SPAM is the word used to describe a message sent to you via E-mail that are basically junk mail. The official meaning of SPAM in terms of the Internet is "Self-Promotional Advertising Message"
The real meaning of SPAM:
Single Posting Addressed Multiple times
Stupid People Are Mandatory
Some People Are Morons
Stupid Person At Machine
Sexual Perverts And Moneygrabbers
Sad Person After Money
Stupid Pricks Are Annoying Me
Sales Person Attacking Me
Stupid People Asking for Money
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Oneliners:
I bet Germans are like "Great, another WWII movie.”
The Bill of Rights passing in 1791 was the post-launch patch for the Constitution people waited four years to get.
When Glinda the Good Witch asks Dorothy if she's a good witch or a bad witch, then immediately tells her that only bad witches are ugly, she's pretty much implying that Dorothy is kind of fugly.
Samwell Tarly becomes the ultimate maester, learning the secret of immortality. Now he lives under the name George R.R. Martin and is writing the story of his youth.
Nick is a nickname.
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VA Tests ‘Service Shark Therapy’ With Mixed Results
EVERGLADES CITY, Fla. — The Department of Veterans Affairs is scheduled to release a study evaluating the use of large sharks as therapy animals, and the official outcome is “inconclusive” regarding their effectiveness supporting veterans emotionally and physically, sources say.
The results are disappointing for the VA, which is eager to regain the trust of veterans after nearly a decade of scandal, incompetence, and mismanagement. They reportedly researched several obscure “avant garde” therapies and a VA spokesman confirmed, officials are “leaving no stone unturned.”
"We are exploring all of our options, no matter the cost or possibility of personal injury," said Noller. "Whether it is 'Squids For Squids,' 'Falcons For Blue Falcons,' or 'Seals for SEALS,' honestly, we don't care. Our goal is to show progress, and to keep veterans distracted until we find a way out of the monumental hole we dug for ourselves."
The charity chosen for this particular study, "Great Whites For Warriors," is the only service animal organization that employs Carcharodon carcharias as therapy animals. Helmed by Florida alligator farm entrepreneur and Chief Executive Officer William "Big Willie" Fallgren, the organization seeks to pair qualified veterans with their gentle "sociopaths of the deep."
Study participants, however, had mixed reviews about how much healing actually went on. In fact, a small sample of respondents were split down the middle, especially when left alone, unsupervised, and within striking distance. But those who survived raved at how the therapy, while unorthodox, changed their lives in a positive way.
"I remember when I was just a single amputee, looking for answers," said double amputee retired Staff Sgt. Barry Goodall. He was paired with his therapy shark, Linda, nearly two years ago, after he lost his leg in Afghanistan.
"I'll never forget that feeling I got when I first saw her — eyes rolled back in her head, jaws extended," said Goodall stroking the shark tank with his prosthetic hook. "The love of an apex predator is a special thing, a once in a lifetime encounter."
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Sure, companies say they're sensitive to their employees' cultural heritages, but show up on casual Friday wearing a necklace made from the ears of your vanquished enemies and all hell breaks loose.
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One man's hobby was fishing, he spent all his weekends near the river or lake, paying no attention to weather.
One Sunday, early in the morning, he went to the river, as usual. It was cold and raining, so he decided to return back to his house. He came in, went to his bedroom, undressed and laid near his wife.
"What terrible weather today honey," he said to her. "Yes. And my idiot husband went fishing!"
Issue of the Times;
Love is Not Enough by Mark Manson
In 1967, John Lennon wrote a song called, “All You Need is Love.” He also beat both of his wives, abandoned one of his children, verbally abused his gay Jewish manager with homophobic and anti-semitic slurs, and once had a camera crew film him lying naked in his bed for an entire day.
Thirty-five years later, Trent Reznor from Nine Inch Nails wrote a song called “Love is Not Enough.” Reznor, despite being famous for his shocking stage performances and his grotesque and disturbing videos, got clean from all drugs and alcohol, married one woman, had two children with her, and then cancelled entire albums and tours so that he could stay home and be a good husband and father.
One of these two men had a clear and realistic understanding of love. One of them did not. One of these men idealized love as the solution to all of his problems. One of them did not. One of these men was probably a narcissistic asshole. One of them was not.
In our culture, many of us idealize love. We see it as some lofty cure-all for all of life’s problems. Our movies and our stories and our history all celebrate it as life’s ultimate goal, the final solution for all of our pain and struggle. And because we idealize love, we overestimate it. As a result, our relationships pay a price.
When we believe that “all we need is love,” then like Lennon, we’re more likely to ignore fundamental values such as respect, humility and commitment towards the people we care about. After all, if love solves everything, then why bother with all the other stuff — all of the hard stuff?
But if, like Reznor, we believe that “love is not enough,” then we understand that healthy relationships require more than pure emotion or lofty passions. We understand that there are things more important in our lives and our relationships than simply being in love. And the success of our relationships hinges on these deeper and more important values.
THREE HARSH TRUTHS ABOUT LOVE
The problem with idealizing love is that it causes us to develop unrealistic expectations about what love actually is and what it can do for us. These unrealistic expectations then sabotage the very relationships we hold dear in the first place. Allow me to illustrate:
1. Love does not equal compatibility. Just because you fall in love with someone doesn’t necessarily mean they’re a good partner for you to be with over the long term. Love is an emotional process; compatibility is a logical process. And the two don’t bleed into one another very well.
It’s possible to fall in love with somebody who doesn’t treat us well, who makes us feel worse about ourselves, who doesn’t hold the same respect for us as we do for them, or who has such a dysfunctional life themselves that they threaten to bring us down with them.
It’s possible to fall in love with somebody who has different ambitions or life goals that are contradictory to our own, who holds different philosophical beliefs or worldviews that clash with our own sense of reality.
It’s possible to fall in love with somebody who sucks for us and our happiness.
That may sound paradoxical, but it’s true.
When I think of all of the disastrous relationships I’ve seen or people have emailed me about, many (or most) of them were entered into on the basis of emotion — they felt that “spark” and so they just dove in head first. Forget that he was a born-again Christian alcoholic and she was an acid-dropping bisexual necrophiliac. It just felt right.
And then six months later, when she’s throwing his shit out onto the lawn and he’s praying to Jesus twelve times a day for her salvation, they look around and wonder, “Gee, where did it go wrong?”
The truth is, it went wrong before it even began.
When dating and looking for a partner, you must use not only your heart, but your mind. Yes, you want to find someone who makes your heart flutter and your farts smell like cherry popsicles. But you also need to evaluate a person’s values, how they treat themselves, how they treat those close to them, their ambitions and their worldviews in general. Because if you fall in love with someone who is incompatible with you…well, as the ski instructor from South Park once said, you’re going to have a bad time.
2. Love does not solve your relationship problems. My first girlfriend and I were madly in love with each other. We also lived in different cities, had no money to see each other, had families who hated each other, and went through weekly bouts of meaningless drama and fighting.
And every time we fought, we’d come back to each other the next day and make up and remind each other how crazy we were about one another and that none of those little things matter because we’re omg sooooooo in love and we’ll find a way to work it out and everything will be great, just you wait and see. Our love made us feel like we were overcoming our issues, when on a practical level, absolutely nothing had changed.
As you can imagine, none of our problems got resolved. The fights repeated themselves. The arguments got worse. Our inability to ever see each other hung around our necks like an albatross. We were both self-absorbed to the point where we couldn’t even communicate that effectively. Hours and hours talking on the phone with nothing actually said. Looking back, there was no hope that it was going to last. Yet we kept it up for three fucking years!
After all, love conquers all, right?
Unsurprisingly, that relationship burst into flames and crashed like the Hindenburg being doused in jet fuel. The break up was ugly. And the big lesson I took away from it was this: while love may make you feel better about your relationship problems, it doesn’t actually solve any of your relationship problems.
The roller coaster of emotions can be intoxicating, each high feeling even more important and more valid than the one before, but unless there’s a stable and practical foundation beneath your feet, that rising tide of emotion will eventually come and wash it all away.
3. Love is not always worth sacrificing yourself. One of the defining characteristics of loving someone is that you are able to think outside of yourself and your own needs to help care for another person and their needs as well.
But the question that doesn’t get asked often enough is exactly what are you sacrificing, and is it worth it?
In loving relationships, it’s normal for both people to occasionally sacrifice their own desires, their own needs, and their own time for one another. I would argue that this is normal and healthy and a big part of what makes a relationship so great.
But when it comes to sacrificing one’s self-respect, one’s dignity, one’s physical body, one’s ambitions and life purpose, just to be with someone, then that same love becomes problematic. A loving relationship is supposed to supplement our individual identity, not damage it or replace it. If we find ourselves in situations where we’re tolerating disrespectful or abusive behavior, then that’s essentially what we’re doing: we’re allowing our love to consume us and negate us, and if we’re not careful, it will leave us as a shell of the person we once were.
THE FRIENDSHIP TEST
One of the oldest pieces of relationship advice in the book is, “You and your partner should be best friends.” Most people look at that piece of advice in the positive: I should spend time with my partner like I do my best friend; I should communicate openly with my partner like I do with my best friend; I should have fun with my partner like I do with my best friend.
But people should also look at it in the negative: Would you tolerate your partner’s negative behaviors in your best friend?
Amazingly, when we ask ourselves this question honestly, in most unhealthy and codependent relationships, the answer is “no.”
I know a young woman who just got married. She was madly in love with her husband. And despite the fact that he had been “between jobs” for more than a year, showed no interest in planning the wedding, often ditched her to take surfing trips with his friends, and her friends and family raised not-so-subtle concerns about him, she happily married him anyway.
But once the emotional high of the wedding wore off, reality set in. A year into their marriage, he’s still “between jobs,” he trashes the house while she’s at work, gets angry if she doesn’t cook dinner for him, and any time she complains he tells her that she’s “spoiled” and “arrogant.” Oh, and he still ditches her to take surfing trips with his friends.
And she got into this situation because she ignored all three of the harsh truths above. She idealized love. Despite being slapped in the face by all of the red flags he raised while dating him, she believed that their love signaled relationship compatibility. It didn’t. When her friends and family raised concerns leading up to the wedding, she believed that their love would solve their problems eventually. It didn’t. And now that everything had fallen into a steaming shit heap, she approached her friends for advice on how she could sacrifice herself even more to make it work.
And the truth is, it won’t.
Why do we tolerate behavior in our romantic relationships that we would never ever, ever tolerate in our friendships?
Imagine if your best friend moved in with you, trashed your place, refused to get a job or pay rent, demanded you cook dinner for them, and got angry and yelled at you any time you complained. That friendship would be over faster than Paris Hilton’s acting career.
Or another situation: a man’s girlfriend who was so jealous that she demanded passwords to all of his accounts and insisted on accompanying him on his business trips to make sure he wasn’t tempted by other women. His life was practically under 24/7 surveillance and you could see it wearing on his self-esteem. His self-worth dropped to nothing. She didn’t trust him to do anything. So he quit trusting himself to do anything.
Yet he stays with her! Why? Because he’s in love!
Remember this: The only way you can fully enjoy the love in your life is to choose to make something else more important in your life than love.
You can fall in love with a wide variety of people throughout the course of your life. You can fall in love with people who are good for you and people who are bad for you. You can fall in love in healthy ways and unhealthy ways. You can fall in love when you’re young and when you’re old. Love is not unique. Love is not special. Love is not scarce.
But your self-respect is. So is your dignity. So is your ability to trust. There can potentially be many loves throughout your life, but once you lose your self-respect, your dignity or your ability to trust, they are very hard to get back.
Love is a wonderful experience. It’s one of the greatest experiences life has to offer. And it is something everyone should aspire to feel and enjoy.
But like any other experience, it can be healthy or unhealthy. Like any other experience, it cannot be allowed to define us, our identities or our life purpose. We cannot let it consume us. We cannot sacrifice our identities and self-worth to it. Because the moment we do that, we lose love and we lose ourselves.
Because you need more in life than love. Love is great. Love is necessary. Love is beautiful. But love is not enough.
Quote of the Times;
Flocking is one of those fascinating phenomena that seem to defy explanation. How do hundreds of these small birds manage to fly in formation so well? For pigeons, there appears to be quite a bit of democracy involved.With the technology available today, we can put GPS trackers on pigeons and use computers to study their precise movements. Researchers learned that each member has a vote in the flock’s movements. Birds closer to the front of the flock have votes that carry more weight, although even the lowliest bird has some influence.Scientists call it a “democratic hierarchy.” Since the pigeons have an almost 360-degree range of vision, they can all see each other and react quickly. Even the lead bird can keep track of his followers without turning his head.The most influential pigeons are determined by raw speed. The bird who can get from point A to point B the fastest is usually in the lead.
Link of the Times;
https://www.chroniclesmagazine.org/