Tom J, J Kennedy, B Clinton, E Spitzer, J Edwards,...

The dems haven't learnt their lesson yet.

Some good ones I heard on Jay:

John Mccain announced his choice for VP - Sara Palin. What do we know about her? Her name is Sara Palin. That's it.

The young lady who was Elliot Spitzer's call girl has been identified as Ashlee Dupree. She said she doesn't want to be thought of as a monster. She can also play a Catholic Schoolgirl, a nurse, a dominatrix, a number of things.

John Edwards now admits he had an affair. How do you like that? A personal injury lawyer who turns out to be a sleazeball. Who could have seen that one coming?

The escort service that put Spitzer's hooker on the train from NY to Washington told her that he might ask for something that wasn't safe. Yah! He put her on Amtrak - right there is something not safe!

And Bill Clinton was upset that Spitzer went to a hotel. He said, 'Come on! Get a desk!'

Geraldine F has quit the Hillary campaign after remarks she made that Barack was where he was because he was black. I think her new job is sidekick for Don Imus. I wonder if people can be more popular because they're black. Think about it - remember how popular MJ was when he was black? He was the biggest star in the world. The day he turned white, nothing - can't give it away.

Lest We Forget

Finished Elaine Landau's book. Wasn't very long - actually, it was a children's book: In Dec 1943, I was shipped from Plashow to a camp which supplied workers for an ammunition factory. Conditions were somewhat better there, as inmates were not generally killed unless they disobeyed. We worked from early morning until late afternoon. For sustenance, we were given a small bowl of clear soup and a cup of something that resembled coffee. Some of the men were so hungry that they'd lick drops of spilled soup from off the ground. We slept on the floor of a barracks that teemed with lice and rodents. One girl was badly bitten by a rat on her nose. (I remember Vladek Spiegelman in Maus - "if anyone spilled him even a drop, they fought until there was blood") 

The living conditions were abominable. Inmates slept so tightly packed together that you were forced to lie on your side. Every few hours, at the guard's command, we had to turn over, but it wasn't always easy to do so. If the person next to you died during the night, you had to turn his body over before turning yours. If you didn't act immediately on command, you might be beaten to death or taken outside and shot. (Basically, killing was only a means - it seems like they really wanted to strike terror into these people and humiliate them. My question - what lessons did the two sides learn after this experience. Germany today is the third most ethnically heterogenous country in the world (or second?). Is that through a deliberately enforced policy?

Atonement? Was it that there were no other scapegoats for hitler to pick on? The whole world was in a recession? Why should the Germans feel bad any more than the others?) At Auschwitz, I was assigned to work outside digging ditches. We dug in the freezing cold and rain, wearing only the thin striped dresses issued to us. The ditches werern't to be used for any particular purpose; the Nazis were merely trying to work us to death. And many did die of sickness, cold, exhaustion, and starvation. I wandered alone in the woods for several days. I had to eat grass and other forest vegetation to stay alive. But I knew liberation was near, and I was determined to survive. Yet I was still extremely aware of being an escaped Jew in enemy territory. I didn't dare allow any of the local people to see me. Now I had to live by my wits, and miscalculation could cost me my life. (Really? Grass and vegetation? Sounds like salad. I remember a Chaplin movie where he pulls out a handfull of grass and munches on the fresh stems) However, not everyone was immediately gassed. I was sent to the concentration camp Bergen-Belsen. There I spent five weeks on an outdoor work detail chopping down forest trees from six o'clock in the morning until dark. We couldn't stop to rest even for a moment as we were surrounded by armed guards and German shepherd dogs that were trained to kill. Those trees weren't being cut for any particular use. If I'd remained on that detail for another week, I don't think I'd have survived. (That's a common theme - gruelling physical labour that was not serving any purpose. This bit about trees is crazy. Why would the Germans want to spoil their own country?) We showered with cold water, and since we had no soap it was difficult to become really clean. After a few weeks, the guards realized that we were unable to function this way so they gave us soap. But when we saw what the soap was made of, we couldn't use it. 

It had been manufactured from the remains of Jewish bodies and bore a stamp which read, MADE FROM PURE JEWISH FAT. I had no way of knowing if the fat used in the soap was my father's, my brother's, or whose. We later learned that when Jews were gassed at some extermination camps such as Auschwitz, their bodies weren't always taken directly to the crematorium to be burned. Too many corpses were frequently produced to fuel the ovens simultaneously. Depending on the circumstances, one to three hundred people might die at once. Their freshly gassed bodies would be laid outside the ground and used as raw materials for German products. Their hair was stuffed into pillows and mattresses, their fat was used to make soap and their bones sent to German glue factories. The gold from their tooth fillings was extracted and used to help support the Nazi cause. (BTW, watching Connections a few months ago - I saw something similar. During the industrial revolution, England faced a food crisis - they needed fertilizer. Guess where the potash came from - they imported bones from cemetaries in Italy. Neat? Dead Italians go into living Brits - through the plants of course)

Pushed to the Edge

Any holocaust book has its share of hard-to-believe stuff. Landau's is no exception: 

We were shocked as we watched both storm troopers and local residents burning books by Jewish authors. We couldn't believe that this was happening in Germany, a country known for its advanced culture and outstanding achievements in music, art, and science. (I have to contrast that with what a professor once said about Germany - Germany has no culture - in the office the boss will definitely try to take advantage of his secretary. You have to pity the secretaries. Of their salary, they have to spend so much on lippenschtift and such. I'm not making this up. Of course, he's talking about a specific aspect of culture. If they hadn't any kultur at all, he wouldn't have dedicated his whole life to studying them.) The Nazis also forced my mother to work in an electronics factory. Something hideous must have happened to her there. She was crying when she returned from her first day of work. She looked at me and said that she was tired and needed to rest. She went into the bedroom to lie down and said that she didn't want to be disturbed. When my father came home later, he was unable to wake her. It was then that we realized she'd taken an overdose of sleeping pills and committed suicide.

'This is your last opportunity to give us whatever you have. If you don't, and it's found on you, you'll be immediately shot.' I knew my father had taken both money and diamonds along, so I begged him to go to the rest room and flush it all down the toilet. He did so, because even throwing our money away was preferable to giving it to the Nazis. (Man, who do you suppose got those diamonds. Are they still lying in the dust of Berlin station?) 

There were four hundred young women at the camp and we were given nearly nothing to eat. We were starving and desperate. One day, a horse dropped dead in the yard behind our factory building. We were so famished that we cut ourselves pieces of the animal, which we ate raw. (Horse sushi. When they got here, they opened Sizzler's) This may sound strange, but in a way Kristallnacht was like a godsend because it warned us of things to come. (I guess so. There was international outrage and the Nazis calmed down a bit. Most people who were able to, left. But, the whole world was already in an economic recession, so it was hard to emigrate) To my amazement, I saw some parents actually push their own children away. I guess they knew they couldn't save them, so they tried to save themselves. It was hard for me to believe that a mother would run from her child, but evidently the fear of death can be overwhelming. Our train ride ended at Theresienstadt. After being there only a week, I came down with scarlet fever. I was quarantined for six weeks, but no medication was available. After I began to recover, I did farm work in the fields with a group of other young people. We'd get up early in the morning and stand on line for roll call. On one occasion, the entire camp was made to stand for forty-eight hours for roll call. We weren't permitted to eat or sleep during those days. (Two days I can understand. Was it Elie Wiesel or Vladek Spiegelman who said about being transported in the cattle car? It stopped at one place for weeks. For weeks!! Can you imagine people being trapped in that kind of space for weeks? No food, no bowel movement? It's a miracle anyone survived at all)

Deutsche Disziplin

From Elaine Landau's book: After a while I, along with a number of others, was taken from Theresienstadt to a site near Berlin where we worked on a construction crew building lodgings for Gestapo officers. I remained on the project for about a year. We did hard physical labour daily for at least fifteen-hour shifts. At night we slept on a wooden board. At times, the guards' treatment of us was extremely harsh. Once when a guard felt I wasn't working fast enough, he hit me in the mouth with a large steel pipe, knocking out all my teeth. I also acquired a number of scars from the frequent beatings.

Special Mention Jorg Seyfferth

Considering how many idiots there are online who waste your time, this guy deserves some praise for giving me what I want in 2 seconds. To be fair, this *t had a link to Jorg's page. This is so simple to do, yet so many guys get it all wrong - either it don't work or it's as user-unfriendly as the Indian subcontinent.

Here's a really crappy implementation:

http://basicer.com/figlet.php

And, as promised (even though he hasn't provided a custom service or help on-demand,..