| Deploying sailors face their toughest task: the goodbyes
The Navy has sent Petty Officer 1st Class Alvin Torres to sea five times before, but on his sixth deployment Friday, Torres had to leave his young family behind for the first time. "This is the toughest one, definitely," said Torres, 36, as he held his 2-year-old daughter, Gillian, and hugged his wife, Anna. The Torres family's goodbyes were repeated by dozens of Navy families that watched sailors depart Friday on the guided missile destroyers Paul Hamilton and O'Kane, which left Pearl Harbor to join the John C. Stennis Carrier Strike Group in the Persian Gulf. Family support group representatives for both ships have already helped the sailors and officers prepare cards and messages for Valentine's Day and for the birthdays and anniversaries that will be missed while the Paul Hamilton and O'Kane are at sea for the next six months or longer.
I'm Anna Nicole Smith's Baby's Daddy
If I am attacked one more time via ET's Anna Nicole Smiths loony anguish, I'm going to claim fatherhood to her baby so that this telecast run-on sentence can find its period. Jacqueline Kennedy as a mother never got this much media coverage.Smith is playing this whole baby bit up till its truly undone genuine motherhood. Of course, Smith is such a born fake that to scale back to the genuine would be impossible. Thus this over exposure simply adds to the layers of obvious nonsense.But it's not only Smith who feeds on psycho dip sticks, ET does as well. ET reporters who sit in front of that loose blonde air duct are accomplices to low camp on the networks. However, if thats all that ET has to spread, then were all held captive. Surely we've been fed enough celebrity zeros in past months to line up an assembly line of paper mache nobodys - Tom Cruise, et cetera.
Tokyo Trash Baby
Tokyo Trash Baby is his go at modern romance from 2000. A witty if somewhat depressing look at Japanese culture, the film tells the story of a handful of young Japanese in various stages of societal dropout. Such problems have become widespread in Japan, where a growing number of young people have forsaken traditional values in favor of living at home and shunning the salaryman route of their fathers. It's easy to see the sort of dysfunctional upbringing these characters had, though it's harder to see where they might be heading.
Miyuki (Mami Nakahara) is a step above the usual furita (the name given said freeloaders, derived from "free time") in that she lives in her own squalid flat. Her days comprise two main activities: working a nowhere job at a small café, and sorting through the trash of Yoshinori (Kazama Suzuki), a would-be rocker who lives in her building.
The Prairie Star
CONRAD, Mont. - It takes innovation and a bit of thriftiness to make ends meet and work in rural Montana's agriculture communities.Innovation and thriftiness are just two skills Steve Hutton and his wife and partner Lisa Schmidt use in their everyday ranching activities on the historic Graham Ranch near Conrad, Mont. Most recently, Hutton and Schmidt added their “cooking" skills to this combination to create their very own cost-effective mineral lick for their grass-fed natural cattle.“The cattle are out on some old grass that needed to be grazed," explained Schmidt. “We went to the store to buy some protein supplements and found the tubs were rather expensive, and the cake was cheaper but the cows gobble it up about as fast as we can put it out there. So we bought some cake, dry molasses and salt and mixed them with water to create our own lick for about one-third the cost of the ones you'd buy in the store.
Choice for tomorrow
Packaging is more tenacious. You need a scalpel to get under the Cellophane skin of new CDs, a drill to get through the plastic carapace that protects new toothbrushes and toys. That stuff is probably some Nasa-engineered polymer, a spin-off from the space programme, like Teflon. If my baby daughter's new plaything has been secured to survive re-entry into the Earth's atmosphere, how am I supposed to get into it? How is she supposed to get into it? It is a conspiracy. The manufacturers know that children are as entertained by toy packaging as by its contents, which means parents get two infant diversions for the price of one. So they lock the toys down so tight that the boxes have to be destroyed in the opening. .
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