A Full Box of Kisses

A Full Box of Kisses

The story goes that some time ago, a man punished his 3-year-old daughter for wasting a roll of gold wrapping paper.Money was tight and he became infuriated when the child tried to decorate a box to put under the Christmas tree. Nevertheless, the little girl brought the gift to her father the next morning and said, "This is for you, Daddy." He was embarrassed by his earlier overreaction, but his anger flared again when he found the box was empty.

He yelled at her, "Don't you know that when you give someone a present, there's supposed to be something inside it?" The little girl looked up at him with tears in her eyes and said, "Oh, Daddy, it is not empty. I blew kisses into the box. All for you, Daddy." The father was crushed. He put his arms around his little girl, and he begged for her forgiveness.

It is told that the man kept that gold box by his bed for years and whenever he was discouraged, he would take out an imaginary kiss and remember the love of the child who had put it there.

In a very real sense, each of us as humans have been given a gold container filled with unconditional love and kisses from our children, friends, family or God. There is no more precious possession anyone could hold.

Why Did the Chicken Cross the Road?

- Why did the chicken cross the road?
- Pourqoui le poulet a-t-il traversé la route?
- Warum das Huhn die Straße überquerte?
- Zakaj je piščanec prečkal cesto?

This is what you get when asked to .....

Teacher: To get to the other side.

Plato: For the greater good.

Aristotle: It is in the nature of chickens to cross roads.

The Bible: And God came down from the heavens and He said unto the chicken "Thou shalt cross the road." And the chicken crossed the road and there was much rejoicing.

Buddha: If you ask this question, you deny your own chicken-nature.

Karl Marx: It was a historical inevitability.

Shakespeare: To cross or not to cross, that is the question.

Rene Descartes: Since the chicken does not really exist it was only an illusion that the chicken crossed the road. This illusion was only in my mind. Therefore I created the chicken that crossed the road.

Darwin: It was the logical next step after coming down from the trees.

Hamlet: That is not the question.

Wordsworth: To wander lonely as a cloud.

Albert Einstein: Whether the chicken crossed the road or the road crossed the chicken depends upon your frame of reference.

Sigmund Freud: The fact that you are at all concerned that the chicken crossed the road reveals your underlying sexual insecurity.

Martin Luther King: I envision a world where all chickens will be free to cross roads without having their motives called into question.

Neil Armstrong: That's one small step for Chicken, one giant leap for Chicken kind.

Joseph Stalin: I don't care. Catch it. I need its eggs to make my omelette.

Josip Broz Tito: Pa druže, ovo ti je rezultat naše protiv fašističke narodno-oslobodilačke borbe bratskih naroda Jugoslavije.

Bill Clinton: I did not cross the road with THAT chicken. What do you mean by chicken? Could you define chicken, please?

Saddam Hussein: This was an unprovoked act of rebellion and we were quite justified in dropping 50 tons of nerve gas on it.

George W. Bush: We don't really care why the chicken crossed the road. We just want to know if the chicken is on our side of the road, or not. The chicken is either against us, or for us. There is no middle ground here.

Tony Blair: I agree with George.

Bill Gates: I have just released eChicken 2003, which will not only cross roads, but will lay eggs, file your important documents, and balance your checkbook - and Internet Explorer is an inextricable part of eChicken.

The Pope: That is only for God to know.

Fox Mulder: You saw it cross the road with your own eyes! How many more chickens have to cross before you believe it?

Homer Simpson:There was free beer on the other side of the road.

Mythbusters: If you fire a frozen chicken out of a cannon; not only will it cross a road, it could be a lethal projectile.

You have two choices

Chandan is the manager of a restaurant. He is always in a good mood. When someone would ask him how he was doing, he would always reply, "If I were any better, I would be twins!"

Many of the waiters at his restaurant quit their jobs when he changed jobs, so they could follow him around from restaurant to restaurant. Why???

Because Chandan was a natural motivator. If an employee was having a bad day, Chandan was always there, telling the employee how to look on the positive side of the situation.

Seeing this style really made me curious, so one day I went up to Chandan and asked him："I don't get it! No one can be a positive person all of the time. How do you do it?"

Chandan replied, "Each morning I wake up and say to myself, I have two choices today. I can choose to be in a good mood or I can choose to be in a bad mood. I always choose to be in a good mood.

Each time something bad happens, I can choose to be victim or I can choose to learn from it. I always choose to learn from it.

Every time someone comes to me complaining, I can choose to accept their complaining or I can point out the positive side of life. I always choose the positive side of life."

"But it's not always that easy,“ I protested.

"Yes it is," Chandan said. "Life is all about choices. When you cut away all the junk every situation is a choice. You choose how you react to situations. You choose how people will affect your mood. You choose to be in a good mood or bad mood. It's your choice how you live your life."
Several years later.......

I heard that Chandan accidentally did something you are never supposed to do in the restaurant business. He left the back door of his restaurant open...

And then ???

In the morning, he was robbed by three armed men. They want? #123*+!@$%&*~

While Chandan trying to open the safe box, his hand, shaking from nervousness, slipped off the combination. The robbers panicked and shot him. Luckily, Chandan was found quickly and rushed to the hospital. After 18 hours of surgery and weeks of intensive care, Chandan was released from the hospital with fragments of the bullets still in his body.…

I saw Chandan about six months after the accident. When I asked him how he was, he replied, "If I were any better, I'd be twins. Want to see my scars?"

I declined to see his wounds, but did ask him what had gone through his mind as the robbery took place.

"The first thing that went through my mind was that I should have locked the back door," Chandan replied. "Then, after they shot me, as I lay on the floor, I remembered that I had two choices: I could choose to live or could choose to die. I chose to live." "Weren't you scared“ I asked? Chandan continued, "The paramedics were great. They kept telling me I was going to be fine.
But when they wheeled me into the Emergency Room and I saw the expression on the faces of the doctors and nurses, I got really scared. In their eyes, I read 'He's a

dead man.' I knew I needed to take action."

"What did you do?" I asked.

"Well, there was a big nurse shouting questions at me," said Chandan. "She asked if I was allergic to anything." 'Yes,' I replied. The doctors and nurses stopped working as they waited for my reply. I took a deep breath and yelled, 'Bullets!' Over their laughter, I told them, 'I am choosing to live. Please operate on me as if I am alive, not dead'.

"Chandan lived thanks to the skill of his doctors, but also because of his amazing attitude. I learned from him that every day you have the choice to either enjoy your life or to hate it. The only thing that is truly yours -- that no one can control or take from you- is your attitude, so if you can take care of that, everything else in life becomes much easier.

THE INTERNET IS SHIT.

It is vitally important that we all realize this and move on. People (eg Bloggers) go on and on about how wonderful it is. About how much information is out there in cyberspace. About the way that everything is within reach in just a few clicks of their mice.

For instance:

"If I can operate Google, I can find anything... Google, combined with Wi-Fi, is a little bit like God. God is wireless, God is everywhere and God sees and knows everything. Throughout history, people connected to God without wires. Now, for many questions in the world, you ask Google, and increasingly, you can do it without wires, too."

-Alan Cohen, V.P. of Airespace, a new Wi-Fi provider, New York Times, 6/29/03

I can name 20 people from my old school class who aren't in Google. I can walk into any public library, no matter how tiny and underfunded, and find facts, stories, amazing information I would never touch in a month of webcrawling. I can go int

o a bar and hear stories Usenet hasn't come close to in its 22 years of waffle. "Oh but what about the stuff you CAN get on the web?" the netheads say. But they're missing the point.

The internet is not the sole basis upon which you can determine existence. It sounds simple but people are starting to forget. If it doesn't have a website, that doesn't make something low quality. If you can't Google your blind date, that doesn't make them a freak. If one website says something about anything, it's more than likely pure invention and shouldn't be taken seriously. Checking your sources does not mean finding another website that says the same. Fiction is self-perpetuating.

Let's say it another way. A URL is not a mark of quality. It's not proof of honesty or approval from the FDA. Sure, people say they know this already, that a lot of the internet isn't true and a lot of it isn't interesting, no matter how angst-ridden and attention-seeking its author. But still we praise the internet for everything, from mobilising global protests to creating the latest trends, while disappearing up its backside and discarding anything outside it as 'out of touch'.

While we ascribe every first-world miracle to the electronic age, there's something truly missing that we once had in our grasp: our sense of wonder. Back in 1995, we were surprised, agog when things appeared on the net. People starting going aroun

d saying 'wow, this could really become something'. Slowly (very slowly at 16kbps), strange websites, new information, odd diversions and discussions with people around the world appeared in this brave new world. Each time it was met with surprise and delight, even if some of it was deeply obscure and slightly dull. There was no doubting the potential of the medium.

And look what we've done with it. Food wrappers and soap operas now tell us to visit their websites. Money is pumped online by people who can't even spell HTML. All manner of pointless and irritating content is continually poured down the infinite hole of data, unfiltered and over-appreciated. In accepting freedom of speech, we can't hide from its consequences - which in this case is millions of terabytes of unreliable information, badly designed and clumsily written. We have failed our own creation and given birth something truly awful. We're just too busy cooing over the pram to notice.

We need to start again. We need to stop saying how wonderful things are. We need to openly, truthfully and respectfully admit that the internet itself, in almost all of what's been done with it, is shit.

There's no point in undoing what has been done. What we need to do is to change our attitude. The internet isn't new any more. The evangelists have done their job. Everyone's heard of it even if they don't spend their lives logged on. Now its the job of the congregation to revolt. Chant it from the rooftops, spread it across your server, email it to your friends. The internet is shit.

And then what? Then we can move on. If we truly understand that the internet is shit then maybe we'll go back to looking elsewhere to check our information instead of just Google. Maybe journalists will do proper research again. If we remember that the medium isn't the message then maybe we'll stop aimlessly surfing for something amusing when we could actually be doing something fun. And, crucially, if the internet is just seen as occasionally unavoidable, maybe those websites that give us something special will be all the more amazing for it.

Give an infinite number of monkeys typewriters and they'll produce the works of Shakespeare. Unfortunately, I feel like I'm reading all the books where they didn't. I can't wait for the day when the internet makes me rejoice in its possibilities again. But right now, it's shit.