I say that this photo cost well over a million jobs!

Each time you get your bill from a cashier while shopping, remember to thank your greedy politician and the lobbyist for the extremely high prices!

US immigration bill’s new visa rules could slow Indian outsourcing juggernaut

By Kay Johnson, Associated Press | Associated Press

http://news.yahoo.com/us-immigration-bill-could-slow-092416883.html

Lobbyist are like Lawyers, Catfish, Lobsters, Craw Fish, and other bottom dwellers of the earth and everyone knows this. Politicians on the other hand are paid good taxpayer money to do our bidding, not fill their pockets with corrupt money!

If the people do not shut down worms like this, we can never get our economy under control?

It is time to stop blaming countries like India and take control of our government officials no matter which party they might be HIDING IN!

However, the biggest greedy people are the companies, the unions and we the greedy public!

I say ‘we’ because I am just as guilty, we go to places like Wal Mart and buy things that cost a little less than our old friends, the mom and pop stores even though we know that.

First, it is made outside of this country, lost jobs.

Second, we know that it will last 1/10 as long as a good quality American made product and still we buy it?

We have done this for so long that Mom & Pop are no longer around!

It cost a little more because we have rules and laws to help protect us from companies taking short cuts and people that get paid to keep them honest.

I still have one garden hose bought in 1993 from a Mom & Pop store (Benny’s) before my retirement.

Just since moving south I am now on my third batch of hoses, great saving?

I think not!

So, you say, where are these stores to buy this great hose?

GONE!

Try this at Wal Mart, Target or Sears?

To help my 5 children learn the value of a dollar and how to handle credit, when they were old enough I would allow then to play some games with friends and have a piece of pizza and soda or get some groceries next door on the way home from school once or twice a week, if their grades were up to par and they called to let us know what they were doing.

I made arrangement with the pizza house and the little grocery store.

Believe it or not all five were real good at pinching pennies!

The little arcade where the children once played, the pizza house and the store are gone, sold to a strip mall!

This comedy-romance-drama, is set in New York City as World War II is raging.    Grant plays Joe “The Greek” Adams, a gambler with a couple of problems.  He and his gambling partner, Zepp(Paul Stewart),  have received draft notices and neither of them wants to serve.  They have to come up with a plan to get out of the draft.  One of their gambling employees, Joe Bascopolous, has died and his draft  status was 4F.  Either Joe or Zepp can use Bascopolous’s identity so they decide to gamble for it.  Zepp cheats but Joe wins and decides to now go by the name of Joe Bascopolous.  The second problem for Joe is the lack of money to pay for his gambling ship.  He wants to raise enough dough to take his ship down to Cuba.  How will Joe find that bankroll of dough?

Joe(Grant) and Zepp(Paul Stewart) discussing their two problems.

He finds it through a local War Relief organization, run by society ladies, and the head lady is Veronica Steadman, played by Gladys Cooper.   Joe has to gain Mrs. Steadman’s trust, the trust of the other ladies at the organization, and the trust of wealthy society lady Dorothy Bryant, played by Laraine Day.  Miss Bryant is beautiful, single, rich, and second-in-command at the War Relief organization, and Joe knows he has to have a positive influence on her if he is to gain Mrs. Steadman’s approval and money.  To prove his trustworthiness, after he has pledged that he wants to join the group of ladies, he agrees to learn to knit!  One of the daily tasks for the ladies  is to knit socks and scarves for the soldiers overseas, and it is a very comical scene as Mrs. Van Every(Florence Bates) takes on the task with joy and energy of teaching Joe how to knit one and purl two!  Seeing a handsome man in their midst is also quite an event for the ladies of the organization!

It’s a delight to find out that Cary Grant has joined your group!

Mrs. Van Every(Florence Bates) who gets to teach Cary Grant how to knit!

Learning to knit can be frustrating!

Mrs. Veronica Steadman(Gladys Cooper), head of the War Relief organization

With all of the knitting going on, and Joe’s punctuality and  his well-dressed and polite persona, he  wins  Mrs. Steadman and Miss Bryant over and soon they agree to a fundraising idea he has for the organization: a charity gambling night.  Joe promises the ladies that they’ll raise enough money to outfit a relief ship.  What Joe is really planning to do is supply the charity gambling event with cashboxes with false bottoms in them so Joe and his gambling outfit can steal the winnings and with that money, he can take his gang and his ship south to Cuba.  However, a letter Joe receives that morning changes everything.  Joe  receives a letter from the real Joe Bascopolous’s mother in Greece.  The letter is written in Greek and Joe is curious about it’s contents so he visits a nearby Greek Orthodox Church and asks the priest there to translate it for him.  The letter informs Joe that the Nazis overran their village and how all of the Greek men died trying to protect their village.  Joe thanks the priest for translating the letter and then heads to the nearest park bench, to sit and think about his life, in comparison to the brave Greek men’s lives.

When Joe arrives at the War Relief organization for the start of the Charity Casino Night, he tells his co-hort, Crunk,(Alan Carney), that he has decided to put all of the winnings towards the ladies’ goal for  war relief.  Zepp overhears this change in plans and decides to stop this from happening.  At the end of the evening, Zepp pulls a gun on Joe and forces him to gather up the winnings.  Dorothy accidentally enters the room and sees Joe collecting the money and assumes the worst about Joe, that he is really just a no-good gambler and crook.  To protect Dorothy so she can’t be one of Zepp’s victims, Joe knocks her out,and  then Joe manages to attack Zepp and kills him in self-defense, but also gets shot in the altarcation.  Joe then  escapes from the War Relief organization’s building.

Some days go by and  Dorothy is feeling very low and stupid for having fallen for Joe and his offer to help the War Relief organization.   One day a man arrives at the War Relief’s building.  He introduces himself as Mr. Hard Swede, that he is a friend of Joe’s, and that Joe wanted him to give the ladies a packet.  In the packet is the money that the ladies rightly earned through their Charity Casino night!  Some more days go by and Dorothy is informed that Joe Bascopolous is dead.  She asks to see a picture of Joe and it isn’t the Joe that she fell in love with.  She learns that Bascopolous worked on a ship called the “Briny Marlin” and remembering some Australian slang phrases Joe had taught her one evening, she rushes to the docks, knowing that the ship and her Joe are probably there.   Dorothy reaches the dock and sees the ship and Joe and begs him to take her with him.  Joe has loaded his ship with war relief supplies and informs Dorothy that he is sailing to Europe and it will be too dangerous to take her with him.  He treats her rudely, as he doesn’t want her to know his real feelings for her.  A few weeks later, Dorothy finds out that the Briny Marlin was torpedoed on its return to New York City and sunk.  Despite this awful news, Dorothy is confident that Joe somehow survived  and she visits the dock each night waiting for his return.

The movie has a happy ending and I don’t want to reveal more to ruin it for the viewer.  Suffice it to say that the movie was a huge hit with the audiences of 1943 and it earned a profit of $1, 603,000 at the box office.  If you are a Cary Grant fan, or if you love knitting, if you want a film that has a bit of a deeper message than a typical romance-comedy, than seek out Mr. Lucky.  The movie is available through Amazon.com, clips of it are on Youtube, and Turner Classic Movies will be airing it this weekend, on March 30th, at 10:30 p.m. CST.

Trying to work his charm on Miss Bryant(Laraine Day).

When Helen Frye’s (Kay Johnson) horoscope predicts that she will kill herself, she calls up her friend Laura Stanhope (Irene Dunne) for some reassurance.  Laura sees all of these untimely deaths as nothing more than coincidence and invites Helen to come visit.  While on the train, Helen meets Ursula Georgi (Myrna Loy), another one of her former classmates. But what Helen doesn’t know is that all those fatal horoscopes are actually from Ursula, not the Swami. Ursula had wanted to be part of their circle of friends, but was rejected because of her mixed-race heritage. Now that she’s working with the Swami, she’s using the horoscopes and her hypnotic powers to exact her revenge.

After Helen kills herself on the train, Laura starts taking the horoscopes more seriously.  Her horoscope predicted that her son would die of a terrible accident on his upcoming birthday. When her son is mysteriously sent a box of poisoned candy, Helen turns to Sergeant Clive (Ricardo Cortez), who quickly makes the connection between Ursula and the deaths and comes up with a plan to catch her on a train by using Laura as bait.

I was quite pleasantly surprised by Thirteen Women. I didn’t have particularly high expectations for it, but I was impressed by how genuinely tense and scary it was. I don’t know if I’ve ever seen Myrna Loy play a villain like that before, but she was quite wonderfully sinister and I loved it. The story is a bit rushed at times.  Seriously, this movie features the fastest police investigation I have ever seen.  But for a movie that’s only a little over an hour long, it could have been a lot more rushed than it was and it’s strong enough in other ways that I have no problem forgiving the unrealistically fast investigation.  This is one movie that deserves to be seen more often.

My biggest complaint about Thirteen Women is that we barely get a chance to see Peg Entwistle. Peg Entwistle is infamous for having committed suicide by jumping off the Hollywood Sign in 1932, but she was first and foremost a very promising stage actress. Bette Davis always cited Peg’s performance as Hedvig in Ibsen’s “The Wild Duck” as being her biggest inspiration to become an actress. Thirteen Women was the one and only film Entwistle made and if you blink, you’ll miss her. It’s too bad that now no one will ever be able to see just how talented she really was. I know I’d love to get a good look at the woman who inspired Bette Davis!

The accused, Sean Wright, would later be sentenced to 50 to 100 years in prison, but the road to recovery is long and painful for detective Brian Johnson, whose right hip and leg were injured in the crash.

But he received a pleasant surprise Monday morning at Mount Ararat Community Center in East Liberty. The quilters of Mount Ararat Quilt Club, led by the detective’s mother, presented him with a colorful patchwork quilt. It was sewn by 15 pairs of hands.

[worldnow id=7361638 width=385 height=255 type=video]

“I love the fact that everyone signed it too,” Johnson said. “And there’s a dedication panel, too, so it’s definitely become an instant family heirloom.”

His mother, Kay Johnson, admits it’s not easy hiding something this large from a trained detective.

“He drops by the house all the time, and I’m forever quilting,” she said. “So I had to hide the quilt every time he came, you know, I didn’t want him to see it until it was totally completed.”

It was a happy moment for an officer who continues rehab three days a week. Amid threads of brown and gold, Detective Johnson sees a silver lining.

“After two years, I’m finally able to drive a car again. My car’s been outfitted so that I can drive with my left foot. I have a lot of pain in my right hip and a lot of general weakness. But, I’m getting there. Slowly and surely, I’m getting there. I can’t complain.”

He hopes to once again wear the uniform and resume the only job he ever wanted.

Ticket for Emil Prielipp to the US from Gornitz, Prussia.

On the passenger record for Emil Prielipp it gives his home town as “Gornitz, Ashebude, Germany”.  Gornitz is the town where Wilhelm was living from November, 1884 until he came to the US in the second half of 1885.  ”Ashebude” (actually Ascherbude) is a small town near Gornitz.

Passenger list for the “Albert Ballin” sailing from Hamburg, Germany on 8 Nov 1923.

I’ve asked Gloria to try to get me in contact with Otto’s daughters.  My hope is that they know something about the relationship between their father/uncle and Wilhelm Schmidt, and perhaps even have some knowledge (even if it’s just family stories) about Gornitz.

It’s also remotely possible that there are still Prielipps living in the old country who might know about any Schmidts who were left behind.  I’m sure there are uncles/cousins/etc who still lived in the area, even after Wilhelmine Schmidt and her children left.

I believe that Emil Prielipp gave the name of his father as a contact person on his passenger information when he came to the US.  It might be possible to find record of that family over in Prussia/Poland given that it was 1923 and not that long ago.

Angela Brooks (Kay Johnson) is happily married to Bob (Reginald Denny), but unfortunately, she soon finds out that Bob isn’t as happy with their marriage.  After a wild night of partying with his friend Jimmy (Roland Young), Angela sees that their antics had made the newspaper.  Only the article mentions a Mrs. Brooks being with them and Angela was at home in bed early that night.  She also finds a card in Bob’s coat pocket from someone named Trixie (Lillian Roth) asking him to come over to her place.  When she tries to confront Bob and Jimmy about the newspaper article, they concoct a story about Trixie being Jimmy’s wife, not Bob’s girlfriend.  But Angela knows better and one night, insists on joining Jimmy to meet Trixie.

Trixie had been looking forward to an evening with Bob and isn’t at all pleased when she gets stuck with Jimmy and Angela in her apartment instead.  Angela does everything in her power to make their evening painfully awkward.  And when Bob finally does show up, lots of frantic attempts are made to cover up the fact that Angela was there and Bob leaves thinking that Jimmy was there with a woman.  Angela doesn’t want to lose Bob and when her trusted maid advises her to spice things up to win him back, she decides to try it.  Earlier, Jimmy had invited her to a costume party on a zeppelin and Angela decides to develop an alter ego for the occasion, Madam Satan.  While Angela is buttoned-up and proper, Madam Satan is the life of the party and wears extremely revealing outfits.

The party is already pretty wild before Madam Satan makes her grand entrance (fashionably late, naturally), but when she arrives, she instantly makes a big splash.  Every man wants her attention and she effectively upstages Trixie, who was shaping up to be the belle of the ball, at every turn.  Of course she picks Bob to be the lucky man who gets to spend the most time with her.  He is madly in love with the mysterious Madam Satan, but is totally unaware of who she really is.  When he does find out, though, he suddenly isn’t so impressed anymore.  But there are bigger problems at hand when the zeppelin they’re on is struck by lightning and everyone suddenly must parachute to safety.  Everyone survives, but once the party’s over, Bob still has a hard time accepting what Angela had done.  However, she did manage to impress Jimmy, who drops by and says that he’d be glad to marry Angela if they get a divorce.  Suddenly Bob realizes that he’s not about to let Angela go quite that easily.

I have never seen a movie quite like Madam Satan.  I’d heard that it was pretty wild, bizarre, and very pre-code so I figured it’d be right up my alley and I was not disappointed.  I’m actually kind of at a loss of words to describe it.  It’s kind of like Why Change Your Wife? but on a zeppelin.  The pacing had room for improvement, but I guarantee that you have never seen a party like the one in Madam Satan.  The party itself is so wild and the costumes are just insane.  It makes the most raucous fraternity party look like a quiet afternoon tea in comparison.