Okay so I was reading this thread about Zombie movies. Everyone was posting their favorite zombie movie, and someone posted Dracula. Now I know that vampires are undead, but if you’re comparing Dracula to movies like Night of The Living Dead, would you consider that to be a zombie movie? Personally, I think of it as a strictly vampire movie, because while vampires and zombies are both undead, they’re still quite different from one another.

Happy Valentines day! I hope you all had a good one! :) Mine was actually quite boring, but I did get a box of chocolates. ;) You know I gotta have my chocolates.

I told you guys I’d tell you more about Halloween Horror Nights, so here goes. We got to Orlando around 4:15. We checked into the hotel and waited for Nick and Bethany to show up. They got to the hotel at around 5 and then we left. The park opened at 6:30, but we left early because it takes forever to get to get to the park, find a parking space, and then walk to the actual entrance.

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Today, I just finished reading Black Creek Crossing by John Saul. The book was excellent! Its about this family that buys this house that noone seems to be able to stay in for very long. I'd write more, but I'm a little busy. To see a more in depth review, click the link below.
http://www.bookreporter.com/reviews2/0345433327.asp

I've decided to make my journal friends only. If you would like to be added to my friends list, please leave a comment.

I spent most of last night and part of this morning watching the reports on hurricane Katrina. I feel really bad about those people in New Orleans and Mississippi. I heard a report about a woman who called 911 because her house was completely flooded to the ceiling. She was trapped in the attic with her three kids. A bunch of people are trapped on the roofs of their houses. It makes you stop and appreciate everything you have because in just one day, you could lose everything.

So, here’s how my weekend went. We spent Friday afternoon cleaning the guest bedroom. Then on Saturday, some of my aunts and uncles came to visit. We were rushing to get things ready because we didn’t know they were coming until two days before. They left around nine in the morning. We spent the rest of Sunday in the pool. Well, that’s pretty much it for now. I’ll post more later.

Today I just finished reading The Historian by Elizabeth Kostova. I absolutely loved it. It was one of those books that once you get into it, you don't want to put it down. If you haven't read it already, I highly recommend it. You can see reviews of the book and an interview with the author
here

Someone posted this on a message board. I can't begin to tell you how angry I was when I saw this.

This was published in the NY Times:

Torture, American Style
By BOB HERBERT

Published: February 11, 2005

Maher Arar is a 34-year-old native of Syria who emigrated to Canada as a teenager. On Sept. 26, 2002, as he was returning from a family vacation in Tunisia,
he was seized by American authorities at Kennedy Airport in New York, where he was in the process of changing planes.

Mr. Arar, a Canadian citizen, was not charged with a crime. But, as Jane Mayer tells us in a compelling and deeply disturbing article in the current issue
of The New Yorker, he "was placed in handcuffs and leg irons by plainclothes officials and transferred to an executive jet."

In an instant, Mr. Arar was swept into an increasingly common nightmare, courtesy of the United States of America. The plane that took off with him from
Kennedy "flew to Washington, continued to Portland, Maine, stopped in Rome, Italy, then landed in Amman, Jordan."

Any rights Mr. Arar might have thought he had, either as a Canadian citizen or a human being, had been left behind. At times during the trip, Mr. Arar heard
the pilots and crew identify themselves in radio communications as members of "the Special Removal Unit." He was being taken, on the orders of the U.S.
government, to Syria, where he would be tortured.

The title of Ms. Mayer's article is "Outsourcing Torture." It's a detailed account of the frightening and extremely secretive U.S. program known as "extraordinary
rendition."

This is one of the great euphemisms of our time. Extraordinary rendition is the name that's been given to the policy of seizing individuals without even
the semblance of due process and sending them off to be interrogated by regimes known to practice torture. In terms of bad behavior, it stands side by
side with contract killings.

Our henchmen in places like Syria, Egypt, Morocco, Uzbekistan and Jordan are torturing terror suspects at the behest of a nation - the United States - that
just went through a national election in which the issue of moral values was supposed to have been decisive. How in the world did we become a country in
which gays' getting married is considered an abomination, but torture is O.K.?

As Ms. Mayer pointed out: "Terrorism suspects in Europe, Africa, Asia and the Middle East have often been abducted by hooded or masked American agents,
then forced onto a Gulfstream V jet, like the one described by Arar. ... Upon arriving in foreign countries, rendered suspects often vanish. Detainees
are not provided with lawyers, and many families are not informed of their whereabouts."

Mr. Arar was seized because his name had turned up on a watch list of terror suspects. He was reported to have been a co-worker of a man in Canada whose
brother was a suspected terrorist.

"Although he initially tried to assert his innocence, he eventually confessed to anything his tormentors wanted him to say," Ms. Mayer wrote.

The confession under torture was worthless. Syrian officials reported back to the United States that they could find no links between Mr. Arar and terrorism.
He was released in October 2003 without ever being charged and is now back in Canada.

Barbara Olshansky is the assistant legal director of the Center for Constitutional Rights, which is representing Mr. Arar in a lawsuit against the U.S.
I asked her to describe Mr. Arar's physical and emotional state following his release from custody.

She sounded shaken by the memory. "He's not a big guy," she said. "He had lost more than 40 pounds. His pallor was terrible, and his eyes were sunken. He
looked like someone who was kind of dead inside."

Any government that commits, condones, promotes or fosters torture is a malignant force in the world. And those who refuse to raise their voices against
something as clearly evil as torture are enablers, if not collaborators.

There is a widespread but mistaken notion in the U.S. that everybody seized by the government in its so-called war on terror is in fact somehow connected
to terrorist activity. That is just wildly wrong.

Tony Blair knows a little about that sort of thing. Just two days ago the British prime minister formally apologized to 11 people who were wrongfully convicted
and imprisoned for bombings in England by the Irish Republican Army three decades ago.

Jettisoning the rule of law to permit such acts of evil as kidnapping and torture is not a defensible policy for a civilized nation. It's wrong. And nothing
good can come from it.
 

My weekend has been so boring. All it did was rain and I wasn't able to go to the movies again. This sucks!