Girls in Kabul, Afghanistan hanging around.  When the religious medieval Taliban extremists see this they must crap their pants.

 

These were wild and crazy guys.

 

 

The Merry Pranksters were a group of people who formed around American author Ken Kesey in 1964 and sometimes lived communally at his homes in California and Oregon. The group promoted the use of psychedelic drugs. Their motto was Never Trust a Prankster.

Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters are noted for the sociological significance of a lengthy road trip they took in the summer of 1964, traveling across the United States in a psychedelic painted school bus enigmatically and variably labeled “Further” or “Furthur.” Their early escapades were chronicled by Tom Wolfe in The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test. Wolfe also documents a notorious 1966 trip on Further from Mexico through Houston, stopping to visit Kesey’s friend, novelist Larry McMurtry. Kesey was in flight from a drug charge at the time.

Notable members of the group include Kesey’s best friend Ken Babbs, Carolyn Garcia, and Neal Cassady. Stewart Brand, Paul Foster, the Grateful Dead, Del Close (then a lighting designer for the Grateful Dead), Wavy Gravy, Paul Krassner, and “Kentucky Fab Five” writers Ed McClanahan and Gurney Norman (who overlapped with Kesey and Babbs as creative writing graduate students at Stanford University) were associated with the group to varying degrees.

 

 

On June 17, 1964, Kesey and 13 Merry Pranksters boarded “Further” at Kesey’s ranch in La Honda, California, and set off eastward. Kesey wanted to see what would happen when hallucinogenic-inspired spontaneity confronted what he saw as the banality and conformity of American society. One author has suggested that the bus trip reversed the historic American westward movement of the centuries.

The trip’s original purpose was to celebrate the publication of Kesey’s novel Sometimes a Great Notion and to visit the 1964 World’s Fair in New York City. The Pranksters were enthusiastic users of marijuana, amphetamines, and LSD, and in the process of their journey they are said to have “turned on” many people by introducing them to these drugs.

The psychedelically painted bus had its stated destination as being “further.” This was the goal of the Merry Pranksters, a destination that could only be obtained through the expansion of one’s own perceptions of reality. They traveled cross-country giving LSD to anyone who was willing to try it (LSD was legal in the United States until October 1966).

 

 

Ken Kesey is center with the beret

 

 

Kesey and the Pranksters also had a relationship with the infamous outlaw motorcycle gang the Hells Angels, who were introduced to LSD by Kesey. The details of their relationship are documented both in Wolfe’s book and in Hunter S. Thompson’s book, Hell’s Angels: The Strange and Terrible Saga of the Outlaw Motorcycle Gangs. Poet Allen Ginsberg also wrote a poem about the Kesey/Angels relationship.

I read Thompson’s book in which he describes how the Pranksters introduced LSD to the Hells Angels in California.  The Angels were being true to form and being quite obnoxious, but once they swallowed some LSD they mellowed right out.  They all became introverted and much easier to communicate with according to Kesey.

 

 

Kenneth Elton “Ken” Kesey; September 17, 1935 – November 10, 2001) was an American author, best known for his novel One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (1962) and as a counter-cultural figure who considered himself a link between the Beat Generation of the 1950s and the hippies of the 1960s. “I was too young to be a beatnik, and too old to be a hippie,” Kesey said in a 1999 interview with Robert K. Elder.

 

 

 

Neal Cassady was in on the shenanigans.  Below photo of Cassady and Jack Kerouac.

 

 

Neal Leon Cassady (February 8, 1926 – February 4, 1968) was a major figure of the Beat Generation of the 1950s and the psychedelic movement of the 1960s. He served as the model for the character Dean Moriarty in Jack Kerouac’s novel On the Road.

 

The Canadian based Idle No More group who is raising the spirits of Aboriginals nation wide has added to it demands. It now wants to meet with the Pope, President Barack Obama, The leader of the Great Lakes Werewolf pack and a Polar Bear. The group is protesting the negative plight of Aboriginals by attacking the government.

It claims all Aboriginals deserve more money from the Feds for sitting on their asses.  The Aboriginals are a strange people.  They do nothing to improve their lot, but always use the blame game.  They always try to depict themselves as victims of the white man’s imperialism.  Would they like to go back to an era where they had no running water or electricity?  They don’t make an effort to try to advance in the current system.

There are no buffalos left! The white devils are not going to move back to Europe!  You Aboriginals are going to have to stop watching TV all day and make an effort to improve your lot.  Stay in school and move along.  No more free lunch pretty soon.  Quite bitching and do something!

And work on that substance abuse.

 

 

 

Big lottery winners offer advice, cautionary tales as $550M Powerball lottery announces where winning tickets were sold

 

If you win the lottery jackpot you will see very different sides of your friends and relatives.

 

 

COLUMBIA, Mo. –  So you just won the $550  million Powerball jackpot, the second highest in lottery history. Now what?

Perhaps it’s time for a tropical vacation or a new car. There are bills to  pay, loans to settle, debts to square.

Past winners of mega-lottery drawings and financial planners have some more  sound advice: Stick to a budget, invest wisely, learn to say no and be prepared  to lose friends while riding an emotional roller-coaster of joy, anxiety, guilt  and distrust.

“I had to adapt to this new life, “said Sandra Hayes, 52, a former child  services social worker who split a $224 million Powerball jackpot with a dozen  co-workers in 2006, collecting a lump sum she said was in excess of $6 million  after taxes. “I had to endure the greed and the need that people have, trying to  get you to release your money to them. That caused a lot of emotional pain.  These are people who you’ve loved deep down, and they’re turning into vampires  trying to suck the life out of me.”

April 13, 2006: Sandra Hayes of Florissant, Mo., who split a $224 million  Powerball jackpot with a dozen co-workers in 2006. (AP)

The single mother kept her job with the state of Missouri for another month  and immediately used her winnings to pay off an estimated $100,000 in student  loans and a $70,000 mortgage.

She spent a week in Hawaii and bought a new Lexus, but six years later still  shops at discount stores and lives on a fixed income — albeit, at a higher  monthly allowance than when she brought home paychecks of less than $500 a  week.

“I know a lot of people who won the lottery and are broke today,” she said.  “If you’re not disciplined, you will go broke. I don’t care how much money you  have.”

Lottery agencies are keen to show off beaming prize-winners hugging oversize  checks at celebratory news conferences, but the tales of big lottery winners who  wind up in financial ruin, despair or both are increasingly common.

There’s the two-time New Jersey lottery winner who squandered her $5.4  million fortune. A West Virginia man who won $315 million a decade ago on  Christmas later said the windfall was to blame for his granddaughter’s fatal  drug overdose, his divorce, hundreds of lawsuits and an absence of true  friends.

The National Endowment for Financial Education cautions those who receive a  financial windfall — whether from lottery winnings, divorce settlements,  cashed-out stock options or family inheritances — to plan for their  psychological needs as well as their financial strategies. The Denver-based  nonprofit estimates that as many as 70 percent of people who land sudden  windfalls lose that money within several years.

“Being able to manage your emotions before you do anything sudden is one of  the biggest things,” said endowment spokesman Paul Golden. “If you’ve never had  the comfort of financial security before, if you were really eking out a living  from paycheck to paycheck, if you’ve never managed money before, it can be  really confusing. There’s this false belief that no matter what you do, you’re  never going to worry about money again.”

David Gehle, who spent 20 years at a Nebraska meatpacking plant before he and  seven ConAgra Foods co-workers won a $365 million Powerball jackpot in 2006,  used some of his winnings to visit Australia, New Guinea and Vietnam. He left  ConAgra three weeks after he won, and now spends his time woodworking and  playing racquetball, tennis and golf.

But most of his winnings are invested, and the 59-year-old still lives in his  native Lincoln. He waited for several years before buying a $450,000 home in a  tidy neighborhood on the southern edge of town.

“My roots are in Nebraska, and I’m not all that much different now than I was  before,” Gehle said. “I’m pretty normal. I never was the kind of guy who went  for big, expensive cars or anything like that. I just want something that  runs.”

In the first year after he won, Michael Terpstra would awaken many nights in  a panic. Had he slept in? Was he late to work the night shift?

“At times I’d wake up and this would all seem like a dream,” the 54-year-old  said. “I’d have to walk around the house and tell myself, I did win. I’m not  working anymore, and I do live here. I didn’t get drunk, break into someone’s  house and go to sleep. This is where I’m supposed to be.”

His new home is a roomy, two-story house in south Lincoln with a big-screen  television and paintings of Jesus on the walls. He no longer uses alarm clocks  and spends his days taking his 92-pound black lab, Rocco, on walks.

He was terrified when he first won, convinced that he would lose all of the  money and have to return to work. So he lives carefully off the interest from  conservative investments, with help from accountants and lawyers. He bought the  new house and a truck, but struggles to name any extravagant purchases.

“I can’t buy a super yacht. I can’t buy a Gulfstream,” he said. “Then again,  I don’t think I’d use either one, so why would I buy one?”

That said, some mega-winners still can’t resist the lure of big jackpots, at  least not the two-buck chances. On Tuesday, former ConAgra worker Dung Tran, a  Vietnamese immigrant, walked into the same Lincoln U-Stop where he purchased the  winning ticket six years ago and bought 22 more from the very employee who sold  him the first prize-winner, said cashier Janice Mitzner.

“We joked about it,” she said. “I told him, ‘Wouldn’t it be something if you  won again?’”

Hayes is also hoping to strike rich again — she bought 10 tickets at a Dirt  Cheap liquor store on her way home Tuesday while speaking with an Associated  Press reporter. Unlike many big winners, she has kept a visible public profile  instead of going underground, appearing on a 2007 reality TV show (“Million  Dollar Christmas”), writing an online Life After the Lottery blog and  self-publishing a short book, “How Winning the Lottery Changed My Life.”

“We have this drawing tomorrow, and if somebody wins, God bless them,” she  said. “They’re going to need those blessings.”

 

 

 

 

From the movie the Legend of Bagger Vance:

Rannulph Junnah:   That’s right Hardy. You see every drink of liquor you take kills a thousand brain cells. Now that doesn’t much matter ‘cos we got billions more. And first the sadness cells die so you smile real big. And then the quiet cells go so you just say everything real loud for no reason at all.

Then memory cells and stupid cells. But Markosun thinks the wreckless stupid cells stay.  Smart cells go real fast.

 

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                        

Photos of the Silent Bus Stop when it was busy

 

Since the city of Winnipeg introduced the rapid transit corridor in the central/south part of the city bus routes have been streamlined.  More routes now use the main streets and the secondary streets have lost most service.  The Donald St. at Hargrave Place bus stop has been transformed into a silent bus stop.  Before rapid transit 4 bus routes picked up passengers at the stop.  Now only one, the 99 route, a secondary bus route, utilizes the stop.

The 99 only runs every half hour and stops running at 7:05 pm.  A once vibrant bus stop has now become a ghost bus stop.  No more people hanging around the stop occasionally scanning north to see if the lumbering bus is approaching.  No more buses pulling up to the stop and lowering the entrance door elevator to let old folks and Mom’s with baby strollers on board. 

Now people who previously grabbed the bus at the now silent bus stop have to walk 3 blocks to the east to get the bus.  But the 7 minutes it takes to walk to that stop is made up by the speed of that bus as it hauls down the rapid transit bus track.  As Alexander Graham Bell said: “When one door closes another door opens; but we often look so long and so regretfully upon the closed door, that we do not see the ones which open for us.”

                                                                                                                                                            

                                                                                                                                                              

                                                                                                                                                                                          

The Bus Stop grows silent

 

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                    

 

The Bus Stop is silent

                                                                                                                                            

I preferred the old Bus Stop

A pretty raunchy bunch was spotted at the parade today.

 

 

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                            

 

Political Correctness raises its ugly head again.

National Post

After an all-party parliamentary committee heard evidence that over half the British public has a negative view of their body image — with girls as young as five worrying about how they look and plastic surgery rates on the rise — they came back with the type of solutions we’ve come to expect from Big Government: Force all school children to attend mandatory self-esteem and body-image classes, and consider including fat people as a protected class under the country’s hate speech laws.

Leave it to the British to take things one step too far. There is nothing wrong with educating children, but preventing adults from speaking what’s on their mind is an egregious violation of the right to free speech. If the committee’s recommendations are followed, the government could put “appearance-based discrimination” in the same class as racial or sexual discrimination — making “obese” and “fat” just as bad as discriminatory terms used against blacks or gays.

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                          

 

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                         

 

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                           

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                          

 

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                           

 

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                          

 

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                       

 

 

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                               

 

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                           

 

Via Laughing Squid