Again, I resisted but eventually succumbed. Just like with Twitter.

Yes, I have joined Facebook.

And yesterday I managed to find my fourth and fifth grade class photos from Lutherville Elementary School in Maryland.

(I’m in the third row, third from left in the denim jacket)

My biggest memory that year was sitting in Mr. Kimmel’s room one morning and hearing screams coming from the hallway outside. Our art teacher (whose name I’m forgetting) was baking our art class ceramics in a kiln and caught her clothes on fire.

Mr. Kimmel ran to the teacher’s lounge, grabbed a blanket and tackled her as she ran down the hall screaming and on fire.

I remember she was gone for many months but returned the following school year.

(Back row, on the very end on the right in that god-awful plaid shirt)

Sixth grade. The top grade at Lutherville and I guess we thought we were top dogs. I had perfect attendance in fifth grade and would again in the sixth. Not by choice, mind you.

I only attended Lutherville those two years.

I remember flag duty. Me and two others were in charge of raising, lowering and folding the school’s American flag everyday.

I remember field trips to the Hippodrome to see “1776″ on the big screen and to Cape Henlopen in Delaware to study oceanography.

I remember the balloon race where we tagged balloons with reply cards and released them to see how far they would travel. I had one cross the bay to Salisbury.

I remember sex education that year. Boys in one room with Mr. Jones, girls in another with Miss Shellhouse.

I even remember orientation for the seventh grade at Ridgley Junior High. But as it turned out, I didn’t get to go and never had the chance to see my classmates again.

Many thanks to Debie Ruiz Jemison for the class photos…

The face says it all.

Professional jealousy, started a rumour
And then it extended, to be more abuse
What started out as just, black propaganda
Was one day seen to be, believed as truth

They say the truth is, stranger than fiction
But a lie is more, deadly than sin
It can make a man very, bitter and angry
When he thinks that there’s someone, is going to win

Professional jealousy makes other people crazy
When they think you’ve got something that, they don’t have
What they don’t understand is it’s, just not easy
To cover it all, and, stand where you stand

Professional jealousy, makes no exception
It can happen to anyone, at any time
The only requirement is, knowing what’s needed
And then delivering, what’s needed on time

The only requirement is to, know what is needed
In doing the best you know how, deliver on time
The only requirement is, to know what is needed
Be best at delivering the, product on time.

–Van Morrison–

With apologies to Bette Davis.

..HEAVY SNOW POSSIBLE.. FROM THURSDAY NIGHT THROUGH SATURDAY..

I am suspicious but I’ll begin to panic anyway because that’s what we do here in the South when winter storms loom. We haven’t had a really big winter storm (and by that I mean deep snow) since the first week of February, 1997. I remember that one all too well. I was stuck inside Woodson’s Mall at our radio station for nearly six days.

Some other tidbits of local interest:

• Joy Bruce, the widow of Ken Bruce, the Campbell County High School assistant principal shot and killed by a student in 2005, spoke to an estimated 150 students and interested citizens at Oak Ridge’s Willow Brook Elementary School as part of a program called “Recovering from Tragedy’.
• A Jacksboro photographer announces a contest.
• The United Way of Anderson County (which also serves Campbell County) has reached 92% of its 2009 fundraising goal.

I got an email from my boss over the weekend informing me my blog appeared to have been hacked. I logged on and sure enough….

No real harm done. There was no attempt to do anything other than block me from my own site just to prove it could be done.

The culprit(s)? Here’s a clue….

DAMASCUS, SYRIA — Small, thin and pale, with a reddish beard, Abdul-Rahman Mahaini estimates that he has stolen millions of dollars’ worth of software, hacking his way into the most complex programs in the world.

For a few bucks, the Syrian programmer will unlock the security codes for any program you send him via e-mail or online chat. But don’t ask him to break into your ex-girlfriend’s e-mail account or steal sales data from your competitor.
Advertisement

After all, the 26-year-old insists, he’s an ethical pirate, a devout Muslim who prays five times a day and breaks into software only because his country is under U.S. sanctions and he has little choice.

More from the Los Angeles Times.

Anyway, I was able to use a backup, delete the hacked version and get it all back up and running.

It’s a good idea to not only make sure you have a backup of your blog’s files (template, images, plug-ins, etc.) but also to upgrade your blog’s software to the latest versions. In my case, I neglected to upgrade from WordPress 2.84 to 2.91 in a timely manner and any vulnerabilities in the older version were probably exploited. That’s really dumb on my part considering I use BlueHost for my domain name and they make upgrading a breeze. I had simply let things slide around here and once I started posting again, I failed to take the sixty seconds to see that WordPress was up to date.

Live and learn.

UPDATE: Even the big dogs get bit once in a while.

I was going to write about the bizarre shake-up at NBC late night and let it be known where my loyalties lie in this whole mess. But I think Andrew Sigwart says, or sings, it best.

Former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani seems to have forgotten about the very thing he’s known for not to mention have his facts wrong.

“What he [Obama] should be doing is following the right things that Bush did — one of the right things he did was treat this as a war on terror. We had no domestic attacks under Bush. We’ve had one under Obama.”

The right things Bush did?

I also seem to recall Bush standing atop a pile of rubble and promising through a megaphone that he would bring to justice those responsible for bringing down the World Trade Center.

He promised to go after the terrorists. Promised to avenge those who died in NYC, Washington, DC and on Flight 93 in Pennsylvania. Remember how he was going to “smoke ‘em out”?

He didn’t. Because we all bought his bullshit about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq and how Saddam Hussein was the root of it all (and we believed YOU TOO, Colin Powell). And we were diverted. And more lives were lost. All so he could finish the job his daddy didn’t ten years earlier.

Seems like all this criticism for Obama is coming from Republicans who are simply pissed they’re not in power now to screw things up even more.