Paul Newman passed away about the same time I joined DU. His role in "Cool Hand Luke" had always been a favorite of mine and seemed to sum up a lot about the pointless but dogged attempts to flee the shackles of the Bush years...

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As Luke shows us, we can try to make the best of what often is a lousy situation.
DU is THE place I come to for news, and solace.
Thanks Bertha for the thread.
And thanks as always to Skinner, Earl and the whole DU crew!

...the farthest you might get is to the end of the skyway before having to transfer to the airline's narrow aisle chair to your seat. You, your grandpa and his chair would have been scanned and checked and the chair, if it's his, goes elsewhere.

My old mother was thoroughly frisked and her power chair taken mostly apart before she got thru security at different times. She didn't ever seem the terrorist type to me - I'm her son and may have been biased - but the TSA folks clearly didn't want to take any chances on this elderly disabled grandma.


I am no fan of the TSA. I think it is expensive security theatre. Another time my wife and I were detained for nearly 30 minutes -and nearly missed our flight- because they "found" a pair of blunt plastic child scissors in the art travel kit we had along (traveling with two little kids)

On the other hand, I lost two good friends "that day". And I had traveled several times thru the Portland airport (pre 9/11) "security" where Mohammed Atta had slipped past. So we clearly needed some better system...

starting around early Newports, but also to have sung FOR him (at a songwriters workshop) and to have 'worked' with him (at Clearwater... trying to keep up with him on litter patrols)

A great human being who still is still going strong like the Energizer Bunny.





thanks for the thread

"The Last Days of Osama Bin Laden" TIME Cover Story (May 7 2012) by Graham Allison and Peter Bergen

http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,2113156,00.html

Must read forthcoming TIME cover story of the lead-up to finding and taking out bin Laden. Allison's reporting is a particularly compelling narrative of President Obama's agonizing decision process and the desperate means to keep the plans secret to insure success.

This passage was eyeopening, regarding the timing of the release of the WikiLeaks documents. That COULD have ruined the chances of getting bin Laden in his compound in Abbottabad a year ago:

"Less than a week before D-Day, on April 25, WikiLeaks' Guantanamo files appeared on the front page of the NewYork Times, citing thousands of pages of classified material it had put up on the Web. One of the documents came from the interrigation of the individuals from whom the CIA had learned the identity of bin Laden's courier and pointed to Abbottabad as a likely refuge for al-Qaeda.
(snip)
"Had bin Laden's protectors read the Times closely, and thus inferred that the U.S. had learned the identity of the courier, the house could have been empty when the Seals arrived"

Did you ever write about it (the less incriminating parts at least)?

I somewhere have a many page account I wrote later about that weekend.

At a recent dinner party we discovered there were three of us that had gone to Woodstock: Myself as a more or less normal high school kid, another who was there as part of the Hog Farm collective, and a third guy who had hitchhiked there, looked around at all the 'long haired freaks' and decided to give away his ticket, turn around and walk away! Of course he admitted he has been ribbed mercilessly for that decision ever since!

--FTC

Just saying.

High cost should not automatically be a barrier to assistive technology innovation. Look at how many billions year in and year out we taxpayer throw at the Pentagon to waste on devices who only purpose is to kill, or disable people such that they need artificial legs or arms...

(Sorry for the rant. Seen too many disabled vets)

"When he was out on the trail running, it was like someone just rang the school bell and said, 'Recess.' It was utter playfulness," recalled Chris McDougall, a friend of True's and author of the nonfiction best-seller "Born to Run."

True's body was discovered Saturday evening in a remote part of southern New Mexico's Gila Wilderness. The search began for him days earlier after he failed to return Tuesday from a 12-mile run.

He was found near a cold stream, his legs still in the water and his water bottle next to him, about a mile southeast of the Gila Cliff Dwellings.

http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/article/ALeqM5hZ-OB7jl7YgmXamkSNtTboAargXw?docId=f97f14ad43fb411381e9d0b2d814de02



"Chances are I'm either running up a mountain, or I'm drinking a cerveza ..."

That message was on Micah True's answering machine. Unfortunately this time he didn't return from 'a little 12 mile' morning run.
Friends who had spent days searching in the desert took solace that he died doing what he most loved. A friend noted that Micah idea of a good funeral for him would probably have been to have his fellow distance runners spend days running the remote trails he so loved doing...

If you have not read "Born To Run" yet I highly recommend it. Micah True (as "Caballo Blanco" is a central character in a very compelling true story that would make nearly anyone want to try running again...just for the shear joy of it.