loris has had one published post, stripped from history, and is awarded the un-quality seal of disapproval.

Mee too loris....buncha wankers.....Upvote for fishhats!!!!

The Wikipedia has track of him till 2003...

In January 2003, Bakker began broadcasting the New Jim Bakker Show at Studio City Cafe in Branson, Missouri, with his second wife, Lori Graham Bakker, whom he married in 1998. He denounces his past teachings on prosperity, saying they were wrong. In I Was Wrong, he reveals that the first time he read the Bible all the way through was in prison, and that it made him realize he had taken certain passages out of context--passages which he had used as "proof texts" to back up his prosperity theology teachings.

It's taken me over 30 years to figure out that this is one of my favourite songs.

From Wikipedia:

"Wichita Lineman" is a popular song written by Jimmy Webb in 1968, first recorded by Glen Campbell and widely covered since. Campbell's version, which appeared on his 1968 album Wichita Lineman, reached #3 on the US charts, remaining in the Top 100 for 15 weeks. In 2004, Rolling Stone magazine's list of the "500 Greatest Songs of All Time" ranked "Wichita Lineman" at #192. It has been referred to as 'the first existential country song'.

Webb was inspired to write the lyrics when he saw a solitary lineman near the Kansas-Oklahoma border, possibly in Wichita County, Kansas or south of Wichita, Kansas. (Despite the identical names, the city and county are over 250 road miles (400 km) apart, and the city is noticeably closer to the Oklahoma border than the county.) The lyric describes the longing that a telephone lineman feels for a woman whose voice he hears, perhaps through attaching an earpiece to a stretch of telephone line he is working on. ...

In the first recording, by Glen Campbell, a notable feature of Al de Lory's orchestral arrangement is that the violins and a Gulbranson synthesiser mimic the sounds that a lineman might hear when attaching a telephone earpiece to a long stretch of raw telephone or telegraph line i.e. without typical line equalisation and filtering. One would be aware of high-frequency tones fading in and out, caused by the accidental rectification (the rusty bolt effect) of heterodynes between many radio stations (the violins play this sound); and occasional snatches of Morse Code from radio amateurs or utility stations (this is heard after the line of lyric, "is still on the line"). Heterodynes are also referenced in the lyric, "I can hear you in the whine".

choggie, the downvote button is there for a reason. All power to you if you want to downvote this. We're all going to see this somewhat differently.

I'd be uncomfortable about this video if I thought that the girls were unwilling or duped into appearing in this show, but they, their parents, their teachers and their peers seem to treat their lives as unusual but normal, if that makes any sense. Abby and Britney have given us permission to look at their televised images as long as we want, so I don't feel guilty about looking and I chose to upvote this video.

I've just started reading Daniel Gilbert's "Stumbling on Happiness" (his TED video is here). The opening paragraphs in chapter 2 describe another pair of conjoined twins:

Lori and Rena Schappel may be twins, but they are very different people. ... [T]here are just two unusual things about Lori and Reba. The first is that they share a blood supply, part of a skull, and some brain tissue, having been joined at the forehead since birth. ... The second unusual thing ... is that they are happy -- not merely resigned or contented, but joyful, playful and optimistic. Their unusual life presents many challenges, of course, but as they often note, whose doesn't? When asked about the possibility of undergoing surgical separation, Reba speaks for both of them: "Our point of view is no, straight out no. Why would you want to do that? For all the money in China, why? You'd be ruining two lives in the process."

So here's the question: If this were your life rather than theirs, how would you feel? If you said, "Joyful, playful and optimistic", then you are not playing the game and I am going to give you another chance. Try to be honest instead of correct. The honest answer is "Despondent, desperate and depressed." Indeed, it seems clear that no right-minded person could really be happy under such circumstances, which is why the conventional medical wisdom has it that conjoined twins should be separated at birth, even at risk of killing one or both. ... Everyone know[s] that conjoined twins will be dramatically less happy than normal people ... . And yet, ... an exhaustive search of the medical literature ... found that the "desire to remain together to be so widespread among communicating conjoined twins as to be practically universal." Something is terribly wrong here. But what?

This is what impresses me about this video. Abby and Britney seem to be as genuinely content and happy as Lori and Reba. They are not bravely soldiering on in face of a terrible disability, but they are living their normal and happy lives. What I hope to learn from their experiences is not something about the nobility of the human spirit under stress (which may be a valid lesson to draw from other situations), but how individual and flexible the path to normalcy and happiness can be. I'm curious about their lives, and unashamed of that, but I don't think I'm condescending to them, either.

Thanks for the provocative discussion and the chance to promote Gilbert's book, too.

On a le droit de parler Français quand il y a une vidéo en Français ?

Cute oldie, much better than Lorie. (don't even try to listen to Lorie (Britney Spears "à la Française"))