Hello fellow Baby Boomers…
For those who did not notice that I am not posting on this site.
Please follow me to my new host…I am up and running!
http://www.BabyBoomerAdvisorClub.com
This is your offical invitation!
Southern smiles and world peace,
Sharon
~The Baby Boomer Queen~
Hello Baby Boomer, readers and friends…
I hope you have missed me as much as I have missed talking to you’all…
I want to thank you for making the Baby Boomer Queen a success. When we hit 100,000 people, we decided it was time for a change.
We have changed the format and server [host] and are now on a slightly elevated blog level. At least I think so…but then again…what do I know, I am a relatively new blogger…what do I actually know…LOL!
I do hope you will come and join us at our new address.
http://www.BabyBoomerAdvisorClub.com
Please bear with me…as you know, I am spelling, typing and computer challenged!
I hope to see and hear from you soon!
Smiles and world peace,
Sharon
~The Baby Boomer Queen~
Sorry, Baby Boomers…I am not going to be writing for a few days…I am revamping the site.
http://www.BabyBoomerAdvisorClub.com is going to be my main blog…
Stop by and whistle!
~The Baby Boomer Queen~
Charlton Heston, Epic Film Star and Voice of N.R.A., Dies at 83
(pics to follow…habe issues with blog posting…)
Charlton Heston, who appeared in some 100 films in his 60 year acting career but who is remembered chiefly for his monumental, jut jawed portrayals of Moses, Ben~Hur and Michelangelo, died Saturday night at his home in Beverly Hills, Calif. He was 83.
Charlton Heston had been suffering from Alzheimer’s.
Charlton Heston posed with his Oscar statuette after winning the 1959 Academy Award for best actor for his portrayal of Ben~Hur.
His death was confirmed by a spokesman for the family, Bill Powers, who declined to discuss the cause. In August 2002, Mr. Heston announced that he had been diagnosed with neurological symptoms “consistent with Alzheimer’s disease.”
“I’m neither giving up nor giving in,” he said.
Every actor dreams of a breakthrough role, the part that stamps him in the public memory, and Mr. Heston’s life changed forever when he caught the eye of the director Cecil B. De Mille. De Mille, who was planning his next biblical spectacular, “The Ten Commandments,” looked at the young, physically imposing Mr. Heston and saw his Moses.
When the film was released in 1956, more than three and a half hours long and the most expensive that De Mille had ever made, Mr. Heston became a marquee name. Whether leading the Israelites through the wilderness, parting the Red Sea or coming down from Mount Sinai with the tablets from God in hand, he was a Moses to remember.
Writing in The New York Times nearly 30 years afterward, when the film was re-released for a brief run, Vincent Canby called it “a gaudy, grandiloquent Hollywood classic” and suggested there was more than a touch of “the rugged American frontiersman of myth” in Mr. Heston’s Moses.
The same quality made Mr. Heston an effective spokesman, off screen, for the causes he believed in. Late in life he became a staunch opponent of gun control. Elected president of the National Rifle Association in 1998, he proved to be a powerful campaigner against what he saw as the government’s attempt to infringe on a Constitutional guarantee, the right to bear arms.
In Mr. Heston, the N.R.A. found its embodiment of pioneer values, pride, independence and valor. In a speech at the N.R.A.’s annual convention in 2000, he brought the audience to its feet with a ringing attack on gun-control advocates. Paraphrasing an N.R.A. bumper sticker (“I’ll give you my gun when you take it from my cold, dead hands”) he waved a replica of a colonial musket above his head and shouted defiantly, “From my cold, dead hands!”
Mr. Heston’s screen presence was so commanding that he was never dominated by mammoth sets, spectacular effects or throngs of spear waving extras. In his films, whether playing Buffalo Bill, an airline pilot, a naval captain or the commander of a spaceship, he essentially projected the same image muscular, steely eyed, courageous. If critics regularly used terms like “marble monumental” or “granitic” to describe his acting style, they just as often praised his forthright, no~nonsense characterizations.
After his success in “The Ten Commandments,” Mr. Heston tried a change of pace. Another legendary Hollywood director, Orson Welles, cast him as a Mexican narcotics investigator in the thriller “Touch of Evil,” in which Welles himself played a murderous sheriff in a border town. Also starring Janet Leigh and Marlene Dietrich, the film, a modest success when it opened in 1958, came to be accepted as a noir classic.
But the following year Mr. Heston stepped back into the world of the biblical epic, this time under the director William Wyler. The movie was “Ben~Hur.” Cast as a prince of ancient Judea who rebels against the rule of Rome, Mr. Heston again dominated the screen. In the film’s most spectacular sequence, he and his co~star, Stephen Boyd, as his Roman rival, fight a thrilling duel with whips as their horse drawn chariots careen wheel~to~wheel around an arena filled with roaring spectators.
“Ben~Hur” won 11 Academy Awards, a record at the time, including those for best picture, best director and, for Mr. Heston, best actor.
He went on to star opposite Sophia Loren in the 1961 release “El Cid,” battling the Moors in 11th century Spain. As a Marine officer stationed in the Forbidden City in 1900, he helped put down the Boxer Rebellion in Nicholas Ray’s 1963 epic “55 Days at Peking.” In “Khartoum” (1966), he played Gen. Charles (Chinese) Gordon, who was killed in a desert uprising led in the film by Laurence Olivier’s Mahdi. When George Stevens produced and directed “The Greatest Story Ever Told” in 1965, there was Mr. Heston, back in ancient Judea, playing John the Baptist to Max von Sydow’s Jesus.
He portrayed Andrew Jackson twice, in “The President’s Lady” (1954) and “The Buccaneer” (1958). There were westerns (“Major Dundee,” “Will Penny,” “The Mountain Men”), costume dramas (“The Three Musketeers” and its sequel, “The Four Musketeers,” with Mr. Heston cast as the crafty Cardinal Richelieu in both) and action films aplenty. Whether playing a hard bitten landowner in an adaptation of James Michener’s novel “The Hawaiians” (1970), or a daring pilot in “Airport 1975,” he could be relied on to give moviegoers their money’s worth.
In 1965 he was cast as Michelangelo in the film version of Irving Stone’s novel “The Agony and the Ecstasy.” Directed by Carol Reed, the film pitted Mr. Heston’s temperamental artist against Rex Harrison’s testy Pope Julius II, who commissioned Michelangelo to create frescoes on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. Mr. Heston’s performance took a critical drubbing, but to audiences, the larger than life role seemed to be another perfect fit. Mr. Heston once joked: “I have played three presidents, three saints and two geniuses. If that doesn’t create an ego problem, nothing does.”
Mr. Heston was catapulted into the distant future in the 1968 science fiction film “Planet of the Apes,” in which he played an astronaut marooned on a desolate planet and then enslaved by its rulers, a race of anthropomorphic apes. The film was a hit. He reprised the role two years later in the sequel, “Beneath the Planet of the Apes.”
<strong><ul>
Son of the Midwest</ul></strong>
It was all a long way from Evanston, Ill., where Charlton Carter was born on Oct. 4, 1924, and from the small town of St. Helen, Mich., where his family moved when he was a small boy and where his father ran a lumber mill. He attended a one room school and learned to fish and hunt and to savor the feeling of being self reliant in the wild, where his shyness was no handicap.
When his parents divorced in the 1930s and his mother remarried, his stepfather’s surname was Heston, the family moved to the Chicago suburb of Winnetka. He joined the theater program at his new high school and went on to enroll at Northwestern University on a scholarship. By that time, he was convinced he had found his life’s work.
Mr. Heston also found a fellow drama student, Lydia Clarke, whom he married in 1944, just before enlisting in the Army Air Force. He became a radio gunner and spent three years stationed in the Aleutian Islands. After his discharge, the Hestons moved to New York, failed to find work in the theater and, somewhat disenchanted but still determined, moved to North Carolina, where they spent several seasons working at the Thomas Wolfe Memorial Theater in Asheville.
When they returned to New York in 1947, Mr. Heston got his first big break, landing the role of Caesar’s lieutenant in a Broadway production of Shakespeare’s “Antony and Cleopatra” staged by Guthrie McClintick and starring Katharine Cornell. The production ran for seven months and proved to be the high point of Mr. Heston’s New York stage career. He appeared in a handful of other plays, most of them dismal failures, although his performance in the title role of a 1956 revival of “Mr. Roberts” won him praise.
If Broadway had little to offer him, television was another matter. He made frequent appearances in dramatic series like “Robert Montgomery Presents” and “Philco Playhouse.” The door to Hollywood opened when the film producer Hal B. Wallis saw Mr. Heston’s performance as Rochester in a “Studio One” production of “Jane Eyre.” Wallis offered him a contract.
Mr. Heston made his film debut in 1950 in Wallis’s “Dark City,” a low grade thriller in which he played a small time gambler. Two years later, he did his first work for De Mille as a hard driving circus boss in “The Greatest Show on Earth.”
Throughout his career he studied long and hard for his roles. He prepared for the part of Moses by memorizing passages from the Old Testament. When filming began on the sun baked slopes of Mount Sinai, he suggested to De Mille that he play the role barefoot, a decision that he felt lent an edge of truth to his performance.
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Filmography: Charlton Heston</ul>
Preparing for “The Agony and the Ecstasy,” he read hundreds of Michelangelo’s letters and practiced how to sculpt and paint convincingly. When filming “The Wreck of the Mary Deare” (1959), in which he played the pilot of a salvage boat, he learned deep-water diving. And he mostly rejected stunt doubles. In “Ben-Hur,” he said, he drove his own chariot for “about 80 percent of the race.”
“I worked six weeks learning how to manage the four white horses,” he said. “Nearly pulled my arms right out of their sockets.”
As the years wore on, the leading roles began to go to younger men, and by the 1980s, Mr. Heston’s appearances on screen were less frequent. He turned to stage work again, not on Broadway but in Los Angeles, at the Ahmanson Theater, where he played roles ranging from Macbeth to James Tyrone in “Long Day’s Journey into Night.” He also returned to television, appearing in 1983 as a paternalistic banker in the miniseries “Chiefs” and as an oil baron in the series “The Colbys.”
Rifles and a ‘Cultural War’
Mr. Heston was always able to channel some energies into the public arena. He was an active supporter of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., calling him “a 20th century Moses for his people,” and participated in the historic march on Washington in 1963.
He served as president of the Screen Actors Guild from 1966 to 1971, following in the footsteps of his friend and role model Ronald Reagan. A registered Democrat for many years, he was nevertheless selective in the candidates he chose to support and often campaigned for conservatives.
In 1981, President Reagan appointed him co-chairman of the President’s Task Force on the Arts and Humanities, a group formed to devise ways to obtain financing for arts organizations. Although he had reservations about some projects supported by the National Endowment for the Arts, Mr. Heston wound up defending the agency against charges of elitism.
Again and again, he proved himself a cogent and effective speaker, but he rejected suggestions that he run for office, perhaps for a seat in the Senate. “I’d rather play a senator than be one,” he said.
He became a Republican after Democrats in the Senate blocked the confirmation of Judge Robert Bork, a conservative, to the Supreme Court in 1987. Mr. Heston had supported the nomination and was critical of the Reagan White House for misreading the depth of the liberal opposition.
Mr. Heston frequently spoke out against what he saw as evidence of the decline and debasement of American culture. In 1992, appalled by the lyrics on “Cop Killer,” a recording by the rap artist Ice T, he blasted the album at a Time Warner stockholders meeting and was a force in having it withdrawn from the marketplace.
In the 1996 elections, he campaigned on behalf of some 50 Republican candidates and began to speak out against gun control. In 1997, he was elected vice president of the N.R.A.
In December of that year, as the keynote speaker at the 20th anniversary gala of the Free Congress Foundation, Mr. Heston described “a cultural war” raging across America, “storming our values, assaulting our freedoms, killing our self-confidence in who we are and what we believe.”
<ul>
A Relentless Drive</ul>
The next year, at 73, he was elected president of the N.R.A. In his speech at the association’s convention before his election, he trained his oratorical artillery on President Bill Clinton’s White House: “Mr. Clinton, sir, America didn’t trust you with our health care system. America didn’t trust you with gays in the military. America doesn’t trust you with our 21 year old daughters, and we sure, Lord, don’t trust you with our guns.”
He was in the news again after the shootings at Columbine High School in Littleton, Colo., in April 1999, when he said that the N.R.A.’s annual membership meeting, scheduled to be held the following week in Denver, would be scaled back in light of the killings but not canceled.
In a memorable scene from “Bowling for Columbine,” his 2002 documentary about violence in America, the director, Michael Moore, visited Mr. Heston at his home and asked him how he could defend his pro~gun stance. Mr. Heston ended the interview without comment.
In May 2001, he was unanimously re~elected to an unprecedented fourth term by the association’s board of directors. The association had amended its bylaws in 2000 to allow Mr. Heston to serve a third one year term as president. Two months after his celebrated speech at the 2000 convention, it was disclosed that Mr. Heston had checked himself into an alcohol rehabilitation program after the convention had ended.
Mr. Heston was proud of his collection of some 30 guns at his longtime home in the Coldwater Canyon area of Beverly Hills, where he and his wife raised their son, Fraser, and daughter, Holly Ann. They all survive him, along with three grandchildren.
Never much for socializing , he spent his days either working, exercising, reading (he was fond of biographies) or sketching. An active diarist, he published several accounts of his career, including “The Actor’s Life: Journals 1956~1976.”
In 2003, Mr. Heston was among the recipients of the Presidential Medal of Freedom awarded by President Bush. In 1997, he was also a recipient of the annual Kennedy Center honors.
Mr. Heston continued working through the 1990s, acting more frequently on television but also in occasional films. His most recent film appearance found him playing a cameo role, in simian makeup, in Tim Burton’s 2001 remake of “Planet of the Apes.”
He had announced in 1999 that he was receiving radiation treatments for prostate cancer.
He had always hated the thought of retirement and once explained his relentless drive as an actor. “You never get it right,” he said in a 1986 interview. “Never once was it the way I imagined it lying awake at 4 o’clock in the morning thinking about it the next day.” His goal remained, he said, “To get it right one time.”
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Thank you AP news and ROBERT BERKVIST
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I am sure that all of you Baby Boomers out there have seen all of Charlton Heston’s movies and it would be hard to pick out one that was truly your favorite. AS they were all so good and he was a master at his craft.
Mr. Heston was a Civil Rights advocate and was very Philanthropic work through out his life time.
I will miss him and will continue to re~watch his movies.
~The Baby Boomer Queen~
52 girls removed from Texas compound
The road to hell and from hell for 52 young girls and women.
ELDORADO, Texas - Child welfare officials are scrambling to find foster homes for dozens of girls removed from a secretive West Texas religious retreat built by polygamist leader Warren Jeffs after a 16 year old living there complained of physical abuse.
By the end of the day, 18 were put legally into state custody, and CPS spokeswoman Marleigh Meisner said interviews would continue Saturday. A warrant has been issued for at least one individual.
The girls put in state custody were believed to be in danger, Meisner said. “Those are the ones we believe have been abused or they are in imminent risk of harm, and it would not be safe for those children to remain in the compound,” she said.
Child welfare officials were looking for foster homes for the girls, most of whom have rarely been outside the insular world of the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints. They were being housed for now at a civic center, she said.
“We’re dealing with children that aren’t accustomed to the outside world, so we’re trying to be very sensitive to their needs,” Meisner said.
The investigation began with a call Monday alleging physical abuse of a 16 year old girl living there, Meisner said. Authorities first arrived at the compound Thursday evening. They interviewed and searched through the night.
On Friday, a search warrant and arrest warrant were issued.
The search warrant sought records dealing with the birth of children to a 16 year old and any records listing a marriage between a 50 year old man and the girl, according to the San Angelo Standard-Times, which cited court records released late Friday in Tom Green County.
The individual listed in the arrest warrant had not been located by Friday evening, said Department of Public Safety spokeswoman Tela Mange. She said she could not reveal whose name was on the warrant.
Standard~Times photo by Brian ConnellyTwo First Baptist Church buses were escorted today by several law enforcement officers out of the FLDS compound near Eldorado. The buses carried dozens of people, mostly girls.
A small white bus that left the compound accompanied by state troopers was filled with children, Meisner said. She could not immediately say how many.
The bus was filled with what appeared to be mostly girls, dressed in conservative long sleeve dresses.
The ranch covers roughly 1,700 acres. It is north of this two stoplight town, down a narrow paved road. Authorities blocked access to the compound’s gate, keeping onlookers miles away.
State officials said they did not know how many people lived at the retreat, but local officials in 2006 put the number at about 150, as members of the reclusive church moved from a community on the Arizona~Utah line.
The congregation, known as FLDS, has been led by Jeffs since his father’s death in 2002. It is one of several groups that split from The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, based in Salt Lake City, decades after it renounced polygamy in 1890.
Standard-Times photo by Brian ConnellyMore than 20 Texas game wardens approached this morning from U.S. Highway 277 South toward the YFZ Ranch compound. A CPS official said they are helping with the investigation.
In November, Jeffs was sentenced to two consecutive sentences of five years to life in prison in Utah for being an accomplice to the rape of a 14 year old girl who wed her cousin in an arranged marriage in 2001.
In Arizona, Jeffs is charged as an accomplice with four counts each of incest and sexual conduct with a minor stemming from two arranged marriages between teenage girls and their older male relatives. He is jailed in Kingman, Ariz., awaiting trial.
The Eldorado retreat, about 160 miles northwest of San Antonio, is on a former exotic game ranch. The church bought the property in 2004 for $700,000 and began an ambitious construction program anchored by an 80 foot tall, gleaming white temple.
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Thank you Wikipedia, Standard~Tiumes, AP News and Michelle Roberets, AP writer
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In July 2004, Warren Jeffs’ nephew, Brent Jeffs, filed a lawsuit against him alleging that in the late 1980s his uncle sodomized him in the Salt Lake Valley compound then owned by the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints (FLDS). Brent Jeffs said he was five or six years old at the time, and that Warren Jeffs’ brothers, also named in the lawsuit, watched and participated in the abuse. Two of Warren Jeffs’ other nephews also made similar abuse claims against him. One of the alleged victims, Clayne Jeffs, committed suicide with a firearm after accusing Warren Jeffs of sexually assaulting him as a child.
This man abuses not only girls but boys…there are no laws for this type of personality.
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This group are also religious white supremacists in sheeps clothing…here are a few of their beliefs…
In 2005, the Southern Poverty Law Center published the following statements of Jeff’s:
I can not begin to tell you how this news saddens, angers and infuriates me. So many issues come to the surface in this article.
There are more issues, I am sure…
But, my guess for action…would be of and for the safety of the children.
What people do in the name of God amazes me. Hatred, incest, adultery, sodomy, rape, murder and child abuse.
I have heard people ask “WHY did God do this to me…HOW could God have done this…WHY did God forsake me.” These type of questions have always puzzled me. Perhaps we pray to a different God.
But right now, I pray that these children recover from these hideous acts and that they find peace and understanding.
~The Baby Boomer Queen~
An elderly man in central Florida had owned a large farm for several years. He had a large pond in the back, fixed up really nice, along with some picnic tables, horseshoe courts, and some apple and peach trees. The pond was properly shaped and fixed up for swimming when it was built.
One evening the old farmer decided to go down to the pond, as he hadn’t been there for a while, and look it over. He grabbed a five gallon bucket to bring back some fruit.
As he neared the pond, he heard voices shouting and laughing with glee. When he came closer, he realized it was a bunch of young women skinny-dipping in his pond. He made the women aware of his presence and they all went to the deep end to shield themselves.
One of the women shouted to him, “We’re not coming out until you leave!”
The old man frowned and replied, “I didn’t come down here to watch you ladies swim naked or make you get out of the pond naked.” Holding the bucket up he said, “I’m here to feed the alligator.”
Moral of the story: Old men may move slow but can still think fast.
Prince Philip married Queen Elizabeth in 1947.
The 86 year old prince, also known as the Duke of Edinburgh, was taken to King Edward VII’s Hospital in London for assessment, the palace said, and all of his weekend engagements have been canceled. No further details were available.
The Prince was seen in public last week during French President Nicolas Sarkozy’s state visit to the UK.
He was due to join the Queen on a royal visit to Devon and Cornwall in southwestern England next week, as well as attending two functions at Windsor Castle. A spokesman for Buckingham Palace told the UK’s Press Association that none of his engagements next week has been canceled.
Prince Philip was born into the Greek royal family in 1921, only to be smuggled out of Greece a year later aboard a British Royal Navy vessel after the king of Greece, Constantine I, his uncle, was forced to abdicate amid political instability.
A great~great grandson of Queen Victoria and a descendant of the Danish royal family, he served in the Royal Navy during World War II, rising to the rank of lieutenant.
In 1947, he married Queen Elizabeth, then heir to the throne, renouncing his Greek royal title to become a naturalized British citizen. Following Queen Elizabeth’s accession to the throne in 1952 he gave up his naval career to support her, in her royal duties.
Prince Philip is the patron of about 800 organizations and was the first president of the World Wildlife Fund. The prince has been a staunch defender of the royal establishment, turning against members of the family who have damaged its reputation.
Philip is not without controversy, however. He is renowned for making what some regard as inappropriate comments and was accused of insensitive remarks after the shooting of school children in Dunblane, Scotland, in 1996.
Conspiracy theorists have blamed him for having a role in Princess Diana’s death in 1997, although the judge at the inquest said this week there was no evidence to support that accusation.
I love the LIMO!
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Thank you CNN News
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What do you think Royal Readers…Baby Boomers…did Prince Phillip have a hand in Princess Di’s MURDER!?!?!?!?!
~The Baby Boomer Queen~
Hello Baby Boomers…
I don’t know about the rest of you, but especially since I have Lupus, I have more aches and pains then Carter has LIVER PILLS!
I am afraid to sleep near humans, as I snore (the dog doesn’t seem to mind, thank goodness!).
And I was tossing and turning so much at night that I woke up tired every morning.
I was afraid to answer personal ads as all said…”no baggage” and the bags under my eyes were definitely weekenders!
I knew that waking up with lower back pain was a sleeping issue
MY problem was that I had a FLAT BED.
Pressure from a FLAT bed.
Pressure from an adjustable bed.
I didn’t know this until I started talking a friend about my hideous sleep/bed problems. She sells Contour Beds. So, guess what I now own…you got it, a CONTOUR BED.
It has been two weeks already and even though it takes about a month to get used to any new bed…I LOVE MINE…I hate to get out of it as it relieves pressure on my whole body.
I am sleeping better, snoring less, I am hardly tossing and turning, there is less pressure on my kidneys heart and lungs from sleeping on my side, better circulation, that weekender baggage under my eyes has already turned into an over night valise, just to name a few.
Even my dog likes it…the vibrator and wave motion scared her at first but now when she hears it turn on…she comes over to join in the relaxation!
I hear it has over a 1000 positions…but, I haven’t had the time to try them all out yet…
I thought that you would like to hear about my NONFLAT bed experience and read some neat information about it.
Baby Boomers…for your own good, you have got to have one of these beds.
You know how to contact me if you need more information
~The Baby Boomer Queen~
By the By…I do have Queen sized bed!
Sleeping and lying down is the only time in which complete relaxation were experienced by the body. We all know that pain and aching are lessened in the muscles, ligaments and the spine. Moreover, anyone suffering from a back injury or chronic pain needs to have good quality, comfortable sleep in order to help in the healing process and to ease discomfort.
Adjustable beds are not the extravagance they once used to be. This are not only for the aged and infirm either. Adjustable beds are for you and me. I know, because I have one. It was the best investment I ever made. If you seriously want a good nights sleep or to ease pain and discomfort a Contour bed is the ticket!
My adjustable bed is my special retreat where I spend time reflecting, sharing time with my loved one, reading a good book, and even watching the occasional DVD and TV. I put a stop to the frustrating battle with an unmanageable stack of pillows {I used to sleep with 7 pillows} that would linger longer, and put an end to my sore neck and lower back pain. My adjustable bed was so successful, that I began to notice reduced tension, strain, soreness. I really achieved a quality nights sleep; something, which had eluded me for years.
I can’t think of ANYTHING you can’t do in a Contour bed.
Best of all, my adjustable bed was an affordable luxury, and I am convinced that it is a piece of furniture that everyone deserves to own. Especailly if you are like me and have heath issues that need to be addressed!
How does an adjustable bed work, you ask???
Adjustable beds, sometimes referred to as the semi~fowler or fetal position bed, can be altered to many varied positions. Sleeping slightly inclined gives comfort to many people with back problems. With the upper body slightly elevated and additional support to the knees at a slight angle, this position eases some stress off the lower back. It provides support to the spinal curves and lightens the pressure over the entire body.
I concider a Contour bed a RECREATIONAL BED, as well!
At the touch of a button, an adjustable bed can be transformed into many relaxing and comfortable positions, which will support your head, neck, shoulders, upper and lower back, hips, thighs, legs, and feet. Your muscles shall relax and local blood circulation in your legs is unimpaired and may be increased by simply elevating your legs with the tap of a finger on your hand control.
The Contours will fit any bed.
Your body’s weight is comfortably distributed so you are able to breathe easily. The relaxing contoured positions you are able to assume allow you to remain on your back all night long.
To relax and sleep in the most comfortable position of all, the semi~fowler or fetal position, just touch a button and adjust yourself to contour into shape. Many people told researchers that they slept in recliner lounges in this position before they got their adjustable bed because it was actually more comfortable than their ordinary ‘FLAT BED’.
Your adjustable bed will provide comfortable sleeping in a slightly inclined position compared to lying flat on your regular flat mattress. There are many back conditions, which can be eased up to give more relief to people in the following situations.
I concider then to be a recreational bed as well…
Spinal Stenosis
Most people with this back problem find more comfort by bending forward rather than standing upright. Unfortunately, flat mattresses provide the least comfort compared to sleeping inclined on an adjustable bed.
Degenerative spondylolisthesis
An adjustable bed will reduce the pain and discomfort in the lower back and provide comfortable and restful sleep during the night.
Contour Beds can be very ROMANTIC [wink~wink]
Osteoarthritis
This back impediment is accompanied by pain, stiffness and aching. An adjustable bed offers better support by lessening density and compression in the joints.
Back surgery
Patients agreed that they felt more comfort using an adjustable bed in contrast to a flat mattress following lower back surgery.
WHY do you think all HOSPITALS have adjustable beds, in every room?
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THIS BED IS GROOVY!
This is my testimonial and review on Contour beds. No one stuck bamboo sticks under my nails OR threatened me with tofu [I hate tofu].
~The Baby Boomer Queen~
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Thank you ArticleSender and Mei Dela Cruz
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King slaying stained Memphis for years…
In MEMPHIS, Tenn., Joe Warren dropped his head to his hands, sobbing as he remembered back 40 years to the bitter garbage workers strike that drew Martin Luther King Jr. to Memphis and to his death.
Warren, 86, was one of the 1,300 black sanitation workers who walked off the job in 1968 with a strike that tore at the foundation of the city’s white only rule.
“They talked to you like you were a dog, and they worked you like a dog,” he said, his shoulders trembling. “But I couldn’t find a job nowhere else.”
The 65 day strike for the right to unionize ended with a victory for the workers. But King’s assassination stained this Southern city for years, limiting its prosperity and hurting its reputation worldwide.
“It took a decade of growth out of the Memphis regional economy,” said David Ciscel, a University of Memphis economist. “It was a time of fairly rapid growth in the South, and it was a time when Atlanta and Nashville kind of left us behind. People just didn’t want to associate with us.”
The city’s fortunes eventually improved, thanks largely to a young cargo airline named Federal Express that in the early 1980s showed that Memphis could still be a good place to do business. The airline grew into today’s FedEx Corp.
“It rescued Memphis,” Ciscel said.
The sanitation strike and King’s assassination made clear to blacks and whites alike that “the old plantation mentality had to be dumped,” said Michael Honey, author of “Going Down Jericho Road,” a history of the Memphis strike and King’s struggle for economic justice for the poor.
In the 1960s, close to 60 percent of black families in Memphis lived in poverty, Honey said, and few jobs other than manual labor were open to blacks.
Today the city has a poverty rate of nearly 24 percent overall, almost twice the national figure, and 30 percent among black residents.
But the good jobs, in government and the private sector, are no longer reserved for whites. Memphis, which was 40 percent black in the 1960s, is now more than 60 percent black. It has had a black mayor since 1991.
The strike began in February 1968 after two sanitation workers were crushed by a trash compactor when they climbed in a garbage truck to get out of the rain.
The accident was blamed on faulty equipment, but it inflamed tensions that had festered for years over low wages, poor working conditions and racist treatment of black workers by white superiors.
The garbage workers had to wrestle with tubs and cans of all shapes and sizes, some so heavy it took two or three men to lift them. In the sweltering Memphis summers, the containers were prime breeding grounds for maggots that tumbled onto the workers.
“You’d have to tie a rag around your head to keep them from going down your back. That’s rough work, but you couldn’t say anything or they’d fire you,” Warren said. “We were men, but they treated us like boys.”
Pay ranged from $1.65 to $1.85 an hour for garbage crew members, just above the federal minimum wage of $1.60. Workers got no breaks or overtime pay and could be sent home without full pay when it rained. White supervisors drew full pay, rain or shine.
Looking back on the indignities endured by the workers still brings tears to Warren’s eyes, but the pain is softened by memories of organizing the strike and taking to the streets under the banner “I Am A Man.”
“I had a sign on my front and my back,” he said, “and I was walking around saying, ‘I am a man. I ain’t going to be quiet no more.’”
The Motel where Dr. King Jr. was slain…
King was cut down April 4 by a rifle slug that tore through his jaw and spine as he stood on the balcony of the Lorraine Motel. James Earl Ray, a petty criminal and prison escapee, pleaded guilty to the murder. He died in prison in 1998.
After King’s death, with the National Guard patrolling the streets, worried Memphis residents began calling for an end to racial hostilities.
“In the beginning, there was chaos,” said Fred Davis, one of three newly elected blacks on the 13 member city council in 1968. “But it brought people together who had never talked to each other to try to deal with a community problem.”
Twelve days after King’s death, the strike ended with the city council recognizing the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees as the workers’ union. The workers got a pay raise of 15 cents an hour, promotions based on seniority and the right to file on~-the~job grievances.
Though King’s killer was not from Memphis, the city was seen by much of the rest of the world as a cultural backwater responsible for the murder.
“People in Memphis have always been pretty sensitive of what outsiders think,” said history professor Charles Crawford of the University of Memphis. “It caused a deliberate change, maybe not in the true feelings of a lot of people, but at least in the expressions of them. The black community could see the collapsing of resistance to their aspirations.”
The National Civil Rights Museum opened at the Lorraine in 1991 after private citizens saved it from foreclosure and demolition. It is now a tourist attraction and a shrine to the civil rights movement.
“Most people say the assassination, set the city back hugely in terms of economic development and tourism and all that,” said Honey, the author, who is also a professor of labor and civil rights studies at the University of Washington, Tacoma.
“They’re now trying to turn that minus into a plus by acknowledging what happened and trying to highlight the history of the black freedom movement.”
For many people, Memphis has become “kind of hallowed ground,” Honey added. “It’s a place where important things happened and people want to connect to that.”
Boarding house across the street from the Lorraine Motel where James Earl Ray fired the shot that killed Dr. King
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Thank you AP News and WOODY BAIRD, Associated Press Writer
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How many of you, red, yellow, black or white could work in these kind of conditions and still feel like a human being…I applaud those of you who fought for your basic human rights and those of your families.
So much tragedy, so many gone, some long gone. Our history is riddled with it.
Memphis will be remembered for Dr. King, Dallas forever for President Kennedy and NY for 911.
World peace, should start at home.
~The Baby Boomer Queen~
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