Friday, June 29, 2007

"Sicko"

Today is the Day for "Sicko"

June 29, 2007

Friends,

This is it! Two years in the making! The day that our new film, "Sicko," arrives in theaters all across North America! Click here to see where the nearest one is to you.

After you go, let me know what you think. Oh, and send us a photo or a video from your cell phone to show us what it looked like at your theater. We'd love to post a photo from each of the 440 movie theaters showing "Sicko."

To read more about the movie, you can go to www.michaelmoore.com.

Here's what this morning's review in the L.A. Times said: "It's likely his most important, most impressive, and most provocative film." Okay, what do they know? I prefer to trust the assessment of E! Television Online: " 'Sicko' - the best movie ever? Maybe." Maybe? MAYBE?! When will they ever give me a break?

It's been a weirdly funny week. First Larry King bumped me for Paris Hilton. Then today, when CNBC invited me to the floor of the New York Stock Exchange for an interview, the stock exchange said I was barred from the building. On top of that, Tony Blair is gone, Cheney says he's no longer answerable to anyone's elected government, and I simply don't want an iPhone. Just another week in America.

Hope you enjoy the movie!

Yours,
Michael Moore
mmflint@aol.com


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Thursday, June 28, 2007

To the Powerful Goes Special Treatment

by Eddie Davis, president of the North Carolina Association of Educators (NCAE)
published June 27, 2007 12:15 am
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    THE SERIES
    “Sea Change” is a three-part series about North Carolina’s imperiled Outer Banks by metro columnist Lorraine Ahearn and photographer Lynn Hey.

    Part 1: Fighting the current

    Part 2: Pressure's on at Outer Banks

    Photo gallery
    HATTERAS VILLAGE -- When she felt her house go off the blocks and start to float, Betty Austin watched from upstairs.

    Named after her grandmother, born and raised here on what used to be high ground, Austin, 84, has ridden out hurricanes before. Just not like Isabel.

    As the tide surged up from the wrong direction on the afternoon of Sept. 18, 2003, she watched her deceased sister Pauline's house spin around and bump her roof. The water tossed an old shad boat into the yard and kept coming, up over the family plot at the top of the hill, where her aunt and uncle, among others, were buried.

    "His coffin was washed out of the ground. Can you believe it?" Austin said. "Her coffin was washed away in the sound. They never did find it."

    On a one-way sand lane that bears her family name, Austin has spent a warm June morning battling the overgrowth around her still-vacant home, swatting mosquitoes and stepping over an occasional toad.

    The daughter of an Ocracoke lightkeeper, Austin speaks in the handsome waterman's brogue that goes back 350 years on the barrier islands.

    Time is pronounced "toyme," life is "loyfe." Phrases that are elsewhere uprooted, consigned to nursery rhymes ("A-hunting we will go...") still see everyday use.

    But after years of working as a desk clerk at the motels that lined the receding shore, Austin's brogue is thinning out, sanded down the way the surf smoothes the edges of a seashell.

    "Everything's changed, even in my lifetime," Austin said, walking between gnarled trees on a path made of old millstones, now leading nowhere.

    "The trees are not doing too well because of the salt air. The sound's close. The ocean's closer. That's just what it is."

    What it is, is change — the one constant on the barrier. The story is told in high water marks, like the rings of a live oak.

    In time, names and exploits run together — Gloria, Hugo, Fran, Floyd, Dennis. And of course, Isabel, which gouged out a new inlet, splitting Hatteras Island in two.

    Intrepid TV announcers in Gore-Tex parkas flock to these violent events, ranked by "worst" and "second worst," tallied in dollars and death.

    But there's violence in birth, as well. After all, the enormity of wind and water that destroy the Outer Banks, storm by storm, are the same forces that landed the narrow strand here in the first place.

    So for each act of destruction, a corresponding creation. At least, that's one way to read the tale of the East Coast's only ghost town: the life and death of Portsmouth.

    They named it, of course, after the city they left in England, and 300 years ago, it was a shipping hub.

    Among the key ports on the seaboard, it was an early European foothold after the mysterious disappearance of the Lost Colony on nearby Roanoke Island, well before Jamestown.

    But no one is planning a visit from the queen. No, these days, other than colonies of pelicans and Great Herons, swarms of mosquitoes and biting green flies, the only inhabitants of Portsmouth are a couple of volunteer caretakers for the Park Service, living at the old Lifesaving Station for two months.

    This was their day off.

    "It's so dark here at night, you can see the lights from Ocracoke, and it looks like a big city," said Chapel Hill resident Jill Snyder, who waited with fellow volunteer John Andrews at the dock for a boat ride, the only way off the island.

    "This is completely away from the modern world."

    Once a week, they haul their garbage out and their drinking water in. They use a generator for electricity, and pick up three TV stations with a rabbit-ear antenna, off and on.

    Aside from their presence to guide the more adventurous tourist during high summer, this is a deserted island — a paradisiacal piece of green pasture and blue sea, with a schoolhouse, a post office and a church with a steeple.

    Open the doors, and there aren't any people. At the Salter House that greets visitors, it looks as if they left in a hurry, leaving a Time magazine with Gov. Dewey on the cover, and a shelf of books including "Uncle Wiggly on Sugar Island" and "Robinson Crusoe."

    But unlike Portsmouth's predecessors at Roanoke Island, there's no mystery where they went, and how this twilight place came to be.

    In the middle of the 19th century, a hurricane punched two new passages further north on the banks, creating Hatteras and Oregon inlets. Portsmouth, where the big ships from the Atlantic used to offload their cargo at one end, pass through the shallow channel and reload on the other side, was no longer needed.

    The old families hung on through the Civil War, through too many hurricanes and nor'easters to name. But finally, the population grew thinner, and only three people lived there by the 1970s, two women and a man.

    When the man died, the women finally left, and the last person who was born in Portsmouth, Jessie Lee Dominique, died in 2005.

    "Jessie Lee didn't like when people called it a 'ghost town,'" Chester Lynn was saying last week about the place where he puts on a homecoming every year, and still decorates the empty houses at Christmas, with cedar berries and ribbon.

    "A lot has happened," Lynn reflected, "but this is a place where time stood. It's not a ghost town. It lives in our hearts."

    Lynn, who can trace his ancestors at Portsmouth back to the 1790 census, as a boy spent summers with relatives in Portsmouth. It was a village so quiet that people watched what they said because the sound carried so. Every door was unlocked at every house — or "hice," as Lynn puts it.

    Sitting in his antique and flower shop across the sound at Ocracoke, he's surrounded by his past — piles of typewritten oral histories he's read so many times, he's memorized them.

    He takes out an old photograph of a ship run aground on the beach with a crowd of people walking toward it. The islanders would dismantle shipwrecks down to the ribs, like blubber off a whale, and use the teak, walnut and mahogany on their houses.

    Then, when children grew up and left the nest, the parents would downsize their houses, tearing down extra rooms they no longer needed.

    Everything was for survival. If they found a turtle, it went in the pot. The trees on the island were chopped down for lumber. They didn't build their houses on stilts: Coming from the other side of the Atlantic, they never dreamed what a hurricane could do.

    Lynn, with no more to guide him than fragments of fencepost foundations and chimneys, has been helping archeologists reconstruct the layout of Portsmouth, and find five lost graveyards. If he succeeds, he wants to be buried in Portsmouth.

    But up the coast at Hatteras, the future is more tenuous for the daughter of the Ocracoke lightkeeper, the youngest of seven children, the only one left. Betty Austin's son started repairing his mother's house after Isabel, but had to go back to work and earn a paycheck.

    "By the time it's done, I'll be in the grave," Austin says, casting an uncertain glance toward the family plot, where some of the graves washed away.

    When Austin saw the water coming, she took the quilts her mother made — back when people had time to "quilt" — and stowed them on the top shelves upstairs. Did Isabel take anything precious to her?

    Austin's eyes narrow at the question: "Yeah," she says. "My car. A Mercury Capri."

    When she wakes up in the morning, she looks out at the ocean and, out of habit, counts the boats on the horizon. This is home, where the land meets the sea.

    And the sea is so much closer now, the land thinning out, getting lighter, getting ready for the next migration.

    "I hate to see it happen," she says. "But it's gonna wash away, eventually. It has to."

    Contact Lorraine Ahearn at 373-7334 or lahearn@news-record.com

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    Friday, June 22, 2007

    ((Ding))

    (((((Ding)))))

    The firefighter stood and faced his God, Which must always come to pass
    He hoped his shoes were shining, Just as brightly as his brass.

    "Step forward now, you firefighter, How shall I deal with you?
    Have you always turned the other cheek? To My Church have you been true?"

    The firefighter squared his shoulders and said," No, Lord, I guess I ain't
    Because those of us who fight fire, Can't always be a saint.

    I've had to work most Sundays, And at times my talk was tough,
    And sometimes I've been violent, Because the streets are awfully tough

    But, I never took a penny, That wasn't mine to keep...
    Though I worked a lot of overtime When the bills got just too steep,

    And I never passed a cry for help, Though at times I shook with fear,
    And sometimes, God forgive me, I've wept unmanly tears.

    I know I don't deserve a place among the people here

    They never wanted me around except to calm their fears.

    If you've a place for me here, Lord, It needn't be so grand,
    I never expected or had too much, But if you don't, I'll understand.

    "There was a silence all around the throne Where the saints had often trod
    As the firefighter waited quietly, For the judgment of his God,

    "Step forward now you firefighter, You've borne your burdens well,
    Walk peacefully on Heaven's streets, You've done your time in Hell."

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    Thursday, June 21, 2007

    Pea Island's Bridge to Nowhere.

    Pea Island's Bridge to Nowhere.
    The bridge that seemingly goes nowhere at mile marker 34 on Pea Island was actually part of two bridges built in the 1930s at the height of the nation's Great Depression. They were constructed after a hurricane opened two inlets across the remote island. Although there were no paved highways on the Outer Banks at the time, a few hardy souls paid to have their gasoline powered trucks and cars ferried from the mainland. Once on the Outer Banks they drove up and down the beaches along the surf line.
    The two new inlets created a natural barrier to these hardy off road drivers. A careful study of the problem at the time revealed the inlets were too narrow and shallow for a ferry crossing. Instead, it was decided two wooden bridges should be built across the channels. The northern bridge (pictured) is the better preserved of the two. All that remains of the southern bridge are pilings.
    Soon after the bridges were built, nature closed the inlets making the bridges obsolete, just another reminder of the unstable nature of the Outer Banks,

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    Pimp my golf cart -- for real in Moyock, N.C.

    Pimp my golf cart -- for real in Moyock, N.C.

    Jeffrey Durham, 14, backs up a go-cart  in order to work on a six-seater golf cart “limousine” Wednesday. His grandfather, Steve Jones, builds custom-made golf carts.
    Jeffrey Durham, 14, backs up a go-cart in order to work on a six-seater golf cart “limousine” Wednesday. His grandfather, Steve Jones, builds custom-made golf carts. CHRIS CURRY PHOTOS | THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT

    By JEFF HAMPTON, The Virginian-Pilot
    © June 18, 2007


    MOYOCK

    Steve Jones drove a stretch limousine golf cart around his Moyock parking lot Friday, stopping briefly to center the chrome steering wheel.

    He still had to hook up speakers for the stereo mounted on the carbon-fiber dashboard, clean the body (painted black with blue tribal flame graphics) and wipe down the six seats (upholstered in black vinyl with blue piping).

    Working from a small shop on N.C. 168, Jones starts with used stock golf carts and adds lift kits, bigger tires, chrome rims, shiny dashboards, rear seats that flip over for carrying cargo and fancy paint jobs.

    His finished, flashy carts grab attention from passersby.

    The carts run about 25 mph on six 8-volt batteries. For a price, he can install bigger batteries or a gas engine. Some racing carts can go 100 mph.

    "I sell them to anybody and everybody," Jones said. "Poor guy and rich guy. Drag racers and homeowners."

    The stretch limousine cart is going for $8,500 to a Canadian company with plans to display it in Las Vegas at one of the largest auto shows in the country.

    But most customers of Steve's Custom Carts just want to ride around their neighborhoods in something personalized.


    Steve Jones custom builds golf carts to a client's specifications including putting in a lift kit, radio and more.

    "Everybody wants their original thing," said Cynthia Atkins, owner of Start to Finish. "They don't want to be like everybody else."

    Atkins upholsters the seats for Jones' golf carts.

    Butch Britt bought a red cart with flames for a different purpose. Britt's father suffers from Parkinson's disease and can't walk well, he said. His son, Joe, takes his grandfather on short rides.

    "It's a bonding time for them," he said.

    Hunters, campers and farmers also are among the buyers.

    "I can't give you specific numbers, but it's one heck of a large business," said Larry Holder, parts manager for Peebles Golf Car Sales in Glen Allen, Va.

    His company alone might sell 500 used golf carts a year, and at least two other dealerships in the area sold just as many or more, he said.

    Jones was a mechanic for car dealerships and tried customizing motorcycles. Five years ago, a friend gave him a couple of old golf carts. Jones said he fixed them up and sold them on eBay for a good profit.

    He's been building and selling them ever since.

    Jeff Hampton, (252) 338-6975,

    jeff.hampton@pilotonline.com

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    Wednesday, June 20, 2007

    2 die in Currituck head-on collision

    2 die in Currituck head-on collision