Cuba Through The Eyes Of The People: Fill & Download for Free

Although the timing of Irma seems to be stealing the news coverage away from the devastation and death caused by Harvey, and the fact that both storms have been described as "unprecedented", it does not mean that people are unjustly concerned about Irma.At the time of this writing, and living in southwest Florida, I am very concerned for the safety and well-being of my family, home and workplace.Frankly, last night I was more concerned (scared shitless) as the forecast track had me in the bullseye of a possible Cat 5 storm, but tonight they say it's more likely to take a path up the southeast coast as a Cat 4, and my area will still be affected to some degree because of the enormous size of the storm. This is after Irma finishes her destruction in the Caribbean as one of the most powerful storms on record.So now I am very worried about family members in Palm Beach County were I grew up, and all those folks in Miami.I have directly experienced many Hurricanes in my life, and I know the way these storms play out, Irma could easily ignore the computer models and decide to not take such a sharp turn to the north as projected this weekend and go up the southwest coast anyway, causing all kinds of mayhem in my area, so we will just have to wait and see.It's a nail biter. From my past I remember how the torrential rain screams sideways, streets turn to rivers, huge trees are uprooted, roofs start coming apart, power lines come down, street lights dangle and sway like yo-yos while power transformers explode one after another with colorful flashes all over the night sky.And the wailing, relentless sound.Then I get weeks or months of home repairs and cleanup, particularly at my job in Public Utilities.Not to take attention away from the victims and ongoing recovery from Harvey, but to everyone in the general vicinity of this latest monster, the threat is real. Be very concerned.Update, Saturday, Sept. 9th:Irma is currently tracking along the upper coast of Cuba, and will be passing through the Florida Keys, then coming up the west coast of Florida as a very powerful, major hurricane on Sunday and Monday. We have evacuated the area.Additional Update, Sunday, Sept. 10th:The eye of Irma (Cat 3 then 2) passes directly through Naples and Ft Myers where I live. I'm not sure what the damage to my home is yet, because we have evacuated:Final Update, Sept. 24, 2017:Well, it's been two weeks since Irma came directly through Southwest Florida. We are still dealing with cleaning up the huge mess. Our house survived, but the yard took a beating, felling trees and destroying the fence, etc. I've been working 12 hour shifts at work (Public Utilities) restoring wastewater lift station functionality to our customers. I've lived in Florida most of my life, but this is the most disruptive hurricane I've ever encountered. Luckily we didn't have major flooding like they had in Texas with Harvey. As bad as Irma was, we count our blessings because it could have been much worse. In the last few days Hurricane Maria followed Irma’s path through the Caribbean and did even more damage with a terrible direct hit on Puerto Rico, but then turned before assaulting Florida. And this Hurricane Season is nowhere near over yet. It's the price we pay for living in “paradise”.

Did Hyman Roth miscalculate the power wielded by Michael Corleone?Much the way Vito Corleone misjudged Virgil Sollozzo, yes.I loved baseball ever since Arnold Rothstien fixed the World Series in 1919. (Hyman Roth)The Godfather, Part II (1974)Something of note perhaps forgotten or never known about Hyman Roth in the Godfather, Part II is that he was based on the real Jewish gangster, Meyer Lansky.Meyer Lanksy was one of the forces behind the legendary Bugsy Siegel’s ambition to build a gambling city in Las Vegas. And the general perspective on Lansky is that he was a business man first, a gangster second.In other words, Lansky was all about making money; he didn’t care how; he didn’t care the source. All that mattered was how to take an illegal venture and make the most profit possible.And so was the character of Hyman Roth. He wasn’t like Luca Brasi or Sonny Corleone. Roth’s goal was to make money, hide it from the government and keep as much of it for himself as possible, probably hidden under fake names and in untraceable accounts."Hyman Roth always makes money for his partners. One by one, our old friends are gone. Death - natural or not - prison - deported. Hyman Roth is the only one left, because he always made money for his partners. " (Johnny Ola to Michael at Lake Tahoe)The Godfather, Part II (1974)Like the real life Lansky, Roth looked like a middle-income businessman who didn’t have much to his name, when in reality, he was the string-puller in casinos from Las Vegas to Cuba.So murder and mayhem wasn’t necessarily Roth’s strongest suit. Or to be more accurate, it wasn’t ever his first play. Much the way Vito Corleone always first judged when and how much violence was truly necessary, Roth was always looking for how to make money, rather than how to return an insult.He put together deals, asked for investors to take part and, like Johnny Ola said, always made money for his partners, which was why he never ended up dead with bullet through the eye like Moe Green (who was based on Siegel.)Hyman Roth was an ambiguous character; well-connected with sources in every family or organization and the reputation of a cold-blooded, ruthless mobster.But he was always about making money first.That isn’t to say Roth was above cutting throats to succeed. It just wasn’t his first response. That’s why he said that line to Michael about having a partner.“I'm going to take a nap. When I wake up, if the money is on the table, I'll know I have a partner. If it isn't, I'll know I don't.” (Roth to Michael in Cuba)The Godfather, Part 2 (1974)Roth already knew Michael was having doubts. Roth knew Michael could only suspect a few people of putting a hit on him and even fewer of being able to pull it off or get as close as Roth did.In fact, the failure to take out Michael could be viewed as an example of how Roth didn’t really carry out a lot of hits, considering the massive failure this was. Roth probably failed to take out two people after all.The hit on Frank Pentangeli didn’t work out either, if you believe it was Roth that ordered the hit on Frankie Five Angels to set Michael up in the eyes of the other Five Families to look like the Corleones gave the order.So maybe it isn’t that Roth underestimated Michael as much as Roth was somewhat overestimated. Or at least, misunderstood in terms of what his main purpose was as a mobster.Thank you, Michael Brett and Gary Korenstein, for the A2A!

“Attractive” is in the eye of the beholder.Every guy has probably had the following experience.“DUDE! Check out that hot girl over there!”Your friend looks over, turns around again, and says: “You’re kidding, right? She’s not hot at all.”“Whatever dude. Cool. Glad we’re not competing. You really wouldn't get with her?"The other dude pauses."Not even on a desert island."Take the same face, do the hair differently, and you’ll get wildly different levels of attraction. Total Makeover, What Not to Wear — that’s the entire gist of those shows. “The babe” is hiding out in the frumpy girl. It’s all in how you bring her out. (Or him. Same difference.)A lot of people before the 1950s would have considered us unbelievably bizarre-looking, probably even kind of scary. Every generation has its standards. My dad grew up in the ’50s and ‘60s. He talks about his dad just losing his mind, almost throwing a fist through the TV screen when The Beatles came on The Ed Sullivan Show. “Those g*@#*)mN shaggy beatniks! Why don’t they cut their hair?!”But seriously. Look back on the ’60s and ’70s today and I’m thinking “Uh, Grandpa was right. Those guys were strange.”A hundred years from now, people will look back on the botox lips and weird Kardashian butt obsession of some of today’s women and ask “What were they thinking? Did they have a mental illness?” (I actually wonder this already.)Victorian, Edwardian and WWII-era hairstyles don’t do much for us any more.But don’t assume that those women were trying to look “sexy” or even “attractive.” They wanted to look respectable. And they weren't on Bumble.And anyway, if you look at the faces, these are not unattractive women.Definitely not the actress Ellen Terry, photographed at age 17 in 1864. Terry was only a decade younger than photography itself:Definitely not Evelyn Nesbit, a huge heart-throb in the early 1900s:Not every woman back then was “gorgeous” (or is now.) But the hairdo is the big issue here. This is just weird to us. Is that a bird's nest?Even when they cropped their hair shorter (1940s here), most of us cringe at these dos. There's nothing wrong with their faces, though. I think a couple of these women are pretty cute:But honestly, I don’t think any decade was as smokin’ as the ‘20s. (All right, maybe women’s fashion in the ‘60s.)Your average woman in the ’20s wasn’t a Ziegfeld Follies girl. But a lot of that’s just in the packaging.These aren’t vintage re-creations. These are real photos from the Roaring Twenties. Looking back on the frumpy Edwardian hairdos, suddenly you understand exactly why “Berniece Bobbed Her Hair” (F. Scott Fitzgerald story.) Thank you, Berniece.Doris Eaton here lived to be 106. Hey, girl.Sometimes a photograph lets you see right through time and realize how much somebody’s appearance was just an accident of fate.Olive Oatman was a pioneer woman from Illinois who went out to Arizona with her family in 1851, when she was 14. Indians killed her family and took her into the Mojave Desert, where she got a blue facial tattoo. When she got back to “civilization,” Oatman got a Victorian haircut and went to see a photographer. But that tattoo speaks volumes.Culture, not physiognomy, determines a lot of your appearance. Oatman just happened to be born at a time when Mojave Indians were tattooing women’s faces and Victorian women were getting that hairdo. That’s all.Go back even farther in time and people thought that big Marge Simpson-style pompadours and white powdered wigs were attractive. We don’t. But they’d consider some of us bizarre to an extreme.Honestly, Olive Oatman wasn’t half as weird as this:Quick addition: diet and living conditions are probably some factor, too.While early Americans, for example, had access to good food — better than ours, in some ways, because it was less processed — if you lived in Cincinnati in 1800 (or in Stockholm), you couldn’t just pull an orange off a tree. Fruit boats from Cuba came up the East Coast of the US, and there were trade networks all over the world, but tropical fruits were naturally harder to come by in inland areas and northern climates. You couldn’t just walk down to the supermarket and buy a lemon. There were orchards, but your supply was more limited, and it was seasonal.And I don’t know if there’s actually any scientific basis to it, but people at the time believed that eating a lot of pork and corn affected your complexion.Regardless, people just spent a lot more time outdoors than we do. Not many people had cushy office jobs in 1849. Most were farmers, sailors, etc. Women spent more time indoors than men back did in the 1800s, but on average they still spent more time working outdoors than women do today. Exposure to wind and sun will age your skin. It’s entirely natural. As usual, we’re the abnormal exceptions to human history.Look at President Zachary Taylor in 1849, the year before he died. Taylor died when he was 65.That’s a picture of a man who spend a lot of time outdoors in the army, in the West, in the wind and the sun, before he sat in the Oval Office.Are there men today who look that shrivelled up at 65? Sure. But they don’t tend to be office workers. For most American men today, this is what you look like when you’re closer to 80. (I even know some 80-year-olds who don’t look this shriveled up yet.)