Welcome

Welcome
John William Tuohy lives in Washington DC

Everything is gonna be okay in the end.....




“Love is a decision, it is a judgment, it is a promise. If love were only a feeling, there would be no basis for the promise to love each other forever. A feeling comes and it may go. How can I judge that it will stay forever, when my act does not involve judgment and decision.” Erich Fromm




 GOOD WORDS TO HAVE………………..

Morpheme: A distinctive collocation of phonemes (such as the free form pin or the bound form -s of pins) having no smaller meaningful parts. Some words in other languages are so useful they're the root of two or more totally different words in English. The word "laughed" is made up of two morphemes: "laugh" and the past-tense morpheme "-ed."
Morphemes are the indivisible basic units of language, much like the atoms which physicists once assumed were the indivisible units of matter. English speakers borrowed morpheme from French morphème, which was itself created from the Greek root morphē, meaning "form." The French borrowed -ème from their word phonème, which, like English phoneme, means "the smallest unit of speech that can be used to make one word different from another word." The French suffix and its English equivalent -eme are used to create words that refer to distinctive units of language structure. Words formed from -eme include lexeme ("a meaningful linguistic unit that is an item in the vocabulary of a language"), grapheme ("a unit of a writing system"), and toneme ("a unit of intonation in a language in which variations in tone distinguish meaning").



I WILL BE SPEAKING AND SIGNING BOOKS AT THE DEEP RIVER PUBLIC LIBRARY ON SATURDAY OCT 3rd FROM 2-4 PLEASE DROP BY AND SAY HELLO


 

I WILL BE SPEAKING  AND SIGNING BOOKS AT MT. ST JOHNS ON OCTOBER 3rd PLEASE ATTEND IF YOU CAN, ITS FOR A GREAT CAUSE


HERE'S MY LATEST BOOK ON SALE AT AMAZON AND ALL BARNES AND NOBLE STORIES


This is a book of short stories taken from the things I saw and heard in my childhood in the factory town of Ansonia in southwestern Connecticut. Most of these stories, or as true as I recall them because I witnessed these events many years ago through the eyes of child and are retold to you now with the pen and hindsight of an older man. The only exception is the story Beat Time which is based on the disappearance of Beat poet Lew Welch. Decades before I knew who Welch was, I was told that he had made his from California to New Haven, Connecticut, where was an alcoholic living in a mission. The notion fascinated me and I filed it away but never forgot it.      
The collected stories are loosely modeled around Joyce’s novel, Dubliners (I also borrowed from the novels character and place names. Ivy Day, my character in “Local Orphan is Hero” is also the name of chapter in Dubliners, etc.) and like Joyce I wanted to write about my people, the people I knew as a child, the working class in small town America and I wanted to give a complete view of them as well. As a result the stories are about the divorced, Gays, black people, the working poor, the middle class, the lost and the found, the contented and the discontented.
Conversely many of the stories in this book are about starting life over again as a result of suicide (The Hanging Party, Small Town Tragedy, Beat Time) or from a near death experience (Anna Bell Lee and the Charge of the Light Brigade, A Brief Summer)
and natural occurring death. (The Best Laid Plans, The Winter Years, Balanced and Serene)
With the exception of Jesus Loves Shaqunda, in each story there is a rebirth from the death. (Shaqunda is reported as having died of pneumonia in The Winter Years)
Sal, the desperate and depressed divorcee in Things Change, changes his life in Lunch Hour when asks the waitress for a date and she accepts. (Which we learn in Closing Time, the last story in the book) In The Arranged Time, Thisby is given the option of change and whether she takes it or, we don’t know. The death of Greta’s husband in A Matter of Time has led her to the diner and into the waiting arms of the outgoing and loveable Gabe.



http://www.amazon.com/No-Time-Say-Goodbye-Memoir/dp/


In 1962, six year old John Tuohy, his two brothers and two sisters entered Connecticut’s foster care system and were promptly split apart. Over the next ten years, John would live in more than ten foster homes, group homes and state schools, from his native Waterbury to Ansonia, New Haven, West Haven, Deep River and Hartford. In the end, a decade later, the state returned him to the same home and the same parents they had taken him from. As tragic as is funny compelling story will make you cry and laugh as you journey with this child to overcome the obstacles of the foster care system and find his dreams.
http://www.amazon.com/No-Time-Say-Goodbye-Memoir/dp/0692361294/
http://amemoirofalifeinfostercare.blogspot.com/


ABOUT THE AUTHOR

John William Tuohy is a writer who lives in Washington DC. He holds an MFA in writing from Lindenwood University. He is the author of numerous non-fiction on the history of organized crime including the ground break biography of bootlegger Roger Tuohy "When Capone's Mob Murdered Touhy" and "Guns and Glamour: A History of Organized Crime in Chicago."

His non-fiction crime short stories have appeared in The New Criminologist, American Mafia and other publications. John won the City of Chicago's Celtic Playfest for his work The Hannigan's of Beverly, and his short story fiction work, Karma Finds Franny Glass, appeared in AdmitTwo Magazine in October of 2008.
His play, Cyberdate.Com, was chosen for a public performance at the Actors Chapel in Manhattan in February of 2007 as part of the groups Reading Series for New York project. In June of 2008, the play won the Virginia Theater of The First Amendment Award for best new play.



Contact John:
MYWRITERSSITE.BLOGSPOT.COM
JWTUOHY95@GMAIL.COM


Excerpt from my book "No Time to Say Goodbye: Memoirs of a Life in Foster Care.

Friendship is unnecessary, like philosophy, like art. . . It has no survival value; rather it is one of those things that give value to survival. -C. S. Lewis


  That first year that I returned to Waterbury I didn’t know anyone other than my mother, my sister Kathleen, and the parade of lost souls who were my mother’s friends and lovers. I was lonely.
  I stayed home at night and on weekends, spending my time taking Kathleen to the park or watching old movies late into the night while I listened to the cadre of neighborhood characters acting up out on the sidewalks.
  One day that back in August my Aunt Ginny dropped by the house and invited me to come over to her apartment and meet her daughter, Little Ginny. My Aunt Ginny— Virginia was her given name—was the eldest of my mother’s tribe of brothers and sisters.  She had a toughness about her that wasn’t practiced. It was real, from the ever-present cigarette butt dangling from the side of her mouth to the incredibly thick Brooklyn accent. She leaned forward when she talked and she talked loudly, and her humor was coarse and rough. Unlike my mother who, surprisingly, didn’t swear very much, Aunt Ginny was Ground Zero for obscenities.
  She was almost fifty years old when she moved to Waterbury, about a year before I returned, to be closer to her father and sister who had moved to Waterbury. Before that, she had spent her entire life in Brooklyn, never once venturing outside its borders. She had never seen Manhattan or its sights. For years she lived within a few feet of an elevated subway track that made everything in the house shake, rattle and roll when a train sped by every forty-five minutes.
  My aunt looked like an older version of my mother except she had piercing, clear blue eyes that showed her natural intelligence. Otherwise, she had the round, ruddy face and freckles and the light auburn hair that the rest of us had.
  Ginny had two children. Her son, Anthony, was my age and as a child I had fought with him whenever we met. He daughter —Little Ginny—was about a year younger than I and had spent most of her life in foster care. She had run away to live with her mother and had come with her to Waterbury. 
  My Aunt Ginny and Little Ginny were living in the old Elton Hotel in the center of town, the place where Paulie and I had stayed with Miss Hanrahan and where we ate in the formal dining room with the waiter who liked my choices. I went to see her a few days after she dropped by my mother’s. But, oh, how the mighty had fallen. The once-grand Elton was now a welfare hotel. Its occupants were the dregs of society, and it showed. All the fine furniture was gone from the lobby, as were the doorman and desk clerks. The thick red carpets were worn and dirty, the hallways eerily quiet and suspiciously dark. Still, the hotel had a regal sense of class, or perhaps it was simply what I wished for that grand old place. I found the room number and knocked.
  Aunt Ginny let me in. She made us coffee. The hotel rooms had been broken up into hundreds of tiny apartments, each with one medium-sized room, a tiny bathroom with a shower, and a large walk-in closet that had been converted into a kitchen with a two-burner stove, sink, and mini-refrigerator. But the high ceilings and the four large windows facing Waterbury Green and the magnificent Basilica of the Immaculate Conception next door made the place seem much larger than it was.   
  Aunt Ginny slept in a cot in the kitchen because the stove kept her warm. Like most alcoholics she was cold all the time. Like my mother, she chain-smoked non-filtered Pall Malls, and the kitchen reeked of tobacco and stale beer. The Pall Malls lowered her voice to a rough gravel, so she sounded more like a man than a woman.   
  “Little Ginny’s gone down the store to get some cigarettes.” She coughed. “You want a beer, Johnny?”
  I passed on the beer, and about then the apartment door opened and Little Ginny stepped in. A blue-eyed blonde, she didn’t resemble anyone in the family. She was taller than I had expected, slim, well- built, not attractive, but not homely. She was dressed loudly and provocatively in a way more fitting to her native Brooklyn than to Waterbury.
  “This here’s Johnny I told you about,” Aunt Ginny, said in her thicker-than-molasses Brooklynese.
  Although Little Ginny had been staring at me, now she turned her gaze toward the kitchen and nodded in a disrespectful recognition of me. She asked her mother, “We got anything to eat?”
  Aunt Ginny handed her a ten-dollar bill and said, “Youse should go out and eat.” She turned to me and said, “She ain’t been outta the house since she got here, so go on, go out,” and sank into a chair, popped a beer can and focused her attention on an old black-and-white movie. 
  Ginny slipped on a silver-colored coat and wordlessly let herself out the door. I followed.
  “I do go out,” she said angrily as she walked quickly down the long hall.  I tried to keep up with her, and then stopped and watched her walk farther and farther away until she stopped and turned to face me.
  “I didn’t do anything wrong,” I said. “So whatever is eating you, don’t take it out on me.” 
 She waited for several seconds and then waved me ahead. “Come on, Mister Sensitive, let’s go get a burger down the White Castle.” And we did.
 It turned out that she was actually a nice person, a little rough around the edges. She had the family trait of swearing like a sailor and was a few hundred miles away from genius, but she could be kind and considerate, and mostly important she was my age and she was company. And I was desperate for company.
  That first day, we spent four or five hours talking about what a drag Waterbury was, but neither one of us had anywhere else to go, although towards the end of the night we hatched a plot to run away to Manhattan and live as panhandlers.
 She didn’t have a sense of humor but she did have a fine appreciation for the absurd. And you need one or the other o when you’re poor because they console you for being the way we are, just as having an imagination compensates you for what you aren’t.
  Over time she began to smile at my inane ramblings, my ridiculous protests over the insignificant but unavoidable difficulties and indignities of life, and with every pronouncement—and there were many of them, because I complain endlessly—her smiles widened. Her eyes grew large and she laughed at what I said. Slowly the arch in her back dropped and the clench in her jaw disappeared and she became happy.
  Whenever one of us had money, we went to the movies at the Palace Theater or splurged on cheeseburgers at the White Castle, but mostly we had no money, so we talked a lot, aimlessly strolling through the downtown streets or sitting in front of my mother’s secondhand black-and-white television, chatting deep into the night. We learned a lot about each other in the way that young people do.
  We spent a lot of time sitting on one of the green painted on the Green. On weekends, Aunt Ginny would go to a package store and buy us a bottle of Boone’s Farm , a remarkably bad apple wine that cost just under a dollar a bottle. Little Ginny and I would sit at our bench that faced the handsome basilica, , sip our wine and chain-smoke our Marlboros. Sometimes we talked and sometimes we just sat there staring up into the night, looking at the stars. More than once we spent the entire night there, leaving after we watched the sun come up.
 “I’m a loner,” she would say, and I would think, No, you aren’t a loner. You don’t enjoy being alone any more than I do.
 “She said once, “This life we got is terrible. I hope the next one is better, or else I’m gonna have something to say to God, I’ll tell ya.”
“I don’t know,” I shrugged. “I think life is good.”
  The faintest of smiles came across her face as she brushed back her hair and said, “Just because we ain’t dead, don’t mean we’re alive.” She waved her hand around the room and added, “I mean, look at where we are, and look at how we live.”
 I don’t know, maybe because the truth hurts, but I felt myself becoming angry at her. She was right, of course. It was a miserable existence, and I was ashamed of it and tired of it.
“You know, Ginny,” I said, “you can’t go through your entire life thinking everyone will let you down.”
 “Why not?” she asked. “It’s easier to believe that, you know? It’s easier to believe in the bad stuff that will happen to you instead of believing in some like, pipe dream where everyone is nice to you and all that.”
  We sat in silence because we disagreed with each other. We were all we had and because of that, we vigilantly kept even the slightest discord from coming between us. 
  “Listen,” she said, as she took my hand and smiled at me, “you’re right, you shouldn’t go through life figuring people are gonna let you down, but from where I sit, from what I seen, you don’t expect nothing you don’t never get disappointed.”
  When we met again a few nights later, I took a paperback from my back pocket, a very worn and tattered copy of Romeo and Juliet. I was battling my way through it as I would all of Shakespeare for the rest of my life. But certain passages touched me with burning clarity and when I found them I circled them in pen and read them aloud to make sure I understood the words t as the author intended. I asked, “Can I read you something?”
  She sat up and crossed her legs towards me and a serious expression came over her face as when I mentioned other books or points of higher learning. I think it flattered her that I thought enough of her to share those studious things. And I think she listened so intently because she knew it made me happy.
 “Listen to this,” I said, my face close to the page.
 “Okay,” she answered, and I read:

“When he shall die,
Take him and cut him out in little stars,
And he will make the face of heaven so fine
That all the world will be in love with night
And pay no worship to the garish sun.”

  When I was finished, she tilted her head to the side and considered the words and said “Take him and cut him out in little stars, and he will—What was the rest of it?”
  I read, “‛And he will make the face of heaven so fine that all the world will be in love with night’.”
  She looked up into the heavens and smiled and whispered, “Wow,” and then asked, “Who wrote that? Some guy?”
“William Shakespeare,” I answered.
“What?” she asked, very concerned “His father die on him or something?”
“Yeah, I guess,” I said. “But I think what he’s saying is, is that everyone is magnificent, even a little piece of them is more glorious than then all the stars in heaven.” 
  She smiled and brushed my hair behind my ear and said, “You know what I like about you? You believe things.”
 “I know,” I said. “I got to stop doing that.”
 “No, no, no,” she said, leaning in closer. “You always got to do that, for the rest of your life. That’s a real important thing to have. We’re poor people, us, but inside your mind with all those poems and nice stuff, it’s like inside a really beautiful palace made outta gold. You ever give that up and I’ll come back and haunt you.”
 If it had been any other person in the world who said “I’ll come back and haunt you,” I would have asked, “Why? Do you plan on dying soon?” but with her, I didn’t ask, because there was a sense of inevitable doom about her. You knew it wasn’t going to end happily, because she was so beaten by it all.
 No one ever gave a damn about her, and, unlike me, she let that defeat her. She was the product of indifference. And that’s the problem in foster care. Bad people aren’t the problem in foster care. Indifferent people are the problem in foster care.
  I was lonely because I didn’t know anyone my age. But I wasn’t tormented by my loneliness because I had the heart of a poet, and because of that I knew the difference between loneliness and solitude. Loneliness can be painful, but solitude can be a productive and glorious exploration.
 Little Ginny was lonely, as was I, but she was lonely because she distrusted the world and everything in it, and that’s the worst sort of loneliness.
 She had encountered many defeats, so she quit trying to win. And that happened because she had never learned to deal with her problems. I had learned to deal with problems the same way a boxer learns to deal with his opponent. Study him, know everything you can about him, find his weak spot and bust him up. But Ginny couldn’t do that. She saw nothing beyond what her life as it was then, a jobless teen in a welfare hotel with no hope. Hope in the present always dies long before hope for the future. She was, she said, a realist. Foster care makes you a realist. The paradox is that to be a realist you must believe in miracles, and this young lady did not, on any level, believe in miracles.
 She didn’t know that there was a way out of it all, out of the poverty and the dead ends. Nor did she believe that a better life could be had because, I suspect, she had absolutely no idea what a better life would be like. But I did. My books told me there was a better life. I was positive that there was a way out and that outside that awful existence we lived in, life was rich and good. She had lost her faith. It’s an odd thing, faith. You can’t do very much with it, but you can’t do anything without it.
 I was always concerned with losing faith, in losing belief in things unseen. I was never deeply concerned about losing hope, something I do quite often. You can always regain hope in something or some else. I’m not sure the same can be said for losing one’s faith. Hell, I’m not even sure we lose faith. I think maybe you just stop letting faith—the belief in a God and a world filled with love and kindness and compassion—direct your life and the way you live it. Without it we become snide, suspicious, and mean. As the Bible says, “According to your faith be it done unto you.” And it isn’t limited to us. Imagine a world without faith. There would be no living in it.
 After a few months at school I started to meet new people, make friends and get drawn into new things. But Ginny didn’t. She stayed the same, day in and day out. I started seeing less and less of her, mostly because I had classes to attend and I couldn’t afford to stay up all night to watch the sun rise over the hill. And the truth is, she was starting to bore me. Maybe that was because I was young and shallow, or maybe because, at our cores, I believed in cause and effect and she believed in luck and circumstances.
 November came and the cold forced us to retreat from our bench to her mother’s cramped apartment, where we spent the weekends drinking wine and smoking and watching ancient black-and-white films and talking late into the nights.
 “Do you like going to dances?” I asked her. “They’re having a dance at the school.”
“I dunno,” she said in a tired slur. “Never been to one.” But she lifted her eyes and asked, “Are they fun?”
 “You wanna go?” I asked.
“I can’t dance,” she said, her eyes on the dirty linoleum floor.
“Sure you can,” I said, joining her in gazing at the floor.
“Don’t know how,” she said.
  I turned down the television and turned on the radio set. In 1971, a lot of folks still had radio sets in their homes. I found the local rock station playing a popular song from that year, a slow, melodic tune by the Bee Gees called “How Can You Mend a Broken Heart?”
  I took her hands, pulled her up from the couch, held her in a dance position and said, “You follow what I do. We’re going to make a box, so go to the left two steps,” and she did.
“Now we go back two steps.” And she did. “Now to the right two steps and now forward two steps.” She was tense and unsure but interested, and kept her eyes on her bare feet.
“Now we do the whole thing over again,” I said, “but just a little bit faster, looser, okay?” She nodded, and after a while she got it and a contented smile spread across her face.  
  “You want to try a spin?” I asked, and she let go of me and spun in a circle.
  “I think you’re supposed to let the guy spin you,” I said. “Let’s try it again.” And that was how we passed the night, waiting for slow songs to come onto the radio and dancing across the room lit only by the flickering light of the muted television set.
  We went to the dance the next weekend. She met some guy, I met some girl and we were both glad we had gone. I was starting to enjoy school more and more. I asked her about getting back into school, or maybe learning a trade—hairdresser, or nurse’s aide— but she was like most foster teens who don’t improve because the only role model they have is themselves. And whenever I made those suggestions, she got get angry. I’ll tell you this much: Nobody wants advice, not really. What they want is for you to tell them they’re right.
  She seemed to collect the everyday insults tossed at her and the memories of the injustices that intruded on her life and talked about them over and over. It was as if she waited for the next grievance so she could add it to her collection of indignities.
  So I lost track of her after a while, I don’t know why, although when I think of her, remembering when we were so close, I ask myself why we allowed each other to drift away. But there is no answer, except that sometimes that’s just the way life is—you replace one person with another.
  Over the years I heard bits and pieces about her from my mother and my aunt. Aunt Ginny died of cancer, and Little Ginny had to move out of the Elton after that. She was involved with some guy and had a baby, and the guy left her. She became a prostitute.
 She contracted AIDS in the early days of the epidemic and died soon afterward. She was twenty years old. I had never gotten to talk to her about that last part of her life, but I know that being a hooker humiliated her because she had a proud dignity about her.
 I remember one morning, as we sat on the bench, she said, “Tears are for after all the bad things happen, ’cause when it’s all falling down around you, tears just waste your time and let them know how bad they hurt you. You know, a lot of times, you think that in the future, when you’re all old and everything, that it’s going to be better because you will have been hurt so much by then, there won’t be nothing left of you to rip apart no more, then they can’t hurt you none, because there ain’t no part of you that’s left.”
 She died with a lot of scars. I will too.
 It’s a sad story of a throwaway life of a person who didn’t matter to the world. But she mattered once, to me, a very long time ago, when we danced the night away in the Elton Hotel. She’ll always be with me. Death can end a life but it can’t end a memory. After Little Ginny died, her son was put into the foster care system and life went on.


WHY THE WORLD NEEDS EDITORS.....................






THE ART OF PULP




Sculpture this and Sculpture that





DON'T YOU LOVE POP ART?

  Bill Noir







THE ART OF WAR...............................



DON’T WORRY-BE HAPPY
  You Can Catch Happiness But Not Depression, University of Warwick Study
Happiness Spreads But Depression Doesn’t
Having friends who suffer from depression doesn’t affect the mental health of others, according to research led by the University of Warwick.
The academics found that having friends can help teenagers recover from depression or even avoid becoming depressed in the first instance.
The findings are the result of a study of the way teenagers in a group of US high schools influenced each others’ mood. The academics used a mathematical model to establish if depression spreads from friend to friend.
Professor Frances Griffiths, head of social science and systems in health at Warwick Medical School, University of Warwick, said: “Depression is a major public health concern worldwide. But the good news is we’ve found that a healthy mood amongst friends is linked with a significantly reduced risk of developing and increased chance of recovering from depression.
“Our results offer implications for improving adolescent mood. In particular they suggest the hypothesis that encouraging friendship networks between adolescents could reduce both the incidence and prevalence of depression among teenagers.”
The study has been published in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B entitled Spreading of healthy mood in adolescent social networks.
Using data from The National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent to Adult Health they looked at more than 2,000 adolescents in a network of US high school students. They examined how their mood influenced each other by modelling the spread of moods using similar methods to those used to track the spread of infectious diseases.
Individuals were classified as either having depressive symptoms (low mood) or not being depressed (healthy mood) according to the score cut-off associated with a clinical diagnosis of depression.
The team found that while depression does not ‘spread’, having enough friends with a healthy mood can halve the probability of developing, or double the probability of recovering from, depression over a six to 12 month period.
The mathematical model used suggests that adolescents who have five or more mentally healthy friends have half the probability of becoming depressed compared to adolescents with no healthy friends. And teenagers who have 10 healthy friends have double the probability of recovering from depressive symptoms compared to adolescents with just three healthy friends.
University of Warwick mathematics researcher Edward Hill is lead author of the research paper. He said: “In the context of depression, this is a very large effect size. Changing risk by a factor of two is unusual.
“Our results suggest that promotion of any friendship between adolescents can reduce depression since having depressed friends does not put them at risk, but having healthy friends is both protective and curative.”
Social factors such as living alone or having experienced abuse in childhood are already linked to depression. Also social support, such as having someone to talk to has been cited as important for recovery from depression.
However this study looks at the effect of being friends with people on the likelihood of developing depression or recovering from it.
Another author of the paper, Dr Thomas House senior lecturer in applied mathematics from the University of Manchester said: “It could be that having a stronger social network is an effective way to treat depression. More work needs to be done but it may be that we could significantly reduce the burden of depression through cheap, low-risk social interventions.
“As a society, if we enable friendships to develop among adolescents (for example providing youth clubs) each adolescent is more likely to have enough friends with healthy mood to have a protective effect. This would reduce the prevalence of depression.”
Other research into adolescent mental health by Warwick Medical School will be explored in an upcoming play called Cracked which is being performed by Santé Theatre Warwick 





People taking pictures of people:
I'm an amateur photographer, I travel a lot so some years ago and I noticed that everywhere I went there was someone taking a photo of someone else. It's part of the human condition and I think it’s fun so I started snapping pictures of people taking pictures. 




HERE'S PLEASANT POEM FOR YOU TO ENJOY................

Animals

By Frank O’Hara

Have you forgotten what we were like then
when we were still first rate
and the day came fat with an apple in its mouth

it's no use worrying about Time
but we did have a few tricks up our sleeves
and turned some sharp corners

the whole pasture looked like our meal
we didn't need speedometers
we could manage cocktails out of ice and water

I wouldn't want to be faster
or greener than now if you were with me O you
were the best of all my days


Francis Russell "Frank" O'Hara (March 27, 1926 – July 25, 1966) was a writer, poet and art critic. Because of his employment as a curator at the Museum of Modern Art, O'Hara became prominent in New York City's art world. O'Hara is regarded as a leading figure in the New York School—an informal group of artists, writers and musicians who drew inspiration from jazz, surrealism, abstract expressionism, action painting and contemporary avant-garde art movements. O'Hara's poetry is personal in tone and in content and described as reading "like entries in a diary".
Poet and critic Mark Doty has said O'Hara's poetry is "urbane, ironic, sometimes genuinely celebratory and often wildly funny" containing "material and association’s alien to academic verse" such as "the camp icons of movie stars of the twenties and thirties, the daily landscape of social activity in Manhattan, jazz music, telephone calls from friends".
O'Hara's writing "sought to capture in his poetry the immediacy of life, feeling that poetry should be "between two persons instead of two pages." The Collected Poems of Frank O'Hara edited by Donald Allen (Knopf, 1971), the first of several posthumous collections, shared the 1972 National Book Award for Poetry.
In the early morning hours of July 24, 1966, O'Hara was struck by a jeep on the Fire Island beach, after the beach taxi in which he had been riding with a group of friends broke down in the dark. He died the next day of a ruptured liver. Attempts to bring negligent homicide charges against 23-year-old driver Kenneth L. Ruzicka were unsuccessful; many of O'Hara's friends felt the local police had conducted a lax investigation to protect one of their own locals. O'Hara was buried in Green River Cemetery on Long Island. The painter Larry Rivers, a longtime friend and lover of O'Hara's, delivered one of the eulogies, along with Bill Berkson, Edwin Denby and René d'Harnoncourt.





HERE'S SOME NICE ART FOR YOU TO LOOK AT....ENJOY!



Howard David Johnson  Valkyrie Maiden


Ignacio Pinazo Camarlench The Artist’s Son Seated

Interior (Woman Reading) (1925) Edward Hopper




I LOVE BLACK AND WHITE PHOTOS







The Real Value of A Universal Basic Income Is That It Raises The Reservation Wage

 Tim Worstall

Steve Randy Waldman has a nice slide series explaining the benefits of a universal basic income as a replacement for the various hotch-potch of policies we currently call the welfare system. I’m largely in agreement that such a universal basic income would be a better idea than what we already do and I’m largely in agreement for most of the reasons that Waldman outlines. However, there’s one point I take rather strongly, which is that such an income must be a basic one. This is not about providing enough income that everyone gets to live nicely without working and it’s most certainly not meant, in my eyes at least, to be anything close to a “living” income. Something like $800 a month for the US, per adult, is the range I think of, for the UK something like the pension guarantee of £130 per week. Enough, just about, to scrape by upon but not enough to provide a life of beers and iPhones: to get those one would need to go out to work.
The other point I like to emphasise is one that Waldman also points to. Which is that a proper, universal, such income would quite radically change power relations in the workplace. This is a point often made by the thinking man’s Marxist, Chris Dillow.
Think about the caricature that we’re told the modern economy is. The decline of unions has meant that the workers have no market power these days. Employers can just offer them whatever scraps fall from the table and they’ve got to accept that as wages simply because they’ve got to feed themselves and their children. This is what is behind the growing inequality, the concentration of wealth at the top and the fall in the share of the national economy that gets paid to labour. That it is in fact all rather more complicated than that is true but let’s stick with that general story that currently reverberates across political scene. There are even those who would insist that declining union power is why kittens no longer gambol in sunshine, as they did in the days of our youth (hyperbole alert!).
The usual answer to this is that we must therefore rebuild union power. Although I have to say that if the solution is to bring back Jimmy Hoffa to “invest” the workers’ pensions funds I think we may well have mis-stated the question. For the thing is that we don’t necessarily want to bring back the unions as the representatives of the workers’ power. What we want to bring back is the workers’ power. Specifically, we want the workers to be able to tell the employers to go take a hike if they offer insultingly low wages. And that’s exactly the thing that a universal basic income does achieve:

Improved worker bargaining power
• Many of us consider the declining relative fortunes of the perfectly hardworking people who could once afford middle class lives and now cannot (without dodgy borrowing) to be a compelling social problem.
• Reversing the decline of union power, or the degree to which middle class workers are now in competition with counterparts in lower-wage countries, or the potential for automation seems unlikely and arguably undesirable.
Quite so. But the universal basic income rides to the rescue: A universal basic income creates bargaining power by increasing all workers’ capacity to refuse a raw deal.
- A UBI increases workers’ “reserve price” — the minimum each worker must be paid before she is willing to accept a given job with particular working conditions
• A UBI is a much more flexible means of enhancing labor bargaining power than unionization or a minimum wage.
- All workers are able to drive a harder bargain with a UBI than without, shifting the distribution of behavior and effectively augmenting bargaining power.
- Firms and individuals retain complete freedom to negotiate the terms oftheir own engagement, and to take into account unusually pleasantworking conditions or nonpecuniary benefits of certain kinds of jobs that might be made untenable by a minimum wage.

You don’t have to be a member of a union to gain this increased bargaining power: there’s no need for there to be a priestly caste standing between you and the employer, a priestly caste growing fat off your tithes (or, union dues) in order to stand up to The Man. Simply because everyone knows that they’ve got the minimum they can scrape by upon (and yes, is is scrape by upon, not live comfortably upon) then everyone has that greater market power.
The other way around of putting this is that the reservation wage has gone up. Imagine that there’s no welfare system at all: it would thus be possible, when there’s high unemployment, for an employer to offer 2 lbs of bread a day as the wage. That was the deal in early Victorian times in England. And people took it because there was no alternative. With people getting $800 a month for just being a breathing adult then such tactics would not work. The amount that an employer must pay in order to convince someone to get up off the couch and come into work will rise. Those of us who are already higher paid already have that market power: that’s why we get paid more than some subsistence amount. One of the things a universal basic income does is provide at least a modicum of that market power to the currently low skilled and low paid.
A UBI therefore meets one of the demands of the liberal right (ie, the economically liberal), that if we’re going to have some form of a welfare state, which we obviously are, then let’s have the most efficient one we can. With the fewest distortions, with low marginal tax rates, fewest disincentives to work and lifestyle choice and so on. A UBI also meets the demands of the liberal left (ie, the not so economically liberal in the modern parlance) and aids in overturning the power imbalances that they see in the current society.
Thus, I would submit, we really ought to damn the torpedos and move straight ahead to a UBI, a universal basic income. That it is economically logical and achieves many political goals, while over turning the current power structures of both left and right (both employers and union bosses, plus the administrators of the current welfare state, would lose out) is why it’s unlikely to happen though. Those political power structures are too well entrenched for it ever to get onto the statute books I fear. There’s too many choke points in the legislative process for it to pass unscathed. Anyone care to imagine the AFL-CIO’s, and thus the Democratic Party’s, reaction to a legal change that would make unions redundant? Or the more archaic part of the Republican party’s reaction to a welfare system that was simple, worked and was expensive?
Quite. It’s the right thing to do but quite how to make it happen….I could see a Parliamentary system like my native Britain managing it long before I could see the US managing to get it enacted.

My latest book is "The No Breakfast Fallacy, why the Club of Rome was wrong about us running out of resources."Amazon and Amazon.co.uk. $6.99 and relevant prices in other currencies.



Photographs I’ve taken


Dog parks, dog beach and dog shows 















































































































CHILDHOOD POVERTY IS HAPPENING EVERYWHERE IN AMERICAN, WE'RE BETTER THAN THIS.....YOU AND ME....WE'RE BETTER THAN THIS AND OUR COUNTRY IS BETTER THAN THIS......LET'S GET THIS CONVERSATION GOING ACROSS AMERICA AND DO SOMETHING TO END POVERTY IN AMERICA NOW  


The face of childhood hunger is increasingly suburban
Jessica Swarner
Nearly half of all students newly eligible for free or reduced-price school lunches lives in America's suburbs, according to a recently released report by national grassroots advocacy group Fair Share Education Fund.
“The face of childhood hunger has changed. Hunger is no longer strictly an urban issue,” said Chris Destiche, state organizer for Arizona Fair Share Education Fund.
The nonprofit’s second annual report on this issue, Childhood Hunger in America’s Suburbs: The Changing Geography of Poverty, shows that Arizona’s statewide eligibility rate increased by 10 percent between 2006-2007 and 2012-2013, while its suburban eligibility rate increased by 14 percent.
In suburban Phoenix, 45 percent of children, were eligible for free or reduced-priced lunch in 2012-13, according to the report. Overall, the region had a 51 percent eligibility rate in that time period.
The report says this change in the geography of childhood hunger occurred after the Great Recession, which created financial hardship for millions of Americans. After those years of economic instability, Phoenix had the third highest poverty rate out of the nation's 25 biggest cities in 2013.
Nearly 1 in 3 Arizona children suffers from food insecurity, meaning they are at risk of hunger every day. That compares to a national rate of 1 in 5.
 Destiche said that the advocacy group released the report in early September because it is Hunger Action Month, and the funding of hunger prevention programs will be a pressing topic in Congress.
David Martinez of St. Mary’s Food Bank Alliance said a priority of Arizona Child Nutrition Coalition, a group of statewide organizations that provides direct aid to students, is to ensure that Congress reauthorizes the Healthy, Hunger-Free Kids Act of 2010 before it expires on Sept. 30.  The measure regulates nine federal nutrition programs. The law is revisited every five years, when changes to items such as funding amounts and school nutrition guidelines can be made.
Although school lunch and breakfast programs are permanently authorized, decisions regarding their funding as well as the future of similar programs are up for debate.
Glendale City Councilman and Glendale Elementary School District Governing Board member Jamie Aldama spoke at a conference about the newly released report, representing a city with a poverty rate above the state average. Census data shows 20.5 percent of Glendale residents fell below the poverty level for 2009-2013, compared to 17.9 percent for Arizona overall.
"No kid should have to go to school hungry,” said Aldama, noting he experienced it growing up with a single mother who cared for seven children.

He urged residents to reach out to elected officials and remind them of the widespread effects of childhood hunger.






THE MOB UNDER SURVEILLANCE 

(LtoR) Testa, Iezzi, Monte and Capello leaving Virgilio's

Tony Spilotro (far left) and the hole in the wall gang (Las Vegas)


Anthony Baratta

Genovese soldier James Bernardone (46) and associate James Coumoutsos outside of a funeral home

Genovese soldier James Bernardone


Joseph Costa, Vincent Parisi, Vincent 'Vinny Butch' Corrao, August Sclafani, Patsy Marsala
Michael Ciancaglini (middle).
Mikey Chang & Joey Merlino.

Ray Long John Martorano

Sebastian John LaRocca in front of the Allegheny Car Wash he owned, located at 100 Sandusky Ave, Pittsburgh

Surveillance photo of Tommy Horsehead Scafidi and John Stanfa

huckie Merlino, Scarfo, and Phil Leonetti (Philadelphia)




IF INDUSTRY WON’T ACT RESPONSIBLE, THEN IMPOSE A SUGAR TAX

 This Is Why You Should Never Drink Coke Again But Use It Instead
HEALTH LIFESTYLE BY JAMIE LOGIE

Do you have a Coke problem? Unless you’re someone like Lindsay Lohan reading this, you’d know right away that I’m talking about the beverage that is part of Americana:Coca Cola. You may be surprised to know that the classic drink which started out as an elixir tonic may be doing a whole lot of harm to your body.
Let me show you 8 reasons why you should look to avoid what’s been called “The Real Thing” (despite how amazing I thought the Coke ad was in the last episode of Mad Men). First, let’s set the stage.

History Of Coke
Coca Cola was invented by Civil War survivor John Pemberton. After being wounded in battle, he became addicted to morphine and was looking for a substitute. Coke started out as a coca wine. It was first registered as a nerve tonic. It was an alcoholic beverage, so after prohibition passed, Pemberton created a non-alcoholic beverage he called Coca-Cola. It was originally sold as a patent medicine for 5 cents a glass at soda fountains. This Cola was believed to cure morphine addiction, dyspepsia, headache and impotence. Pretty good deal for only a nickel.
You might be wondering where the name “Coca-Cola” comes from? Well, this ties into the whole “cocaine in Coke” issue. The original formula never used straight cocaine; however, the coca leaf is where cocaine is derived from. It inadvertently contained trace amounts. By 1903 fresh leaves were removed for “spent leaves” that contained virtually no cocaine. Today, Coke uses a cocaine-free coca leaf extract.
The name cola comes from the Kola nut which acts as a flavoring and supplies the caffeine. The “K” was eventually replaced with a “C” for marketing purposes. The rest of the recipe is a tightly guarded secret that has remained pretty much unchanged to this day, except for alternative varieties like New Coke.
With all this in mind, let’s look at the issues that come from consuming this “black gold”.

1. A Horrific Amount Of Sugar
This is clearly the main issue around drinking soda in general — it’s liquid sugar. You are basically drinking a chocolate bar! A regular can of Coke contains upwards of 10 teaspoons of sugar. Since it’s fast acting liquid sugar, you are looking at skyrocketing blood sugar and insulin surges. Over time this leads to insulin resistance, obesity, heart disease, and diabetes.

2. High Fructose Corn Syrup
High fructose corn syrup was introduced into beverages once it was found to be a much cheaper alternative to sugar. HFCS also has a longer shelf life. It is also the reason why drink sizes have become gigantic over the years. Since it costs manufacturers very little to make, you now have Big Gulps the size of an SUV.
When you consume HFCS it goes straight to the liver (unlike regular sugar) and triggers lipogenesis. This refers to the production of fats like triglycerides and cholesterol. It is one of the major causes of liver damage in the country, causing “fatty liver.” This affects 70 million people!

3. High Caffeine Content
Some caffeine comes from clean sources, like tea or fresh ground coffee. These aren’t that bad in moderation, and actually provide some health benefits. Caffeine in Coke is far from a clean source. Constant exposure can raise blood pressure, cause heart burn, negatively impact your sleep, lead to ulcers, and cause indigestion.
If you want to learn more about the dangers of too much caffeine read this other article I wrote for Lifehack.

4. Promotes Dehydration & Thirst
This is the double whammy that causes you to keep drinking more. The caffeine issues mentioned above can also cause loss of water, since it acts as a diuretic. Then, the sodium content also keeps you thirsty. Add into this the addictive properties of sugar and caffeine (I’ll get to in a second), and you have a product with a built in continuous consumption cycle.

5. Phosphoric Acid
You might wonder why this is an ingredient in a soft drink. Phosphoric acid helps to give a sharper taste to sodas like Coke. It also slows the growth of molds and bacteria, which normally multiply rapidly in a sugary solution.
When you consume phosphoric acid it can lead to low mineral bone density and osteoporosis. This is specific to colas and not other clear sodas, which tend to use citric acid. To make matters worse, the first thing this acid hits is your teeth. Phosphoric acid can cause tooth enamel erosion, even at low levels.
Think of phosphoric acid as something that can pretty much dissolve away your skeletal system, like drinking from the wrong Holy Grail in Indiana Jones and The Last Crusade.

6. Tap Water
This seems a bit weird, but it’s important to remember that tap water is not the healthiest thing in the world either, and it is the main ingredient in Coke. They are using the cheapest municipal water sources they can find. These sources contain amounts of chlorine, which has been linked to bladder, rectal, and breast cancer.

7. Aspartame
This is going to apply more to Diet Coke, but with Diet being produced in larger quantities than regular this will apply to most people. Aspartame is an artificial sweetener that went through a lot of shady politics to get approved. It probably should have been left for its original intended purpose: an ulcer medication.
When you consume an artificial sweetener like aspartame it does a few things: it acts as an excitotoxin (which can destroy brain cells), it causes addiction, leads you to want to consume more, and newer research shows it to alter our gut bacteria
The aspartame/artificial sweetener issue is a big mess. You can read more about it here. Speaking of destroyed brain cells, I wonder how much Diet Coke the Kardashians have consumed?

8. It’s Bad For Your Body, But Can Be Good For Other Uses
Do you really want to drink something that removes rust? Now that you know how harmful drinking Coke is, here are a few other ways you can use the favorite drink of Mean Joe Green:
1. Pouring Coke on a bug bite or bee sting can help neutralize the pain.
2. A can of Coke and a wet cloth make a great cleaning solution to remove bugs and dust from car windows.
3. Remove rust from small objects. You might have tried this with the old penny in the glass of Coke overnight trick.
4. Coke can help get the smell of skunk off your pets. Just don’t forget to rinse your pet off afterwards.
5. Coke can also be used for toilet cleaner. Phosphoric acid is actually good for something! Your (old) favorite drink can now help breakdown all the lime scum and buildup in a toilet.






FROM LLR BOOKS. COM
Litchfield Literary Books. A really small company run by writers.

AMERICAN HISTORY


The Day Nixon Met Elvis
Paperback 46 pages
http://www.amazon.com/Day-Nixon-Met-elvis/

Theodore Roosevelt: Letters to his Children. 1903-1918
Paperback 194 pages
http://www.amazon.com/Theodore-Roosevelt-Letters-Children-1903-1918/dp/

THE ANCIENT GREEKS AND CIVILIZATIONS
The Works of Horace
Paperback 174 pages
http://www.amazon.com/Works-Horace-Richard-Willoughby/

The Quotable Greeks
Paperback 234 pages
http://www.amazon.com/Quotable-Greeks-Richard-W-Willoughby

The Quotable Epictetus
Paperback 142 pages
http://www.amazon.com/Quotable-Epictetus-Golden-Sayings

Quo Vadis: A narrative of the time of Nero
Paperback 420 pages
http://www.amazon.com/Quo-Vadis-Narrative-Time-Nero

CHILDRENS BOOKS
The Porchless Pumpkin: A Halloween Story for Children
A Halloween play for young children. By consent of the author, this play may be performed, at no charge, by educational institutions, neighborhood organizations and other not-for-profit-organizations.
A fun story with a moral
“I believe that Denny O'Day is an American treasure and this little book proves it. Jack is a pumpkin who happens to be very small, by pumpkins standards and as a result he goes unbought in the pumpkin patch on Halloween eve, but at the last moment he is given his chance to prove that just because you're small doesn't mean you can't be brave. Here is the point that I found so wonderful, the book stresses that while size doesn't matter when it comes to courage...ITS OKAY TO BE SCARED....as well. I think children need to hear that, that's its okay to be unsure because life is a ongoing lesson isn't it?”
Paperback: 42 pages
http://www.amazon.com/OLANTERN-PORCHLESS-PUMPKIN-Halloween-Children

BOOKS ON FOSTER CARE
It's Not All Right to be a Foster Kid....no matter what they tell you: Tweet the books contents
Paperback 94 pages
http://www.amazon.com/Right-Foster-Kid-no-matter-what

From the Author
I spent my childhood, from age seven through seventeen, in foster care.  Over the course of those ten years, many decent, well-meaning, and concerned people told me, "It's okay to be foster kid."
In saying that, those very good people meant to encourage me, and I appreciated their kindness then, and all these many decades later, I still appreciate their good intentions. But as I was tossed around the foster care system, it began to dawn on me that they were wrong.  It was not all right to be a foster kid.
During my time in the system, I was bounced every eighteen months from three foster homes to an orphanage to a boy's school and to a group home before I left on my own accord at age seventeen.
In the course of my stay in foster care, I was severely beaten in two homes by my "care givers" and separated from my four siblings who were also in care, sometimes only blocks away from where I was living.
I left the system rather than to wait to age out, although the effects of leaving the system without any family, means, or safety net of any kind, were the same as if I had aged out. I lived in poverty for the first part of my life, dropped out of high school, and had continuous problems with the law.
 Today, almost nothing about foster care has changed.  Exactly what happened to me is happening to some other child, somewhere in America, right now.  The system, corrupt, bloated, and inefficient, goes on, unchanging and secretive.
Something has gone wrong in a system that was originally a compassionate social policy built to improve lives but is now a definitive cause in ruining lives.  Due to gross negligence, mismanagement, apathy, and greed, mostly what the foster care system builds are dangerous consequences. Truly, foster care has become our epic national disgrace and a nightmare for those of us who have lived through it.
Yet there is a suspicion among some Americans that foster care costs too much, undermines the work ethic, and is at odds with a satisfying life.  Others see foster care as a part of the welfare system, as legal plunder of the public treasuries.
 None of that is true; in fact, all that sort of thinking does is to blame the victims.  There is not a single child in the system who wants to be there or asked to be there.  Foster kids are in foster care because they had nowhere else to go.  It's that simple.  And believe me, if those kids could get out of the system and be reunited with their parents and lead normal, healthy lives, they would. And if foster care is a sort of legal plunder of the public treasuries, it's not the kids in the system who are doing the plundering.
 We need to end this needless suffering.  We need to end it because it is morally and ethically wrong and because the generations to come will not judge us on the might of our armed forces or our technological advancements or on our fabulous wealth.
 Rather, they will judge us, I am certain, on our compassion for those who are friendless, on our decency to those who have nothing and on our efforts, successful or not, to make our nation and our world a better place.  And if we cannot accomplish those things in the short time allotted to us, then let them say of us "at least they tried."
You can change the tragedy of foster care and here's how to do it.  We have created this book so that almost all of it can be tweeted out by you to the world.  You have the power to improve the lives of those in our society who are least able to defend themselves.  All you need is the will to do it.
 If the American people, as good, decent and generous as they are, knew what was going on in foster care, in their name and with their money, they would stop it.  But, generally speaking, although the public has a vague notion that foster care is a mess, they don't have the complete picture. They are not aware of the human, economic and social cost that the mismanagement of the foster care system puts on our nation.
By tweeting the facts laid out in this work, you can help to change all of that.  You can make a difference.  You can change things for the better.
We can always change the future for a foster kid; to make it better ...you have the power to do that. Speak up (or tweet out) because it's your country.  Don't depend on the "The other guy" to speak up for these kids, because you are the other guy.
We cannot build a future for foster children, but we can build foster children for the future and the time to start that change is today.

No time to say Goodbye: Memoirs of a life in foster 
Paperbook 440 Books
http://www.amazon.com/No-Time-Say-Goodbye-Memoir
  
BOOKS ABOUT FILM

On the Waterfront: The Making of a Great American Film
Paperback: 416 pages
http://www.amazon.com/Waterfront-Making-Great-American-Film/

BOOKS ABOUT GHOSTS AND THE SUPERNATUAL

Scotish Ghost Stories
Paperback 186 pages
http://www.amazon.com/Scottish-Ghost-Stories-Elliott-ODonell

HUMOR BOOKS
The Book of funny odd and interesting things people say
Paperback: 278 pages
http://www.amazon.com/book-funny-interesting-things-people

The Wee Book of Irish Jokes
http://www.amazon.com/Book-Series-Irish-Jokes-ebook

Perfect Behavior: A guide for Ladies and Gentlemen in all Social Crises
http://www.amazon.com/Perfect-Behavior-Ladies-Gentlemen-Social

BOOKS ABOUT THE 1960s

You Don’t Need a Weatherman. Underground 1969
Paperback 122 pages
http://www.amazon.com/Dont-Weatherman-Notes-Weatherman-Underground-1969

Baby Boomers Guide to the Beatles Songs of the Sixties
Paperback
http://www.amazon.com/Boomers-Guide-Beatles-Songs-Sixties/

Baby Boomers Guide to Songs of the 1960s
http://www.amazon.com/Baby-Boomers-Guide-Songs-1960s


IRISH- AMERICANA
The Connecticut Irish
Paper back 140 pages
http://www.amazon.com/Connecticut-Irish-Catherine-F-Connolly

 The Wee Book of Irish Jokes
http://www.amazon.com/Book-Series-Irish-Jokes-ebook/

The Wee Book of Irish Recipes 
http://www.amazon.com/The-Wee-Book-Irish-Recipes/
 
 The Wee Book of the American-Irish Gangsters
  http://www.amazon.com/The-Wee-Book-Irish-American-Gangsters/

 The Wee book of Irish Blessings... 
http://www.amazon.com/Series-Blessing-Proverbs-Toasts-ebook/

The Wee Book of the American Irish in Their Own Words
http://www.amazon.com/Book-American-Irish-Their-Words/

Everything you need to know about St. Patrick
Paperback 26 pages
http://www.amazon.com/Everything-Need-About-Saint-Patrick

A Reading Book in Ancient Irish History
Paperback 147pages
http://www.amazon.com/Reading-Book-Ancient-Irish-History

The Book of Things Irish
http://www.amazon.com/Book-Things-Irish-William-Tuohy/

Poets and Dreamer; Stories translated from the Irish
Paperback 158 pages
http://www.amazon.com/Poets-Dreamers-Stories-Translated-Irish/

The History of the Great Irish Famine: Abridged and Illustrated
Paperback 356 pages
http://www.amazon.com/History-Great-Irish-Famine-Illustrated/


BOOKS ABOUT NEW ENGLAND

The New England Mafia
http://www.amazon.com/The-New-England-Mafia-ebook/

Wicked Good New England Recipes
http://www.amazon.com/Wicked-Good-New-England-Recipes/

The Connecticut Irish
Paper back 140 pages
http://www.amazon.com/Connecticut-Irish-Catherine-F-Connolly

The Twenty-Fifth Regiment Connecticut Volunteers
Paperback 64 pages
http://www.amazon.com/Twenty-Fifth-Regiment-Connecticut-Volunteers-Rebellion

The Life of James Mars
Paperback 54 pages
http://www.amazon.com/Life-James-Mars-Slave-Connecticut

Stories of Colonial Connecticut
Paperback 116 pages
http://www.amazon.com/Stories-Colonial-Connnecticut-Caroline-Clifford

What they Say in Old New England
Paperback 194 pages
http://www.amazon.com/What-they-say-New-England/


BOOK ABOUT ORGANIZED CRIME

Chicago Organized Crime
Chicago-Mob-Bosses
http://www.amazon.com/Chicagos-Mob-Bosses-Accardo-ebook

The Mob Files: It Happened Here: Places of Note in Chicago gangland 1900-2000
http://www.amazon.com/The-Mob-Files-1900-2000-ebook

An Illustrated Chronological History of the Chicago Mob. Time Line 1837-2000
http://www.amazon.com/Illustrated-Chronological-History-Chicago-1837-2000/

Mob Buster: Report of Special Agent Virgil Peterson to the Kefauver Committee
http://www.amazon.com/Mob-Buster-Peterson-Committee-ebook/

The Mob Files. Guns and Glamour: The Chicago Mob. A History. 1900-2000
http://www.amazon.com/Mob-Files-Guns-Glamour-ebook/

Shooting the Mob: Organized crime in photos. Crime Boss Tony Accardo
http://www.amazon.com/Shooting-Mob-Organized-photos-Accardo/

Shooting the Mob: Organized Crime in Photos: The Saint Valentine’s Day Massacre.
http://www.amazon.com/Shooting-Mob-Organized-Valentines-Massacre

The Life and World of Al Capone in Photos
http://www.amazon.com/Life-World-Al-Capone

AL CAPONE: The Biography of a Self-Made Man.: Revised from the 0riginal 1930 edition.Over 200 new photographs
Paperback: 340 pages
http://www.amazon.com/CAPONE-Biography-Self-Made-Over-photographs

Whacked. One Hundred Years Murder and Mayhem in the Chicago Outfit
Paperback: 172 pages
http://www.amazon.com/Whacked-Hundred-Murder-Mayhem-Chicago/

Las Vegas Organized Crime
The Mob in Vegas
http://www.amazon.com/Mob-Files-Vegas-ebook

Bugsy & His Flamingo: The Testimony of Virginia Hill
http://www.amazon.com/Bugsy-His-Flamingo-Testimony-Virginia/

Testimony by Mobsters Lewis McWillie, Joseph Campisi and Irwin Weiner (The Mob Files Series)
http://www.amazon.com/The-Kennedy-Assassination-Ruby-Testimony-ebook

Rattling the Cup on Chicago Crime.
Paperback 264 pages
http://www.amazon.com/Rattling-Cup-Chicago-Crime-Abridged

The Life and Times of Terrible Tommy O’Connor.
Paperback 94 pages
http://www.amazon.com/Life-Times-Terrible-Tommy-OConnor

The Mob, Sam Giancana and the overthrow of the Black Policy Racket in Chicago
Paperback 200 pages
http://www.amazon.com/Giancana-ovethrow-Policy-Rackets-Chicago

When Capone’s Mob Murdered Roger Touhy. In Photos
Paperback 234 pages
http://www.amazon.com/Capones-Murdered-Roger-Touhy-photos

Organized Crime in Hollywood
The Mob in Hollywood
http://www.amazon.com/Mob-Files-Hollywood-ebook/

The Bioff Scandal
Paperback 54 pages
http://www.amazon.com/Bioff-Scandal-Shakedown-Hollywood-Studios

Organized Crime in New York
Joe Pistone’s war on the mafia
http://www.amazon.com/Joe-Petrosinos-War-Mafia-Files/

Mob Testimony: Joe Pistone, Michael Scars DiLeonardo, Angelo Lonardo and others
http://www.amazon.com/Mob-Testimony-DiLeonardo-testimony-Undercover/

The New York Mafia: The Origins of the New York Mob
http://www.amazon.com/The-New-York-Mafia-Origins

The New York Mob: The Bosses
http://www.amazon.com/The-New-York-Mob-Bosses/

Organized Crime 25 Years after Valachi. Hearings before the US Senate
http://www.amazon.com/Organized-Crime-Valachi-Hearings-ebook

Shooting the mob: Dutch Schultz
http://www.amazon.com/Shooting-Mob-Organized-Photographs-Schultz

Gangland Gaslight: The Killing of Rosy Rosenthal. (Illustrated)
http://www.amazon.com/Gangland-Gaslight-Killing-Rosenthal-Illustrated/

Early Street Gangs and Gangsters of New York City
Paperback 382 pages
http://www.amazon.com/Early-Street-Gangs-Gangsters-York

THE RUSSIAN MOBS
The Russian Mafia in America
http://www.amazon.com/The-Russian-Mafia-America-ebook/

The Threat of Russian Organzied Crime
Paperback 192 pages
http://www.amazon.com/Threat-Russian-Organized-Crime-photographs-ebook

Organized Crime/General
Best of Mob Stories
http://www.amazon.com/Files-Series-Illustrated-Articles-Organized-Crime/

Best of Mob Stories Part 2
http://www.amazon.com/Series-Illustrated-Articles-Organized-ebook/

Illustrated-Book-Prohibition-Gangsters
http://www.amazon.com/Illustrated-Book-Prohibition-Gangsters-ebook

Mob Recipes to Die For. Meals and Mobsters in Photos
http://www.amazon.com/Recipes-For-Meals-Mobsters-Photos

More Mob Recipes to Die For. Meals and Mobs
http://www.amazon.com/More-Recipes-Meals-Mobsters-Photos

The New England Mafia
http://www.amazon.com/The-New-England-Mafia-ebook

Shooting the mob. Organized crime in photos. Dead Mobsters, Gangsters and Hoods.
http://www.amazon.com/Shooting-mob-Organized-photos-Mobsters-Gangsters/

The Salerno Report: The Mafia and the Murder of President John F. Kennedy
http://www.amazon.com/The-Salerno-Report-President-ebook/

The Mob Files: Mob Wars. "We only kill each other"
http://www.amazon.com/The-Mob-Files-Wars-other/

The Mob across America
http://www.amazon.com/The-Files-Across-America-ebook/

The US Government’s Time Line of Organzied Crime 1920-1987
http://www.amazon.com/GOVERNMENTS-ORGANIZED-1920-1987-Illustrated-ebook/

Early Street Gangs and Gangsters of New York City: 1800-1919. Illustrated
http://www.amazon.com/Gangsters-1800-1919-Illustrated-Street-ebook/

The Mob Files: Mob Cops, Lawyers and Informants and Fronts
http://www.amazon.com/The-Mob-Files-Informants-ebook/

Gangster Quotes: Mobsters in their own words. Illustrated
Paperback: 128 pages
http://www.amazon.com/Gangsters-Quotes-Mobsters-words-Illustrated/

The Book of American-Jewish Gangsters: A Pictorial History.
Paperback: 436 pages
http://www.amazon.com/The-Book-American-Jewish-Gangsters-Pictorial/

The Mob and the Kennedy Assassination
Paperback 414 pages
http://www.amazon.com/Mob-Kennedy-Assassination-Ruby-Testimony-Mobsters


BOOKS ABOUT THE OLD WEST

The Last Outlaw: The story of Cole Younger, by Himself
Paperback 152 pages
http://www.amazon.com/Last-Outlaw-Story-Younger-Himself

BOOKS ON PHOTOGRAPHY
Chicago: A photographic essay.
 Paperback: 200 pages
http://www.amazon.com/Chicago-Photographic-Essay-William-Thomas

STAGE PLAYS
Boomers on a train: A ten minute play
Paperback 22 pages
http://www.amazon.com/Boomers-train-ten-minute-Play-ebook

Four Short Plays
By John William Tuohy
http://www.amazon.com/Four-Short-Plays-William-Tuohy

Four More Short Plays
By John William Tuohy
http://www.amazon.com/Four-Short-Plays-William-Tuohy/

High and Goodbye: Everybody gets the Timothy Leary they deserve. A full length play
By John William Tuohy
http://www.amazon.com/High-Goodbye-Everybody-Timothy-deserve

Cyberdate. An Everyday Love Story about Everyday People
By John William Tuohy
http://www.amazon.com/Cyberdate-Everyday-Story-People-ebook/

The Dutchman's Soliloquy: A one Act Play based on the factual last words of Gangster Dutch Schultz.
By John William Tuohy
http://www.amazon.com/Dutchmans-Soliloquy-factual-Gangster-Schultz/

Fishbowling on The Last Words of Dutch Schultz: Or William S. Burroughs intersects with Dutch Schultz
Print Length: 57 pages
http://www.amazon.com/Fishbowling-Last-Words-Dutch-Schultz-ebook/

American Shakespeare: August Wilson in his own words. A One Act Play
By John William Tuohy
http://www.amazon.com/American-Shakespeare-August-Wilson-ebook

She Stoops to Conquer
http://www.amazon.com/She-Stoops-Conquer-Oliver-Goldsmith/

The Seven Deadly Sins of Gilligan’s Island: A ten minute play
Print Length: 14 pages
http://www.amazon.com/Seven-Deadly-Gilligans-Island-minute-ebook/

BOOKS ABOUT VIRGINIA
OUT OF CONTROL: An Informal History of the Fairfax County Police
http://www.amazon.com/Control-Informal-History-Fairfax-Police/

McLean Virginia. A short informal history
http://www.amazon.com/McLean-Virginia-Short-Informal-History/


THE QUOTABLE SERIES

The Quotable Emerson: Life lessons from the words of Ralph Waldo Emerson: Over 300 quotes
http://www.amazon.com/The-Quotable-Emerson-lessons-quotes

The Quotable John F. Kennedy
http://www.amazon.com/The-Quotable-John-F-Kennedy/

The Quotable Oscar Wilde
http://www.amazon.com/The-Quotable-Oscar-Wilde-lessons/

The Quotable Machiavelli
http://www.amazon.com/The-Quotable-Machiavelli-Richard-Thayer/

The Quotable Confucius: Life Lesson from the Chinese Master
http://www.amazon.com/The-Quotable-Confucius-Lesson-Chinese/

The Quotable Henry David Thoreau
http://www.amazon.com/Quotable-Henry-Thoreau-Quotables-ebook

The Quotable Robert F. Kennedy
http://www.amazon.com/Quotable-Robert-F-Kennedy-Illustrated/

The Quotable Writer: Writers on the Writers Life
http://www.amazon.com/The-Quotable-Writer-Quotables-ebook

The words of Walt Whitman: An American Poet
Paperback: 162 pages
http://www.amazon.com/Words-Walt-Whitman-American-Poet

Gangster Quotes: Mobsters in their own words. Illustrated
Paperback: 128 pages
http://www.amazon.com/Gangsters-Quotes-Mobsters-words-Illustrated/

The Quotable Popes
Paperback 66 pages
http://www.amazon.com/Quotable-Popes-Maria-Conasenti

The Quotable Kahlil Gibran with Artwork from Kahlil Gibran
Paperback 52 pages
Kahlil Gibran, an artist, poet, and writer was born on January 6, 1883 n the north of modern-day Lebanon and in what was then part of Ottoman Empire. He had no formal schooling in Lebanon. In 1895, the family immigrated to the United States when Kahlil was a young man and settled in South Boston. Gibran enrolled in an art school and was soon a member of the avant-garde community and became especially close to Boston artist, photographer, and publisher Fred Holland Day who encouraged and supported Gibran’s creative projects. An accomplished artist in drawing and watercolor, Kahlil attended art school in Paris from 1908 to 1910, pursuing a symbolist and romantic style. He held his first art exhibition of his drawings in 1904 in Boston, at Day's studio. It was at this exhibition, that Gibran met Mary Elizabeth Haskell, who ten years his senior. The two formed an important friendship and love affair that lasted the rest of Gibran’s short life. Haskell influenced every aspect of Gibran’s personal life and career. She became his editor when he began to write and ushered his first book into publication in 1918, The Madman, a slim volume of aphorisms and parables written in biblical cadence somewhere between poetry and prose. Gibran died in New York City on April 10, 1931, at the age of 48 from cirrhosis of the liver and tuberculosis.
http://www.amazon.com/Quotable-Kahlil-Gibran-artwork/

The Quotable Dorothy Parker
Paperback 86 pages

The Quotable Machiavelli
Paperback 36 pages
http://www.amazon.com/Quotable-Machiavelli-Richard-L-Thayer

The Quotable Greeks
Paperback 230 pages
http://www.amazon.com/Quotable-Greeks-Richard-W-Willoughby

The Quotabe Oscar Wilde
Paperback 24 pages
http://www.amazon.com/Quotable-Oscar-Wilde-lessons-words/

The Quotable Helen Keller
Paperback 66 pages
http://www.amazon.com/Quotable-Helen-Keller-Richard-Willoughby

The Art of War: Sun Tzu
Paperback 60 pages
http://www.amazon.com/Quotable-Confucius-Lesson-Chinese-Quotables-ebook

The Quotable Shakespeare
Paperback 54 pages
http://www.amazon.com/Quotable-Shakespeare-Richard-W-Willoughby

The Quotable Gorucho Marx
Paperback 46 pages
http://www.amazon.com/Quotable-Groucho-Marx-Devon-Alexander



BLOGLAPEDIA’S BLOGS



ARCHITECTURE
Architecture for the blog of it
http://architecturefortheblogofit.blogspot.com/

THE ARTS
Art for the Blog of It
http://artfortheblogofit.blogspot.com/

Art for the Pop of it
http://artforthepopofit.blogspot.com/

Photography for the blog of it
http://photographyfortheblogofit.blogspot.com/

Music for the Blog of it
http://musicfortheblogofit.blogspot.com/

Sculpture this and Sculpture that
http://sculpturethisandsculpturethat.blogspot.com/

The art of War (Propaganda art through the ages)
http://theartofwarcleverhuh.blogspot.com/

Album Art (Photographic arts)
http://albumartsocheesyitsgood.blogspot.com/

Pulp Fiction Trash (The art of Pulp Fiction covers)
http://pulpfictiontrash.blogspot.com/

Admit it, you want to Read this Book (The art of Pulp Fiction covers)
http://goaheadadmitityouwanttoread.blogspot.com/

FILM
The Godfather Trilogy BlogSpot
http://thegodfathertrilogyblogspot.blogspot.com/

On the Waterfront: The Making of a great American Film
http://onthewaterfrontthefilm.blogspot.com/

FOOD
Absolutely blogalicious
http://absolutelyblogalicious.blogspot.com/

The Wee Book of Irish Recipes (Book support site)
http://theweeblogofirishrecipes.blogspot.com/

Good chowda (New England foods)
http://goodchowda.blogspot.com/

Old New England Recipes (Book support site)
http://oldnewenglandrecipes.blogspot.com/

And I Love Clams (New England foods)
http://andiloveclams.blogspot.com/

In Praise of the Rhode Island Wiener (New England foods)
http://inpraiseoftherhodeislandwiener.blogspot.com/

Wicked Cool New England Recipes (New England foods)
http://whickedcoolnewenglandrecipes.blogspot.com

Old New England Recipes (New England foods)
http://oldnewenglandrecipes.blogspot.com

FOSTER CARE
Foster Care new and Updates

Aging out of the system

Murder, Death and Abuse in the Foster Care system

Angel and Saints in the Foster Care System

The Foster Children’s Blogs

Foster Care Legislation

The Foster Children’s Bill of Right

Foster Kids own Story

The Adventures of Foster Kid.

HEALTH
Me vs. Diabetes (Diabetes education site)
http://mevsdiabetes-bloglapedia.blogspot.com/

HISTORY
The Quotable Helen Keller
http://thequotablehelenkeller.blogspot.com/

Teddy Roosevelt's Letters to his children (Book support site)
http://teddyrooseveltsletterstohischildren.blogspot.com/

The Quotable Machiavelli (Book support site)
http://thequotablemachiavelli.blogspot.com/

HUMOR
Whatever you do, don't laugh
http://whateveryoudodontlaugh.blogspot.com/

The Quotable Grouch Marx
http://thequotablegrouchmarx.blogspot.com/

IRISH-AMERICANA
A Big Blog of Irish Literature
http://abigblogofirishliterature.blogspot.com/

The Wee Blog of Irish Jokes (Book support blog)
http://theweeblogofirishjokes.blogspot.com/

The Wee Blog of Irish Recipes
http://theweeblogofirishrecipes.blogspot.com/

The Irish American Gangster
http://irishamericangangsters.blogspot.com

The Irish in their Own Words
http://theirishintheirownwords.blogspot.com/

When Washington Was Irish
http://whenwashingtonwasirish.blogspot.com/

The Wee Book of Irish Recipes (Book support site)
http://theweeblogofirishrecipes.blogspot.com/

LITERATURE
Following Fitzgerald
http://followingfitzgerald.blogspot.com/

Shakespeare
http://shakespeareinamericanenglish.blogspot.com/

The Blogable Robert Frost
http://theblogablerobertfrost.blogspot.com/

Charles Dickens
http://charlesdickensfan.blogspot.com/

The Beat Poets of the Forever Generation
http://thebeatspoetsoftheforevergenera.blogspot.com/

Holden Caulfield Blog Spot
http://holdencaulfieldblogspot.blogspot.com/

The Quotable Oscar Wilde
http://thequotableoscarwilde.blogspot.com/

NEW ENGLAND BLOGS
The Quotable Thoreau
http://thequotablethenrydavidthoreau.blogspot.com/

Old New England Recipes
http://oldnewenglandrecipes.blogspot.com

Wicked Cool New England Recipes
http://whickedcoolnewenglandrecipes.blogspot.com

Emerson
http://emersonsaidit.blogspot.com/

The New England Mafia
http://thenewenglandmafia.blogspot.com/

And I Love Clams
http://andiloveclams.blogspot.com/

In Praise of the Rhode Island Wiener
http://inpraiseoftherhodeislandwiener.blogspot.com/

Watch Hill
http://watchhillwesterly.blogspot.com/

York Beach
http://yorkbeachfortheblogofit.blogspot.com/

The Connecticut History Blog
http://connecticuthistory.blogspot.com/

The Connecticut Irish
http://theconnecticutirish.blogspot.com/

Good chowda
http://goodchowda.blogspot.com/

NOSTALGIA
God, How I hated the 70s
http://godhowihatedthe70s.blogspot.com/

Child of the Sixties Forever
http://childofthesixtiesforeverandever.blogspot.com/

The Kennedy’s in the 60’s
http://thekennedysinthe60s.blogspot.com/

Music of the Sixties Forever
http://musicofthesixtiesforever.blogspot.com/

Elvis and Nixon at the White House (Book support site)
http://elvisandnixonatthewhitehouse.blogspot.com/

Beatles Fan Forever
http://beatlesfanforever.blogspot.com/

Year One, 1955
http://yearone1955.blogspot.com/

Robert Kennedy in His Own Words

The 1980s were fun
http://the1980swereokayactually.blogspot.com/

The 1990s. The last decade.
http://1990sthelastdecade.blogspot.com/

ORGANIZED CRIME
The Russian Mafia
http://russianmafiagangster.blogspot.com/

The American Jewish Gangster
http://theamericanjewishgangster.blogspot.com/

The Mob in Hollywood
http://themobinhollywood.blogspot.com/

We Only Kill Each Other
http://weonlykilleachother.blogspot.com/

Early Gangsters of New York City
http://earlygangstersofnewyorkcity.blogspot.com/

Al Capone: Biography of a self-made Man
http://alcaponethebiographyofaselfmademan.blogspot.com/

The Life and World of Al Capone
http://thelifeandworldofalcapone.blogspot.com/

The Salerno Report
http://salernoreportmafiaandurderjohnkennedy.blogspot.com/

Guns and Glamour
http://gunsandglamourthechicagomobahistory.blogspot.com/

The St. Valentine’s Day Massacre
http://thesaintvalentinesdaymassacre.blogspot.com/

Mob Testimony
http://mobtestimony.blogspot.com/

Recipes we would Die For
http://recipeswewoulddiefor.blogspot.com/

The Prohibition in Pictures
http://theprohibitioninpictures.blogspot.com/

The Mob in Pictures
http://themobinpictures.blogspot.com/

The Mob in Vegas
http://themobinvegasinpictures.blogspot.com/

The Irish American Gangster
http://irishamericangangsters.blogspot.com

Roger Touhy Gangster
http://rogertouhygangsters.blogspot.com/

Chicago’s Mob Bosses
http://chicagosmobbossesfromaccardoto.blogspot.com/

Chicago Gang Land: It Happened Here
http://chicagoganglandithappenedhere.blogspot.com/

Whacked: One Hundred years of Murder in Gangland
http://whackedonehundredyearsmurderand.blogspot.com/

The Mob Across America
http://themobacrossamerica.blogspot.com/

Mob Cops, Lawyers and Front Men
http://mobcopslawyersandinformantsand.blogspot.com/

Shooting the Mob: Dutch Schultz
http://shootingthemobdutchschultz.blogspot.com/

Bugsy& His Flamingo: The Testimony of Virginia Hill
http://bugsyandvirginiahill.blogspot.com/

After Valachi. Hearings before the US Senate on Organized Crime
http://aftervalachi.blogspot.com/

Mob Buster: Report of Special Agent Virgil Peterson to the Kefauver Committee (Book support site)
http://virgilpetersonmobbuster.blogspot.com/

The US Government’s Timeline of Organized Crime (Book support site)
http://timelineoforganizedcrime.blogspot.com/

The Kefauver Organized Crime Hearings (Book support site)
http://thekefauverorganizedcrimehearings.blogspot.com/

Joe Valachi's testimony on the Mafia (Book support site)
http://joevalachistestimonyonthemafia.blogspot.com/

Mobsters in the News
http://mobstersinthenews.blogspot.com/

Shooting the Mob: Dead Mobsters (Book support site)
http://deadmobsters.blogspot.com/

The Stolen Years Full Text (Roger Touhy)
http://thestolenyearsfulltext.blogspot.com/

Mobsters in Black and White
http://mobstersinblackandwhite.blogspot.com/

Mafia Gangsters, Wiseguys and Goodfellas
http://mafiagangsterswiseguysandgoodfellas.blogspot.com/

Whacked: One Hundred Years of Murder and Mayhem in the Chicago Mob (Book support site)
http://whackedonehundredyearsmurderand.blogspot.com/

Gangland Gaslight: The Killing of Rosy Rosenthal (Book support site)
http://ganglandgaslightrosyrosenthal.blogspot.com/

The Best of the Mob Files Series (Book support site)
http://thebestofthemobfilesseries.blogspot.com/

PHILOSOPHY
It’s All Greek Mythology to me
http://itsallgreekmythologytome.blogspot.com/

PSYCHOLOGY
Psychologically Relevant
http://psychologicallyrelevant.blogspot.com/

SNOBBERY
The Rarifieid Tribe
http://therarifiedtribe.blogspot.com/

Perfect Behavior
http://perfectbehavior.blogspot.com/

TRAVEL
The Upscale Traveler
http://theupscaletraveler.blogspot.com/

TRIVIA
The Mish Mosh Blog
http://theupscaletraveler.blogspot.com/

WASHINGTON DC
DC Behind the Monuments
http://dcbehindthemonuments.blogspot.com/

Washington Oddities
http://washingtonoddities.blogspot.com/

When Washington Was Irish
http://whenwashingtonwasirish.blogspot.com/