In celebration of its semisesquicentennial1, Esquire magazine shares the seven greatest stories ever told in the pages of their magazine and has published them online in their entirety. (See also Esquire's 70 greatest sentences.) Get a load of these initial paragraphs.

The School by C.J. Chivers:

Kazbek Misikov stared at the bomb hanging above his family. It was a simple device, a plastic bucket packed with explosive paste, nails, and small metal balls. It weighed perhaps eight pounds. The existence of this bomb had become a central focus of his life. If it exploded, Kazbek knew, it would blast shrapnel into the heads of his wife and two sons, and into him as well, killing them all.

The Falling Man by Tom Junod:

In the picture, he departs from this earth like an arrow. Although he has not chosen his fate, he appears to have, in his last instants of life, embraced it. If he were not falling, he might very well be flying. He appears relaxed, hurtling through the air. He appears comfortable in the grip of unimaginable motion. He does not appear intimidated by gravity's divine suction or by what awaits him. His arms are by his side, only slightly outriggered. His left leg is bent at the knee, almost casually. His white shirt, or jacket, or frock, is billowing free of his black pants. His black high-tops are still on his feet. In all the other pictures, the people who did what he did -- who jumped -- appear to be struggling against horrific discrepancies of scale. They are made puny by the backdrop of the towers, which loom like colossi, and then by the event itself. Some of them are shirtless; their shoes fly off as they flail and fall; they look confused, as though trying to swim down the side of a mountain. The man in the picture, by contrast, is perfectly vertical, and so is in accord with the lines of the buildings behind him. He splits them, bisects them: Everything to the left of him in the picture is the North Tower; everything to the right, the South. Though oblivious to the geometric balance he has achieved, he is the essential element in the creation of a new flag, a banner composed entirely of steel bars shining in the sun. Some people who look at the picture see stoicism, willpower, a portrait of resignation; others see something else -- something discordant and therefore terrible: freedom. There is something almost rebellious in the man's posture, as though once faced with the inevitability of death, he decided to get on with it; as though he were a missile, a spear, bent on attaining his own end. He is, fifteen seconds past 9:41 a.m. EST, the moment the picture is taken, in the clutches of pure physics, accelerating at a rate of thirty-two feet per second squared. He will soon be traveling at upwards of 150 miles per hour, and he is upside down. In the picture, he is frozen; in his life outside the frame, he drops and keeps dropping until he disappears.

What Do You Think of Ted Williams Now? by Richard Ben Cramer:

Few men try for best ever, and Ted Williams is one of those. There's a story about him I think of now. This is not about baseball but fishing. He meant to be the best there, too. One day he says to a Boston writer: "Ain't no one in heaven or earth ever knew more about fishing."

"Sure there is," says the scribe.

"Oh, yeah? Who?"

"Well, God made the fish."

"Yeah, awright," Ted says. "But you have to go pretty far back."

Frank Sinatra Has a Cold by Gay Talese:

Frank Sinatra, holding a glass of bourbon in one hand and a cigarette in the other, stood in a dark corner of the bar between two attractive but fading blondes who sat waiting for him to say something. But he said nothing; he had been silent during much of the evening, except now in this private club in Beverly Hills he seemed even more distant, staring out through the smoke and semidarkness into a large room beyond the bar where dozens of young couples sat huddled around small tables or twisted in the center of the floor to the clamorous clang of folk-rock music blaring from the stereo. The two blondes knew, as did Sinatra's four male friends who stood nearby, that it was a bad idea to force conversation upon him when he was in this mood of sullen silence, a mood that had hardly been uncommon during this first week of November, a month before his fiftieth birthday.

M by John Sack:

One, two, three at the most weeks and they would give M company its orders -- they being those dim Olympian entities who reputedly threw cards into an IBM machine or into a hat to determine where each soldier in M would go next, which ones to stay there in the United States, which to live softly in Europe, and which to fight and to die in Vietnam.

The Last American Hero Is Junior Johnson. Yes! by Tom Wolfe:

Ten o'clock Sunday morning in the hills of North Carolina. Cars, miles of cars, in every direction, millions of cars, pastel cars, aqua green, aqua blue, aqua beige, aqua buff, aqua dawn, aqua dusk, aqua aqua, aqua Malacca, Malacca lacquer, Cloud lavender, Assassin pink, Rake-a-cheek raspberry. Nude Strand coral, Honest Thrill orange, and Baby Fawn Lust cream-colored cars are all going to the stock-car races, and that old mothering north Carolina sun keeps exploding off the windshields. Mother dog!

Superman Comes to the Supermarket by Norman Mailer:

For once let us try to think about a political convention without losing ourselves in housing projects of fact and issue. Politics has its virtues, all too many of them -- it would not rank with baseball as a topic of conversation if it did not satisfy a great many things -- but one can suspect that its secret appeal is close to nicotine. Smoking cigarettes insulates one from one's life, one does not feel as much, often happily so, and politics quarantines one from history; most of the people who nourish themselves in the political life are in the game not to make history but to be diverted from the history which is being made.

[1] That's seventy five years, yo. Quattuordecennial is the anniversarial name for fourteen years. Others. ↩

Contemplating the possible nomination of Sen. Hillary Clinton to be secretary of state, commentator and author Christopher Hitchens, a frequent and harsh Clinton critic, revived the unsubstantiated claim that Hillary Clinton blocked any action by the Clinton administration in war-torn Bosnia in 1993 because she didn't want it to interfere with passage of her health-care plan. In reviving the claim on MSNBC's Hardball, MSNBC's 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, and CNN's Larry King Live between November 17 and November 19, Hitchens purported to quote Hillary Clinton demanding of Bill Clinton that he not intervene in Bosnia, lest, in Hitchens' words on the November 17 Hardball, it "spoil my wonderful health-care plan, which should be front and center." In a March 31 article for Slate.com, Hitchens cited Sally Bedell Smith's For Love of Politics: Bill and Hillary Clinton: The White House Years for the claim that Hillary Clinton blocked Clinton administration intervention in Bosnia, but the book does not support Hitchens' claim; it does not mention Hitchens' purported quote or otherwise assert that Hillary Clinton directed Bill Clinton not to take action in Bosnia.

On all three shows, Hitchens also revived his claim that then-Defense Secretary Les Aspin was a strong proponent of U.S. intervention in Bosnia but was thwarted by Hillary Clinton. In his Slate article, as purported further support for his claim that Hillary Clinton blocked action in Bosnia to protect her domestic priority, Hitchens cited an exchange he said he had with Aspin that does not, in fact, prove his broader claim about Hillary Clinton. Moreover, in her book, On the Edge: The Clinton Presidency (Simon & Schuster, 1994), author Elizabeth Drew, a former Washington correspondent with The New Yorker, writes that, contrary to media reports at the time, Aspin was not a proponent of U.S. intervention in Bosnia.

In his Slate article, Hitchens quoted at length from Bedell Smith's book, which includes numerous other errors and flaws, to advance the claim that Hillary Clinton deterred President Clinton from intervening in Bosnia because it would "distract attention from the first lady's health care 'initiative.' " However, neither the quote Hitchens cited from Bedell Smith -- nor the Newsweek article that she referenced -- supports Hitchens' claims.

In For Love of Politics, Bedell Smith wrote:

Taking the advice of [then-Vice President] Al Gore and National Security Advisor Tony Lake, Bill agreed to a proposal to bomb Serbian military positions while helping the Muslims acquire weapons to defend themselves -- the fulfillment of a pledge he had made during the 1992 campaign. But instead of pushing European leaders to sign on, he directed Secretary of State Warren Christopher merely to consult with them. When they balked at the plan, Bill quickly retreated, creating a "perception of drift." The key factor in Bill's policy reversal was Hillary, who was said to have "deep misgivings," and viewed the situation as "a Vietnam that would compromise health-care reform." The United States took no further action in Bosnia, and the "ethnic cleansing" by the Serbs was to continue for two more years, resulting in the deaths of more than 250,000 people.

In asserting that Hillary Clinton "was said to have 'deep misgivings,' and viewed the situation as 'a Vietnam that would compromise health-care reform,' " Bedell Smith did not purport to quote Hillary Clinton directly and did not assert that she directed her husband to do or not do anything with respect to Bosnia, as Hitchens has repeatedly claimed.

Moreover, Bedell Smith cites a 1993 Newsweek article by Tom Post for her claim that Hillary Clinton "was said to have 'deep misgivings,' and viewed the situation as 'a Vietnam that would compromise health-care reform.' " But Post did not report that as fact; rather, in the article Bedell Smith cited, he reported that sources gave differing accounts of the influences on Bill Clinton's Bosnia policy, providing one point of view offered by adviser Mandy Grunwald, but then citing "other sources" saying that Hillary Clinton had "deep misgivings" about Bosnia, and quoting a "friend" saying: "She regards this as a Vietnam that would compromise health-care reform." Moreover, the Newsweek article does not support Bedell Smith's flat assertion that Hillary was "[t]he key factor in Bill's policy reversal" on Bosnia, and Bedell Smith provides no other support for the assertion.

From the Newsweek article:

By the time Christopher returned to Washington, the mood was grim. His aides had warned him of a weakening of resolve in the White House. Could it be that political consultants had gotten to the president and warned him to back off Bosnia? "We don't mess around with foreign-policy decisions," insists Mandy Grunwald, an informal adviser. "Nobody is saying, 'You've got an economic program to worry about, don't do this'." But other sources say the most important adviser of all-Hillary Rodham Clinton-has deep misgivings. "She regards this as a Vietnam that would compromise health-care reform," says a friend.

After quoting from Bedell Smith's book, Hitchens wrote in his Slate article:

I can personally witness to the truth of this, too. I can remember, first, one of the Clintons' closest personal advisers -- Sidney Blumenthal -- referring with acid contempt to Warren Christopher as "a blend of Pontius Pilate with Ichabod Crane." I can remember, second, a meeting with Clinton's then-Secretary of Defense Les Aspin at the British Embassy. When I challenged him on the sellout of the Bosnians, he drew me aside and told me that he had asked the White House for permission to land his own plane at Sarajevo airport, if only as a gesture of reassurance that the United States had not forgotten its commitments. The response from the happy couple was unambiguous: He was to do no such thing, lest it distract attention from the first lady's health care "initiative."

Hitchens did not explain how the anecdote he attributes to Aspin about being told not to land his plane in Sarajevo "lest it distract attention from the first lady's health care 'initiative' " proves the truth of Bedell Smith's claim that it was Hillary's purported "misgivings" that served as "[t]he key factor" in the delay of U.S. intervention in Bosnia.

Moreover, in his three television appearances on November 17, 18, and 19, Hitchens presented Aspin as a strong proponent of U.S. intervention in Bosnia, up against Hillary Clinton. For example, on November 18, Hitchens said:

HITCHENS: We all remember, or we should, that when Les Aspin had then got the Clinton administration very nearly to do something about the horror in the Balkans that belatedly the Clinton administration did decide to stop -- the Clinton-Gore administration -- they delayed it because Hillary said, "No, no, don't do it, it will take away attention from my brilliant, wonderful health care program" that we all remember so well.

But in her book, Drew reported the opposite -- that Aspin "was for doing as little as possible in Bosnia." From Drew's book:

Contrary to many published reports at the time, Aspin (who was said to favor bombing) was for doing as little as possible in Bosnia. He thought it was "a loser from the start," that there was no way to deal with the problem effectively without enormous military force, and that neither the United States nor Europe was willing to pay that price. He argued that the best they could end up with was a divided Bosnia -- Serb, Croat, and Muslim -- with the Serbs maintaining control over most of the land they had already won in the war. When the question of bombing Bosnian Serb artillery sites arose in the spring of 1993, Aspin favored a cease-fire in place. [Page 142]

From the November 17 edition of MSNBC's Hardball with Chris Matthews:

CHRIS MATTHEWS (host): Well, I probably disagree with Hitchens on this, but I am very suspicious when [Sen.] Jon Kyl [R-AZ], a major supporter of the war in Iraq, a complete hawk, a neocon in many ways, complete hawk, supports her for this. Henry Kissinger's come out of the woodwork. He supports her for this.

HITCHENS: Yes.

MATTHEWS: Why do these establishment conservatives want her? What are they up to? Why do they want her? I don't know what they want.

HITCHENS: Don't compare Kissinger -- don't compare Kissinger to Kyl. I mean, Kissinger is a critic of the war and a so-called realist, and someone who likes leaving dictators like Saddam Hussein in place --

MATTHEWS: Well, why do they both want her? They're both Republicans. Why do they want her?

HITCHENS: Because she's a status-quo type, and they know they can, so to speak, trust her. She's a member of their club. Just to comment on what Peter said a moment ago: If you remember -- and I'll drag you back to this Bosnia farce that she inflicted on us during the campaign. Actually, when there was pressure on the Clinton administration -- Les Aspin was secretary of defense, you remember -- to do something about Sarajevo, to stop the killing, to prevent the ethnic cleansing, Hillary Clinton moved in hard on her husband and said, "Don't you do a thing about Bosnia. It'll spoil my wonderful health-care plan, which should be front and center." And remember how beautifully that worked out, too.

PETER BEINART (The New Republic editor-at-large and Time contributor): I'm not sure I think that's an entirely accurate accounting of --

HITCHENS: Yes, it is.

BEINART: -- her role in Bosnia. And the reality is that the Clintons, albeit very late, the Clinton administration acted very well --

MATTHEWS: OK.

BEINART: -- in Bosnia in 1995.

HITCHENS: Over her objections.

MATTHEWS: OK.

BEINART: I'm not sure it was over her objections.

HITCHENS: Yes, it was.

From the November 18 edition of MSNBC's 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue with David Gregory:

GREGORY: And what's the impact on a Secretary of State Clinton because of those associations? Can they not put up a firewall between them?

HITCHENS: Well, as I say, if it hadn't involved her, too, the campaign finance scandals -- we're not talking about the ongoing stuff -- Mr. Clinton's huge speaking fees in the Gulf and elsewhere -- we're talking about previous convictions in the Clinton fundraising scandal. If it wasn't for the fact that she couldn't refuse her brothers everything -- or sorry, anything -- couldn't refuse them anything; anything they wanted they seem to have got, including some kind of deal for Marc Rich -- all of this might be forgivable or it might assume a different proportion, David, if it wasn't for the fact that this woman doesn't really have any foreign policy experience worth mentioning.

And what is memorable about it is pretty bad. We all remember, or we should, that when Les Aspin had then got the Clinton administration very nearly to do something about the horror in the Balkans that belatedly the Clinton administration did decide to stop -- the Clinton-Gore administration -- they delayed it because Hillary said, "No, no, don't do it, it will take away attention from my brilliant, wonderful health care program" that we all remember so well. At least on health care, she knows enough about the subject to have really changed American health care for the worse in her time. But foreign policy, she --

GREGORY: And yet --

HITCHENS: About foreign policy, she doesn't even know that much.

From the November 19 edition of CNN's Larry King Live:

LARRY KING (host): Christopher, if she takes the job, does that end her presidential ambitions?

HITCHENS: No. I mean, I actually agree with what Tom Friedman said. It must be very nerve-racking if you're a president to have a secretary of state who you know is thinking about four years ahead or maybe eight all the time. She never thinks about anything else, never has thought about anything else, except the possibility that she might one day be president of the United States. Wasn't even a team player in her own husband's administration.

Remember, when Les Aspin wanted to do something finally about Sarajevo and the rape of Bosnia, Hillary Clinton said, "No, I don't want you intervening. You'll get in the way of my health-care plan," which you remember worked out so brilliantly. Someone who simply cannot think about anything but her own ego, or sometimes, her husband's, but who -- if Barack Obama does this to himself, he'll never have a minute's peace in foreign policy --

KING: Paul [Begala] --

HITCHENS: -- and neither will we. And every lobbyist and foreign policy interest group from China to Indonesia will be laughing --

KING: Paul, what do you make of that?

HITCHENS: -- because they've got exactly the person they know listens to them.

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A DVD rip of a movie called Tunnel Rats (aka 1968 Tunnel Rats) was just released by group 5MeOAMT. Judging from the trailer actually looks pretty good, although the thing that makes me hesitant to watch it is that its directed by Uwe Boll Also the video sample might be a bit of a spoiler so be careful

During the Vietnam War [1959-1975] a special US combat unit is sent out to hunt and kill the Viet Cong soldiers in a man-to-man combat in the endless tunnels underneath the jungle of Vietnam. Suicide squads of a special kind.

Release Name: Tunnel.Rats.2008.DVDRip.XviD-5MeOAMT
Size: 700MB
Quality: DVDrip - XviD | 608×336 - 799kbps | MP3
Runtime: 92 minutes

Links: IMDB | Trailer
Sample: Video Sample
NFO: Here
Torrent: NTi | TPB | NZB

more at RLSLOG.net

Auteur : becker_
Tags : platoon vietnam
Envoyé : 21 novembre 2008
Note :0.0
Votes :0

A Singapore newspaper published an article announcing the discount rate for Vietnam brides. This drew criticism from many Vietnamese individuals and groups: “It's horrible to see them [Vietnamese would-be brides] ‘discounted’ like they are a sack of rice or a pair of shoes.”

Live Current Media, a Canadian company which is in the business of developing, operating and monetizing premium domain names, has raised a little over $1 million through a private placement. The money comes from Live Current’s own management team and a couple of outside investors, and is expected to be the first part of a private funding which could total up to $2 million in the next 15 days.

Live Current, which changed its name from Communicate.com earlier this year, is a publicly traded company (OTCbb:LIVC). The investors paid 65 cents per unit, a premium of 38% to yesterday’s closing price of 40 cents.

The company acquired YCombinator startup Auctomatic in March 2008. A month after, it was time for a far bigger deal: it signed a $50 million deal to obtain the exclusive online rights to official content from the Indian Premier Cricket League. (Live Current owns Cricket.com and operates IPLT20.com, the official site for the league). When we reported on the deal, we wrote:

It is a pretty big commitment for Live Current Media, a domain-name company with revenues of $9 million last year and a net loss of $2 million. The Canadian company is basically betting its entire $51 million over-the-counter market cap on this deal.

And that was before the economic meltdown. Now, Live Current is being forced to sell up to six of its premium domain names, including Communicate.com, Brazil.com, Vietnam.com, Indonesia.com, Malaysia.com, Canadian.com and GreatBritain.com, hoping to fetch a combined total of $6 million to $10 million. It could turn into a fire sale or worse, deadpool tag for the company, unless they can convince some outside investors that they’re able to turn the ship around.

Most of Live Current’s revenue, which was nearly $2 million for the quarter ended September 30, comes from its Perfume.com operation. But with a gross profit of $352,435 and expenses of $2,343,285, those numbers aren’t going to do the trick.

Live Current CEO and Chairman, Geoffrey Hampson, said in a statement:

“This financing, in addition to the expected proceeds of the previously announced sale of up to six non-core domain names, is consistent with management’s strategy to ensure that sufficient cash resources are available to meet our obligations through the end of 2009 while minimizing dilution for existing investors.”

Only time will tell if the cash resources are sufficient enough to keep the company afloat.

(Hat tip to DomainNameWire)

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