YMCA – The Village People

YMCA was founded by George Williams and 11 friends. George Williams was a London draper, who was typical of the young men drawn to the cities by the Industrial Revolution.

They were concerned about the lack of healthy activities for young men in major cities; the options available were usually taverns and brothels. Williams’ idea grew out of meetings he held for prayer and Bible-reading among his fellow workers in a business in the city of London, and on 6 June 1844, he held the first meeting that led to the founding of YMCA with the purpose of “the improving of the spiritual condition of young men engaged in the drapery, embroidery, and other trades.” Anthony Ashley-Cooper, 7th Earl of Shaftesbury served as YMCA’s first president from 1851 until his death in 1885.

By 1845, YMCA started a popular series of lectures held that went on to be held at Exeter Hall, London, from 1848, and the lectures started being published the following year, the series running until 1865.

YMCA was associated with Industrialisation and the movement of young people to cities to work. YMCA “combined preaching in the streets and the distribution of religious tracts with a social ministry. Philanthropists saw them as places for wholesome recreation that would preserve youth from the temptations of alcohol, gambling, and prostitution and that would promote good citizenship.”

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/YMCA

Young man, there’s no need to feel down
I said, young man, pick yourself off the ground
I said, young man, ’cause you’re in a new town
There’s no need to be unhappy

Young man, there’s a place you can go
I said, young man, when you’re short on your dough
You can stay there, and I’m sure you will find
Many ways to have a good time

It’s fun to stay at the YMCA
It’s fun to stay at the YMCA

They have everything for you men to enjoy
You can hang out with all the boys

It’s fun to stay at the YMCA
It’s fun to stay at the YMCA

You can get yourself clean, you can have a good meal
You can do what ever you feel

Young man, are you listening to me?
I said, young man, what do you want to be?
I said, young man, you can make real your dreams
But you got to know this one thing

No man does it all by himself
I said, young man, put your pride on the shelf
And just go there, to the YMCA
I’m sure they can help you today

It’s fun to stay at the YMCA
It’s fun to stay at the YMCA

You can get yourself clean, you can have a good meal
You can do what ever you feel

Young man, I was once in your shoes
I said, I was down and out with the blues
I felt no man cared if I were alive
I felt the whole world was so tight

That’s when someone came up to me
And said, young man, take a walk up the street
There’s a place there called the YMCA
They can start you back on your way

It’s fun to stay at the YMCA
It’s fun to stay at the YMCA

Inmates on Dostoevsky

He gets up abruptly from the desk he’s been leaning on and lumbers over. “All right,” he says. “Let me have one of those Pall Malls.” I offer the whole pack. He takes three, puts one behind each ear, lights the other, and French-inhales the smoke in a way I haven’t seen for twenty years. “The first thing to understand about an execution,” he says, “is that it’s a ritual. You’ve heard that before, but probably only as a truism. There’s nothing cliché about an execution. It is a modern religious ritual, sanctified in the sense that everything represents something else. The executioner’s fee is the eye for the eye. The sacrifice is implicit in the fact that only one out of every hundred or so gets killed. The blood atonement is what the prisoner’s last meal symbolizes. Notice how the exact menu always gets in the newspaper story? That’s just some AP asshole, acting out a ritual he doesn’t even know is a ritual. He’s covering a communion.”

Dennis is a middle-class northerner, a black sheep who at the age of nineteen killed a man accidentally while sowing wild oats in a barnstorming through the South in the late 1950s. He wound up in Angola and lost his eye in a knife fight in which he killed an inmate, for which he received a death sentence. Like Rideau, who taught himself to read on the row, Dennis spent the 1960s reading everything from the New Republic to Dostoevsky. Everyone in this office has read Dostoevsky, in fact, and to a man they are convinced that he murdered someone during his youth. No one, they say, could have understood the psyche of a murderer that well without having tasted blood himself.

Solotaroff, Ivan. The Last Face You’ll Ever See

Why the All Star Game is in Denver

Major League Baseball moved its All-Star Game from Atlanta to Denver. That move came in protest against Georgia’s new law that limits access to voting for many people. Republicans favor new voter restrictions after losing the 2020 election. And they have now responded to Major League Baseball with a new disinformation campaign. They’ve said Colorado’s voter laws are just as restrictive as Georgia’s. In reality, Colorado voting laws are among the most inclusive in the country.

NPR

County General on Saturday Night

I put down her chart. He was right. A bullet through the abdomen wasn’t the worst case. It was nothing. Something that would wait till morning. There were people who were worse, people who had been run over by cars or stabbed in gang fights, people with multiple gunshot wounds, people who wouldn’t survive if they didn’t get immediate attention. And this was the judgment residents had to develop in a MASH unit like this.

As we walked away, he said, “You’ll get used to it. You’ll learn to do it.”

I thought, No, I won’t.

I was wrong. I very quickly saw more than I ever imagined, and came to realize that doctors are basically biological repairmen, especially in inner-city hospitals on violence-riddled Saturday nights. On my first night at County General, I treated a guy with a penis the size of a football. It turned out he’d been shot in the ass, and the bullet had exited through his penis. After a few Saturdays, though, I learned that two things could be predicted with 100 percent accuracy: If you asked anyone with a knife wound what happened, they’d say, “I don’t know.” And if a person had something stuck up their butt—which in my experience included lightbulbs, broomsticks, and grapefruits—they’d explain, “It was an accident. I sat on it.”

Pinsky, Drew. Cracked: Life on the Edge in a Rehab Clinic

Slacker – Quotes from

Old Man: When young, we mourn for one woman… as we grow old, for women in general. The tragedy of life is that man is never free yet strives for what he can never be. The thing most feared in secret always happens. My life, my loves, where are they now? But the more the pain grows, the more this instinct for life somehow asserts itself. The necessary beauty in life is in giving yourself to it completely. Only later will it clarify itself and become coherent.

Video Backpacker: To me, my thing is, a video image is much more powerful and useful than an actual event. Like back when I used to go out, when I was last out, I was walking down the street and this guy, that came barreling out of a bar, fell right in front of me, and he had a knife right in his back, landed right on the ground and… Well, I have no reference to it now. I can’t put it on pause. I can’t put it on slow mo and see all the little details. And the blood, it was all wrong. It didn’t look like blood. The hue was off. I couldn’t adjust the hue. I was seeing it for real, but it just wasn’t right. And I didn’t even see the knife impact on the body. I missed that part.

Old Anarchist: And remember: the passion for destruction is also a creative passion.

Working on Same Painting: Sorry, I’m late.

Having a Breakthrough Day: That’s okay, time doesn’t exist.

IMDB

Presents a day in the life in Austin, Texas among its social outcasts and misfits, predominantly the twenty-something set, using a series of linear vignettes. These characters, who in some manner just don’t fit into the establishment norms, move seamlessly from one scene to the next, randomly coming and going into one another’s lives. Highlights include a UFO buff who adamantly insists that the U.S. has been on the moon since the 1950s, a woman who produces a glass slide purportedly of Madonna’s pap smear, and an old anarchist who sympathetically shares his philosophy of life with a robber.

Kansas Frito-Lay Strike. Working Conditions, Pay, and Intolerable Hours at Issue


Kansas Frito-Lay workers join growing strike wave of US workers against intolerable work conditions and being forced to work 7 days a week along with working 12 hour suicide shifts from PublicFreakout

Anxious-Ad1868
I did not know about this. Thank you for the post. Frito Lay ban is now in effect for our household and I’ll talk about it with others, when I can.

CantStopPoppin
You are most welcome, when I find things like this I do my best to get it out there. Companies control the media and silence the voices of the masses. Here at least and for now at least I can shed light onto issues like this that would otherwise get no traction.

sully2813
Btw frito lay is part of pepsico so avoid pepsi, Tropicana, quaker oats, Gatorade and more.

List of Frito-Lay Brands:
Lay’s
Fritos
Doritos
Ruffles
Cheetos
Sun Chips
Tostitos
Rold Gold
Funyuns
Walkers
Kurkure

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frito-Lay

Let Forever Be – Chemical Brothers

“Let Forever Be” is a song by English big beat band The Chemical Brothers, released as the second single from their third studio album, Surrender. It contains the vocals of Noel Gallagher of Britpop band Oasis, who also co-wrote the song and previously worked with The Chemical Brothers on “Setting Sun”.

Wikipedia

Depression and Summer

Often, when Dr. Rosenthal talked about his research, someone would approach him to say that the same thing happened to them — but in the summer. In 1987, he and his colleagues published a report of 12 people who experienced a pattern of seasonal depression between March and October. This and subsequent work suggested that summer SAD presented differently than its winter counterpart, and might have different causes.

“Summer SAD is more of an agitated depression,” said Dr. Rosenthal, a clinical professor of psychiatry at the Georgetown University School of Medicine. While those with winter SAD tend to oversleep and overeat, summer SAD often shows up with insomnia and lowered appetite.

Seasonal Affective Disorder Isn’t Just for Winter
Feeling blue even though everyone seems to be basking in perfect summer weather? There might be a good reason for that.
Cameron Walker
NYTIMES

Overuse of Inheritance – Object Oriented Programming

Many of these books claim that by creating these abstractions, in this example Person, you can “re-use” them in other projects. However, in 15 years of my professional experience, I have hardly seen many (or any) examples of such abstractions being used across projects in a useful manner.

At one point, I started creating a class library of these abstractions that I could share across projects. After a little while, that class library ended up being bloated with lots of unrelated abstractions and versioning it across different projects ended up being a nightmare. If you have done this before, you may relate to this story.

Once I was engaged as a consultant for a greenfield project, and in the introductory session, the data architect of the project walked me through tons of UML class diagrams (more than 50 pages). Every class was inheriting from another class and eventually, they all led to a class that was called “Thing”! No joke!

What text books tell you about inheritance in OOP is wrong
Mosh Hamedani

Hitler Hears Bad News – Don’t Shoot The Messenger

…as Halder recorded:

When he read a statement compiled from unimpeachable sources which showed that in 1942 Stalin would still be able to muster another one to 1-1/4 million men in the region north of Stalingrad and west of the Volga, and at least half a million more in the eastern Caucasus and the region to its north, and which proved moreover that the Russian output of first line tanks amounted to at least 1200 a month, Hitler flew with clenched fists and foam in the corners of his mouth at the one who was reading this statement, and forbade such idiotic nonsense.

Hitler’s Mistakes: New Insights into What Made Hitler Tick
Ronald Lewin

That Lost Golden Age – How Real Was It?

There’s a moment in “The End of the Golden Gate” that seems to encapsulate all three things, penned with a light hand and probing eye by comedian W. Kamau Bell:

“I once did a show at Vesuvio Cafe with Allen Ginsberg opening with a new poem. Margaret Cho dropped in to try out some new material. Kirk Hammett from Metallica and Jerry Garcia played folk songs on acoustic guitars. Annie Sprinkle did a visual history of porn. … Armistead Maupin sat in the back writing a book that ended up being ‘Tales of the City.’ And unbeknownst to all of us, Willie Mays and Rick Barry were in there the whole time.”

In his essay, Bell acknowledges: “Um, I don’t think that timeline works” of the fictional gathering he conjures above, only for his friends to reply, “You missed it, man. It was so cool.”

San Francisco is forever dying
Michelle Robertson
SFGATE

Article discusses this book:
The End of the Golden Gate: Writers on Loving and (Sometimes) Leaving San Francisco