How boring are these Republican candidates?  At least, a few of them have dropped out of the GOP Presidential nomination race.  There’s only four left, but none of them look like a good choice for me.  Man, am I glad I am an Independent registered voter.

Rick Santorum won the Iowa Caucus instead of Mitt Romney.  That’s after they finally finished counting up the votes last week.  Santorum won by 30 votes, and this happened after Mitt Romney won the New Hamphire Primary!

Now, Newt Gingrich has won the South Carolina Primary.  That makes Mitt Romney look bad.  :-)  I wonder if Ron Paul will win Florida.

No wonder that President Obama has nothing to worry about!

Were the Mayans wrong about the world ending on December 21, 2012?

Acutally, the ABC soap called One Life to Live ends its 43 year run on Friday, January 13.  I’ve been a fan of that show since April 1982.  I started watching the show while I was at home sick during Easter vacation.  I didn’t have anything else to do that week.  I’m going to miss that show a lot.

The show had its ups and downs over the years.  It’s had serious stories about bullying and racism as well as silly stories about time travel and underground cities (Eterna).

When this blog was connected to the Boston Now daily newspaper, I occasionally wrote about One Life to Live just to give it the publicity it deserves. I sometimes wondered why ABC would focus so much on General Hospital when it hasn’t been so good in recent years (some people call GH the Sonny and Carly show and Married to the Mob).

So long, OLTL!  I’ll miss you!

 

 The Bullying Storyline on OLTL this past spring

I spend too much time thinking about being a successful writer than blogging about it here. Can’t blame myself for being too ambitious though. It is something I want to do.

Right now, I want to get my writers group book, Seven at The Sevens on the best sellers list if possible. It’s a goal right now for me.

Wouldn’t you want this book as a gift for somebody special in your life this holiday season?

Available at Amazon.com

P.S.

I want to start writing and self-publishing my own stuff soon.

Even though it’s less than two weeks before Thanksgiving, Boston oldies station WODS-FM (103.3) is already playing all those favorite Christmas songs.  They started on 11/11/11.  I love Christmas songs as much as the next person, but it’s very early anyway.

Check out their web site at http://wods.radio.com/

I wonder why Demi Moore hasn’t divorced this nitwit yet.  The most famous person on Twitter, Ashton Kutcher, tweeted on Wednesday how upset he was about the firing of Penn State football coach Joe Paterno and never bothered to check the facts on why Paterno was fired before he tweeted.  It seems like Ashton hasn’t been paying attention to the sex abuse scandal that has rocked Penn State University to its core.

Ashton has tweeted an apology to his millions of followers and has declared that his management team will be handling his Twitter account from now.  He made a few more tweets explaining his actions and  admitted his mistake.

Currently, Ashton Kutcher is starring on Two and a Half Men.  I wonder how this is going to affect the ratings after this incident.

After 72 days of marriage, reality star Kim Kardashian filed for a divorce on October 31.  Her soon-to-be ex-husband is Kris Humphries.  Back on August 20, E! showed a two day special that covered Kim’s fairytale wedding.

Kim spent tons on money of the wedding when she should have focused more on the relationship.  Having a big wedding doesn’t cure a difficult relationship.

I’m not a watcher of the Kardashian reality shows and specials, but I could tell that this marriage wasn’t going to last no matter how much of a rating it would bring in for the E! channel.

Better luck next time, Kim!

Today, Bank of America announced that they are not going to start a 5 dollar debit fee on their cards.  They had stated a month ago about the new debit fee charge on debit cards that was supposed to start in January, but the news of the debit fee outraged many customers of the bank that they protested with petitions and closing their accounts.

It turns out that the bank is listening to their customers for once.  Other banks like Wells Fargo, JP Morgan Chase, and Sun Trust have decided to roll back their debit card fees earlier this week.

Maybe, the tide is turning at last.  Time to take back our country from the banks.

#Techdaycamp Today, I went to Eastern Nazarene College in Quincy, Massachusetts, to attend the very first Tech Day Camp 2011, powered by the Toobox, Inc. (Tom and Reiko Beach’s company).  I had a great time there and learned exciting things that will help me with my personal goals for being a writer and artist.

The workshops I went to were these:

• 10 Things You May Not Know About MS Word by Deb Kane
• So You Think You Want a Mac? by Ed Justen
• 10 Things You May Not Know About MS Excel by Deb Kane
• e-Publishing Strategies by Blaise Freeman
• Social Business – Culture, Caring and Branding by Robert Collins

There were other workshops as well going on at the same time during the day.  I chose to go to the ones I had the most interest in.  I am thinking about buying a new Mac because my eMac is almost 10 years old.  Yikes!  That’s ancient in the world of computers.

Tom and Reiko Beach are my fellow members of the Boston Media Makers.

The best part of the day for me was when I was one of the raffle winners.  I won a gift certificate for a free workshop done by Deb Kane, owner of the business called Kaizen Computing.

I actually wrote this last October for a planned collection of essays book that I’m still working on.  Because Steve Jobs passed away recently, I thought about presenting it here as a sort of tribute to Steve Jobs.  He was a genius, and he will be missed.

I DID THINK DIFFERENT BEFORE IT BECAME APPLE’S SLOGAN
(Essay dated 10/18/10)

Before I was diagnosed with Asperger’s Syndrome in 2002, everyone attached the different label on me.  They said, “Yvonne, you’re so different!” so many times that I felt was hearing a TV commercial catch-phrase.  However, I didn’t understand why they kept on describing me with the word “different” all the time.

When I was a child growing up in the suburbs of Washington, DC, I kept hearing this word “different” and thought people didn’t understand me at all.  It seemed as though that was the only word they could think of to describe me.  Of course, when I was bullied they said a lot of harsh words again me.  That “Sticks and Stones” saying is a lot of nonsense because the words hurt a great deal because I was an undiagnosed person with Asperger’s Syndrome and had trouble controlling emotions.  My brain was not like theirs at all.  The real truth was that I was being normal under the influence of my undiagnosed Asperger’s Syndrome.

Being called different annoyed me, but I wasn’t being sensitive to criticism.  I only saw it as though the others (classmates, teachers, parents, and siblings) just didn’t see who I was.  Also, I didn’t understand how I was being different from everyone else (sometimes, I thought the people around me were crazy with their observations about me and other things).  I wore clothes, I bathed every day, I love watching television (maybe too much), I loved music (The Beatles being my favorites, despite the fact that some of the kids I went to school with during the 1970s resented that I loved them), and I loved to eat candy just like everyone else at school.  Yet, other kids and, after I grew up, adults would look at me and remark that I was different, as though I was going against the norm.

I, like others who were diagnosed with Asperger’s Syndrome as adults, didn’t realize what they were saying when they said the word “different.”  When I got that diagnosis, I discovered why they were saying it.

Rest in Peace, Steve Jobs!

#Occupy Wall Street.  According to the news, there are occupy protests happening around the world.  It all started a month ago at Wall Street and then Boston.  Now, there are riots in Rome.  There’s even an Occupy Seasame Street.  I saw it all on the news tonight.

Feel free to do an occupy protest in these places:

1. The Twilight Zone
2. The Dead Zone
3. The Phantom Zone
4. Motown
5. Funkytown
6. Abbey Road
7. Sunset Boulevard
8. Boulevard of Broken Dreams
9. Wisteria Lane
10. Naked City
11. Second City
12. Knots Landing, CA
13. Llanview, PA
14. Port Charles, NY
15. Pine Valley
16. Valley of the Dolls
17. Death Valley
18. Falcon Crest
19. Southfork
20. Vulcan
21. Krypton
22. Asgard
23. Valhalla
24. Oz
25. Oa
26. Mount Olympus
27. Atlantis
28. Pompei
29. Latveria
30. Santa’s Workshop
31. Liddsville
32. Land of the Giants
33. Land of 1,000 Dances
34. MacArthur Park
35. South Park
36. Paradise Island
37. Bermuda Triangle
38. Gotham City
39. Metropolis
40. Smallville
41. Central City
42. Transylvania
43. Gallifrey
44. Land of the Lost
45. Stonehedge
46. Camelot
47. Cocoa Beach, FL
48. Witch Mountain
49. Space Mountain
50. Gilligan’s Island