Tom McMahon

Early in his career, P. T. Barnum created an exhibit, entitled "The Happy Family," consisting of a cage housing a lion, a tiger, a panther - and a baby lamb. The remarkable display earned Barnum unprecedented publicity and attendance figures. Some time after its opening, Barnum was asked about his plans for the happy family. "The display will become a permanent feature," he declared, "if the supply of lambs holds out."

This is probably the most beautiful Christmas e-card I have ever seen, made by English artist Jacquie Lawson.

Marion Tinsley died April 3, 1995, at the age of 68. Why does a checker (8x8 draughts) player attract our attention? His record speaks for itself: Since an accidental loss in the 1950 U.S. Championship, Tinsley had amassed an incredible record. Over the period 1950-1995, Tinsley finished in undivided first place in every tournament that he played in. He contested 9 World Championship matches, winning each usually by an embarrassingly large margin. Over the last 45 years of his life, comprising thousands of tournament, World Championship, match, exhibition and casual games, Tinsley lost the unbelievable number of seven games. Seven games!? In 45 years? Tinsley was as close to perfect as is humanly possible.

Tinsley once remarked that he had become bored playing humans; there wasn't any challenge left. When he was young, Tinsley began to acquire the reputation of being unbeatable. For 45 years, most of his opponents would play for the draw; going for a win was unthinkable. Tinsley's enjoyment for the game waned, and at one point he retired from the game for 12 years because of a lack of competition. When the checkers program Chinook came on the scene, Tinsley relished the opportunity to play it. Chinook had no respect for Tinsley's abilities, willingly taking risks; anything to increase the chances of winning. Tinsley said that playing Chinook made him feel like a young man again.

Do you remember these?... - You will find yourself saying "Yes I do! We had some of these when I was a kid!". With these classic vintage LIFE Magazines you are able to stroll through your past via advertisements for items that were so much a part of your life. The celebrity covers, articles and whimsical ads can also make great framed art gifts for any antique, nostalgia or memorabilia buff!.

Review the products offered and ask yourself: Is it likely the products could be sold successfully on their own merits without going through a MLM distribution system? If nothing comparable is on the market, find out why. Does the MLM company focus on legitimate products of value to consumers, or does it emphasize fleeting trends and timing, and exotic or secret formulas? Are products of consistently high quality, and do they carry a buy-back guarantee? Can all product claims (such as health claims) be backed up by reliable research? Are orders filled and shipped promptly? And are manufacturing and expiration dates printed on consumable products?

Truth: The sale of products is in no way a protection from anti-pyramid scheme laws or unfair trade practices set forth in federal and state law. MLM is a legal form of business only under certain rigid conditions set forth by the FTC and state Attorneys General. Many MLMs are in gross violation of these guidelines and operate only because they have not been prosecuted. Recent court rulings are using a 70% rule to determine an MLM's legality. At least 70% of all goods sold by the MLM company must be purchased by non-distributors. This standard would place most MLM companies outside the law. The largest of all MLMs acknowledges that only 18% of its sales are made to non-distributors.

Christmas sales of Adolf Hitler wine have reached a record high thanks to publicity generated by attempts to ban it in both Brussels and Berlin. Wine-grower Alessandro Lunardelli started selling the bottles of Hitler wine in 1995 after the success of his Mussolini label back home in Italy. He has already made a fortune but says this Christmas sales have "gone through the roof" thanks to the interest generated by publicity over attempts to ban his wine. "Getting sued was the best thing that could have happened," Lunardelli said in a telephone interview from his company's headquarters near Udine on Italy's border with Austria.

Martin Luther King's "I Have a Dream" speech is still in copyright (as is almost everything else familiar in our lives), and Dr King's heirs strictly enforce the copyright. Wendy Seltzer points out what this means for free expression and political commentary. You can always quote a few lines without asking permission, but that's likely to be the same few lines that have become cliched with repetition. Quote the whole speech to make a more substantial point, and you face thousand-dollar license fee claims from the estate. Quote them to make a point critical of King, and you may be denied a license entirely.

Adolf Hitler left no offspring when he died in his bunker in 1945. But he wasn't the last of the Hitler line. He had a nephew, William Patrick Hitler, who grew up in England, moved to America, and had three sons. The story of those Hitlers is told in a new documentary, "The Last of the Hitlers," based on the book of the same name by British journalist David Gardner, who said: "They've lived all-American lives. They live in a small town in Long Island. ... They were born in America, and these are the American Hitlers, in effect. "

• A-Ha's Take on Me is still your favorite video


• You know whose number is 867-5309


• You still practice your Care Bear stare


• You can do the Safety Dance


• You always waited for the Sweet Pickles Bus to visit your house


• You keep asking if you can take the physical challenge instead of the quiz


• Your idea of appreciating ancient cultures is Walk Like an Egyptian


• If someone says, "Who are you gonna call?" the first thing you say is "Ghostbusters"


• When someone is called more than once in public, you say "Bueller, Bueller, Bueller"

You wouldn’t have seen anything like this five years ago, but now it seems that the reality of the boomers’ liberalism is slowly starting to affect the livelihood of Generation X. The joy of mass immigration is easy to talk about when you live in the suburbs and benefit from cheap housecleaning, but when you are going to schools that are 50 percent Spanish and watching your education slip through your fingers, you tend to be a little more pragmatic. The same goes for affirmative action. Who was laughing the loudest when Jayson Blair was exposed? The journalism students who were forced to intern for us because they couldn’t get paying jobs in the mainstream press.

Taking on all at once Germany, Japan, and Italy — diverse enemies all — did not require the weeding out of all the fascists and their supporters in Mexico, Argentina, Eastern Europe, and the Arab world. Instead, those in jackboots and armbands worldwide quietly stowed all their emblems away as organized fascism died on the vine once the roots were torn out in Berlin, Rome, and Tokyo. So too will the terrorists, once their sanctuaries and capital shrivel up — as is happening as we speak. -- Victor Davis Hanson

Double-landlocked: Let's call a country "landlocked" if it doesn't border any ocean or sea, except the purely inland seas that have no substantial natural connection to the ocean (e.g., the Caspian Sea or the Aral Sea). This is more or less the standard definition: Paraguay, for instance, is landlocked; Turkey is not.

Which countries in the world are double-landlocked, which means that all the countries that they border are themselves landlocked? Answer here.

• The only place where success comes before work is in the dictionary.


• Triumph is just umph added to try.


• The best vitamin for making friends is B-1.


• Patience is counting down without blasting off.


• A diamond is a chunk of coal that made good under pressure.


• People who never make a mistake never make anything else.


• When you feel yourself turning green with envy, you're ripe to be plucked.


• Having a sharp tongue can cut your own throat.


• Hug your kids at home, but belt them in a car.


• Fear is the darkroom where negatives are developed.


• Birds have bills too, but they keep on singing.


• Be like a giraffe. Stick your neck out and reach higher than all the others.

And the most vile part of this campaign against Mr. Bush is that the terrorist war is being used as a tool to try to defeat him--which means that if Mr. Bush does not win, we will certainly lose the war. Indeed, the anti-Bush campaign threatens to undermine our war effort, give encouragement to our enemies, and cost American lives during the long year of campaigning that lies ahead of us.

I studied anthropology in college, and one of the things I learned was that certain human social structures always reappear. They can't be eliminated from society. One of those structures is religion. Today it is said we live in a secular society in which many people---the best people, the most enlightened people---do not believe in any religion. But I think that you cannot eliminate religion from the psyche of mankind. If you suppress it in one form, it merely re-emerges in another form. You can not believe in God, but you still have to believe in something that gives meaning to your life, and shapes your sense of the world. Such a belief is religious.

Today, one of the most powerful religions in the Western World is environmentalism. Environmentalism seems to be the religion of choice for urban atheists. Why do I say it's a religion? Well, just look at the beliefs. If you look carefully, you see that environmentalism is in fact a perfect 21st century remapping of traditional Judeo-Christian beliefs and myths.

There's an initial Eden, a paradise, a state of grace and unity with nature, there's a fall from grace into a state of pollution as a result of eating from the tree of knowledge, and as a result of our actions there is a judgment day coming for us all. We are all energy sinners, doomed to die, unless we seek salvation, which is now called sustainability. Sustainability is salvation in the church of the environment. Just as organic food is its communion, that pesticide-free wafer that the right people with the right beliefs, imbibe.

Eden, the fall of man, the loss of grace, the coming doomsday---these are deeply held mythic structures. They are profoundly conservative beliefs. They may even be hard-wired in the brain, for all I know. I certainly don't want to talk anybody out of them, as I don't want to talk anybody out of a belief that Jesus Christ is the son of God who rose from the dead. But the reason I don't want to talk anybody out of these beliefs is that I know that I can't talk anybody out of them. These are not facts that can be argued. These are issues of faith.

A Soviet citizen stands in line for three days to requisition a car. On the fourth day he reaches the counter. At last he concludes his transaction.

“Congratulations, comrade!” says the Soviet official. “Your automobile will be delivered to you on the fifth of March in the year 2005.”

“Morning or afternoon?” inquires the citizen.

The official is puzzled. “Why do you ask?”

The citizen explains: “The plumber is coming in the morning.”

In May of 1835, the Wolf Girl of Devil's River was born to Mollie Dent, who had gone with her husband to the Beaver Lake area to trap. Mollie was having problems with the birth, so her husband, John Dent, rode to get help from a Mexican-run goat ranch on the Pecos Canyon, but he was struck and killed by lightning before he could return accompanied by the Mexican couple. By the time the Mexicans reached Mollie, she had died, apparently in childbirth. Wolf tracks in the vicinity suggested that the newborn infant had been devoured by the lobo wolves of the area.

However, in 1845 a boy saw a girl, in the company of a pack of lobo wolves, attacking a herd of goats. Less than a year later, a Mexican woman at San Felipe saw two large wolves and a girl devour a freshly-killed goat. She observed the girl run off — first on all fours, and then on two legs. A hunt was mounted, and after three days the child was caught after fighting wildly to keep her freedom. She was taken to a ranch (really just a two-room hovel) and locked in. Her howling attracted answering cries from wolves far and wide, and a large pack of wolves rushed the corrals, attacking the goats, cows and horses. Shooting started, and in the confusion the girl managed to remove the board nailed over the window and make her escape.

In 1852, a group of frontiersmen surveying a better route to El Paso saw a girl suckling two wolf cubs on a sand bar in the river, who then ran off, carrying the cubs. She would have been 17 in that year; but she was never seen again.

• The 1957 Milwaukee Braves were the first baseball team to win the World Series after being relocated.


• Des Moines has the highest per capita Jello consumption in the U.S


• "Mr. Mojo Risin" is an anagram for Jim Morrison.


• The silhouette on the NBA logo is Jerry West.


• The silhouette on the Major League Baseball logo is Harmon Killebrew.


• February 1865 is the only month in recorded history not to have a full moon.


• Montpelier, Vermont is the only U.S. state capital without a McDonalds.


• Maine is the only state that borders on only one state.


• October 4, 1957 is a historic date to be remembered, it is the day both "Leave it to Beaver" and the Russian satellite Sputnik 1 were launched.


• The only two days of the year in which there are no professional sports games (MLB, NBA, NHL, or NFL) are the day before and the day after the Major League Baseball All-Star Game.


• The first letters of the months July through November, in order, spell the name JASON.


• In 1963, baseball pitcher Gaylord Perry remarked, "They'll put a man on the moon before I hit a home run." On July 20, 1969, a few hours after Neil Armstrong set foot on the moon, Gaylord Perry hit his first, and only, home run.

Three Hotels on Broadway Boogie-Woogie - 1949
Piet Mondrian
oil on canvas,
56 x 46 inches.
Price Available On Request

This piece, part of a series Mondrian painted to honor America's favorite board game, was lost for many years. In the early 1960s, a janitor found it while cleaning out a storage closet in The Playboy Club, which had taken over the space previously occupied by Mondrian's studio.

In this colorful composition, the artist appears to be making a comment on the pivotal aspect of American corporate economic strength, ie. "Monopoly", while at the same time, his innovative placement of various street names and sales prices implies a profound indictment of urban exploitation perpetrated against the poor.

The extreme Left has made a terrible strategic mistake shacking up with the Islamists. In one sense, they’re not as incompatible as they might appear: Islamism may be religious in origin but in its political form it is simply this decade’s brand of oppressive statism, as communism was before it. But the only question now is how deeply this strategic error infects the less insane Left. On National Public Radio the other day, Howard Dean advanced the theory that the Saudis had tipped off Bush about 9/11 in advance. When the Democratic presidential front-runner is cheerfully wearing his tinfoil hat in public, it’s no wonder the other fellows are scrambling to sound just as loopy.

Interviewer: "In all the time you played for the Dallas Cowboys, did you ever see Tom Landry smile?"
Walt Garrison: "No, but I only played with them for 9 years."

As the tide of battle turns against Hitler it may be well to consider very briefly the possibilities of his future behavior and the effect that each would have on the German people as well as on ourselves . . . . .

8. Hitler might commit suicide.

This is the most plausible outcome. Not only has he frequently threatened to commit suicide, but from what we know of his psychology it is the most likely possibility. It is probably true that he has an inordinate fear of death, but being an hysteric he could undoubtedly screw himself up into the super-man character and perform the deed. In all porbability, however, it would not be a simple suicide. He has too much of the dramatic for that and since immortailty is one of his dominant motives we can [Page 248] imagine that he would stage the most dramatic and effective death scene he could possibly think of. He knows how to bind the people to him and if he cannot have the bond in life he will certainly do his utmost to achieve it in death. He might even engage some other fanatic to do the final killing at his orders.

Hitler has already envisaged a death of this kind, for he has said to Rauschning:

"Yes, in the hour of supreme peril I must sacrifice myself for the people."

This would be extremely undesirable from our point of view because if it is cleverly done it would establish the Hitler legend so firmly in the minds of the German people that it might take generations to eradicate it.

Whatever else happens, we my be reasonably sure that as Germany suffers successive defeats Hitler will become more and more neurotic. Each defeat will shake his confidence still further and limit his opportunities for proving his own greatness to himself. In consequence he will feel himself more and more vulnerable to attack from his associates and his rages will increase in frequency. He will probably try to compensate for his vulnerability on this side by continually stressing his brutality and ruthlessness.

His public appearances will become less and less for, as we have seen, he is unable to face a critical audience. He will probably seek solace in his Eagle's Nest on the Kehlstein near Berchtsegaden. There among the ice-capped peaks he will [Page 249] wait for his "inner voice" to guide him. Meanwhile, his nightmares will probably increase in frequency and intensity and drive him closer to a nervous collapse. It is not wholly improbably that in the end he might lock himself into this symbolic womb and defy the world to get him.

In any case, his mental condition will continue to deteriorate. He will fight as long as he can with any weapon or technique that can be conjured up to meet the emergency. The course he will follow will almost certainly be the one which seems to him to be the surest road to immortality and at the same time drag the world down in flames.