Talent Agency 411

Charles Carroll and his brother, Bobby, had the misfortune of being unwanted and hard-to-place foster children in the 1950s. So the powers that be simply reclassified them from “orphan” to “retarded” and exiled them to a state institution for the mentally retarded. There they remained for years, deprived of their civil liberties, devoid of their right to an education, and denied any semblance of a humane existence.

Carroll’s new memoir, HARD CANDY: Nobody Ever Flies Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, reveals the alarming abusesemotional abuse, physical abuse, and sexual abuse and pedophiliaendured by the author, his brother, and other residents. It’s written in the format of a novel; as a reader, you can easily lose yourself in Carroll’s world and think you’re reading fiction. But every so often, you’ll turn the page to discover a photograph depicting the scene you’ve just reada sobering reminder that this is, in fact, a shockingly true story.

“I chose to use the novel format because I felt this was the best way to tell my story,” says Carroll. “I think this really allowed me to communicate how I felt at the time things were happening to me. I had the freedom to bring the ‘characters’ to life and take the reader on the journey with me.” And what a journey that is. The author describesthrough the eyes of a child, but the sensitive introspection of an adulta world of living conditions so sadistic, so brutal and degrading, that “child abuse” seems a chillingly inadequate label.

Of course, that was fifty years ago. Such things could never happen today. Right?

Unfortunately, wrong.

“The Justice Department has been investigating state institutions across the U.S.more than 60 facilities in the last five years alone,” says Carroll. “Some of these have been developmental disability and mental retardation facilities. And, lo and behold, the New Lisbon Developmental Center in New Jersey, where my brother and I were committed, came under their radar screen.”

In fact, the book’s appendix offers startling evidence that abuses are anything but a thing of the past. The Justice Department’s investigation of New Lisbon, in 2001-2002, found continuous violations of residents’ civil rights and even life-threatening conditions. Investigations at other institutions bear striking similarities to one another and to New Lisbon: sexual abuse, physical abuse, and verbal abuse of residents (by staff and by other residents, even by other children); failure to report and follow up on incidents; inadequate psychiatric and medical care; inadequate education; inadequate habilitation programs (to prepare residents to function in society); and even a failure to provide basic sanitation. (For more details on the Justice Department probes under CRIPA, the Civil Rights for Institutionalized Persons Act, and a partial list of facilities investigated, go to www.usdoj.gov/crt/split/cripa.htm.)

“When I read the Justice Department reports,” relates Carroll, “all of my personal experiences came to mindthe abuse by staff, the attacks by other children, the unsanitary conditions, the feeling of futility when any of us tried to report an incident. In my book, I paint a pretty forthright picture of my life back then, with no apologies and no sugarcoating. But I also try to focus on how I survived, how my love for my brother kept me going. And I really want this book to be a voice for all those other children, victims like me, who can’t speak for themselves.”

As gut-wrenching as HARD CANDY is, it ultimately leaves the reader with a sense of that determination to survive and of the strong bond Carroll hadand haswith his brother, Bobby. “After we were released from the state system, I lost track of Bobby. When I found him, in 1988, I decided it was time to write this booksomething I had vowed to one day do when I was in my early teens.”

HARD CANDY has been the culmination of a long, hard road since Carroll’s days as a state ward. When he was finally released at the age of 16, he had the equivalent of a second grade education. He ended up in California and earned his diploma from Hollywood High School, then went on to earn an associate’s degree in sociology and came just one course short of receiving his bachelor’s degree from California State University. Carroll eventually started his own electrical contracting business, which supported him for twenty years.

That’s when he found Bobby and started working on the book. He spent six years doing research, and another seven years writing, for a total of 12 revisions. “Facing my past was difficult,” says the author. “I cried a lot, and the nightmares began all over again. But I persevered, and it ended up being a very cathartic processbetter than therapy. Today, I’m at peace with myself.”

Today, the brothers are reunited and living in Southern California. What does Carroll want to do now? “I want Bobby and I to stay together now, the way we started as children. And I want to raise public awareness of child abuse, pedophilia, and institutional abuseto try to prevent similar abuses from happening in the future. Otherwise, I want little else for myself.”

HARD CANDY: Nobody Ever Flies Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, by Charles A. Carroll, is available on Amazon and other online book retailers.

Help Prevent Child Abuse

If you suspect a case of child abuse or neglect, contact your local police, department of child protective services or family and children services, or
National Child Abuse Hotline (Childhelp USA)
800-4-A-Child or 800-422-4453 (24 hours)
www.childhelpusa.org

Alison Cohen has an MBA from Cornell University and twenty years’ experience in marketing, writing, and editing. For more information about HARD CANDY or to set up an interview with author Charles A. Carroll, please contact Ms. Cohen at 248-548-4489 or alisoncohen@joralis.com, or go to http://championpress.com/nonfiction/hardcandy.htm

Hey I bet you would like some more information, not just any information real solid information you can use. It seems these days there are so many places and ways to get information that many people are informationed out. Since you are reading this article, while I’ll be you typed into the search engine; “Give Me Knowledge” and do you know why you instinctively wrote that? Do you.

Well it is because you are tired of the same old information and news, you want more substantive data and information. What you want is either wisdom, because you are beyond the news, sports and weather or you want knowledge, real knowledge, not opinion or conjecture but real world knowledge that you can use to better yourself and those around you. The thirst for knowledge is obviously something you possess or you would not have asked the question.

Now one would suppose that asking the question is the first step; “Give me Knowledge?” Indeed this is one of the first steps to acquiring knowledge, but another key ingredient is to get with others who also feel the same, like in a think tank or perhaps an online forum where others who are well versed in many endeavors are also seeking wisdom and knowledge. Do you possess some wisdom or some knowledge in a particular endeavor, would you like to share that in trade to learn from others? If so may be you have read the right article indeed then. Think on this in 2006.

“Lance Winslow” - Online Think Tank forum board. If you have innovative thoughts and unique perspectives, come think with Lance; http://www.WorldThinkTank.net/wttbbs/

Have you ever thought about laughter as healthy?

Over 25 years ago, Dr. Norman Cousins in his book “Anatomy of an Illness” described how watching Marx Brother movies helped him recover from a life-threatening tissue disease. “Laughter is an antidote to apprehension and panic,” wrote Dr. Cousins.

Can laughter improve your health? Yes! Medical studies have shown that laughter utilizes muscles throughout the body. For instance, laughter exercises the lungs and circulatory system and increases the amount of oxygen in the blood. Laughter also:

Reduces muscle tension

Boosts levels of endorphins, the body’s natural painkillers

Reduces levels of hormones and neurochemicals

Stablizes blood pressure

Increases heart rate

Provides a natural boost to the immune system

Amazingly, laughter also reduces stress. Levels of epinephrine, the stress hormone which constricts blood vessels and suppresses immune activity–decrease in the body as a result of laughter In other words, laughter is a good way for people to relax! It is beneficial from the inside-out, and has no side effects.

Do you have respiratory problems? It may be possible to laugh them away. There have been incidences where a hearty belly laugh helped people with respiratory problems by clearing mucus and aiding ventiliation.

Laughter also gives your heart a good cardiac workout. Some hospitals have stand-up comedians and “clown kids” in attempts to speed their patients healing, recovery and boost morale.

Medical researcher Dr. Lee Berk found that laughter increased the activity of “natural killer cells” which destroy viruses and tumors. Laughter also increased disease-fighting protein, B-cells, the source of a disease-destroying antibody, and T-cells which help cellular immune response.

Today is a fantastic day to laugh, learn, love, and grow. You can do it! Go ahead and laugh. It’s good for you.

There is this woman at my son’s school with whom I have a very bad human connection indeed. I think she is unapproachable, indifferent, and unfriendly. In fact, though I like a few people, there are more people in that school whom I absolutely dislike. In my book they are all indifferent, unapproachable, and unfriendly.

On the other hand I have a great human connection with my piano teacher, now a friend, who is just delightful, warm, interesting, generous, and very intelligent. Ditto for my son who is also very intelligent, sensitive, caring, loving, and absolutely hilarious.

How is that that I have great and not so great relationships with different people? What is there that makes me like and be liked as well as hated (or disliked) and hateful (or despising)? Why do I recognize negative qualities in some people and positive qualities in other people?

The answer is very simple: I am just mirroring myself in these people. As we hate to realize it, the truth is that we all have positive and negative qualities (according to our values, of course) that we project onto others, thus, some people push our buttons whereas others just delight us.

It is, thus, crucially important to know who are we exactly, so we can transform all our relationships into positive and gratifying ones. To know our qualities we need only make two lists. For each list, get a piece of paper and make a line in the middle.

In the first sheet, do the following:

1. Write on top: Qualities I appreciate in others.

2. On the left hand side of the paper, write the names of people you most admire. They can be real people or imaginary characters, dead or alive, that you have or have not known personally; it matters not.

3. On the right hand side of the paper, for each person, write all the qualities you most admire in them.

4. Keep doing this until you have written qualities for all of the people in that list.

5. Do not repeat qualities. Write them only once.

In the second piece of paper do the same, only this time, you will write: “Qualities I despise in others,” meaning all the negative qualities certain people have that you truly despise, even hate. Now, pay attention that you should not write about behavior but qualities only.

For example: Hitler = mass murderer.
Mass murderer is a behavior, not a quality. You could write instead: Hitler = unsympathetic (to put it mildly).
See the difference?

When you are done with both lists write the following at the bottom of each page:
I see these qualities in others because I too, have them.
Ouch! How can I compare myself with that despicable man?

Now is the time to reflect about each of our negative qualities, the ones we are sure NOT to have but which, indeed we do, in a subtle or not so subtle way. In our example: unsympathetic. Ok; the guy condoned the murderer of millions of people. In what way are we being and doing the same? You don’t need to go far. If you are not a vegetarian, you already have an answer. (This is a lame comparison, I know. I just want to give an example.)

See? It is not difficult at all to see where our projections go. Try it and I guarantee your relationships are about to change radically for the better.

By the way: For some reason, I can’t care less about the people in that school. I, too, am indifferent, unapproachable, and unfriendly. It is up to me to change the situation. Once I change, everything will fall into place beautifully.

© Maria Moratto 2005

About the author

Dr. Maria Moratto holds 5 degrees and is a life and spiritual coach/educator. She promotes coaching, seminars and courses in developing the perfect life’s blueprint, which includes attracting abundance and loving relationships, time management, stress management, diversity, goal setting, career search and change, values clarification, leisure, self-improvement, college life, communication and learning styles, spirituality, natural health and lifestyle.
She is also writing two books: one on successful relationships and the other on attracting the perfect lifestyle; both coming soon. Visit her website at http://www.rx4bliss.com and sign up for a no-cost e-zine that is short, informative, and fun.
Go to her blog at: http://www.rx4bliss.blogspot.com for great discussions on these topics. Visit http://www.thedollarbillgame.blogspot.com to participate in a great prosperity game.

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However you like to do it, dating is a dangerous game. Not talking to strangers might be sound advice to give to kids but as a strategy to stop being single, it has at least one obvious drawback. Unless you want to marry your cousin, finding someone to settle down with will involve making eye contact with total strangers, engaging them in conversation and meeting them one-on-one.

There are two obvious dangers here. The first is that your new friend might appear to be a complete charmer but could actually be a cold-blooded philanderer with a record of heart-breaking. They’ll think nothing of leading you on, playing games and trampling over your emotions. That’s bad enough and you’ve probable had enough of people like that already.

The second danger is even worse, even if it is a great deal rarer. The attractive stranger that you meet in the bar could actually be an escaped convict from the local sanatorium. Instead of finding someone who makes you feel safe and secure for the rest of your life, you pick someone up who’s going to put your safety at risk and require you to take out a series of court orders and new alarm systems.

Although the chances of meeting someone like this online is extremely small, it is worth making the effort to be cautious. In this chapter, we’re going to talk about how to steer clear of this second group and stay safe online.

Anonymity Cuts Both Ways

When you meet someone in a bar, the initial pick-up is as much a safety check as it is a check-out. If you spot someone attractive sitting alone at the table next to yours, before you even give them a lookbefore you make any kind of contact at allyou observe them for a few minutes to see how they behave with the waiters, by themselves or with people who pass by. If they are rude, arrogant or just downright unpleasant, it doesn’t matter how much of a looker they are, you’re still going to look right on by. Only if you’re sure they’re normal, civilized human beings do you try to make eye contact, pluck up the courage to face rejection and make your move.

And once you do make that move, you’re always looking out for little signals that tell you that the person you’re talking to is less than normal. There are all sorts of clues to help you do that: the way someone dresses, the way they talk and their body language to name but a fewand you notice all of them without even realizing that you’re looking for them.

A cowboy hat and a Texas drawl for example, tell you instantly where someone is from and where they stand in the country’s cultural divide. Bleached hair and sentences that end with ‘dude’ tell you much the same. Nervous twitches, roaming hands and peculiar scratching all say something about the person you’re sizing up and help you make a decision about whether you should make a date or make an excuse.

Face-to-face, you’ve got a ton of different signals that tell you huge amounts about the person you’re thinking of chatting to.

Online, you’ve got nothing to go on but what the person puts on their profile and writes in their email.

“Unlike real-life relationships where you have some idea of what a person drives, what they really look like, how they live, etc., online you have none of that,” says Lisa Hupman, a veteran cyberdater who set up WildXangel.com, a website that warns other daters about the dangers in online dating. “You give more trust than is actually due because you have no choice.”

And the reason you have no choiceor more accurately, little choiceabout the level of trust you give is that the main tool that protects you online is the same thing that protects the occasional nutcase who roams the Web: anonymity.

There is no way for two people who exchange emails online to know the real identities of the people they’re writing to. The email you receive lands in an inbox located on the site.

The name you choose is one you create and should bear no relation to your real identity.

As long as you don’t let your real, full name slip out before you’ve built up a certain amount of trust, you start an online relationship fully protected by the fact that the person who writes to you has no idea who you are, where you live or how they can get hold of you outside the site.

When you date online, the dating identity that’s doing the looking exists only on the Internet. There’s a complete barrier between your online self and the real youand that barrier is your best protection against any wacko you might be unlucky enough to meet online.

If you have the bad luck to meet a loony at a dating site, as long as you’ve kept your identity a secret, there’s no way that they can bother you in real life.

Of course, that works for them too. Because there’s no way for you to check the identity of someone you meet online, you’ve got no idea whether the doctor who sent you an email got his or her degree certificate from Harvard, as they claim, or ordered it from a website in Romania. You’ve got no idea if they were really working for the Peace Corps for the last two years or spent that time sewing mailbags in a state penitentiary. And you’ve got no idea whether the person who described themselves as passionate will leave you alone once you tell them you’re not interested or hang around outside your front door waiting for you to come home from work.

It would be nice if there were a checklist that you could go through when you meet someone online. If they mentioned ‘knives’ more than three times in the first email, you could tick a box. If they mentioned that they served multiple sentences for violent crimes, that would lead you to tick another box. If they talked about their friendship with the Unabomber that would strike them out.

But it’s not that easy.

The best way to keep yourself safe online is to follow three simple rules: keep your anonymity as long as possible; remember that if something feels wrong, it probably is; and cut them out quick and completely as soon as you smell something fishy.

1. Keeping Your Name (And Everything Else) To Yourself
There’s no reason at the beginning of an online relationship for you to say who you are, where you work, where you live, what your telephone number is or any other identifying detail that you might later regret.

When you start exchanging emails, you can chat about your hobbies. You can talk in general about the kind of work you do. You can say that you like walking in Central Park or heading out to Sequoia. But tell someone you’ve never seen, never met and whose real name you don’t know that you live at 123 Killmenow Road, Apt. 103 and it’s certainly possible that you’ll have reason to regret it when you find yourself looking for a new apartment.

In a later chapter we talk in more detail about what the first couple of emails of an Internet relationship are supposed to do. At this stage though, it’s enough to say that what they’re not supposed to do is draw out personal information that would allow your new pal to find you offline.

If someone asks for a phone number, you can tell them politely that you’d rather hold onto it for a while. If they ask exactly where you work, you can just say a big law firm in the city or a clothes store in town. If they ask, in their first email, for your address, you can delete their message, add them to your blocked members list and tell the website that this person looks a bit suspicious.

2. If Something Looks Wrong, It Probably Is…
That’s because on the Internet, it pays to be suspicious.

The vast majority of the people you meet online will be as honest, direct and truthful as the people you meet offline. It’s unlikely that you’ll come across many angels who will lay out their entire life histories, warts and all, right at the beginning, but it’s also very unlikely that you’ll be unfortunate enough to come across any axe-wielding psychopaths or the stereotypical man masquerading as a womanor vice-versa (most of those seem to have run off with Netscape in the early days of the Internet).

For the most part, you’ll find that the vast majority of fibs you encounter on dating sites tend to concern age, weight, income and of course photo, with ten-year-old graduation photos passing as up-to-date snaps.

That’s certainly bad enough but it’s not a threat and you can decide, when you uncover the real story, whether the truth has been stretched beyond the bounds of forgiveness.

You can also get a feel for when someone’s lying onlineeven if you can’t see the way they behave when they’re spinning you a story and you can’t hear in their voice that not even they believe what they’re saying. It’s hard to keep a story straight and there are often little inconsistencies the tell you that something isn’t quite right.

If someone born in 1974 for example, talks about having been in their current job for twelve years and their previous job for fifteen, then that should set alarm bells ringing. If a potential date who claims on their profile never to have been married mentions a stay with ex-in-laws, that should raise a red flag. And if someone says they don’t like spending time with the police that should send out a serious warning.

These are exactly the kind of tell-tale signs that tell you that something isn’t quite right. And when you get those signs, it’s always a good idea to trust your instincts.

3. Cut Them Out Quick
We’ve already mentioned that you might come across two different kinds of deception online: the more common truthful economies that exaggerate positive qualities such as youth or wealth at the expense of complete honesty; and the total lies that obscure a character that likes to stalk, harass or otherwise make life miserable for their unfortunate victim.

When you come across the first typeand there’s a fair chance that you will come across the first type online, just as you’ll come across milder forms offline tooyou can decide what you want to do. If you’re dealing with just a mild little exaggeration you might be willing to forgive them their trespasses (just you might be hoping that people will forgive you yours).

But if you get the feeling that the person you’re dealing with is even close to being on the dangerous side, the best thing to do is cut them out quickly.

Just about all dating sites allow you to block emails from members who are bothering you. Add them to your blocked list and if you’ve managed to keep your identity details secret, that should be the last you hear from them.

Don’t even think twice about it. With millions of people searching for singles online, with such a huge reservoir of people to choose from, there’s absolutely no reason for you to take any risks at all on the Internet. The dangers are just too great and the alternatives too many for you to bother with them.

The moment you see even the slightest hint of a red flag waving, cut, run and move on to the next likely prospect. There are far too many fish in the sea for you to waste your time and your safety swimming with the sharks.

Millions of people have used online dating sites without ever coming across the slightest hint of danger, risk or deception. If you do see a flag, it’s more likely to be the light pink of a couple of years shaved off a birth date than the throbbing red of a Glenn Close looking for a victim. While it’s perfectly possibleand even easyfor someone to misrepresent their qualifications online, it’s no less easy for you to protect yourself from any danger and look for someone more honest.

To keep safe online, and to protect yourself from nasty surprises such as lying Lotharios and deceptive divas, you’ll need little more than common sense and a sensitive nose for the whiff of deceit.

Merav Knafo

Merav Knafo is the co-founder of LookBetterOnline.com. LookBetterOnline offers an easy and economical solution to the problem of sub-standard online dating photos. Available in over 6000 cities in the US and Canada, all the photographers they employ are pre-screened, are specially trained and will make you look your best! You get 12 great images that are the perfect size and resolution for your profile - and for no additional charge, their staff will recommend the best photos to use!

Do your photos do you justice? If they aren’t working for you, they may be working against you.

For more information and to schedule a photo session that may change your life, visit http://lookbetteronline.com