Top Model Baby Belle: Elton John- Candle In The Wind Marilyn Monroe

Source:Top Model Baby Belle- Hollywood Babydoll Marilyn Monroe.

Source:The New Democrat 

The best tribute to Marilyn Monroe because it perfectly sums up Marilyn Monroe's life is that she was a candle in the wind that blew out far too soon and left a huge hole that no one else could fill, or has filled since.  She was the best looking woman who has ever come from Hollywood and also a good actress and a hell of singer.  She was also very funny, and a lot of that humor was intentional, and even though she is stereotyped as a dumb blond bimbo, she had a quick wit and mind but many inner problems as well.

Marilyn Monroe was dead at 36 in 1962 from a drug overdose. It was a probable suicide but in a lot of ways summed up her life perfectly about a woman so perfect on the outside with so much talent but not much going on in the inside with regard to the ability to manage her talents and abilities. She was a woman who could attract the President of the United States and the U.S. Attorney General but was incapable  of managing her own affairs.

She was a goddess on the outside but on the inside thought of herself as a loser without self-confidence and someone who apparently didn't see much point in living and didn't enjoy life. She had the talent and ability to work for anyone but a childlike inability to manage her life. She was lost outside her crib and could not manage life in the real world.
Source:Top Model Baby Belle

HBO Films: Magic & Bird a Courtship of Rivals

Source:The New Democrat

This film is about the two men who saved the National Basketball Association in the 1980s. And to know that, you have to be familiar with the NBA back in the late 1970s. The fact that the NBA finals were shown on tape-delay television means the game is played at one point. The network back then was CBS and CBS Sports, which recorded the game and broadcast it. The game was played at 8 or 9 pm, but then CBS Sports aired the game at midnight after the local TV news.

Regarding Earvin Magic Johnson's and Larry Legend Bird's second or third season, sports fans wanted to see the NBA again and their ratings were back up and all of their games are now being shown live. The reason for this is that both players were great to see, but why were they great to see: Because of what they were about, which wasn't themselves but their teams and winning. All they were interested in was winning, and as the great NBA basketball head coach Pat Riley said, Magic and Legend were about team first and team last and everything else in between and nothing else.

The only thing that Magic and Legend cared about was winning and the fact that they were the two best. Players, at least of their generation playing for the two best teams of this era, and playing in opposite conferences, Larry Bird playing for the Boston Celtics in the Eastern Conference, and Earvin Johnson playing for the Los Angeles Lakers in the Western Conference, and for either to win the NBA finals, most likely they would have to beat the Celtics or Lakers. It meant for the two best team players of all time to win the championship. They would have to beat each other to do that.

I am not sure whether Larry Bird and Earvin Johnson would have been as great as they were had they not played in the same era and were from the same generation. Had they been clearly the best players of their era without anyone to push them for the top and had the Celtics been the best team of this era without the Lakers to push them and vice-versa I am not sure they would have been as great as they were without the other player and team pushing them. Because part of Legend's and Magic's greatness was the other pushing them to make them as great as they were:  the competition of the rivalry.

Mzybert: Rounders (1998) The Final Hand

Source:Mzybert- Matt Damon as Mike McDermott.

Source:The New Democrat 

Great scene because this is really about a guy Mike McDermott who at best is a part-time law student, but who really makes a living as a gambler a poker player. Who makes his money reading other people’s faces and mannerism’s who is in a deep hole of ten-thousand dollars. Actually a hole he inherited from his friend Worm who ran up a big debt losing in poker and Mike is trying to help his irresponsible friend out. And that is where he get’s into trouble because his friend is not good for the debt.

So Mike goes into this game hours away from having to pay his debt off. Or get his ass kicked by gangsters he owes the money to thanks to Worm. So he goes to the one guy who has the money that he could win from him to get the money he needs to pay off the debt. And so he’s down to his last play late in the game fourth and twenty. And he comes through and makes the play or risk getting his ass handed to him and perhaps not surviving the experience.

This is the ultimate scene about one guy putting everything on the line and coming out on top. Beating the best poker player in New York City by not getting lucky which is really not what poker is about. But by using his poker skills to read KGB and beat him at his own game and not only wins enough money to pay off all of his debts. But walk away from the game with a profit and he kicks KGB’s ass at his own game and walks away the winner.
Source:Mzybert

Erik Schneider: Journey On a Bike

Source:The New Democrat

This story is almost exactly a week old, actually more like ten days. But a week from last Wednesday the Wednesday before the Super Bowl, I took my bike out for a ride on a cold late Maryland afternoon. Which isn’t uncommon for me, but what was uncommon was that the gears weren’t working properly. The gears were stuck in low gear if not the lowest gear making the bike very difficult to accelerate. Imagine driving a car on the road especially a highway with the top speed of twenty miles an hour. Well that is what it is like riding a bicycle stuck in low gear.

The next day somehow the gears are back to running normally and I didn’t do a thing to the bike. Or have anyone look at it or fix it, but the gears were back to running normally. But last Friday I had a bigger problem with the gears in that they were now stuck in high gear. So I’m trying to ride up steep hills with the bike in top gear. Kinda like trying to push a piano up a flight of steps with just your hands. Lucky for me I’m an avid rider and I’m in very good physical and biking shape. When they were stuck in top gear I knew I had a serious problem and needed to get the bike to the shop.

So last Saturday I take the bike in high gear ride it all the way over to Big Wheel Bikes in downtown Bethesda, Maryland. About two miles from where I live and this is a place that gives excellent service. I’ve been a regular customer there for almost four years now since the summer of 2010. And they told me they didn’t have the parts to fix the gear changer on the bike. But that I should call them back Tuesday and the manager there would call around and see if he can get the new parts by then, but he wasn’t sure if he could at all.

The guys at Big Wheel even suggested that if I didn’t want to wait that long which I didn’t I bike ride everyday, that maybe I should take the bike over to Griffin’s Bikes just up the street. And maybe they could fix it that day, Griffin’s just happens to be one of Big Wheel’s competitors. I use to be a regular customer of Griffin’s but in late 2009 I go in there just for a tune-up which are normally like three-hundred bucks for my old bike. The bike is four years old at this point and guy there was basically trying to sell me a new bike. Saying that if he gave it a tune-up I might only get a couple more months out of that bike.

I take the bike over to Big Wheel in the summer of 2010 and get another tune-up after the last tune-up came from Griffin’s in the fall of 2009 and they fixed the bike right up and I got almost another four years out of it. I go to Big Wheel partly because of my last experience at Griffin’s, but also because Big Wheel was suggested to me by two people who know a lot about bikes that I respect. The last two years for my old bike were pretty rough. The whole bike except for the base of it has essentially been rebuilt including the breaks and the gears would’ve had to have been replaced as well.

I go to Griffins last Saturday because Big Wheel couldn’t fix the gears right away. And the guy there asks me if he can look the bike all over because he very quickly was seeing a lot that wasn’t right. About the bike and basically concluded that what it would take to rebuild the bike it would simply be cheaper to get a new bike. And what I asked him was how about if you completely repair the old bike and I’ll get a new bike from you and use the old bike as a spare. He told me that fixing the old bike would be somewhere around a thousand dollars and it wouldn’t be worth the time. So I decided to dump the old bike except for the parts that still worked like the basket, headlight, backlight and so forth. And had them transferred to my new bike.

I bought the old bike in the summer of 2005 for five-hundred dollars. I bought my new Trek mountain bike today that has all the new features as my old 2005 Giant Boulder. Great bike by the way when it was running for six-hundred and fifty dollars. Griffins saved me something like four-hundred dollars by getting me a new bike. And the thing I can’t figure out is how come Big Wheel didn’t figure out that my old bike needed a hell of a lot of new work on it. On top of the work I had on it late last year and the summer as well and just tell me, “how about we dump this bike and sell you a new one and save you some money”.

Radical Films: House Un-American Activities: Looking For Communists in Hollywood

Source:The New Democrat

The House Un-American Activities Committee and then later the Joe McCarthy Government Oversight Committee in the Senate were classic cases of guilt by association. Because they assumed some Americans were Un-American and not deserving of being Americans simply because of people they may have associated with and political positions they may have held. Not because of any illegal activities they have been involved in. Which is how we are supposed to judge people’s involvement in criminal activity.

The United States a liberal democracy where Americans have the right to believe what they believe. And say what they want to say with a few exceptions. Like encouraging violence or libeling people without any basis in fact. Yelling fire in tight public spaces. But for the most part our own politics is our own business. And we are free to either express our own political opinions, or opinions about any other subjects or not. And not be held criminally libel because of what we believe.

But what we got instead from these Congressional communist investigative committees was guilt by association that ruined a lot of good productive Americans lives. And for what, so people on the far-right and people simply just looking for political advancement, Senator Joe McCarthy comes to mind, could have a big issue and use it to advance their own political careers. No matter who they may hurt along the way which is about as Un-American as it gets.

Associated Press: Today in History For January 26th

Source:The New Democrat

1998 the year that could’ve been for President Bill Clinton that instead turned out to be the year that wasn’t. Because a fifty-year old man couldn’t get enough of a White House intern. A year where he wanted to reform and shore up entitlement programs, expand pensions and health insurance. He had a very big agenda going into 1998, but that all gone because of an affair he had with an intern. Just goes to show how stupid he was to have this affair and everything that he cost himself and his party as. A result that again going into 1998 probably had an opportunity to win back the House of Representatives. Bill Clinton similar to Richard Nixon had more than his share of enemies in the opposition party. People who were simply looking to bring them down. Where Nixon and Clinton made mistakes was to give them the hammers to hit them with their own personal behavior.

Bill Clinton, I don’t want to say is the Jack Kennedy of his generation when it came to his sexual appetite. Because lets face it, JFK was a morbidly obese man when it came to sexual activity. Had he not had this little job as President of the United States, perhaps the only thing he would’ve had done was to have sex. And maybe there would be a hundred little JFK’s running around today with perhaps a hundred different mothers, with the Jack being the father of all of them. Bill Clinton (at least as far as we know) didn’t have sex with a different women every time he was out-of-town on his own, or when Hillary went out-of-town on her own. But when President Clinton saw a women and in Monica Lewinski’s case, a teenage girl as far as how cute she was and maturity level that he liked, he made his move.

And without the Paula Jones bogus lawsuit, I mean seriously why would a man as handsome, charming, funny and intelligent as Bill Clinton, want anything to do with Paula Jones. Especially when he already had Jennifer Flowers which was a real affair. But putting that all aside for a minute, without her lawsuit against the President, Monica Lewinski’s name is probably never famous. She didn’t want this story to come out. And President Clinton for obvious as water is wet reasons didn’t want this story to come out either. The whole Monica affair just reminds me of how stupid even the most brightest and politically gifted people can be when they don’t have discipline. And that is one thing that Bill Clinton will always have in common with Jack Kennedy.

Associated Press: NY Yankees 3B Alex Rodriguez Out For Entire 2014 Season

Source:The New Democrat. 

Is anyone surprised by this. We knew A-Rod was going to get hit big for use of drugs that are illegal in Major League Baseball. And what A-Rod has been doing what the last six months or so is trying to buy time in hope that he would be bailed out. And have some shot of playing in 2014. If you are dumb enough to illegal drugs in MLB, then you’re dumb enough to get caught and more than deserve the time that you get for them. He knows about his physical health and the state of his playing career better than anyone. And what a one year suspension could do to him in his late thirties. Especially since his career has been in decline the last few years anyway. And yet he takes this big risk with the rest of his career and will now pay the price for getting caught.