It seems that I neglected to tell the seedy story behind the hellacious catfight update of 3/31/05. Misti Knight and I literally ended up shredding our sheer tan pantyhose when we went off on each other. This is how it had all had gotten started on that fine October day...


Misti Knight and I were auditioning for movie roles together. We were going to play sisters. Our audition should have been simple: just a few lines of dialogue and lots of smiles at the director. For some unknown reason Misti started getting really competitive with me. She would interrupt me when I was speaking, stand in my light, and roll her eyes when I was rehearsing my lines and trying to get into character. Finally I turned on her and asked her what she thought she was doing. Did she think that she was going to play the roles of BOTH sisters if she succeeded in upstaging me at this casting call? The whole room broke out in uproarious laughter when I demanded to know this. Misti didn't like being the butt of the joke and all of a sudden we were writhing around on the carpet in nothing but our short skirts and sheer tan pantyhose!!


-- XXOO Tanya

Good morning,

Do you happen to remember when I had a Photo of the Day on the front page here? Well, I still have one at
www.blondeisland.us

Today's photo is especially comical with the bouffant hairdo :)


-- XXOO Tanya

Good morning,

I don't often start my day off crying, but today I did. As I was standing in line this morning to buy my coffee, candy bar and newspaper I began reading one of the front-page stories in the L.A. Times. It is about the residents of Bangor, Maine, many of whom are ex-military themselves, who turn out to greet every single plane of returning soldiers who pass through their town. It is a genuinely touching story and I'm still in tears as I think of it now. Every one of our soldiers deserves a hero's welcome upon returning to US soil. God Bless them all.

The story is called "Welcome Stop for Warriors" by Tony Perry and is on the front page of
www.losangelestimes.com today too.

-- XXOO Tanya

Good morning,

I just reread my post from yesterday and realized that it may have appeared that I was on the cusp of a religious conversion or something. Don't worry, I'm not. I just liked the part of yesterday's post that espouses kindness to one another.

Maybe that's just because I live in a big city and I'm tired of people leaning on their horns if I haven't shifted into gear and blasted away from a stoplight at 90 MPH one second after it turned green :)

Several weeks ago I was standing in line in Sav-on when an elderly man in a wheelchair had to ask a lady in line to step back so he could maneuver through the store. She seemed fearful that he was trying to cut into the line in front of her and she pointedly informed him that he couldn't. The poor guy indicated that he was just attempting to move to a different part of the store and the line was blocking his access. Afterwards the woman was slightly embarrassed and she turned to the couple behind her and said: "Well, I have to watch out for #1 because no one else will."

It was kind of a weird moment in a mean city.

- XXOO Tanya

Good afternoon,

This was sent to me by a friend the other day and I thought I'd share it:

Numbers tell only part of the story. Whatever one thinks of Christianity, the history of Jesus gave birth to a new, lasting vision of the origins and destiny of human life, a vision drawn from the religion's deep roots in Judaism. Everyone is created in God's image; there is, as Paul said, "neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is neither male nor female; for you are all one in Christ Jesus"; all are equal, special, worthy. In the Christian world view, says the Roman Catholic theologian George Weigel, "we are not congealed stardust, an accidental byproduct of cosmic chemistry. We are not just something, we are someone." The promise at the heart of the faith: that God, as the fourth-century church father Athanasius said, "was made man that we might be made gods."

As the search goes on for so many along so many different paths, Paul offers some reassuring words for the journey: "Be at peace among yourselves ... encourage the faint-hearted, help the weak, be patient with them all. See that none of you repays evil for evil, but always seek to do good to one another and to all. Rejoice always, pray constantly, give thanks ... hold fast what is good, abstain from every form of evil"—wise words for all of us, whatever our doubts, whatever our faith.

-- XXOO Tanya

Visit the Top 50

Good afternoon,

There has been lots of stuff all over the news here
about the possibility of the FDA lifting its ban on
silicone breast implants. During a hearing many women
gave what amounted to 12 hours of testimony pleading
with the FDA not to lift the ban. They spoke of
illnesses and deaths that had occurred allegedly
because of silicone breast implant ruptures and
leakages.

I have silicone breast implants and elected to get
silicone implants instead of saline even at the height
of the silicone breast implant hysteria here some
years ago. That was when Dow Corning and the other
implant makers were hit with huge class-action
lawsuits from women who claimed that the silicone
implants were unsafe.

My feeling is that the silicone implants made in the
last 20 years or longer are not unsafe. I have known
of women who blamed their leaking implants for their
own serious illnesses and in every case they had
received their implants before 1980. What I am going
to say next is entirely anecdotal, but it struck a
chord with me as soon as I heard it. It just seems to
have the ring of truth even though this is basically
just uncorroborated thirdhand information.

An acquaintance of mine knows a man who worked for a
company that manufactured some of the first silicone
breast implants. Those implants were put into womens'
bodies and the company realized after the fact that
the industrial-grade type of silicone (or whatever)
they were using would be very dangerous or fatal to
the recipients if the implant ever leaked and that the
design of them might allow a lot of leakages. They
quietly researched the issue and created a safer type
of silicone implant. Now, many decades later the
company will never, ever admit to this.

As I said, I know of women who became seriously ill
with peculiar afflictions they feel were due to their
silicone breast implants. In most cases they were
friends of friends of mine, all of them were dancers,
and all of them received their implants in the 1970s.
One obvious conclusion to that is that it just took a
while for their implants to leak and that those of us
who received implants in the 1990's will eventually
have leakages and illnesses too. I don't believe so
because a lot of these women were already having
health issues in the 1970s and 1980s. Plus, I
personally know other dancers whose post-1980 silicone
implants have leaked and they did not become ill. They
had to have surgery to replace or remove the implants,
of course, but they never had recurring or abnormal
medical afflictions afterwards.

These words almost seems like a waste of my typing because
everything I'm writing is based on hearsay. Even I
don't actually have substantive reason to believe what
I'm writing, but yet it all feels like the truth on
some intuitive level. So much for my contribution to
research science :)

Nothing I've written will ever be proven, but I just
can't shake the feeling that it is the truth.

-- XXOO Tanya

Hi,

My friend Jay has built a new Yahoo group for me!


groups.yahoo.com/group/devoted2tanya



--XXOO Tanya

If someone read the whole story below to me and deleted all reference to where it happened I would still know that this incident occurred in Texas. Texas is the only state I know of in which major metropolitan newspapers have entire sections covering highschool football. By "entire sections" I'm not referring to pages within the sports section itself, I'm talking about another daily sports section that features nothing but highschool football news and is an entity unto itself.

My sister and I grew up in California, but she later went on to teach highschool in the Dallas public school system. In her words: "The way the kids look at it is that either you're a football player or you're a cheerleader or you're a loser." She said the attitude was very deeply entrenched. I hope she sends my nieces and nephew to school in California. They are nice kids and I'd hate to see them turn into complete nimrods just because they're growing up in Texas.



Texas High School Football Coach Shot


CANTON, Texas (April 7) - The father of a high school football player shot and wounded the coach with an assault rifle Thursday and fled in a pickup loaded with weapons, claiming to have a hit list, authorities said.

Jeffrey Doyle Robertson, 45, was captured a few hours later, after his truck was found abandoned near a golf course outside Canton. Robertson was carried out of the woods on a stretcher.

Police were trying to establish the motive for the shooting of Canton High coach Gary Joe Kinne.

But Police Chief Mike Echols said Robertson had been banned from campus and told not to attend school functions. Robertson had had confrontations with some of the coaches, including Kinne, who took over the football program in 2003, authorities said. Kinne's son was the team's quarterback.

According to one parent, Robertson had complained last year that his son was being picked on by his teammates.

Kinne was shot with an AK-47 rifle in the chest at the school's field house, officials said. He was airlifted to a hospital in nearby Tyler; his condition was not immediately released.

Robertson said he had a hit list, according to state Homeland Security spokeswoman Sophie Yanez.

An athlete's father, Steve Smith, said Robertson had threatened to kill Smith's son last year over an on-field teasing.

"He's a very high-strung, hot-tempered individual," said Smith, a Canton business owner.

Smith told the Tyler newspaper that Robertson's son, then a freshman football player, was walking off the field when some older students "razzed" him.

"This guy blew up," Smith said. "He thought some kids were picking on his son. My son wasn't even the one who said anything. But he threatened to kill him."

Smith said he complained to the school and police. Robertson was never charged.

A local restaurant cashier said Robertson had a reputation in Canton, about 60 miles east of Dallas.

"I wouldn't say he was respected. But he was well-known," said Sister's Cafe cashier Diane Price, who said she has known Robertson for 37 years because he attended high school with her daughter. ___

(Associated Press writers Anabelle Garay and Bobby Ross Jr. in Dallas contributed to this report. )


-- XXOO Tanya