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Missed Trader Joe's Cheesy Handshake

I was with a friend at Trader Joe’s in the Union Square area of Manhattan, looking for a certain sort of vegetarian cheese. The first thing you should know about this supermarket location is that it is so popular that the line to the checkout counter is frequently long enough to wrap all around the store and come near the entrance of the store, with employees holding signs to indicate where to enter for various numbers of items per shopper. That made it sufficiently difficult to find anything without bumping into several people.

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Saucony Jazz Sneaker Review

I have never been much of a picky shopper when it came to shoes. When I was a child I always wanted to get the “popular” shoes but never got anything overpriced as that was just outrageous and not to be considered. In the last few years this has translated into my only buying shoes from such places as Zappos and warehouse store locations, never paying more than one hundred dollars for a pair of shoes. I certainly did not think that I would ever buy a pair of shoes based on an e-mail message from a record store.

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Four Students, One Lunch, One Revolution

People sit down to eat lunch and it’s really not anything of consequence. Most people don’t notice when people sit down in diners, restaurants, etcetera as it is so commonplace. One would therefore think that it would not have been a big to-do when David Leinhail Richmond, Joseph Alfred McNeil, Franklin Eugene McCain, and Ezell A. Blair Jr. sat down in a Greensboro Woolworth’s to eat lunch. This was not the case, of course — it was 1960 and the segregation ran rampant in these United States — clearly not so united at the time.

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I Am Not Who You Think I Am

I have had my Gmail account for nearly six years now — thanks to an early invitation from master publisher David Boles. I chose the username “gordond” because I wanted to see if it was available. For many years I only chose the username ‘gdavides’ based on the assigned username I got at Peddie — it was based on the first letter of my first name and the following seven letters of my last name.

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Guitar and the Stripped Soul

In 2005, The Mountain Goats released an emotionally rich album called “The Sunset Tree.” The entire album was full of references to John Darnielle’s painful childhood and the years of abuse from his late stepfather. Around the same time that this album was released, The Mountain Goats released a vinyl only alternate version called “Come, come to the Sunset Tree” that had stripped down songs that were just John with his acoustic guitar.

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Regeneration Tricks: Same Show, Different Leads

From 1963-1966, actor William Hartnell portrayed the character of The Doctor on the British television program “Doctor Who.” Towards the end of his run, Hartnell was weary from the intense schedule and bowed out. The producers faced a fundamental dilemma: How to continue the series if they did not have their lead actor?

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The Appeal of Vinyl Records

I have many memories of purchasing music as a child, and all of them involved the cassette tape format. This is not to say that other formats were not available for purchase — rather, this was the only format that was both affordable to me and easy to take with me. It might seem hard to believe now in a day where you can get a digital music player with no moving parts with a twenty dollar bill and get change, but portable music players were really expensive in the 1980’s — especially to me, a child with no actual income.

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