Its awesome...the Detroit Pistons are kicking the asses of the Lakers. I'm speechless. I have and always will be a Piston girl. Rodman & Thomas will forever be my idols. Though Wallace, Wallace & Hamilton...these guys are awesome.

When Larry Brown took the head coaching position with the Pistons on June 3, 2003, he must have liked what he saw, a team that he believed could play "the right way": A malleable, coachable squad that could suffocate opponents on defense, rebound, hustle, run the break and pay attention to detail.

Rasheed Wallace had 26 points and 13 rebounds as Detroit beat Los Angeles 88-80 on Sunday despite an enormous effort from Lakers giant center Shaquille O'Neal, who had 36 points and 20 rebounds.

The win gives Detroit a 3-1 series lead and puts them on the verge of their first National Basketball Association title in 15 years. The Pistons couldn't afford to squander their series lead as they played with a special sense of urgency in the fourth quarter, outscoring the Lakers 32-24.

Detroit could wrap up the series with a win in game five on Tuesday at home. The Pistons are seeking their third NBA title and their building was rocking Sunday as they seemed to feed off the energy of their 22,076 boisterous fans.

Chauncey Billups had 23 points while Richard Hamilton finished with 17 points and six assists.

The Pistons outscored the Lakers 41-39 in the first half of what was the most physical game of the best-of-seven series so far. No team has ever come back from a 3-1 deficit in the finals. In each of the first three games, the Pistons won the third quarter but the Lakers stayed with them this time as O'Neal was a dominant force. But, other than Kobe Bryant, he didn't get much help from his supporting cast.

Fuelled by an additional day of rest, O'Neal came out with more energy, an extra spring in his step and a boxer's scowl on his face. O'Neal bumped Ben Wallace so hard on the first dunk of the game that Wallace's head was still bobbing long after O'Neal threw it down.

Defensive-minded Detroit are known for slowing games down but continued to run-and-gun the Lakers in this series with 21 fast break points to the Lakers five. Detroit shot 42.6 percent from the field and capitalized on the Lakers' 35 fouls.

Aging star Karl Malone started but played little after the first quarter as he is playing with a sore right knee.Gary Payton awoke from his playoff slump scoring six points in the first quarter, including a nifty left-handed jumper as he soared through the paint. But Payton scored just two points in the second half.

I LOVE THIS GAME!

My Achie Gulaman has always been there for me when I needed it. She was the older sister I never had, and she is one of the most important people in my life. She's honest, kind and the type of friend who will give you the shirt of her back. I know because she did that for me once and I will forever love her for it.

She's also one of the best corporate-minded people I know. I have lost count of the number of times I ran to her for help when I was still working my first couple of jobs and she bailed me out with just the right thing to do each time. She's a major influence on my achieving the professional laurels I now have.

And now after managing to bring up a company from virtually nothing, she's given her pink slip. Because she "costs too much for the company to maintain at this point". This is the thanks she gets.

My heart goes out to her, what with the countless problems & responsibilies she already has, she doesn't need this. Hell, she doesnt deserve this.

Dont worry Achie, it will all work out. Were here for you, as Im sure are countless others. And yes we will help you and you will accept it.

There is a legend that is told among the lovers of tangerines, a legend passed down over the centuries that tangerines have been grown. The tale of two lovers, after whom the Tangerine was named.

Once, long, long ago, two young people fell in love and wished to marry. They told their parents of their love, but Angeline's family was vehemently against the match. Angeline came from a long line of rich and powerful families, while the young man, Thomas, was one of the farmers who worked the land for Angeline's father. Angeline's parents expected her to marry a rich young man to bring more money to the family.

Angeline was told that she would be disowned if she married him, but she did not care. One night, the lovers gathered all their posessions together and ran away, heading for a small country Thomas had heard of where land was free for the taking and where they could begin their lives anew.

They reached the country he had heard about on the fourth night, but as they were riding through a forest, robbers came out of the forest and dragged Angeline from her horse. While one held a knife to her throat, the others grabbed the horses and stripped the couple of everything of value. Before they disappeared back into the forest, one of the robbers mortally wounded Thomas with a knife wound in his chest. Holding his dying body to her, Angeline prayed to the stars for help. To her amazement, one of the stars began to glow, turning a bright shade of orange before falling from the sky in a burst of light so bright that it made her faint. When she could woke up, Angeline looked around. The wound in Thomas's chest had closed, leaving only a star-shaped scar, and they were surrounded by more than a dozen trees bearing golden fruit that looked like small oranges.

Thomas, now completely healed, picked one of the orange-like fruits and peeled it, wanting to see if they were, in fact, small oranges. Spitting out one of the seeds, he nearly dropped the rest of the fruit in his astonishment-the seed was made of gold! He quickly ate the rest of the fruit, and collected twelve more golden seeds! He showed these to the amazed Angeline, who, being hungry anyway, picked her own fruit. Before they went to sleep that night, they had eaten over 50 of the small fruit, and had collected more than 600 golden seeds!

After they harvested all the fruits on the trees, they went to the king of the small country and with their newfound wealth bought the entire forest in which they had spent that night. After that first harvest, the seeds of the trees were ordinary fruit seeds, but the trees still held that same magic for the couple, and they spent the rest of their lives growing more, only telling their children the tale of the star and the first magical harvest of the fruit, which after their deaths became known as tangerines.

From that day, the tangerine star has been a sign of recognition for anything that is thought to be so wonderful that it is as if magic has been used to create it-which it has! The magic of life is within us all, just waiting to bear fruit!

New York City’s Chinatown, the largest Chinatown in the United States—and the site of the largest concentration of Chinese in the western hemisphere—is located on the lower east side of Manhattan. Its two square miles are loosely bounded by Kenmore and Delancey streets on the north, East and Worth streets on the south, Allen street on the east, and Broadway on the west. With a population estimated between 70,000 and 150,000, Chinatown is the favored destination point for Chinese immigrants, though in recent years the neighborhood has also become home to Dominicans, Puerto Ricans, Burmese, Vietnamese, and Filipinos among others.

Chinese traders and sailors began trickling into the United States in the mid eighteenth century; while this population was largely transient, small numbers stayed in New York and married. Beginning in the mid nineteenth century, Chinese arrived in significant numbers, lured to the Pacific coast of the United States by the stories of “Gold Mountain” — California — during the gold rush of the 1840s and 1850s and brought by labor brokers to build the Central Pacific Railroad. Most arrived expecting to spend a few years working, thus earning enough money to return to China, build a house and marry.

As the gold mines began yielding less and the railroad neared completion, the broad availability of cheap and willing Chinese labor in such industries as cigar-rolling and textiles became a source of tension for white laborers, who thought that the Chinese were coming to take their jobs and threaten their livelihoods. Mob violence and rampant discrimination in the west drove the Chinese east into larger cities, where job opportunities were more open and they could more easily blend into the already diverse population. By 1880, the burgeoning enclave in the Five Points slums on the south east side of New York was home to between 200 and 1,100 Chinese. A few members of a group of Chinese illegally smuggled into New Jersey in the late 1870s to work in a hand laundry soon made the move to New York, sparking an explosion of Chinese hand laundries.

When the Exclusion Act was finally lifted in 1943, China was given a small immigration quota, and the community continued to grow, expanding slowly throughout the ‘40s and ‘50s. The garment industry, the hand-laundry business, and restaurants continued to employ Chinese internally, paying less than minimum wage under the table to thousands. Despite the view of the Chinese as members of a “model minority,” Chinatown’s Chinese came largely from the mainland, and were viewed as the “downtown Chinese," as opposed the Taiwan-educated “uptown Chinese,” members of the Chinese elite.

When the quota was raised in 1968, Chinese flooded into the country from the mainland, and Chinatown’s population exploded, expanding into Little Italy, often buying buildings with cash and turning them into garment factories or office buildings. Although many of the buildings in Chinatown are tenements from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the rents in Chinatown are some of the highest in the city, competing with the Upper West Side and midtown. Foreign investment from Hong Kong has poured capital into Chinatown, and the little space there is a precious commodity.

Today’s Chinatown is a tightly-packed yet sprawling neighborhood which continues to grow rapidly despite the satellite Chinese communities flourishing in Queens. Both a tourist attraction and the home of the majority of Chinese New Yorkers, Chinatown offers visitor and resident alike hundreds of restaurants, booming fruit and fish markets and shops of knick-knacks and sweets on torturously winding and overcrowded streets.

Sometimes it does seem like we haven't traveled all that far since the anti-Chinese riots and the Exclusion Act, since the internment camps of World War II. We think of Vincent Chin in Detroit. We remember the post-Rodney King plundering of Korean businesses in Los Angeles. We consider the Wen Ho Lee case. We read, with dismay, about a survey that finds that 25 percent of fellow Americans hold "very negative feelings" toward Chinese and Asian Americans. And this is not a poll taken in 1970. This was from a cross-section of people throughout the country almost exactly one year ago.

What to do about this? Among other things, like education and outreach, I say we celebrate. We take pride in ourselves and in each other. We raise our profiles and increase our activities in the community, in politics, in media and in the arts.