Archive for November, 2009

MIAMI (Reuters) – A bank in Florida refused to cash a check for an armless man because he could not provide a thumbprint.

“They looked at my prosthetic hands and the teller said, ‘Well, obviously you can’t give us a thumbprint’,” Steve Valdez told CNN on Wednesday.

But he said the Bank of America Corp branch in downtown Tampa, Florida, still insisted on a thumbprint identification for him to cash a check drawn on his wife’s account at the bank, even though he showed them two photo IDs.

In the incident last week, a bank supervisor told Valdez he could only cash the check without a thumbprint if he brought his wife in with him or he opened an account with them.

“I told them I neither wanted an account with them and couldn’t bring my wife in because she was nowhere close by,” Valdez told CNN.

Bank of America said in a statement cited by CNN: “While the thumbprint is a requirement for those who don’t have accounts, the bank should have made accommodations.”

Valdez said his treatment by the bank violated the U.S. Americans with Disability Act requiring institutions to provide reasonable accommodation to disabled persons.

(Writing by Pascal Fletcher; editing by Todd Eastham)

Good days are to be gathered like sunshine in grapes, to be trodden and bottled into wine and kept for age to sip at ease beside the fire. If the traveler has vintaged well, he need trouble to wander no longer; the ruby moments glow in his glass at will.

Happy Thanksgiving. Thank Able Lincoln too. He Finalized its Bogus Invention.

Published on November 26th, 2009 Posted by John C Dvorak in General

THIS IS A REPOST OF A 2005 POST
HAPPY THANKSGIVING from Everyone at Dvorak Uncensored.

Thanksgiving Proclamation by Abraham Lincoln — I’m always amused by the cock and bull story about Thanksgiving being about Pilgrims, maize, turkeys and Indians when the holiday stems from an Abe Lincoln proclamation at the behest of a magazine editor. The road to today’s Thanksgiving has had a rocky road, in fact.

I’m not sure when the baloney about Pilgrims and Indians actually took hold as folklore, but I find it offensive that it is taught in schools as fact..

That said, who is complaining about days off? And I do like a good turkey and gladly spend the extra money for a real old-fashioned bird with real flavor. A great turkey actually tastes more like pheasant and does not have that exaggerated turkey flavor you get from commercial birds. I’m convinced that the only reason that people are deep fat frying these birds nowadays is to minimize that obnoxious taste only recently bred into the birds.

This is the proclamation which set the precedent for America’s national day of Thanksgiving. During his administration, President Lincoln issued many orders like this. For example, on November 28, 1861, he ordered government departments closed for a local day of thanksgiving.

The holiday we know today as Thanksgiving was recommended to Lincoln by Sarah Josepha Hale, a prominent magazine editor. Her letters to Lincoln urged him to have the “day of our annual Thanksgiving made a National and fixed Union Festival.” The document below sets apart the last Thursday of November “as a day of Thanksgiving and Praise.”

According to an April 1, 1864 letter from John Nicolay, one of Lincoln’s secretaries, this document was written by Secretary of State William Seward, and the original was in his handwriting. Fellow Cabinet member Gideon Welles recorded in his diary on October 3 that he complimented Seward on his work. A year later, the manuscript was sold to benefit Union troops and since then has disappeared.

Oh, and I apparently bitched about this last year with a snarky, but well-researched piece on the various iterations of Thanksgiving.

It was a cool one this morning, almost to the point where one would call it cold. Currently at my thermometer it is 25°F outside. I know when I got off of work there was frost everywhere. It was thick frost too, I actually had to scrape my windows otherwise I would have to sit a good while waiting for the defroster to work.

I hope everyone had a good Thanksgiving yesterday. We are planning on having our a few days late on the 29th. But the real Thanksgiving is actually in October. I will post more on the history of the day later on, either today or tomorrow.

There is also a scam, so to speak, of certain online retailers and I will also post more on this later.

According to my ‘unofficial’ poll, meaning my memory of how full the parking lots were, it seems that Shopko must not have as good deals this year as last and Kmart must have better deals. I’m sure the paper will have more information on that later on this week.

Enjoy your day and I’m off to bed after a glucose check and a post of today’s book. /Mike

From all of us here at the Manley Ranch, Happy Thanksgiving to all and may you have a happy holiday season. /Mike