3311 Snork.

Monday, July 18, 2011

Evans(?), in a letter to the Kingston Daily Freeman: There is no necessary connection between the desire to lead and the ability to lead.... Leadership is more likely to be assumed by the aggressive than by the able and those who scramble to the top are more often motivated by their own inner torments than by any demand for their guidance.

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From http://www.fun1067.com/?page=1&cat=4 :

Posted Monday, July 18th, 2011
BORGATA CASINO NAILED FOR UNDERAGE GAMBLERS
29 suspected underage gamblers have been rounded up at the Borgata in Atlantic City, and casino regulators have seized more than $2,600 in cash. The New Jersey Division of Gaming Enforcement announced today that the gamblers were rounded up recently, and the money was taken as a forfeiture. The money will be given to special state programs that benefit from gaming. The decision was approved earlier this month, and announced today.

Let's see, 29 gamblers, $2,600, that's $90 each. Not exactly high rollers. That next to last sentence, "given to special state programs that benefit from gambling", cracked me up! Anyone want to take a guess as to what kind of programs? I'm stumped.

Only in New Jersey. You know, in any other state the money would be given to programs like Gamblers Anonymous.

Looked a little further. Other news outlets have now picked up the story (and they are now all using the same wording, different from the above wording), and they say:

The money will be split between state-funded programs to help senior citizens with prescription medication and transportation, and programs to help compulsive gamblers.

Oh. Ohhhhkaaaaaayyy. I wonder what the truth is.

When I see the exact same wording in every place I look, I don't believe it any more. Once upon a time, "reporters" did their own "reporting", and you could get different views of the same story, the truth being usually somewhere in the middle. Now, everyone copies the same story word for word, and you have to wonder if there was a slant, bias, agenda, of the original writer, and what it was. No way to know. Doesn't matter so much with this story (I suspect it was just a poor choice of words in the first rendition), but it's important for other matters.

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I have already eaten six fair-sized tomatoes from my tiny potted plant - two ripe and four as fried green. There are about 24 more tomatoes on it in various stages of development.

I'm getting anxious about the bell peppers. There are 14 peppers, growing slowly larger, but I don't think the largest is full sized yet. I want one now!

It's been putting out more flowers, but the flowers just drop off. It's not setting more peppers. I did some research, and it turns out that in high heat and/or high humidity, pepper pollen gets gummy and won't fertilize the flowers. Duh. So I hope there'll be a second crop later, when it gets cooler.
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