100% of funds will be 'hand delivered' to the point of need....just for the price of a "Happy Meal:..... 
Jan 11, 2005
The Real Deal….A ‘Happy’ Meal….
Last night five of us ate wonderful, fresh Thai food…..and ALL the proceeds, plus the extra donation we made….went directly to the Tsunami Relief Fund….
There is a restaurant on Howard Street in Tampa, Florida called Royal Palace Thai, which our family goes to quite often…It is owned and operated by three sisters from Thailand. One sister is married to an American who lives and does business in Thailand as well….he told us last night that he missed the tsunami by 2 days since he was here in the states for Christmas…
Thai Palace is closed on Mondays…..the exception is that throughout January, they and all their staff donated their day off to ‘the cause’….that being that ALL Monday’s sales, tips, and donations would be taken directly to Thailand and put toward the most urgent need….
Lines of people waited outside…..we called ahead and asked for 7:15 reservations with the knowledge that we would still have to wait. We waited an hour….the restaurant is a fairly small place but the lines for take-out was as busy as the seating lines….Two people next to us each had a glass of wine and quickly gave up their table leaving an $80.00 tip….
I asked one of the sisters who served us if she was tired….she smiled and said “It is a good ‘tired’.”
Our food was outstanding…..quality was not sacrificed for expediency….
I almost felt ’guilty’ enjoying it so much…for once it was o.k. to order the ’most expensive’ thing on the menu…..needless to say, Thai Palace will not have to do any public advertising in the future…
The only thing…..I felt like I should have been up helping pour water, wash dishes, or cleaning tables…..physical help would have relieved my heart’s gratitude to these dear people who believe in a ‘united effort’ to help others….Heroes are everywhere….even in the kitchen!
I salute you…..Royal Palace Thai
Jan 8, 2005
This is a ‘MUST’ Read the meaning of LIFE…
in 2005...
Receiving an e-mail from my sister-in-law, Liz, is a very significant happening for me today…the words below speak very eloquently to my heart and I am SURE it will to you as well…..
I, too, am in the process of reformatting my entire life’s thinking and purpose and seeing my own thought process put into words by another writer….is a Gift from God to me….I pray it is for you as well….
January 07, 2005 12:37 PM
Subject: Ben Stein
Subject: Ben Stein
Even if you‘re not a Ben Stein fan, you may find it worthwhile:
For many years Ben Stein has written a biweekly column for the online website called "Monday Night At Morton's." (Morton's is a famous chain of Steakhouses known to be frequented by movie stars and famous people from around the globe.) Now, Ben is terminating the column to move on to other things in his life. Reading his final column is worth a few minutes of your time.
Ben Stein's Last Column... (Read all of this or you will have missed the best).
============================================
How Can Someone Who Lives in Insane Luxury Be a Star in Today's World?
As I begin to write this, I "slug" it, as we writers say, which means I put a heading on top of the document to identify it. This heading is "eonlineFINAL," and it gives me a shiver to write it. I have been doing this column for so long that I cannot even recall when I started. I loved writing this column so much for so long I came to believe it would never end.
It worked well for a long time, but gradually, my changing as a person and the world's change have overtaken it. On a small scale, Morton's, while better than ever, no longer attracts as many stars as it used to. It still brings in the rich people in droves and definitely some stars. I saw Samuel L. Jackson there a few days ago, and we had a nice visit, and right before that, I saw and had a splendid talk with Warren Beatty in an elevator, in which we agreed that Splendor in the Grass was a super movie. But Morton's is not the star galaxy it once was, though it probably will be again.
Beyond that, a bigger change has happened. I no longer think Hollywood stars are terribly important. They are uniformly pleasant, friendly people, and they treat me better than I deserve to be treated. But a man or woman who makes a huge wage for memorizing lines and reciting them in front of a camera is no longer my idea of a shining star we should all look up to.
How can a man or woman who makes an eight-figure wage and lives in insane luxury really be a star in today's world, if by a "star" we mean someone bright and powerful and attractive as a role model? Real stars are not riding around in the backs of limousines or in Porsches or getting trained in yoga or Pilates and eating only raw fruit while they have Vietnamese girls do their nails.
They can be interesting, nice people, but they are not heroes to me any longer. A real star is the soldier of the 4th Infantry Division who poked his head into a hole on a farm near Tikrit, Iraq . He could have been met by a bomb or a hail of AK-47 bullets. Instead, he faced an abject Saddam Hussein and the gratitude of all of the decent people of the world.
A real star is the U.S. soldier who was sent to disarm a bomb next to a road north of Baghdad . He approached it, and the bomb went off and killed him.
A real star, the kind who haunts my memory night and day, is the U.S. soldier in Baghdad who saw a little girl playing with a piece of unexploded ordnance on a street near where he was guarding a station. He pushed her aside and threw himself on it just as it exploded. He left a family desolate in California and a little girl alive in Baghdad .
The stars who deserve media attention are not the ones who have lavish weddings on TV but the ones who patrol the streets of Mosul even after two of their buddies were murdered and their bodies battered and stripped for the sin of trying to protect Iraqis from terrorists.
We put couples with incomes of $100 million a year on the covers of our magazines. The noncoms and officers who barely scrape by on military pay but stand on guard in Afghanistan and Iraq and on ships and in submarines and near the Arctic Circle are anonymous as they live and die.
I am no longer comfortable being a part of the system that has such poor values, and I do not want to perpetuate those values by pretending that who is eating at Morton's is a big subject.
There are plenty of other stars in the American firmament...the policemen and women who go off on patrol in South Central and have no idea if they will return alive; the orderlies and paramedics who bring in people who have been in terrible accidents and prepare them for surgery; the teachers and nurses who throw their whole spirits into caring for autistic children; the kind men and women who work in hospices and in cancer wards.
Think of each and every fireman who was running up the stairs at the World Trade Center as the towers began to collapse. Now you have my idea of a real hero.
We are not responsible for the operation of the universe, and what happens to us is not terribly important. God is real, not a fiction; and when we turn over our lives to Him; He takes far better care of us than we could ever do for ourselves. In a word, we make ourselves sane when we fire ourselves as the directors of the movie of our lives and turn the power over to Him.
I came to realize that life lived to help others is the only one that matters. This is my highest and best use as a human. I can put it another way. Years ago, I realized I could never be as great an actor as Olivier or as good a comic as Steve Martin...or Martin Mull or Fred Willard--or as good an economist as Samuelson or Friedman or as good a writer as Fitzgerald. Or even remotely close to any of them.
But I could be a devoted father to my son, husband to my wife and, above all, a good son to the parents who had done so much for me. This came to be my main task in life. I did it moderately well with my son, pretty well with my wife and well indeed with my parents (with my sister's help). I cared for and paid attention to them in their declining years. I stayed with my father as he got sick, went into extremis and then into a coma and then entered immortality with my sister and me reading him the Psalms.
This was the only point at which my life touched the lives of the soldiers in Iraq or the firefighters in New York . I came to realize that life lived to help others is the only one that matters and that it is my duty, in return for the lavish life God has devolved upon me, to help others He has placed in my path. This is my highest and best use as a human.
Faith is not believing that God can. It is knowing that God will.
By Ben Stein From widave@comcast.net Sat Jan 1 14:09:04 2005
Receiving an e-mail from my sister-in-law, Liz, is a very significant happening for me today…the words below speak very eloquently to my heart and I am SURE it will to you as well…..
I, too, am in the process of reformatting my entire life’s thinking and purpose and seeing my own thought process put into words by another writer….is a Gift from God to me….I pray it is for you as well….
January 07, 2005 12:37 PM
Subject: Ben Stein
Subject: Ben Stein
Even if you‘re not a Ben Stein fan, you may find it worthwhile:
For many years Ben Stein has written a biweekly column for the online website called "Monday Night At Morton's." (Morton's is a famous chain of Steakhouses known to be frequented by movie stars and famous people from around the globe.) Now, Ben is terminating the column to move on to other things in his life. Reading his final column is worth a few minutes of your time.
Ben Stein's Last Column... (Read all of this or you will have missed the best).
============================================
How Can Someone Who Lives in Insane Luxury Be a Star in Today's World?
As I begin to write this, I "slug" it, as we writers say, which means I put a heading on top of the document to identify it. This heading is "eonlineFINAL," and it gives me a shiver to write it. I have been doing this column for so long that I cannot even recall when I started. I loved writing this column so much for so long I came to believe it would never end.
It worked well for a long time, but gradually, my changing as a person and the world's change have overtaken it. On a small scale, Morton's, while better than ever, no longer attracts as many stars as it used to. It still brings in the rich people in droves and definitely some stars. I saw Samuel L. Jackson there a few days ago, and we had a nice visit, and right before that, I saw and had a splendid talk with Warren Beatty in an elevator, in which we agreed that Splendor in the Grass was a super movie. But Morton's is not the star galaxy it once was, though it probably will be again.
Beyond that, a bigger change has happened. I no longer think Hollywood stars are terribly important. They are uniformly pleasant, friendly people, and they treat me better than I deserve to be treated. But a man or woman who makes a huge wage for memorizing lines and reciting them in front of a camera is no longer my idea of a shining star we should all look up to.
How can a man or woman who makes an eight-figure wage and lives in insane luxury really be a star in today's world, if by a "star" we mean someone bright and powerful and attractive as a role model? Real stars are not riding around in the backs of limousines or in Porsches or getting trained in yoga or Pilates and eating only raw fruit while they have Vietnamese girls do their nails.
They can be interesting, nice people, but they are not heroes to me any longer. A real star is the soldier of the 4th Infantry Division who poked his head into a hole on a farm near Tikrit, Iraq . He could have been met by a bomb or a hail of AK-47 bullets. Instead, he faced an abject Saddam Hussein and the gratitude of all of the decent people of the world.
A real star is the U.S. soldier who was sent to disarm a bomb next to a road north of Baghdad . He approached it, and the bomb went off and killed him.
A real star, the kind who haunts my memory night and day, is the U.S. soldier in Baghdad who saw a little girl playing with a piece of unexploded ordnance on a street near where he was guarding a station. He pushed her aside and threw himself on it just as it exploded. He left a family desolate in California and a little girl alive in Baghdad .
The stars who deserve media attention are not the ones who have lavish weddings on TV but the ones who patrol the streets of Mosul even after two of their buddies were murdered and their bodies battered and stripped for the sin of trying to protect Iraqis from terrorists.
We put couples with incomes of $100 million a year on the covers of our magazines. The noncoms and officers who barely scrape by on military pay but stand on guard in Afghanistan and Iraq and on ships and in submarines and near the Arctic Circle are anonymous as they live and die.
I am no longer comfortable being a part of the system that has such poor values, and I do not want to perpetuate those values by pretending that who is eating at Morton's is a big subject.
There are plenty of other stars in the American firmament...the policemen and women who go off on patrol in South Central and have no idea if they will return alive; the orderlies and paramedics who bring in people who have been in terrible accidents and prepare them for surgery; the teachers and nurses who throw their whole spirits into caring for autistic children; the kind men and women who work in hospices and in cancer wards.
Think of each and every fireman who was running up the stairs at the World Trade Center as the towers began to collapse. Now you have my idea of a real hero.
We are not responsible for the operation of the universe, and what happens to us is not terribly important. God is real, not a fiction; and when we turn over our lives to Him; He takes far better care of us than we could ever do for ourselves. In a word, we make ourselves sane when we fire ourselves as the directors of the movie of our lives and turn the power over to Him.
I came to realize that life lived to help others is the only one that matters. This is my highest and best use as a human. I can put it another way. Years ago, I realized I could never be as great an actor as Olivier or as good a comic as Steve Martin...or Martin Mull or Fred Willard--or as good an economist as Samuelson or Friedman or as good a writer as Fitzgerald. Or even remotely close to any of them.
But I could be a devoted father to my son, husband to my wife and, above all, a good son to the parents who had done so much for me. This came to be my main task in life. I did it moderately well with my son, pretty well with my wife and well indeed with my parents (with my sister's help). I cared for and paid attention to them in their declining years. I stayed with my father as he got sick, went into extremis and then into a coma and then entered immortality with my sister and me reading him the Psalms.
This was the only point at which my life touched the lives of the soldiers in Iraq or the firefighters in New York . I came to realize that life lived to help others is the only one that matters and that it is my duty, in return for the lavish life God has devolved upon me, to help others He has placed in my path. This is my highest and best use as a human.
Faith is not believing that God can. It is knowing that God will.
By Ben Stein From widave@comcast.net Sat Jan 1 14:09:04 2005
Jan 7, 2005
99th Epiphany Celebration….A ‘Family’ Affair’
Yesterday in Tarpon Springs, seventeen year old, Andrew McAdams III had his personal Epiphany when he spotted the white wooden cross as it glowed gold in the murky bayou waters of Spring Bayou….
Andrew was told, “I’m proud to pass the trophy off to you…”
by Jimmy Hughes his cousin and last years winner….
For about 20 seconds, the 43 divers searched and splashed before Andrew emerged with a wide smile and the cross…
“Once I got the cross, my whole body kind of went numb, I couldn’t move.” Wet and chilly, he stumbled to the dock and knelt for the ‘blessing’….
Amusingly, his mother pushed through the crowd…
“That’s my baby,” Dede McAdams cried, as the other divers cleared a path through the media so she could hug her only son…
A family affair to be sure…both boys attend Berkeley Preparatory School and also, St. Nicholas Greek Orthodox Cathedral….
Greek Orthodox boys in Tarpon Springs grow up dreaming of their day to dive…Andrew and his cousins would sit together on Epiphany and thing about when it would be their turn….
Yesterday was the culmination of both of their dreams….and as another cousin said, “It’s great that it stayed in the family….”
What is a ‘Family Affair’ in your family?
Are we recording, documenting, preserving that which is unique and sacred to our own family and culture?
We can never come back to these moments…..they are precious indeed…just ask Jimmy and Andrew….Or better yet, ask Dede McAdams, Andrews Mom….she will certainly attest to the significance of the ‘Good Life’ moment of January 6, 2005.…
Jan 6, 2005
Wake Up Call….
Living in the Tampa Bay area makes one aware of the many festivals of historic value which we have annually….
In February there is the Gasparilla which is a ‘Southern style Mardi Gras’ and people go ‘bonkers’……
Today in Tarpon Springs is the 99th year of the Greek Orthodox Epiphany celebration and the traditional diving for the cross…
Epiphany is a full day of activities culminating into the moment when 45 Greek Orthodox boys ages 16 to 18 dive into Spring Bayou to retrieve ‘The Cross’…The day which is always Jan. 6th, celebrates the baptism of Christ in the Jordan River….
Below is a picture and last years winner, Jimmy Hughes……
James Hughes, 16, a local football player and onlooker for years, emerged triumphal with the cross....on Jan. 6, 2004...
Last year, Hughes didn’t do anything different than the other 16 divers...
He ate a good breakfast.
He listened to some rock ’n’ roll.
He thought about the cross.
But Hughes, then a Berkeley Preparatory School sophomore, recognized his chance the instant the white oak cross left the archbishop’s hand.
The lanky football player plunged into the 64-degree water.
Less than 5 seconds later, he came up sputtering with the cross in his hand.
“I saw this cross gleaming in the water and I just got it,” Hughes said.
“It kind of stood out in the dark muck.”
The crowd yelled in Greek....”Axios!” - Greek for “He is worthy!”...
“Jimmy, you did it!” came the cries from his friends as they hoisted him on their shoulders. Jimmy had ‘his epiphany which he will remember all his life…
The word ...epiphany....is used in a nonchurch context in James Joyce’s autobiographical novel ‘Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.’
The book describes the man, Stephen, and his personal epiphany on the beach.
In this case it meant....a startling insight, a realization or understanding that changes a person’s life.
A moment of...INSPIRED CLARITY.
Isn’t that what we all need from time to time in order to put our lives in proper prospective and focus?
What better time than a New Year to ask for and seek this....Gift of what I call …the serendipity of epiphany…..
May you....have your….Wake Up Call......today!
God Bless you....and may God continue to Bless.....America!
Jan 3, 2005
Happy New Year in 2005
Hope all of you had a wonderful New Year’s celebration with your family and friends….
Our boating friends had a ‘land’ party at Dockie and Ann’s with Bonnie & Buddy coming from Alabama ….heard it was a great event.
Our family gathered at the Grand Cypress in Orlando and at midnight there was 10,000 red, white & blue balloons released in the atrium.
Quite a celebration…
The first morning of 2005 dawned bright and sunshiny…a normal Florida ’blessed event’….
We all have so much to be thankful for….this is what we emphasized in our mornings ’Family Forum’….as we sat and spoke our ’new resolves’ for the year…..
A grateful heart was the common expression of all plus a reminder to…..‘Release your faith for something GOOD to happen in your life’…..this is what I pray for you as well….
Happy….’New Beginnings’ to you and all those you hold dear…this Year!
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
