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Everything posted by samhexum
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3 rentals that didn't charge, then back to the co-op I grew up in, which doesn't charge. In each case, it's because the apartments aren't individually metered. My a/c's go on in Mid-May and off in mid-Oct, unless there's a cloudy day in the low 70s during that stretch.
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Well, I haven't paid utilities since about 1985, so I'd have to say pretty good.
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They are just trying to copy Weird Al.
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Brace yourself, classic rock fans: The Who has confirmed its first new studio album in more than a dozen years is in the works. Legendary lead guitarist Pete Townshend, 73, said in a statement that fans should expect “dark ballads, heavy rock stuff, experimental electronica, sampled stuff and Who-ish tunes that began with a guitar that goes yanga-dang.” Set to drop later this year, the new recording is the first since The Who’s “Endless Wire,” a 10-part mini-opera released in 2006. Frontman Roger Daltrey also announced dates for the band’s “Moving On!” tour, which launches May 7 at the Van Andel Arena in Grand Rapids, Michigan, peaks May 13 at Madison Square Garden and wraps Oct. 23 at the Rogers Arena in Edmonton, Alberta. A local orchestra will join the band every night of the tour for an evening of music spanning their entire career, Rolling Stone reports. But don’t expect the Rock and Roll Hall of Famers to go soft on us. They all have viagra prescriptions, ladies! “Be aware, Who fans!” Daltrey said in a statement. “Just because it’s The Who with an orchestra, in no way will it compromise the way Pete and I deliver our music. This will be full throttle Who with horns and bells on.” What about rings on their fingers and bells on their toes? Say... Has anybody seen my Sweet Gypsy Rose? The 75-year-old “Baba O’Riley” belter also hints that this could be his last tour. “I have to be realistic that this is the age I am and voices start to go after a while,” he tells the Mirror. “I don’t want to be not as good as I was two years ago.” Diehard fans should also be on the lookout for Daltrey’s upcoming memoir, “Thanks A Lot Mr. Kibblewhite: My Story,” which publishes in the US on the same day the “Moving On!” tour ends.
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I can walk, but stiffly and sometimes painfully due to back issues. Standing still is worse than walking. I keep a computer chair in my (galley) kitchen so I can roll back and forth and face either side. I cook and do dishes sitting down, standing only when necessary.
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Detroit — A 21-year-old man was found dead at the abandoned Packard Plant Saturday morning, police said. Police said the man was with a group of friends playing a game of hide-and-seek inside the building on St. Aubin near East Ferry. Police said the building is an extension of the 45-building plant. The group was playing the game between midnight and 1:30 a.m. on the ninth floor of the building. He ran off to hide and possibly fell through the elevator shaft on the ninth floor, police said. Friends were unable to find him and left the building. They returned in the morning with flashlights to search for him. They found his body inside an elevator shaft on the first floor covered by debris, police said. Friends called Detroit police Saturday morning. Developers of the Packard Plant project at Arte Express purchased the property, with its 43 dilapidated buildings and 45 acres of decayed landscape, in 2014. The first phase of the project broke ground in May 2017, which included revitalizing the administration building and a nearby building. The project is estimated to cost $23 million and developer Fernando Palazuelo is financing the entire project himself. The entire project, which has four phases across the property’s 45 acres, is expected to take up to 15 years.
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What if (assuming you can afford it) you accumulate some gear/clothing of the type you like seeing guys in, then hire a guy you like the look of, then ask him to put it on at the start of your assignation. Maybe the gear + your excitement will turn him on & he'll get into it more than he'd thought he would.
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New White Sox closer Kelvin Herrera.
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A teenager allegedly participating in the "'Bird Box' Challenge" caused a two-car accident when she attempted to drive while her eyes were covered, police say. A 17-year-old girl was driving on the Layton Parkway just before 5 p.m. Monday when she allegedly decided to pull her beanie hat over her eyes and continue driving, said Layton Police Lt. Travis Lyman. "It didn't take long for her to lose control," he said. The girl, traveling about 35 mph, began to swerve back and forth, eventually overcorrecting, and went into oncoming traffic where she sideswiped another vehicle on the driver's side, Lyman said. The impact from that crash spun the girl's pickup truck into a light pole and a concrete barrier. The challenge was created on social media after the Netflix movie "Bird Box" was released. In the movie, Sandra Bullock's character is forced to do many activities while blindfolded, including running through a forest and taking a boat on a lake. Similar to the dangerous "In My Feelings" car challenge and the Tide Pod eating challenge, the "Bird Box" Challenge became the latest internet craze that even officials at Netflix have publicly tried to discourage. People participating in the challenge attempt to do activities while blindfolded. Neither the man in the car that was hit in Layton, nor the teenage driver or her 16-year-old male passenger were injured. The incident has police shaking their heads in disbelief. "It's just outrageous that somebody would think to do that. This one, luckily, didn't end in any injuries but easily could have. The stakes are just way too high to do something like that while you're driving," Lyman said. When Layton police first investigated Monday's crash, they weren't sure what caused the accident. "Initially we were told she was just talking to her passenger and got distracted," Lyman said. But the driver who was hit wasn't convinced. Lyman said the driver decided to do some of his own detective work. "He just could not understand why her car was doing what it was doing," he said. "It was actually through some help and work on the other driver's part to try and make sense of why she was driving the way she was based on what he had seen (that the challenge came out)." The driver talked to someone who had overheard what the teen girl was really doing. After passing that information along to police, detectives reinterviewed the girl and she admitted she had tried the challenge, Lyman said. Police are expected to hand the case over to prosecutors to be screened for a potential charge of reckless driving.
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'Bachelor' Colton Underwood: 'I don't wear underwear' He might be America’s most famous virgin, but Colton Underwood is still free-balling. “I don’t wear socks and I don’t wear underwear,” the 26-year-old says.
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Woman, 29, Still in 10-Year Coma, Is Pregnant by a Rapist By FRANK BRUNI JAN. 25, 1996 This is a digitized version of an article from The Times’s print archive, before the start of online publication in 1996. To preserve these articles as they originally appeared, The Times does not alter, edit or update them. She was an outstanding student, graduating near the top of her class at a respected Roman Catholic high school in the area and heading to an Ivy League university for a future in the sciences, or perhaps medicine. But a sudden swerve off a road thrust her car into a tree and her into a coma that never lifted over the next decade. Fed by a tube, swaddled in a diaper, she aged from 19 to 29 with little change in her condition. Then in late December, the staff attending her at a nursing home in Brighton, a suburb on this city's southeastern edge, noticed a puzzling difference: her belly was growing bigger. The police said that doctors first checked for a digestive blockage, then did three separate tests before relaying their discovery to criminal authorities and the patient's stunned family on New Year's Eve. The woman was pregnant, the victim of a rape. This extraordinary case, details of which have emerged gradually over recent weeks, has drawn scrutiny from state health and criminal justice officials for its vivid demonstration of the vulnerability of nursing-home patients to abuse. But it is attracting the attention of physicians and ethicists for an additional reason: the young woman's parents, acting as her guardians, have chosen to continue her pregnancy. A full-term pregnancy would result in a birth in May. John Parrinello, a lawyer in Rochester who is serving as the family's spokesman, said: "It was a very difficult decision, because nobody could predict the future, her capacity to survive a pregnancy, her capacity to deliver a child. There are not many cases similar to this." Mr. Parrinello said it had not been determined who would raise the child. Several prominent biomedical ethicists said that while they can cite cases of pregnant women who fell into comas or suffered brain death, they cannot recall any other case of a woman's becoming pregnant while already in one of those conditions. They said this case raises troubling ethical concerns. "There's some question here about using her as a vessel," said Ellen Moskowitz, a health care lawyer and bioethicist at the Hastings Center in Briarcliff Manor. "Does that recognize her humanity? Is this something that offends the natural order?" In addition, Ms. Moskowitz said, "You could wonder about the effects of a child born of this arrangement. What kind of explanation is due this child, and what are the potential harms that could flow from that?" Law enforcement sources said the young woman's family was motivated by the belief that she would not have wanted an abortion and by the desire to see a part of her live on. The family declined to be interviewed, and Mr. Parrinello has released little information about her. He has also asked that she be accorded the anonymity usually granted rape victims who request it. The authorities investigating the case, who have not made an arrest, have withheld the young woman's name from the public record and similarly have released little information about her. But Gary Ciulla, an investigator with the Brighton Police Department, said that to see the young woman, whose blue eyes often follow a visitor around the room, is to get a haunting sense of the promise her life once held. "You could see the remnants of her beauty," Mr. Ciulla said. "She was a beautiful girl." Mr. Ciulla and others who have visited her say she breathes without the assistance of machines, responds physically to certain stimuli and can feel pain, but is completely uncommunicative and seems unaware of her surroundings. As a result of her family's silence, little is known about her prognosis when she first lapsed into a coma in 1985, the choices her family faced in keeping her alive or the precise reasons they decided not to end her pregnancy, which was between four and a half and five months along when it was detected. Although the doctors attending the young woman's pregnancy at Strong Memorial Hospital in Rochester, where she was moved after her condition was discovered, declined to be interviewed, other medical experts said that if the young woman's vital signs are normal, she may well be able to deliver a healthy baby. The young woman and her family are Catholic, and one of her close friends from high school remembered her as deeply religious and opposed to abortion. "She was always pretty pro-life," said the friend, Vicky Hansen, who now lives in Troy, N.Y. Ms. Hansen said that she recalled her stating that position in a class they took on contemporary issues. Ms. Hansen, other classmates, family acquaintances and the woman's school records portray her as a straight-laced, sober-minded teen-ager from a middle-class family with some domestic troubles that led to her parents' divorce sometime after the car accident. On her mother's side, she comes from a large Polish clan of colorful weddings and deep Catholic faith. The young woman herself was the oldest child and only girl in a family of four children. They lived on a suburban street in a modest two-story house that afforded a view of the steeple on the Catholic church a block away. The young woman attended a Catholic grammar school and then a Catholic high school for girls, participating in diving, gymnastics, theater and a Christian service group during her first years. Later, Ms. Hansen said, the young woman scaled back on extracurricular activities so she could take a job as a cashier in a grocery store and save money for college. But her attention to her studies never flagged. "There was a big deal about who was going to be valedictorian, and she was in the running," Ms. Hansen said. "It came down to the wire." By different accounts, the young woman graduated second or third in a class of roughly 180 students. She was accepted to Cornell University in Ithaca, and was inducted into the National Honor Society before her high school graduation in June 1984. Photographs of her from her yearbook show an extremely pretty girl with a radiant smile and a tiny metal crucifix dangling from a chain around her neck. Classmates said they lost track of her when she went to Cornell. The car accident apparently occurred during the second semester of her freshman year, because school records show that she had ceased to attend classes by late March 1985. Elaine McKay, a high school classmate, recalled that the young woman was driving with a college boyfriend and swerved off the road to avoid hitting a deer. Ms. McKay could not remember the boyfriend's name, what happened to him or where the accident occurred. Ms. Hansen said the young woman had been dogged by ill fortune. Her boyfriend during her senior year of high school accidentally shot and killed himself, Ms. Hansen said. The incident drew widespread local publicity because the 17-year-old boy was apparently influenced by the Russian roulette sequence in the movie "The Deer Hunter." Since her own accident, the young woman has been institutionalized, but she was not placed in the nursing home, the Westfall Health Care Center, until February of last year. The 145-bed nursing home had opened just two months earlier. Surrounded by fields, decorated in blues and purples and immaculately clean during a visit on Tuesday, the nursing home appeared to be an ideal environment. But unannounced visits from State Health Department inspectors last year found many deficiencies, including ants in the dining room and crusted food around patients' mouths, said Claudia Hutton, a department spokeswoman. More disturbingly, one of Westfall's former nurse's aides, John Horace, 51, has been charged with sexually abusing a 49-year-old female patient there in September. The comatose woman's rape is believed to have occurred in August. Criminal authorities said there are differences between the cases; the 49-year-old patient, for example, is partly physically disabled and was not raped. The police would not say whether they have a suspect. Claudia Blumenstock, the administrator of Westfall, said in a prepared statement that its staff is shocked by what happened. "Unfortunately," Ms. Blumenstock added, "nursing homes cannot provide full-time surveillance of our premises to prevent unforeseeable criminal acts." The State Attorney General's office has joined the Brighton police in investigating the rape, because Westfall's acceptance of Medicaid patients gives Attorney General Dennis C. Vacco some jurisdiction. Mr. Vacco said that what happened there should be be seen in the context of 1,000 complaints about abuse in nursing homes that his office receives every year. "It is indicative of a very significant problem that is largely unrecognized," Mr. Vacco said.
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ALSO: from the mother ship: Grief TV-14 | 46min | Episode aired 4 February 1998 Season 8 | Episode 14 McCoy pursues murder charges against a health care worker who impregnated a comatose patient after the woman dies during childbirth. However, investigation also reveals that the victim's mother may have played a role in the incident.
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1. What actor or actress starred in an unsuccessful (but very funny) show that had the same name as two subsequent hit shows? 2. What actor or actress played a parent on a TV show, then on a later show played a parent to the sibling of an actor that had played their kid on the first show? http://www.netanimations.net/Animated-gif-spinning-question-mark-picture-moving.gifhttp://www.netanimations.net/Animated-gif-three-flashing-question-marks-picture-moving.gifhttp://www.netanimations.net/Animated-dancing-red-question-mark-picture-moving.gif 1. VALERIE HARPER 2. VALERIE HARPER
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When planning for a family trip to New Zealand, an American father wrote a classified ad in the NZ Herald for his three “unmarried, handsome sons” as a joke. But it quickly caused a social media sensation, and his sons were flooded with more than 600 responses. Neil, from Oregon, secretly created the dating ad in December for his sons, Benjamin, Jeremy and Matthew. “My wife and I have 3 wonderful, successful, alas unmarried, sons,” the ad reads. “We are not expecting, just hoping, to introduce our sons to nice NZ daughters. At the very least, we’ll embarrass our sons and the truth is, we do find some enjoyment in that.” Neil had never placed an ad like this before and just wanted his kids to put themselves out there. His youngest son, Benjamin, is a 26-year-old consultant in Seattle. Middle son Jeremy is a 28-year-old working for nonprofit organizations and the oldest, 31-year-old Mathew, works in real estate in Portland. “I am sure they will be surprised and annoyed, but I am sure they will laugh,” Neil, who didn’t want to disclose his last name for personal reasons, told The NZ Herald. “We have a good relationship and are always joking with each other. They know I am a little unusual in that regard.” Thanks to their dad’s efforts, the sons ended up meeting some New Zealand bachelorettes on their travels. “Between my brothers and I, we went on a few one-on-one dates,” Benjamin told The Daily Mail. ‘[New Zealand women] are very intelligent, kind, friendly people. We love their accents. They were a lot of fun, everyone we met seemed nice.” Neil said that they were even invited to “family dates.” “We are doing great, my sons were a tad embarrassed but they handled it well and thought it was hilarious in the end,” Neil told The Daily Mail. “I even met some great parents.” And Benjamin said his brother even found a potential partner during their holiday. “Two weeks is hard to fall deeply in love,” he said. “Matthew actually met someone so hopefully that’s the start of something.” (He's the cute one on the left)
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Even worse than a lump of coal, Lifetime was slapped with a lawsuit for calling a random family ugly in, of all things, a Christmas movie. TMZ reports that Setiam Allah and wife Katherine sued the network over their film “Christmas Harmony,” in which the couple’s family photo was called “ugly” by the male lead. The lawsuit claims that an Allahs’ family picture somehow ended up as a prop in the film without their permission. In the scene, the titular character Harmony pins a random family photo to the wall and her love interest tells her to take it down, adding, “They’re ugly!” The Allahs were reportedly humiliated when their friends and family members called them to inform them of their unfortunate, unplanned cameo in the Christmas film. They alleged in their suit that they only sent their portraits to about 50 people, none of whom worked for Lifetime. “Christmas Harmony” first aired in November. The Allahs are asking for all of the film’s profits. A rep for Lifetime did not return a request for comment on the “Christmas Harmony” suit. The Allahs did not immediately return requests for comment.
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spoiler alert!!! this gives away the ending: When Debra Newell first spotted John Meehan on a dating website in 2014, she was instantly smitten — but the mother of four couldn’t have predicted that her whirlwind romance would quickly unravel into a horrifying nightmare. Newell’s case of love gone wrong is the subject of an upcoming Oxygen documentary titled “Dirty John: The Dirty Truth.” It features interviews with detectives who worked on the case, some of Meehan’s former girlfriends and even his first wife, Tonia Bales. The shocking tale was the subject of a smash-hit podcast in 2017 – from Wondery and the Los Angeles Times – and, more recently, in late 2018, Bravo premiered “Dirty John,” a scripted series with Connie Britton in the starring role. “I felt that the reason I participated in all of it, not just the Oxygen special, was to get awareness out there for other women,” Newell told Fox News. Newell, who was four times divorced, met Meehan on an over-50 dating website. Meehan posed as an anesthesiologist who’d just returned to Southern California after a year in war-torn Iraq while volunteering with Doctors Without Borders. Newell, a wealthy and successful interior designer ready for romance, was impressed by what she read and saw. “What drew me into John was number one his love for animals,” explained Newell. “That he loved children. He … was good looking in my eyes. He was a doctor. Basically, he checked all the boxes for me.” After two months of dating, the couple got married. “John was extremely persistent,” said Newell. “Every day, he was saying, ‘Please, please, please marry me. You are my soulmate. You are the person that I want to live the rest of my life with. We’re getting older. Let’s just do it.’ I was nervous, apprehensive about doing it, but I did.” While Newell said she felt herself quickly falling in love with the charismatic doctor, her four children weren’t impressed. In fact, one of her daughters hired a private investigator to confirm her fears. It turned out Meehan never worked for Doctors Without Borders and never even attended medical school. What Meehan did have was a felony rap sheet which unveiled he served time for stealing narcotics in hospitals. The Los Angeles Times reported that from 2005 to 2014, he had “seduced, swindled and terrorized multiple women, many of whom he had met on dating sites while posing as a doctor.” Newell said the report made by the private investigator was about 324 pages. The newspaper added that by the time Meehan married Newell in December 2014, three women had standing restraining orders against him. At least three others had requested them. Meehan had also told Newell one of his sisters had died of cancer. However, both of his siblings were alive and well. “I think that I jumped with my heart instead of my head, and I ignored the flags,” Newell admitted. “They were in front of me, but I refused to really look at them. I was just falling in love. … I wasn’t happy with how he was treating my kids. But I wasn’t seeing a lot of it because how he would treat them when I wasn’t around was very different when I was around … he didn’t make an effort to get to know my family, get to know my friends. He just wanted to be with me, and I thought that was one of the biggest signs.” Newell said she thought then of her sister, Cindi Vickers. Oxygen shared that in 1984, Vickers’ husband Billy came up behind her, placed a pistol to the back of her neck and shot her to death. After pulling the trigger, Billy then shot himself in the stomach. He would survive the gunshot and later remarried. Newell immediately wanted to end the marriage, even though Meehan kept insisting he was innocent of the allegations. They reconciled briefly, but eventually, she realized she couldn’t spend the rest of her life with a manipulative con artist. Newell filed to annul the marriage to Meehan in April 2016. She also went into hiding. “I gave John a chance. I also had one foot in, and one foot out. I really needed to analyze and figure this all out on my own,” she recalled. “When I left I had an exit plan because you don’t walk away from these men without something violent happening,” said Newell. “I had another phone. I had changed all my passwords. I changed emails. I had transferred money. I had talked to my office that I was going to be gone so they could get a hold of me remotely. There were many, many things I did to prepare myself to leave so that I could go into hiding.” People magazine reported Meehan filed for divorce himself, demanding half of Newell’s income and ownership in her business. He also reportedly lit her Tesla on fire, emailed nude images of her to her family and began to stalk her. “I thought he was after me for my money, so I didn’t feel that my kids should be in fear,” said Newell. “We thought it was me, and so I’d been hiding for seven months at this point.” Then on Aug. 20, 2016, Meehan waited outside of her youngest daughter Terra’s apartment and attacked her with a knife. An injured Terra, who was inspired by moves she saw on “The Walking Dead,” managed to fight Meehan off her. She kicked the knife from his hand, grabbed the weapon and stabbed him multiple times. “She was right-handed. She didn’t think,”reported the Los Angeles Times. “She began flailing, looking for targets. She connected, again and again. His shoulder. His shoulder blade. His triceps. His shoulder blade. His upper back. His shoulder blade. His upper back. Between his shoulder blades. His forearm. His triceps. His shoulder. His chest. His left eye — and through it — into his brain.” Newell would receive a phone call from a distraught Terra. “I get this call from my daughter, and she’s screaming that she killed my husband,” said Newell. “It was so surreal. The guilt and just everything overwhelmed me. … I don’t know how I got there, but I got to the site … She was sitting on the curb. I just wanted to be with her.” Meehan died in the hospital four days later. Newell said she and Meehan were separated at the time. She claimed their annulment was going to be final on September 13. The then-25-year-old Terra was never charged for Meehan’s death because it was determined she fought back in self-defense. Newell also shared Terra was sent away for about six months to Austin, Texas where she received extensive therapy for PTSD. But before then, Newell reached out to Meehan’s sisters to notify them of their brother’s fate. “When everything happened we actually called John’s sisters,” said Newell. “They talked about the fact that they had been in fear, and that they were OK with what Terra had done. … The girls had relief. They were many, many other victims out there that were all of a sudden no longer in fear because John was gone.” Newell said she hasn’t dated since. These days, she’s hoping her story will educate others on how easily one can be tangled in a terrifying situation if those glaring red flags are ignored. “I hope people understand that it can happen to anyone,” said Newell. “There are many, many people out there that are going through what I went through, maybe in a different way. But they are not alone.” “Dirty John: The Dirty Truth” airs Jan. 14 at 8 p.m. on Oxygen.
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The NBA had a few, most notably former 1st round pick Kelvin Cato.
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DEAR ABBY: My son and daughter-in-law are “horrified” that we refer to our 3-year-old grandson’s penis using the correct terminology. Should we relent and refer to that part of his body as something else? — UNSURE IN THE SOUTH DEAR UNSURE: Not in my opinion. Children should be taught the correct terms for their body parts as soon as they are aware enough to identify — and pronounce — them. To do this will prevent confusion and possibly embarrassment later. Teach him to call it his ‘heat-seeking missile’ and see how popular he becomes! No, the Force was not with him. Luke Sky Walker, 21, was arrested in early December by police in Elizabethton, Tennessee, for a probation violation in connection with a felony theft charge. The jailbird namesake of the Jedi master was then taken into custody at the Probation and Parole Office before being taken to the Carter County Detention Center, WCMH reports. Even Mark Hamill — who played Luke Skywalker in the iconic “Star Wars” film series — commented that the arrest was a little out of this world. “The real crime here is Mr. & Mrs. Walker saddling this poor guy with that name in the first place,” Hamill tweeted early Sunday. “#MisbegottenMoniker” Hamill also took a shot at Walker’s height of 5 feet 6, seemingly pointing out that he doesn’t have a future with the Dark Side either by adding to his tweet, “#AlsoTooShortForAStormtrooper.” Hamill’s tweet had been retweeted more than 1,900 times as of early Monday — and generated plenty of puns for “Star Wars” aficionados. “I feel worse for his sister, Anna Kin,” one tweet read. “It is, realistically, an impossible name to live up to,” another read. Walker remained held without bail at the Carter County Detention Center, jail records show. ALSO FROM DECEMBER: A fed-up mom-to-be KO’d her baby shower because she said her “fake a– family” ridiculed the name she’d chosen for her child. The unidentified woman blasted her family for questioning her decision to name her son Squire Sebastian Senator in a post on the Facebook event page for the now-canceled shindig. “Ya’ll have been talking sh-t about my unborn baby. AN UNBORN CHILD,” she wrote. “How can you judge an unborn child?? What is wrong with you?? “I never knew my family could be so judgmental. “They’ve spread rumors and lies about my child,” she wrote. “No, I am not crazy. No, I am not mentally unstable. No, I was not drunk when I named my child.” But she assured her relatives that no matter how they felt about it — she wasn’t going to budge on her son’s name. “This is the name I was meant to give him,” she wrote. “This is how it will be. He will not be allowed to have a nickname, he is to be called by his full and complete first name. “This name conveys power. It conveys wealth. It conveys success,” she added, explaining that she’d chosen the moniker because it hinted at the family’s ties to senators and squires. “My baby’s name WILL be a revolution,” she continued. “It will push people to question everything.” The raving future mom told her family she was planning a smaller “more inclusive” baby shower where she wouldn’t be judged. “F–k you all. Fake a– family,” she wrote. “You won’t get to be a part of my baby’s life and it’s all because you had to judge him.” Her post was published on Reddit on Saturday, where users continued to mock the baby’s name. A mother who gave her daughter the name “Abcde” is upset because a Southwest Airlines gate agent at John Wayne Airport in California mocked the girl’s name, not only in person but also on social media. Abcde Redford is an epileptic, so she and her mother Traci always board before others, and a few weeks ago that triggered the incident. Traci Redford said the agent not only mocked her five-year-old daughter’s name, which is pronounced “Ab-city,” in front of the young girl but also took a picture of her boarding pass and posted it on social media so others could make fun of it, too. Redford claimed, “The gate agent started laughing, pointing at me and my daughter, talking to other employees. So I turned around and said, ‘Hey if I can hear you, my daughter can hear you, so I’d appreciate if you’d just stop.'” Traci and Abcde Redford and her daughter were bound for El Paso, Texas, where they make their home. Traci Redford filed a complaint with the airline. Traci Redford recalled, “While I was sitting there, she took a picture of my boarding pass and chose to post it on social media, mocking my daughter. It was actually brought to my attention by somebody who had seen it on Facebook and reported it to Southwest Airlines. And after two weeks of doing a formal complaint, Southwest hadn’t done anything.” Southwest Airlines stated to ABC7: We extend our sincere apology to the family. We take great pride in extending our Southwest Hospitality to all of our Customers, which includes living by the Golden Rule and treating every individual with respect, in person or online. The post is not indicative of the care, respect, and civility we expect from all of our Employees. We have followed up with the Employee involved, and while we do not disclose personnel actions publicly, we are using this as an opportunity to reinforce our policies and emphasize our expectations for all Employees. One might think that naming a child “Abcde” would be unique, but as Vocativ reports, “According to the Social Security Administration database, 328 babies, all girls, have been named Abcde in the United States. Since 1990, we’ve had Abcdes born every year except 1991, 1993, 1994, 1995 and 1996. The name was given to an all-time high of 32 babies in 2009, though the number has slightly declined each year since then. The median age of Abcdes is 7.5, and all but 11 of them are minors.” In 2014, a 7-year-old autistic girl named Abcde and her service dog, a pit bull named Pup-Cake, wanted to meet a mall Santa and waited for 30 minutes, but the Santa wouldn’t meet the girl because he feared the dog. Traci Redford decided to make the experience educational for her daughter. She told ABC7, “She said ‘Mom, why is she laughing at my name? And I said not everyone is nice and not everyone is going to be nice and it’s unfortunate.'” Tattoos are for life… but names aren’t. A Swedish mom getting a tattoo of her son’s name came up with a quick fix when the artist made a glaring mistake – she just changed her toddler’s moniker. Johanna Giselhäll Sandström recently told local newspaper Blekinge Läns Tidning her “heart stopped” and she “thought [she] was going to faint,” when she saw the ink on her arm had an extra letter and read Kelvin — instead of Kevin, The Local Sweden reported. The 30-year-old mom wanted to honor her children – Nova and Kevin – with a tat three years ago and when the artist didn’t ask about the spelling, she didn’t give it any more thought, she said. Shortly after, she noticed the glaring mistake and went back to the shop, only to have the artist laugh and say there was nothing he could do except issue a refund. Sandström balked at the idea of going through the painful and expensive tattoo removal process and thought legally changing her then-2-year-old’s name would be simpler. The parents have grown to love their son’s “unique” name and the boy – who is 5 now – has taken to it too, Sandström said. “I had never heard the name ‘Kelvin’ before. There isn’t anyone who names their kid Kelvin. So when I thought more about it, I realized that no one else has this name. It became unique. Now we think it is better than Kevin,” Sandström said. The couple had just welcomed their third child, a little girl named Freya, and Sandström wants to go under the needle again to add her name. This time, she’ll be more watchful. “I’m going to write it down on a piece of paper and check it over 10,000 times,” she joked.
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Umm...
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