Grant was notorious for drinking VERY heavily whenever he was bored. During the Wilderness Campaign he was drunk almost constantly, and his staff pretty much ran things. As far as he being a "great" general, that's nonsense. The difference between he and Meade, McLellan, Burnside and the others is that they were utterly incompetent in warfare, whereas he was competent. And his competance consisted primarily of throwing so many more men into the meat grinder that eventually Lee had to capitulate, as he had so few. Neither of them was nearly as great as the claims made for them.

His Presidency was notorious for lauding personal loyalty over competence (sound familiar?), and he was a first-class cronyist.

He went broke because he invested in the wrong firm.

The one thing I can say for Grant is that when he found out he was dying he worked on his memoirs until he could no longer lift up his pen so as to keep his family out of poverty. He succeeded in that. He genuinely succeeded in little else.

That should have read "banana_fish." Sorry.

I have a friend in France who is literally depressed by the election of this right-wing trogladyte. And she's not alone. How about a story or two about the French and what they think of their new president?

Sorry, Gary, but "we" did not beat Hitler or save the world. At best, the Allies assisted the Soviet Union in its thorough destruction of Nazi Germany, so much so that even Eisenhower admitted as much when he let them take the Reichstagg.

And I say that as the grandson and grandnephew of THREE members of my family who fought in combat during World War II. I do them no dishonor. They all fought bravely and well, and returned home to their families. But they were - and in one case, still are - very humble in the face of what they helped achieve. They were and are not the type to thump their chests and crow about "kicking Hitler/Mussolini/Tojo's ass." Far from it.

And while I agree with Kamiya's overall point, I'm afraid I must disagree with some of his particulars. Everyone who fought in World War II against Fascism was a hero. Any person who volunteered for Vietnam after 1968 was not only an idiot but a moral cretin, and if it were up to me their names would not be on that wall in Washington, D.C. There are moral distinctions to be made, and that is one of them.

Oh that's easy. He and Joan are buddies. If someone wrote with crayons with a ten word vocabulary, but was Joan's buddy, she'd publish them.

How about "Get out of the race you stinking clown!"??

...I'd SWEAR that Eve is reaching for Adam's nipple. I think they're about to get it on.

I don't know the exact year, but sometime in the late 90s, Elisabeth Shue and friend Penelope Anne Miller were in a very serious car accident in which both of their faces were badly cut up. The timing could not have been worse for both of them, and the accident and their scars were (and are) kept quiet. Miller had the worst scarring, effectively ending her career as a leading lady. Shue's scarring is most notable in the first film she made after the accident and subsequent recovery, "Molly." Rumor has it that she had to raise the money herself, and produce it, as no one would take a chance on her.

Some of you people are out of your fucking minds. He's barely got a paunch, with a little stubble. I see guys like that with girlfriends/wives all the time and, yeah, the lady is often a babe. So some of you need to stroll through the real world once in a while. Seriously.

...I'll say it again: With all that is available on YouTube, THIS is what you decide to feature???

Good riddance. Too many people have celebrated the "Harry Potter" series for "introducing" children to reading. Yes, it introduced them to reading derivative, poorly-written CRAP. God forbid that they should be encouraged to read Watership Down or Charlotte's Web or, for that matter, The Little Prince. No, lets feed their little minds the literary equivalent of the toxic McFood we shovel down their throats.

I see signs all around me that the movie IDIOCRACY wasn't a comedy, but a prophecy.