Hittokiri's Hara-Kiri Forum

I know have the story of the ultimate idiocy from the state and from bureaucracy.

Upon arriving at my school earlier this week, I noticed that the door had a couple of floor mats in front to of it to keep the door open, however it wasn't working to well.  I really didn't think to much of it (famous last words as far as I'm concerned). Then I overheard something that just bugged me, and still does. The school was told to remove the door stops from its doors because they were.... get this.... a fire hazard! These weren't the wedges you stick in front of a door, these are the swivel down kind that are attached to the door. I have no idea why they (whoever they are, I'm guessing the fire department) made this decision. If anything these door stops should be a requirement, they keep the door open which in the event of fire keep the door out of the way of people trying to exit the building, I would say the door is a bigger fire hazard than a door stop.

Are we strangling ourselves? I think so, no need to worry about some serial killer doing it, we are already strangling ourselves.

We know that just about everything in nature cycles itself, from water to oxygen to nitrogen to carbon. However I think we are strangling ourselves by using fossil fuels, or at least we will. Even though carbon cycles, much of it is stored in the form of fossil fuels, in the ground and not in the atmosphere, but if we keep burning it and adding it to the air our air will become diluted. It is comparable to having a small home water fountain, the water cycles around, in this case it is the carbon already in the atmosphere. Now imagine if you will taking a gallon of water (representing the carbon in the earth), and pouring it into that little water fountain, it is now over flowing. Take this into context of real life, instead of having a small mess to clean up, we now have less breathable air. We are now choking. Will this happen? I don't know, it is just an interesting thought that occurred to me.

   what do you think?

If you had purchased $1000.00 of Nortel stock one year ago, it would now
be worth $49.00.
 
With Enron, you would have $16.50 left of the original $1000.
 
With WorldCom, you would have less than $5.00 left.
 
If you had purchased $1000.00 of Delta Air Lines stock, you would have
$49.00 left.
 
If you had purchased United Airlines, you would have nothing left.
 
But, if you had purchased $1000.00 worth of beer one year ago, drank all
the beer, then turned in the cans for the aluminum recycling refund you
would have $214.00.
 
Based on the above, the best current investment advice is to drink
heavily and recycle.

THIS IS CALLED THE 401-KEG PLAN.

Beware people, voting left will be a big mistake. Why? you ask. Because in an increasingly desperate day and age people look more and more to comedy. What does this have to do with your vote? you ask. Simple if we have a Republican comedians have loads and loads of materials, it never end the when the Republicans are in office.  Sure you could vote for Barrack and there would be an initial surge of jokes for him, but they would quickly die. All the "no black president" jokes will be irrelevant. You would have a week of "wanted: white house chef needed who can cook low and slow" and "White house gets new paint job" jokes, but that would be it. So..

A Democrat in office is not a funny thing!
Vote Republican...... your laugh depends on it.








lol

Here is an optical illusion

-follow the movement, everything should look fine
- Look at the + but still follow the movement, a green dot will start moving around the circle
- keep your eyes on the + and the dots should disappear



obviously the dots neither turn green nor disappear, but this is a neat illusion

Ever wondered what happened to the guy on Mad magazine.

John McCain is a danger to our rights and to our safety. McCain is a extremist protestant. McCain is against extreme sports (most notably MMA), is against contraception, would enforce bad education policies, deny health care to those who need it, and would ban stem cell research (which could save the lives of those with horrible diseases). .... wait we already have all this, courtesy of George W.

Can we trust a person who is backed by extremist pastors.  Pastors like John Hagee, who made claims that the Nazi did what God wanted. But that's not all pastor Rod Parsley who has called Islam an inherently violent religion, also supports McCain.



If by now you haven't realized this post is a spoof on the anti-Obama posts. Obama isn't the only one with pastor problems. It's easy to make these claims that someone is a religious zealot by stretching the truth about their religion and their beliefs. The only difference between McCain and Obama in this comparisons is that Obama isn't actually Muslim. And to those who note that his parents were, I say it doesn't matter. Just because somebodies parents are in one religion doesn't mean they are. Religious views can change between generations. I can say that from experience, my parents are Catholic, I was raised as one, went to catholic school for 8 years, but I'm an agnostic and so are my sisters.  If you want to claim that Obama didn't practice Islam say that he could say that he wasn't Muslim and get into office, think of how absurd that plan sounds.

AMAZING SIMPLE HOME REMEDIES

1. IF YOU'RE CHOKING ON AN ICE CUBE, SIMPLY POUR A CUP OF BOILING WATER DOWN YOUR THROAT. PRESTO! THE BLOCKAGE WILL INSTANTLY REMOVE ITSELF.

2. AVOID CUTTING YOURSELF WHEN SLICING VEGETABLES BY GETTING SOMEONE ELSE TO HOLD THE VEGETABLES WHILE YOU CHOP.

3. AVOID ARGUMENTS WITH THE FEMALES ABOUT LIFTING THE TOILET SEAT BY USING THE SINK.

4. FOR HIGH BLOOD PRESSURE SUFFERERS ~ SIMPLY CUT YOURSELF AND BLEED FOR A FEW MINUTES, THUS REDUCING THE PRESSURE ON YOUR VEINS. REMEMBER TO USE A TIMER.

5. A MOUSE TRAP PLACED ON TOP OF YOUR ALARM CLOCK WILL PREVENT YOU FROM ROLLING OVER AND GOING BACK TO SLEEP AFTER YOU HIT THE SNOOZE BUTTON.

6. IF YOU HAVE A BAD COUGH, TAKE A LARGE DOSE OF LAXATIVES. THEN YOU'LL BE AFRAID TO COUGH.

7. YOU ONLY NEED TWO TOOLS IN LIFE - WD-40 AND DUCT TAPE. IF IT DOESN'T MOVE AND SHOULD, USE THE WD-40. IF IT SHOULDN'T MOVE AND DOES, USE THE DUCT TAPE.

8. REMEMBER - EVERYONE SEEMS NORMAL UNTIL YOU GET TO KNOW THEM.

9. IF YOU CAN'T FIX IT WITH A HAMMER, YOU'VE GOT AN ELECTRICAL PROBLEM.

I say: what's the big deal, he bought a security system with taxpayer money, do we not pay plenty of skilled people armed with guns and sophisticated electronic equipment to protect the president for millions a year,  you know the secrete service.

Events of 1997 3/12
March

* indicates my note
~ indicates Handbook note

1; Thunderstorms and tornadoes, sweeping across Arkansas, Mississippi, Kentucky, West Virginia, and Ohio, leave 48 people dead.

5; Clinton Administration Officials admit that Margaret A. Williams, Hillary Rodham Clinton's chief of staff, accepted- in the White House in 1995- a $50,000 campaign donation to the Democratic Party from Johnny Chung, a California businessman. Federal Law prohibits solicitation or receipt of political contributions in government offices.

6; China's legislature revises the nation's criminal code for the first time since 1979, introducing laws regulating insider trading and money laundering and elimination laws covering a variety of "counterrevolutionary" crimes.

7; The most severe flooding along the Ohio River since 1964 crests at Louisville, Kentucky, 15.7 feet (4.8 meters) above flood stage. It leaves 29 people dead and tens of thousands homeless in West Virginia, Ohio, Indiana, Tennessee, and Kentucky.

8; Hostage crisis negotiations between Peruvian officials and the Tupac Amaru collapse when the Marxist rebels discover that government security police are digging a tunnel beneath the Japanese ambassador's residence in Lima, the capital, where the Tupac Amaru have held 72 people hostage since Dec. 17, 1996.

10; The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) issues a statement flatly refuting President Bill Clinton's claim, made during a news conference earlier in the day, that the FBI had warned White House officials in 1996 that China might be attempting to illegally funnel money into U.S. political campaigns.

11; The U.S. Senate approves a measure to investigate "Illegal and improper" campaign fund-raising activities in the executive and legislative branches of the government.

12; Japanese Prime Minister Ryutaro Hashimoto publicly apologizes for his government's "inadequate" response to a March 11 fire that triggered an exposing 21 workers to low-level radiation. A similar accident in December 1995 at Monju, Japan's only fastbreeder reactor, triggered widespread criticism of Japans's Nuclear industry.

13; A 23-year-old Jordanian soldier opens fire on a group of Israeli junior-high school girls visiting Naharayim. Seven girls die and six are wounded before the attacker is subdued.

In Tirane, the capital of Albania, looters carry off the remains of the city's dwindling food supply, while the police arm civilians in the hope that they will defend the government of authoritarian ruler Sali Berisha, who refuses to resign the presidency. The U.S. State Department warns that all Americans in Albania should leave immediately.

14; The Giant food corporation H.J. Heinz announces that it will lay off 2,500 employees- 5.8 percent of its work force- shut down at least 25 domestic and international plants, and sell its frozen-foods subsidiary, Ore-Ida foods Incorporated.

15; Zairian rebels take the important, eastern city of Kisangani, a Congo River port of more than 300,000 residents, from the Zairian army, which puts up token resistance. Kasangani's fall signals the downfall of President Mobutu Sese Seko, who has ruled Zaire for 31 years.

17; Anthony Lake, President Bill Clinton's nominee for Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) director, withdraws his name from consideration after his confirmation, delayed for three months, is threatened with additional delays by the U.S. Senate Intelligence Committee.

18; The Presidential Advisory Committee on Gulf War Veterans' illnesses, a panel charged with investigation illnesses associated with the Persian Gulf War, presents evidence that the March 1991 demolition of an enemy ammunition dept in Iraq released clouds of nerve gas. The gas may have spread as far as 165 miles (265 kilometers) in a southerly direction, exposing hundreds of thousands of American troops to low doses of toxic chemicals.

20; The Ligger Group, Inc, which manufactures the Chesterfield, L & M, and Lark brands of cigarettes, acknowledges that tobacco is addictive and causes cancer. The Legit spokesperson also concedes that tobacco companies historically have marketted their products to minors in an attempt to lure children as young as 14 years old into a lifetime smoking habit.

24; Director of the Kenya Wildlife Service David Western announces his support for lifting the 20-year ban on big-game hunting on private land in order to cull overpopulations of such non endangered species as zebra, antelope, and wart hogs, which overrun farmers' fields.

25;The Federal Reserve banking system, under the leadership of Chairman Alan Greenspan, votes to raise interet rates for the first time in more than two years.

26; The bodies of 39 mass suicide victims are discovered in a mansion in the San Diego suburb of Rancho Santa Fe. The dead- 21 women and 18 men- belonged to a cult named Heaven's Gate. They apparently had believed that a space ship traveling behind Comet Hale-Bopp, visible in the night sky, would pick up and transport then to a better world.

29; A dozen tornadoes rampage through Tennessee, leaving more than 40 people homeless. In Chattanooga, tornadoes snap tree and utility poles designed to withstand winds of up to 160 miles per hour (270 kilometers per hour). Two people were killed when the same series of storms cut through Indiana and Kentucky late on March 28.
 

Events of 1997  2/12
February

* indicates my note
~ indicates a handbook note

2; Algerian rebels kill more than 30 people in a town south of Algiers, the capital. The Victims were associated with a dissident member of a fundamentalist Muslim faction, one of a number of groups battling the government and each other in Algeria's five-year-old civil war.

3; Sergeant Major of the Army Gene McKinney, the U.S. Army's top-ranking enlisted man and a member of the committee that reviews army sexual harassment policies, is accused of sexually assaulting a female colleague.

5; Former Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto's Pakistan People's Party concedes that the Pakistan Muslim League, headed by Nawaz Sharif, has taken 124 of the National Assembly's 217 seats in the February 3 elections. The People's Party wins only 19 seats.

6; The German government announces that the number of Germans without jobs rose in January to 3.66 million, 12.2 percent of the workforce and the nation's highest unemployment rate since 1933, the year Adolf Hitler became chancellor.

7; Ron Robertson, head of the District of Columbia police union, describes the streets of the nation's capital as a war zone and call on the federal government to take control of the police force. Forty-five people have been murdered since January 1 on the streets of Washington, D.C.

10; A civil court jury in Santa Monica, California, orders O.J. Simpson to pay $25 million in punitive damages to the families of Simpsons's ex wife, Nicole Brown Simpson, and her friend Ronald L. Goldman who were murdered in 1994. On February 4, the same jury , ruling against Simpson in the wrongful-death suit brought by the Brown and Goldman families, ordered Simpson to pay $8.5 million in compensatory damages.

13; The Dow Jones Industrial Average, a composite of the stock prices of 30 major companies listed on the New York Stock Exchange, climbs 60.81 points to close at at 7,022.44. The push beyond 7,000, coming only 82 trading days after the Dow cleared the 6,000-point level, is the fastest 1000-point jump in Wall Street history.

14; Forty-nine dolphins and three whales are found dead in the Gulf of California near Culiacan, Mexico. Biologists suspect that the cause is a chemical used by drug traffickers to mark sites where drugs are dropped in the ocean.

15; More than 60 countries, meeting in Geneva, Switzerland, agree to open their telecommunications markets to foreign competition, a move that could push down the cost of international telephone calls, which averages $1 a minute, by 80 percent.

17; The Department of Health and Human Services announces that the U.S. government will pay teaching hospitals not to train physicians. University of Pennsylvania professor Alan Hillman called the program, which is designed to reduce the surplus of doctors, "an amazing treatment of health care as a commodity."

19; Deng Xiaoping, leader of one fifth of all humans beings on Earth, dies at the age of 92. "Paramount leader" of China for 18 years, Deng was the last of the generation of Communist revolutionaries who transformed China from a chaotic, feudal state to a world power.

21; Kenneth Starr announces he has changed his mind and will not resign as the Justice Department's independent counsel until the investigation into the failed Arkansas real estate venture known as Whitewater is completed. Starr had announced his resignation on February 17, sparking widespread speculation that he had failed to collect sufficient evidence to prosecute President Clinton and First Lady Hillary Rodham Clinton for their possible roles in the Whitewater project.

22; Embryologist Ian Wilmut announces that he and his research group at the Roslin Institute near Edinburgh, Scotland, have cloned an adult animal. Using a mammary cell from an adult ewe, Wilmut and his team prepared other ewe. After removing DNA from the donor ewe, which gave birth in July 1996 to a healthy lamb with DNA that perfectly matches that of the donor ewe.

23 Wielding a semiautomatic weapon a 69-year-old Palestinian immigrant opens fire on a crowd of 90 to 100 people on the 86th-floor open-air observation deck atop New York City's Empire State Building. One person is fatally shot and seven are wounded before the gunman turns the gun on himself.

26; Chairman of the Federal Reserve System Alan Greenspan publicly warns that stock prices may be "unsustainable high"

27; Officials of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention annouce that deaths from AIDS throughout the United States have dropped "substantially." The AIDS death rate was 13 percent lower in the first six months of 1996 compared with the same period in 1995. The decline is attributed to the benefits of drug therapies introduced in the late 1990's to fight HIV, the virus that causes AIDS.

I am starting a series of post that will cover the events spanning 1997.
any *'s will denote a note of mine any ~ will denote a note in the annual handbook.

January 1997

1; An off- duty Israeli soldier empties clip of his M-16 automatic rifle into the open- air market in Herbron on the Wast Bank and wounds seven Arabs before being overpowered by other Isrealie soldiers. The incident, according to the gunman, in to keep Herbron from being handed over to Palestinian control.

3; The Serbian government, dominated by Slobodan Milosevic, rejects a call endorsed by 54 nations to install in office those candidates who were victorious in the Nov. 17, 1996, local elections, but who were disqualified by their opposition to Milosevic.

4; Winter storms, which have battered at the West Coast for two weeks, result in massive flooding in Washington, Oregon, and northern California and cause the death of more than 30 people, the evacuation of 125,000 people, and damage to property in excess of $1 billion.

7 Newt Gingrich, a Republican from Georgia, is reelected speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives. Nine Republican, disturbed by Gingrich's admission that he had violated various ethical standards of the House, defected from the party by voting on other candidates or by abstaining.

9 All 26 passengers and 3 crew members aboard a twin-engine, turboprop plane are killed when the commuter plane crashes on approach to the Detriot Metropolitan Airport during a heavy snowstorm.

11; Bulgarians by the tens of thousands take to the streets of Sofia, the capital, demanding early elections in order to oust the highly unstable, Socialist- controlled government. Police swinging clubs and firing guns, work their way through the crowds to free lawmakers trapped in the parliament building.

15; Isralei Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Palestinian leader Yasir Arafat agree on the details and timing of an Israeli pullout of Hebron, the largely Palestinians cuty on the West Band of the Jordan River. Hebron is sacred to both Jews and Muslims as the traditional burial place of the Biblical prophet Abraham. By January 17, Israel removes its troops from 80 percent of the city of Hebron.

17; Ireland's High Court grants a divorce, the first in the county's modern history. Irish voters in 1995 narrowly approved a constitutional amendment allowing divorce.

18; Paul E. Tsongas, the 1992 Democratic presidential candidate credited with forcing fellow candidates to deal with the nation's economic problems (* if only he knew), dies at the age of 55.

19; Two bombs explode in a Tulsa, Oklahoma abortion clinic, which was hit by firebombs on Jan. 1. Similar bombings took place at an Atlanta, Georgia, abortion clinic during the week of Jan. 12.

20; William Jefferson Clinton, the 42nd president of the United States, is inaugurated for a second term in Washington, D.C.

21; Members of the U.S. House of Representatives vote to reprimand Speaker Newt Gingrich for using tax-exempt money to promote a Republican party agenda and for giving false information to the ethics committee investigating his behavior. It is the most severe rebuke ever delivered to a presiding officer of the house .

22; A federal jury in Greensboro, North Carolina, awards Food Lion, a supermarket chain, more than $5.5 million in punitive damages for a 1992 segment of the American Broadcasting Company (ABC) television show "Prime Time Live" that accused the chain of selling spoiled meat.

23 Madeleine K. Albright, the former U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations, is sworn in as the first female secretary of state of the United States. She was unanimously confirmed in her position by the senate on January 22.

26; The Green Bay Packers win Super Bowl XXXI (* 31 for the Roman impaired), 35 to 21, over the New England Patriots. The Green Bay Packers had not won a National Football League title for 29 Years.

28; South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation Commission, a committee investigating abuses under apartheid, announces that former policemen had confessed to a number of notorious murders, including the 1977 killing of Black Consciousness Movement Leader Steve Biko.

29; American Online Inc. (AOL), The internet subscription service, agree to offer credits and millions of dollars in refunds to compensate customers for network traffic jams.

30; The Internal Revenue Service (IRS), after admitting to a congressional panel that it had spent  $4 billion on computer systems that do not work, proposes hiring independent contractors to process paper tax returns.

- from the Handbook Annual, 1998 edition.

Really, is somebodies brain malfunctioning. Why would you want to put a strip club next to a Baseball stadium and Arena? According to radio DJ Bob Frantz, most people e-mailing his show have no problem with there being a strip club there. Although I wouldn't call a collection of emails from the audience of one DJ to be a scientific survey.

I for one don't have a problem with strip clubs, but if there is going to be a strip club in that area is should be one one or both of the following circumstances.
1: It is not directly by Indians Stadium; at least a few blocks away, not where people (mainly kids) will see it when walking to the Stadium.
2: It is nondescript: by looking at it you can't tell it is a strip club (save for a change in words like Adult club), no neon strip-pole in the window, and nothing can be seen from outside.

It's someones choice if they want to go to a strip club, but one shouldn't be so close to a family place that parents should have to worry about their kids seeing such a place.

I recently found an old knife that belong to my grandfather. It is covered in rust, so I am wondering if anyone knows how to get rid of it with household products, other than CLR?

SISTER MARY ANN'S GASOLINE

Sister Mary Ann, who worked for a home health agency, was out making
her rounds visiting homebound patients when she ran out of gas. As luck
would have it, an Texaco Gasoline station was just a block away.

She walked to the station to borrow a gas can and buy some gas. The
attendant told her that the only gas can he owned had been loaned out, but
she could wait until it was returned. Since Sister Mary Ann was on the
way to see a patient, she decided not to wait and walked back to her car.

She looked for something in her car that she could fill with gas and
spotted the bedpan she was taking to the patient. Always
resourceful, Sister Mary Ann carried the bedpan to the station,
filled it with gasoline, and carried the full bedpan back to her car.

As she was pouring the gas into her tank, two Baptists watched from
across the street. One of them turned to the other and said,

               'If it starts, I'm turning Catholic.'