"I am calling for us to take back our lives and culture and to stop spreading the virus. I am calling for us to resist the normalization of disease and once again embrace health. I'm calling for an end to the false advertising for drugs and for us to stop minimizing the infection with cute little names like 'the gift' or 'the bug.' I want to see an ad campaign showing a sexy man saying: I don't have H.I.V. I don't want to waste my life and resources on drugs. I am taking charge of my body, my health and my destiny. I am a negative gay role model."
-- Harvey Fierstein, op-ed piece titled The Culture of Disease , in The New York Times

"No one can make you feel inferior without your consent."
-- Eleanor Roosevelt

"Audiences are my best friends. You never tire of talking with your best friends."
-- Bob Hope, 1903-2003

"We teach people how to treat us."
-- Dr. Phil McGraw

"Three U.S. soldiers were killed Saturday while guarding a Baquouba children’s hospital northeast of Baghad bringing the number of U.S. troops killed in combat to 161 — 14 more than the 1991 Gulf War total."
-- News Report, Fox News

"Looking at the proliferation of personal web pages on the net, it looks like very soon everyone on earth will have 15 Megabytes of fame."
-- M.G. Siriam, from QuoteGarden

"You can't change what you don't acknowledge."
-- Dr. Phil McGraw, Life Strategies

"So far, more than 40 U.S. troops have been killed in hostile fire since May 1, when President Bush declared major combat operations in Iraq to be over."
-- Voice of America News

"Issues of principle aside, the invasion of a country that hadn't attacked us and didn't pose an imminent threat has seriously weakened our military position. Of the Army's 33 combat brigades, 16 are in Iraq; this leaves us ill prepared to cope with genuine threats. Moreover, military experts say that with almost two-thirds of its brigades deployed overseas, mainly in Iraq, the Army's readiness is eroding: normal doctrine calls for only one brigade in three to be deployed abroad, while the other two retrain and refit... To top it all off, our insistence on launching a war without U.N. approval has deprived us of useful allies. George Bush claims to have a "huge coalition," but only 7 percent of the coalition soldiers in Iraq are non-American — and administration pleas for more help are sounding increasingly plaintive."
-- Paul Krugman, The New York Times

"Listen to the song of life."
-- Charles Dudley Warner

"There is nothing wrong with America that cannot be cured by what is right with America."
-- William Jefferson Clinton

"Don't take guilt trips. Take a trip to the mall, to the next county, to a
foreign country, but NOT to where the guilt is."
-- George Carlin

"The healing part of show business, I've learned, is that it teaches you the show must go on."
-- Karen Finley in New York Magazine.

"To hear the casual patter of White House aides about the deficit, one would think it was pocket change. In fact, the shortfall has ballooned 50 percent in just five months, to $455 billion and counting. This historic high shows no sign of cresting, certainly not while the president's detaxation mania rolls forward. The White House firmly insists that the growing wad of government costs and debt being rolled across the years toward tomorrow's taxpayers is eminently "manageable." Actually, what was manageable was the $127 billion surplus the fledgling administration enjoyed just two years ago."
-- Editorial, The Deficit Floats Up and Away, The New York Times

Republicans want to lay a cornerstone at ground zero during their national convention? Only Democrats, apparently, are barred from exploiting 9/11... You might think that someone would step in and say, just for the record, what an unimaginably offensive idea this is."
-- Michael Tomasky, City Politic: Anything Goes, in New York Magazine.

More than half of the U.S. Army's combat strength is now bogged down in Iraq, which didn't have significant weapons of mass destruction and wasn't supporting Al Qaeda. We have lost all credibility with allies who might have provided meaningful support; Tony Blair is still with us, but has lost the trust of his public. All this puts us in a very weak position for dealing with real threats. Did I mention that North Korea has been extracting fissionable material from its fuel rods?... How did we get into this mess? The case of the bogus uranium purchases wasn't an isolated instance. It was part of a broad pattern of politicized, corrupted intelligence.
-- Paul Krugman, Pattern of Corruption, The New York Times

"We do not deal much in facts when we are contemplating ourselves."
-- Mark Twain

"You can't be a rationalist in an irrational world; it isn't rational."
-- Joe Orton

"It's beginning to sound a little like Watergate. They start throwing people over the side. The deeper you go, the more interesting it will be. It's very clear that it may be George Tenet's responsibility, but that information also existed in the State Department and it also existed in the vice president's office, so they will not get away with simply throwing George Tenet over the side."
-- Howard Dean, CNN

"You know my father was a urologist, and he said you should always go to the bathroom whenever you have to ... and you see, you had to. So how do you do? I'm Katharine Hepburn."
-- Katharine Hepburn, in Kate Remembered by A. Scott Berg

"Satisfy people's need for the ridiculous
and they will accept your vision of the sublime"
-- Maurice Wilson Disher

"Would you tell me,please, which way I ought to go from here?"
"That depends a good deal on where you want to get to," said the Cat.
"I don't much care where --" said Alice.
"Then it doesn't matter which way you go," said the Cat.
"--so long as I get somewhere," Alice added as an explanation.
"Oh, you're sure to do that," said the Cat, "if you only walk long enough."
-- Lewis Carroll, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland

'snafu (sna-FOO, SNA-foo) noun... A bad situation, especially one resulting from incompetence... adjective... Marked by confusion; chaotic... verb tr.... To throw into disorder or confusion... [US military acronym from Situation Normal, All F**ked Up, also euphemistically, Situation Normal, All Fouled Up. Note: We've asterisked the F word here to make sure this newsletter doesn't get held by the nanny software.]... "But the Burger King snafu is potentially damaging, Cohen said."... Scott Leith; Coke on Thin Ice With Burger King; The Monterey Herald (California); Jun 19, 2003... "In a conference call, chief executive Steve Snyder said the snafu was `literally a cut-and-paste error in an Excel spreadsheet that we did not detect ...'" Drew Cullen; Excel Snafu Costs Firm $24m; The Register (UK), Jun 19, 2003.
This week's theme: abbreviations and acronyms.'
-- A.Word.A.Day, Wordsmith.org

"There are a lot of mes."
-- Buddy Ebsen, dancer, actor, author, novelist, painter, 1908-2003.

"One should always be a little improbable."
-- Oscar Wilde

"To divide one's life by years is of course to tumble into a trap set by our own arithmetic. The calendar consents to carry on its dull wall-existence by the arbitrary timetables we have drawn up in consultation with those permanent commuters, Earth and Sun. But we, unlike trees, need grow no annual rings."
-- Cliff Fadiman

"Freedom is not enough".
-- Lyndon B. Johnson

"My database does not encompass the dynamics of human pair-bonding."
-- Arnold Schwarzenegger, as the Terminator in Teminator 3: Rise of the Machines.

"Don't carry a grudge. While you're carrying the grudge the other guy's out dancing."
-- Buddy Hackett, 1924-2003

When was the last time you embraced a situation that you didn't like? Did you complain through the entire experience or did you run away from the situation altogether? If you did either, you missed a wonderful opportunity to be something that you've never been before. And who knows? It just might have been that one thing that you had been wishing for."
-- Les Brown, Up Thoughts For Down Times