FitSugar

The Ting Tings - "Shut Up and Let Me Go"

Whiplash — Fri, 23 May 2008 06:59:16 -0700

If you own a TV, you've probably heard the Ting Tings. The latest iPod commercial that's been playing every five minutes features their song "Shut Up and Let Me Go."

Here is the full version:

The Ting Tings - Great Dj

saddyblue — Tue, 17 Jun 2008 18:49:53 -0700

Fed up with your indigestion.
Swallow words one by one.
Your folks got high at a quarter to five.
Don’t you feel your growing up undone.

Nothing but the local DJ.
He said he had some songs to play.
What went down from his fooling around.
Gave hope and a brand new day.

Imagine all the girls,
Ah ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah.
And the boys,
Ah ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah.
And the strings,
Eee, eee, eee, eee, eee, eee, eee, eee.
And the drums, the drums, the drums, the drums, the drums, the drums, the drums, the drums, the drums, the drums, the drums, the drums. Oh.

Nothing was the same again.
All about where and when.
Blowing our minds in our life unkind.
Gotta love the bpm.
When the smoke was all baton
Remember how this begun.
We wore his love like a hand in a glove.
Where the future plays it all night long.

Nothin' but the girls,
Ah ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah.
And the boys,
Ah ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah.
And the strings,
Eee, eee, eee, eee, eee, eee, eee, eee.
And the drums (19x)

Imagine all the girls.
Ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah.
And the boys,
Ah ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah.
And the strings,
Eee, eee, eee, eee, eee, eee, eee, eee.
And the drums,
Ah ah ah ah, ah, ah, ah, oh.

All the girls
Ah ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah.
And the boys,
Ah ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah.
And the strings,
Eee, eee, eee, eee, eee, eee, eee, eee.

And the drums, the drums, the drums, the drums

The Ting Tings - Shut Up And Let Me Go

scotlandrulz — Wed, 11 Jun 2008 08:43:55 -0700

The Ting Tings - Great Dj

saddyblue — Tue, 10 Jun 2008 02:43:33 -0700

Fed up with your indigestion.
Swallow words one by one.
Your folks got high at a quarter to five.
Don’t you feel you’re growing up undone.

Nothing but the local DJ.
He said he had some songs to play.
What went down from this fooling around.
Gave hope and a brand new day.

Imagine all the girls,
Ah ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah.
And the boys,
Ah ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah.
And the strings,
Eee, eee, eee, eee, eee, eee, eee, eee.
And the drums, the drums, the drums, the drums, the drums, the drums,
the drums, the drums, the drums, the drums, the drums, the drums.

Oh.

Nothing was the same again.
All about where and when.
Blowing our minds in a life unkind.
Gotta love the bpm.
When his work was all but done
Remembering how this begun.
We wore his love like a hand in a glove.
There’s a future plays it all night long.

Nothing but the girls,
Ah ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah.
And the boys,
Ah ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah.
And the strings,
Eee, eee, eee, eee, eee, eee, eee, eee.
And the drums, the drums, the drums, the drums, the drums, the drums…..

All the girls
Ah ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah.
And the boys,
Ah ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah.
And the strings,
Eee, eee, eee, eee, eee, eee, eee, eee.
And the drums, the drums, the drums, the drums.

OMFGG: Gossip Girl Soundtrack is Out Today!

goSSIpGirlieGirl — Mon, 01 Sep 2008 22:51:35 -0700

THE SOUND OF GOSSIP

The Kills were there when Serena apologized to Chuck for his illicit deliveries, when Lily watched the sex tape, and now, when you finally break up with your deadbeat boyfriend.
Our favorite TV show is about to become our favorite soundtrack, with the release of OMFGG No. 1 (yes, that stands for Original Music From Gossip Girl). The track listing reads like a who’s who of the indie scene: among the 15 tracks are songs by The Kooks, The Virgins, The Ting Tings, and of course, The Kills.
The album won’t be hitting stores until October 28, but you can get a digital copy starting today, September 2 on iTunes!
And if all goes well, the plan is to make this soundtrack the first of many; if Seth Cohen had his indie favorites on six OC mixes, then it’s only fitting that Gossip Girl gets several installments. Although it’s not like you needed another reason to tune in.
I bought it immediately of course and here are all of the songs on the album::

1.) SOUR CHERRY:::: The Kills

2.) DO YOU WANNA::: The Kooks

3.) DO THE PANIC::: Phantom Planet

4.) FEELING BETTER::: The Teenagers

5.) ONE WEEK OF DANGER::: The Virgins

6.) GOT YOUR NUMBER::: Nadia Oh

7.) CRIMEWAVE::: Crystal Castles

8.) FIGHT SONG::: THe Republic Tigers

9.) CITIES IN DUST::: Junkie XL

10.) WE STARTED NOTHING::: The Ting Tings

11.) BREAKFAST IN NYC::: Oppenheimer

12.) THREE WISHES::: The Pierces

13.) HARD TO LIVE IN THE CITY::: Albert Hammond Jr.

14.) EVERYTIME::: Lincoln Hawk

15.) GLAMOROUS::: Constance Billard A Capella Choir

slsawhney — Tue, 02 Mar 2010 03:43:55 -0800

"Winners do not do different things, they do the tings differently

Conservatives target their own fringe

stephley — Sun, 28 Feb 2010 07:25:09 -0800

After months of struggling to harness the energy of newly engaged tea party activists, the conservative establishment - with critical midterm congressional elections on the horizon - is taking aim for the first time at the movement’s extremist elements.

The move has been cast by some conservatives as a modern version of the marginalization of the far-right, anti-communist John Birch Society during the reorganization of the conservative movement spearheaded by William F. Buckley Jr. in the 1960s and 1970s.

“A similar effort will be required today of conservative political and intellectual leaders,” former Bush speechwriter Michael Gerson wrote in his column in The Washington Post. “It will not be easy. Sometimes it takes courage to stand before a large crowd and proclaim that two plus two equals four.”

But for Gerson and other conservatives, this is not just an intellectual exercise. They have a very specific political goal: to deprive Democrats and their allies of a potentially potent weapon to use against the GOP in November.

“I don’t believe we should be giving [extremists] a platform or empowering them to do anything based off their conspiracy theories,” said Ned Ryun, president of American Majority, “because they give the left ammunition to try to define the tea party movement as crazy and fringy.”

The attempt “to clean up our own house,” as Erick Erickson, founder of the influential conservative blog RedState, puts it, is necessary “because traditional press outlets have decided to spotlight these fringe elements that get attracted to the movement, and focus on them as if they’re a large part of this tea party movement. And I don’t think they are.”

Until recently, organizers and activists mostly seemed content to ignore, or in some cases tolerate, extremists in their ranks, confident they’d be drowned out by the hundreds of thousands of activists who took to congressional town halls and marches around the country to protest big-spending initiatives pushed by President Barack Obama and the Democratic Congress.

But inflammatory rhetoric such as former congressman Tom Tancredo’s racially tinged speech at this month’s tea party convention, reports of the involvement of right-wing militia groups and the continued propagation of conspiracy theories about Obama have sometimes cast the movement in an unfavorable light.

Erickson has advised new tea party organizers on how to avoid affiliations with extremists and this month banned birthers - conservatives who believe that Obama was not born in the United States and is, therefore, ineligible to be president - from his blog. (He has long blacklisted truthers, those who believe that the U.S. government was complicit in the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks - a conspiracy theory with devotees across the political spectrum.)

“At some point, you have to use the word ‘crazy,’” said Erickson.

Ryun’s American Majority, a group that trains tea party activists and others around the country, has done much the same thing. Its website has moved to close its sessions to activists who identify themselves with the birther, truther or militia movements or the John Birch Society.

Ryun conceded that extremists are involved in the tea party movement. But he said, “It’s just such a small percentage, and it should not be portrayed as representative of the broader movement.”

The fringe fighters’ methods range from censuring signs at rallies or banishing unruly participants completely to challenging the media’s focus on the fringe and highlighting the movement’s diversity and tolerance.

They have gone out of their way, for example, to promote activists and movement-backed candidates of color, including tea party stars Marco Rubio and Allen West, running for U.S. Senate and House, respectively, in Florida, and Texas Senate candidate Michael Williams - all Republicans.

Ryan has another strategy. He has commissioned a poll that he thinks will show that tea partiers share with independent voters a commitment to reducing taxation and government spending and prove that the tea party movement is “very much mainstream.”

But the tea party movement’s decentralized structure, vaguely defined goals and anti-establishment tone make it an attractive place to channel angry feelings. Mainstream media organizations such as The New York Times, which recently ran a 4,500 word story on the infiltration of the movement by a militia-linked group called Oath Keepers, have recently focused on these aspects of the movement.

Independent of their actual numbers, it’s in both political parties’ interests to inflate the influence of the other side’s fringe, said Tom De Luca, a Fordham University political science professor who studies political movements and wrote the 2005 book “Liars! Cheaters! Evildoers! Demonization and the End of Civil Debate in American Politics.”

“That creates this dynamic that seems to exaggerate the influence of the extremes,” De Luca said.

Much as conservatives have sought to link Democrats to environmental extremism or socialism, he said, it’s an obvious countermove for the left to try to link Republicans with the more extreme elements that have gained traction around - and sometimes within - the tea partiers.

So it was that liberals have demanded to know where Republicans stood on Obama’s citizenship, or that last week found left and right debating which side had more in common with Andrew Joseph Stack III, the software developer who crashed his plane into the IRS offices in Austin, Texas.

The left seized on a comment by hard-line conservative Rep. Steve King (R-Iowa), reportedly expressing his empathy for the pilot’s anti-tax views. Rush Limbaugh retorted that Stack “sounds like he's blaming Bush and Reagan," asserting that he sounded “almost word for word [like] Nancy Pelosi. Almost word for word [like] Rahm Emanuel and Barack Obama.”

De Luca predicted that another “Bill Buckley moment” will occur only when the political damage done by extremists outweighs the boost the tea party movement has provided to conservatives generally and the Republican Party specifically.

“My guess is their basic stance will be to try to juggle as long as they can,” he said.

That approach - and its drawbacks - were on display at last week’s Conservative Political Action Conference, the annual gathering of Washington’s conservative establishment. It featured the John Birch Society as a co-sponsor. And while conference organizers nixed a panel on Obama’s citizenship, a birther contingent still made its presence felt, as did the Oath Keepers, who co-sponsored the conference.

After filming a brief segment at the conference, liberal MSNBC host Rachel Maddow, a leading tea party antagonist, concluded on her show that “the conservative movement right now is really not afraid to let its freak flag fly. … They‘re happy to show off the ‘we want another revolutionary war,’ ‘we think the black president is arrogant,’ ‘we think the apocalypse is nice’ side of themselves.”

Liberal commentators similarly highlighted the extremism on display at this month’s National Tea Party Convention in Nashville, Tenn., which included a speech by WorldNetDaily Editor Joseph Farah questioning Obama’s citizenship and one by Tancredo asserting Obama was elected because "we do not have a civics, literacy test before people can vote in this country."

A blogger on the liberal site Daily Kos asserted Tancredo’s speech revealed the “REAL reason” tea partiers are upset: “A black man is President and their White Privelege [sic] is fading.”

Tancredo’s speech was not widely condemned by conservative intellectuals or media, but immediately after Farah delivered his, he was confronted in a hallway outside the convention hall by conservative media entrepreneur and fellow convention speaker Andrew Breitbart, who said it was a disservice to the tea party movement to infer its activists are “all obsessed with the birth certificate, when it’s not a winning issue.”

Others cited the jeering of an anti-gay activist at CPAC who condemned organizers for inviting gay Republican group GOProud to participate. Conservative author and TownHall columnist Ashley Herzog said it was proof that “CPAC, and the conservative movement in general, isn’t a haven for haters after all,” and urged the left to view a video of the incident, which she said is evidence of “a lack of bigotry [that] must be painfully puzzling to liberals.”

Conservatives similarly pushed back against a New York Times blog post that accused a CPAC speaker of ripping Obama “in racial tones," partly by affecting a "Chris Rock voice" to mock the president.

They noted that the speaker - like comedian Rock - is from Brooklyn and speaks with a regional accent, and demanded an apology.

And in a clever Web video that went viral this week, the Dallas Tea Party called out MSNBC host Keith Olbermann, who had mocked the mostly white makeup of the Nashville convention of what he called the "Tea Klux Klan," comparing its racially diverse leadership to MSNBC’s mostly white host lineup.

Judson Phillips, the Nashville tea party activist who organized this month’s convention, said it’s incumbent on local tea party leaders across the country “to control the message and to prevent the tea party movement from being hijacked.”

In the run-up to a July tea party convention he’s planning in Las Vegas, Phillips said, he’s planning to ask speakers “to stick to our message, which is unity headed into the fall.”

http://dyn.politico.com/printstory.cfm?uuid=0D1D0BCC-18FE-70B2-A8AAAE2A1...

Leopard Flower

FashionSheSays — Sat, 27 Feb 2010 16:44:18 -0800

Michael Kors dress. Betsey Johnson belt with flower pin. Vintage locket necklace. Vintage woven bangle. Vintage costume pearl ring. Taupe tights. Marc by Marc Jacobs wristlet. Roger Vivier ‘Belle Vivier’ shoes.
Michael Kors tailors to travelers who take his designs on jaunts worldwide – my shift dress’ tulip skirt & I debuted at a party in NYC. This frock’s green leopard sheen glamorously revamps army camo print, while the flower pinned to my heart-studded belt is a force of peace, love & happiness. My purple topaz locket necklace is tinged with magic because it belonged to my grandmother… Fashionshesays.com.

Millions of Unemployed Face Years Without Jobs

Roarman — Tue, 23 Feb 2010 08:42:41 -0800

Even as the American economy shows tentative signs of a rebound, the human toll of the recession continues to mount, with millions of Americans remaining out of work, out of savings and nearing the end of their unemployment benefits.

Economists fear that the nascent recovery will leave more people behind than in past recessions, failing to create jobs in sufficient numbers to absorb the record-setting ranks of the long-term unemployed.

Call them the new poor: people long accustomed to the comforts of middle-class life who are now relying on public assistance for the first time in their lives - potentially for years to come.

Yet the social safety net is already showing severe strains. Roughly 2.7 million jobless people will lose their unemployment check before the end of April unless Congress approves the Obama administration’s proposal to extend the payments, according to the Labor Department.

Here in Southern California, Jean Eisen has been without work since she lost her job selling beauty salon equipment more than two years ago. In the several months she has endured with neither a paycheck nor an unemployment check, she has relied on local food banks for her groceries.

She has learned to live without the prescription medications she is supposed to take for high blood pressure and cholesterol. She has become effusively religious - an unexpected turn for this onetime standup comic with X-rated material - finding in Christianity her only form of health insurance.

“I pray for healing,” says Ms. Eisen, 57. “When you’ve got nothing, you’ve got to go with what you know.”

Warm, outgoing and prone to the positive, Ms. Eisen has worked much of her life. Now, she is one of 6.3 million Americans who have been unemployed for six months or longer, the largest number since the government began keeping track in 1948. That is more than double the toll in the next-worst period, in the early 1980s.

Men have suffered the largest numbers of job losses in this recession. But Ms. Eisen has the unfortunate distinction of being among a group - women from 45 to 64 years of age - whose long-term unemployment rate has grown rapidly.

In 1983, after a deep recession, women in that range made up only 7 percent of those who had been out of work for six months or longer, according to the Labor Department. Last year, they made up 14 percent.

Twice, Ms. Eisen exhausted her unemployment benefits before her check was restored by a federal extension. Last week, her check ran out again. She and her husband now settle their bills with only his $1,595 monthly disability check. The rent on their apartment is $1,380.

“We’re looking at the very real possibility of being homeless,” she said.

Every downturn pushes some people out of the middle class before the economy resumes expanding. Most recover. Many prosper. But some economists worry that this time could be different. An unusual constellation of forces - some embedded in the modern-day economy, others unique to this wrenching recession - might make it especially difficult for those out of work to find their way back to their middle-class lives.

Labor experts say the economy needs 100,000 new jobs a month just to absorb entrants to the labor force. With more than 15 million people officially jobless, even a vigorous recovery is likely to leave an enormous number out of work for years.

Some labor experts note that severe economic downturns are generally followed by powerful expansions, suggesting that aggressive hiring will soon resume. But doubts remain about whether such hiring can last long enough to absorb anywhere close to the millions of unemployed.

A New Scarcity of Jobs

Some labor experts say the basic functioning of the American economy has changed in ways that make jobs scarce - particularly for older, less-educated people like Ms. Eisen, who has only a high school diploma.

Large companies are increasingly owned by institutional investors who crave swift profits, a feat often achieved by cutting payroll. The declining influence of unions has made it easier for employers to shift work to part-time and temporary employees. Factory work and even white-collar jobs have moved in recent years to low-cost countries in Asia and Latin America. Automation has helped manufacturing cut 5.6 million jobs since 2000 - the sort of jobs that once provided lower-skilled workers with middle-class paychecks.

“American business is about maximizing shareholder value,” said Allen Sinai, chief global economist at the research firm Decision Economics. “You basically don’t want workers. You hire less, and you try to find capital equipment to replace them.”

During periods of American economic expansion in the 1950s, ’60s and ’70s, the number of private-sector jobs increased about 3.5 percent a year, according to an analysis of Labor Department data by Lakshman Achuthan, managing director of the Economic Cycle Research Institute, a research firm. During expansions in the 1980s and ’90s, jobs grew just 2.4 percent annually. And during the last decade, job growth fell to 0.9 percent annually.

“The pace of job growth has been getting weaker in each expansion,” Mr. Achuthan said. “There is no indication that this pattern is about to change.”

Before 1990, it took an average of 21 months for the economy to regain the jobs shed during a recession, according to an analysis of Labor Department data by the National Employment Law Project and the Economic Policy Institute, a labor-oriented research group in Washington.

After the recessions in 1990 and in 2001, 31 and 46 months passed before employment returned to its previous peaks. The economy was growing, but companies remained conservative in their hiring.

Some 34 million people were hired into new and existing private-sector jobs in 2000, at the tail end of an expansion, according to Labor Department data. A year later, in the midst of recession, hiring had fallen off to 31.6 million. And as late as 2003, with the economy again growing, hiring in the private sector continued to slip, to 29.8 million.

It was a jobless recovery: Business was picking up, but it simply did not translate into more work. This time, hiring may be especially subdued, labor economists say.

Traditionally, three sectors have led the way out of recession: automobiles, home building and banking. But auto companies have been shrinking because strapped households have less buying power. Home building is limited by fears about a glut of foreclosed properties. Banking is expanding, but this seems largely a function of government support that is being withdrawn.

At the same time, the continued bite of the financial crisis has crimped the flow of money to small businesses and new ventures, which tend to be major sources of new jobs.

All of which helps explain why Ms. Eisen - who has never before struggled to find work - feels a familiar pain each time she scans job listings on her computer: There are positions in health care, most requiring experience she lacks. Office jobs demand familiarity with software she has never used. Jobs at fast food restaurants are mostly secured by young people and immigrants.

If, as Mr. Sinai expects, the economy again expands without adding many jobs, millions of people like Ms. Eisen will be dependent on an unemployment insurance already being severely tested.

“The system was ill prepared for the reality of long-term unemployment,” said Maurice Emsellem, a policy director for the National Employment Law Project. “Now, you add a severe recession, and you have created a crisis of historic proportions.”

Fewer Protections

Some poverty experts say the broader social safety net is not up to cushioning the impact of the worst downturn since the Great Depression. Social services are less extensive than during the last period of double-digit unemployment, in the early 1980s.

On average, only two-thirds of unemployed people received state-provided unemployment checks last year, according to the Labor Department. The rest either exhausted their benefits, fell short of requirements or did not apply.

“You have very large sets of people who have no social protections,” said Randy Albelda, an economist at the University of Massachusetts in Boston. “They are landing in this netherworld.”

When Ms. Eisen and her husband, Jeff, applied for food stamps, they were turned away for having too much monthly income. The cutoff was $1,570 a month - $25 less than her husband’s disability check.

Reforms in the mid-1990s imposed time limits on cash assistance for poor single mothers, a change predicated on the assumption that women would trade welfare checks for paychecks.

Yet as jobs have become harder to get, so has welfare: as of 2006, 44 states cut off anyone with a household income totaling 75 percent of the poverty level - then limited to $1,383 a month for a family of three - according to an analysis by Ms. Albelda.

“We have a work-based safety net without any work,” said Timothy M. Smeeding, director of the Institute for Research on Poverty at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. “People with more education and skills will probably figure something out once the economy picks up. It’s the ones with less education and skills: that’s the new poor.”

Here in Orange County, the expanse of suburbia stretching south from Los Angeles, long-term unemployment reaches even those who once had six-figure salaries. A center of the national mortgage industry, the area prospered in the real estate boom and suffered with the bust.

Until she was laid off two years ago, Janine Booth, 41, brought home roughly $10,000 a month in commissions from her job selling electronics to retailers. A single mother of three, she has been living lately on $2,000 a month in child support and about $450 a week in unemployment insurance - a stream of checks that ran out last week.

For Ms. Booth, work has been a constant since her teenage years, when she cleaned houses under pressure from her mother to earn pocket money. Today, Ms. Booth pays her $1,500 monthly mortgage with help from her mother, who is herself living off savings after being laid off.

“I don’t want to take money from her,” Ms. Booth said. “I just want to find a job.”

Ms. Booth, with a résumé full of well-paid sales jobs, seems the sort of person who would have little difficulty getting work. Yet two years of looking have yielded little but anxiety.

She sends out dozens of résumés a week and rarely hears back. She responds to online ads, only to learn they are seeking operators for telephone sex lines or people willing to send mysterious packages from their homes.

She spends weekdays in a classroom in Anaheim, in a state-financed training program that is supposed to land her a job in medical administration. Even if she does find a job, she will be lucky if it pays $15 an hour.

“What is going to happen?” she asked plaintively. “I worry about my kids. I just don’t want them to think I’m a failure.”

On a recent weekend, she was running errands with her 18-year-old son when they stopped at an A.T.M. and he saw her checking account balance: $50.

“He says, ‘Is that all you have?’ ” she recalled. “ ‘Are we going to be O.K.?’ ”

Yes, she replied - and not only for his benefit.

“I have to keep telling myself it’s going to be O.K.,” she said. “Otherwise, I’d go into a deep depression.”

Last week, she made up fliers advertising her eagerness to clean houses - the same activity that provided her with spending money in high school, and now the only way she sees fit to provide for her kids. She plans to place the fliers on porches in some other neighborhood.

“I don’t want to clean my neighbors’ houses,” she said. “I know I’m going to come out of this. There’s no way I’m going to be homeless and poverty-stricken. But I am scared. I have a lot of sleepless nights.”

For the Eisens, poverty is already here. In the two years Ms. Eisen has been without work, they have exhausted their savings of about $24,000. Their credit card balances have grown to $15,000.

“I don’t know how we’re still indoors,” she said.

Her 1994 Dodge Caravan broke down in January, leaving her to ask for rides to an employment center.

She does not have the money to move to a cheaper apartment.

“You have to have money for first and last month’s rent, and to open utility accounts,” she said.

What she has is personality and presence - two traits that used to seem enough. She narrates her life in a stream of self-deprecating wisecracks, her punch lines tinged with desperation.

“See that,” she said, spotting a man dressed as the Statue of Liberty. Standing on a sidewalk, he waved at passing cars with a sign advertising a tax preparation business. “That will be me next week. Do you think this guy ever thought he’d be doing this?”

And yet, she would gladly do this. She would do nearly anything.

“There are no bad jobs now,” she says. “Any job is a good job.”

She has applied everywhere she can think of - at offices, at gas stations. Nothing.

“I’m being seen as a person who is no longer viable,” she said. “I’m chalking it up to my age and my weight. Blame it on your most prominent insecurity.”

Two Incomes, Then None

Ms. Eisen grew up poor, in Flatbush in Brooklyn. Her father was in maintenance. Her mother worked part time at a company that made window blinds.

She married Jeff when she was 19, and they soon moved to California, where he had grown up. He worked in sales for a chemical company. They rented an apartment in Buena Park, a growing spread of houses filling out former orange groves. She stayed home and took care of their daughter.

“I never asked him how much he earned,” Ms. Eisen said. “I was of the mentality that the husband took care of everything. But we never wanted.”

By the early 1980s, gas and rent strained their finances. So she took a job as a quality assurance clerk at a factory that made aircraft parts. It paid $13.50 an hour and had health insurance.

When the company moved to Mexico in the early 1990s, Ms. Eisen quickly found a job at a travel agency. When online booking killed that business, she got the job at the beauty salon equipment company. It paid $13.25 an hour, with an annual bonus - enough for presents under the Christmas tree.

But six years ago, her husband took a fall at work and then succumbed to various ailments - diabetes, liver disease, high blood pressure - leaving him confined to the couch. Not until 2008 did he secure his disability check.

And now they find themselves in this desert of joblessness, her paycheck replaced by a $702 unemployment check every other week. She received 14 weeks of benefits after she lost her job, and then a seven-week extension.

For most of October through December 2008, she received nothing, as she waited for another extension. The checks came again, then ran out in September 2009. They were restored by an extension right before Christmas.

Their daughter has back problems and is living on disability checks, making the church their ultimate safety net.

“I never thought I’d be in the position where I had to go to a food bank,” Ms. Eisen said. But there she is, standing in the parking lot of the Calvary Chapel church, chatting with a half-dozen women, all waiting to enter the Bread of Life Food Pantry.

When her name is called, she steps into a windowless alcove, where a smiling woman hands her three bags of groceries: carrots, potatoes, bread, cheese and a hunk of frozen meat.

“Haven’t we got a lot to be thankful for?” Ms. Eisen asks.

For one thing, no pinto beans.

“I’ve got 10 bags of pinto beans,” she says. “And I have no clue how to cook a pinto bean.”

Local job listings are just as mysterious. On a bulletin board at the county-financed ProPath Business and Career Services Center, many are written in jargon hinting of accounting or computers.

“Nothing I’m qualified for,” Ms. Eisen says. “When you can’t define what it is, that’s a pretty good indication.”

Her counselor has a couple of possibilities - a cashier at a supermarket and a night desk job at a motel.

“I’ll e-mail them,” Ms. Eisen promises. “I’ll tell them what a shining example of humanity I am.”

Source: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/21/business/economy/21unemployed.html?sq=... New Poor&st=cse&scp=1&pagewanted=all

WeiTing, Happypill.

RyannnnnW — Thu, 24 Dec 2009 09:34:01 -0800

' Smile, knowing that i'm always by your side. '

Haaaaaaaapypill! Working on Christmas, omgxzxzxz. Slap you okay. Cannot anyhow say that all guy are jerks! Happypill isn’t one. HAHA. Yes, me. Bhb ttm. HAHA. Well, it’s been a long year for you hasn’t it.
Yup, heartbreaks, there’re all part of life. Just show those guys, you’re not someone that they can mess with. Show them, you’re smarter than they are, you’re better and more awesome! HAHA. Just wanted to wish you Merry Christmas, I know it’s really late. But it doesn’t matter. MERRY CHRISTMAS HAPPYPILL. Take care of yourself okay! Don't party too late! Need your rest too!

God Bless!
Ryan, happypillxzxzxz!