be honest, you really don’t care. My position will either be replaced or absorbed. Everyone will move on. Sort of.
Dancing in the Street
August 22, 1964 - Martha and The Vandellas debuted at No. 68 on the Billboard Hot 100 chart with their single, "Dancing In The Street." I was only 10 at the time.
Bed-Stuy was still a "mixed" neighborhood back then. Originally mostly Hasidic, there were still many of their families... The first time I ever saw a tattoo from "the camps" was one day when the landlord came by to collect the rent and when I asked what the numbers were for, my mother shushed me and apologized, embarrassed... He lived upstairs, his son Moshe was my best friend and we always played together in the hallways. I remember their entire family along with the others would move out in to the backyard, to a little hut they built every year. When I asked my mom why, she said "Passover" as if that somehow explained it.
WHITE SUPREMACY WAS INJECTED WITH A LEGISLATIVE SYRINGE
- Written by: Curtis W. Long
- Category: Law
Triggered mainly by circumstances resulting from Bacon’s Rebellion of 1676, in 1705, Virginia Colony’s House of Burgesses enacted “Slave Codes” that established a mind-set which, 70 years in the future would allow the founders of a republic blatantly to ignore the high-minded sentiments that they had expressed in a document intended to free themselves from what they quite cynically considered to be stifling oppression! That same mind-set, which soon after its birth developed into the psychological norm, almost a century later required close to a million mortal sacrifices to sustain the murky, ill-conceived compact agreed upon by the colonists. That skewed, psychological inset dragged us along for another hundred years. Today, although progressively dealing with the fallout, the remnants of that artificially created, psychological disorder are difficult to dislodge.
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