Freebies For Us

The Story of the Mighty Dog Nation
Like many great movements, the Mighty Dog Nation started small - a sniff here, a bark there. And as mighty dogs come together from all walks of life, their voices will grow and their stories will be heard.

The founding of this first-of-its-kind nation for dogs will be documented in a short dogumentary called “Mighty Dog Nation: The Movie.” Dog owners are invited to enter a national video contest for the chance for their dogs to win a starring role in the dogumentary, which will be 3-5 minutes in length and will debut on www.mightydog.com in January 2010.

In addition to being chosen for feature roles in Mighty Dog(R) Nation: The Movie, three grand prize winners will appear in a 30-second film trailer that will air in a commercial break during the National Dog Show on NBC on Thanksgiving Day.

“As the brand that helps dogs be their mightiest, Mighty Dog(R) dog food is excited to see the many ways in which the citizens of our nation show their mightiness everyday,” said Nicole Balderas, brand manager for Purina Mighty Dog. “Are they fearless front porch defenders or the masters of their domain who oversee all household activities? Regardless of the ways in which these spirited dogs show their mightiness, it’s time for them to be recognized.”

Owners of mighty dogs can go to www.mightydog.com to learn how to become a citizen of the Nation and get a copy of the Official Contest Rules on how to enter the Mighty Dog Nation: The Movie Video Contest.

About Nestle Purina PetCare

Nestle Purina PetCare promotes responsible pet care, community involvement and the positive bond between people and their pets. A premiere global manufacturer of pet products, Nestle Purina PetCare is part of Swiss-based Nestle S.A., the world’s largest food company.

To mark St Patrick’s Day, Faith Central has compiled 10 celebratory tidbits, some myth, some fact, on the Patron Saint of the Irish.

1. The potato crop was traditionally planted in Ireland after March 17

2. Blue not green is the color originally associated with St Patrick. “St Patrick’s Blue” is used on Ireland’s Presidential Standard or flag, while the Irish Guards sport a plume of St Patrick’s blue in their bearskins. The emphasis on green is thought to be linked to “wearing the Green”, a symbol from the 18th century on, of sympathy with Irish independence.

3. St Patrick is patron of fishermen in the Loire, where a legend associates him with a blackthorn bush. The saint is said to have slept beneath it, and when he awoke the next day, Christmas, the bush flowered, and was said to have continued to do so every Christmas until its destruction during the First World War.

4. A regiment of the Mexican army in the 1846 -8 War between Mexico and America was named after St Patrick. Members of the Batellón de San Patricio included Afro-Americans freshly liberated from the slave plantations of the South, and the soldiers were granted Mexican citizenship afterwards.

5. The first St Patrick’s Day parade took place in 1737 in Boston, followed in 1762 by New York. George Washington allowed his soldiers a holiday on March 17, 1780 as “an act of solidarity with the Irish in their fight for independence.”

6. Until the 1970’s, all pubs were shut in Ireland on St Patrick’s Day, and the sole venue selling drink the annual dog show. Lenten fasting – and the obligation to abstain from meat – were lifted on the day, which most families would begin with Mass.

7. St Patrick’s Day is a public holiday in Ireland and also in Monserrat “the Emerald Isle of the Carribean,” so called because it was settled in 1633 by Irish migrants from St Kitts.

8. According to legend, on the day of Judgement, while Christ judges all other nations, St Patrick will be the judge of the Irish.

9. Since 1962, tons of green dye are tipped on St Patrick’s Day into the Chicago river, although the quantity has reduced, for environmental reasons, from 100 to 40.

10. Should you wish to carry on celebrating St Patrick after March 17, in the United States, you might visit the four Shamrocks in the USA including Mount Gay-Shamrock, W.Va or the nine cities named Dublin, including Dublin, Ohio (the largest Dublin in the U.S.) and Dublin, Georgia.

You have to be a registed member to get this offer. Register on Loreal’s site!

After registration or sign-in, go to “My Loreal” then go to “Special Offers” on the left side. You should see the sample link there.

Purpose
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Tuesday January 20th
Watch President-elect Barack Obama become the next President of the United States on CNN.com Live. Update your own Facebook status and see status updates from your friends and other Facebook users on CNN.com Live.

Don’t miss out!

Add me on Facebook, Brick ONeil, as we watch this historic day when our Nation Inaugurates our first African American/Black President! What a proud day for the United States, and indeed, the World.

Remember where you were when America’s first chosen African American President was sworn in to bring America back! The entire world waits in eager anticipation, seeing President Elect Obama as the one person who can bring everyone together. What will his first actions, as President, be? How will world leaders welcome him? TIme will tell.

Enjoy history in the making.

By calling 1-800-FREE411, you get free directory assistance service for any business, residential, government or toll-free listing in the United States.

How it works: After navigating the voice prompts, you listen to a short advertisement (about 10 seconds long) and then you have the option to connect to the original business you requested, or to the sponsor.

A family of four can save up to $80-$100 a month, or about a $1,000 a year.

American’s spend $6 to $7 billion on directory assistance in 2007, which is more than the U.S. government spent on cancer research the same year.
The catch: It’s all automated (which is part of the reason they can give it to you for free).

Privacy Policy
Jingle Networks & 1-800-FREE411 Corporate Privacy Policy

Revised November 29, 2007

At 1-800-FREE411, we are committed to protecting your privacy. We will never share your personal information with telemarketers or spammers. To learn more, review our full Privacy Policy below. In addition, you may also want to read our Web site Terms of Use.

1. Overview and Statement of Privacy Objectives
Thank you for visiting our website and reviewing our Corporate Privacy Policy. Your privacy is important to us, and we would like to share with you how we collect, protect and use information you provide to us. This policy relates to all areas of our web sites at www.jinglenetworks.com and www.free411.com (“Web Site”) and to our 1-800-FREE411 telephone directory assistance service (“Free 411 Service”).

Apologies for no new posts the past two days, the 451 Press Servers were offline due to a glitch. The little hamsters that power the wheels took a rest and are now fully charged and ready to go.

This time has given me pause to thank all my readers during 2008 and promise to continue to post quality information each day. Bringing you quality information has been a pleasure and will continue to be. There is a dearth of great information out in the great world wide web and it is my pleasure to bring it to you. I try to bring you information I think that is relevant to you and that you can use in your everyday lives. During this time, and ongoing, I hope you will search the archives for timely information that will help you.

Let me know what areas you would like to see covered here, either in the comments or by shooting me an email. Any posts you like and would love to see again or more? Any posts that outraged you or thought irrelevant? Would you like to see this site on a social network, like facebook, twitter, linkedin, digg, and/or newsvine?

Thank you again, for sticking with me during 2008 and 2009 promises to be even better.

Quirky Thanksgiving trivia:

In 1953, someone at Swanson severely overestimated the amount of turkey Americans would consume that Thanksgiving. With 260 tons of frozen birds to get rid of, a company salesman named Gerry Thomas ordered 5,000 aluminum trays, recruited an assembly line of women armed with spatulas and ice-cream scoops and began creating mini-feasts of turkey, corn-bread dressing, peas and sweet potatoes — creating the first-ever TV dinner. Thomas later said he got the idea from neatly packaged airplane food.

Football & Feastin’

Thanksgiving is ruled by two very powerful f-words: “food” and “football.” Nearly as old as the sport itself, the tradition of watching football on Thanksgiving began in 1876, when the newly formed American Intercollegiate Football Association held its first championship game. Less than a decade later, more than 5,000 club, college and high school football teams held games on Thanksgiving, with match-ups between Princeton and Yale drawing more than 40,000 fans out from their dining rooms. 1934 marked the first NFL game held on Thanksgiving when the Detroit Lions took on the Chicago Bears. The Lions have played on Thanksgiving ever since — except, of course, when the team was called away to serve during World War II.

Franksgiving

FDR learned the hard way not to mess with some traditions. In 1939, the President declared that Americans should celebrate the annual feast one week early, hoping the decision would spur retail sales during the Great Depression. But Americans did not react kindly to the New Deal meal. Some took to the streets while others took to name-calling; the mayor of Atlantic City solved the controversy by declaring his residents would simply enjoy two meals — Thanksgiving and “Franksgiving.” After two years of squabbling (or gobbling, as it were), Congress adopted a resolution in 1941 setting the fourth Thursday of November as the legal holiday

Mary Had a Little Thanksgiving Obession

The woman who wrote the classic nursery rhyme “Mary Had a Little Lamb” also played an integral role in making Thanksgiving a national holiday. After a 17-year letter-writing campaign, magazine editor Sarah Josepha Hale finally convinced President Abraham Lincoln to issue an 1863 decree recognizing the historic tradition.

Americans at the Abbey

In 1942, London’s Westminster Abbey held Thanksgiving services for U.S. troops stationed in England. More than 3,500 soldiers filled the church’s pews to sing America, the Beautiful and The Star-Spangled Banner — the first time in the church’s 900-year history that a foreign army was invited to take over the grounds. It was an ironic gesture given the holiday’s origins as a festival for pilgrims fleeing religious tyranny in Britain.

Read more by clicking above. Happy Thanksgiving!

BY MELISSA NEWMAN

EVERY YEAR, AMID the excitement of Halloween-related fun, conversations commonly turn toward scary and unnerving talk of the mysterious world of paranormal and supernatural phenomena. Unlike the entertaining “safe scares” that Halloween brings, for those who encounter “real paranormal phenomena,” the encounters can be truly terrifying and even life-changing. And while these otherworldly phenomena have been a part of the human experience since the dawn of humankind – and, incidentally, is where Halloween originates – not even western society’s modern-day cynical culture of scientific analysis could dismiss and suppress the existence of these elusive phenomena. On the contrary, whether you are a believer or a hardened skeptic, an avalanche of experiences involving paranormal and supernatural phenomena continues to be reported worldwide.

According to several polls and surveys conducted around the world, belief in the paranormal and supernatural is at an all time high and shows no evidence of decline. In the U.S. alone, a recent Gallop poll showed that 75% of Americans have some sort of paranormal belief; a Harris poll showed that half of Americans believe in ghosts; a CBS poll showed that one in five Americans have seen or physically encountered a ghost; and still another survey taken from more than 400 college students with the highest GPAs found seniors and grad students more likely to believe in the paranormal then their “uneducated” freshman counterparts. Paranormal beliefs include such phenomena as extraterrestrial and UFO close encounters, all types of psychic phenomena, miracles and demonic possession, ghosts and poltergeists, witchcraft and metaphysics, and encounters with extraordinary life forms, including Bigfoot and the notorious chupacabra.

HALLOWEEN ORIGINS

Whether one is a believer or a skeptic, Halloween in the U.S. might be the one time of the year that both stand united in simply having a good time in the shadow of such reported phenomena. The origins of Halloween itself lay in supernatural beliefs and an ancient Celtic festival that dates back some 2,000 years. Originally called Samhain (pronounced sow-in), the festival originated amidst the region now known as the United Kingdom and celebrated the one night each year that the boundary between the worlds of the living and the dead became indistinguishable. On this night, the Celts believed that the ghosts of the dead returned to Earth for good or for bad and allowed Druid priests to additionally interact with them for the wellbeing of them all.

Over the course of hundreds of years, early Christianity would attempt to suppress and replace the Celtic festival with All Saints’ Day, which was celebrated on November 1, a holy day of obligation to honor saints and martyrs in the Christian faith. The celebration was also called All-hallows or All-hallowmas (from Middle English Alholowmesse meaning All Saints’ Day) and the night before it, the night of Samhain, began to be called All-hallows Eve and, eventually, Halloween. But even the powerful influence of the church was unable to squelch the supernatural festival, and Halloween endured and flourished over the centuries to become the sensationalistic celebration it is today in the U.S.

While Halloween is still mostly an American commercial phenomenon, little by little every year, evidence that the spooky holiday is being embraced globally is being seen more and more. UNICEF itself has a special “Trick-or-Treat for UNICEF” program aimed to empower kids, not just in the U.S., but in other countries as well, by trick-or-treating for donations to help their counter-parts in need all over the world. The reluctance to embrace Halloween in other countries has been primarily due to the seriousness that the supernatural and paranormal is taken in other cultures. While the western world can make light of beliefs, both religious and metaphysical, other old-world cultures are very sensitive to and deeply immersed in their beliefs and find such playfulness like the Amercanized version of Halloween to be considered as taboo and, in some cultures, even sacrilegious.

Enjoy your Halloween!

From the website: Dear Friend,

I would be delighted to send you a complimentary sample sachet of our beautiful products, along with a full color catalog to browse in return for your completion of the critical market research survey below!

As a small business owner, this information is very necessary for me to better service my customers, subscribers and site visitors. I would love to be able to continue to evolve my company into a simple to navigate educational resource with products that meet the expectations and convenience for organic savvy shoppers, while guiding those who are just beginning their journey of organic living to make informed decisions based on helpful information.

I give you my word that your information will NEVER be given, traded or sold to any third parties. You will receive periodic promotional emails and helpful resources to living organic - but you may unsubscribe at any time.

Blessings,
Candy Loya, Owner
ONEwithEarth Organics

from Lee Seats, about.com: Ethics and Freebies?
You are probably wondering how ethics and freebies are connected. In my rather simplistic view of ethics, the subject boils down to a code of how you deal with other people. When you order freebies and when I provide links to free offers we are both using the Internet to deal with real people at the other end of the wire. The nature of the Internet makes it easy to forget that everything on the Net is there as a result of someone’s efforts.

Freebie Hunters’ Code
Please remember that when a company offers something for free they are doing it for business reasons. They are hoping that the lure of something for free will not only bring visitors to their site, but that those visitors will be potential customers. Companies usually only have a limited number of free items that they can provide. Based on those points, here is my suggested ethical code for the freebie seeker:

Order Responsibly - Only order freebies that you can use or that interest you. Don’t just send for something because it is free.

Honor Restrictions - If there is a restriction on who can order, only order it if you qualify. Some examples are businesses only, over 18 only, etc.

Don’t be Greedy - Most free offers are one per household or one per person. This one is important not only to respect the company’s wishes, but to leave some goodies for other freebie hunters.

Be Polite - If you have an opportunity, say “thank you” in a comment field or email message. Don’t yell at company representatives because they ran out of a freebie because you didn’t qualify.
General Internet Ethics
While I am still on my soap box I’ll harp about a general “Internet ethics” issue that came to my attention quite bluntly. I found a small portion of my work copied by two other Web publishers. I contacted both of them and worked things out, but we all need to be more careful about how we use what we find on the Net. The nature of the Internet makes it easy for this type of thing to happen, but as responsible Internet citizens we need to do a little thinking about how our actions impact others. It is easier to be respectful when you just remember that there are real people at the other end of the wire.

Get your free copy of the Car Care Guide today!

This first-of-its-kind reference guide for motorists from the Car Care Council is now available to the independent market. Focus group research revealed that shop owners, counterpersons and technicians would find the guide valuable when discussing recommended maintenance and repair to their customers. Consumers interviewed agreed that they would trust information from a credible third party like the Car Care Council. The successful “Be Car Care Aware” consumer education campaign has demonstrated motorists’ interest in vehicle maintenance information and advice. The 56-page guide covers nine major service occasions and 12 component groups of the vehicle, plus service interval recommendations, a maintenance log and much more. Additionally, the guide now contains two new sections on fuel economy and environmental awareness. Order your FREE copy today!