YouTube: Benjamin Netanyahu Uses This Website to Present Israel's Position

The Twisted Sisterhood Offers a New Interactive Site for Women

Duchess O’Blunt – Brenda Stone (Brown) – found me on LinkedIn and sent me a message about her website TheTwistedSisterhood.com. I checked out the site and was impressed. So I asked her to write a guest post about the genesis of the site. And at the end of the blog post is a little bio I also asked her to write.

Building castles, wet t-shirt contests, dealing with scorpions, eating worms, murder mysteries, and much more – these are some of the things The Twisted Sisterhood will tell you about in the new interactive website for women. Some of these things may not SOUND like fun, but come and see for yourself the Twist we have given them.

We are a group of women who have been “Twisting it Up!” since early 2000. Our vision is to inspire clean simple fun with women all over the world – to create an online community where woman can feel free to be creative, relax and rejuvenate. We have shared some of our million dollar memories. Yours can be made with just a bit of imagination, a touch of ingenuity and a little of your time.

For seven years we talked about how together the six of us would make the perfect woman. We had everything we needed between us to start our own business. In October 2007, at our yearly B&B weekend away together, we made the decision to go for it. The website is the result. It is a far cry from the kits we were going to make and sell, but it is ultimately a much better product. Along the way we had a lot of help and encouragement.

We want women to learn to give themselves permission to have fun. The Twisted Sisterhood can help you with that in a unique way. We also want to provide as much opportunity for networking as we can in the spirit of Sisterhood. We have married those two objectives into one distinctive website with boundless opportunities. We currently have over 220 members across the globe and continue to see a steady growth. With more members, more opportunities are created.

As business women we tend to focus on growing our businesses and often neglect the one thing that makes us unique – the connections and bonds we have with our girlfriends. The vision of The Twisted Sisterhood is to inspire women to reclaim those connections. It’s vital to allow space for new friendships and maintaining those we have developed over the years (but may be neglecting). If you are up for some fun, we have just the thing for you!

The Twisted Sisterhood offers many unique opportunities. Here are some of the benefits:
• It’s free!
• It’s fun!
• It’s user-friendly

We provide an opportunity to:
• Build on your friendships with imaginative events that require little or no money
• Think outside your “circle” or “bubble” and expand the possibilities
• Share the positive, help encourage others
• Message, chat, and create new connections with other members
• Blog to your heart’s content!
• “Hold Court” (come see us to find out how)

We might not be able to transform the world, but we hope to encourage some good changes in those whose lives we touch. Join us as we share our passion for “The Twisted Sisterhood," where we take individual strands of friendship and Twist them into Sisterhood. It’s a simple concept with some big ideas initiated with little money and resulting in LOTS OF FUN. This is our way of “giving back” a bit of what we have found with each other.

My given name is Brenda meaning sword, but with The Twisted Sisterhood my persona is The Duchess O’Blunt. I am a mother of two wonderful young men and happily married to my high school sweetheart. I am very proud of all three men in my life, have had a good career in the corporate world, and have now ventured into the unknown (for me anyway) world of the internet. I have volunteered time in teaching seniors how to use computers and the internet. This has been as fulfilling for me as it has been educational for them. I love to learn, I love history, and our seniors have an abundance to teach us.

The Gift of a Goat: A Special Needs Boy Celebrates His Bar Mitzvah

I attended the Bar Mitzvah of a special needs boy, and this Bar Mitzvah was a moving testament to the boy, his family and the Jewish community to which his family belongs. The rabbinical student who worked with the Bar Mitzvah boy did an amazing job of starting the service in a way that directly related to the boy and the other special needs children at the Bar Mitzvah.

A young friend of the Bar Mitzvah boy read his speech, in which we learned that he had used his money to buy a goat to help a family in Africa. Later on during the service the Bar Mitzvah boy's father said the boy would have liked to keep the goat in his own backyard. Yet it was destined to make a difference in someone else's life.

I wondered through what project or organization that the goat had been provided to a family in Africa. The Bar Mitzvah boy's mother told me the organization was Heifer International.

In FY2007, Heifer had 867 active projects in 53 countries/provinces and 28 U.S. states. Heifer projects around the world help families achieve self-reliance through the gift of livestock and training. Gifts are passed from recipient to recipient until entire communities are transformed.

Remembering that the overall sentiment of this special Bar Mitzvah was that we can all work towards going beyond our apparent abilities, I thought how appropriate this particular Bar Mitzvah tzedakah (charity) gift was -- the gift of the goat would go beyond being a simple gift to transform the life of a family and perhaps the entire village. Just as this Bar Mitzvah had gone beyond a traditional coming-of-age ritual to transform all of us privileged to witness this day.

Brad Pitt Makes It Right in New Orleans: We Can All Help

The picture of Brad Pitt on the cover of the January 2009 Architectural Digest magazine caught my eye. What was he doing on the cover?

The article’s headline said it all: “Brad Pitt Makes It Right in New Orleans: After Hurricane Katrina, the Actor Breaks New Ground and Helps Rebuild the Lower Ninth Ward.”

The article describes how, in December 2006, Brad Pitt gathered a group of experts in New Orleans to figure out how to build affordable and sustainable housing for victims of Hurricane Katrina, which devastated New Orleans in late August of 2005.

One of the most-devastated areas was the African-American community of the Lower Ninth Ward (northeast of the French Quarter). By the time I toured the Lower Ninth Ward in October of 2007 it looked peaceful – grass grew in open fields and there were almost no buildings. I learned that this peaceful appearance resulted only after the destroyed homes and dead people had been removed.

Now Brad Pitt is leading the effort to build new homes in this area – homes that are eight-feet off the ground and feature rooftop escape hatches so residents won’t be trapped again if the waters rise so quickly. The article features the six houses completed in October 2008, which will be joined by 144 more in this first stage.

The Make It Right organization is seeking donations to help fund its efforts. Check out the organization’s website to learn more about this amazing rebirth story and to help the rebirth effort.

Playing Field Leveled for High School Athletes Applying to College

I was very pleased to read the December 18th Wall Street Journal article “The Do-It-Yourself Athletic Scholarship” by Matthew Futterman:

Coaches and recruiters easily notice top-tier talent in big-name sports. But mid-level high-school athletes or those in lesser-known sports often pay high-priced private consultants to connect them with coaches. With fees ranging from $700 to $5,000, the system has been expensive for students and inefficient for coaches – who get scouting recommendations only on kids who can afford to pay the consultants.

Now, do-it-yourself services have emerged that allow student athletes to showcase their abilities for a fraction of the price. Aside from beRecruited.com, other sites include Prepchamps.com, TRUpreps.com (owned by CBS Corp.’s MaxPreps unit), ActiveRecruiting.com, Collegecoaches.net and SportsWorx.com. There are also numerous sport-specific sites.

This is a wonderful leveling of the playing field for high school athletes. And as a mother who a few years ago had to learn everything on her own about helping a child who wanted to participate in a particular NCAA Division 1 college sport, I can only say that this is a wonderful use of the internet.

And as I’ve said before in another context, don’t assume that the sport a teen plays in high school is not of interest to a college. Do the research to find out what colleges might be interested in that sport, and then use these online showcases to put a teen’s athletic skills in the public eye.

Support Our Troops at Holiday Times and Throughout the Year

The above painting "Coming Home" is by Colonel Charles Waterhouse, the "artist in residence" for the Marine Corps and a veteran of Iwo Jima.

It's a fitting illustration for this post on showing our appreciation and support for our military personnel. Nancy Brown of YourMilitary.com and I just finished interviewing -- on our BlogTalkRadio show YourMilitaryLife -- Janel Landon, who is on the Illinois USO board of directors.

Janel reminded our audience that USO centers in airports and elsewhere are open 24 hours a day 365 days of the year. She talked about how important it is to have USO volunteers greet military personnel returning from deployment. And she reminded us that we are a nation at war.

As Janel spoke about this "welcome home" mission by the USO, I was reminded of the bitterness that a Vietnam veteran recently revealed to me. He told me that no one had greeted and thanked him at the airport when he returned from Vietnam. Instead he had been vilified -- and this wound still hurt after all these years. (Read the whole post.)

Check out USO.org to see how you can help. Or read recent posts at my blog about the needs of wounded soldiers or check out the MRS. LIEUTENANT website for organizations that support military personnel and their families.

In this holiday season and in the coming year, please remember our troops who are in harm's way protecting our country and our freedoms.

Tonight We Light the First Hanukkah Candle

Tonight is the first night of the eight-day Jewish festival of Hanukkah. Rabbi Karen L. Fox and I wrote in our Jewish holiday book:

Hanukkah honors an historical event -- the struggle for religious freedom. Hanukkah commemorates a time when the ancient homeland of the Jews -- now known as Israel -- was ruled by the Greeks in the second century before the common era. The Greeks threatened to eliminate the religious faith and customs of the Jewish people.

A small band of Jews resolved to forfeit their lives if necessary to preserve their heritage. Their successful struggle against overwhelming odds determined that the Jewish people and their unique beliefs and practices would survive.

You can read more about this holiday in our book Seasons for Celebration: A Contemporary Guide to the Joys, Practices and Traditions of the Jewish Holidays.

A Jewish friend who had been raised in foster homes told me how she had mistakenly lit all eight candles the first night when she finally had her own home and could celebrate the holiday. Because of this mistake, Karen and I took pains to ensure that we gave very specific instructions on how to light the Hanukkah menorah, which holds the eight candles plus the shamash (the serving candle used to light the others).

Then one year a non-Jewish friend asked me for a menorah. I gave him the menorah, candles and a copy of SEASONS FOR CELEBRATION. Only Karen and I had forgotten to write one instruction: the candles remain burning until they burn up -- they are NOT blown out. My non-Jewish friend said a blessing after lighting the candles, and promptly blew them out as if they were birthday cake candles. So much for the "complete" instructions Karen and I thought we had written.