Maybe we should turn to our history books and point out to people like Mr. Lujan why today’s American is not willing to accept this new kind of immigrant any longer. Back in 1900 when there was a rush from all areas of Europe to come to the United States , people had to get off a ship and stand in a long line in New York and be documented.

Some would even get down on their hands and knees and kiss the ground. They made a pledge to uphold the laws and support their new country in good and bad times. They made learning English a primary rule in their new American households and some even changed their names to blend in with their new home.

They had waved goodbye to their birth place to give their children a new life and did everything in their power to help their children assimilate into one culture. Nothing was handed to them. No free lunches, no welfare, no labor laws to protect them. All they had were the skills and craftsmanship they had brought with them to trade for a future of prosperity.

Most of their children came of age when World War II broke out. My father fought along side men whose parents had come straight over from Germany , Italy , France and Japan . None of these 1st generation Americans ever gave any thought about what country their parents had come from. They were Americans fighting Hitler, Mussolini and the Emperor of Japan. They were defending the United States of America as one people.

When we liberated France , no one in those villages were looking for the French American, the German American or the Irish American. The people of France saw only Americans. And we carried one flag that represented one country. Not one of those immigrant sons would have thought about picking up another country’s flag and waving it to represent who they were. It would have been a disgrace to their parents who had sacrificed so much to be here. These immigrants truly knew what it meant to be an American. They stirred the melting pot into one red, white and blue bowl.

And here we are with a new kind of immigrant who wants the same rights and privileges. Only they want to achieve it by playing with a different set of rules, one that includes the entitlement card and a guarantee of being faithful to their mother country. I’m sorry, that’s not what being an American is all about. I believe that the immigrants who landed on Ellis Island in the early 1900’s deserve better than that for all the toil, hard work and sacrifice in raising future generations to create a land that has become a beacon for those legally searching for a better life. I think they would be appalled that they are being used as an example by those waving foreign country flags.

And for that suggestion about taking down the Statue of Liberty, it happens to mean a lot to the citizens who are voting on the immigration bill. I wouldn’t start talking about dismantling the United States just yet.

Rosemary LaBonte

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Dennis Hopper, whose portrayals of drug-addled, often deranged misfits in the landmark films “Easy Rider,” “Apocalypse Now” and “Blue Velvet” drew on his early out-of-control experiences as part of a new generation of Hollywood rebel, died at his home in Venice, Calif., on Saturday, The Associated Press reported. He was 74.

The death was announced by Alex Hitz, a family friend, according to The A.P. A cause of death was not immediately given, but Mr. Hopper was recently being treated for prostate cancer.

Mr. Hopper, who said he stopped drinking and using drugs in the mid-1980s, followed that change with a tireless phase of his career in which he claimed to have turned down no parts. His credits include at least six films released in 2008 and at least 25 over the past 10 years.

Most recently, Mr. Hopper starred in the television series “Crash,” an adaptation of the Oscar-winning film of the same title. Produced for the Starz cable channel, the show had Mr. Hopper portraying a music producer unhinged by years of drug use. During a promotional tour last fall for that series, he fell ill; shortly thereafter, he began a new round of treatments for prostate cancer, which he said was first diagnosed a decade ago.

Inverting a famous line of dialogue spoken by Peter Fonda in “Easy Rider,” Manohla Dargis wrote of Mr. Hopper in The New York Times:

Dennis Hopper — actor, filmmaker, photographer, art collector, world-class burnout, first-rate survivor — never blew it. Unlike the villains and freaks he has played over the decades — the psycho with the mommy complex in “Blue Velvet,” the mad bomber with the grudge in “Speed” — he has made it through the good, the bad and some spectacularly terrible times. He rode out the golden age of Hollywood by roaring into a new movie era with “Easy Rider.” He hung out with James Dean, played Elizabeth Taylor’s son, acted for Quentin Tarantino. He has been rich and infamous, lost and found, the next big thing, the last man standing.

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When diminutive comedic actor Gary Coleman died on Friday after a brain hemorrhage, pop culture fans of “Diff’rent Strokes” rushed to the Internet to post their “Whatchu talkin’ ’bout, Willis?” tributes, and the news channels tried to piece together the details of his death (he had suffered a seizure on an episode of “The Insider” in February, and was admitted to a hospital in Provo, Utah, on Wednesday).

Mostly, though, there was a palpable sense of shock that the perennially youthful actor was gone so soon.

Almost as shocking as his death is the fact that Gary Coleman was 42 years old. Because his height topped out at 4 feet 8 inches, Coleman would always be young Arnold Jackson in the eyes of TV watchers. In more recent years, the public seemed hard-pressed to accept the more unfortunate aspects of this otherwise-cheerful comedian’s life.

In his happier days in the late 1970s and the early 1980s, Coleman was a true cornerstone of popular culture, and wherever he went, laughter seemed not far behind.

Gary Coleman broke into acting in a series of successful guest appearances on everything from “Buck Rogers in the 25th Century” to “The Jeffersons” and “Good Times.
“Diff’rent Strokes” premiered on November 3, 1978, and ran for a very successful eight seasons. Coleman was just 10 years old when he first played Arnold Jackson, the role that would eventually make him a star. The plot centered on orphans Arnold and brother Willis (Todd Bridges), who were adopted by a wealthy Park Avenue resident named Phillip Drummond (Conrad Bain), who learned just as much from them as they learned from him. Willis had a knack for getting involved in many wacky hijinks that would always result in Arnold’s now more than iconic catch phrase, “Whatchu talkin’ ’bout, Willis?”
Coleman had a fairly successful film career as well. In 1979?s “The Kid From Left Field” — a remake of a 1953 movie — Coleman starred alongside Robert Guillaume, playing Jackie Robinson “J.R.” Cooper, who wound up the manager of the San Diego Padres even though he was a child.
And later, in 1981?s “On the Right Track” (eventually played relentlessly on HBO), Coleman played an orphaned shoeshine boy who lived in a locker at a railway station. He costarred with Norman Fell (better known as Mr. Roper on “Three’s Company.
Eventually, Coleman proved so popular on “Diff’rent Strokes” that in 1982, he was given his own Saturday morning cartoon called “The Gary Coleman Show.” Eerily enough, given recent news, in his self-titled show, Coleman played an angel who returns to Earth to help other children with their problems.

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Just Topeka it.

Google led a wave of technology-related April Fool’s Day gags Thursday morning, announcing on its homepage that the search-engine giant had changed its name to that of the Kansas town.

The announcement, along with the word “Topeka” replacing “Google” in the site’s multicolored logo, is a riff on the city “renaming” itself Google for a month.

The stunt was part of the city’s bid to be picked for Google’s “Fiber for Communities” program, which Google says will provide Internet access 100 times faster than normal.

“We didn’t reach this decision lightly; after all, we had a fair amount of brand equity tied up in our old name,” Google … er … Topeka CEO Eric Schmidt said in a blog post. “But the more we surfed around (the former) Topeka’s municipal website, the more kinship we felt with this fine city at the edge of the Great Plains.”

The blog even gave a list of proper and improper usage of the new name. “Before our blind date, I did a Topeka search on him” got the green light, while “Before our blind date, I topeka’d him with AltaVista” did not.

The post did point out that the “honor” didn’t mean Topeka has a leg up in Google’s broadband plan.

YouTube saves a buck or two

Forget high-definition. It’s time for text-only video.

YouTube said Thursday that new bandwidth-sucking video technology is cutting into its profits, so it’s now offering TEXTp, a low-tech, text-only mode that looks like a grainy cross between “The Matrix” and when satellite interference is screwing up your TV reception.

Users could switch to the joke mode on at least some videos by clicking on 480, the default bandwidth, and scrolling up to TEXTp.

“By using text-only mode, you are saving YouTube $1 a second in bandwidth costs,” read a message that appears when viewing in TEXTp. “Click here to go back to regular YouTube and happy April Fools Day!”

New use for the iPad

ThinkGeek, that purveyor of the latest in awesome tech-nerd gizmos and gadgets, was offering an add-on for the highly anticipated iPad: the iCade.

The fictional iCade looks just like a miniature version of an old-school arcade game, and a photo features two of them: one with a docked iPad showing a basic screen and the other appearing to run the classic game Donkey Kong.

The site’s “sales pitch” makes fun of the Apple-fanatic furor over the iPad, which hits stores Saturday.

“After the glow of the initial announcement wore off, many of us came to the conclusion that the iPad was actually pretty useless,” it read. ” ‘It’s a giant iPhone!’ some said. Others exclaimed, ‘WTF, no Flash!?’ Still, we knew that most Apple fanbots (us included) would have to have one anyway.”

The page links to other “suggested items” for sale, including the Screaming Knife and Tell Me Your Secrets Bear.

Other favorites:

• Electronics maker Toshiba got into the act with the TubeTop, an inflatable laptop with an internal inner tube.

• On news-sharing site Reddit, everyone is an administrator. The result was regular users banning each other and using their unlimited voting power to move stories to the top of the site. No. 1 as of this writing? “Reddit, here’s a picture I just drew … ” followed by “Quick! Use your new admin powers to upvote the crap out of this puppy dog.”

• Instead of latitude and longitude coordinates, smartphone users who type “Where am I?” into Google’s search field get answers such as “Neptune,” “Mordor” and “Entrance to Hogwarts.”

• Google Maps is offering users who pan down to Street View a new option: 3-D. Of course, if you don’t have a set of 3-D glasses handy, tough luck.

• Wikipedia’s main page offered an interesting array of articles, from a featured piece on the cherished custom of wife-selling to a headline about how Sony had accidentally used a time machine to zap some of its customers back to 1999.

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Early last month the mayor of Topeka, Kansas stunned the world by announcing that his city was changing its name to Google. We’ve been wondering ever since how best to honor that moving gesture. Today we are pleased to announce that as of 1AM (Central Daylight Time) April 1st, Google has officially changed our name to Topeka.

We didn’t reach this decision lightly; after all, we had a fair amount of brand equity tied up in our old name. But the more we surfed around (the former) Topeka’s municipal website, the more kinship we felt with this fine city at the edge of the Great Plains.

In fact, Topeka Google Mayor Bill Bunten expressed it best: “Don’t be fooled. Even Google recognizes that all roads lead to Kansas, not just yellow brick ones.”

For 150 years, its fortuitous location at the confluence of the Kansas River and the Oregon Trail has made the city formerly known as Topeka a key jumping-off point to the new world of the West, just as for 150 months the company formerly known as Google has been a key jumping-off point to the new world of the web. When in 1858 a crucial bridge built across the Kansas River was destroyed by flooding mere months later, it was promptly rebuilt — and we too are accustomed to releasing 2.0 versions of software after stormy feedback on our ‘beta’ releases. And just as the town’s nickname is “Top City,” and the word “topeka” itself derives from a term used by the Kansa and Ioway tribes to refer to “a good place to dig for potatoes,” we’d like to think that our website is one of the web’s top places to dig for information.

In the early 20th century, the former Topeka enjoyed a remarkable run of political prominence, gracing the nation with Margaret Hill McCarter, the first woman to address a national political convention (1920, Republican); Charles Curtis, the only Native American ever to serve as vice president (’29 to ‘33, under Herbert Hoover); Carrie Nation, leader of the old temperance movement (and wielder of American history’s most famous hatchet); and, most important, Alfred E. Neuman, arguably the most influential figure to an entire generation of Americans. We couldn’t be happier to add our own chapter to this storied history.

A change this dramatic won’t happen without consequences, perhaps even some disruptions. Here are a few of the thorny issues that we hope everyone in the broader Topeka community will bear in mind as we begin one of the most important transitions in our company’s history:

Correspondence to both our corporate headquarters and offices around the world should now be addressed to Topeka Inc., but otherwise can be addressed normally.
Google employees once known as “Googlers” should now be referred to as either “Topekers” or “Topekans,” depending on the result of a board meeting that’s ongoing at this hour. Whatever the outcome, the conclusion is clear: we aren’t in Google anymore.
Our new product names will take some getting used to. For instance, we’ll have to assure users of Topeka News and Topeka Maps that these services will continue to offer news and local information from across the globe. Topeka Talk, similarly, is an instant messaging product, not, say, a folksy midwestern morning show. And Project Virgle, our co-venture with Richard Branson and Virgin to launch the first permanent human colony on Mars, will henceforth be known as Project Vireka.
We don’t really know what to tell Oliver Google Kai’s parents, except that, if you ask us, Oliver Topeka Kai would be a charming name for their little boy.
As our lawyers remind us, branded product names can achieve such popularity as to risk losing their trademark status (see cellophane, zippers, trampolines, et al). So we hope all of you will do your best to remember our new name’s proper usage:

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