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To Live is to Remember: A Brief History of AIDS

HIV and AIDS are infections that still plague the face of the earth even though there are drug treatment therapies that can buy time for those infected.

Without medical intervention and treatment the average incubation period for HIV is 9-10 years and death after a full-blown AIDS diagnosis is still only 9.2 months.

People and their deaths are not best understood on timelines and statistical averages. The value in the human component of living is in remembering those who have suffered and fallen before you.

To live is to remember.

I remember in the mid-to-late 1980’s how this unnamed “Gay disease” we now know as HIV/AIDS was eating people alive. It was a frightening time because no one really knew in a shared, universal societal understanding, how HIV was being transmitted or how AIDS was being contracted.

There were rumors in the mainstream community you could get AIDS — no one really understood the HIV component until years later — by sitting on a toilet seat or by someone sneezing on you or by just shaking hands with an infected person.

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Blame it on the Jews: A History of Hating

With the recent explosions of vitriol from Mel Gibson against the Jews in general and with the new insurgency against Israel proper by Hezbollah in particular, one begins to wonder about the how and the why of blaming the world’s troubles on the Jews. I decided to do some quick Google searches on historically paired stereotypical keywords to see what kind of hate against the Jews was being officially published on the internet and the results were hateful but not surprising.

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Underage Backstage at Barrymore’s Bar

Barrymore’s Bar in Lincoln, Nebraska is unique. It is located in the backstage area of what used to be the Stuart Theatre. You enter the bar through an alley. The bar entrance was the performer’s stage door when the theatre opened in 1929.

Barrymore’s was always dark and musky and smelling of sawdust and rope. The Stuart theatre is still a performance space with seats and a stage and on the other side of the fire curtain remains Barrymore’s — still backstage — and still thriving with life and ambition and still giving off a strange ambience of being someplace you don’t belong but were always meant to be in the end.

Barrymore’s is where the radio people I used to work with would hang out before, during and after work because the station was on the eighth floor of the same building. If I joined them during the day I always had a pop while those around me would slowly make their way into the slosh. One day my friends and I were hanging out downtown after school and we decided to go into Barrymore’s.

Barrymore’s was an upper class bar. It wasn’t like the bar troughs clotted along downtown where University of Nebraska-Lincoln students would head for the cheapest buzz they could find. The five of us sat down together at a tiny round table. The waitress came over and smiled and asked what we were drinking as she placed a cocktail napkin before each of us. She said drinking in such a way we knew she mean alcohol and not pop or water.

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Gay in the Womb

Reuters is reporting today a study claiming male sexual orientation is determined in the womb before birth. This “sexual orientation-maternal immune response” theory suggests a mother’s reaction to her male fetus is see as a “foreign body” in her body and her immune system goes into subconscious overdrive to purge the male within her. 

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Top Ten Dude Cars

Yesterday we provided a list of Top Ten Chick Cars and today, as promised, we provide the definitive list of Top 10 Dude Cars — and when we say “Dude Cars” we mean these are vehicles only men should drive and no self-respecting woman should be caught dead driving or even riding shotgun — because these cars have masculine edges, dull personalities and bleed XY chromosomes.

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Top Ten Chick Cars

Here is the definitive list of Top Ten Chick Cars — and when we say “Chick Cars” we mean these are cars women should drive and no self-respecting man should be caught dead driving or even riding shotgun — because these cars have feminine curves, engaging personalities and bleed XX chromosomes.

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A Pound of Starbucks Whole Bean Bag Art

It isn’t enough for Starbucks to just offer great coffee. They also provide beautiful bags for some of their best whole bean roasts. Today I am here to celebrate three of my favorite Starbucks bags of art.
Starbucks Bag Art is unique because it covers the entire bag. In the examples below you will see I cut the bag in the back and then pulled apart the sticky seams and ironed the entire bag flat with my bare hands.

Now you can see how the art actually wraps around the entire bag of coffee. This art isn’t a sticker or a sliver of color — the art is the bag and the bag is the art and that makes Starbucks a celebration of the human spirit. 

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