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<title>William Hazelgrove - EzineArticles Expert Author</title>
<link>http://EzineArticles.com/expert/William_Hazelgrove</link>
<pubDate>Wed, 15 Feb 2012 06:31:28 -0600</pubDate>
<image><title>William Hazelgrove - EzineArticles Expert Author</title>
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<copyright>Copyright 2012 EzineArticles.com - All Rights Reserved.</copyright>
<description><![CDATA[William Elliott Hazelgrove has written four novels, Ripples, Toacco Sticks, Mica Highways and Rocket Man. He is the Ernest Hemingway Writer in Residence and writes in the attic of Ernest Hemingway. His books  have been translated into many languages and chosen as Book of the Month Club Selections. He is the editor of the online magazine Speak Without Interruption.]]></description>
<lastBuildDate>Tue, 11 Jan 2011 20:58:10 -0600</lastBuildDate>
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<title>What College Doesn't Teach You About Writing</title>
<link>http://EzineArticles.com/5264922</link>
<guid>http://EzineArticles.com/5264922</guid>
<pubDate>Tue, 11 Jan 2011 20:58:10 -0600</pubDate>
<description><![CDATA[When I graduated college I sat down and read F. Scott Fitzgerald's This Side of Paradise and didn't know half the words. This is after I had received a Masters in History.]]></description>
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<title>Meeting Ernest Hemingway's Son-Jack Hemingway</title>
<link>http://EzineArticles.com/5377452</link>
<guid>http://EzineArticles.com/5377452</guid>
<pubDate>Mon, 22 Nov 2010 09:50:39 -0600</pubDate>
<description><![CDATA[One day I was working in the attic when Virginia Cassen the head of the Hemingway Foundation said to come on down. I had been in the attic for about five years and had gotten used to the tourists who went through the home and was more than glad to say a few words about writing in the attic. When I came down the stairs there was a man in a blue blazer and tie.]]></description>
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<title>Getting That First Novel Published</title>
<link>http://EzineArticles.com/5377457</link>
<guid>http://EzineArticles.com/5377457</guid>
<pubDate>Mon, 22 Nov 2010 09:42:52 -0600</pubDate>
<description><![CDATA[Publishing your first novel is like having a baby. It is very very hard. Of course the first novel is an experiment and you have no idea what you are doing.]]></description>
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<item>
<title>The Politics of Right and Left</title>
<link>http://EzineArticles.com/5377461</link>
<guid>http://EzineArticles.com/5377461</guid>
<pubDate>Mon, 22 Nov 2010 07:42:07 -0600</pubDate>
<description><![CDATA[The first thing we have to do is admit we are no longer watching news. We are watching political theatre. Theatre is fine.]]></description>
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<title>When You Know You Have to Leave Your Writing Group</title>
<link>http://EzineArticles.com/5264936</link>
<guid>http://EzineArticles.com/5264936</guid>
<pubDate>Thu, 28 Oct 2010 09:04:09 -0500</pubDate>
<description><![CDATA[You come into your writing group full of great intentions and are delighted to find kindred souls, people who do this brain cracking work of writing and for a long time you glide along with your fellow scribes. You look forward to reading your work and getting the feedback and now you have a thick skin and are able to ferret out the good criticism from the bad and you all sort of move along at the same pace and then suddenly like high school, you graduate...you get published.]]></description>
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<title>My First Writing Group</title>
<link>http://EzineArticles.com/5239022</link>
<guid>http://EzineArticles.com/5239022</guid>
<pubDate>Thu, 21 Oct 2010 22:06:29 -0500</pubDate>
<description><![CDATA[When I was grinding it out in Chicago trying to find a voice I saw an ad in the Chicago Tribune for a writers group on the West Side and decided to give it a try. I had been working like a monk for years on novels and short stories getting nowhere fast except for pasting my room above a Thai restaurant with form rejection letters. So on a hot summer evening I buzzed down Diversey Avenue on my motorcycle to an apartment on a ramshackle street of two flats and buzzed the door that had a small sign WRITERS...]]></description>
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<title>Your Book Has Been Delayed - Now What?</title>
<link>http://EzineArticles.com/5239047</link>
<guid>http://EzineArticles.com/5239047</guid>
<pubDate>Thu, 21 Oct 2010 22:06:18 -0500</pubDate>
<description><![CDATA[There is nothing easy about getting a book published and for most authors the final moment is seeing the book on the shelves in a bookstore. It is nice to get an advance copy in the mail and read it through just to see how it feels. But the end of the path lies in the stacks of the bookstore where you see the spine peeking out with your name on it and you feel the whole sweep from the very first word you wrote to the signing of a contract, receiving money, and finally, the placement among men and...]]></description>
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<title>Self Publishing in the Age of the Internet</title>
<link>http://EzineArticles.com/5239082</link>
<guid>http://EzineArticles.com/5239082</guid>
<pubDate>Thu, 21 Oct 2010 22:06:01 -0500</pubDate>
<description><![CDATA[The Internet is empowerment. This is what we always hear. It gives everyone a chance to be seen, heard from, opinion, publish, record, you name it and you an do it.]]></description>
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<title>The New Beat Generation of the Great Recession</title>
<link>http://EzineArticles.com/5168301</link>
<guid>http://EzineArticles.com/5168301</guid>
<pubDate>Thu, 14 Oct 2010 14:21:55 -0500</pubDate>
<description><![CDATA[I wrote Rocket Man two years ago and thought that by the time it came out the recession would be over. But I wrote the novel thinking someone should come to grips with his awful calamity grinding up the middle class. Little did I know we would still be in the belly of the beast at the time of publication.]]></description>
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<title>Falling Off the Franzen Train</title>
<link>http://EzineArticles.com/5168271</link>
<guid>http://EzineArticles.com/5168271</guid>
<pubDate>Thu, 14 Oct 2010 13:59:59 -0500</pubDate>
<description><![CDATA[The problem with reading a book that everyone says is great is it colors your natural inclination to decide for yourself if you like the book or not. Writers start out being told what books they should read. The Classics.]]></description>
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<title>Writer Cars</title>
<link>http://EzineArticles.com/5168277</link>
<guid>http://EzineArticles.com/5168277</guid>
<pubDate>Thu, 14 Oct 2010 13:57:05 -0500</pubDate>
<description><![CDATA[Now the writers car should have no payment. This is a must. This prevents the writers car from being snatched when times get hard.]]></description>
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<title>The White Hot Furnace of Fiction</title>
<link>http://EzineArticles.com/5168285</link>
<guid>http://EzineArticles.com/5168285</guid>
<pubDate>Thu, 14 Oct 2010 13:32:37 -0500</pubDate>
<description><![CDATA[You have to live it to some degree. You have to be committed and yes money ruins you. Fiction writing is not a parlor trick you sit in your armchair and play.]]></description>
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<title>Maybe We Should Just Forget About Retirement</title>
<link>http://EzineArticles.com/5011921</link>
<guid>http://EzineArticles.com/5011921</guid>
<pubDate>Wed, 15 Sep 2010 15:49:14 -0500</pubDate>
<description><![CDATA[Retirement. Where does that come from? Some sort of hangover from the World War II generation. Certainly the people who grew up in the last Great Depression never thought about retirement. Something companies and stock brokers came up with so people would invest their money]]></description>
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<title>The Problem With the Kindle</title>
<link>http://EzineArticles.com/5011886</link>
<guid>http://EzineArticles.com/5011886</guid>
<pubDate>Wed, 15 Sep 2010 15:39:21 -0500</pubDate>
<description><![CDATA[The problem with the Kindle is it changes fiction. So I have always taken the view that if anyone wants to read my novel on a screen that is fine. But then as I was reading from that dinosaur of pulp and ink...the book....it hit me. Reading fiction from a screen is different than reading it from paper.]]></description>
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<title>Even Twain Was Broke</title>
<link>http://EzineArticles.com/4902908</link>
<guid>http://EzineArticles.com/4902908</guid>
<pubDate>Fri, 27 Aug 2010 17:58:37 -0500</pubDate>
<description><![CDATA[You would think a man who was one of the bestselling authors of his time would not have financial difficulties. Just finished biography The Singular Mark Twain and I was amazed that apart from marrying well and making very good money from his books and lecturing--he had to file bankruptcy and died with very little money that was squandered by his daughters. When reading Twain's biography you are struck at how much money he made and how much he lost.]]></description>
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<title>Bookstores Might Go the Way of Record Stores</title>
<link>http://EzineArticles.com/4902914</link>
<guid>http://EzineArticles.com/4902914</guid>
<pubDate>Thu, 26 Aug 2010 18:33:23 -0500</pubDate>
<description><![CDATA[Think about it. You know that bookstore you love to browse through and find your favorite book, maybe discover a new author, stand and read in the aisle...imagine that bookstore in your computer now. That could be the future.]]></description>
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<title>The Elusive American Vacation</title>
<link>http://EzineArticles.com/4829673</link>
<guid>http://EzineArticles.com/4829673</guid>
<pubDate>Fri, 13 Aug 2010 14:41:37 -0500</pubDate>
<description><![CDATA[Taking our family on vacation is not what it used to be. It can be downright exhausting.]]></description>
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<title>Return of the Fedora - Men Might Dress Like Men Again</title>
<link>http://EzineArticles.com/4755920</link>
<guid>http://EzineArticles.com/4755920</guid>
<pubDate>Tue, 10 Aug 2010 14:02:20 -0500</pubDate>
<description><![CDATA[The great American boy man might be in trouble. American men see themselves as large boys. We have ever since the Who decided they would rather die than get old and then of course they got old.]]></description>
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<title>Do We Really Need Gifted Programs in Our Schools?</title>
<link>http://EzineArticles.com/4755977</link>
<guid>http://EzineArticles.com/4755977</guid>
<pubDate>Tue, 03 Aug 2010 15:24:52 -0500</pubDate>
<description><![CDATA[I was at a party of women the other night and inevitable discussion turned to children and schools and who was in what program and then the word made its debut for the night...Gifted. "My son is in a gifted program and I really don't think the teacher is challenging him enough and I let the principal know I wanted a better teacher," one woman rambled who had several children in gifted programs. ]]></description>
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<title>End of the Hardcover With the More Affordable Kindle?</title>
<link>http://EzineArticles.com/4755912</link>
<guid>http://EzineArticles.com/4755912</guid>
<pubDate>Tue, 03 Aug 2010 15:05:55 -0500</pubDate>
<description><![CDATA[You want that book but you don't want to pay twenty five dollars for it. Much like that song you wanted on that CD that you didn't want to pay twenty dollars for it. Books may become quaint artifacts to a simpler time as the price of Kindles fall (about 200) There are people who simply don't want to read a book on a screen and for them there will always be a paper alternative.]]></description>
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<title>Death of the Independent Bookstore</title>
<link>http://EzineArticles.com/4755947</link>
<guid>http://EzineArticles.com/4755947</guid>
<pubDate>Tue, 03 Aug 2010 14:59:44 -0500</pubDate>
<description><![CDATA[No big news but another independent bookstore has bit the dust. Barbaras Books of Oak Park has gone the way of so many and left only an eight by eleven paper stuck to the door to explain that after forty years they have gone out of business. Of course the death of the independent bookstore has been a foregone conclusion for years since the superstores moved into town.]]></description>
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<title>Our Casablanca - Restless Americans Have to Wait and Wait and Wait</title>
<link>http://EzineArticles.com/4229811</link>
<guid>http://EzineArticles.com/4229811</guid>
<pubDate>Thu, 06 May 2010 08:19:10 -0500</pubDate>
<description><![CDATA[We are in Casablanca. We are all waiting for the next plane to Lisbon and we will do anything to get our travel vouchers allowing us to move on. Americans are restless.]]></description>
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<title>Maybe Democrats and Republicans Just Plain Don't Like Each Other</title>
<link>http://EzineArticles.com/4229801</link>
<guid>http://EzineArticles.com/4229801</guid>
<pubDate>Thu, 06 May 2010 08:15:20 -0500</pubDate>
<description><![CDATA[Maybe, maybe these two groups viscerally can't stand being around each other. Take Healthcare Reform. Not one. Count it. Not one Republican vote.]]></description>
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<title>Southern Boys and the Lost Cause</title>
<link>http://EzineArticles.com/4096874</link>
<guid>http://EzineArticles.com/4096874</guid>
<pubDate>Wed, 14 Apr 2010 16:14:57 -0500</pubDate>
<description><![CDATA[It is different growing up in the South. I had read Gone With the Wind ten times by the time I was sixteen. Not that this is normal, but the literary culture of the South is permeated with echoes of the Lost Cause.]]></description>
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<title>The Tyranny of the Left and the Right</title>
<link>http://EzineArticles.com/4096892</link>
<guid>http://EzineArticles.com/4096892</guid>
<pubDate>Wed, 14 Apr 2010 14:57:56 -0500</pubDate>
<description><![CDATA[We are all victims. Right and Left. We get pulled into a vortex no one can stop.]]></description>
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<title>The Mirage of the American Dream</title>
<link>http://EzineArticles.com/4057446</link>
<guid>http://EzineArticles.com/4057446</guid>
<pubDate>Tue, 13 Apr 2010 10:12:00 -0500</pubDate>
<description><![CDATA[Down here in Naples Florida is where it all ends. The American Dream takes its place among the palm trees and the small pools and the endless heat. This is where the payoff should be as we read about a world gone mad.]]></description>
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<title>The American Vacation is Becoming Extinct</title>
<link>http://EzineArticles.com/4057428</link>
<guid>http://EzineArticles.com/4057428</guid>
<pubDate>Fri, 09 Apr 2010 07:41:35 -0500</pubDate>
<description><![CDATA[The American vacation doesn't exist anymore. Used to be our parents would take a couple of weeks without cellphones and computers and would just call in. Amazing.]]></description>
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<title>Go West Young Man - Review of Raymond Carver - A Writer's Life</title>
<link>http://EzineArticles.com/4057419</link>
<guid>http://EzineArticles.com/4057419</guid>
<pubDate>Fri, 09 Apr 2010 02:22:25 -0500</pubDate>
<description><![CDATA[Every writer has to find his way. That is the nub of writing fiction. There is no clear path generally speaking and so it becomes a make it up as you go right from the start.]]></description>
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<title>Conversation Salons - A Solution For Our Divided Nation?</title>
<link>http://EzineArticles.com/3816136</link>
<guid>http://EzineArticles.com/3816136</guid>
<pubDate>Thu, 25 Feb 2010 10:42:55 -0600</pubDate>
<description><![CDATA[Went to a Conversation Salon the other night. In case you haven't heard these are gatherings of people who want to talk issues. In a time when people are tuned into either Fox or MSNBC I thought this might be a good opportunity to hash out the issues in a controlled environment.]]></description>
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<title>Republican States Are Spankers While Democratic States Give Time Outs</title>
<link>http://EzineArticles.com/3763136</link>
<guid>http://EzineArticles.com/3763136</guid>
<pubDate>Wed, 17 Feb 2010 08:49:10 -0600</pubDate>
<description><![CDATA[Research shows that Republican states are spankers while Democratic states are time out people. What are we to take from this? Spanking is a very black and white punishment. You have done something wrong and now you will be punished. ]]></description>
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<title>Glimmers of Haiti in Illinois Quake</title>
<link>http://EzineArticles.com/3737999</link>
<guid>http://EzineArticles.com/3737999</guid>
<pubDate>Thu, 11 Feb 2010 21:40:35 -0600</pubDate>
<description><![CDATA[You wake thinking something exploded. Someone hit the house with a hammer and everything shook. You jump out of bed because something has just happened, and yet the house is quiet.]]></description>
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<title>The United States is Losing Oxygen</title>
<link>http://EzineArticles.com/3673834</link>
<guid>http://EzineArticles.com/3673834</guid>
<pubDate>Tue, 02 Feb 2010 16:47:26 -0600</pubDate>
<description><![CDATA[After Apollo 13's oxygen tank blew a hole and started venting precious oxygen into space and the craft started to tumble like a tin can in a dryer and all the computers restarted and every system on board read failure, Gene Krantz the flight director turned and said, lets forget about what's not working...tell me what works? The engineer stared at him and said, I'll get back to you on that Gene. We now have to ask the same question about our deadlocked government. What works?]]></description>
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<title>Rest in Peace Holden Caulfield - Catcher in the Rye Author Passes on</title>
<link>http://EzineArticles.com/3659913</link>
<guid>http://EzineArticles.com/3659913</guid>
<pubDate>Fri, 29 Jan 2010 16:51:06 -0600</pubDate>
<description><![CDATA[You cannot be an American writer and not come to grips with "A Catcher in the Rye." The quintessential first person coming of age changed the bar for all writers when it's laconic wise guy narrator took the field and offended our sensibilities. He hated everyone and most of all himself.]]></description>
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<title>Grace Under Pressure - President Obama's Hard Decision</title>
<link>http://EzineArticles.com/3647670</link>
<guid>http://EzineArticles.com/3647670</guid>
<pubDate>Thu, 28 Jan 2010 12:14:01 -0600</pubDate>
<description><![CDATA[Grace under Pressure was Hemingway's definition of courage. It certainly rings true as President Barack Obama faces his second year in office. Being a President is not a popularity contest and the will of the people is a relative term.]]></description>
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<title>Can We Afford a Visionary For a President Now?</title>
<link>http://EzineArticles.com/3647032</link>
<guid>http://EzineArticles.com/3647032</guid>
<pubDate>Wed, 27 Jan 2010 19:43:07 -0600</pubDate>
<description><![CDATA[F Scott Fitzgerald said in the opening of The Great Gatsby, "I was going to become that most limited of all specialist the well rounded man. This isn't an epigram, life is more successfully looked at from a single window after all." Certainly President Obama is that most limited of specialists.]]></description>
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<title>A Nation of Squatters - The Suburbs of America</title>
<link>http://EzineArticles.com/3647010</link>
<guid>http://EzineArticles.com/3647010</guid>
<pubDate>Wed, 27 Jan 2010 19:42:41 -0600</pubDate>
<description><![CDATA[When I wrote my last novel Rocket Man about a man struggling to keep his home, I emphasized the chaos of the American Dream and threw everything but the kitchen sink at my poor main character. Now this fictional character seems to have moved down the pike into the mainstream of suburban America. A bank representative told me years ago that what we would have in this country is a nation of squatters.]]></description>
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<title>Was Barack Obama Too Inexperienced to Be President?</title>
<link>http://EzineArticles.com/3620513</link>
<guid>http://EzineArticles.com/3620513</guid>
<pubDate>Mon, 25 Jan 2010 09:01:05 -0600</pubDate>
<description><![CDATA[In the early days of Obama's run for President a lot of people said he had no experience. Remember all those people who said this guy had just been a Senator for a couple years and did he really have the experience to walk into the ring and govern and be the leader of the Free World. Barack wrote a couple books and gave some outstanding speeches and then the economy tanked.]]></description>
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<title>President Obama Does Not Like Washington</title>
<link>http://EzineArticles.com/3613511</link>
<guid>http://EzineArticles.com/3613511</guid>
<pubDate>Fri, 22 Jan 2010 11:10:05 -0600</pubDate>
<description><![CDATA[President Obama does not like the White House. It is easy to see that. He takes every opportunity to book out of there.]]></description>
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<title>The Politics of Obscurity - A Writers Worst Nightmare</title>
<link>http://EzineArticles.com/3613489</link>
<guid>http://EzineArticles.com/3613489</guid>
<pubDate>Fri, 22 Jan 2010 10:59:58 -0600</pubDate>
<description><![CDATA[We live in a age when fame is the ultimate bar of success. John Kennedy Toole - how many people have heard of him?]]></description>
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<title>Why We Vote</title>
<link>http://EzineArticles.com/3613478</link>
<guid>http://EzineArticles.com/3613478</guid>
<pubDate>Fri, 22 Jan 2010 10:33:01 -0600</pubDate>
<description><![CDATA[People are either Republican or Democrat, conservative or liberal. But this says nothing about why we vote. It is not the issue.]]></description>
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<title>Will All Writing Be Outsourced in the Future</title>
<link>http://EzineArticles.com/3566156</link>
<guid>http://EzineArticles.com/3566156</guid>
<pubDate>Thu, 21 Jan 2010 15:08:50 -0600</pubDate>
<description><![CDATA[There was an article in the New York Times recently about how writing is now being outsourced to India. Newspapers are now employing someone in India to write about what is happening in Scranton. Amazing.]]></description>
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<title>Our New Religion - People Stay Wired Even During Christmas</title>
<link>http://EzineArticles.com/3485022</link>
<guid>http://EzineArticles.com/3485022</guid>
<pubDate>Wed, 30 Dec 2009 09:26:06 -0600</pubDate>
<description><![CDATA[Well the holidays are over. How many of you really unplugged? How many stowed your Blackberrys, let your laptops cool, shutdown your desktops. Some maybe. But a lot of people stay wired through the holidays, even on Christmas. My own holiday was one of navigating screens. I was with people who couldn't get away from their laptops even on Christmas. ]]></description>
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<title>The Pursuit of Happiness - Healthcare is a Right</title>
<link>http://EzineArticles.com/3443877</link>
<guid>http://EzineArticles.com/3443877</guid>
<pubDate>Fri, 18 Dec 2009 11:53:54 -0600</pubDate>
<description><![CDATA[We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. So if we are to take these words at their core and apply them to the year 2009 then we must extrapolate that all people are created equal and have certain inalienable rights and one of them has to be have equal and fair heathcare. ]]></description>
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<title>The United States Must Change</title>
<link>http://EzineArticles.com/3443854</link>
<guid>http://EzineArticles.com/3443854</guid>
<pubDate>Fri, 18 Dec 2009 11:50:24 -0600</pubDate>
<description><![CDATA[Our country is in decline. You see it when you drive around and see all the dirty little towns and river communities that are in decay. You see the rust belt cities where industry left and will never return. You see it in the realtor's sitting in empty offices and the mortgage brokers looking for work. You see it in the men passing the day in Starbucks and the silent factories and abandoned shopping malls.]]></description>
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<title>The Offering - Finishing Your Novel</title>
<link>http://EzineArticles.com/3443889</link>
<guid>http://EzineArticles.com/3443889</guid>
<pubDate>Fri, 18 Dec 2009 11:03:05 -0600</pubDate>
<description><![CDATA[Finishing a novel is a bit like making an offering. You spend years of your life moving toward this moment. A novel begins with an idea and finishes like a symphony. Then once you have finally dotted the last i and crossed the last t you send it off into oblivion quite unsure what will happen. You send off two and a half years of your life in a 81/2 by 11 box not sure if it will find a home or be relegated to the dust heaps of a slush pile. Maybe you have some novels published before and this will have to follow those trail blazers. ]]></description>
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<title>The Tragedy of Sarah Palin</title>
<link>http://EzineArticles.com/3431505</link>
<guid>http://EzineArticles.com/3431505</guid>
<pubDate>Wed, 16 Dec 2009 17:12:59 -0600</pubDate>
<description><![CDATA[Do you know that in Japan you can walk up to a train station and scan in your schedule with your cellphone? Do you know that in Germany you can page through a magazine and if you see a recipe you like or a particular article or a list of places to go you can just swipe your phone across it and you will then have the recipe in your phone or the article or the list. You can slip your phone across a subway turnstile and board the train.]]></description>
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<title>Why the Banks Won't Lend You Money</title>
<link>http://EzineArticles.com/3431496</link>
<guid>http://EzineArticles.com/3431496</guid>
<pubDate>Wed, 16 Dec 2009 17:07:55 -0600</pubDate>
<description><![CDATA[If you are wondering why you cannot get a loan or your credit cards hit the stratosphere or your equity line was cut or why your refinance did not go through--here is the reason: the banks don't need you anymore. A little thing happened this week that most people don't even know about. FHA loans which are Government loans for homeowners just upped their loan requirements from a FICO requirement of 620 to a 640.]]></description>
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<title>Did it Ever Occur to You - We Are the Less Fortunate</title>
<link>http://EzineArticles.com/3431469</link>
<guid>http://EzineArticles.com/3431469</guid>
<pubDate>Wed, 16 Dec 2009 17:02:41 -0600</pubDate>
<description><![CDATA[Palin and the boys paint a picture of an American populace in the thrall of spend crazy Democrats who take honest folks money and spend it on health care and social programs to help the less fortunate. These millionaires in their Beck/Palin/Hannity buses harangue the President and the Democrats on losing touch with normal Americans to be at the beck and call of Wall Street and the elitist media talking heads who push them along with Global Warming legislation and other tax and spend programs to help those in need or the less fortunate. It is recognized that the...]]></description>
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<title>Have We Seen Enough Naked People in Bath Tubs?</title>
<link>http://EzineArticles.com/3431567</link>
<guid>http://EzineArticles.com/3431567</guid>
<pubDate>Wed, 16 Dec 2009 17:00:47 -0600</pubDate>
<description><![CDATA[You've seen it. You're sitting there with your kids watching Elf or some kid movie and here they come. A middle aged couple yucking it up over some wine and before you know it they are in the bathtubs in the yard holding hands, celebrating the fact that flaccidity has been banished with CIALIS.]]></description>
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<title>Maybe Americans Don't Want a Smart President</title>
<link>http://EzineArticles.com/3431554</link>
<guid>http://EzineArticles.com/3431554</guid>
<pubDate>Wed, 16 Dec 2009 16:55:54 -0600</pubDate>
<description><![CDATA[There is an old saying: never let anyone see how smart you are, they will cut you off at the knees. Certainly President Obama never heeded this little aphorism. He has shown us how smart he was time and again and he is paying a price.]]></description>
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<title>Carrie Prejean and Sarah Palin - Strange Bedfellows</title>
<link>http://EzineArticles.com/3419113</link>
<guid>http://EzineArticles.com/3419113</guid>
<pubDate>Tue, 15 Dec 2009 14:37:50 -0600</pubDate>
<description><![CDATA[Now on the surface you may say Carrie Prejean and Sarah Palin have little in common. But in the Celebrity Book Olympics they really are two peas in a pod. First lets talk about celebrity books in the year 2009.]]></description>
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<title>Almost Famous - Gate Crashers at the White House Doth Protest Too Much</title>
<link>http://EzineArticles.com/3411220</link>
<guid>http://EzineArticles.com/3411220</guid>
<pubDate>Fri, 11 Dec 2009 21:54:45 -0600</pubDate>
<description><![CDATA[If you watch the former cheerleader and horsey vineyard owner you start to feel what crept up when Richard Heene played his theme song for his science reality show and you realized that people will go to extreme lengths to become famous. The couple on Good Morning America talked in subdued tones of the egregiously injured--"our life has been torn away from us." They are somber and seem like toppled gentility until Matt Louer brings up another interview.]]></description>
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<title>Giving Up Plastic and Living on Cash</title>
<link>http://EzineArticles.com/3411202</link>
<guid>http://EzineArticles.com/3411202</guid>
<pubDate>Fri, 11 Dec 2009 21:53:00 -0600</pubDate>
<description><![CDATA[About six months ago we gave up plastic. Shock. Paralysis.]]></description>
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<title>Mr Smith Goes to Washington - An English Teacher Learns About Obama Culture</title>
<link>http://EzineArticles.com/3411166</link>
<guid>http://EzineArticles.com/3411166</guid>
<pubDate>Fri, 11 Dec 2009 21:52:32 -0600</pubDate>
<description><![CDATA[Michelle Obama declared she wanted to bring all things cultural back to the White House much the way Jackie Kennedy did and she even invoked the old Camelot moniker. All things cultural is a wide swath including state dinners, poetry readings, musical recitals, art, literature, great thinkers. Jackie Kennedy did it masterfully.]]></description>
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<title>Tis the Season - Those Christmas Letters We Love to Hate</title>
<link>http://EzineArticles.com/3411250</link>
<guid>http://EzineArticles.com/3411250</guid>
<pubDate>Fri, 11 Dec 2009 15:36:31 -0600</pubDate>
<description><![CDATA[Tis the season. They come in drips and drabs. One, two, three, then a flood as the yuletide approaches.]]></description>
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<title>No Peace in the Computer Age</title>
<link>http://EzineArticles.com/3411237</link>
<guid>http://EzineArticles.com/3411237</guid>
<pubDate>Fri, 11 Dec 2009 15:35:22 -0600</pubDate>
<description><![CDATA[These days, there is Marcelline's old steamer trunk, a wine bottle from Spain, a cello, two wrought-iron gas stanchions from the late 19th century and National Geographics from 1912, 1915, and 1918 complete with scribbling on the pages from Ernest's father, or perhaps from Ernest himself. There are two small lithographs from 1945 advertising bullfights in Spanish, parts of a Victorian bed and a crib, as well as boxes and boxes of bronze heads that look curiously like the great writer, marked "Hemingway Busts." There are doors propped up that are from the days when a young Ernest Hemingway...]]></description>
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<title>The Rich Just Get Richer</title>
<link>http://EzineArticles.com/3137231</link>
<guid>http://EzineArticles.com/3137231</guid>
<pubDate>Wed, 28 Oct 2009 22:26:59 -0500</pubDate>
<description><![CDATA[Well now, why isn't the economy turning around? Why is the combined unemployment and underemployment in this country topping twenty percent?]]></description>
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<title>What the Far Right Fears</title>
<link>http://EzineArticles.com/2837910</link>
<guid>http://EzineArticles.com/2837910</guid>
<pubDate>Fri, 25 Sep 2009 07:41:35 -0500</pubDate>
<description><![CDATA["What the right as a whole fears is the erosion of it's own social position, the collapse of it's power, the increasing incomprehensibility of a world--now overwhelmingly technical and complex--that has changed so drastically within a lifetime." Interesting words from a New York Times op ed piece. I think the first part is fairly obvious, but it is the last line that is fascinating. A world now overwhelmingly technical and complex that has changed so drastically within a lifetime. Politics aside for a moment--this is really at the crux of our world now--the change heaped upon a people who can't even get the right channel from a remote.]]></description>
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<title>The Last Kennedy</title>
<link>http://EzineArticles.com/2837832</link>
<guid>http://EzineArticles.com/2837832</guid>
<pubDate>Wed, 16 Sep 2009 09:25:33 -0500</pubDate>
<description><![CDATA[I grew up in Baltimore and Virginia and my parents were Kennedy liberals. They loved JFK much the same way people love Obama today.  It was the hope and passion and idealism that John Kennedy inspired, and even as a very small child I can remember seeing the funeral on the television after he was assassinated.]]></description>
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<title>American Vacations - Do We Take Them Anymore?</title>
<link>http://EzineArticles.com/2837890</link>
<guid>http://EzineArticles.com/2837890</guid>
<pubDate>Wed, 16 Sep 2009 07:52:22 -0500</pubDate>
<description><![CDATA[A German friend of mine said the other day that Americans are the most overworked people in the world. "Ja, what is wrong with these people they never relax...you people work too hard..." Another friend of mine never uses his vacation days and in the winter he broods about how he will have to sit home for a week and use up his days.]]></description>
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<title>Watching Ourselves on Cable</title>
<link>http://EzineArticles.com/2837872</link>
<guid>http://EzineArticles.com/2837872</guid>
<pubDate>Wed, 16 Sep 2009 07:45:06 -0500</pubDate>
<description><![CDATA[Vapidity aside...is it just me or has cable become the dumping ground of all that is cheap, shallow, worthless, produced in a nanosecond on a shoestring with a gnats intelligence? Certainly the pay channels are the only refuge now. I was just reading David Foster Wallaces' essay on television written in 1990 and not much has changed. Or has it?]]></description>
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<title>Politics  In Polite Company - What We Really Don't Talk About</title>
<link>http://EzineArticles.com/2442074</link>
<guid>http://EzineArticles.com/2442074</guid>
<pubDate>Wed, 10 Jun 2009 09:49:58 -0500</pubDate>
<description><![CDATA[Ever bring up politics at a social gathering? It's like someone turned on the gas. People leave the room, people look away, they quickly veer away from the subject.]]></description>
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<title>The Snows of Disbelief - The Fiction of Our Times</title>
<link>http://EzineArticles.com/2442079</link>
<guid>http://EzineArticles.com/2442079</guid>
<pubDate>Wed, 10 Jun 2009 08:05:47 -0500</pubDate>
<description><![CDATA[We don't really understand fiction anymore. You assume people know who Ernest Hemingway is."Wasn't he that writer guy?" A biography comes on television and he pops up in old films of movie stars or on a safari, but that time is past and the century is gone.]]></description>
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<title>Lindbergh and Flight 447 - What Has Changed?</title>
<link>http://EzineArticles.com/2442026</link>
<guid>http://EzineArticles.com/2442026</guid>
<pubDate>Wed, 10 Jun 2009 08:00:23 -0500</pubDate>
<description><![CDATA[Lindbergh flew the Atlantic over eighty years ago. He had a single engine plane with barely enough room for himself and his small lunch in a brown paper bag. The plane was filled with gasoline tanks and weight was so critical he couldn't even see ahead and had to use a periscope. When he flew over the ocean he had to use dead reckoning to figure out where he was going.]]></description>
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<title>The Downloadable Classroom</title>
<link>http://EzineArticles.com/2442014</link>
<guid>http://EzineArticles.com/2442014</guid>
<pubDate>Wed, 10 Jun 2009 07:58:22 -0500</pubDate>
<description><![CDATA[If you have kids in school now then you are in the down loadable classroom. Now we are all teachers. If little Johnny or Suzy has a problem the teacher simply downloads it to the parent. The download comes in the form of emails, websites, twitters, webinars. You name it, teachers discovered the cyber world has a built in time saver--you download all your problems to the parents and you have done your job.]]></description>
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<title>Travel Sports - Boomers Gone Bad</title>
<link>http://EzineArticles.com/2442053</link>
<guid>http://EzineArticles.com/2442053</guid>
<pubDate>Tue, 09 Jun 2009 16:40:34 -0500</pubDate>
<description><![CDATA[Used to be you just played baseball or soccer of football. There was Little League and Pony League and the Majors but after that you played for a school. If you are a parent then you know what has come to fill in the gap for the passionate sport parent who doesn't get enough time with their child.]]></description>
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<title>Between Enthusiasm and Money - Interview With the Author of Sideways - Rex Pickett</title>
<link>http://EzineArticles.com/2351406</link>
<guid>http://EzineArticles.com/2351406</guid>
<pubDate>Tue, 19 May 2009 11:30:55 -0500</pubDate>
<description><![CDATA[In a time when Kirstie Alley is on the cover of People Magazine for gaining eighty seven pounds, Elizabeth Edwards rules the airwaves with a book that promises to dish dirt on her husbands affair and possible love child - do we care about the novelist who puts it all on the line? We better. It's our only chance for great stories.]]></description>
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<title>All the President's Men - Where Will the Next Woodward and Bernstein Be Found?</title>
<link>http://EzineArticles.com/2351429</link>
<guid>http://EzineArticles.com/2351429</guid>
<pubDate>Tue, 19 May 2009 09:31:54 -0500</pubDate>
<description><![CDATA[What will the death of the newspapers mean to journalism? Where will the next Woodward and Bernstein be found?]]></description>
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<title>Dog the Bounty Hunter - Our New Fiction</title>
<link>http://EzineArticles.com/2351436</link>
<guid>http://EzineArticles.com/2351436</guid>
<pubDate>Tue, 19 May 2009 09:05:58 -0500</pubDate>
<description><![CDATA[An exhausted populace has little appetite for a book and we are an exhausted populace. As E.M Forester observed long ago--art is for a man with a full belly.]]></description>
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<title>Should We Care What Miss USA Thinks?</title>
<link>http://EzineArticles.com/2271183</link>
<guid>http://EzineArticles.com/2271183</guid>
<pubDate>Wed, 29 Apr 2009 07:46:16 -0500</pubDate>
<description><![CDATA[Anita Bryant sold a hell of a lot of orange juice as Miss America. She sold it as a darling of the right espousing family values. ]]></description>
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<title>The Wolves Will Come - The Permanent Unemployed</title>
<link>http://EzineArticles.com/2252556</link>
<guid>http://EzineArticles.com/2252556</guid>
<pubDate>Sat, 25 Apr 2009 15:31:32 -0500</pubDate>
<description><![CDATA[What will happen to the unemployed whose jobs will never come back?  The best and the brightest from older generations left in the dust.]]></description>
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<title>The Sum of Our Liabilities and Assets - Man Kills Family Over Debt</title>
<link>http://EzineArticles.com/2252191</link>
<guid>http://EzineArticles.com/2252191</guid>
<pubDate>Sat, 25 Apr 2009 11:57:46 -0500</pubDate>
<description><![CDATA[My very Southern father used to say to me, "you are not the sum of your liabilities and assets." Or around Christmas when he spent more than we had, he would say "It's" only money." Of course the horrific story of the man who shot his wife and three children over four hundred and sixty thousand dollars in debt and a vacation home he couldn't' sell, is beyond horrific.]]></description>
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<title>Our Google Fame - Does it Matter?</title>
<link>http://EzineArticles.com/2250890</link>
<guid>http://EzineArticles.com/2250890</guid>
<pubDate>Fri, 24 Apr 2009 16:39:52 -0500</pubDate>
<description><![CDATA[I have a photo in my office of the Wright Brothers historic flight where they hit the air for twelve seconds. That was all it took and they were famous. We live in an age now where millions of people look for that twelve seconds.]]></description>
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<title>Death of General Motors - Team Geitner Cleans House</title>
<link>http://EzineArticles.com/2217927</link>
<guid>http://EzineArticles.com/2217927</guid>
<pubDate>Thu, 16 Apr 2009 15:51:26 -0500</pubDate>
<description><![CDATA[Geitner and the boys have told GM to get ready to file bankruptcy. GM is already spinning it as a "quick bankruptcy". Quick or slow the result will be the same. There will be a new GM and an old GM. You better hope you aren't at the old GM. The old GM will be dismantled, factories sold off, people terminated, unions busted, shareholders wiped out. The pension will be tossed into the new GM, but guess what, it is a cool thirteen billion light, so the Government (us) will pick up that tab. But the unions will take it on the chin. Basically, the era of the union will end when GM slips into BK land.
]]></description>
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<title>The New Auto Mechanics - Doctors and Dentists</title>
<link>http://EzineArticles.com/2201163</link>
<guid>http://EzineArticles.com/2201163</guid>
<pubDate>Tue, 14 Apr 2009 11:54:36 -0500</pubDate>
<description><![CDATA[Have you noticed something? The new auto mechanics are doctors and dentists. Ever go into one of those fast lube places and some guy with no teeth holding a dirty air filter slouches over to your chair. "I highly recommend you replace this puppy if I were you and I noticed your fuel injectors haven' been cleaned and your radiator ain't been flushed and your differentials need the oil changed...for you just be bout six hundred and some change." We usually just nod and say, no, just change the oil with the tacit understand that this is the way the game is played. They try and make money and you say no thank you.]]></description>
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<title>The Cyber Author</title>
<link>http://EzineArticles.com/2200492</link>
<guid>http://EzineArticles.com/2200492</guid>
<pubDate>Tue, 14 Apr 2009 11:45:18 -0500</pubDate>
<description><![CDATA[There just isn't enough time in the day. Not if you have a new book out. Used to be you would do a few signings and some radio interviews, maybe a little television. Not exactly a leisure pace, but you felt like marketing a book had some tempo, some sense of progression. ]]></description>
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<title>Mad Dogs and Englishmen - The Demonstrations in London</title>
<link>http://EzineArticles.com/2177608</link>
<guid>http://EzineArticles.com/2177608</guid>
<pubDate>Wed, 08 Apr 2009 15:32:37 -0500</pubDate>
<description><![CDATA[So we were sitting there at dinner when on comes a revolution. The young Englishmen were in the streets in London getting bashed by the Bobbies. Blood streaming down foreheads and shouting young men being pulled back into the crowd put me back to when I was kid watching the college demonstrations for that Indochina war that never quite worked out.]]></description>
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<title>The Great American Payoff - Maybe We Should Rethink Retirement</title>
<link>http://EzineArticles.com/2164042</link>
<guid>http://EzineArticles.com/2164042</guid>
<pubDate>Mon, 06 Apr 2009 14:37:57 -0500</pubDate>
<description><![CDATA[The Great American Payoff is retirement but will we be too old and burned out to enjoy it? Who will really make it to the Golden Years now?]]></description>
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<title>A Pebble Might Start an Avalanche</title>
<link>http://EzineArticles.com/2155402</link>
<guid>http://EzineArticles.com/2155402</guid>
<pubDate>Fri, 03 Apr 2009 10:36:14 -0500</pubDate>
<description><![CDATA[Its that last query that might make the difference. Even a small email could start a bestseller.]]></description>
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<title>The Three Percent</title>
<link>http://EzineArticles.com/2122306</link>
<guid>http://EzineArticles.com/2122306</guid>
<pubDate>Mon, 30 Mar 2009 11:59:50 -0500</pubDate>
<description><![CDATA[What is really behind the AIG bonus rage is the suspicion that there is a group of people in this country who are laughing their way to the bank. It is that old idiom that ninety seven percent of the money is given to three percent of the people and the remaining ninety seven percent must split the remaining three percent. AIG bears this out. But what is really behind our collective outrage is that this group of people who seem to have it all don't work for their money. They don't. Ivy League schools dump out business graduates and they are snapped up by companies like AIG who put them in positions that require six figure retention bonuses. Normal people do not get hundreds of thousands of dollars for staying on the job. ]]></description>
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<title>What Do We Do With Our Money Now?</title>
<link>http://EzineArticles.com/2102542</link>
<guid>http://EzineArticles.com/2102542</guid>
<pubDate>Tue, 24 Mar 2009 14:13:21 -0500</pubDate>
<description><![CDATA[Who wants to be a millionaire? Where do we put our money now? Ludicrous isn't it? The get rich quick reality shows are still on television. Sort of like watching reruns of Seinfeld from the nineties when people cared about George Costanza's meditations at the diner.]]></description>
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<title>All the Sad Lonely Men of Starbucks</title>
<link>http://EzineArticles.com/2095308</link>
<guid>http://EzineArticles.com/2095308</guid>
<pubDate>Mon, 23 Mar 2009 14:06:01 -0500</pubDate>
<description><![CDATA[The unemployed men descent on coffee houses. All the sad lonely men of our time.]]></description>
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<title>Pulp Memories</title>
<link>http://EzineArticles.com/2095129</link>
<guid>http://EzineArticles.com/2095129</guid>
<pubDate>Mon, 23 Mar 2009 13:56:09 -0500</pubDate>
<description><![CDATA[The move from pulp based books to digital. The fact is people are going to go with what is accessible, convenient and cheap.]]></description>
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<title>Our Cyberland Addiction</title>
<link>http://EzineArticles.com/2094141</link>
<guid>http://EzineArticles.com/2094141</guid>
<pubDate>Mon, 23 Mar 2009 13:21:49 -0500</pubDate>
<description><![CDATA[Once upon a time you wrote a book and then you put it out there and did some readings, some media, then hoped for the best. Those days are long gone. The cyber-author is a twenty-four-seven author.]]></description>
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<title>Depression Jeopardy</title>
<link>http://EzineArticles.com/2086917</link>
<guid>http://EzineArticles.com/2086917</guid>
<pubDate>Fri, 20 Mar 2009 13:16:11 -0500</pubDate>
<description><![CDATA[A round of Jeopardy with Rush Limbaugh, President Obama, Senator McCain and a Bank President. The topic is the Depression.]]></description>
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<title>Ageless Rock</title>
<link>http://EzineArticles.com/2085332</link>
<guid>http://EzineArticles.com/2085332</guid>
<pubDate>Thu, 19 Mar 2009 16:26:37 -0500</pubDate>
<description><![CDATA[I watch bad television late at night and so I am victim to all the bad shows and infomercials. I am the man riding herd on the late night charlatans and collections of the Greatest Music of All Time--The Sixties! So of course I had to watch the reunions of the British Invasion.]]></description>
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<title>The Times They Are a Changing</title>
<link>http://EzineArticles.com/2086663</link>
<guid>http://EzineArticles.com/2086663</guid>
<pubDate>Thu, 19 Mar 2009 16:11:44 -0500</pubDate>
<description><![CDATA[Bob Dylan could be singing today and he would be as on as he was in 1964 when he penned that song of social upheaval. Forget about the stimulus package, it is now the progressive package. Forget about the economy. We are having a revolution. The old ways have not worked and they are DEAD. We are in the new world now like it or not. Global Warming is our problem. Health Care is our issue. The socialists are in the saddle, the liberals, the progressives. Why? Because the people were hungry for change. Not the left, not the liberals, not the socialist, not Barack Obama...the people. We are going to rebuild the country and take the lead in education now. Not because Barack Obama says it must be so but because the Country says it must be so. ]]></description>
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<title>Citizen Reviewers</title>
<link>http://EzineArticles.com/2085301</link>
<guid>http://EzineArticles.com/2085301</guid>
<pubDate>Wed, 18 Mar 2009 13:45:53 -0500</pubDate>
<description><![CDATA[How many people read the New York Times Book Review? Raise your hands. Hmmm...small crowd. How many people go and buy the books after reading a NYT Book Review? Extremely small crowd. My novel was reviewed in the New York Times and I did regard it as a benchmark, a status symbol of the novelist finally arrived. I do read the New York Times Book Review. Religiously. Every Sunday. But I must confess to a feeling akin to reading short stories in The Saturday Evening Post and that is I am reading something that belongs to a different time. The books reviewed are of a certain staple: fiction, international fiction with protagonists who overcome incredible odds in war torn regions.  Not that this is bad content....but it is no secret that book sections in the major newspapers are vanishing. ]]></description>
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<title>Generation Jones</title>
<link>http://EzineArticles.com/1776413</link>
<guid>http://EzineArticles.com/1776413</guid>
<pubDate>Thu, 12 Mar 2009 10:11:41 -0500</pubDate>
<description><![CDATA[Novel Rocket Man sums up Generation Jones. A new novel being hailed as the forty something's Catcher In the Rye.  It has targeted the generation between Generation X and Boomers.

]]></description>
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