The JackB

"When you're in jail, a good friend will be trying to bail you out. A best friend will be in the cell next to you saying, 'Damn, that was fun'." Groucho Marx

Archives for August 2006

When a Mannequin Kicks Your Ass

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Ok, I am laughing pretty hard at this.

“Attack of the Mannequins” might sound like a horror film title, but, for some shoppers, it could also be a documentary.

Diana Newton, 51, of Westminster sued the J.C. Penney Co. last month after she was allegedly thwacked on the head by a department store dummy.Newton said she was ambushed by a legless female mannequin at the company’s Westminster Mall store, a skirmish that left her with a bloodied scalp, a cracked tooth, recurring shoulder pain and numbness in her fingers.

The alleged attack was the latest in a string of mannequin mayhem incidents nationwide.

“There are a slew of lawsuits like this,” said mannequin manufacturer Barry Rosenberg, who joked that stores should run background checks on dummies before letting them mingle with shoppers.

Most of the cases involved mannequins toppling over onto customers, but an Indiana woman claimed she caught herpes from the lips of a CPR training dummy. She dropped her lawsuit against the American Red Cross in 2000 after further tests revealed that she didn’t have the disease, according to news reports.

The alleged Westminster Mall incident happened nearly a year ago in the women’s department at J.C. Penney. Newton said she wanted to buy a certain blouse, but the only one in her size was being worn by a mannequin.

When a salesclerk tried to remove the garment, the dummy’s arm flew off and struck Newton’s head, according to her lawsuit, which was filed in Orange County Superior Court and seeks unspecified damages.

“I felt a burning sensation,” she recalled. Then, blood cascaded down her face, she said.

Paramedics arrived and patched her gash. Feeling woozy but stable, Newton drove home, then had someone take her to Hoag Memorial Hospital Presbyterian in Newport Beach for further treatment.

” ‘My mom got beat up by a mannequin’ was the joke around my house,” Newton said.”

Negotiating for Prisoners

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You may recall that when Hizbollah first kidnapped the soldiers Nasrallah said that the only way to get them back would be a prisoner exchange. Well we all know where this led and now we find ourselves in a poor position.

There is a questionable ceasefire in place and the soldiers still haven’t been returned. There are rumors that they spent the war locked in the Iranian embassy in Beirut or that they were spirited off to Syria and or Iran. It is not clear, at least not to the best of my knowledge.

Not unlike so many others I very much want them to be safely returned to their homes and families, but I am quite concerned about what message would be sent by this. In fact I am not sure that there is any real way to support this.

Israel went to war and did not come back with them. Their kidnapping is not the only reason for the war, but it is part of it. What I am most concerned about is whether negotiating their return serves as an incentive to the terrorists to continue conducting these operations. Somehow, someway there has to be a solution that doesn’t involve giving that kind of hope and incentive away.

Beyond that, let’s take a look at who Hizbollah wants released. One of the main guys is Samir Kuntar:

“Abu Abbas, the former head of a Palestinian terrorist group who was captured in Iraq on April 15, is infamous for masterminding the 1985 hijacking of the Italian cruise ship Achille Lauro. But there are probably few who remember why Abbas’s terrorists held the ship and its 400-plus passengers hostage for two days. It was to gain the release of a Lebanese terrorist named Samir Kuntar, who is locked up in an Israeli prison for life. Kuntar’s name is all but unknown to the world. But I know it well. Because almost a quarter of a century ago, Kuntar murdered my family.

It was a murder of unimaginable cruelty, crueler even than the murder of Leon Klinghoffer, the American tourist who was shot on the Achille Lauro and dumped overboard in his wheelchair. Kuntar’s mission against my family, which never made world headlines, was also masterminded by Abu Abbas. And my wish now is that this terrorist leader should be prosecuted in the United States, so that the world may know of all his terrorist acts, not the least of which is what he did to my family on April 22, 1979.

It had been a peaceful Sabbath day. My husband, Danny, and I had picnicked with our little girls, Einat, 4, and Yael, 2, on the beach not far from our home in Nahariya, a city on the northern coast of Israel, about six miles south of the Lebanese border. Around midnight, we were asleep in our apartment when four terrorists, sent by Abu Abbas from Lebanon, landed in a rubber boat on the beach two blocks away. Gunfire and exploding grenades awakened us as the terrorists burst into our building. They had already killed a police officer. As they charged up to the floor above ours, I opened the door to our apartment. In the moment before the hall light went off, they turned and saw me. As they moved on, our neighbor from the upper floor came running down the stairs. I grabbed her and pushed her inside our apartment and slammed the door.

Outside, we could hear the men storming about. Desperately, we sought to hide. Danny helped our neighbor climb into a crawl space above our bedroom; I went in behind her with Yael in my arms. Then Danny grabbed Einat and was dashing out the front door to take refuge in an underground shelter when the terrorists came crashing into our flat.

They held Danny and Einat while they searched for me and Yael, knowing there were more people in the apartment. I will never forget the joy and the hatred in their voices as they swaggered about hunting for us, firing their guns and throwing grenades. I knew that if Yael cried out, the terrorists would toss a grenade into the crawl space and we would be killed. So I kept my hand over her mouth, hoping she could breathe. As I lay there, I remembered my mother telling me how she had hidden from the Nazis during the Holocaust. “This is just like what happened to my mother,” I thought.

As police began to arrive, the terrorists took Danny and Einat down to the beach. There, according to eyewitnesses, one of them shot Danny in front of Einat so that his death would be the last sight she would ever see. Then he smashed my little girl’s skull in against a rock with his rifle butt. That terrorist was Samir Kuntar.

By the time we were rescued from the crawl space, hours later, Yael, too, was dead. In trying to save all our lives, I had smothered her.

A man like Kuntar does not deserve freedom. The cost is too high.

Call Me Ishmael- In Search Of the Perfect Post

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“Call Me Ishmael.” Thanks to Herman Melville I cannot take credit for the opening line of this post, but I can thank him for helping me to set the tone. I am on a journey, a quest to find the perfect post. That is my own white whale.

I rarely am ever satisfied with my writing. It is always lacking. The rhythm, the rhyme, the tone, the words are not quite what I want. I feel like Tantalus. The eloquence I seek is always just beyond my reach.

As I surf the blogosphere I come across others who do such a good job turning a phrase. I stumble onto writers whose command of the language is superior to my own and in turn I am reminded of just how hard I need to work to improve.

If memory serves Robert has said on more than one occasion that writing is rewriting. I understand and appreciate that. Writing can almost always be improved upon. It is a practice that I should take on. I should spend more time rewriting and revising my work but…

I don’t do it because I don’t like doing it and in my blog I feel that I can get by without it. I blog by feel. I write what sits on my soul and I do it through a style that I think of as being stream-of-consciousness.

You, the reader are granted access to my unedited thoughts. Ok, that is not completely true, there is some minor editing. But the reality is that there really is very little of it. It passes from my mind to the keyboard and there you have it.

It is a topic that I have touched upon in previous posts, why I blog that is. I would be lying if I said that I didn’t care about comments. Ultimately I write for myself and would continue even if no one said anything, but that doesn’t mean that I don’t appreciate the feedback and the dialogue.

In terms of comments the most popular post I ever created is called What Do You Call Your Blog. In my experience the posts that receive the most feedback usually are about blogging.

In my search for the perfect post I have learned many things. The most important of these lessons is the reminder that writing is an exercise and like other exercises it can be improved upon. My suggestion is to read, read, read and write, write, write.

Read as much as you can. Look at how others construct their posts, their stories, their sentences and their novels. But never forget to just keep writing. The More that you do it the Easier it Becomes.

A List Of Things About Me

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I received a request to try and create list of things about myself. I don’t have any real direction so I am going to just throw it out there and we’ll see if it is remotely interesting. (originally posted here.)

  1. I have a problem with brevity, I am naturally long winded.
  2. Although I can be gregarious I can be exceptionally quiet.
  3. I can be the life of the party or the shyest guy in the room.
  4. I am a hopeless romantic.
  5. I love movies that have a character that has loved and lost- Casablanca and Unforgiven come to mind.
  6. I am exceptionally stubborn. I can maintain my position against the world, even at the expense of cutting off my nose to spite my face. I am working on that.
  7. I can bark like a dog. It sounds like a very large dog and I have used it on many occasions for many purposes.
  8. When I was 12 I called the police on the FBI.
  9. I was evacuated from a Forest Fire when I was 16 and have been through several major earthquakes.
  10. I used to be able to curl 150 pounds and benchpress more than 300. Now I find putting up 200 to be challenging.
  11. I am a Peace Corps baby. My parents met in Ecuador but I was born in Los Angeles.
  12. My first car was a 1969 Dodge Dart Swinger. That was followed by a 1977 Cheverolet Impala Station Wagon. Then I had a 1977 Camaro, it was Blue. That was followed by a 1990 Toyota Camry Station Wagon. That was followed by a 1996 Honda Accord and a 2000 Honda CRV.
  13. I took my Dart offroading, did donuts in the quad at my high school, drove through trash cans, shopping carts and endless other barriers that we would assemble.
  14. In high school I helped an underclassman sneak out by allowing him to hide in the trunk of the Dart. I didn’t want to do it but he begged me for a month and I finally gave in. I drove for about 3 miles before I let him out, but not before I hit every speed bump and dip I could find. When he got out of the car he was covered in a ton of muck, not to mention some oil I kept in the trunk.
  15. I went to Israel for the first time in 1985. Before I left I made sure to get a haircut because I had heard that the barbers there were terrible. While in the chair I kept encouraging my barber to cut my hair really short. By the time he was done my head was shaved. My mother was furious.
  16. One of the guys in my group started calling me Rambo. When we met the other kids on the trip they wanted to know why that was my nickname. It didn’t take long for us to make up all sorts of stupid stories about how I was in the army, or had saved a family at the airport from being robbed. None of them were true, but I thought that they were pretty cool. I was 16, what did I know.
  17. I am afraid of the dark and have been for as long as I can remember. I once tried to overcome my fear by walking alone at night through the woods for a couple of miles. It helped a little, but sometimes I still feel like that scared little boy.
  18. I have Irritable Bowel Syndrome. My biggest fear is that one day I won’t make it to the bathroom in time. I have used all sorts of places and have some pretty good stories about my bathroom escapades.
  19. One morning when I was having trouble I pulled into the parking lot of a diner. The men’s room was locked so I ran into the womens. Fortunately it was empty. While I was in the middle of my business two women walked in and spent a ridiculous amount of time primping and talking at the mirror. When they finally finished and left I ran out, washed my hands and ducked out of there. A policeman saw me walk out and stopped me. I didn’t know how to respond to his questions so I answered him in Hebrew. He finally decided that I must not have spoken English and let me go.
  20. I could eat pizza every day and never get tired of it.
  21. In college I tore the doors off of a pick up truck at my fraternity house. It was an old truck that had been sitting out in the rain for about 5 years. It didn’t work and no one wanted to take responsibility for getting rid of it. One day after having had my heart torn out by an ex-girlfriend I took out my frustration on the truck. It took me about an hour to kill the first door. I was surprised when the door came off and of course had to see if I could do the same to the other door. It only took 45 minutes to tear that one off.
  22. I love watching The Worlds Strongest Man Contests on ESPN. They are goofy, ridiculous, but oh so much fun.
  23. I loved Gladiator. One of my favorite movie lines is “Unleash Hell”
  24. Speaking of favorite quotes here are a few from Casablanca ” “Of all the gin joints in all the towns in all the world, she walks into mine.” “Rick: How long was it we had, honey?Ilsa: I didn’t count the days.Rick: Well, I did. Every one of them. Mostly, I remember the last one, the wild finish. A guy standing on a station platform in the rain, with a comical look on his face, because his insides have been kicked out.”
  25. I was in the pilot episode of a game show called “The Grudge Match.” The show consisted of three rounds in which you fought an opponent. I was reluctantly matched up against a woman.The first round we had kind of a pillow fight. They gave us “pillow swords.” I let her smack me with it a few times and then took it out of her and started to popping her with her sword and mine. Continued
  26. The next round we were given big sticks that had pillows on the ends, they looked like giant cue tips. She kept trying to hit me in the crotch with her stick and I kept shaking my head at her. Eventually I swept her legs out from under her and that ended the round.The final round was boxing. They gave her regulation 16 ounce gloves to use. I was given oversized 32 ounce gloves. Continued again
  27. They were monstrous and if i held them up I couldn’t see her. I spent a large part of that round trying to avoid having to hit her, but she had no compunction about hitting me, especially below the belt. I finally got fed up with it and hit her back. I didn’t hit her hard, but I would be lying if I said that I didn’t get a little satisfaction out watchin her hit the canvas. There is only so many times that you can let someone do something like that before you react.
  28. In my life I have considered working as a sports writer, rabbi, lawyer and teacher.
  29. I once took out a singles ad. I got 24 responses and went out with 17 of the women who responded to my ad. For a brief time I dated 3 of them. It was cool because since they all had found me through the ad they knew that there were other women and no one gave me any grief about the others. Eventually I narrowed it down to one and had a girlfriend for about 8 months or so.
  30. If I was single again I would not use an ad. It was a ton of fun, but it was an incredible amount of work to date that many people. Too hard to get to know anyone seriously when there are so many others, but it was fun while it lasted.
  31. In college I lost a “push-up” contest. The goal was to do more consecutive push-ups then the others in the competition. I did a little more than 700. The winner did close to 850.
  32. I love to read anything and everything. My profile lists a very small selection of the authors I enjoy.
  33. I love history, it fascinates me.
  34. I wore glasses or contacts for 20 years. I had the lasik surgery four years ago and never looked back. It is amazing.
  35. I wish that I had James Earl Jones voice. I like mine, but his is on a different level.
  36. I have worked as a writer, editor, teacher, youth director, cross country coach, P.E. coach, sold copiers, ad space (online and print), run a marketing department and sold lemonade.
  37. Many years ago I was told that a great way to relieve stress was to just go outside and scream. I have never done this outside, but I admit to having done so in my car. And I admit to being scared at the outpouring of emotion. I always feel a little more vulnerable afterwards. FWIW, I don’t think that I have done this more than three times and never while actually driving.
  38. I have been accused of being too intense. I have also been accused of not taking anything seriously. The answer lies in between.
  39. I have a body that was built for demolition, grace is not something that is used to describe me. I am not a klutz, I play many sports, some of them well, but I am just kind of big.
  40. I am a daydreamer. I love to spend time lost in thought about things, people, places and all sorts of stuff.
  41. I once believed that I would never be married. I have a bad case of wanderlust and I didn’t think that I could be in one place with one person for any length of time.
  42. When I was younger sometimes I would get in my car and just drive until something caught my eye.
  43. I am a storyteller. I am good at coming up with stories off the cuff and just running with them.
  44. Everything in this list is true, but I have had to work hard at making sure I didn’t include anything that was fabricated. I really wanted to and I may still do it yet.
  45. The best thing I have ever done in my life is become a parent. It is the hardest and the scariest, but still the best.
  46. I used to say that I wanted six children. I still do, but I am not sure that it is a reasonable goal.
  47. In college I told one of my girlfriends that I wanted to have six children. She told me that I was selfish and crazy, that it was unfair to ask one woman to bear that many children for me. I told her thatI told her that was very spiritual and that I would do as my forefathers did. I said that I would spare her the full load and offered to marry her and her two sisters. Not only did I offer my hand in marriage but health, retirement and vacation benefits.She didn’t think that was funny. I still smile about it.
  48. The scariest thing about being a parent is my own memory of the things that I did. I cringe sometimes at the thought of my children doing as I did.
  49. I sometimes think that G-d gave me a daughter to punish/teach me a lesson. I love her dearly, but again when I think about boys/men and girls it makes me crazy. I work out harder so that when I am 50 those boys who come looking for my daughter will think twice about it. I don’t really think that it will work, I never was intimidated by fathers, but maybe it will work for me. Who knows.
  50. I almost never proofread my posts. I don’t spell check them and unless someone points out a mistake it sits there, a siren notifying the world of my silly error.
  51. I always wanted to be able to speak with an Irish accent. I don’t know why, but I do. I can do a pretty good Southern accent. If I am speaking with someone with a drawl it just sneaks out of me. It can be strong enough to fool people into thinking that I am from Dixie. Of course they get a little irate when they hear me speak in my normal voice, but that is a story for a different day.
  52. I love Didi Reese Cookies.
  53. When I was about seven we had an Old English Sheepdog named Fluffy. She was wild. She ate shoes, the door, and assorted odds and ends. She used to go tearing through the house at top speed. I remember her knocking my sisters over like bowling pins. Eventually my parents gave her away and I cried.
  54. When I was 24 we had to put our dog to sleep. I took her to the vet by myself and I held her paw as they injected her. I watched the lights go out in her eyes. It was terrible. Her kidneys were failing, she could barely see and she many other problems, but it was still hard. I stayed in the room with her and held her dead body. I cried then too. It was rough.
  55. I could extend this silly list of nonsense, but I am not sure that it is even worth posting so I’ll cut it off here for now.

Hollywood Takes a Stand Against Terror

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I was glad to read about this.

NICOLE Kidman has made a public stand against terrorism.

“The actress, joined by 84 other high-profile Hollywood stars, directors, studio bosses and media moguls, has taken out a powerfully-worded full page advertisement in today’s Los Angeles Times newspaper.

It specifically targets “terrorist organisations” such as Hezbollah in Lebanon and Hamas in Palestine.

“We the undersigned are pained and devastated by the civilian casualties in Israel and Lebanon caused by terrorist actions initiated by terrorist organisations such as Hezbollah and Hamas,” the ad reads.

“If we do not succeed in stopping terrorism around the world, chaos will rule and innocent people will continue to die.

“We need to support democratic societies and stop terrorism at all costs.”

A who’s who of Hollywood heavyweights joined Kidman on the ad.

The actors listed included: Michael Douglas, Dennis Hopper, Sylvester Stallone, Bruce Willis, Danny De Vito, Don Johnson, James Woods, Kelly Preston, Patricia Heaton and William Hurt.

Directors Ridley Scott, Tony Scott, Michael Mann, Dick Donner and Sam Raimi also signed their names.”

From YNET:

“Actor Adam Sandler was present at one of the many briefings the consul general gave this week. At the end of the briefing, Sandler announced that he would personally donate USD 100,000 to the children of the north and south, and about 400 Playstation games purchased by the actor are expected to be transferred to the Foreign Ministry in Jerusalem in the coming days.”