The Simpsons – Comic books

The site below provides more than a hundred comic books entirely for free!! Have fun!

comic.wtso.net

A Lecture Upon the Shadow

One of the most beautiful poems I’ve ever read!

Stand still, and I will read to thee
A lecture, love, in love’s philosophy.
These three hours that we have spent,
Walking here, two shadows went
Along with us, which we ourselves produc’d.
But, now the sun is just above our head,
We do those shadows tread,
And to brave clearness all things are reduc’d.
So whilst our infant loves did grow,
Disguises did, and shadows, flow
From us, and our cares; but now ’tis not so.
That love has not attain’d the high’st degree,
Which is still diligent lest others see.

Except our loves at this noon stay,
We shall new shadows make the other way.
As the first were made to blind
Others, these which come behind
Will work upon ourselves, and blind our eyes.
If our loves faint, and westwardly decline,
To me thou, falsely, thine,
And I to thee mine actions shall disguise.
The morning shadows wear away,
But these grow longer all the day;
But oh, love’s day is short, if love decay.
Love is a growing, or full constant light,
And his first minute, after noon, is night.

John Donne (1572 – 1631)

On War

“Never has there been a good war or a bad peace.”

Benjamin Franklin (1706 – 1790)

Top Ten Conspiracy Theories

04. The Moon Landing Hoax

In the 1978 film Capricorn One, American astronauts and NASA faked a Mars landing. Though a mediocre film, it was an interesting idea, and one that would endure for decades. In 2001, Fox television aired the program “Conspiracy Theory: Did We Land on the Moon?,” which rehashed many discredited “discrepancies” between the official version of the moon landing and photographs of the landing. (Curiously, they never explain why NASA would distribute photographs that would “prove” that they had faked the moon landing.) Web sites such as BadAstronomy.com have pages and pages of point-by-point, detailed refutations of the Fox claims. Of course, even if there was some credible evidence showing that the 1969 Apollo moon landing was a hoax, conspiracy theorists must also account for later moon missions, involving a dozen astronauts. And there’s the issue of the hundreds of pounds of moon rocks that have been studied around the world and verified as of extraterrestrial origin… how did NASA get the rocks if not during a moon landing? Many astronauts have been offended by the implication that they faked their accomplishments. In fact in 2002, when conspiracy theorist Bart Sibrel confronted Buzz Aldrin and called him a “coward and a liar” for faking the moon landings, the 72-year-old punched Sibrel in the jaw.

Monday mornings

911 Calls

Dispatcher : 9-1-1 What is your emergency?
Caller: I heard what sounded like gunshots coming from the brown house on the corner.
Dispatcher: Do you have an address?
Caller:  No, I have on a blouse and slacks, why?

Dispatcher: 9-1-1 What is your emergency?
Caller :  Someone broke into my house and took a bite out of my ham and cheese sandwich .
Dispatcher : Excuse me?
Caller :  I made a ham and cheese sandwich and left it on the kitchen table and when I came back from the bathroom, someone had taken a bite out of it.
Dispatcher : Was anything else taken?
Caller :  No, but this has happened to me before and I’m sick and tired of it!

Dispatcher: 9-1-1 What is the nature of your emergency?
Caller:   I’m trying to reach nine eleven but my phone doesn’t have an eleven on it.
Dispatcher: This is nine eleven.
Caller:    I thought you just said it was nine-one-one
Dispatcher: Yes, ma’am nine-one-one and nine-eleven are the same thing.
Caller:    Honey, I may be old, but I’m not stupid.

Dispatcher: 9-1-1 What’s the nature of your emergency?
Caller:    My wife is pregnant and her contractions are only two minutes apart
Dispatcher: Is this her first child?
Caller:  No, you idiot! This is her husband!

Dispatcher: 9-1-1
Caller:  Yeah, I’m having trouble breathing. I’m all out of breath.  Darn…..I think I’m going to pass out.
Dispatcher: Sir, where are you calling from?
Caller:   I’m at a pay phone. North and Foster.
Dispatcher:  Sir, an ambulance is on the way. Are you an asthmatic?
Caller:   No, I’m a Methodist
Dispatcher: What were you doing before you started having trouble breathing?
Caller:   Running from the Police.

Telephone English – Tips for Getting People to Slow Down!!

One of the biggest problems is speed. Native speakers, especially business people, tend to speak very quickly on the telephone. Here are some practical tips to get native speakers of English to slow down!

• Immediately ask the person to speak slowly.
• When taking note of a name or important information, repeat each piece of information as the person speaks..

This is an especially effective tool. By repeating each important piece of information or each number or letter as  the spell or give you a telephone number you automatically slow the speaker down.

• Do not say you have understood if you have not. Ask the person to repeat until you have understood.Remember that the other person needs to make himself/herself understood and it is in his/her interest to make sure that you have understood. If you ask a person to explain more than twice they will usually slow down.
• If the person does not slow down begin speaking your own language!A sentence or two of another language spoken quickly will remind the person that they are fortunate because THEY do not need to speak a different language to communicate. Used carefully, this exercise in humbling the other speaker can be very effective. Just be sure to use it with colleagues and not with a boss :-)!

By Kenneth Beare, About.com Guide

Top Ten Conspiracy Theories

05. Paul McCartney’s Death

According to many stories and conspiracy theories that circulated in the late 1960s, Beatles guitarist Paul McCartney died in 1966. The remaining members of the Beatles–along with their manager and others–conspired to keep McCartney’s death a secret, going so far as to hire a look-alike and sound-alike to take his place in the band. Well, kind of: In a case of seriously twisted logic (even by conspiracy theory standards) the conspirators in this case took great pains to keep the press and public from finding out about McCartney’s demise–yet they also wanted fans to know about it, and placed clever clues in album covers and music giving details about McCartney’s death. For example, on the cover of the Abbey Road album, all four Beatles are photographed striding across a zebra crossing, but only McCartney is barefoot, and out of step with the other three. This must mean something, right? Despite public denials by the band, fans couldn’t just let it be, and came together to look for more clues.

Soldier finds his voice blogging from Iraq

Bullets were pinging off our armor, all over our vehicle, and you could hear multiple RPGs being fired, soaring through the air every which way and impacting all around us. All sorts of crazy insane Hollywood explosions were going off. I’ve never felt fear like this. I was like, this is it, I’m going to die.
When U.S. Army machine gunner Colby Buzzell began blogging about his combat experiences from a military base in Mosul, Iraq, he wasn’t looking for attention or trouble. Buzzell just wanted a way to chronicle what he saw and did and felt during the Iraq war.
But his visceral, first-hand accounts were a bracing antidote to dry news reports and bloodless Pentagon news releases. In the first major war of the Internet age, Buzzell and other soldier bloggers in Iraq offered readers around the world unfiltered, real-time glimpses of an ongoing conflict.
“Here’s a soldier in a combat zone … writing about it and posting it on the Internet. I don’t think that’s ever been done in previous wars,” Buzzell said.
“It just provides another perspective that no embedded journalist can ever do,” said the veteran, now a freelance writer in San Francisco, California, and the author of “My War: Killing Time in Iraq.” “An embedded journalist is just there observing. But a soldier writing about it — you can’t get more embedded than that.”
A suburban skateboarder with punk-rock sensibilities, Buzzell had no background in creative writing before he joined the Army in 2002. Inspired by a Marine buddy and burned out by a string of dead-end jobs, he signed up after a smooth-talking recruiter offered a signing bonus and sold him on the Army “like it was some [expletive] Club Med vacation.”
When Buzzell arrived in Iraq in November 2003, he didn’t know what a blog was. But after he read an article about a blogger in Time magazine in June 2004, he began posting anonymous journal entries on the Web under the nickname CBFTW (Colby Buzzell F— The War).
“The only writing I knew how to do was … like I was telling a story to the person next to me,” he said. “I’d go to the Internet cafe [at the Army base], and my ears would still be ringing from whatever the experience [was] that day. There were times when I couldn’t type fast enough.”
Over the next six weeks, Buzzell wrote brutally frank, profanity-laced posts about the terror, tedium and misadventures of an infantryman’s life in Iraq. At first, few people seemed to notice. But word spread, and before long he was getting hundreds of e-mails a day from readers.
Parents of troops in Iraq wrote to thank him for helping them understand their children’s wartime perspective. One reader said they found Buzzell’s blog more informative than the war coverage in The New York Times. Buzzell even heard from a sympathetic Iraqi in Baghdad who prayed for his safe return to America.
But almost nobody — not even Buzzell’s wife — knew that he was the blogger.
Then came August 4, 2004. Mosul erupted in gunfire, and Buzzell’s platoon survived an ambush by swarms of black-clad insurgents wielding rocket-propelled grenades. Buzzell witnessed his platoon sergeant survive a bullet through his helmet and narrowly missed being killed himself.
The next day, Buzzell went online and found a few brief news reports of the firefight that killed at least 22 Iraqi insurgents and civilians. In his mind, the stories didn’t begin to capture what happened. So he wrote a long blog post, titled “Men in Black,” about the ambush.

I observed a man, dressed all in black with a terrorist beard, jump out all of sudden from the side of a building, he pointed his AK-47 barrel right at my f—— pupils, I froze and then a split second later, I saw the fire from his muzzle flash leaving the end of his barrel and brass shell casings exiting the side of his AK as he was shooting directly at me. I heard and felt the bullets whiz literally inches from my head.
The “Men in Black” post attracted media attention, and Buzzell was flooded with e-mails and interview requests from around the world. Based on his descriptions of the Mosul attacks, his commanding officers soon figured out that he was the blog’s author.
The Army confined Buzzell to the base and began monitoring his posts. Then, after he posted an anti-Iraq war rant by Dead Kennedys singer Jello Biafra, they ordered him to stop blogging.
Buzzell’s Iraq blog lasted just 10 weeks, but it helped pave the way for others to follow. Today, according to the Army, thousands of active-duty soldiers write some form of online journal, often known as a military blog or “milblog.”
Pentagon security policy forbids soldiers to publish sensitive information, such as unit locations or the timing of military operations, that might put troops in harm’s way. But beyond that, soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan are encouraged to blog about military life, said Army Public Affairs Spc. Lindy Kyzer.
“We’re actually entering an era of transparency, where we need to have our soldiers talk. It does open up risks. Once you post something, you can’t get it back. But we trust our soldiers with a lot,” she said. “They are our best spokespersons. They know what the life of a soldier is like, and it’s important to convey that to the American people.”
Blogging also helps soldiers process traumatic combat experiences that can be hard for them to talk about, Kyzer said.
Since leaving Iraq, Buzzell collected his wartime blog posts and journal entries into “My War,” which was published in 2005. Excerpts from his Iraq blog also appeared in the Oscar-nominated documentary “Operation Homecoming: Writing the Wartime Experience.”
The war cost Buzzell his marriage and left him with post-traumatic stress disorder, a diagnosis that helped him avoid being redeployed to Iraq last spring. Now 32, he contributes regular features to Esquire magazine and hopes to write another book, the contents of which he’s not ready to discuss.
Buzzell is no fan of the Iraq conflict, although he’s heartened that active-duty soldiers are still reading “My War.”
“The book is being passed around over there, which is kind of surreal,” he said. “I do get e-mails from soldiers over there. Guys will say, ‘Thanks for getting our story out,’ or ‘Things haven’t really changed that much since you were here.’
“Looking back now, I don’t think we had any business [in Iraq],” said Buzzell, who wants to see President-elect Barack Obama end the war. “Hopefully, he gets us out of Iraq in a way that’s not a disaster or that gets a lot of soldiers killed.”

from: http://www.cnn.com/2008/TECH/11/13/soldier.blogger/index.html

Rush – Double Agent

Where would you rather be?
Anywhere but here
When will the time be right?
Anytime but now

On the edge of the sleep,

I was drifting for half the night

Anxious and restless,

Pressed down by the darkness

Bound up and wound up so tight

So many decisions, a million revisions

Caught between darkness and light…

Wilderness of mirrors

World of polished steel

Gears and iron chains

Turn the grinding wheel

I run between the shadows

Some are phantoms, some are real.

Where would you rather be?
Anywhere but here
When will the time be right?
Anytime but now
Where would you rather be?
The doubt and the fear
I know would all disappear
Anywhere but here
Anywhere but here…

On the edge of sleep,

I heard voices behind the door

The known and the nameless

Familiar and faceless

My angels and my demons at war

Which one will lose depends on what I choose

Or maybe which voice I ignore…

Wilderness of mirrors

Streets of cold desire

My precious sense of honor

Just a shield of rusty wire

I hold against the chaos

And the cross of holy fire

Wilderness of mirrors

So easy to deceive

My precious sense of rightness

Is sometimes so naive

So that which I imagine

Is that which I believe.

On the edge of sleep, I awoke to a sun so bright

Rested and fearless, cheered by your nearness

I knew which direction was right

The case had been tried by the jury inside

The choice between darkness and light…