First Year Anniversary Quotes

I was just as in love with her in our eleventh year as I was in the first. Every anniversary was a victory, a middle finger to everyone who thought we wouldn't last. Abby tamed me, marriage settled me down, and when I became a father, my entire outlook changed.

She does not want to feel even the faintest temptation to call his mobile number, as she had done obsessively for the first year after his death so she could hear his voice on the answering service. Most days now his loss is a part of her, an awkward weight she carries around, invisible to everyone else, subtly altering the way she moves through the day. But today, the Anniversary of the day he died, is a day when all bets are off.

todays the first anniversary of the asteroid hitting the moon. A year ago i was sixteen years old, a sophomore in high school.

They say to keep what you have, you have to give it away. I believe that. I also believe that you can be cool as fuck, not give a fuck and fucking kick ass in life, and not be fucked up. I’m still the first person to say “Fuck you” but I’m faster to say “I love you.” If life is what you make it, I’ve made mine great. It took a lot of hard work and if you need to, you can do it too.

Today...is the anniversary of when we first met. You were just born, and I was five years old.

I almost forgot. It’s our anniversary.” “What?” I asked, bolting upright. “We’ve been married a year already?” “Not that anniversary.” “Oh, whew. So, on this day however many years ago we … kissed for the first time?” “Nope,” he said with a smirk, opening the bottle with a loud pop. “We … celebrated the first spine you’d severed in my defense?

The Jesuit boast, ‘Give me the child for his first seven years, and I’ll give you the man,’ is no less accurate (or sinister) for being hackneyed.

The year 1992 should have been remembered as the 700th anniversary of the death of a man who changed the world. Yet the occasion passed without note. Few know of the remarkable achievements of someone who, more than any other, can be said to have invented science.

It’s the anniversary of the first day I realized I was madly in love with you. That night, we went to your friend’s Halloween party. I remember the black dress you wore. You had feathery black angel wings attached to your back and glitter all over your body like you were a fairy from A Midsummer Night’s Dream.” “I dressed as a fallen angel that year.” “You were my angel. The most beautiful thing I’d ever seen.

One suggested function of the first gardens of nearly 11,000 years ago was to provide a reliable reserve larder as insurance in case wild food supplies failed.

With the rise of chiefdoms around 7,500 years ago, people had to learn, for the first time in history, how to encounter strangers regularly without attempting to kill them. Part

Great promise and responsibility await Canada. As we look ahead to the next 150 years, we will continue to rise to the most pressing challenges we face, climate change among the first ones. We will meet these challenges the way we always have – with hard work, determination, and hope. On the 150th anniversary of Confederation, we celebrate the millions of Canadians who have come together to make our country the strong, prosperous, and open place it is today. On behalf of the Government of Canada, I wish you and your loved ones a very happy Canada Day.

The stone technology of the Tasmanians, when first encountered by European explorers in A.D. 1642, was simpler than that prevalent in parts of Upper Paleolithic Europe tens of thousands of years earlier.

In this long history of accelerating development, one can single out two especially significant jumps. The first, occurring between 100,000 and 50,000 years ago, probably was made possible by genetic changes in our bodies: namely, by evolution of the modern anatomy permitting modern speech or modern brain function, or both. That jump led to bone tools, single-purpose stone tools, and compound tools. The second jump resulted from our adoption of a sedentary lifestyle, which happened at different times in different parts of the world, as early as 13,000 years ago in some areas and not even today in others.

You can't help noticing that since abandoning its faith in the unseen world Europe seems also to have lost its faith in the seen one. Consider this poll taken in 2002 for the first anniversary of September 11: 61 percent of Americans said they were optimistic about the future, as opposed to 43 percent of Canadians, 42 percent of Britons, 29 percent of the French, 23 percent of Russians, and 15 percent of Germans. I wouldn't reckon those numbers will get any cheerier over the years.

For a similar example in humans, we have only to consider the surprising evolution of syphilis. Today, our two immediate associations to syphilis are genital sores and a very slowly developing disease, leading to the death of many untreated victims only after many years. However, when syphilis was first definitely recorded in Europe in 1495, its pustules often covered the body from the head to the knees, caused flesh to fall off people’s faces, and led to death within a few months. By 1546, syphilis had evolved into the disease with the symptoms so well known to us today. Apparently, just as with myxomatosis, those syphilis spirochetes that evolved so as to keep their victims alive for longer were thereby able to transmit their spirochete offspring into more victims.

As we were wrapping up the book, I sat down and thought about all the lessons I’d learned over the past two years. I couldn’t list them all, but here are a few: Never complain about the price of a gift from your spouse--accept it with love and gratitude. You can’t put a price on romance. Take lots of videos, even of the mundane. You will forget the sound of your children’s voices and you will miss your youth as much as theirs. Celebrate every wedding anniversary. Make time for dates. Hug your spouse every single morning. And always, ALWAYS, say “I love you.” Believe in your partner. When you hit hard times as a couple, take a weekend away or at least a night out. The times that you least feel like doing it are likely the times that you need it the most. Write love notes to your spouse, your children, and keep the ones they give you. Don’t expect a miniature pig to be an “easy” pet. Live life looking forward with a goal of no regrets, so you can look back without them. Be the friend you will need some day. Often the most important thing you can do for another person is just showing up. Question less and listen more. Don’t get too tied up in your plans for the future. No one really knows their future anyway. Laugh at yourself, and with life. People don’t change their core character. Be humble, genuine, and gracious. Before you get into business with someone, look at their history. Expect them to be with you for the long haul, even if you don’t think they will be. If they aren’t someone you could take a road trip across the country with, don’t do business with them in the first place. Real families and real sacrifices live in the fabric of the Red, White, and Blue; stand for the national anthem.

invention is often the mother of necessity, rather than vice versa. A good example is the history of Thomas Edison’s phonograph, the most original invention of the greatest inventor of modern times. When Edison built his first phonograph in 1877, he published an article proposing ten uses to which his invention might be put. They included preserving the last words of dying people, recording books for blind people to hear, announcing clock time, and teaching spelling. Reproduction of music was not high on Edison’s list of priorities. A few years later Edison told his assistant that his invention had no commercial value. Within another few years he changed his mind and did enter business to sell phonographs—but for use as office dictating machines. When other entrepreneurs created jukeboxes by arranging for a phonograph to play popular music at the drop of a coin, Edison objected to this debasement, which apparently detracted from serious office use of his invention. Only after about 20 years did Edison reluctantly concede that the main use of his phonograph was to record and play music.

In this long history of accelerating development, one can single out two especially significant jumps. The first, occurring between 100,000 and 50,000 years ago, probably was made possible by genetic changes in our bodies: namely, by evolution of the modern anatomy permitting modern speech or modern brain function, or both. That jump led to bone tools, single-purpose stone tools, and compound tools.

In contrast, the crowd diseases, which we discussed earlier, could have arisen only with the buildup of large, dense human populations. That buildup began with the rise of agriculture starting about 10,000 years ago and then accelerated with the rise of cities starting several thousand years ago. In fact, the first attested dates for many familiar infectious diseases are surprisingly recent: around 1600 B.C. for smallpox (as deduced from pockmarks on an Egyptian mummy), 400 B.C. for mumps, 200 B.C. for leprosy, A.D. 1840 for epidemic polio, and 1959 for AIDS.

These feelings don't just go away. They linger. Hover. They are with me always. Even at my most functioning...they are there, watching me. These emotions are my roommates now, bunking up beside me at night. They do not pay any rent...they are determinded to ruin me, and yet I can never fully evict them from my brain. I have tried -- really tried -- to chip away at my grief...But lately, I've just given up. I'm finally giving it permission to breathe and exist... Most days now, they lie dormant in me. Sometimes it gets so quiet in my brain I think they've finally packed up and left. But every year as the calendar rounds the corner to March and the anniversary of her death approaches, anger bubbles again...I rage over the smallest of things, screaming behind the steering wheel of my car when another driver forgets to use their blinker. At first I'm perplexed, and then I remember: it's here again. And I am still mad. So mad. I can starve it, avoid it, rationalize it, manage it, talk about it in therapy, and eat it up in neat little points value. No matter how much weight I lose, I will never lose this one simple truth: I want my mom. I am so f***ing mad that she's gone. And that feeling will never, ever die.

Hello everyone. I would like to thank all of you for getting me here. This day is a huge milestone for me. I would like to thank all of the people who have supported me from the start till the end. I would like to thank the people who have also given me advice. I would like to thank most my english teacher for making my vocabulary so rich and my language so fluent and readable. I am very grateful for her and my improvements are all because of her. I have published this book on my first anniversary of being an Author. I am happy beyond understanding and feel that I should make my next year of writing a much more successful one than my first year.

Kristen and I always have a lot to celebrate at the end of June. First there’s Father’s Day, followed by our wedding anniversary and my birthday. But prior to the Best Practices this two-week season of parties didn’t inspire much of a celebratory mood. It always felt strange celebrating Father’s Day, given that my parenting skills had been something of a disappointment for the first three years, and the tears that Kristen had shed on our third wedding anniversary spoke rather poignantly to the fact that our marriage hadn’t been much to celebrate, either. That left my birthday, a day that was all about toasting the birth of the very person who had made Kristen’s life miserable.

I would dance all day in my basement listening to Off the Wall. You young people really don’t understand how magical Michael Jackson was. No one thought he was strange. No one was laughing. We were all sitting in front of our TVs watching the “Thriller” video every hour on the hour. We were all staring, openmouthed, as he moonwalked for the first time on the Motown twenty-fifth anniversary show. When he floated backward like a funky astronaut, I screamed out loud. There was no rewinding or rewatching. No next-day memes or trends on Twitter or Facebook posts. We would call each other on our dial phones and stretch the cord down the hall, lying on our stomachs and discussing Michael Jackson’s moves, George Michael’s facial hair, and that scene in Purple Rain when Prince fingers Apollonia from behind. Moments came and went, and if you missed them, you were shit out of luck. That’s why my parents went to a M*A*S*H party and watched the last episode in real time. There was no next-day M*A*S*H cast Google hangout. That’s why my family all squeezed onto one couch and watched the USA hockey team win the gold against evil Russia! We all wept as my mother pointed out every team member from Boston. (Everyone from Boston likes to point out everyone from Boston. Same with Canadians.) We all chanted “USA!” and screamed “YES!” when Al Michaels asked us if we believed in miracles. Things happened in real time and you watched them together. There was no rewind. HBO arrived in our house that same year. We had

decade after the first edition of this book was published, Yan Wong and I met in the fitting surroundings of the Oxford Museum of Natural History to discuss the possibility of producing a new, tenth anniversary edition. Yan, once my undergraduate pupil, had been employed as my research assistant during the writing of the original edition, before he left for his lecturing position in Leeds and his career as a television presenter. He played an enormously important part in the conception and execution of the first edition, and he was credited as joint author of several of the chapters. During the course of our discussion ten years on, we realised that much new information had come in, especially from the molecular genetics laboratories of the world. Yan undertook the bulk of the revision and I proposed to the publisher that this time he should be properly credited as joint author of the whole book.

After all, who are they - these egoists! Every single one of them stands up only for the interests of his class. Behind all of them stands either a Jew or their own moneybag. They are nothing other than profiteers; they live from the profits of this war; no good will follow it. I confront these folk as nothing other than the simple fighter for my German Volk that I am. And I am convinced that, just as this struggle has been blessed by Providence up to now, so it will also be blessed in the future. When I stepped before you in this hall for the first time, twenty-one years ago, I was unknown, nameless, and I had nothing other than my own faith. In these twenty-one years, a new world was created! The way from the present to the future will be easier than the one from February 24, 1920, leading to this day and to this place. With zealous confidence I look to the future. The whole nation has stepped up, and I know that the moment there is the command to “fall into step,” Germany will march! Speech for the 21st anniversary of the N.S.D.A.P. in the Hofbrauhaus Munich, February 24, 1941

This neighborhood was mine first. I walked each block twice: drunk, then sober. I lived every day with legs and headphones. It had snowed the night I ran down Lorimer and swore I’d stop at nothing. My love, he had died. What was I supposed to do? I regret nothing. Sometimes I feel washed up as paper. You’re three years away. But then I dance down Graham and the trees are the color of champagne and I remember— There are things I like about heartbreak, too, how it needs a good soundtrack. The way I catch a man’s gaze on the L and don’t look away first. Losing something is just revising it. After this love there will be more love. My body rising from a nest of sheets to pick up a stranger’s MetroCard. I regret nothing. Not the bar across the street from my apartment; I was still late. Not the shared bathroom in Barcelona, not the red-eyes, not the songs about black coats and Omaha. I lie about everything but not this. You were every streetlamp that winter. You held the crown of my head and for once I won’t show you what I’ve made. I regret nothing. Your mother and your Maine. Your wet hair in my lap after that first shower. The clinic and how I cried for a week afterwards. How we never chose the language we spoke. You wrote me a single poem and in it you were the dog and I the fire. Remember the courthouse? The anniversary song. Those goddamn Kmart towels. I loved them, when did we throw them away? Tomorrow I’ll write down everything we’ve done to each other and fill the bathtub with water. I’ll burn each piece of paper down to silt. And if it doesn’t work, I’ll do it again. And again and again and— — Hala Alyan, “Object Permanence

National Socialism nurtured racism. In reality there are only two races, namely the "race" of decent people and the "race" of people who are not decent. And "segregation" runs straight through all nations and within every single nation straight through all parties. Even in the concentration camps one came across halfway decent fellows here and there among the SS men-just as one came across the odd scoundrel or two among the prisoners. not to mention the Capos. That decent people are in the minority, that they have always been a minority and are likely to remain so is something we must come to terms with. Danger only threatens when a political system sends those not-decent people, i.e., the negative element of a nation, to the top. And no nation is immune from doing this, and in this respect every nation is in principle capable of a Holocaust! In support of this we have the sensational results of scientific experiments in the field of social psychology, for which we owe thanks to an American; they are known as the Milgram Experiment. If we want to extract the political consequences from all this, we should assume that there are basically only two styles of politics, or perhaps better said, only two types of politicians: the first are those believe that the end justifies the means, and that could be any means...While the other type of politician knows very well that there are mans that could desecrate the holiest end. And it is this type of politician whom I trust, despite the clamor around the year 1988, and the demands of the day, not to mention of the anniversary, trust to hear the voice of reason and to ensure that all who are of goodwill, stretch out their hands to each other, across all the graves and across all divisions.

These usages are attested in the most formal manner. “I pour upon the earth of the tomb,” says Iphigenia in Euripides, “milk, honey, and wine; for it is with these that we rejoice the dead.”10 Among the Greeks there was in front of every tomb a place destined for the immolation of the victim and the cooking of its flesh.11 The Roman tomb also had its culina, a species of kitchen, of a particular kind, and entirely for the use of the dead.12 Plutarch relates that after the battle of Platæa, the slain having been buried upon the field of battle, the Platæans engaged to offer them the funeral repast every year. Consequently, on each anniversary they went in grand procession, conducted by their first magistrates to the mound under which the dead lay. They offered the departed milk, wine, oil, and perfumes, and sacrificed a victim. When the provisions had been placed upon the tomb, the Platæans pronounced a formula by which they called the dead to come and partake of this repast. This ceremony was still performed in the time of Plutarch, who was enabled to witness the six hundredth anniversary of it.13 A little later, Lucian, ridiculing these opinions and usages, shows how deeply rooted they were in the common mind. “The dead,” says he, “are nourished by the provisions which we place upon their tomb, and drink the wine which we pour out there; so that one of the dead to whom nothing is offered is condemned to perpetual hunger.”14 These are very old forms of belief, and are quite groundless and ridiculous, and yet they exercised empire over man during a great number of generations. They governed men’s minds; we shall soon see that they governed societies even, and that the greater part of the domestic and social institutions of the ancients was derived from this source.

I was told love should be unconditional. That's the rule, everyone says so. But if love has no boundaries, no limits, no conditions, why should anyone try to do the right thing ever? If I know I am loved no matter what, where is the challenge? I am supposed to love Nick despite all his shortcomings. And Nick is supposed to love me despite my quirks. But clearly, neither of us does. It makes me think that everyone is very wrong, that love should have many conditions. Love should require both partners to be their very best at all times. Unconditional love is an undisciplined love, and as we all have seen, undisciplined love is disastrous. You can read more about my thoughts on love in Amazing. Out soon! But first: motherhood. The due date is tomorrow. Tomorrow happens to be our anniversary. Year six. Iron. I thought about giving Nick a nice pair of handcuffs, but he may not find that funny yet. It's so strange to think: A year ago today, I was undoing my husband. Now I am almost done reassembling him. Nick has spent all his free time these past months slathering my belly with cocoa butter and running out for pickles and rubbing my feet, and all the things good fathers-to-be are supposed to do. Doting on me. He is learning to love me unconditionally, under all my conditions. I think we are finally on our way to happiness. I have finally figured it out. We are on the eve of becoming the world's best, brightest nuclear family. We just need to sustain it. Nick doesn't have it down perfect. This morning he was stroking my hair and asking what else he could do for me, and I said: 'My gosh, Nick, why are you so wonderful to me?' He was supposed to say: You deserve it. I love you. But he said, 'Because I feel sorry for you.' 'Why?' 'Because every morning you have to wake up and be you.' I really, truly wish he hadn't said that. I keep thinking about it. I can't stop. I don't have anything else to add. I just wanted to make sure I had the last word. I think I've earned that.

Reaching into his sporran, he pulled out a small bundle wrapped in fine linen. “I want to give ye somethin’, somethin’I want ye to wear this day.”Carefully, he unfolded the linen and held his hand out to her. Josephine’s eyes widened with curiosity and joy. “’Tis beautiful, Graeme!” “It be a brooch that each MacAulay lad receives when he turns six and ten. I want ye to have it.” Josephine carefully took it and studied it closely. Made of pewter, in the center of the brooch were two hands, one decidedly masculine, the other feminine. The masculine hand held the feminine hand in his palm. In the center of her palm was a tiny ruby. To one side, the circle had been engraved to look like stars twinkling near a crescent moon. On the other were the words aeterna devotione. Eternal devotion. Tears filled her eyes as she looked into his. “Ye want me to have this?” “Aye, I do, Joie,”he said as he placed a kiss on her forehead. “Me great-great-great grandfather presented a brooch just like this to his wife, me great-great-great grandmum. But no’until the first anniversary of their weddin’day. ’Twas a symbol of the great love they had found with one another. ’Tis tradition for the MacAulay men to only give their brooch to a woman who has stolen their heart, a woman they love and trust above all else.” Tears trailed down her cheeks, her heart beating so rapidly she was certain it would burst through her breastbone at any moment. “I do no’quite understand how it happened, or how it happened so quickly, Joie, but it has. Amorem in corde meo ut arctius coccino colloeandus arctius ideo astra,”Graeme said first in Latin and then again in Gaelic, “Toisc go bhfuil do ghrá eitseáilte isteach i mo chroí i corcairdhearg, mar sin tá sé eitseáilte amonst na réaltaí.”He placed a tender kiss on her cheek. “As yer love be etched into me heart in crimson, so it be etched amongst the stars,”he told her. “As me grandda said those words to me grandmum all those many years ago, I say them to ye.

In Western culture today, you decide to get married because you feel an attraction to the other person. You think he or she is wonderful. But a year or two later—or, just as often, a month or two—three things usually happen. First, you begin to find out how selfish this wonderful person is. Second, you discover that the wonderful person has been going through a similar experience and he or she begins to tell you how selfish you are. And third, though you acknowledge it in part, you conclude that your spouse’s selfishness is more problematic than your own. This is especially true if you feel that you’ve had a hard life and have experienced a lot of hurt. You say silently, “OK, I shouldn’t do that—but you don’t understand me.” The woundedness makes us minimize our own selfishness. And that’s the point at which many married couples arrive after a relatively brief period of time. So what do you do then? There are at least two paths to take. First, you could decide that your woundedness is more fundamental than your self-centeredness and determine that unless your spouse sees the problems you have and takes care of you, it’s not going to work out. Of course, your spouse will probably not do this—especially if he or she is thinking almost the exact same thing about you! And so what follows is the development of emotional distance and, perhaps, a slowly negotiated kind of détente or ceasefire. There is an unspoken agreement not to talk about some things. There are some things your spouse does that you hate, but you stop talking about them as long as he or she stops bothering you about certain other things. No one changes for the other; there is only tit-for-tat bargaining. Couples who settle for this kind of relationship may look happily married after forty years, but when it’s time for the anniversary photo op, the kiss will be forced. The alternative to this truce-marriage is to determine to see your own selfishness as a fundamental problem and to treat it more seriously than you do your spouse’s. Why? Only you have complete access to your own selfishness, and only you have complete responsibility for it. So each spouse should take the Bible seriously, should make a commitment to “give yourself up.” You should stop making excuses for selfishness, you should begin to root it out as it’s revealed to you, and you should do so regardless of what your spouse is doing. If two spouses each say, “I’m going to treat my self-centeredness as the main problem in the marriage,” you have the prospect of a truly great marriage. It Only Takes One to Begin

Dear Mom and Dad How are you? If you are reading this it means your back from the wonderful cruise my brothers and I sent you on for your anniversary. We’re sure you both had a wonderful time. We want you to know that, while you were away, we did almost everything you asked. All but one thing, that is. We killed the lawn. We killed it dead. You asked us not to and we killed it. We killed it with extreme prejudice and no regard for its planty life. We killed the lawn. Now we know what you’re thinking: “But sons, whom we love ever so much, how can this be so? We expressly asked you to care for the lawn? The exactly opposite of what you are now conveying to us in an open digital forum.” True enough. We cannot dispute this. However, we have killed the lawn. We have killed it good. We threw a party and it was quite a good time. We had a moon bounce and beer and games and pirate costumes, oh it was a good time. Were it anyone else’s party that probably would have been enough but, hey, you know us. So we got a foam machine. A frothy, wet, quite fun yet evidently deadly, foam machine. Now this dastardly devise didn’t kill the lawn per se. We hypothesize it was more that it made the lawn very wet and that dancing in said area for a great many hours over the course of several days did the deed. Our jubilant frolicking simply beat the poor grass into submission. We collected every beer cap, bottle, and can. There is not a single cigarette butt or cigar to be found. The house is still standing, the dog is still barking, Grandma is still grandmaing but the lawn is no longer lawning. Now we’re sure, as you return from your wonderful vacation, that you’re quite upset but lets put this in perspective. For one thing whose idea was it for you to leave us alone in the first place? Not your best parenting decision right there. We’re little better than baboons. The mere fact that we haven’t killed each other in years past is, at best, luck. Secondly, let us not forget, you raised us to be this way. Always pushing out limits, making sure we thought creatively. This is really as much your fault as it is ours, if not more so. If anything we should be very disappointed in you. Finally lets not forget your cruise was our present to you. We paid for it. If you look at how much that cost and subtract the cost of reseeding the lawn you still came out ahead so, really, what position are you in to complain? So let’s review; we love you, you enjoyed a week on a cruise because of us, the lawn is dead, and it’s partially your fault. Glad that’s all out in the open. Can you have dinner ready for us by 6 tonight? We’d like macaroni and cheese. Love always Peter, James & Carmine

Fascism rested not upon the truth of its doctrine but upon the leader’s mystical union with the historic destiny of his people, a notion related to romanticist ideas of national historic flowering and of individual artistic or spiritual genius, though fascism otherwise denied romanticism’s exaltation of unfettered personal creativity. The fascist leader wanted to bring his people into a higher realm of politics that they would experience sensually: the warmth of belonging to a race now fully aware of its identity, historic destiny, and power; the excitement of participating in a vast collective enterprise; the gratification of submerging oneself in a wave of shared feelings, and of sacrificing one’s petty concerns for the group’s good; and the thrill of domination. Fascism’s deliberate replacement of reasoned debate with immediate sensual experience transformed politics, as the exiled German cultural critic Walter Benjamin was the first to point out, into aesthetics. And the ultimate fascist aesthetic experience, Benjamin warned in 1936, was war. Fascist leaders made no secret of having no program. Mussolini exulted in that absence. “The Fasci di Combattimento,” Mussolini wrote in the “Postulates of the Fascist Program” of May 1920, “. . . do not feel tied to any particular doctrinal form.” A few months before he became prime minister of Italy, he replied truculently to a critic who demanded to know what his program was: “The democrats of Il Mondo want to know our program? It is to break the bones of the democrats of Il Mondo. And the sooner the better.” “The fist,” asserted a Fascist militant in 1920, “is the synthesis of our theory.” Mussolini liked to declare that he himself was the definition of Fascism. The will and leadership of a Duce was what a modern people needed, not a doctrine. Only in 1932, after he had been in power for ten years, and when he wanted to “normalize” his regime, did Mussolini expound Fascist doctrine, in an article (partly ghostwritten by the philosopher Giovanni Gentile) for the new Enciclopedia italiana. Power came first, then doctrine. Hannah Arendt observed that Mussolini “was probably the first party leader who consciously rejected a formal program and replaced it with inspired leadership and action alone.” Hitler did present a program (the 25 Points of February 1920), but he pronounced it immutable while ignoring many of its provisions. Though its anniversaries were celebrated, it was less a guide to action than a signal that debate had ceased within the party. In his first public address as chancellor, Hitler ridiculed those who say “show us the details of your program. I have refused ever to step before this Volk and make cheap promises.” Several consequences flowed from fascism’s special relationship to doctrine. It was the unquestioning zeal of the faithful that counted, more than his or her reasoned assent. Programs were casually fluid. The relationship between intellectuals and a movement that despised thought was even more awkward than the notoriously prickly relationship of intellectual fellow travelers with communism. Many intellectuals associated with fascism’s early days dropped away or even went into opposition as successful fascist movements made the compromises necessary to gain allies and power, or, alternatively, revealed its brutal anti-intellectualism. We will meet some of these intellectual dropouts as we go along. Fascism’s radical instrumentalization of truth explains why fascists never bothered to write any casuistical literature when they changed their program, as they did often and without compunction. Stalin was forever writing to prove that his policies accorded somehow with the principles of Marx and Lenin; Hitler and Mussolini never bothered with any such theoretical justification. Das Blut or la razza would determine who was right.

From the Introduction to Christopher Columbus and the Age of Exploration for Kids: In 1892, with the 400th anniversary of Christopher Columbus’s arrival in the West Indies, the world rushed to celebrate—or at least the United States did. In America, the glorifying of the Discoverer took its most lofty form in the Columbian Exposition, held in Chicago. In a nation with 63 million people, the fair attracted 24 million visitors. It cost as much to put on the extravaganza as it would to build the Panama Canal more than a decade later. The Columbian Exposition had but one purpose: to celebrate America’s magnificence—a result of Columbus’s brave and daring initial voyage, its surprising revelation, and its marvelous impact on world history. Clearly, in 1892, Christopher Columbus held center stage. Not so a hundred years later, in 1992, when the 500th, anniversary of the Discovery rolled around. No longer, it was said, should Columbus’s achievement be considered an unmixed blessing. Nor should the man, himself, be viewed with uncritical reverence. Columbus, many historians were now willing to concede, had numerous character flaws that resulted in misadventures and moral failure. The Admiral was seen as the first of many Europeans, who, in coming to the New World, would ravage the land, plunder its wealth, and eventually introduce African slavery. There was no Columbian Exposition in 1992. In the United States, Columbus was hardly mentioned at all. Christopher Columbus is possibly the most researched and written about individual in history. That is not surprising. No matter what one may think of Columbus, hero, heel, or both, the significance of what he did, however interpreted, is monumental. Christopher Columbus changed the world. For that, the Admiral of the Ocean Sea deserves to be known and explored. What follows, hopefully, will be your own act of discovery.

Oh, Matthew," she whispered, moved to tears. "I called it Grace. I hope you don't mind." For the first time, his manner held a hint of shyness, disconcerting in a man who had just made love to her without hesitation or reticence. Gently, she curled her hand around what was inside the box and lifted it to the light. "It's your rose." "No, it's your rose." A heady fragrance filled the air. With one shaking finger, Grace touched a flawless pink petal. The color was unforgettable. It was the most beautiful rose she'd ever seen. Impossible to credit that those unpromising stalks in his courtyard had produced this exquisite bloom. "It's perfect," she whispered. "It's a miracle." He was a miracle. How could she not love the man who conjured this beauty with hands and imagination? The faint smile broadened. Had he worried that she'd reject his gift? Foolish, darling Matthew. The question was whether the rose was a promise of a future or a token of parting. "I worked on it whenever I could. This last year has been busy." An understatement, she knew. The Marquess of Sheene had been a ubiquitous presence in London since his release. Everywhere he went, society feted him as a hero. She'd read of the string of honors he'd received, the friendship with the king, the invitations to join scientific boards and societies. Echoing her gesture, he reached out to touch the petals. The sensitivity of his fingers on the flower reminded her of his hands on her skin. "I did most of the basic experiments when I was a prisoner, but I couldn't get it right." He glanced up with an expression that combined pride and diffidence in a breathtakingly attractive mixture. "This is the first bud, Grace. It appeared almost a year to the day after I promised to wait. It seemed a sign." "And you brought it to me," she said softly, staring at the flower. The anniversary of his release didn't occur for two more days. That date was etched on her longing heart. Then she noticed something else. "My glove," she said blankly. With unsteady hands, she reached in and withdrew a light green kidskin glove from a recess carved away from the damp. The buttery leather was crushed and worn from incessant handling. "Have you kept it all this time?" "Of course." He wasn't smiling anymore and his eyes deepened to a rich, rare gold. Beautiful, unwavering, somber. "You make me want to cry." Her voice emerged so thickly, she didn't sound like herself. She laid the box on the bench and tightened her grip on the soft leather until her knuckles whitened. What was he trying to tell her? What did the rose mean? The glove? Had he carried her glove into his new life like a knight wore his lady's favor into battle? The thought sent choking emotion to her throat.

two days of pay on the first-year anniversary grew to four weeks of pay by the tenth-year anniversary. Additionally, five-year employment anniversaries were celebrated with a cake, ten years with a monogrammed silver platter with the name Pepperidge Farm and the date inscribed on the bottom, and fifteen years with a monogrammed

This issue of Stvar we dedicate to the anniversaries. Each effort that commences from historical years and epochal dates, however, is not only supposed to cope with the legacy and lessons of evoked events and figures, but also to question a certain (dominant) relation to the past and history. In other words, the task is not a commemorative one, that is, a fetishist relation to the epoch of decisive dates and big events, but rather the radical grasping of the materiality of history following its work where social contradictions require that fight for emancipation and progress is to be taken up. What is at stake here is not an academic requiem or a leftist memorial service to the era of revolutions and great revolutionaries; it is all about casting our gaze toward the past in order to better examine those moments where the past opens itself toward the future. The relation toward past, therefore, should contain perspectives of different future. Amputation of the future is nowadays one of the features of many current academic, scientific and ideological discourses. Once this perspective of different future has been eliminated, the resignification of Marx, Luxemburg, Kollontai, Lenin and others becomes possible, because their doctrines and results have been quite depoliticized. On the contrary, it is the memory that calls for struggle that is the main cognitive attitude toward the events remembered in the collected texts in this issue. Not nostalgic or collectionist remembrance but critical memory filled with hope. The main question, thus, is that of radical social transformations, i.e. theory and practice of revolution. In this sense, Marx, Kollontai, Lenin and other Bolsheviks, and Gramsci as well, constitute the coordinates in which every theoretical practice that wants to offer resistance to capitalist expansion and its ideological forms is moving. The year 1867, when the first Volume of Marx’s Capital is brought out in Hamburg, then October 1917 in Russia, when all power went to the hands of Soviets, and 1937, when Gramsci dies after 11 years of fascist prison: these are three events that we are rethinking, highlighting and interpreting so that perspective of the change of the current social relations can be further developed and carried on. Publishing of the book after which nothing was the same anymore, a revolutionary uprising and conquest of the power, and then a death in jail are the coordinates of historical outcomes as well: these events can be seen as symptomatic dialectical-historical sequence. Firstly, in Capital Marx laid down foundations for the critique of political economy, indispensable frame for every understanding of production and social relations in capitalism, and then in 1917, in the greatest attempt of the organization of working masses, Bolsheviks undermined seriously the system of capitalist production and created the first worker’s state of that kind; and at the end, Gramsci’s death in 1937 somehow symbolizes a tragical outcome and defeat of all aspirations toward revolutionizing of social relations in the Western Europe. Instead of that, Europe got fascism and the years of destruction and sufferings. Although the 1937 is the symbolic year of defeat, it is also a testimony of hope and survival of a living idea that inspires thinkers and revolutionaries since Marx. Gramsci also handed down the huge material of his prison notebooks, as one of the most original attempts to critically elaborate Marx’s and Lenin’s doctrine in new conditions. Isn’t this task the same today?

it wouldn’t last forever. Nothing does. Not even grief. The first year after you’ve lost someone is the most painful, but the second year is excruciating in its own way. The grief fades, and it’s only on birthdays, and anniversaries, and holidays that you realize you’ve become accustomed to their absence. That you don’t think about them every day.

For many of us, an interesting anniversary will be 365 days from now: the first year of the rest of our lives will end then.

On November 2, 1899, eight members of the United States Navy were awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor for extraordinary heroism and service beyond the call of duty. On the night of June 2, 1898, they had volunteered to scuttle the collier USS Merrimac, with the intention of blocking the entry channel to Santiago de Cuba. On orders of Rear Admiral William T. Sampson, who was in command, their intention was to trap Spanish Admiral Cervera’s fleet in the harbor. Getting the USS Merrimac underway, the eight men navigated the ship towards a predetermined location where sinking her would seal the port. Their course knowingly took them within the range of the Spanish ships and the shore batteries. The sailors were well aware of the danger this put them into, however they put their mission first. Once the Spanish gunners saw what was happening, they realized what the Americans were up to and started firing their heavy artillery from an extremely close range. The channel leading into Santiago is narrow, preventing the ship from taking any evasive action. The American sailors were like fish in a barrel and the Spanish gunners were relentless. In short order, the heavy shelling from the Spanish shore batteries disabled the rudder of the Merrimac and caused the ship to sink prematurely. The USS Merrimac went down without achieving its objective of obstructing navigation and sealing the port. ‎Fête du Canada or Canada Day is the anniversary of the July 1, 1867, enactment of the Canadian Constitution Act. This weekend Americans also celebrate the United States’, July 4, 1776 birthday, making this time perfect to celebrate George Fredrick Phillips heroic action. Phillips was one of the men mentioned in the story above of the USS Merrimac. He was born on March 8, 1862, in Saint John, New Brunswick, Canada and joined the United States Navy in March 1898 in Galveston, Texas. Phillips became a Machinist First Class and displayed extraordinary heroism throughout the Spanish bombardment during their operation. He was discharged from the Navy in August 1903, and died a year later at the age of 42 in Cambridge, Massachusetts. His body was returned to Canada where he was interred with honors at the Fernhill Cemetery in his hometown of Saint John, New Brunswick.

The first year after you’ve lost someone is the most painful, but the second year is excruciating in its own way. The grief fades, and it’s only on birthdays, and anniversaries, and holidays that you realize you’ve become accustomed to their absence. That you don’t think about them every day.

The reality is that the true fundamental transformation in America (and the West generally) has come in the realm of culture, notably in matters of sexual orientation, gender, marriage, and family. The shift there has been unprecedented and far beyond anyone’s imagination in 2008. It was signaled most conspicuously in June 2015 when the Obama White House—the nation’s first house—was illuminated in the colors of the “LGBTQ” rainbow on the day of the Obergefell decision, when the Supreme Court, by a one-vote margin, rendered unto itself the ability to redefine marriage (theretofore the province of biblical and natural law) and imposed this new “Constitutional right” on all fifty states. If ever there was a picture of a fundamental transformation, that was it. And that was just one of countless “accomplishments” heralded and boasted of by the Obama administration. In June 2016, to celebrate the one-year anniversary of Obergefell, the White House press office released two extraordinary fact sheets detailing President Obama’s vast efforts to promote “LGBT” rights at home and abroad.663 Not only was it telling that the White House would assemble such a list, and tout it, but the sheer length of the list was stunning to behold. There was no similar list of such dramatic changes by the Obama White House in any other policy area. Such achievements included the infamous Obama bathroom fiat, through which, according to Barack Obama’s executive word, all public schools were ordered to revolutionize their restrooms and locker rooms to make them available to teenage boys who want to be called girls.

But then just under one year ago—on their sixteenth wedding anniversary, no less—Julian had arrived home, strolled into their first-floor master bedroom suite, just as nonchalant as he pleased, and announced that he was leaving her for another woman.

accomplishment on the job who has no time for her co-workers, whom she generally avoids like the plague. Are we to believe that she’s celebrating the fact she has this particular job, the joy of coming to work each day in her shared DIA cubicle? I don’t think so. She didn’t seem to celebrate anything. It made no sense. Then we theorized that the date had some very special significance to her life. September 30 was the date she first set foot into DIA. Could it also have been the date that she first penetrated the U.S. intelligence community at the behest of her Cuban handlers? Was it possible that she took September 30 off every year to celebrate the anniversary of her success at

In an episode that now hits a little too close to home given that the word quarantine has become part of our vocabulary over the last few years, Bernadette has an accident at her lab that causes her to be quarantined at the hospital for preventive measures. At first it throws a wrench in Howard’s anniversary plans (he wrote his wife a special song that he was going to perform—with the rest of the gang doing backup vocals), but then they move it to the hospital where he sings it for her on the opposite side of the glass partition walls.

It’s the date of our first wedding anniversary.” “Oh? Oh, that’s right!” He smiled, relieved at the change to a safe subject. “We’ll have been married a year. My, it doesn’t seem that long!” “It seems much longer,” she said tonelessly. She was looking off again, and he felt in sudden uneasiness that the subject was not safe at all; he wished she would not look as if she were seeing the whole course of that year and of their marriage. . . . not to get scared, but to learn—she thought—the thing to do is not to get scared, but to learn . . . The words came from a sentence she had repeated to herself so often that it felt like a pillar polished smooth by the helpless weight of her body, the pillar that had supported her through the past year. She tried to repeat it, but she felt as if her hands were slipping on the polish, as if the sentence would not stave off terror any longer—because she was beginning to understand. If you don’t know, the thing to do is not to get scared, but to learn. . . . It was in the bewildered loneliness of the first weeks of her marriage that she said it to herself for the first time. She could not understand Jim’s behavior, or his sullen anger, which looked like weakness, or his evasive, incomprehensible answers to her questions, which sounded like cowardice; such traits were not possible in the James Taggart whom she had married. She told herself that she could not condemn without understanding, that she knew nothing about his world, that the extent of her ignorance was the extent to which she misinterpreted his actions. She took the blame, she took the beating of self-reproach—against some bleakly stubborn certainty which told her that something was wrong and that the thing she felt was fear.

They had their assumptions about who was responsible, as did the police, but it would take a full fifteen years before murder charges were filed. Rather than yell, or publicly criticize the investigation, these women sent cookies to the Newport Beach Police Department each year on the anniversary of the slaying. It was the gentlest of reminders not to forget about their dad. These were wonderful human beings showing grace under the worst circumstances imaginable. Meeting them for the first time broke my heart, and the more I learned, the more motivated I became.

There was a lot going on during those years. He was quite palsied and he couldn’t write his own letters, so he had someone write for him, but he carried on this incredible correspondence with Jefferson during those years. [Their letter writing culminated with these two bitter enemies coming to peace with one another, and both dying on the same day, the fiftieth anniversary of the Declaration of Independence.]

I suppose it’s like newlywed sex. The first few years, you get busy anytime, anywhere, baby. But after a few anniversaries, you’d rather stay up and watch Leno.

Today was the first day of summer, she realized, her spirits lifting like a kite. She loved milestones of any sort: birthdays, anniversaries, holidays, checks on the calendar, notches on a growth chart. Today would be special, brand new. She felt it deep inside. Summer was here with sunny days and balmy nights, the informality of barbecues and dips in the swimming pool. She was so relieved to have the grind of the school year finished. She missed playing with her children.

Kristen and I always have a lot to celebrate at the end of June. First there’s Father’s Day, followed by our wedding anniversary and my birthday. But prior to the Best Practices this two-week season of parties didn’t inspire much of a celebratory mood. It always felt strange celebrating Father’s Day, given that my parenting skills had been something of a disappointment for the first three years, and the tears that Kristen had shed on our third wedding anniversary spoke rather poignantly to the fact that our marriage hadn’t been much to celebrate, either. That left my birthday, a day that was all about toasting the birth of the very person who had made Kristen’s life miserable. But after fifteen months of hard work and soul-searching, Kristen and I were finally able to look forward to this season with real anticipation. We were communicating again, and I was beginning to hit my stride as a father and as a husband. I was folding laundry, Kristen was taking her first uninterrupted showers in years, and when America’s Next Top Model wasn’t on during its regularly scheduled hour, I stayed cool as a cucumber. And that gave us plenty of reason to break out the streamers and party hats. Heck, we could have made a layer cake. In light of all this, I decided that June would be the best time to embark on my most ambitious Best Practice yet: being fun.

Today, we pause to remember and honour the Canadian men and women who have served our country and fought for freedom around the world. Time may fade, but our memories cannot. We all have a duty to hold the torch high, and to keep its flame alight. Liberty’s cause beats deeply within our hearts, and every generation of Canadians has answered the call to serve. We must remember that, during the First and Second World Wars, Canada and Newfoundland fought side by side. This year marks the 100th anniversary of the Battle of Beaumont-Hamel, when a generation of Newfoundlanders laid down their lives in defence of the freedom, democracy, and diversity that we enjoy today. From Ypres to Vimy Ridge, Dieppe to Juno Beach – we will not forget. From Korea to the Suez, Cyprus to Kandahar – we will not forget. We remember yesterday’s youth, far from home, who fought for reason and progress. They stood up to tyranny and stood for liberty, and sacrificed their future for the future of so many. We honour Canada’s bravest, who stand shoulder to shoulder with our allies around the world. Every day, they face down the threat of terrorism, and protect the values we cherish most. At 11:00 am, I encourage all Canadians – no matter where you are – to observe the two minutes of silence. When we remember, we must remember war as it was and as it is. Freedom’s terrible price is known but to the few who have fought for it. That is why today we stand sombre and silent, with poppies close to our hearts, and take the time to remember. Lest we forget.

Larry King Larry King is one of the premier figures in American broadcasting, and his show, Larry King Live, on CNN, is one of the longest-running television programs currently on the air. The summer of 2007 will mark his fiftieth anniversary in broadcasting. I first met Princess Diana at a party in Los Angeles. As at so many parties in LA, there were famous people from all walks of life--actors, broadcasters, executives, authors, politicians, journalists. But there was only one princess, and she stood out from the crowd, talking and smiling and taking the time to give each person some personal attention. I kept her in the corner of my eye, waiting for an opportunity to talk to her. But she was spending so much time with every guest! Eventually, I made my way over to where she stood, and waited for a chance to finally meet this illustrious lady. Her pictures did not do her justice. I had seen her many times on TV and in the papers, of course, but seeing her in person was a whole new experience. She was absolutely beautiful. Her face was radiant, animated and full of life. She had honesty in her eyes, which made her approachable, and she had this uncanny ability to make everyone around her comfortable. I have interviewed thousands of people in my career, and this is a quality that I’ve always known is essential for a broadcaster. But for Diana, it seemed to come completely naturally. Within the first five seconds of meeting her, I felt like we had been friends for years. It was a big party and she was the star. Everybody wanted to talk to her. Not a big surprise--after all, she had interesting things to say about so many different topics. I always respected her work with land mines and AIDS, I knew her importance to the fashion world, and her role as a princess in the Royal Family made her one of the hottest topics of the tabloids. Yet she chatted about her sons and her friends with everybody--Diana was an extraordinary woman with an unassuming air, and it was an absolute pleasure to be in her presence. When we were introduced, her eyes lit up and she grabbed my hand. She said, “Oh, you’re Larry from the telly!” We laughed and spoke for a little while about our families, and I was amazed at how well she remembered all of the little details I mentioned. After all of the people she had met that night, she was bright-eyed and curious about everything. My only regret from the first time we met was that we didn’t have a few more hours to talk! I blushed when she mentioned a few interviews I had done earlier in the year. I didn’t know she had seen me on CNN. It was a warm, friendly greeting that I will never forget.

From The Bridge” by Captain Hank Bracker Mundane Happenings Life is just packed with “Mundane Happenings!” It’s the mundane happenings that usually take the most time and they always seem to interfere, just about when you want to do something really important. Let’s start with mundane things that are routine, like doing the dishes and taking out the garbage. The list for a single person might be a little less involved or complicated but it would be every bit as important as that of a married couple or people with lots of children or even pets. Oh yes, for some the list of mundane responsibilities would include washing clothes and taking the children to their activities. You know what I mean… school, sports, hobbies, their intellectual endeavors and the like. For most of us beds have to be made, the house has to be kept clean, grass has to be cut and the flowers have to be pruned. Then there are the seasonal things, such as going trick or treating, buying the children everything they need before school starts or before going to summer camp. Let’s not forget Christmas shopping as well as birthdays and anniversaries. This list is just an outline of mundane happenings! I’m certain that you can fill in any of these broad topics with a detailed account of just how time consuming these little things can be. Of course we could continue to fill in our calendar with how our jobs consume our precious time. For some of us our jobs are plural, meaning we have more than one job or sometimes even more than that. I guess you get the point… it’s the mundane happenings that eat up our precious time ferociously. Blink once and the week is gone, blink twice and it’s the month and then the year and all you have to show for it, is a long list of the mundane things you have accomplished. Would you believe me, if I said that it doesn’t have to be this way? Really, it doesn’t have to, and here is what you can do about it. First ask yourself if you deserve to recapture any of the time you are so freely using for mundane things. Of course the answer should be a resounding yes! The next question you might want to ask yourself is what would you do with the time you are carving out for yourself? This is where we could part company, however, whatever it is it should be something personal and something that is fulfilling to you! For me, it became a passion to write about things that are important to me! I came to realize that there were stories that needed to be told! You may not agree, however I love sharing my time with others. I’m interested in hearing their stories, which I sometimes even incorporate into my writings. I also love to tell my stories because I led an exciting life and love to share my adventures with my friends and family, as well as you and future generations. I do this by establishing, specifically set, quiet time, and have a cave, where I can work; and to me work is fun! This is how and where I wrote The Exciting Story of Cuba, Suppressed I Rise, now soon to be published as a “Revised Edition” and Seawater One…. Going to Sea! Yes, it takes discipline but to me it’s worth the time and effort! I love doing this and I love meeting new friends in the process. Of course I still have mundane things to do…. I believe it was the astronaut Allen Shepard, who upon returning to Earth from the Moon, was taking out the garbage and looking up saw a beautifully clear full Moon and thought to himself, “Damn, I was up there!” It’s the accomplishment that makes the difference. The mundane will always be with us, however you can make a difference with the precious moments you set aside for yourself. I feel proud about the awards I have received and most of all I’m happy to have recorded history as I witnessed it. My life is, gratefully, not mundane, and yours doesn’t have to be either.” Captain Hank Bracker, author of the award winning book “The Exciting Story of Cuba.

Here, courtesy of Dan Rather, anchor and managing editor of the CBS Evening News, is a prime example of how an editorial edge is woven into your "news": This was President Bush's first day at the office, and he did something to quickly please the right flank of his party: he reinstituted an anti-abortion policy that had been in place during his father's term and the Reagan presidency but was lifted during the Clinton years. Rather is telling you in no uncertain terms that President Bush used this important issue to make a political payoff in his first act as president. Compare that to Rather's characterization of Bill Clinton's first day as president: On the anniversary of Roe versus Wade, President Clinton fulfills a promise, supporting abortion rights . . . Today, with the stroke of a pen, President Clinton delivered on his campaign promise to cancel several anti-abortion regulations of the Reagan-Bush years. A cynical player of partisan politics versus a man fulfilling a promise to voters--two very different ways of characterizing men, each of whom was both appeasing a wing of his party and fulfilling a campaign promise. Although I was personally thrilled with Clinton's decisions on abortion rights, I can't pretend, as Dan Rather chose to do, that it was a matter of pure principle. Spin is that simple, that insidious, and a part of your nightly news.

At the end of that first year at secondary school the ceremonies held on the anniversary of the Korean War affected me deeply and made me very emotional. The day began at school with outdoor speeches from our teachers and headmaster. They opened with the solemn words, spoken into a microphone: ‘On the morning of 25 June 1950, at 3 a.m., the South Korean enemy attacked our country while our people slept, and killed many innocents …’ The images conjured for us of tanks

July first, the anniversary of the Battle of Aretia, is hereby proclaimed Reunification Day and will be celebrated throughout Navarre on this date every year to honor the lives lost during the war to save our kingdom from separatists and those saved by the Treaty of Aretia.

1. Great Work decays. Over time, Great Work decays into Good Work. As Great Work becomes comfortable and familiar as you master it, it no longer provides the challenge, stretch, or rewards it once did. Your Great Work of today won’t be your Great Work five years from now. The iPod syndrome kicks in. Remember how special iPods were when they first arrived on the scene? Now everyone has one, and they’re taken for granted. 2. Good Work has its attractions. Even as we hunger for more Great Work, we’re always drawn back to the comfort of Good Work. It’s a perpetual tension—the challenge, risk, and reward of the Great against the familiarity, efficiency, and safety of the Good. 3. Different years demand different responses. Some years are “stretch” years when you go for it; others are years to conserve your strength, gathering ideas and laying the groundwork for your next initiative. This ebb and flow reminds me of an anniversary card I once saw that read, “Thanks for 20 great years . . . 7 average years . . . and 2 absolute stinkers.

The view of Ukrainians as constituents of the Russian nation goes back to the founding myth of modern Russia as a nation conceived and born in Kyiv, the “mother of Russian [rather than Rus’] cities.” The Synopsis of 1674, the first printed “textbook” of Russian history, compiled by Kyivan monks seeking the protection of the Muscovite tsars, first formulated and widely disseminated this myth in Russia. Throughout most of the imperial period, Ukrainians were regarded as Little Russians—a vision that allowed for the existence of Ukrainian folk culture and spoken vernacular but not a high culture or a modern literature. Recognition of Ukrainians as a distinct nation in cultural but not political terms in the aftermath of the Revolution of 1917 challenged that vision. The aggression of 2014, backed by the ideology of the “Russian World,” offers Ukrainians today a throwback in comparison with Soviet practices. Nation building as conceived in a future New Russia makes no provision for a separate Ukrainian ethnicity within a broader Russian nation. This is hardly an oversight or excess born of the heat of battle. Less than a year before the annexation of the Crimea, Vladimir Putin himself went on record claiming that Russians and Ukrainians were one and the same people. He repeated that statement in a speech delivered on March 18, 2015, to mark the first anniversary of the annexation of the Crimea. Since the fall of the USSR, the Russian nation-building project has switched its focus to the idea of forming a single Russian nation not divided into branches and unifying the Eastern Slavs on the basis of the Russian language and culture. Ukraine has become the first testing ground for this model outside the Russian Federation.

These feelings don't just go away. They linger. Hover. They are with me always. Even at my most functioning...they are there, watching me. These emotions are my roommates now, bunking up beside me at night. They do not pay any rent...they are determined to ruin me, and yet I can never fully evict them from my brain. I have tried -- really tried -- to chip away at my grief...But lately, I've just given up. I'm finally giving it permission to breathe and exist... Most days now, they lie dormant in me. Sometimes it gets so quiet in my brain I think they've finally packed up and left. But every year as the calendar rounds the corner to March and the anniversary of her death approaches, anger bubbles again...I rage over the smallest of things, screaming behind the steering wheel of my car when another driver forgets to use their blinker. At first I'm perplexed, and then I remember: it's here again. And I am still mad. So mad. I can starve it, avoid it, rationalize it, manage it, talk about it in therapy, and eat it up in neat little points value. No matter how much weight I lose, I will never lose this one simple truth: I want my mom. I am so f***ing mad that she's gone. And that feeling will never, ever die.

Most days now, [the feelings] lie dormant in me. Sometimes it gets so quiet in my brain I think they've finally packed up and left. But every year as the calendar rounds the corner to March and the anniversary of her death approaches, anger bubbles again...I rage over the smallest of things, screaming behind the steering wheel of my car when another driver forgets to use their blinker. At first I'm perplexed, and then I remember: it's here again. And I am still mad.

If you’re reading this, dear reader, then I know you’ve read B’s story. I know you had to go through the same torture I did — perhaps even more so, since you lived out those thirteen years in the matter of approximately three-hundred-and-sixty-two pages. You deserve to know what happened next. You deserve a happy ending — at least, as happy as masochists such as ourselves can provide. But, before I can tell you the end of her side of the story, I need to at least tell you some of my side. So, again, we can’t start here. We have to go back. Way back. To the very first drop…

Quick-fixes do not work. All lasting inner change requires time and effort. Persistence is the mother of personal change. I’m not saying that it will take years to make profound changes in your life. If you diligently apply the strategies I am sharing with you every day for only one month, you will be astonished at the results. You will begin to tap into the highest levels of your own capacity and enter the realm of the miraculous. But to reach this destination, you must not get hung up on the outcome. Instead, enjoy the process of personal expansion and growth. Ironically, the less you focus on the end result, the quicker it will come.” “How so?” “It’s like that classic story of the young boy who traveled far from his home to study under a great teacher. When he met the wise old man, his first question was, ‘How long will it take me before I am as wise as you?’ “The response came swiftly, ‘Five years.’ “‘This is a very long time,’ the boy replied. ‘How about if I work twice as hard?’ “‘Then it will take ten,’ said the master. “‘Ten! That’s far too long. How about if I studied all day and well into the night, every night?’ “‘Fifteen years,’ said the sage. “‘I don’t understand,’ replied the boy. ‘Every time I promise to devote more energy to my goal, you tell me that it will take longer. Why?’ “‘The answer is simple. With one eye fixed on the destination, there is only one left to guide you along the journey.

After more than thirty years of traveling to Oahu, I no longer gasp when I see the wafting palm trees out the plane window or feel quite as awed by the sight of Diamond Head, the volcanic mountain that sits like a massive green bulwark southeast of Waikiki. What I feel now is the exhilaration of familiarity. I am oriented to this place in ways I’d never have imagined for myself as a kid. Though I remain just a visitor, I do know this one island very well, just as I know this one man who introduced me to it, through our regular and committed returns. I feel like I know every bend in the highway that leads from the airport to the North Shore. I know where to go for excellent shave ice and Korean barbecue. I can recognize the scent of plumeria in the air and take delight in the underwater shadow of a manta ray flapping its way through shallow water. I’m well-acquainted with the quiet waters of Hanauma Bay, where we first showed our toddlers how to swim, and the windy sea cliffs at Lanai Lookout, where my husband goes to remember his beloved mother and grandmother, whose ashes he scattered there. A couple of years ago, to celebrate our wedding anniversary, Barack and I made a special trip to Honolulu, and he surprised me with a celebratory dinner out on the town. He’d rented a private space on the rooftop terrace of a hotel by the ocean and hired a small band to play.

the young boy who traveled far from his home to study under a great teacher. When he met the wise old man, his first question was, ‘How long will it take me before I am as wise as you?’ “The response came swiftly, ‘Five years.’ “‘This is a very long time,’ the boy replied. ‘How about if I work twice as hard?’ “‘Then it will take ten,’ said the master. “‘Ten! That’s far too long. How about if I studied all day and well into the night, every night?’ “‘Fifteen years,’ said the sage. “‘I don’t understand,’ replied the boy. ‘Every time I promise to devote more energy to my goal, you tell me that it will take longer. Why?’ “‘The answer is simple. With one eye fixed on the destination, there is only one left to guide you along the journey.

You know, it’s actually my anniversary with Ryan tomorrow,” she says. “The first time in years I’ll have been alone on this date.” “Yeah, but you’re not alone. Look at that city. Look at how big it is. How can anybody be alone here?

Fighting through month after month of trying to pay the bills on the road, singing songs on my other albums about life and love and struggle, then coming back together each December to sing about Jesus and only about Jesus was like performing yearly maintenance on my soul. Every December I would think, “Oh, right. This is the point of it all. Now I remember.” It was like bringing flowers to my first love on our anniversary. Actually, no. It was like my first love bringing flowers to me.

Today, in 2020, I cannot see the future, but my instincts tell me that we are going to experience a replay of the first Great American Depression of the 1930’s, and that it will happen before the 100 year anniversary of that last one. (Keep in mind the uselessness of such personal premonitions) (Update September 2020 in light of record setting stock market valuations (for some companies) while economies were still under water) The above made so little sense, it became possible to imagine that certain companies had a pipeline to free Federal reserve cash.

Securing publication of Saints, Slaves, and Blacks proved most challenging. Five different presses rejected the manuscript. Ultimately, Greenwood Press—a small academic press based in Westport Connecticut—accepted it. Once in print, the volume garnered minimal exposure due in part to limited promotion. Outrageously overpriced, the book’s primary market was university and public libraries. When its limited print run sold out, the volume went out of print—this occurring a mere five years following publication. Reissue of Saints, Slaves, and Blacks in a relatively inexpensive paperback edition is intended to make it available to a wider audience. Such a reprint is also timely in that 2018 marks the fortieth anniversary of the lifting of the priesthood and temple ban. The volume deserves republication for an even more important reason. When first published, Saints, Slaves, and Blacks provided a unique, albeit controversial, perspective relative to the origins of black priesthood denial. Its central thesis that the ban emerged largely as the byproduct of Mormon ethnic whiteness initially articulated in the Book of Mormon and Pearl of Great Price was provocative. Building on these scriptural proof-texts, nineteenth century Latter-day Saints viewed themselves as a divinely “chosen” lineage—the literal descendants of the House of Israel. They considered their “whiteness” emblematic, indeed proof, of their status as the Lord’s “favored people.” Conversely, Mormons utilized these same scriptures, along with the Old Testament, to prove that black people were members of a divinely cursed race, given their alleged descent from two accursed Biblical counter-figures—Ham, the misbehaving son of Noah, and Cain, humankind’s alleged first murderer. Physical proof of African-American accursed status was

22  A married couple was celebrating their 60th wedding anniversary. At the party everybody wanted to know how they managed to stay married so long in this day and age. The husband responded "When we were first married we came to an agreement. I would make all the major decisions and my wife would make all the minor decisions. And in 60 years of marriage we have never needed to make a major decision.

It was over 50 years ago that I had the privilege of being the Class Advisor to the class of 1969 at what was then called Henry Abbott Regional Vocational Technical School. It was another era and a time when we as a nation stood tall. It was the year when Buzz Aldrin, Neil Armstrong and Michael Collins lifted off from Cape Kennedy, for the first manned landing on the Moon. “One small step for man, one giant leap for mankind.” It was a time when we felt proud to be Americans! Fifty years ago the 4 Beatles got together in a recording studio for the last time, where they cut “Abbey Road.” In 1969 alone they published 13 songs including “Yellow Submarine.” John Lennon claimed that the best song he ever did was “Come Together” and that was in 1969. Although it wasn’t possible for me to attend the class reunion I did however connect with them by telephone and a speaker system. I had the opportunity to wish them well and share some thoughts with my former students who are now looking forward to their senior years that I always thought of as “The Youth of Old Age.” Having just celebrated my 85th birthday, 69 years old does seem quite youthful in comparison. Earlier in the week Dave Coelho, the class Vice President read to me the list of graduates that are no longer with us. I was stunned by the number, but at the time the United States was at war, regardless of what it was called. In 1968, the year before the class graduated, our country had a peak of 549,000 of our young people serving in Viet Nam. During the year of the Tet Offensive alone, 543 were killed and 2547 were wounded, and that is what the class of 1969 faced upon their graduation! It was a war in which 57,939 of our young people were killed or went missing! It was nice to talk to the class president LaBarbera and I enjoyed the feeling of guilt when one former student told me that he still has a problem with addition. To this I gladly accepted the blame but reminded him that this would not be of much help, if he had to face the IRS when his taxes didn’t compute. Look for part 2, the conclusion

Traditions are conditioned reflexes. Throughout Part 2 of this book, you will find suggestions for establishing family traditions that will trigger happy anticipation and leave lasting, cherished memories. Traditions around major holidays and minor holidays. Bedtime, bath-time, and mealtime traditions; sports and pastime traditions; birthday and anniversary traditions; charitable and educational traditions. If your family’s traditions coincide with others’ observances, such as celebrating Thanksgiving, you will still make those traditions unique to your family because of the personal nuances you add. Volunteering at the food bank on Thanksgiving morning, measuring and marking their heights on the door frame in the basement, Grandpa’s artistic carving of the turkey, and their uncle’s famous gravy are the traditions our kids salivated about when they were younger, and still do on their long plane rides home at the end of November each year. (By the way, our dog Lizzy has confirmed Pavlov’s observations; when the carving knife turns on, cue the saliva, tail wagging, and doggy squealing.) But don’t limit your family’s traditions to the big and obvious events like Thanksgiving. Weekly taco nights, family book club and movie nights, pajama walks, ice cream sundaes on Sundays, backyard football during halftime of TV games, pancakes in Mom and Dad’s bed on weekends, leaf fights in the fall, walks to the sledding hill on the season’s first snow, Chinese food on anniversaries, Indian food for big occasions, and balloons hanging from the ceiling around the breakfast table on birthday mornings. Be creative, even silly. Make a secret family noise together when you’re the only ones in the elevator. When you share a secret that “can’t leave this room,” everybody knows to reach up in the air and grab the imaginary tidbit before it can get away. Have a family comedy night or a talent show on each birthday. Make holiday cards from scratch. Celebrate major family events by writing personalized lyrics to an old song and karaoking your new composition together. There are two keys to establishing family traditions: repetition and anticipation. When you find something that brings out excitement and smiles in your kids, keep doing it. Not so often that it becomes mundane, but on a regular and predictable enough basis that it becomes an ingrained part of the family repertoire. And begin talking about the traditional event days ahead of time so by the time it finally happens, your kids are beside themselves with excitement. Anticipation can be as much fun as the tradition itself.

Similarly, people without proper joy strength, which means an underdeveloped “joy center” in the right side of the brain, can appear “just fine” for the first 20 or sometimes even 30 years of life, but eventually life’s wear and tear reveals the faulty construction, and the painful process of collapsing begins. A house without a firm foundation, for example, cannot withstand the stress of a hailstorm or an earthquake, nor can it survive the pressure of remodeling. Similarly, a person without a firm joy foundation cannot withstand the stress of breakups or losses, nor survive the pressure of growth and maturity.

Let us assume that on the first wedding anniversary, before the SOP was put in place, a long-time close friend of Draupadi asks her out of naughty friendly curiosity, which of her five husbands she favoured the most and which the least. Draupadi feigns anger at the question, but in a playful mood, tells her friend that she has a meticulous log of the number of nights she spent with each of her husbands through the year, though she has no intention of sharing the information with her! But as a tease, she is willing to share with her friend, the total number of nights spent by her with four of her husbands in five different combinations. In effect, she presents her friend with the following five equations: y + b + a + n = 304 b + a + n + s = 296 a + n + s + y = 294 n + s + y + b = 280 s + y + b + a = 310 Where y stands for the total number of nights spent with Yudhisthira, b for the number of nights spent with Bhima, a for the number of nights with Arjuna, n for the number of nights with Nakula, and s for the nights spent with Sahadeva.