Friday, December 26, 2008
So Christmas Eve I experienced full blown kidney stones. Let me tell you it was the worst thing ever. Now to please Mr. The C i'm not going to go into TOO much detail
Let's just say I had chills, fever, so much pain that I felt like death was an option and crawling to my toilet bowl to puke and then laying on the washroom floor for 20 minutes crying my eyes out.
Yep, not exactly the best X-Mas Eve ever.
On top of that my X360 decided to die exactly one year to the day I got it. I came home last night from a family party to play the Lost video game. I put the game in and everything is working fine then BAM! as soon as I was going to click the start button to play the game everything froze up. I power up the console again to see the 3 red lights. (Thank God it wasn't the full blown RROD) So today I sent for my coffin from MS. Hopefully things will go relatively quickly and I don't have to wait 2 months or something crazy like that.
Other then that I had a great Christmas with family. The young cousins in my family love me to death. They just love getting me involved in their activities and one of them decided to use me as his personal monkey bars so to speak LOL!
I came home with a bit of an irritated back but it was worth it. I love to see family, especially the younger ones being happy. That's one of the great things about having a large extended family IMO.
I hope everyone had a great Christmas.
Monday, December 22, 2008
On the homefront my father has been out of a job for a few months now and it's affecting him a lot. He keeps a brave face but as each week passes he has become more resigned to the fact that he probably won't find anything. This isn't a very good thing because once his package from his old employer runs out in March we may have to move out of the house. I hope we don't get into that situation.
Then there's my aunt who I just saw last night. She's been suffering through depression ever since her husband died a couple months ago and last night she looked like a ghost of her former self. She has lost a lot of weight and she was very withdrawn. She was nowhere close to her old self as she's always very talkative and such. I'm a very empathetic guy and this really shook me.
Overall, i'm having a tough time being all merry and happy this Christmas season. Hopefully you guys are having a better X-Mas season then I am.
Tuesday, December 16, 2008
"Sigh"
************************************************** **************
Well let's get to something a little more lighthearted. I present to you a song that this soul singer is most known for. Here's mr. Joe Tex with "Aint Gonna Bump No More (With No Big Fat Woman)"!
If you don't find this to be funky then you have no soul.
Tuesday, November 18, 2008
My parents were both from Guyana and it was once a pretty thriving country relatively speaking as it was part of the British Empire. However, by the 1960s things got murky as Guyana tried to carve out independence for itself. Now i'm not going to expect you guys to know the complexities of the situation but basically there were two men of differing ideologies that were at the forefront of the Guyanese independent movement. One was a US educated socialist named Cheddi Jagan. The other was Linden Forbes Burnham. Burnham wasn't as well known to people outside of Guyana but they'd soon learn that he was even more autocratic and communist then Jagan ever was.
As most of us know at this time the US was really into the Domino Theory of communism and when Cheddi Jagan had attained power in Guyana they were fearful of communism spreading further. The CIA led an underground coup that got Jagan out of power and more or less installed Burnham as leader. Burnham was the one person who destroyed all progress in Guyana. At first, he was moderate in tone and played nice. He was able to get Guyana out from under the yoke of British rule and declared independent. However shortly after Burnham took power he enacted sweeping authoritarian control with a National Security Act that made it legal for search, seize and arrests of anyone.
He increasingly moved to the left of the political spectrum and had strong ties to Cuba and the Soviet Union. Burnham even banned all imports to the country which included things like flour and many varieties of rice. He also nationalized foreign owned and operated major industries in the country which severely curtailed the private sector's share of the economy. It was Burnham's policies that led to the mass exodus of Guyanese people in the '80s.
My parents were one of the early ones to leave the country. I've heard stories of how there would be shooting in the streets mainly by the military and how there were food shortages and roving blackouts throughout the country. Burnham's rule had completely destroyed the infrastructure and the will of the people in many ways. As an aside though, Cheddi Jagan did get a measure of revenge as he came out of the wilderness and became president of Guyana in the '90s. His rule in the '90s helped to re-establish some order in Guyana and to bring about better economic policies. At this time Jagan and the country of Guyana was given a formal apology by a representative (can't remember) of the Kennedy Administration over the forced coup of Jagan and what it did to Guyana.
I've gone totally off the topic but at least you get some sense of where my parents lived and such. Today is the 30th anniversary of Jonestown which is what the country is most known for. Here's a link to an excellent MSNBC article
Jonestown 30 years later
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