WA2K Radio is now on the air

and from Lionel, Try, and to all our listeners:

Thanks for the time that you've given me
The memories are all in my mind
And now that we've come to the end of our rainbow
There's something I must say out loud

You're once, twice, three times a lady
And I love you
Yes you're once, twice, three times a lady
And I love you
I love you

When we are together, the moments I cherished
With every beat of my heart
To touch you, to hold you, to feel you, to need you
There's nothing to keep us apart

You're once, twice, three times a lady
And I love you
Yes you're once, twice, three times a lady
And I love you
I love you

That Lionel Richie song was "our song" when mrs edgarblythe and I were dating.

Ah, edgar. This has been synchronicity day for me. I am so glad that I played it for you and your Mrs., Texas.

How about one from Olivia, then.


In the corner of the bar there stands a jukebox
With the best of country music, old and new
You can hear your five selections for a quarter
And somebody else's songs when yours are through

I got good Kentucky whiskey on the counter
And my friends around to help me ease the pain
'Til some button-pushing cowboy plays that love song
And here I am just missing you again

Please, Mr., please, don't play B-17
It was our song, it was his song, but it's over
Please, Mr., please, if you know what I mean
I don't ever wanna hear that song again

If I had a dime for every time I held you
Though you're far away, you've been so close to me
I could swear I'd be the richest girl in Nashville
Maybe even in the state of Tennessee

But I guess I'd better get myself together
'Cause when you left, you didn't leave too much behind
Just a note that said "I'm sorry" by your picture
And a song that's weighing heavy on my mind

Please, Mr., please, don't play B-17
It was our song, it was his song, but it's over
Please, Mr., please, if you know what I mean
I don't ever wanna hear that song again


The Best of Olivia Newton-John [1998]

Laughter In The Rain
Neil Sedaka

Strolling along country roads with my baby
It starts to rain, it begins to pour
Without an umbrella we're soaked to the skin
I feel a shiver run up my spine
I feel the warmth of her hand in mine

Ooooo, I hear laughter in the rain
Walking hand in hand with the one I love
Ooooo, how I love the rainy days
And the happy way I feel inside

After a while we run under a tree
I turn to her and she kisses me
There with the beat of the rain on the leaves
Softly she breathes and I close my eyes
Sharing our love under stormy skies

Ooooo, I hear laughter in the rain
Walking hand in hand with the one I love
Ooooo, how I love the rainy days
And the happy way I feel inside
I feel the warmth of her hand in mine

I feel the warmth of her hand in mine
Ooooo, I hear laughter in the rain
Walking hand in hand with the one I love
Ooooo, how I love the rainy days
And the happy way I feel inside
Ooooh, I hear laughter in the rain
Walking hand in hand with the one I love
Ooooo, how I love the rainy days
And the happy way I feel inside

Say goodnight, Letty.

"Goodnight, Letty."

Thank you for that goodnight song, edgar. <smile>

From Letty with love.

Leo Tolstoy
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Born 9 September 1828
Yasnaya Polyana, Russia
Died 20 November 1910
Astapovo, Russia

Count Lev Nikolayevich Tolstoy (Russian: Лев Никола́евич Толсто́й (help·info), Lev Nikolaevič Tolstoj), commonly referred to in English as Leo Tolstoy, (September 9, 1828 - November 20, 1910, N.S.; August 28, 1828 - November 7, 1910, O.S.) was a Russian novelist, philosopher, Christian anarchist, pacifist, educational reformer, vegetarian, moral thinker and an influential member of the Tolstoy family. Tolstoy is widely regarded as one of the greatest of all novelists, particularly noted for his masterpieces War and Peace and Anna Karenina; in their scope, breadth and realistic depiction of Russian life, the two books stand at the peak of realistic fiction. As a moral philosopher he was notable for his ideas on nonviolent resistance through his work The Kingdom of God is Within You, which in turn influenced such twentieth-century figures as Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King, Jr..

Biography

Count Leo (pronounced in his family circle as "Lyov", not "Lev") was born on his father's estate of Yasnaya Polyana, in the Tula guberniya of Central Russia. The Tolstoys are a well-known family of old Russian nobility, the writer's mother was born a Princess Volkonsky, while his grandmothers came from the Troubetzkoy and Gorchakov princely families. Tolstoy was connected to the grandest families of Russian aristocracy; Alexander Pushkin was his fourth cousin. The fact of belonging by birth to the best Russian nobility marks off Tolstoy very distinctly from the other writers of his generation. He always remained a class-conscious nobleman who cherished his impeccable French pronunciation and kept aloof from the intelligentsia.

Early life

Tolstoy's childhood and boyhood were passed between Moscow and Yasnaya Polyana, in a large family of three brothers and a sister. He has left us an extraordinarily vivid record of his early human environment in the wonderful notes he wrote for his biographer Pavel Biryukov. He lost his mother when he was two, and his father when he was nine. His subsequent education was in the hands of his aunt, Madame Ergolsky, who is supposed to be the starting point of Sonya in War and Peace. (His father and mother are respectively the starting points for the characters of Nicholas Rostov and Princess Marya in the same novel).

In 1844, Tolstoy began studying law and Oriental languages at Kazan University, where teachers described him as "both unable and unwilling to learn." He found no meaning in further studies and left the university in the middle of a term. In 1849 he settled down at Yasnaya Polyana, where he attempted to be useful to his peasants but soon discovered the ineffectiveness of his uninformed zeal.


The Church of St. Nicholas in Khamovniki, of which Tolstoy was a parishioner before his excommunication.Much of the life he led at the university and after leaving it was of a kind usual with young men of his class, irregular and full of pleasure-seeking ?- wine, cards, and women ?- not entirely unlike the life led by Pushkin before his exile to the south. But Tolstoy was incapable of that lighthearted acceptance of life as it came. From the very beginning, his diary (which is extant from 1847 on) reveals an insatiate thirst for a rational and moral justification of life, a thirst that forever remained the ruling force of his mind. The same diary was his first experiment in forging that technique of psychological analysis which was to become his principal literary weapon.

Military career

Tolstoy's first literary effort was the translation of A Sentimental Journey Through France and Italy. Sterne's influence on his early works was substantial, although he subsequently denigrated him as "a devious writer". To the year 1851 belongs his first attempt at a more ambitious and more definitely creative kind of writing. In the same year, sick of his seemingly empty and useless life in Moscow, which brought about heavy gambling debts, he went to the Caucasus, where he joined an artillery unit garrisoned in the Cossack part of Chechnya, as a volunteer of private rank, but of noble birth (юнкер). In 1852 he completed his first story (Childhood) and sent it to Nikolai Nekrasov for publication in the Sovremennik. The story had an immediate success and gave Tolstoy a definite place in Russian literature.

In his battery Tolstoy lived the rather easy and unoccupied life of a noble officer of means. He had much spare time, and most of it was spent in hunting. In the little fighting he saw, he did very well. In 1854 he received his commission and was, at his request, transferred to the army operating against the Turks in Wallachia, where he took part in the siege of Silistria. In November of the same year he joined the garrison of Sevastopol. There he saw some of the most serious fighting of the century. He took part in the defense of the famous Fourth Bastion and in the Battle of Chernaya River, the bad management of which he satirized in a humorous song, the only piece of verse he is known to have written.

In Sevastopol he wrote the Sebastopol Sketches, widely viewed as his first approach to the techniques to be used so effectively in War and Peace. Appearing as they did in the Sovremennik monthly while the siege was still on, the stories greatly increased the general interest in their author. Soon after the abandonment of the fortress, Tolstoy went on leave of absence to Petersburg and Moscow. The following year he left the army, thoroughly disgusted with the meaningless carnage he had witnessed.

Between retirement and marriage

The years 1856-61 were passed between Petersburg, Moscow, Yasnaya, and foreign countries. In 1857 (and again in 1860-61) he traveled abroad and returned disillusioned by the selfishness and materialism of European bourgeois civilization, a feeling expressed in his short story Lucerne and more circuitously in Three Deaths. As he drifted towards a more oriental worldview with Buddhist overtones, Tolstoy learned to feel himself in other living creatures. He started to write Kholstomer, which contains a passage of interior monologue by a horse. Many of his intimate thoughts were repeated by a protagonist of The Cossacks, who reflects, falling on the ground while hunting in a forest:

'Here am I, Dmitri Olenin, a being quite distinct from every other being, now lying all alone Heaven only knows where - where a stag used to live - an old stag, a beautiful stag who perhaps had never seen a man, and in a place where no human being has ever sat or thought these thoughts. Here I sit, and around me stand old and young trees, one of them festooned with wild grape vines, and pheasants are fluttering, driving one another about and perhaps scenting their murdered brothers.' He felt his pheasants, examined them, and wiped the warm blood off his hand onto his coat. 'Perhaps the jackals scent them and with dissatisfied faces go off in another direction: above me, flying in among the leaves which to them seem enormous islands, mosquitoes hang in the air and buzz: one, two, three, four, a hundred, a thousand, a million mosquitoes, and all of them buzz something or other and each one of them is separate from all else and is just such a separate Dmitri Olenin as I am myself.' He vividly imagined what the mosquitoes buzzed: 'This way, this way, lads! Here's some one we can eat!' They buzzed and stuck to him. And it was clear to him that he was not a Russian nobleman, a member of Moscow society, the friend and relation of so-and-so and so-and-so, but just such a mosquito, or pheasant, or deer, as those that were now living all around him. 'Just as they, just as Uncle Eroshka, I shall live awhile and die, and as he says truly: "grass will grow and nothing more".'

These years after the Crimean War were the only time in Tolstoy's life when he mixed with the literary world. He was welcomed by the litterateurs of Petersburg and Moscow as one of their most eminent fellow craftsmen. As he confessed afterwards, his vanity and pride were greatly flattered by his success. But he did not get on with them. He was too much of an aristocrat to like this semi-Bohemian intelligentsia. All the structure of his mind was against the grain of the progressive Westernizers, epitomized by Ivan Turgenev, who was widely considered the greatest living Russian author of the period.


Portrait by Ivan Kramskoi (1873).Tolstoy did not believe in progress and culture and liked to tease Turgenev by his outspoken or cynical statements. His lack of sympathy with the literary world culminated in a resounding quarrel with Turgenev (1861), whom he challenged to a duel but afterwards apologized for so doing. The whole story is very characteristic and revelatory of his character, with its profound impatience of other people's assumed superiority and their perceived lack of intellectual honesty. The only writers with whom he remained friends were the conservative "landlordist" Afanasy Fet and the democratic Slavophile Nikolay Strakhov, both of them entirely out of tune with the main current of contemporary thought.

In 1859 he started a school for peasant children at Yasnaya, followed by twelve others, whose ground-breaking libertarian principles Tolstoy described in his 1862 essay, "The School at Yasnaya Polyana". He also authored a great number of stories for peasant children. Tolstoy's educational experiments were short-lived, but as a direct forerunner to A.S.Neill's Summerhill School, the school at Yasnaya Polyana can justifiably be claimed to be the first example of a coherent theory of libertarian education.

In 1862 Tolstoy published a pedagogical magazine, Yasnaya Polyana, in which he contended that it was not the intellectuals who should teach the peasants, but rather the peasants the intellectuals. He came to believe that he was undeserving of his inherited wealth, and gained renown among the peasantry for his generosity. He would frequently return to his country estate with vagrants whom he felt needed a helping hand, and would often dispense large sums of money to street beggars while on trips to the city. In 1861 he accepted the post of Justice of the Peace, a magistrature that had been introduced to supervise the carrying into life of the Emancipation reform of 1861.

Meanwhile his insatiate quest for moral stability continued to torment him. He had now abandoned the wild living of his youth, and thought of marrying. In 1856 he made his first unsuccessful attempt to marry (Mlle Arseniev). In 1860 he was profoundly affected by the death of his brother Nicholas, which was for him the first encounter with the inevitable reality of death. After these reverses, Tolstoy reflected in his diary that at thirty four, no woman could love him, since he was too old and ugly. In 1862, at last, he proposed to Sofia Andreyevna Behrs and was accepted. They were married on 23 September of the same year.

Marriage and family life

Tolstoy's wife Sofia Andreevna Tolstaya and daughter Alexandra Tolstaya.His marriage is one of the two most important landmarks in the life of Tolstoy, the other being his conversion. Once he entertained a passionate and hopeless aspiration after that whole and unreflecting "natural" state which he found among the peasants, and especially among the Cossacks in whose villages he had lived in the Caucasus. His marriage provided for him an escape from unrelenting self-questioning. It was the gate towards a more stable and lasting "natural state". Family life, and an unreasoning acceptance of and submission to the life to which he was born, now became his religion.

For the first fifteen years of his married life he lived in this blissful state of confidently satisfied life, whose philosophy is expressed with supreme creative power in War and Peace. Sophie Behrs, almost a girl when he married her and 16 years his junior, proved an ideal wife and mother and mistress of the house. On the eve of their marriage, Tolstoy gave her his diaries detailing his sexual relations with female serfs. Together they had thirteen children, five of whom died in their childhoods.[1]

Sophie was, moreover, a devoted help to her husband in his literary work, and the story is well known how she copied out War and Peace seven times from beginning to end. The family fortune, owing to Tolstoy's efficient management of his estates and to the sales of his works, was prosperous, making it possible to provide adequately for the increasing family.

Conversion

Tolstoy had always been fundamentally a rationalist. But at the time he wrote his great novels his rationalism was suffering an eclipse. The philosophy of War and Peace and Anna Karenina (which he formulates in A Confession as "that one should live so as to have the best for oneself and one's family") was a surrender of his rationalism to the inherent irrationalism of life. The search for the meaning of life was abandoned. The meaning of life was Life itself. The greatest wisdom consisted in accepting without sophistication one's place in Life and making the best of it. But already in the last part of Anna Karenina a growing disquietude becomes very apparent. When he was writing it the crisis had already begun that is so memorably recorded in A Confession and from which he was to emerge the prophet of a new religious and ethical teaching.

Following this conversion, the details of which are given below, Tolstoy's rationalism found satisfaction in the admirably constructed system of his doctrine. But the irrational Tolstoy remained alive beneath the hardened crust of crystallized dogma. Tolstoy's diaries reveal that the desires of the flesh were active in him till an unusually advanced age; and the desire for expansion, the desire that gave life to War and Peace, the desire for the fullness of life with all its pleasure and beauty, never died in him. We catch few glimpses of this in his writings, for he subjected them to a strict and narrow discipline. His magic touch did not suffer from his conversion, however. He wrote as effortlessly as ever and his late years produced admirable works of art, such as Hadji Murat, one of many pieces that appeared posthumously. It became increasingly apparent, that, in the words of Vladimir Nabokov, there were only two subjects that Tolstoy was really interested in and thought worth writing about ?- and these were life and death. The relationship between life and death was examined by him over and over again, with increasing complexity, in the final version of Kholstomer, in The Death of Ivan Ilyich, in How Much Land Does a Man Need?

Later life

Leo Tolstoy with his granddaughter in Yasnaya Polyana.Soon after A Confession became known, Tolstoy began, at first against his will, to recruit disciples. The first of these was Vladimir Chertkov, an ex-officer of the Horse Guards, described by D.S. Mirsky as a "narrow fanatic and a hard, despotic man, who exercised an enormous practical influence on Tolstoy and became a sort of grand vizier of the new community". Tolstoy also established contact with certain sects of Christian communists and anarchists, like the Dukhobors. Despite his unorthodox views and support for Thoreau's doctrine of civil disobedience, Tolstoy was unmolested by the government, solicitous to avoid negative publicity abroad. Only in 1901 the Synod excommunicated him. This act, widely but rather unjudiciously resented both at home and abroad, merely registered a matter of common knowledge ?- that Tolstoy had ceased to be an Orthodox Church-man.

The dogmatic followers of Tolstoy were never numerous, but his reputation among people of all classes grew immensely. It spread all over the world, and by the last two decades of his life Tolstoy enjoyed a place in the world's esteem that had not been held by any man of letters since the death of Voltaire.[2] Yasnaya Polyana became a new Ferney ?- or even more than that, almost a new Jerusalem. Pilgrims from all parts flocked there to see the great old man. But Tolstoy's own family remained hostile to his teaching, with the exception of his youngest daughter Alexandra Tolstaya. His wife especially took up a position of decided opposition to his new ideas. She refused to give up her possessions and asserted her duty to provide for her large family. Tolstoy renounced the copyright of his new works but had to surrender his landed property and the copyright of his earlier works to his wife. His late marriage life has been described by A.N.Wilson as one of the unhappiest in literary history.

Tolstoy was remarkably healthy for his age, but he fell seriously ill in 1901 and had to live for a long time in Gaspra and Simeiz, Crimea. Still he continued working to the last and never showed the slightest sign of any weakening of brain power. Ever more oppressed by the apparent contradiction between his preaching of communism and the easy life he led under the regime of his wife, full of a growing irritation against his family, which was urged on by Chertkov, he finally left Yasnaya, in the company of his daughter Alexandra and his doctor, for an unknown destination. After some restless and aimless wandering he headed for a convent where his sister was the mother superior but had to stop at Astapovo junction. There he was laid up in the stationmaster's house and died on November 7, 1910. He was buried in a simple peasant's grave in a wood 500 meters from Yasnaya Polyana. Thousands of peasants lined the streets at his funeral.

Novels and fictional works

Tolstoy's fiction consistently attempts to convey realistically the Russian society in which he lived. Matthew Arnold commented that Tolstoy's work is not art, but a piece of life. Arnold's assessment was echoed by Isaak Babel who said that, "if the world could write by itself, it would write like Tolstoy".

His first publications were three autobiographical novels, Childhood, Boyhood, and Youth (1852-1856). They tell of a rich landowner's son and his slow realization of the differences between him and his peasants. Although in later life Tolstoy rejected these books as sentimental, a great deal of his own life is revealed, and the books still have relevance for their telling of the universal story of growing up.

Tolstoy served as a second lieutenant in an artillery regiment during the Crimean War, recounted in his Sevastapol Sketches. His experiences in battle helped develop his pacifism, and gave him material for realistic depiction of the horrors of war in his later work.

The Cossacks (1863) is an unfinished novel which describes the Cossack life and people through a story of Dmitri Olenin, a Russian aristocrat in love with a Cossack girl. This text was acclaimed by Ivan Bunin as one of the finest in the language. The magic of Tolstoy's language is naturally lost in translation, but the following excerpt may give some idea as to the lush, sensuous, pulsing texture of the original:

Along the surface of the water floated black shadows, in which the experienced eyes of the Cossack detected trees carried down by the current. Only very rarely sheet-lightning, mirrored in the water as in a black glass, disclosed the sloping bank opposite. The rhythmic sounds of night ?- the rustling of the reeds, the snoring of the Cossacks, the hum of mosquitoes, and the rushing water, were every now and then broken by a shot fired in the distance, or by the gurgling of water when a piece of bank slipped down, the splash of a big fish, or the crashing of an animal breaking through the thick undergrowth in the wood. Once an owl flew past along the Terek, flapping one wing against the other rhythmically at every second beat.

War and Peace is generally thought to be one of the greatest novels ever written, remarkable for its breadth and unity. Its vast canvas includes 580 characters, many historical, others fictional. The story moves from family life to the headquarters of Napoleon, from the court of Alexander I of Russia to the battlefields of Austerlitz and Borodino. The novel explores Tolstoy's theory of history, and in particular the insignificance of individuals such as Napoleon and Alexander. But more importantly, Tolstoy's imagination created a world that seems to be so believable, so real, that it's not easy to realize that most of his characters actually never existed and that Tolstoy never witnessed the epoch described in the novel.

Somewhat surprisingly, Tolstoy did not consider War and Peace to be a novel (nor did he consider many of the great Russian fictions written at that time to be novels). It was to him an epic in prose. Anna Karenina (1877), which Tolstoy regarded as his first true novel, was one of his most impeccably constructed and compositionally sophisticated works. It tells parallel stories of an adulterous woman trapped by the conventions and falsities of society and of a philosophical landowner (much like Tolstoy), who works alongside the peasants in the fields and seeks to reform their lives.

Tolstoy's later work is often criticised as being overly didactic and patchily written, but derives a passion and verve from the depth of his austere moral views. The sequence of the temptation of Sergius in Father Sergius, for example, is among his later triumphs. Gorky relates how Tolstoy once read this passage before himself and Chekhov and that Tolstoy was moved to tears by the end of the reading. Other later passages of rare power include the crises of self faced by the protagonists of After the Ball and Master and Man, where the main character (in After the Ball) or the reader (in Master and Man) is made aware of the foolishness of the protagonists' lives.

Reputation

Tolstoy may have been the greatest novelist ever. His contemporaries paid him lofty tributes: Dostoevsky thought him the finest of all living writers while Gustave Flaubert compared him to Shakespeare and gushed: "What an artist and what a psychologist!". Anton Chekhov, who often visited Tolstoy at his country estate, wrote: "When literature possesses a Tolstoy, it is easy and pleasant to be a writer; even when you know you have achieved nothing yourself and are still achieving nothing, this is not as terrible as it might otherwise be, because Tolstoy achieves for everyone. What he does serves to justify all the hopes and aspirations invested in literature."

Later critics and novelists continue to bear testaments to his art: Virginia Woolf went on to declare him "greatest of all novelists", and James Joyce noted: "He is never dull, never stupid, never tired, never pedantic, never theatrical!". Thomas Mann wrote of his seemingly guileless artistry?-"Seldom did art work so much like nature"?-sentiments shared in part by many others, including Marcel Proust, William Faulkner, Vladimir Nabokov, who placed him above all other Russian fiction writers, even Gogol, and equalled him with Pushkin among Russian poets.

Religious and political beliefs

Portrait of Leo Tolstoy (1887) by Ilya Yefimovich RepinAt approximately the age of 50, Tolstoy had a mid-life crisis, at which point he determined that he could not go on living without knowing the meaning of life, and so he vowed to either find it or commit suicide. After exploring a variety of areas, he found his answer in the teachings of Jesus, which in his interpretation have strong Buddhist overtones. He relates the story of his mid-life crisis in A Confession, and the conclusions of his studies in My Religion, The Kingdom of God is Within You, and The Gospels in Brief.

The teaching of mature Tolstoy is a rationalized "Christianity", stripped of all tradition and all positive mysticism. He rejected personal immortality and concentrated exclusively on the moral teaching of the Gospels. Of the moral teaching of Christ, the words "Resist not evil" were taken to be the principle out of which all the rest follows. He rejected the authority of the Church, which sanctioned the State, and he condemned the State, which sanctioned violence and corruption. His condemnation of every form of compulsion authorizes us to classify Tolstoy's teaching, in its political aspect, as Christian anarchism.

Sources

Tolstoy's conversion from a dissolute and privileged society author to the non-violent and spiritual anarchist of his latter days was brought about by two trips around Europe in 1857 and 1860-61, a period when many liberal-leaning Russian aristocrats escaped the stifling political repression in Russia; others who followed the same path were Alexander Herzen, Mikhail Bakunin and Peter Kropotkin. During his 1857 visit, Tolstoy witnessed a public execution in Paris, a traumatic experience that would mark the rest of his life. Writing in a letter to his friend V. P. Botkin:

The truth is that the State is a conspiracy designed not only to exploit, but above all to corrupt its citizens ... Henceforth, I shall never serve any government anywhere.

Tolstoy's political philosophy was also influenced by a March 1861 visit to French anarchist Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, then living in exile under an assumed name in Brussels. Apart from reviewing Proudhon's forthcoming publication, "La Guerre et la Paix", whose title Tolstoy would borrow for his masterpiece, the two men discussed education, as Tolstoy wrote in his educational notebooks:

If I recount this conversation with Proudhon, it is to show that, in my personal experience, he was the only man who understood the significance of education and of the printing press in our time.

In Chapter VI of A Confession, Tolstoy quoted the final paragraph of Schopenhauer's The World as Will and Representation. In this paragraph, the German philosopher explained how the nothingness that results from complete denial of self is only a relative nothingness and not to be feared. Tolstoy was struck by the description of Christian, Buddhist, and Hindu ascetic renunciation as being the path to holiness. This conformed to his own ideas, expressed in his diary for years. Thus Tolstoy, the Russian nobleman, gradually became converted to the ascetic morality, chosing poverty and denial of the will.

Christian anarchism

Tolstoy's Christian beliefs were based on the Sermon on the Mount, and particularly on the phrase about turn the other cheek, which he saw as a justification for pacifism, nonviolence and nonresistance. Tolstoy believed being a Christian made him a pacifist and, due to the military force used by his government, being a pacifist made him an anarchist.

Tolstoy's doctrine of nonresistance (nonviolence) when faced by conflict is another distinct attribute of his philosophy based on Christ's teachings. By directly influencing Mahatma Gandhi with this idea through his work The Kingdom of God is Within You, Tolstoy has had a huge influence on the nonviolent resistance movement to this day. He also opposed private property and the institution of marriage and valued the ideals of chastity and sexual abstinence (discussed in Father Sergius and his preface to The Kreutzer Sonata), ideals also held by the young Gandhi.

In hundreds of essays over the last twenty years of his life, Tolstoy reiterated the anarchist critique of the State and recommended books by Kropotkin and Proudhon to his readers, whilst rejecting anarchism's espousal of violent revolutionary means, writing in the 1900 essay, "On Anarchy":

The Anarchists are right in everything; in the negation of the existing order, and in the assertion that, without Authority, there could not be worse violence than that of Authority under existing conditions. They are mistaken only in thinking that Anarchy can be instituted by a revolution. But it will be instituted only by there being more and more people who do not require the protection of governmental power ... There can be only one permanent revolution - a moral one: the regeneration of the inner man.

Pacifism

Despite his misgivings about anarchist violence, Tolstoy took risks to circulate the prohibited publications of anarchist thinkers in Russia, and corrected the proofs of Peter Kropotkin's "Words of a Rebel", illegally published in St Petersburg in 1906. Two years earlier, during the Russo-Japanese War, Tolstoy publicly condemned the war and wrote to the Japanese Buddhist priest Soyen Shaku in a failed attempt to make a joint pacifist statement.

A letter Tolstoy wrote in 1908 to an Indian newspaper entitled "Letter to a Hindu" resulted in intense correspondence with Mohandas Gandhi, who was in South Africa at the time and was beginning to become an activist. Reading "The Kingdom of God is Within You" had convinced Gandhi to abandon violence and espouse nonviolent resistance, a debt Gandhi acknowledged in his autobiography, calling Tolstoy "the greatest apostle of non-violence that the present age has produced". The correspondence between Tolstoy and Gandhi would only last a year, from October 1909 until Tolstoy's death in November 1910, but led Gandhi to give the name the Tolstoy Colony to his second ashram in South Africa. Besides non-violent resistance, the two men shared a common belief in the merits of vegetarianism, the subject of several of Tolstoy's essays.

Along with his growing idealism, Tolstoy also became a major supporter of the Esperanto movement. Tolstoy was impressed by the pacifist beliefs of the Doukhobors and brought their persecution to the attention of the international community, after they burned their weapons in peaceful protest in 1895. He aided the Doukhobors in migrating to Canada.

Charles Boyer
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Charles Boyer (August 28, 1899 - August 26, 1978) was a French actor who starred in several classic Hollywood films.

Born in Figeac, Lot, Midi-Pyrénées, France, Boyer started on the stage, but he found his success in European and Hollywood movies during the 1920s and 1930s. He continued to make films over the next several decades. He eventually became an american citizen.

Charles Boyer is best known for his role in the 1944 film Gaslight in which he tried to convince Ingrid Bergman's character that she was going insane. Some years earlier, it was Boyer's role in Algiers (1938) that caused many to credit him with the never-heard line "Come with me to the casbah."

In 1948 Charles Boyer was made a chevalier of the French Legion of Honor. He continued to act until a few years before his death, his last major film role being that of the High Lama in a musical version of Lost Horizon (1973).

For his contribution to the motion picture and television industries, Charles Boyer has two stars on the Hollywood Walk of Fame at 6300 Hollywood Blvd.

Two days after his wife, British actress Pat Paterson, died from cancer, Charles Boyer committed suicide with an overdose of Seconal. He was interred in Holy Cross Cemetery, Culver City, California, United States alongside with his wife and son Michael Charles Boyer, who had committed suicide in 1965 at the age of 21.

Roger Tory Peterson
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Roger Tory Peterson (August 28, 1908 - July 28, 1996), a naturalist, ornithologist, artist, and educator, is held to be one of the founding inspirations for the 20th century environmental movement. He was born in Jamestown, New York. In 1934 he published his seminal Guide to the Birds, the first modern field guide. The Guide to the Birds went through 5 editions. He edited or wrote many of the volumes in the Peterson Field Guide series on topics ranging from rocks and minerals to beetles to reptiles. He is known for the clear illustrations of his field guides and the clear delineation of relevant field marks. He also developed the Peterson Identification System.

Peterson received every major American award for natural science, ornithology, and conservation, as well as numerous honorary medals, diplomas, and citations, including the United States Presidential Medal of Freedom.

He co-wrote Wild America with James Fisher.

"In this century, no one has done more to promote an interest in living creatures than Roger Tory Peterson, the inventor of the modern field guide."

- Paul R. Ehrlich, ecologist.
Peterson died in 1996 at his home in Old Lyme, Connecticut

Donald O'Connor
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Donald David Dixon Ronald O'Connor (August 28, 1925 - September 27, 2003) was a singer, dancer and actor who came to fame in a series of movies in which he co-starred with Francis the Talking Mule. He is still best known for his performance in the movie musical Singin' in the Rain, in which he performed the vaudeville-inspired comedy number "Make 'Em Laugh", Arthur Freed's reworking of Cole Porter's "Be a Clown" from The Pirate (1948).

O'Connor was born in Chicago, Illinois, into an Irish immigrant family of vaudeville entertainers. As a toddler, he and his sister were involved in a road accident, which resulted in her death. His father died of a heart attack only a few weeks later. Yet it was as a comedy actor and a song-and-dance man that he became famous. His boyish looks did not allow him to take a romantic lead, except when appearing with a bigger star such as Ethel Merman (in Call Me Madam) or Bing Crosby (with whom he appeared in his first film at the age of eleven). However, he did have a separate Hollywood career in the late 1930s, in which he played such incongruous roles as Beau Geste. During World War II, he was re-invented as a star of musical films.

When the heyday of the film musical was over, O'Connor returned to the stage, and had a short-lived television series during the late 1960s. After overcoming a drinking problem in the 1970s, he continued to make film and television appearances into the 1990s. O'Connor was still making public appearances well into 2003. One of the last known on camera interviews with Donald O'Connor was arranged by friend David Ruprecht and conducted by Steven F. Zambo. A small portion of this interview can be seen in the 2005 PBS special The Pioneers of Primetime.

O'Connor died from congestive heart failure at the age of 78. Among his last words, he is reported to have expressed thanks for the Academy Award for Lifetime Achievement which he expected to win at some future date. He left behind his wife, Gloria, and four children.

Donald O'Connor is buried in the Forest Lawn - Hollywood Hills Cemetery in Los Angeles.

Ben Gazzara
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Ben Gazzara (born Biagio Anthony Gazzara on August 28, 1930, in New York City) is an American actor in television and motion pictures.

Born to Italian immigrants, Antonio Gazzara and Angela Consumano, Gazzara grew up on New York's tough Lower East Side. He found relief from his bleak surroundings by joining a theater company at a very young age. Years later, he said that the discovery of his love for acting saved him from a life of crime during his teenage years. Despite his obvious talent, he went to City College of New York to study electrical engineering. After two years, he gave it up, and after a short intermission joined the Actor's Studio.

In the 1950s, he starred in various Broadway productions, most notably Tennessee Williams' Cat On A Hot Tin Roof, directed by Elia Kazan. However, he lost out on the film role to Paul Newman. As a young actor, Gazzara joined other Actors Studio members in the 1957 film, The Strange One.

He has had a long and varied acting career, with spells as an accomplished director too (TV mostly). His most popular acting roles include Anatomy of a Murder (1959), A Rage to Live (1965), The Bridge at Remagen (1969), Capone (1975), Voyage of the Damned (1976), and High Velocity (1977). He also starred in a couple of television series, beginning with Arrest and Trial, which ran from 1963 until 1964 on ABC, and the more successful series Run for Your Life from 1965 to 1968 on NBC.

His most formidable appearances, however, were characters he created for his friend John Cassavetes in the 1970s. They collaborated for the first time on Cassavetes' film Husbands (1970) where he appeared alongside Peter Falk and Cassavetes himself. The collaboration of the two men achieved its peak in The Killing of a Chinese Bookie in which Gazzara took the leading role of the hapless strip joint owner, Cosmo Vitelli. In order to pay off a gambling debt to the mob, Vitelli agrees to kill a Chinese unknown to him. Against all odds, he succeeds in killing the man, but he gets severely wounded during his flight. But the gangsters turn against him, as they had not expected him to survive the assassination and Vitelli is forced to kill these men too. The plot itself hardly describes the true meaning of the movie, as John Cassavetes did everything to keep it from turning into an ordinary genre flick. Gazzara delivered a life-like portrayal of a simple man who found his happiness in running a third-rate strip bar, and who gets caught in something that is much too big for him. Sometimes he does not even seem to understand the whole meaning of it. The little emotional involvement that Gazzara's character shows during the events is played with stunning accuracy, with Gazzara's performance and Cassavetes' direction complementing each other. A year later Gazzara starred in yet another Cassavetes-directed movie, Opening Night, playing the role of stage director Manny Victor who struggles with the mentally unstable star of his show, played by Cassavetes' wife Gena Rowlands.

In the 1980s, he could be seen in a variety of different movies, such as They All Laughed (directed by Peter Bogdanovich) or Quicker Than the Eye (1989). He also appeared in the critically acclaimed AIDS-themed TV movie An Early Frost (1985), which also starred Gena Rowlands.

In the 1990's, he appeared in 38 films, among these many TV productions. In Hollywood movies he mostly appeared as a supporting actor, but worked with several renowned directors, such as the Coen Brothers (The Big Lebowski), Spike Lee (Summer of Sam), and John McTiernan (The Thomas Crown Affair).

Now in his seventies, Gazzara is still acting. In 2003, he appeared in the film Dogville, directed by Danish enfant terrible Lars von Trier, alongside Nicole Kidman.

Geez, Bob. That Tolstoy bio was another "War and Peace"! (I didn't read that whole thing, either.)

Daniel Stern
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia


Date of birth: August 28, 1957
Birth location: Bethseda, Maryland, USA
Notable role(s): Marvin Murchins in Home Alone 1, Home Alone 2
Phil Burquist in City Slickers, City Slickers II.

Daniel Stern (born August 28, 1957, in Bethesda, Maryland), is an American television and film actor.

Born in Bethesda, Maryland, Stern applied for a job as a lighting engineer for a Shakespeare Festival in Washington, D.C., but was hired as a walk-on. After taking acting lessons, Stern began his acting career on and off Broadway. In 1979, he made his movie debut as Cyril in Breaking Away. The following year he played a student who raised objections during Jill Clayburgh's proof of the snake lemma in the film It is My Turn. His breakthrough role as an actor came in Barry Levinson's Diner, another film role he is remembered for is the 1983 action film Blue Thunder as J.A.F.O., also known as Officer Richard Lymangood. He was the original choice to play Biff Tannen in the 1985 film, Back to the Future, but he turned the role down.

However, Stern is often more remembered for playing bumbling but lovable idiots, such as Phil from the City Slickers movies and Marv from the first two Home Alone movies. Many consider his role as Marv to a be break through for his career. He is also noted for providing the voice of the narrator on the TV series The Wonder Years, and the eponymous title character of the animated series of Scott Adams' comic strip, Dilbert.

Stern has also tried his hand at directing through several episodes of The Wonder Years and the movie Rookie of the Year.

Shania Twain
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Birth name Eilleen Regina Edwards
Born August 28, 1965
Origin Timmins, Ontario, Canada

Shania Twain, OC (born August 28, 1965 in Windsor, Ontario) is a Canadian singer and songwriter who has enjoyed popular if not critical success in the country and pop music genres. Her third album Come on Over is the biggest-selling album of all time by a female artist, and the sixth biggest selling album in music history, and she is the only female artist to have three albums certified Diamond by the RIAA, and is also the recipient of five Grammy awards, many BMI Songwriter awards and numerous other prestigious music awards. She is married to legendary Rock producer Mutt Lange, and they have a son, Eja. Shania and her family currently reside between Switzerland and New Zealand.

Early years

Born Eilleen Regina Edwards, in Windsor, Ontario to Sharon and Clarence Edwards, her name was changed to Eilleen Twain after her parents separated when she was two, and her mother remarried to Jerry Twain, a full-blooded member of the Ojibwa First Nation. She grew up in Timmins, Ontario.

Eilleen Twain had a hard childhood; with her parents not earning much, Twain was sent out to sing in numerous clubs and bars to help bring the money in, encouraged and mentored by her mother, Sharon, who often fell into bouts of depression over the lack of food in the household.

At the age of 13, Eilleen Twain was invited to perform on CBC television's Tommy Hunter Show. During high school in Timmins, she was the vocalist for a local band "Longshot" which covered Top 40 music. When her mother and adoptive father died in a car accident on November 1, 1987, Eilleen put her musical career on hold, and was forced to take care of the family. She took her two younger brothers, Mark and Darryl, and sister Carrie-Ann to Huntsville, Ontario, where she supported the family by performing at a local resort (Deerhurst resort). In 1991, after an entertainment lawyer (Dick Frank) from Nashville, Tennessee heard her act, she was invited to record a demo tape.

In 1991, when she signed her first recording contract with Richard Frank of Mercury Nashville Records, she changed her name to Shania (pronounced shu-NYE-uh) which is an Ojibwa word meaning "I'm on my way". Twain's embrace of her adoptive Ojibwa heritage has at times been reported to be controversial among Canadian First Nations, with some disagreement about whether a non-Ojibwa adopted by an Ojibwa parent can be considered a true Ojibwa. Shania Twain responded to such criticism by saying, "I don't know how much Indian blood I actually have in me, but as the adopted daughter of my father Jerry, I became registered as a 50% North American Indian ... That is my heart and my soul, and I'm very proud of it." [1]

The city of Timmins later renamed a street for her, gave her the key to the city and built the Shania Twain Museum (Shania Twain Centre), which Twain visited in 2004, as shown on a CTV special.

Recording Career

1993: Shania Twain

Twain felt her 1993 self-titled debut album was unsatisfactory as she was forced by her record company to work with Nashville songwriters, and she only got to co-write one of the songs, and felt that the album was not really her own.

The album didn't please the public, gaining little sales and no real chart action for its singles. The albums first two singles, "What Made You Say That" and "Dance with the One That Brought You", as well as the album all peaked at #55 on Billboards Country Charts. By the end of 1993 the album sold less then 250,000 copies.

Twain immediately felt alienated from the Nashville music scene, as she felt the album lacked her passion and drive for country music. Thankfully for her, things changed when she met Mutt Lange at Nashville Fan Fair.

1995?-1996: The Woman in Me

Everything changed when rock producer Robert "Mutt" Lange heard Shania's original songs and singing and thought she held promise. He offered to produce her and to write songs with her. After many telephone conversations, they met in person at Nashville's Fan Fair in June 1993. Soon their professional relationship took a romantic turn, and they were married on December 28, 1993.


The video for "The Woman in Me" (1995) was filmed in Egypt.Lange and Twain instantly formed a successful partnership, and Twain has often commented that a reason they work so well is because they are so different; after all, Lange is 17 years older than she is. They started working on a second album, and in 1995 The Woman in Me caught fire due to singles like "Any Man of Mine" and "Whose Bed Have Your Boots Been Under?", because the videos were saucier than anything that Nashville had ever seen before; it was clear that Twain wanted to make her mark. The album eventually topped the country charts for months and became a massive crossover to mainstream charts, peaking at No. 5 and to date has sold over 12 million copies. The Woman in Me went on to win the Grammy Award for Best Country Album as well as the Academy of Country Music award for Album of the Year; the latter group also awarded Twain as Best New Female Vocalist.

1997?-2000: Come on Over

In 1997, Twain released her follow-up album, Come on Over. This was the album that established Twain as a successful crossover artist. Selling 172,000 copies out of the gate, the album was seen by many at first as a disappointment, given the massive success of her last effort. But slowly, the album started racking up sales. It never hit the top spot, but with the multi-chart hit single "You're Still the One", sales skyrocketed. Songs like "Don't Be Stupid", "Honey, I'm Home", "Man! I Feel Like a Woman!", "That Don't Impress Me Much", and "From This Moment On" joined the 12 songs that eventually saw release as singles. Over the next two years, the album stayed on the charts, spinning off hit after hit. When the dust finally settled, Come on Over had sold 20 million copies in the United States and 39 million worldwide, making it the biggest-selling album of all time by a female artist, the biggest-selling country album of all time, and the No. 6 selling album of all time.


The video for "That Don't Impress Me Much" (1998), one of Twain's most memorable videos.Songs from the album won four Grammy Awards over the next two years, including Best Country Song for Twain and Lange for "You're Still the One" and "Come On Over" and Best Female Country Performance for "You're Still the One" and "Man! I Feel Like a Woman!". The album has sold 39 million copies worldwide, the largest ever by a female solo artist, but despite this it wasn't able to top the Billboard 200, reaching a peak of #2. It did however top the charts for 11 weeks in the UK. Additionally, the album set the record for the longest ever stay in the Top 20 of The Billboard 200, remaining in the Top 20 for 99 weeks (about 1 year and 10 months).

There were several keys to all this success. The songs on Come on Over were full of memorable phrases and catchy hooks, rendered well in Twain's singing. Lange's hard rock production techniques from his work with Def Leppard and others proved surprisingly effective in the country/pop context. And many newer fans were totally unaware of her country music roots, particularly as versions of singles released to non-country radio in North America and around the world featured remixed versions de-emphasizing country-style instrumentation.

Twain's mainstream pop acceptance was further helped by her appearance in the 1998 first edition of the VH1 Divas concert, where she sang alongside Mariah Carey, Céline Dion, Gloria Estefan, and Aretha Franklin, and by VH1's 1999 heavily-aired Behind the Music treatment of her, which concentrated on the tragic aspects of her early life as well as her physical attractiveness and Nashville's early resistance to her bared-midriff music videos. In 1999 Twain also established a visible commercial relationship with Revlon cosmetics, based around "Man! I Feel Like a Woman!".

In 1998 Shania Twain launched her first major concert tour, aided by her manager Jon Landau, a veteran of many large-scale tours with Bruce Springsteen. The shows were enthusiastically received by audiences around the globe and answered critics who speculated that she could not perform live. As part of this tour, she held a contest in each city that she visited to allow one young singer to join her on stage for one of her songs. One of these lucky winners was Avril Lavigne who sang with Twain at her concert in Ottawa.[2] Twain's peak of success was further emphasized when she was named the 1999 Entertainer of the Year by both the Academy of Country Music and the Country Music Association. She is the first of only two non-Americans and one of only five solo women to win the CMA version of the award. The other non-American is Keith Urban, and the other solo women are Reba McEntire, Barbara Mandrell, Dolly Parton, and Loretta Lynn.

2002?-2003: Up!

The video for "I'm Gonna Getcha Good!" (2002), the first video from Up!.After taking time off and having a child, Eja [pronounced Asia] in 2001, Shania Twain went back into the studio. Up! was released in November 2002, making it five years since the world had new material from her, and she toured again to promote it. Twain and Lange were reported to have taken it easy during this break, as Twain wanted a 2 year break due to exhaustion. They drank lots of hot chocolate, rode horses and relaxed in their Switzerland mansion, according to the singer. They toured over the world greatly, and recorded and wrote the material for the new album in many different countries, from Berlin to Mumbai. A double album, it featured 19 songs in pop mixes and the same 19 songs in country mixes. Internationally the country mixes were replaced by world music mixes, the instrumentation of which featured non-classical Indian music styles. The International remixes were recorded in Mumbai, India. Up! was given 4 out of 5 stars by Rolling Stones magazine, and debuted at No. 1 on the Billboard albums chart, selling 874,000 in the first week alone. It charted at the top for five weeks.

The first single from the album "I'm Gonna Getcha Good!", became a modest country hit that didn't do much on the pop charts, while the follow-up single "Up!" failed to hit the top ten country or the top 40 pop. However, the third single from the album would be the most successful. The romantic ballad "Forever And For Always" was released as a single in April 2003 and peaked at No. 4 on the country chart and No. 1 on the AC chart, spending 6 weeks there. "She's Not Just A Pretty Face" was a country top-ten hit but failed on other charts, while the last single, "It Only Hurts When I'm Breathing", debuted on her fifth TV special Up! Close and Personal, made the top 20 on both Country and AC. Internationally, Twain had great success with exclusive releases of "Ka-Ching!", "Thank You Baby! (for Makin' Someday Come So Soon)", and "When You Kiss Me", particularly in countries such as Germany and the UK. "Nah!" was rumored to also be a single, until the record company ditched it due to the album flatlining on the sales charts. To date, Up! has gone 11 times platinum in the U.S., and has sold over 17 million copies worldwide. These are very impressive marks by normal standards, despite not being as high as the records set by "Come on Over".

Also in 2003, Twain participated in the Dolly Parton tribute album, Just Because I'm a Woman, covering Parton's classic "Coat of Many Colors". (On a number of occasions, Twain has cited Parton as one of her greatest musical influences.)

2004?-2005: Greatest Hits

In 2004, she released the Greatest Hits album, with three new tracks. To date, it has sold over three million copies in the U.S, and over 7 Million worldwide. The first single, the multi-format duet "Party For Two", made the country top ten with Billy Currington but the pop version with Sugar Ray lead singer Mark McGrath made the top 10 on the UK singles chart. Two further singles did not do much on any chart, although "Don't!" was featured in the film An Unfinished Life and "I Ain't No Quitter" showed Twain's fans, that despite the fact that she had mastered a successful change into the world of pop, her country roots were still very dear to her. Twain received a lot of criticism from CMT for the gestures made in the video to "I Ain't No Quitter", but Twain simply ignored them; as she once said "I find that the very things that I get criticized for, which is usually being different and just doing my own thing and just being original, is the very thing that's making me successful."

2006: Currently

After the singles were released from Twain's Greatest Hits, Twain announced she would be going back into the studio to work on a new album, however she was unsure of what she wanted to do, musically. Mercury Records, Twain's recording label, have denied that a new single and album will be out by the end of the year, but other unofficial sources have claimed that there will be - the matter is still undecided.

However, Twain was recently seen at a Toronto airport which may tie along into the Czech news story back in the spring that Twain would be filming a new music video in Canada this summer.

Although there are now rumours circulating the internet of a possible release of an album in November called So Happy, with a lead single called "Don't Shoot The Messenger".

Personal

Life

Twain recently bought some land near Wanaka in New Zealand, at a 170 km² sheep station where she hopes to build a house, despite much criticism in its purchase from neighbours. Her Swiss Chateau, is currently on the market for $25m US.

Twain celebrated her 40th birthday in August 2005, and in the same month she released the single "Shoes" from the Desperate Housewives soundtrack; it failed to make much of an impact, barely getting into the top 30 on the country charts and not charting elsewhere. Shoes was also the first single release in which she and her husband were not the entire writing credits since her first album (besides the promotional release of Coat of Many Colors from the album Just Because I'm A Woman: Songs of Dolly Parton.

A television biopic of Twain, Shania: A Life in Eight Albums, aired on CBC Television on November 7, 2005, with Meredith Henderson starring as Twain.

In 2005 Twain would add a commercial relationship with COTY [3], for the creation of her fragrance Shania by Stetson [4]. Around the same time, Twain appeared on an episode of the reality show The Apprentice, riding horses around Central Park and having dinner with two contestants who had successfully marketed her fragrance on the show.

On November 18, 2005, Twain was invested as an Officer in the Order of Canada. [5]

Shania has also been confirmed as one of the recipients of a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, to be awarded in 2007

Morals and principles

Twain has always been known for her beliefs, and always stands up for them. She and her husband are strict vegetarians, and she once said 'Nothing that has to die' in regards to her vegetarianism; and it is believed that she has raised her son, Eja, vegetarian until he is old enough to decide for himself.

After The Woman in Me was released, everyone expected her to tour, but Twain declined. Her reasons for this were that she didn't want to tour with songs that weren't her own, as to stage a good tour, she would need to use material from her first self-titled album, which she didn't want to do as she only co-wrote one of the ten songs on it. Critics immediately declared that she couldn't sing, and was just a Mutt Lange studio product; but Twain proved everyone wrong when she toured after Come on Over, and she broke records for the number of tickets sold on this tour. On her most recent tour, Up!, she designed the stage so that it was a round one, and happily signed autographs for fans whilst singing.

She is also a great supporter of charities which help feed 'hungry kids across North America'. These include the Second Harvest Kids Bag and Kids Cafe, and to show her support, she released the song "God Bless the Child" in 1996, with all proceeds from it going to her favourite charities.

"Black Eyes, Blue Tears" was a song that Twain specifically wrote to encourage and inspire 'bruised and battered women', suffering domestic violence; Twain believes in the power of music, that it can change a person and send a very powerful message.

Twain has always said, that if her mother was still alive, she wouldn't have been surprised to see the kind of success that Twain has had; she always believed in her daughter.

MEN

Men Are Just Happier People-What do you expect from such simple creatures? Your last name stays put. The garage is all yours. Wedding plans take care of themselves. Chocolate is just another snack. You can be President. You can never be pregnant. You can wear a white T-shirt to a water park. You can wear NO shirt to a water park. Car mechanics tell you the truth. The world is your urinal. You never have to drive to another gas station restroom because this one is just too icky. You don't have to stop and think of which way to turn a nut on a bolt. Same work, more pay. Wrinkles add character. Wedding dress $5000. Tux rental-$100. People never stare at your chest when you're talking to them. The occasional well-rendered belch is practically expected. New shoes don't cut, blister, or mangle your feet. One mood all the time.


Phone conversations are over in 30 seconds flat. You know stuff about tanks. A five-day vacation requires only one suitcase. You can open all your own jars. You get extra credit for the slightest act of thoughtfulness. If someone forgets to invite you, he or she can still be your friend.

Your underwear is $8.95 for a three-pack. Three pairs of shoes are more than enough. You almost never have strap problems in public. You are unable to see wrinkles in your clothes. Everything on your face stays its original color. The same hairstyle lasts for years, maybe decades. You only have to shave your face and neck.

You can play with toys all your life. Your belly usually hides your big hips. One wallet and one pair of shoes ---one color for all seasons. You can wear shorts no matter how your legs look. You can "do" your nails with a pocket knife. You have freedom of choice concerning growing a mustache.

You can do Christmas shopping for 25 relatives on December 24 in 25 minutes.

No wonder men are happier.

Hi Eva:

Don't blame you a bit--neither did I. I only included it for those idle few who have to have the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth. Yes, we know they're out there.

Bob

Good late morning, WA2K listeners and contributors. Yes, hawkman, it's a man's world. <smile>Thanks for the bio's, Bob

Welcome back, Eva. Don't you know by now that the hawk is our resident postman? Nothing keeps him from his appointed task, not even Venus. <smile>

Actually, folks, I was surprised that Charles Boyer and his son both committed suicide. Also, Tolstoy's bio reminded me of Anton Chekhov and his wonderful short story, "A Slander." More about that later.

an excerpt from "A Slander":


"You scoundrel!" he addressed him. "Why have you covered me with mud before all the town? Why did you set this slander going about me?"

"What slander? What are you talking about?"

"Who was it gossiped of my kissing Marfa? Wasn't it you? Tell me that. Wasn't it you, you brigand?"

Vankin blinked and twitched in every fiber of his battered countenance, raised his eyes to the icon and articulated, "God blast me! Strike me blind and lay me out, if I said a single word about you! May I be left without house and home, may I be stricken with worse than cholera!"

Vankin's sincerity did not admit of doubt. It was evidently not he who was the author of the slander.

"But who, then, who?" Ahineev wondered, going over all his acquaintances in his mind and beating himself on the breast. "Who, then?"

Of course, folks, we know who. It was Ahineev himself. We are our own worst enemy, and I have never forgotten that, even to this day.

later on, a poem celebrating women writers. Sometimes it's a woman's world, Bob

Good afternoon.





Going now to ponder just how easy men have it.

Good afternoon, Raggedy. Once again a fine quartet of celebs. Hey, Someone ought to start a band by the name of Ben, Shania, Charles, and Donald. Reckon it would sell, folks? Thanks again, PA, and just to give you something else to ponder:

An excerpt from another celebration:

The shining hat with tawdry ribbands bound,
The lofty may-pole and the well-swept ground,
Where valiant combats speak the thirst of Fame,
And the loud shout proclaims the victor's name.

O VANITY, thy potent reign
Spreads its influence o'er the plain-
For thee, the blushing maids prepare
Garlands wove with nicest care,
For thee, they dress their festive bow'rs
With waving wreaths of scented flow'rs,
Where the bold Youth that wins the prize
Reads his best Victory in his Sweetheart's Eyes.

Such is thy pow'r-thy mandate rules
Above the laws of Pedant Schools;
REASON, in vain contends with Thee,
TRIUMPHANT, DEATHLESS VANITY!
E'en now, I feel thy vivid sparks infuse
A warmth that guides my hand, and bids me court the MUSE.



Mrs. M. Robinson, Pembroke-Hall, Cambridge

This has been one of those days, folks. Still trying to get my paper work sorted out, but I want to add that the poem that I just read earlier, had to do with the celebration of women writers, and was an antithesis to Bob's men joke.

I have also called an exterminator to see if we can't get rid of the bugs in our studio.