As a boy Jack Warner wished to be a singer and a comedian. His brothers, recognizing his lack of talent instructed him to sing in tent when they wanted audience to leave. He was later advised that money was not in performing, it was in paying performers. Among stars that would be under contract to him would be Betty Davis, James Cagney, Humphrey Bogart and Errol Flynn.

The silent days were a struggle for Warner Bros. Rin Tin Tin, a German shepherd that according to his publicity was born in a foxhole in World War I, was their biggest star. Heroic as he might have been on screen, he proved to be, like many stars, cantankerous in person. Jack Warner took dog on a publicity tour. As he introduced him to crowd, his ungrateful employee bit him on behind, leading to dog's dismissal. It proved to be a prelude to Warner's many future battles with stars.

Trying to make a name for themselves, four brothers got great publicity by announcing that renowned opera tenor Caruso would be arriving from Italy to make a film for them. They paid him 25,000 dollars and then put him in a silent movie.

by Dagmar Rakos

That was one of those days - I call them hell days, my friends call them haunted - when nothing seemed to work.

Everything what could go wrong, went.

First my main desktop computer played it's favorite "dead beetle" game and didn't want to turn on until I forced it with main On/Off switch at back.

Then my ISP provider pretended I don't exist and quietly and efficiently kicked me off Net few seconds after my modem finally forced it's way to their server.

Seems like ancient Latin would be easier to communicate with at times than this "computerese" both of machines are supposed to understand.

(I wonder when finally time will come when kicking off your own customers without first even giving them opportunity of choice will become non-acceptable in civilized society.

Actually I am more afraid it will spread and in a few years we can find ourselves at front of food store where we just been kicked out few minutes after we entered and gave them our money - bouncing at it's door and pleading: "Let me in! Please, let me in! I honestly Do need to eat!")

- After I finally was able to log on and successfully closed down few automatic pop-ups for various communication and protection software I never heard off I found out that email from my hosting company is still in stage of evolution where according to some mysterious laws of cyber-universe email messages to "anything-I-put-here@makeyourhobbysell.com" will go through, but messages to "dagmar@makeyourhobbysell.com" will be rejected by my hosting company vigilant server as a "bad, malfunctioned address". Or maybe they are just finicky, they simply don't like my name.

Anyway, it's too personal and what-do-I-think Internet belongs to machines it doesn't need some stupid softy human touch…

When I clawed my way through my handy Mailwasher anti-spam preview program, and marked usual spam dirt (offers for enlarged penis, and Viagra and such stuff - mind you I am a woman!) from my boxes on servers - incredibly enough this time all my hosts and even fussy ISP didn't object to bouncing spam dirt back to its senders.

Then as a kick to my over-inflated ego (from at least something finally working) I got a message from my credit card processing company that they changed everything they could due to enhancement of their service, and everything will be better and safer and faster and brighter, and nice and sunny, blah, blah, blah… (all that jazz) - which automatically raised my "Catastrophe!" alert sensors at their highest level - and "insignificant triviality" they want from me is to go to their site and check my user ID and password and if it doesn't work get myself a new one.