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Zwan - "Mary Star of the Sea" - (2003 - Repriserecords) Billy Corgan from Smashing Pumpkins new band.. My Photographs You like photos? I love taking them. Click here, if you wanna see some of my work
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Monday, Feb. 24, 2003 - 4:19 p.m. Heard this on the radio around 3 am this morning, and thought it worth passing along: Explosions Are a Growing Hazard at Crematoriums Fri February 21, 2003 08:43 AM ET STOCKHOLM (Reuters) - Dead people are increasingly going out with a bang in Sweden and the trend is posing serious occupational hazards for crematorium workers, a Swedish church newspaper said. Kyrkans Tidning reported a growing number of explosions in caskets during cremations, sparked by undetected items including heart pacemakers, whose batteries ignite in the intense heat. Swedes have increasingly taken to cremation and the paper said next of kin and friends were adding to the problem by leaving explosive farewell tokens such as bottles of alcohol, ammunition cartridges and pieces of fireworks in the coffins. Silicon implants in women who had had cosmetic breast surgery were also known to have exploded during cremation. Exploding breasts? Fireworks packed in with the dearly departed? Amazing what I find humorous when I am sleep deprived� Yeah, I had to plow snow again last night. Yeah, it�s getting old. The State has started something new this winter involving callouts. For some reason, I hadn�t really noticed until recently. Maybe it�s because they haven�t done it as much with our shift as the other one. Anyway�. here is what is different: They aren�t waiting quite as long (for the roadways and ditches to fill with vehicular accidents) before they call us in. The State�s unwillingness to call us in until accidents started happening was always a sore spot for me. Why have all of the equipment, manpower, and weather forecasting technology if all they did was wait for the phone to start ringing with calls from local police with reports of slippery roads? Might as well just pay one person in London to look out the window every 15 minutes or so, looking for the flakes to start falling. Last night, the new callout system was used on our shift. They had Gordo call everyone on our shift (including a few hourly guys to fill up the routes) at 6:30 pm. We were told to be in the storage at 8 pm, ready to work. That means we had a full hour and a half to get ready for work. I think this is the third time they have done this with our shift this winter. They are actually getting us in BEFORE the snow causes any problems! The first flakes fell from the sky around 8:30 pm. They even had the timing down on this callout. We ended up receiving a steady light snow fro 8:30 pm to 2:30 am. It never fell faster than I could keep up plowing it off the road. I didn�t have time to stop for anything but reloading my salt and draining my bladder all night. Since I had been awake for almost 24 hours, I finally had to pull over for a short �eye closing� session at 6 am. I had just finished plowing my shoulders back, and had applied my last load of salt to my in-town areas. I had also reached the point where I couldn�t concentrate on what I was doing. When you start hallucinating, seeing people walking in the road in the shadows from an overhead sign (there were no people in the road, in other words), it�s time to pull over for a few minutes of mental recharging. I pulled into the massive parking lot of Wallyworld, turned off my strobe lights, and laid my head against my seat�s headrest. I might have closed my eyes for 2 minutes when I was jolted awake by the sound of a truck horn, blaring in my ears. It was one of the private plow operators clearing the lot for the corporate giant from Arkansas. Was I in his way? No. I intentionally pulled into an area that he had already cleared out. Was I the only truck parked in the lot? No, there were several semis parked at various spots, their drivers most assuredly sleeping too. No, I think he honked at me just because it bothered him that I was resting while he was working. Why did I come to this conclusion? Because when I looked up at him, he was shaking his fist at me. Did he know that I was taking a short brake, and that I had caught up with what I could do on my route? No. I don�t care how hard we push ourselves during a storm. Somebody will think we didn�t work hard enough, or that we should have done more. I didn�t confront him. I just gave him a dismissive wave, put my truck in gear, and headed back out to my route. 2 minutes. How can somebody begrudge me a 2-minute resting of the eyes? A quick review on the Grammy award show from last night: I only watched the first 40 minutes or so, so I can�t comment on the whole show. But it seemed to me that there wasn�t a lot of energy on stage last night. Maybe it was the mistake of having Simon and Garfunkle leading the show off, singing one of the most downbeat songs of their short career (Why them? Why now? �Lifetime achievement award�? They haven�t performed together since the late 70�s!) The big winner was Nora Jones. Her album is a nice, quiet confection of jazz-pop that I really should pick up a copy of for my jazz collection. I do need some mellow music for the days when I need to relax, after all. I enjoy modern jazz, so her sweep of all the categories that she was nominated for was a nice change from the usual crap that wins at this award show. But one thought came to mind, after hearing the sound clips of her speech backstage, after the show: How can she ever top this? She is only 24 years old, and has already reached the pinnacle of her profession on her first album. She sold tons of albums (several million, I think), and walked away with an armful of the biggest awards in the music industry.
I think (from her comments) that she also realizes these facts. She said something along the lines of �this can never happen to me again�. She�s right. She might want to contact Lauryn Hill to find out what happens next. Or maybe Christopher Cross. Both won tons of Grammies with their first solo albums. And both fell off the face of the Earth immediately thereafter��.
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