JamesSavik

Then you are debating theology and they own that particular real estate. Best to flush the whole stinking mess [religion] and embrace spirituality which is a completely different trip. You can recognize spiritual enlightment because it doesn't hate on anyone nor does it beg for money to lobby politicians to hate on anyone.

humm- are any of them redheads? vote #1 slot hott blonds? next in line...

I'm celebrating 3 years clean & sober! None of this... and none of this... make me the beefcake, BEEFCAKE that I yam today.

It really sucks. I started getting sick Saturday and went into self-imposed quarentine. I've got no problems sharing but viruses should be personal don't ya think? It started out with the nose running like a sprinkler. Then the fever and chills set in. I've slept more in the past few days than I have in ages. All I wanted to do was sleep. Did I mention how much I hate to be sick? I could never use that excuse to skip work cuz the bosses knew if I called in sick, I must be half dead. I can't figure out how I got it. It's not like I hang out with a lot of scruffy looking fowl. I avoid kids, espically groups of kids, because they are like little incubators of biohazards. This is the first time in years that I've had anything other than the occassional allergy. I can tell it will be a while before I'm 100% When I went to the doc, he said, "I don't like the sound of that cough." I did my best to look real hurt and said: "But I've been practicing it day and night." _______________________________ ON a much healthier Note: I got this little gem Friday night. Time was I couldn't imagine being clean & sober for an hour. Three years was an unimaginable feat. PS. Why didn't I get any feedback on my Gays in the Military blog? I though it was going to be a hit but I got nary a comment. Was it that bad.

I don't understand...

I try to ignore those asswipes because they get off on the attention.

Ding, ding, ding! We have a winner folks! Someone hand LB a rug-rat immediately!

Why would a skunk spray a goat? You must have startled him. Otherwise he would save the skunk venom for a more menacing target. Besides: what are you doing around politicians anyway?

The sadistic murderer possibility is a rare extreme- and probably a danger to the parents as well. The more common problem is with parents who don't accept one or some of their children because of their gender, orientation, career choice, etc.

Bob- I picked option #2. My "coffee break" is different than most yanks. At 10:00am CST, I have a cup of earl grey and a croissant. I might as well be a Brit. Sir James, Earl of Croissant

You don't have to believe in karma- it just works. The clod will get what is coming to him. It might take a while but when karma decides to land, it takes no prisoners.

Is this GA member really Luke from Dom's Desert Dropping? I thought so when I first saw his picture. However- I think that our Leo is probably too smart to fall for Aaron Keslin's BS.

How about the hates kids, will feed them to wolves option? Not me of course. Whenever I see kids, I have to restrain myself from hugging them. Kids know an easy mark when they see one. I spoil them mercilessly. I do like kids and would love to have one (or three) regardless of their gender of orientation. Anyone that can't love a kid unconditionally shouldn't have any.

CJ- Anybody who has ever been to a big city gay club will tell you that men from the Middle East are world class pervs- even dirtier than the Japanese. They will proposition you to do things that I've only heard of on Nifty and when you say no, they'll whup out a big roll of bills. They are sickos for that blond hair. In fact rich Middle Easterners keep the sex slave trade in business. Rumor has it that the reason so many kids go missing in the US and are never heard of again is that they are abducted and end up in some shiek's harem. The FBI is forbidden from blowing the whistle on this because of the sensitive relations with one of the worst offenders: Saudia Arabia. Having friends like these makes you feel like you need a shower.

Obviously there were no gays in the military in this WWII era recruitment poster- despite the coy looking blond twink servicing all those pipes and valves. Nothing homo-erotic at all about this big, burly sweaty man slamming that big shell home... This WWI era recruiting poster is looking for young men and seamen... Oh well, leave it too the marines to know where the action is. Semper fi, do or die, Marine Corp, Marine Corp, Marine Corp! _______________________________________________________________ I mean absolutely no disrespect to any of the services... even the Air Farce. I just wish that I had the oppertunity. You can save any of these images by backclick, save image.

The tarot, astrology, numerology and other scams have a few things in common: they are all so generic they could apply to anyone. For instance, just look at the 12 sun signs of astrology. Read the discription for any one of the 12 signs from Aries to Scorpio. Jumble them up and say give a Scorpio the same discription as a Leo. Chances are, he'll say I can see that. The same goes for John Edwards- the biggest doush in the universe, and his scam: cold reading. He starts his show out saying "I'm getting a message from Mike or Michael who has passed"... if there are more than three people in the group sombody has a dead uncle mike. He reads the audiance reaction and then zeros in on some sucker... He sees a middle aged lady with K-mart shoes who is responding with a big S on her key ring and says, "Uncle Mike says to quit worrying about money and live your life... is it Susan or Sarah?" Who isn't worried about money? "It's Sarah", says the adoring dolt. Before it gets too specific or there are details he moves on... "Now I'm hearing from a William and he wants to say he's sorry to a Cindy or Mindy..." It looks amazing but its 100% grade A corn fed B*LLS*IT.

The brightest supernova Astronomers using NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory and ground-based telescopes have detected the brightest stellar explosion ever recorded. Observations suggest supernova SN 2006gy is the brightest and most energetic stellar explosion ever recorded and may be a long-sought new type of explosion. Here, an artist's illustration shows what SN 2006gy may have looked like if viewed up close. NASA/CXC/M.Weiss Astronomy Magazine Online May 7, 2007 The brightest stellar explosion ever recorded may be a long-sought new type of supernova, according to observations by NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory and ground-based optical telescopes. This discovery indicates that violent explosions of extremely massive stars were relatively common in the early universe, and that a similar explosion may be ready to go off in our own galaxy. "This was a truly monstrous explosion, a hundred times more energetic than a typical supernova," says Nathan Smith of the University of California at Berkeley, who led a team of astronomers from California and the University of Texas in Austin. "That means the star that exploded might have been as massive as a star can get, about 150 times that of our sun. We've never seen that before." Astronomers think many of the first generation of stars were this massive, and this new supernova may thus provide a rare glimpse of how the first stars died. It is unprecedented, however, to find such a massive star and witness its death. The discovery of the supernova, known as SN 2006gy, provides evidence that the death of such massive stars is fundamentally different from theoretical predictions. An infrared image (left) shows NGC 1260, the galaxy containing SN 2006gy. The dimmer source to the lower left is the center of NGC 1260, while the much brighter source to the upper right is SN 2006gy. The panel on the right shows Chandra's X-ray image of the same field of view. Infrared: Lick/UC Berkeley/J. Bloom and C. Hansen; X ray: NASA/CXC/UC Berkeley/N.Smith et al. "Of all exploding stars ever observed, this was the king," said Alex Filippenko, leader of the ground-based observations at the Lick Observatory at Mt. Hamilton, California, and the Keck Observatory in Mauna Kea, Hawaii. "We were astonished to see how bright it got, and how long it lasted." The Chandra observation allowed the team to rule out the most likely alternative explanation for the supernova: that a white dwarf star with a mass only slightly higher than the sun exploded into a dense, hydrogen-rich environment. In that event, SN 2006gy should have been 1,000 times brighter in X-rays than what Chandra detected. "This provides strong evidence that SN 2006gy was, in fact, the death of an extremely massive star," says Dave Pooley of the University of California at Berkeley, who led the Chandra observations. The star that produced SN 2006gy apparently expelled a large amount of mass prior to exploding. This large mass loss is similar to that seen from Eta Carinae, a massive star in our galaxy, raising suspicion that Eta Carinae may be poised to explode as a supernova. Although SN 2006gy is intrinsically the brightest supernova ever, it is in the galaxy NGC 1260, some 240 million light years away. However, Eta Carinae is only about 7,500 light years away in our own Milky Way galaxy. "We don't know for sure if Eta Carinae will explode soon, but we had better keep a close eye on it just in case," says Mario Livio of the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore, who was not involved in the research. "Eta Carinae's explosion could be the best star-show in the history of modern civilization." Supernovas usually occur when massive stars exhaust their fuel and collapse under their own gravity. In the case of SN 2006gy, astronomers think that a very different effect may have triggered the explosion. Under some conditions, the core of a massive star produces so much gamma ray radiation that some of the energy from the radiation converts into particle and anti- particle pairs. The resulting drop in energy causes the star to collapse under its own huge gravity. After this violent collapse, runaway thermonuclear reactions ensue and the star explodes, spewing the remains into space. The SN 2006gy data suggest that spectacular supernovas from the first stars

Don't give up on it Frank. It may just be the linkage. Sometimes they slip and won't engauge and have to be put back in place. Do you have anyone nearby that knows their stuff and is honest? Perhaps you can get Lugnutz to give you an over the phone diagnosis.

How the Beast avatar came to be: Long ago when I was a kid, me and all of my friends were X-men fans. My BF was Arch-angle, my best friend was Havoc and another was Iceman and Nightcrawler. We didn't take our own nicknames, the group gave it to you. The group gave me the nickname the Beast. At first I didn't care for it because I was bigger than most kids my age. The other kids said it wasn't just because I was big and strong but because I am also good natured and smart. That I could live with. Time passed and I forgot about it but when I wrote my story Broken I remembered it. Big and strong but smart and gentle struck me as both highly complimentry and describing me fairly well so I kept it.

I seek balance and truth. Yes there are parents who will completely accept a kid coming out. There are others who will send them to quacks or religious fanatics that will mess with their heads. Some parents will simply disown them. A small but dangerous minority of hard core bigots or psychos who will try to beat or torture their sexual orientation out of them, or pour boiling water on their genitals so they won't get those urges. Some nut cases in the Cuban communities in South Florida have been reported killing young people in unauthorized exorcisms to expel the demon of homosexuality. This is because people aren't always rational when it comes to the subject of homosexuality. Others who don't appear to give a rip will go bonkers when homosexuality shows up in their family. We do no one any favors by creating propaganda pro or con. The best we can do is tell the truth and that truth is, while conditions are much improved, we still have a long way to go. When I write, my stories show a spectra of reactions to homosexuality from so what to get thee behind me abomination and every variation in between. This is the reality that I know. If it wasn't for the spelling checker, I couldn't even spell utopia.

I have always been here.

You've had that avatar a long time and I instantly associate it with you. We can't really tell you what a cool avatar might be. To be cool, it must come from you and possibly say something about yourself. I once had a long discussion on another forum about the psycology of avatars: how people pick them, what they mean to you and what they mean to others. For instance in a forum elsewhere about tekkie stuff, my avatar was Wiley Coyote. Wiley is a great engineer but he is cursed with bad luck. You can't help but admire his grit. He never gives up and he is one tough coyote. Please don't be trite! There are more than enough Homer Simpsons. Brian the dog from Family Guy and Looney Tunes characters. To replace your excellent avatar, you're going to have to come up with something that can top it and that's going to be tough.

Excellence isn't limited to GA... and I do believe that makes three people who suggested that New Brother is a great story.

Yom Kippur was also a brilliant use of counter-attack and combined arms to utterly and completely destroy a numerically superior enemy. Since its very inception, the state of Israel has had to fight to survive and be free. I admire Israel's military professionalism, courage as a nation and sheer tenacity and will to survive.

No. Cygnus is a huge cloud- this is merely the northern half- it is several hundred light years across. It corresponds to the Milkey Way galaxy's Cygnus Arm- one of our galaxy's bright spiral arms. Two other well known clouds are the Orion and Scorpius-Taurian Arms. The red glowing parts of the cloud are energized by starlight from bright massive and energetic stars. The darker parts of the cloud are collapsing to form stars, multiple stars and/or planetary systems. As it happens, those bright/massive stars pump out a lot of radiation pressure which either energizes the gas or pushes it towards gravitational collapse. This particular region could be forming many thousands of stars.