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Lesnar did a lot of 'no-selling' during this match.. *caugh* Goldberg *caugh*
Lots of drama after a mandatory house show main event ref bump..
Lesnar kicked out of the pedigree!
Lesnar ended up reversing a pedigree it into the F-5 for the win!
HHH demanded to be announced as "still the World champion".
If you attend a WWE house show, or any other wrestling show for that matter, we would love to from you; Send in your results, you recaps, opinions and thoughts on the show you paid your hard earned money on..Please send to this address [email protected].
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High blood pressure, or hypertension, affects more than one in four UK adults, according to the NHS.
Symptoms are usually difficult to spot, unless your blood pressure is extremely high.
Finding blood in your urine, or having severe headaches, vision problems and a pounding in your chest, could all be signs of high blood pressure.
But, you could lower your blood pressure by cutting back on coffee and tea.
“It's not always clear what causes high blood pressure, but certain things can increase your risk,” said the NHS.
“Drinking more than four cups of coffee a day may increase your blood pressure.
“If you're a big fan of coffee, tea or other caffeine-rich drinks, such as cola and some energy drinks, consider cutting down.
“It's fine to drink tea and coffee as part of a balanced diet, but it's important that these drinks are not your main or only source of fluid.” Caffeine’s effect on blood pressure varies from person to person.
If you’re more caffeine-sensitive, coffee could raise your blood pressure more than others.
Getting a good night’s sleep could also help to lower your blood pressure, the NHS added.
Long-term sleep deprivation is linked to a rise in blood pressure, so it’s a good idea to get at least six hours of sleep every night.
Being overweight or obese makes it harder for your heart to pump blood around the body, which increases blood pressure.
Losing just a few pounds will make a big difference to blood pressure.
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By preparing a microtubule sample in a graphene liquid cell, researchers demonstrate that the radiation tolerance of proteins proteins in liquid-phase electron microscopy is increased by an order of magnitude compared to a sample in ice.
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Treasurer Loftis Announces New 529 Future Scholar Contract
Monday, July 23, 2012
(Columbia, SC) – South Carolina State Treasurer Curtis Loftis announced the selection of Columbia Management as the Program Manager of the South Carolina Future Scholar 529 Plan following a competitively bid procurement process. Under the new contract, Columbia Management will also take on the role of Program Manager for the South Carolina Tuition Prepayment Program.
Columbia Management has acted as Program Manager of South Carolina’s advisor-sold and direct-sold Future Scholar 529 college saving plans since 2001. The new contract extends the partnership into 2017.
“With this new contract we were able to improve the program by including more investing options with lower fees,” Treasurer Loftis said. “This is a win/win for the state and Future Scholar participants. There is nothing more important than a quality education and the Future Scholar 529 Plan helps make college more accessible to everyone.”
Future Scholar plans can be purchased either directly by an individual or through a financial advisor. The direct-sold plan is available only to South Carolina residents and an online application can be accessed at www.futuresholar.com. The advisor-sold plan is available nationally through financial advisors.
The South Carolina Future Scholar 529 College Savings Plan offers three investment options:
Age-based option – corresponds with the child’s age and the parents’ risk tolerance over time
Single-fund option – variety of mutual funds from some of the industry’s leading money managers
As of June 30, 2012 South Carolina’s Future Scholar 529 plan had approximately $1.5 Billion in assets and 93,000 accounts. To learn more about the 529 Future Scholar program, visit www.futurescholar.com.
The new Future Scholar contract is just another step in the Treasurer’s push to streamline and modernize the Treasurer’s office. In the past year, Treasurer Loftis updated the State Treasurer’s Office banking services contract and commissioned the first independent audit of the State Treasurer’s Office since 1988. The audit covered $700 million in assets. Currently, the Treasurer’s Office is rebidding its banking custody services contract.
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British Bull Dog ?
Image via Wikipedia
Not a noticeably doggish performance then as Red Bull lock out the front row for this weekend’s 2011 British Grand Prix despite challenges from Ferrari and the rule book. So much for the changes which should have held them back by banning the use of exhaust gases in managing aerodynamics. For the cognoscenti, this was a restriction permitting only 10% of off-throttle exhaust gases to be run through the diffuser. The performance was almost routine until you dig into the detail, with Mark Webber eclipsing his normally dominant teammate Vettel by 3 hundredths of a second, to snaffle pole position for today’s race. Ferrari’s Alonso was so close – third by only a tenth of a second, confirming that the Spaniard and the Prancing Horse are well within sight of the usual lockout by Red Bull.
“We are quite happy. Tomorrow, anything can happen. I think this circuit is quite tough on tyres, so we see what we get tomorrow.” – Sebastian Vettel
This leading group is over half a second in front of Ferrari also-ran Massa, and the McLaren of Jenson Button, back on home turf (Hamilton’s woes continuing as he managed to scrape onto the grid in 10th – clearly off his game). Bodes poorly for a home win at Silverstone. Revealing my McLaren bias, perhaps the British weather will throw a well-aimed spanner into the Renault engine – but it is hard to take anything away from either a brilliant Red Bull team, or the charging Alonso in a resurgent Ferrari.
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Boykin achieved widespread media coverage for his statements that appeared to frame the War on Terror in religious terms, first broadcast on NBC News, October 15, 2003.... [A Los Angeles Times] article revealed Boykin giving a speech about hunting down Osman Atto in Mogadishu: "He went on CNN and he laughed at us, and he said, 'They'll never get me because Allah will protect me. Allah will protect me.' Well, you know what? I knew that my God was bigger than his. I knew that my God was a real God and his was an idol."
Every expert will tell you that by the middle of this century the continent of Europe will be an Islamic continent, and they can't reverse it, they can't stop it. It is because they took Jesus out of their societies and it's been replaced by darkness. Any time there is a void it will be replaced by the Enemy, and the Enemy is unquestionably real and he is in fact called Satan, and that is something that people in this country have not yet figured out.
Self-proclaimed “ex-terrorist” Kamal Saleem ... sat down again with fellow anti-Muslim activists Jerry Boykin and Rick Joyner on Prophetic Perspectives where he warned that as part of the effort of Muslim-Americans to usher in an Islamic theocracy, they are replacing the words "In God We Trust" on the dollar with "In Allah We Trust"...
Every mainstream pundit in America told you that Mitt Romney would spend the period after he effectively clinched the GOP nomination moving to the center. Um, we're still waiting. What he's been giving us instead is wingnut porn: Trump earlier in the week, and today a visit to the headquarters of Solyndra -- the solar company whose name works on wingnuts the way telescreen clips of Emmanuel Goldstein work on the residents of Oceania.
Mitt Romney's campaign justified its secrecy in setting up a press conference in front of Solyndra's California headquarters Thursday by warning of a conspiracy by White House officials to potentially sabotage their efforts.
"We knew, if word got out, that Solyndra would do everything in their power, and the Obama administration would do everything in their power, to stop us from having this news conference,"an unnamed adviser told reporters, per CNN.
Reporters raised the question of how this devious plot to derail the event would work, given that the freedom to hold a press conference in public is a fairly basic right.
"Well, he's only the president of the United States," the adviser replied. "I mean, they could work with town officials to deny us access."
Romney alluded to similar concerns in his press conference.
"I think there are people who don't want to see this event occur, don't want to have questions asked about this particular investment," Romney told reporters when asked about the secrecy behind the event, according to the New York Times.
I'd call this black-helicopter talk catnip for right-wingers, but it's more like crack, or bath salts. This stuff makes them crazy.
****
Who's advising Romney to focus on revving up the base rather than the middle? Karl Rove? Roger Ailes? Is Romney doing this because he thinks he'll win if rich super PAC donors give even more than the gazillion dollars they've pledged to give to buy him the presidency? Does he think they watch Fox News all the time (which may be true), and that they won't back him if he doesn't ride the same hobbyhorses as Fox?
Are they insisting that he go birther? Is that the point of Trump?
Or is Ailes whispering Trump's name in Romney's ear? Trump is still the object of hero-worship at Fox -- there was Sean Hannity last night saying, "You know who I am really happy with? Donald Trump" -- and, a week ago, acclaiming Trump as an "iconoclastic" guy who "lays it on the line." The panelists on The Fivelavishing praise on Trump a couple of days ago. ("He's an American icon!” "He connects with the modern man." "He represents ... a new GOP." "He has a blue-collar approach to life.") In just one week earlier this spring, Trump got 34 minutes on Bill O'Reilly's show plus segments on three other Fox shows.
Obama campaign adviser David Axelrod was shouted down Thursday at an event in Boston that was staged to attack Mitt Romney's record as governor of Massachusetts.
Axelrod called the press conference to hammer home the Obama campaign's critique of Romney's time as governor, and brought along officials from around the state to reinforce the message.
But the pro-Obama speakers had to shout to be heard over the "boos" from Romney supporters who showed up for the event....
Mitt Romney has made a habit of using "I'm rubber, you're glue" rhetoric in attacking President Obama -- calling Obama "out of touch" after being called that himself, responding to Obama's recent statement on gay marriage by charging that Obama is a flip-flopper -- and now it appears that the Romney campaign is stealing tactics from Team Obama.
On the front page of its Sunday edition, the New York Times gave a big spread to Ann Romney spending lots of time and tons of money on an exotic genre of horse-riding. The clear implication: The Romneys are silly rich, move in rarefied and exotic circles, and are perhaps a tad shady.
Only days earlier, news surfaced that author David Maraniss had unearthed new details about Barack Obama's prolific, college-age dope-smoking for his new book, "Barack Obama: The Story" -- and the Times made it a brief on A15.
No wonder Republicans are livid with the early coverage of the 2012 general election campaign. To them, reporters are scaring up stories to undermine the introduction of Mitt Romney to the general election audience -- and once again downplaying ones that could hurt the president....
Here's the difference, Politico: Maybe if Mitt Romney had written candidly about dressage in a book seventeen years ago, the Times wouldn't have considered it a big news story now. Maybe if the Romney had answered questions about the dressage issue in the last primary season -- perhaps even as early as 2006 -- the Times wouldn't be putting it on the front page now. Maybe if Romney, in the last primary season, had joked about dressage, including on national television, the Times wouldn't be making a big deal of it today. Maybe if Romney had weathered attacks on his dressage habits four years ago from a campaign surrogate of a primary opponent, there would be little press interest now.
Wednesday, May 30, 2012
REMEMBER PEARL HARBOR
The four-minute Fox & Friendsanti-Obama ad may not show a greater degree of contempt shown for the president than the show's typical content, and, as an ad, it may not be unusually harsh by contemporary right-wing standards (it's just longer, like a turgid metal anthem done in a prolonged, elephantine live version), but it still crosses a line. We put different types of political speech in different pigeonholes, or we did until now -- Fox & Friends is hours every day of anti-Democratic, anti-liberal chatter, but it's chatter. Political ads are supposed to appear in ad slots; they're heavy, concentrated doses of manipulative overkill, and we expect them to be where they traditional are. This crossed over. It was product placement.
Fox News has won a front-row seat in the White House press room after the shakeup following the retirement of the longest-serving journalist in the presidential residence....
The White House Correspondents Association agreed to move the Associated Press to the front row, center seat, which had been held by Helen Thomas, who retired in June....
The new arrangement allowed the conservative Fox News to snag the front row seat previously occupied by AP. National Public Radio got the second row seat previously held by Fox, next to Bloomberg News.
"It was a very difficult decision," said the association, which is a self-governing body of the correspondents assigned to the White House.
"The board received requests from Bloomberg and NPR in addition to Fox for relocation to the front row and felt all three made compelling cases. But the board ultimately was persuaded by Fox's length of service and commitment to the White House television pool." ...
T%he White House should respond to this Fox & Friends attack ad by bouncing Fox -- and I mean bouncing Fox altogether. No front row, no row at all. The lefty groups that tried to keep Fox out of the front row, saying it "is a right-wing propaganda operation, not a legitimate news organization," have been proven right -- and not for the first time today.
It's war. The White House won't shoot back, but it should. Do that, and then keep fighting. Fox can't be appeased.
I'm fascinated by the way Mitt Romney has become a proud, unabashed moral relativist.
It used to be that politicians dissociated themselves from supporters or staffers who said or did unsavory things because they wanted to be seen as believers in the notion that life requires certain standards of conduct. A lot of this has always been self-serving, of course, but the point has always been to identify oneself with the notion that there really are lines of decency that shouldn't be crossed.
Mitt Romney's refusal to repudiate Donald Trump sends a signal, both to Democrats and the voting public: With the nation's future at stake in this November's election, Romney will not accommodate calls that he disown supporters who make ill-considered, unpopular, or sometimes outrageous statements on matters not fundamental to the campaign.
(Let's stop right there -- what if Barack Obama had declared in 2008 that he wouldn't play the "repudiation game" with regard to "outrageous statements" such as ... oh, say, years-old remarks about America made by the Reverend Jeremiah Wright? Would Romney have backed up Obama's decision? I'm guessing not.)
[One] reason Romney is wary of such concessions is that John McCain tried them, and they didn't do him any good. For example, in February 2008, a local Ohio radio host, Bill Cunningham, introduced McCain at a rally in Cincinnati. In the introduction, Cunningham referred to Obama three times by his full name, which at the time some Republicans feared would open them up to unspecified accusations of intolerance. "At one point, the media will quit taking sides in this thing," Cunningham said, "and start covering Barack Hussein Obama." McCain immediately apologized and disavowed Cunningham's remarks. Eleven months later, of course, Obama took the oath of office, beginning, "I, Barack Hussein Obama..." In retrospect, the Cunningham episode looked ridiculous.
Er, no. In retrospect, McCain looks wise. A couple of months later -- mere days before the election -- Cunningham declared that "Obama wants to gas the Jews." A couple of weeks prior to that, he said:
And around Ohio, the number [of newly registered voters] is 666,000. Six-six-six. The mark of the beast. The great majority, of course, are registered by ACORN. The mark of the beast. And who is the beast? Who gave ACORN $800,000 as part of this criminal conspiracy? Who was the lawyer for ACORN? Who conducted ACORN seminars to tell ACORN employees and others how to cheat the system? Barack Hussein Obama. I may declare him to be the beast. Six-six-six. It could be the end of all days.
Would it have helped McCain to have those clips on the news after his own failure to distance himself from Cunningham?
And why are McCain's repudiations the only ones we're talking about here? Obama repudiated Wright, and Obama won. Why is Romney so certain that repudiation equals perceived weakness? Does he really believe that?
I also wonder if Romney just has a visceral desire to out-macho his predecessor at the top of the GOP ticket the way George W. Bush wanted to out-macho his own father (and, possibly, Romney wants to out-macho his).
Poles and Polish-Americans expressed outrage today at President Obama's reference earlier to "a Polish death camp" -- as opposed to a Nazi death camp in German-occupied Poland.
"The White House will apologize for this outrageous error," Foreign Minister Radek Sikorski tweeted. Sikorski said that Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk "will make a statement in the morning. It's a pity that this important ceremony was upstaged by ignorance and incompetence."
The president had been trying to honor a famous Pole, awarding a Presidential Medal of Freedom to Jan Karski, a resistance fighter who sneaked behind enemy lines to bear witness to the atrocities being committed against Jews. President Obama referred to him being smuggled "into the Warsaw ghetto and a Polish death camp to see for himself."
National Security Council spokesman Tommy Vietor said in a statement, "The President was referring to Nazi death camps operated in Poland. The President has demonstrated in word and deed his rock-solid commitment to our close alliance with Poland." ...
The right-wingers who want to argue that this is some sort of uniquely Obama-esque gaffe need to know that, for better or worse, this happens all the time. Here's a 2009 story at Poland.com:
American broadcaster CNN has apologized Poland for using a phrase "polish death camps" during their Tuesday's report of "March of the living" in Auschwiz-Birkenau.
Using words "polish death camps" on information strip during other news CNN joined a large group of broadcasters. Similar phrases were used by ABC News, CBS News and newspapers New York Times, Die Welt and The Guardian. Especially distasteful is the usage of phrase by the German newspaper.
Also republican senator Sam Brownback from Kansas used a phrase "polish concentration camp" while speaking in Congress about the film telling the story of Irena Sendlerowa. Poles demand a disclaimer in Congress from him.
After a lot of talk about Mitt Romney's bizarre infatuation with Donald Trump, we got something we weren't asking for last night: the release of Mitt Romney's birth certificate (or at least a 2012 copy of it -- remember how a modern copy of Obama's birth certificate wasn't good enough for the birthers?). I was as baffled by the Romney camp's decision to release the certificate as I have been by his Trump fixation -- but when I started to read the Reuters story about the release of the document, I began to suspect a strategy on Team Romney's part:
Romney's birth certificate evokes his father's controversy
...So on a day when real estate and media mogul Donald Trump was trying to help Mitt Romney by stirring up a new round of questions about whether Democratic President Barack Obama was born in the United States, Romney's own birth record became a reminder that in the 1968 presidential campaign, his father had faced his own "birther" controversy.
... Records in a George Romney archive at the University of Michigan describe how questions about his eligibility to be president surfaced almost as soon as he began his short-lived campaign.
In many ways, they appear to echo today's complaints that Trump and some other conservative "birthers" have made about Obama....
In George Romney's case, most of the questions were raised initially by Democrats....
As early as February 1967 - a year before the first 1968 presidential primary - some newspapers were raising questions....
Is the campaign of the famously father-obsessed Mitt Romney feeding the press not only the birth certificate but the sob story? Is that why Romney and his people thought they could withstand any negative press from Trump's birtherism -- because their plan all along was to say, "Hey, Mitt Romney's father was the victim of birthers, too"?
Are they jealous of Obama's birther problem? Do they think it wins him sympathy? Do they want some of that sympathy for themselves?
*****
Elsewhere in the press, I see suggestions that -- wahhhh! -- Mitt himself is a victim of birthers, although there's scant evidence. A New York magazine blog post is headlined "In Unexpected Twist, Birthers Turn Against Romney" -- though no birthers are identified who are actually turning against Romney. We do, however, get a quote from Dana Milbank of The Washington Post, who said, before the release of the birth certificate, that there was debate out there among the rabble about ... whether Romney's middle name is Mitt or Milton. Um, really? Is this a burning issue, even among crazies?
Yesterday, Milbank published a column referencing the Mitt/Milton question, and also mentioning a joke site suggesting that Romney needs to prove he's not a unicorn.
I think the Romney camp wants this discussion, out of the hope that it neutralizes the question of birtherism altogether -- if both sides can point to a history of victimization, the Romney's backers (including Trump) aren't especially crazy and Obama's not being singled out.
Am I crazy to see that as the strategy? If so, feel free to tell me why.
Tuesday, May 29, 2012
"Well, I think you're going to find throughout this campaign season that the president's team will be doing everything in their power to try and hold up various shiny objects. Many of them will be in regard to me, some will be with regards the president's policies or promises of some new major giveaway.
"All these things designed to take people's eyes off the ball, which is the massive deficit this president has put in place, his inability to develop our energy resources in this country, his ObamaCare, which is not attractive at all to the American people. And an economy which is stumbling along..."
In other words: there are two kinds of things we can talk about in this campaign -- what Mitt Romney wants to talk about ... and distractions.
According to Jennifer Rubin, the insane obsession of one of Romney's chief fund-raisers and surrogates, a man with whom Romney has chosen to appear at more than one campaign event, is a "shiny object":
The notion that Donald Trump's fundraiser is somekind of debacle for Mitt Romney is one more “shiny object” stunt that is a transparent diversion by the Obama campaign so the media will avoid examining President Obama’s record. And it’s yet another indication of just how in-the-tank-for-Obama is so much of the media coverage....
But here's how "shiny objects" work on the other side. The right-wing base isn't really motivated to vote for Mitt Romney, whose full commitment to the Cause is suspect. So the right keeps ginning up stories meant to enrage the base and make sure that the crazies in the base think the whole country is going to hell in a handbasket and the only possible salvation is the defeat of Barack Obama. These things don't even have to be connected to Obama -- the base sees everything to the left of the GOP as one hydra-headed evil octopus, so the right-wing blog obsession of the past few days -- Brett Kimberlin -- serves as a "shiny object" meant to distract from Romney's weaknesses as a candidate (right-wingers are being victimized by the liberal media, and the liberal criminal justice system, and liberal George Soros-funded organizations!). So is the sting video released by the anti-abortion group Live Action, in which a Planned Parenthood staffer who's since been fired agrees to help a right-wing activist posing as a woman who wants a sex-selection abortion. It's all meant to keep the base enraged. It's all meant to advance the Cause. It's all meant to make righties feel outgunned and under siege, with their vote of November being their last chance to avoid extermination or an irreversible totalitarian hell.
When our side talks about Trump, it's because Mitt Romney has done everything in his power to cozy up to Trump short of putting the loutish SOB on the ticket. He's Romney's highest-profile surrogate. Why is Romney's press secretary-wannabe acting as if talking about him and his cockamamie ideas is somehow out of bounds for Obama supporters?
THERE'S NOW, AT MOST, AN INCH OF DAYLIGHT BETWEEN DAVID BROOKS AND GLENN BECK
Is David Brooks trying to tell us in today's column that, hlike much of the modern conservative movement, he thinks the twentieth century should be repealed? Or -- and this would be worse, because it's both heartless and gutless -- is he trying to have it both ways, endorsing Gilded Age sink-or-swim economics while seeming not to, because he doesn't want to turn in his nice-guy card and give up his NPR gig and his book signings in politically moderate suburbs?
Brooks starts by praising Alexander Hamilton as a guy who really knew what government ought to be doing: encouraging business and not worrying about whether people are starving. Then he tells us that the Hamiltonian approach has been undermined:
The abandonment came in three phases. First, the progressive era. The progressives were right to increase regulations to protect workers and consumers. But the late progressives had excessive faith in the power of government planners to rationalize national life....
Second, the New Deal. Franklin Roosevelt was right to energetically respond to the Depression. But the New Deal's dictum -- that people don't eat in the long run; they eat every day — was eventually corrosive. Politicians since have paid less attention to long-term structures and more to how many jobs they "create" in a specific month. Americans have been corrupted by the allure of debt, sacrificing future development for the sake of present spending and tax cuts.
Third, the Great Society. Lyndon Johnson was right to use government to do more to protect Americans from the vicissitudes of capitalism. But he made a series of open-ended promises, especially on health care. He tried to bind voters to the Democratic Party with a web of middle-class subsidies.
In each case, a good impulse was taken to excess. A government that was energetic and limited was turned into one that is omnidirectional and fiscally unsustainable.
This sinister process -- a distortion of the Founders' intent that started with the Progressives -- is "omnidirectional." It's got us caught in a "web." We are now "corrupted." It's all "corrosive." Hmmm -- where have I heard that before?
Beck: All right, now, if all of this sounds like a government out of control, go back to the progressive movement. It is not what our founders of this country intended. One hundred years of this movement, and the government growing while our rights are shrinking. I've been saying now for awhile, and it really has clicked in my mind, um, that it is the progressive movement, it is the cancer that is inside both parties. It's why you don't feel like there is a choice. It's why John McCain and Barack Obama, you're going, 'You gotta be kidding me, right?'
Tell me what the difference is. I'm having trouble figuring that out.
Oh, yeah, I'm know: Brooks is upset only at the excess. So how does he define that excess?
A government that was trusted and oriented around long-term visions is now distrusted because it tries to pander to the voters' every momentary desire.
What are some of these "momentary desires," David? The desire not to eat out of dumpsters in your old age, or after being sacked when a venture capital firm buys your company? Is that what you mean?
Brooks won't say. This is how he keeps his nice-guy status while endorsing the Beck line: Oh, I'm just against the bad parts of the Progressive Era and the New Deal and the Great Society. You know what the bad parts are -- they're the parts that are bad!
Or perhaps Brooks's very next sentence is an example of what he means:
A government that devoted its resources toward future innovation and development now devotes its resources to health care for the middle-class elderly.
That's right -- health care for the middle-class elderly is, to Brooks, the moral equivalent of ... what? Having a one-night stand while high on cocaine? That's the kind of thing I think of when a moralizer talks about the evils of "momentary desires." Apparently, wanting Grandma to live her last days with a modicum of dignity is just as sinful.
Hey, Davey -- you know who can afford modern medical care for the elderly without a little financial aid? People like you who can also afford $4 million houses. For us peasants, it's a heavy lift.
The Obama campaign is attacking Mitt Romney for his association with Donald Trump, who's still a proud birther, but Romney isn't backing down:
President Barack Obama's campaign is highlighting what they call Mitt Romney's "refusal" to condemn Donald Trump's continued highlighting of the "birther" conspiracy....
Asked on his charter plane Monday night whether Trump's questioning of Obama's birthplace gave him pause, Romney said he was grateful for all his supporters.
"You know, I don't agree with all the people who support me and my guess is they don't all agree with everything I believe in," Romney said. "But I need to get 50.1% or more and I'm appreciative to have the help of a lot of good people." ...
Romney does this a lot: he and his team gently rebuke people other presidential campaigns would cut loose. Romney mildly denounced incivility in general when Ted Nugent made inflammatory remarks about Obama, but he did no more than that -- he is still apparently happy to have Nugent's endorsement. In April, Romney's campaign claimed that immigrant-bashing Kansas secretary of state Kris Kobach was a "supporter" and no longer an "advisor" (while Kobach claimed his role hadn't changed), but Romney hasn't repudiated Kobach. Romney stuck by foreign policy adviser Richard Grennell when a look at Grennell's Twitter feed revealed that he'd frequently insulted prominent people in politics, primarily women. (But this loyalty thing goes only so far, of course: when it was clear that Grennell's presence in the campaign offended people on the right -- he's openly gay and a supporter of marriage equality -- he was thrown under the bus.)
Romney seems to be trying to rewrite the rules of toxicity. He seems to be trying to take advantage of his own straitlaced-ness, and of the relaxed rules in general for scandal-plagued Republicans (hello, David Vitter), to give himself immunity whenever an associate offends (as long as the offended parties are merely lefty and centrist). He seems to be telling us that we should let him hang out with anyone he pleases, as a general rule, and that we have no right to judge him by the company he keeps.
Well, he's Republican, so if he's brazen enough about this, he may get away with it.
DougJ has wondered for years whether birtherism would ever go truly mainstream, with centrist pundits arguing that there are "legitimate issues" we really shouldn't ignore. I don't see that happening -- but I see this as a way for the right to declare, by fiat, that birtherism is a harmless eccentricity, and the only problem is that you make too much of it. (That's basically the way the right talks about racism.) That could easily happen. And maybe it could work.
Monday, May 28, 2012
NEWSFLASH: REPUBLICAN-LEANING GROUP LEANS REPUBLICAN
A lot of attention is being directed to a Gallup poll showing Mitt Romney with a 24-point lead over Barack Obama among veterans. And while this is a bigger gap than Obama experienced in 2008, according to exit polls -- he lost them by 10 points, 54%-44%, running against an actual veteran -- this year's veterans aren't representative of the populace as a whole (overall, in the current Gallup poll, Obama and Romney are tied).
As Gallup noted in 2009, veterans are simply more Republican than non-veterans -- and if you check Gallup's numbers on this, you see that this becomes more and more the case among younger service personnel and veterans. In 2009, in the 18-24-year-old group, Democrats outnumbered Republicans by 13 percentage points among non-veterans, while Republicans outnumbered Democrats by 18 percentage points among veterans and servicemembers. That's a huge gap.
Beyond that is the fact that, because of wars and the Cold War draft, a large percentage of America's elderly are veterans -- and older people are warier of Obama than any other age group is, as multiple polls have noted. It's a leap to ascribe older veterans' distrust of Obama to their veteran status -- many old people just don't like the guy. Is it because old people disproportionately watch Fox News? Is it racism? Is it health care? I think a lot of it is health care. Bill Clinton lost seniors when he pursued health care reform (and he'd done well among them in 1992, much better than Obama did in 2008). In any case, I don't think older veterans distrust Obama because they're veterans.
"I feel... uncomfortable, about the word because it seems to me that it is so rhetorically proximate to justifications for more war. Um, and, I don't want to obviously desecrate or disrespect memory of anyone that's fallen, and obviously there are individual circumstances in which there is genuine, tremendous heroism, you know, hail of gunfire, rescuing fellow soldiers, and things like that. But it seems to me that we marshal this word in a way that is problematic. But maybe I’m wrong about that."
I find it ironic that Hayes would say this at a time when the most controversial tool of the military, at least on the left, is the unmanned drone. Forgive me if I'm sidestepping the question of whether Hayes insulted the troops, but I find myself focusing on the question of whether praise for the troops makes us more bellicose as a nation, and I think the answer is no. If you're the type of person who wants America to go out there and kick some ass, you're happy that we're using unmanned drones. I think you'd be happy to cheer on an all-drone fleet of military aircraft and an all-robot army, just so long as it was smiting the evildoers.
I don't think we're overly eager to fight because we think too much of the troops; I think we're overly eager to fight because of the high regard we have for ourselves. A lot of us think America is a force for good in the world by definition, so we assume that our leaders will always send the troops to fight with a noble purpose, and using noble means. The problem isn't that we call the troops heroes -- it's that we don't question the belief that America is a hero nation.
When I was a child, we were much more irreverent about those who served in the military. I grew up with Beetle Bailey and Gomer Pyle and McHale's Navy. It was OK to treat people in the military as comic figures. Somehow, though, that didn't prevent us from miring ourselves in Vietnam.
I wonder if we're more capable now of decoupling patriotism from bellicosity than we realize. Since 1984, we've elected a saber-rattler president only once, in 2004. (Bush in 2000 actually promised a "humble" foreign policy.) A lot of us like Ron Paul's isolationist rhetoric. The country is ready to be done with the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Maybe we haven't been bellicose for years -- maybe we've just deferred to those among us who are most bellicose.
I don't think it's connected with the troops in most Americans' minds. I think we fall for the notion of war, but we don't like it as much as we think we do.
Sunday, May 27, 2012
I WANT THE KIMBERLIN TRUTH TO PUT ON ITS BOOTS
On Friday I wrote about the right blogosphere's group attack on Brett Kimberlin, an ex-con who's now a lefty activist and, the righties say, a dangerous serial harasser of his enemies. As I said on Friday, if their claims about him are accurate, he absolutely deserves the attention of authorities -- someone who's done what they say he's done ought to be locked up. But they're the only ones telling us this stuff, and (as I also said on Friday) they seem to be doing it primarily to attack liberals and Democrats, and only secondarily to protect their ideological soul mates.
The latest, from one of the self-proclaimed harassees, Robert Stacy McCain, is that Kimberlin is pursuing a "peace order" against another person who says Kimberlin harassed him. That may mean the story is more nuanced than the righties want you to believe it is -- or it may mean that Kimberlin is following the classic pattern of a spouse-beater who tells the authorities he's the one being abused. We just don't know.
And this gets me back to a subject that's come up in the lefty blogosphere in the past, notably during the James O'Keeffe ACORN brouhaha. Back then, Clark Hoyt, at the time the public editor of The New York Times,asserted that the non-right-wing press pursued the ACORN story too tardily, and therefore the Times "would now assign an editor to monitor opinion media and brief them frequently on bubbling controversies." This was met with some outrage and disgust on the left -- but I've always believed that following the stories right-wingers are ranting and raving about is a good idea for the mainstream press, if it's done with the goal of getting the truth out rather than with the goal of appealing to the right-wing audience. In fact, I think it hurts our side -- and the country as a whole -- if the non-right-wing press ignores these right-wing stories. The Kimberlin story could be another example.
That's what must be prevented in the case of Brett Kimberlin. In addition to convicting him in the media, the right is already trying to tie him to the Obama administration, and, by inference, to every liberal and Democrat in America. That's only going to continue.
Let wingnuts be the mainstream press's assignment editors? I say yes, but just in order to tell the truth. At worst, we learn that Kimberlin really was a nasty guy; the fact appears to be that liberals and Democrats who may have allied with him simply didn't know that. (Yeah, he's an ex-con, but so is Don King, who once killed a guy, which didn't stop the GOP from expressing delight as his endorsement of George W. Bush in 2004.) Or we may find out that behavior is being ascribed to Kimberlin and his friends that's someone else's doing, or that's being exaggerated and distorted, just to score political points. Either way, the right is prevented from owning the story for the next several months and presenting it in a way that exclusively helps the right. If these hissyfits are ignored, they don't go away.
Hoffmann stared at the tablecloth and let the discussion flow around him. He was remembering now why he didn't like the rich: their self-pity. Persecution was the common ground of their conversation, like sport or the weather was for everyone else. He despised them.
"I despise you," he said, but nobody paid him any attention, so engrossed were they in the inequities of higher-rate taxation and the inherent criminality of all employees.
'
--From Robert Harris's novel The Fear Index (London: Hutchinson, 2011; New York: Knopf, 2012)
... the billionaire investor Joe Ricketts ... is involved in another effort slated for this summer, a documentary film based on a widely criticized book, "The Roots of Obama's Rage" by Dinesh D'Souza, which asserts that Mr. Obama is carrying out the "anticolonial" agenda of his Kenyan father.
Mr. Ricketts's aides said he was one of roughly two dozen investors, providing only 5 percent of the film's budget. But ... Mr. Ricketts's aides also said that he had helped pay for newspaper and Internet advertisements promoting Mr. D'Souza's book in late 2010, one of which called it "the book the White House doesn't want you to read," and warned, "The real Barack Obama is even worse than you think." ...
A spokesman for Mr. Ricketts said that he had supported the book and the movie only because of his friendship with Mr. D’Souza, whom he has known for several years. The two men became acquainted through the American Enterprise Institute, a spokesman said....
The Times doesn't post the film's apocalyptic trailer, or a link to the film's Web site, but you can get those right now from -- where else? -- Fox Nation. Here's the trailer:
And here's Breitbart.com joining this axis of evil, with a column from the film's producer, Gerald Molen (he also co-produced Schindler's List, as he and others involved in the film never tire of reminding us). Molen's column is also apocalyptic, as he talks (somewhat incoherently) about the consequences of the 2008 election:
...We failed to hear that horrific sucking sound of our falling into the vortex of calm voices pushing us ever so gently but with assured and deft platitudes, into the hell of our own making.
... We can never lose our awareness that those who perpetrate the lie and the hate by using their best tools of fear and envy and class warfare are alive and well and doing their very best to take our basic freedoms away from us....
Another part of the ongoing dilemma is that the President surrounded himself with self-proclaimed Marxists, socialists, communists and progressives. Why? Is the answer that he embodies some or all of those ideological characteristics? I think so. Each of them arrived with an agenda to turn America into the vision of themselves and the despicable goal of changing America into a European style state of fear and class warfare....
Molen sounds a bit like his patron Joe Ricketts, as quoted in the Times today:
An early glimpse of his views on Mr. Obama can be found in a June 2010 graduation speech he gave at Bellevue University in Nebraska, for which he is a leading benefactor. Lamenting the banking and auto bailouts, he declared, "Our Republic is under assault from our government," adding the historical note that "most of the past threats have come from outside our borders."
He called this "a most dangerous time," when "people begin to second-guess the American experiment" and "flirt with dead-ends like socialism."
Back when Forbes was excerpting D'Souza's book, Adam Serwer looked at his "Kenyan anticolonialist" thesis and wrote:
This is birtherism with big words. This is the witchdoctor sign without Photoshop, WorldNetDaily without the exclamation points. D'Souza doesn't need to stare at Obama's birth certificate for hours to come to the same conclusion as the birthers, which is that the president is a foreigner.
True enough -- but I think the talk of all these guys going beyond birtherism to literal Antichrist-ism. I know right-wingers get this way every time there's a Democrat in office -- D'Souza, in a CPAC video linked at the films site, says Obama isn't "a traditional Democrat" like that nice Bill Clinton, but, of course, the right thought Clinton was the Antichrist when he was in office. I'm just pointing it out because Antichrist-ism is as crazy and conspiratorial as birtherism, yet it isn't denounced the way birtherism is. It wasn't in Clinton's time, and it isn't now. It should be. Ricketts, Molen, and D'Souza are exactly as crazy as Orly Taitz.
Friday, May 25, 2012
EVERYTHING IS FOR THE CAUSE
Right-wing bloggers are having a group event today: they're all blogging about a guy named Brett Kimberlin. Years ago, Kimberlin was convicted of involvement in a series of bombings; he spent many years in prison. While he was locked up, he claimed to have once sold pot to Dan Quayle, who was then running for vice president; he charged that prison authorities isolated him illegally after the story became public. That was the last time I ever heard his name, but I guess he's been peripheral to my world since -- I gather he was involved with the news site Raw Story and in investigating voting irregularities as a colleague of Brad Blog's Brad Friedman. (Here's a 2007 Time story about the guy.)
The right-wingers who are blogging about him now are blogging about him because, if I understand their story correctly, he's a nasty piece of work who (among other things) has driven righty blogger Robert Stacy McCain into hiding and who's engaged in several forms of harassment against Patrick Frey, aka Patterico; the tactics, Patterico says, include "swatting": you spoof a phone number, call as the person you're targeting, say you just killed someone at your house, then the SWAT team shows up and maybe arrests the target ... or opens fire. Patterico says it happened to him (and he was taken into custody) last year.
Oh, and (wheels within wheels) Andrew Breitbart is involved, because he talked about this in an interview he gave not long before he died, as Patterico notes.
What's the truth here? I have no idea. But several thoughts come to mind.
If this guy is as nasty as the righties say, then I, as a lefty, have no use for him, even if he's doing work I approve of. Call the cops if you think you've got a case against him. Lock him up -- I don't care.
If the story the righties are telling is true, there's a guy on the loose who should be locked up. But their blogswarm today doesn't seem to be focused on getting him locked up -- it seems to be focused (as is practically everything right-wingers say and do) on damaging liberalism. On the right, that's Priority #1 -- and #2 and #3 and #4 and #5. The posts and tweets I've looked at are full of references to George Soros and the Tides Foundation and Barbra Streisand (because, you see, giving money to organizations that include a guy you don't know is a criminal is a disgusting, shameful, immoral act, which makes you an accessory to crimes you didn't know had taken place, and haven't been conclusively shown to be the grant recipient's doing).
And, gosh, it's an election year, isn't it -- a few tenuous, strained links to Obama will certainly be discussed on righty blogs in the days to come, no?
I'm hoping a real news organization tells me the truth about this. I'm hoping this guy is put away if he's a seriously bad person committing seriously criminal acts. I almost think I'm more interested in seeing the responsible party face justice than some of the righties are. A lot of them (hello, Michelle Malkin) seem much more concerned about winning one for their side.
Read all of the incredible, sick-making story -- which includes some perfectly typical and disgusting bile spewed by some of the violence-supporting left-wing animals who think things like this are just peachy -- and gird your loins. Because it's going to come down to shooting with these vermin eventually, if we're to retain any rights at all. Patterico wouldn't like me saying that, I’m sure; I don’t much like having to say it myself. But it's a mere acknowledgment of current reality: we are in a cold war with neo-Marxists who are trying to steal our country, have already done enormous and probably permanent damage to it, and will stop at nothing --absolutely nothing -- to see to it that our voices are silenced. That war must inevitably go hot, unless we're willing to surrender to them.
"[I]t's going to come down to shooting ... The war must inevitably go hot...." Are you expressing your fears, dude -- or your hopes?
UM, YOU TOLD ME BARACK OBAMA WAS A STRANGE AND EXOTIC GUY AMERICANS COULDN'T RELATE TO
This morning, Mike Allen at Politico's Playbook helped kick off the de-embargoing of David Maraniss's still-unpublished Barack Obama biography, by quoting from a review in The Washingtonian:
"Maraniss's Obama is sympathetic, and in contrast to his exotic background, he emerges as a normal, well-adjusted guy. At Occidental, 'Barry''s Mick Jagger impression was legendary, and as a teen at Honolulu's Punahou School, he was known for snagging joints from his buddies' hands and shouting 'Intercepted!' before taking an extra hit...."
Obama's a guy from my generation (he's two years younger), and what strikes me about the Politico quote is, yes, the fact that Obama just sounds so normal. Hey, I used to do Jagger impressions, too. And that "Intercepted!" thing sounds like every kid anywhere. And it's a football allusion! American football, not soccer or some other socialist sport!
Obama and his friends had favorite hangout spots. They gave a name to one particular friend's reliable ride. They invented rituals that became an in-group language. This is so normal -- and it matters because it cuts against the bizarre portrait the right paints of Obama as a red diaper baby/communist agent-in-training/madrassa-bred stranger to American cultural norms. Trust me -- if you lurk on the right, the picture of young Barack Obama is of a kid in a treasonous hothouse being secretly bred to grow up and destroy America. And really, he was just a typical American kid of his generation.
Today, Peggy Noonan publishes an interview with Mitt Romney so spongy and cottony that "softball" doesn't begin to describe it -- it's more like a Nerf ball interview. ("Do you wake up in a good mood, or do you have to work your way into it?") This is obviously meant to show Romney in the best possible light, and to humanize him -- but even so, Romney can't help himself, and communicates this to Noonan (emphasis added):
Before rallies and town meetings, he always tries to have private, off-the-record meetings with voters. "I sit down with five or six couples or individuals and just go around the table, and I ask them to tell me about their life. And the stories I hear suggest a degree of anxiety which is not reflected in the statistics." He is struck, he said, by the number of people who are employed but in legitimate fear of being let go. He is struck by the number of people who've made investments for their retirement -- real estate, 401(k)s -- and seen them go down.
Wait -- we've been dealing with the effects of this financial collapse for four years, and Romney is surprised to learn that people fear losing their jobs? He's just now figuring that out?
And though the line on Romney is that he's relentlessly data-driven, he apparently has spent four years overlooking the fact that anxiety about job loss is "reflected in the statistics":
And it never occurred to him until now that middle-class people have 401(k)s, and that they're invested in stocks and bonds, which went down when the economy cratered? No combination of data inputs allowed him to intuit that? He didn't know until he went among the peasants and they explained it to him?
We know Romney has claimed to understand the fear of job loss as it applies to himself. I guess he had to leave his multiple mansions to learn that these fears, and economic hardship in general, affect the common people.
DeLong also posted one question he didn't ask Mann and Ornstein, and I've been trying to figure out something clever to say about it, but all I can say is that it sums up practically everything I feel about politics in America right now, so here it is:
Look. You two are expecting normal politics to rein in a Republican Party gone bonkers extreme. But it will not work. The press corps will continue to say "he said, she said, yadda yadda yadda" either because they are gutless cowards or because they are bought. In a world of low-information voters, the bonkers extremism and sheer total meanness of the Republican Party will not get through. The only way it could get through would be if moderate Republican barons were to announce that they had had enough and were crossing t'he aisle, and if they did so in a way that they brought their affinities with them. But I don't see Brent Scowcroft doing that, I don't see Colin Powell doing that, I don't see Greg Mankiw doing that, I don't see Marty Feldstein doing that, I don't see Gail Wilensky doing that, I don't see Bob Dole doing that, I don't see Jack Danforth doing that, I don't see Richard Lugar doing that--and I don't see you doing that, Mr. Ornstein. I don't see you calling for the defeat of every single Republican candidate this fall and every fall until the party comes back to reality.
And since all of you moderate Republicans are unwilling to take the only step that might fix the situation on your side, we have to take the only step open to us: We have to stop bringing a set of policy proposals and briefing papers to what the Republican Party has made a thermonuclear exchange. We have to oppose their noise, slime, and lie machine with a noise, disinfectant, and truth machine of our own--and at the same intensity.
That means you moderates need to pick a side and fasten your seat belts, rather than wringing your hands about how the Republicans are being so mean, and you wish they would be less so.”
[Mitt] Romney's campaign is ... raffling a chance to have dinner with [Donald] Trump for supporters who donate to the campaign.
"I want you: Dine with the Donald," a campaign flier proclaims, along with a drawing of Trump.
The campaign offers: "Airport transportation in the Trump vehicle; Stay at the Trump International Hotel & Tower New York; Tour the Celebrity Apprentice Boardroom; Dine with Donald Trump and Mitt Romney."
UPDATE: Good to see birtherism is the main thrust of DNC press secretary Melanie Roussell's response to this:
Once again Mitt Romney is failing the moral leadership test. Instead of rejecting Donald Trump's 'birther' conspiracy theories and divisive attacks, he's endorsing them by campaigning and fundraising with him. Romney has shown time and again that he's not ready to have his John McCain 2008 type moment by speaking out against these types of attacks against the President. This type of false and extremely divisive rhetoric has no place in the political discourse of our country and Mitt Romney should stand up against it instead of standing with Donald Trump to raise money for his campaign.
I can easily imagine Romney canceling this event as a result of too much bad press about Trump's birtherism. Which raises the question: How can we elect a guy president who throws in his lot with a birther and doesn't foresee that this will be a problem for his campaign? Does the heads-I-win-tails-I-win nature of the financial wheeler-dealer world from which Romney emerged just make him incapable of grasping that some decisions are seriously ill-advised?
If I understand the premise of this Politico article correctly, the fact that a bunch of rich people have spent multiple gazillion dollars to ensure that a sitting governor retains his seat while facing recall in the middle of his term, something he's now expected to do by a comfortable if not overwhelming margin, against a candidate who doesn't exactly thrill many of his critics, ought to be enough to propel that governor into the front ranks of U.S. politics. White House, here we come?
GOP officials and operatives all agree Walker's got a promising political future if he comes out on top of the recall battle.
"He's a guy who has something to offer his state now and hopefully the country in the future," said former Republican National Committee Chairman Michael Steele....
Wait -- he's the giant-killer? Not the check-writers?
National GOP donors have rushed to his defense, helping him rake in more than $25 million since January 2011 -- with more than $13 million raised in just over three months earlier this year. That included $500,000 from Bob Perry -- who helped fund the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth attacks against John Kerry in 2004 -- and $250,000 from Sheldon Adelson, a GOP super donor who poured millions into the super PAC that backed Newt Gingrich's presidential bid.
Outside groups have also formed a defensive line around Walker. Americans for Prosperity, a conservative group backed by the billionaire Koch brothers, spent more than $1.5 million on ads defending the governor in the first three months of 2012....
Hell, I could win a recall election in Wisconsin with that kind of scratch behind me, and I don't even know how to milk a cow.
The article's premise is flawed for one reason above all: it doesn't matter that Walker seems like the #1 aggrieved right-winger who fought the hated liberals right now, because by the time, say, 2016 rolls around, there'll have been thirty or forty new aggrieved right-wingers who fought the hated liberals to take his place. There's always a new one! There's a new one every few months! The right is like an assembly line churning out aggrieved people three shifts a day, seven days a week!
So yeah, Scott, it's quite possible you'll win. But watch the throne -- there's stiff competition for the title of Top Right-Wing Victim. Ask Sarah Palin, who thought she had it locked up four years ago.
Elizabeth Warren is largely unscathed by the weeks-long controversy surrounding her ancestry, according to a new Suffolk University poll released Wednesday evening.
Unscathed? She's not unscathed -- she's gaining, big time:
The survey shows the Massachusetts Democrat trailing GOP Sen. Scott Brown by a single percentage point, with Brown netting 48 percent to Warren's 47 percent. The result marks a measurable shift toward Warren since the last Suffolk poll in February, which had Brown up 9 points, 49 percent to 40 percent.
... Since then, Warren has been ensnared in a round of unflattering stories questioning the credibility of her claim that she is 1/32 Cherokee.
Is it too much to argue that that attack is actually helping her?
A plurality of those polled -- 49 percent -- believe Warren is telling the truth about being part Native American. Just 28 percent said she was not being honest while 23 percent weren't sure.
A plurality of 45 percent also believe she did not benefit by listing herself as a minority at Harvard or the University of Pennsylvania, where she also taught.
More than two-thirds of voters -- 69 percent -- said Warren's Native American heritage listing is not a significant story, with just 27 percent saying it is.
You know how this would work if the parties were reversed, don't you? If an attack like this were launched against a Republican, we'd spend half a day talking about the charges ... and then two weeks responding to cries of "media bias!" from the right-wing noise machine. By Day Three at the latest, the press would start beating itself up for running the story at all. We'd spend all our time talking about the characteristic viciousness of the win-at-any-cost Democrats and the shameful collusion of the scandal-mongering liberal media. We'd forget about the charges altogether.
Shortly afterward, polls would show that the public was shrugging off the charges ... which, somehow, is what's happening to Warren, even without a noise machine. I don't know how that happened. Maybe the public is genuinely unimpressed by stories like this that don't seem relevant to job performance. Maybe a lot of voters have family stories about interesting forbears that they know may or may not be true.
His biggest asset? 47% of likely voters say he'll be more independent than Warren.
... a key finding that could boost Brown: 56% believe Massachusetts would benefit by having one Democrat and one Republican in the Senate...38% say no.
Damn blue-staters. In the red states, voters vote for Republicans. In Democratic states, voters want to be reasonable. And that's how the GOP winds up controlling everything. That's why we can't have nice things.
Warren's favorability rating has risen 8 points since February, to 43 percent, although her unfavorable rating has also increased 5 points, to 33 percent, perhaps reflecting Brown’s attempts to portray her as an elitist.
But:
Brown, who has worked hard to burnish his everyman image, is viewed more positively than Warren.
Fifty-eight percent of voters said they view him favorably, up 6 points from February, while 28 percent said they view him unfavorably.
Wednesday, May 23, 2012
The 41% of Americans who now identify themselves as "pro-choice" is down from 47% last July and is one percentage point below the previous record low in Gallup trends, recorded in May 2009. Fifty percent now call themselves "pro-life," one point shy of the record high, also from May 2009.
Typically when abortion rights are threatened, support for legal abortion rises, according to polling experts.
In the last decade, for example, previous polls show support for Roe peaking at 56% around 1991, when the decision was under attack across the country....
In 1992, the Supreme Court issued a decision upholding Roe, with some modifications. The same year, Clinton, an abortion rights supporter, was elected president. Both events appeared to reassure people there would be no dramatic changes in abortion policy. Subsequently, support for Roe began to decline.
In a 1996 poll, 46% of respondents endorsed Roe vs. Wade. By 1999, support had slipped slightly to 43%....
Look at the graph. Notice when the numbers were almost as much in the "pro-life" direction as they are now: 2009, just after the pro-choice Barack Obama took office. Abortion rights seemed safe, so people drifted away from the "pro-choice" self-identification.
Now look at the last time "pro-choice" beat "pro-life": 2011, a few months after the overwhelmingly anti-abortion GOP class of 2010 took their oaths of office in Congress, state houses, and state legislatures. Abortion right seemed under threat, so more people decided they were pro-choice.
I'm reading through the Mark Halperin interview of Mitt Romney. Remember the way right-wingers said in 2008 that Barack Obama was acting as if he had supernatural transformational powers? Remember how they said that Obama supporters believed he was just going to magically transform America as a result of his wonderfulness?
Well, I think Mitt Romney thinks he's "The One" now:
Halperin: So a lot of these changes though, the tax and spending changes, kick in January 1. You wouldn't take office until January 20. Does that worry you about what that might do to the economy in terms of confidence, in terms of perception?
Romney: Well actually if I'm lucky enough to be elected the consumers and the small-business people in this country will realize that they have a friend in the White House, who is actively going to encourage economic growth, and there will be a resurgence in confidence in this country and a willingness to take risks, to invest, to add employees. I think it will be very positive news to the American economy.
That's right -- he's going to magically make economic trouble go away weeks before taking office! His aura is going to do it! He's just going to exist, and troubled economic waters will be stilled!
Halperin is asking him about the "fiscal cliff" -- the impending need to raise the debt ceiling, the expiration of the Bush tax cuts, automatic spending cuts that are due to kick in. Romney just says his mere fabulousness will prevent all this from being a problem:
Will I be able to get done between January 1 and January 20 the things that I'd like to do? Of course not, I'm not in office. But I believe that we will be able to have a grace period, which allows us to tackle these issues one by one and put in place a structure, which is very much designed to get America working again.
He's just going to hold economic budgetary problems at bay using his sheer Mitt-ness. Trouble will just sit and wait patiently until he's darn good and ready!
On Monday, National Review Online posted an article by Kevin Williamson that portrayed the Republican Party as more or less singlehandedly responsible for the advancement of African-American civil rights, with the resistance to that advancement being overwhelmingly attributable to Democrats. Yup, according to Williamson, the GOP has always been the pro-black party and the Democrats have always been anti-black. I'd rebut this pathetic attempt to win non-white voters to the Republican Party, but it's already been eloquently and thoroughly debunked by Jonathan Bernstein, by Adam Serwer, and (most thoroughly) by Jonathan Chait. I have nothing to add to their fine takedowns.
What's odd, though, is that two days after the posting of the Williamson article, we have an electoral result that actually seems to support Williamson's thesis: President Obama failed to crack 60% yesterday against "uncommitted" in the Kentucky Democratic primary and against a white nonentity in the Arkansas primary, two weeks after failing to crack 60% against a white felon in the West Virginia Democratic primary.
Now, plenty of us on the left -- Alec MacGillis, Zandar, BooMan -- are perfectly willing to say that this reflects lingering racism among fairly conservative voters in Appalachia and the Upper South who still regard themselves as Democrats, and are still registered with the party. We say this even though we believe that the Democratic Party as a whole is far more committed to racial justice than the Republican Party.
But when right-wingers are handed electoral results that could actually be interpreted as supporting their Dems-are-the-real-racists! thesis, what do they say? Let's go to Bryan Preston at Pajamas Media:
I Told You They Would Blame Obama's Awful Kentucky and Arkansas Results on Race
Wait -- shouldn't these guys be the ones blaming the results on race? Aren't they the people who think Democrats have cornered the market on racism? Weren't they just saying this two days ago?
Ah, but you have to understand: given the choice between trying to win over African-Americans with honey or vinegar, they just can't stick with the honey. They could say, "See? Racist Democrats insulted Obama" -- but they'd rather say, "Oh, that pathetic Obama is such a loser." They'd rather insult the first black president, a guy who has near-universal African-American support.
House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan predicted Tuesday that November's elections could bring a broad mandate for the Republican Party to enact aggressive reforms to the nation's finances.
In a nearly 30-minute speech at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library, Ryan ... called for changes to taxes and entitlements that Ryan said would parallel Reagan's first year in office.
"We will not only win the next election -- we have a unique opportunity to sweep and remake the political landscape," the Wisconsin congressman said....
Do you doubt that Ryan will be the real president of the United States if Mitt Romney is elected? I'd listen to what Grover Norquist said in his CPAC speech in February: he said that he and his brothers-in-arms in movement conservatism "just need a president to sign this stuff. We don't need someone to think it up or design it." By "this stuff," he means stuff like the Paul Ryan budget.
With their favorite having lost the nomination for president, [Ron] Paul's dedicated band of youthful supporters are setting their sights down-ballot and swarming lightly guarded Republican redoubts like state party conventions in an attempt to infiltrate the top echelons of the party....
In Minnesota, Paulites stormed the Republican gathering in St. Cloud last weekend, bumping aside two conventional Republican candidates to choose one of their own, Kurt P. Bills, a high school economics teacher, to challenge Senator Amy Klobuchar, a Democrat, this fall.
Backers of Mr. Paul, a Republican congressman from Texas, crashed Republican conventions in Iowa, Maine, Minnesota and Nevada in recent weeks, snatching up the lion's share of delegate slots for the Republican National Convention in Tampa this August....
And Paulite candidates for Congress are sprouting up from Florida to Virginia to Colorado, challenging sitting Republicans and preaching the gospel of radically smaller government, an end to the Federal Reserve, restraints on Bush-era antiterrorism laws and a pullback from foreign military adventures.
It would really amuse me if -- spoiler alert! -- what's happening to the GOP eventually turns into the end of Wild in the Streets, with crazies having fully seized control and rallying around a young, smug leader ... only to be challenged by even younger (and even less self-doubting) extremist absolutists.
Up to a point, of course, there should be no conflict -- the Paulbots and the Paul Ryan-bots agree that policies on taxation, social services, and business regulation should be those of the Gilded Age. They can agree on auditing the Fed. Maybe they'll even agree on the gold standard.
But after that, what? Conventional Republicans of the Paul Ryan stripe aren't going to forswear military adventurism and chest-thumping jingoism -- rallying the nation against some swarthy evildoer of non-European descent has been far too useful a weapon in the GOP's arsenal over the years. Give that up? Not gonna happen.
I suppose some of the Ron Paul types will just learn to stop worrying and love the bomb, while others will drift back over to the left, wandering in the wilderness and wondering whether Russ Feingold or Rocky Anderson will run for president third-party. But it would be amusing if this were a future conservative crack-up.
On the other hand, these two wings of the far right could be our two-party system in the near future. I say this because, while I'm heartened to learn that the pro-Obama super PAC Priorities USA is actually increasing its focus on Bain Capital (despite whining from across the political spectrum about the supposed inappropriateness of attacking Bain), I see the future of the Democratic Party in the mewling of folks like Cory Booker, Ed Rendell, Harold Ford and others -- in the future, Democrats won't even utter empty platitudes about the people vs. the powerful.
In that case, why will there even need to be a Democratic Party? The only ideological fight in America will be in the GOP, between plutocratic isolationists and plutocratic neocons. Or the latter will simply win and we'll be a one-party state, as disillusioned Paulites go off to write sci-fi novels.
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Readers should beware of this book, which is an ambitious analysis of all of Thucydides (including especially Book Eight) disguised as a relatively slim paperback volume. It is more substantial reading than they might expect, and although it is very clearly written and the author invests much energy in describing Thucydides' narrative and speeches, it will best suit readers who have already thought about Thucydides quite a lot. For these, and for brave beginners, the book offers a fresh and independent minded analysis.
Classicists who study Thucydides will quickly notice that Hawthorn is immune to the authority of famous passages and scholarly consensus. For instance, he is impressed neither by the first sentence of the History: "[Thucydides] would have been prescient indeed if he foresaw a great war at the faltering start . . ." (3), nor by the eulogy for Pericles at 2.65 . . . "an incomplete assessment of Pericles and wrong about most of the other [leaders]" (65); ". . . As historical judgments, they do not do him justice and one can regret that he set them down" (67). By contrast, against an array of scholars contending the opposite he argues that book eight is a kind of masterpiece. "He writes of [the politics of those years] with his best dispassionate passion" (2) or "with brilliance" (203).
This, then, is a book that rethinks from the beginning and challenges its readers to do the same. The writing can be correspondingly intricate. For example, in Chapter Three Hawthorn begins to examine Thucydides' presentation of the causes of the war. "Thucydides remarks that Sparta's fear, which he believes to be the 'truest cause' of the war, was 'the one least openly stated' at the time (1.23.6). . . He leaves it to the reader to see how in the years before the start of open hostilities between Sparta and Athens, it was to be exaggerated arguments advanced by an ally of Sparta's in response to events which need not in themselves have been decisive that for a different and deeper reason caused Sparta to move to war, and that for reasons of its own, the leadership in Athens let it do so" (28).
Whether or not one agrees with every clause of this summary, it offers a condensed analysis of substantial sections of book one, and provokes the reader to refine his or her own ideas. Were the Corinthians' arguments exaggerated and the quarrels over Epidamnus and Potideia not decisive? Did the leadership in Athens simply not stop the Spartans from taking the decision to go to war? And what was the Spartans' "different and deeper reason" for doing so? In Hawthorn's view it was that Spartan pre-eminence had become a "necessary identity." "If they were to concede [Athenian pre-eminence], they would no longer be seen by anyone, including themselves, to be the people they thought they were and had devoted so much, indeed everything, to remaining" (49-50). Readers might initially find Hawthorn's terminology superfluous: wouldn't we normally call this "necessary identity" "honour"? Maybe, but Hawthorn's "necessary identity" might be a useful clarification of the term "honour", which is sometimes used so broadly as to be useless for thinking with. By contrast, here we have a carefully defined idea.
Other arguments are deceptively simple. For instance, Hawthorn argues that Thucydides represents the Archidamian War as lasting so long because neither side could figure out what to do. "[T]he Spartans could not see how otherwise [i.e. otherwise than by wasting Attica] to take the war to the Athenians, and the Athenians could not see how to take the war to the Spartans at all" (68). In the absence of a plan for winning "Each [side] could only harness the resources it had and try to acquire more, take what opportunities it had to disadvantage the other, and otherwise try to maintain its position…[I]mprovisation, haste, hesitation, and accident" (71) were thus characteristic of the war, as Thucydides tells it. Again, one must test Hawthorn's description against one's own views. Personally, I thought his argument was quite convincing, and I particularly appreciated Hawthorn's emphasis on how the great powers' aporia made them vulnerable to the persuasions of third parties (76, 79, 81).
In Hawthorn's view, this planless war of attrition ends in 413, after Athens's defeat in Sicily, when the two great powers finally discover clear strategic aims (202), if not clear strategies (e.g. 205, 221). Together with this change, Thucydides finally hits his stride as a political writer, and begins anew, just as does the war itself. Hawthorn devotes the central section of this chapter to a fine retelling of book eight, "Thucydides' most sustained and compelling exposition of practical politics" (226). His chapter reminded me that book eight is poorly understood, and called to mind how little serious work compares, contrasts, or argues with Hawthorn's description; Rood (1998) remains the main analysis.1
If we see Thucydides as Hawthorn does, the text really has two parts: books one through seven, and book eight, which begins a new kind of narrative. This division of Thucydides entails some reliance on the idea that the historian progressed towards the abilities he displays in book eight. This idea is not new, as Hawthorn explains, citing, for instance Macleod and Dewald. 2 What is new, at least to me, is the contention that in book eight Thucydides exposes new skill as a political writer (203). Overall, of course, Hawthorn gives the political character of Thucydides' writing more attention than classicists are used to. For instance, he gives the relation of speech and narrative an explicitly political character: "Political rhetoric was an art in which Thucydides took great interest and no doubt much pleasure, but for him to place it as he did, and thus expose it was itself a political act" (235). By this argument, the text of Thucydides is organized politically, in that it consistently exposes political speech to the fire of corrective fact, and is also in itself a political statement, equivalent to a warning: "Speeches… were an essential part of politics; but they were no more to be trusted on events in the present and what might follow for the future than were poems and chronicles on the past" (233). One must conclude that the History is therefore addressed to a political audience, i.e. one for whom this organization would be productive.
Fortunately, Hawthorn has a generously broad view of the political. He is not, it seems to me, trying to claim Thucydides for a single discipline, and this also shows in his bibliography, which includes as many classicists as social scientists as philosophers. He relies on the excellent new translation of Jeremy Mynott,3 quotations from which support both the accessibility and intelligibility of his argument. Moreover, although he sees Thucydides' "utility" for us today in political terms, these terms are such as to free us, in fact, from the jargon of the social sciences. "Politics remain," he observes, despite the growth of organizational institutions, "and…if we describe these in ways that do no more than mirror general aspirations and formal manifestations, or in the languages of the twentieth century as forces of a 'structural' kind, the exercise of 'rational choice' or the expression of a 'culture', they can be occluded. We need to be able to see them as politics, and in the clarity of an almost incomparably more elemental context, this is what Thucydides allows us to do – incomparably well" (238).
To sum up, those who have read Thucydides closely will both get the most benefit from the arguments made here and also find the most to disagree with. Compare Hawthorn to David Gribble (1998) on 2.65: by contrast to Hawthorn, Gribble makes a strong argument for seeing the culmination of central Thucydidean themes in this chapter.4 I found it difficult to accept some of Hawthorn's other ideas, such as his suggestion that "one can read him [Thucydides] to incline to a non-separability thesis on motive, intention and action and a non-isolability thesis on motive, intention and action and their context" (149, cf. 232). I cling to arguments made e.g. in Schneider (1974) or Baragwanath (2008):5 it seems to me that Thucydides worked hard to separate out those four factors for the reader, although he may indeed have exposed the fact that our deepest motivations are hidden from ourselves. But disagreement on or questions about such points is small potatoes compared to reconsidering the issues. Whether readers agree or not with particular arguments, this is a book to which they will be able to turn for an honest and intelligent interpretation of the whole.
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About BMCR
Bryn Mawr Classical Review (BMCR) publishes timely reviews of current scholarly work in the field of classical studies (including archaeology). The authoritative archive can be found at http://bmcr.brynmawr.edu.
This site was established to allow responses to reviews through the comments feature; all reviews from August 2008 have been posted.
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Hat tip to Sarolta Cump for all of these Homeland-Security finds. Some of the photos were taken before the presidential race got going, but they present issues that have very much carried through into the campaign.
First: John Ryan Brubaker from Portland, Oregon, captured this street commentary a couple of years ago in Oakland, California, possibly when he was still living there.
Robot_zombie_monkey may have just moved to Nashville from Portland, Oregon, where she took this picture. She says, “[M]ost of these posters were gone within hours of being pasted up. This particular one managed to hang on for almost two days.”
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There are many things to treasure in Wes Anderson's "The Grand Budapest Hotel." The usual pleasures of his films are there to be found, including the meticulous set design, carefully crafted dialogue and precision comedic pacing. But one element that has been a bit undersung is Alexandre Desplat's score and the soundtrack to the film. It marks a departure of sorts for the filmmaker, who forgoes his usual mixtape of choice cuts, for a mostly score driven piece, with 'Budapest' almost functioning as a musical, with a variety of themes and melodies carrying the film through its variety of screwball adventures.
There are many things to treasure in Wes Anderson's "The Grand Budapest Hotel." The usual pleasures of his films are there to be found, including the meticulous set design, carefully crafted dialogue and precision comedic pacing. But one element that has been a bit undersung is Alexandre Desplat's score and the soundtrack to the film. It marks a departure of sorts for the filmmaker, who forgoes his usual mixtape of choice cuts, for a mostly score driven piece, with 'Budapest' almost functioning as a musical, with a variety of themes and melodies carrying the film through its variety of screwball adventures. This week, Fox Searclight released "The Grand Budapest Hotel" on DVD and Blu-ray and we thought it would be a good time to look back on the music of the movie, share some exclusive photos from the recording sessions and talk to Anderson's longtime music supervisor Randall Poster about working on the project.
But firstly, while Poster is known for his collaborations with Anderson, his resumé is extensive and varied, counting both television and film, with directors like Martin Scorsese, Richard Linklater, Harmony Korine, Sam Mendes and more all utilizing his talents. However, Poster and Anderson's work together is special, with the former even keeping a running reserve of tunes just for the director to use in the future, but it was the mostly score driven nature of "The Grand Budapest Hotel" that provided a change in their usual process.
"By virtue of the fact of the film being set in the periods that they're set, I think it certainly didn't lend itself to contemporary pop music," Poster explained. "That wasn't [Wes Anderson's] instinct. I think that we were not quite as clear as we have been in the past about what the musical element was going to be and so we embarked on a bit of a musical expedition, in terms of trying to gather all of the different music that might come to bear. Then Wes really zeroed in on certain Middle European folk music sounds. Primarily in the film there's a very big balalaika element that they knew we wanted to have. Wes had a very broad sense of where this music might come from and as the film evolved we narrowed our musical focus."
The balalaika — a sort of triangular mandolin like instrument — provided an opportunity for both Poster and Anderson to dig into a style of music they weren't familiar with. "I think that Wes and I are not purely anchored in the world of classical music, or in various regional folk music, so for the six months before we started or so, we tried to keep ourselves in it and you know consulted with various people who were experts to make sure that we weren't overlooking anything," Poster elaborated. "Then as things became clearer, it got filtered through Wes' sensibility and a clearer path emerged [for the score]."
And that path led to composer Alexandre Desplat, returning for this third film with Anderson and Poster following "Fantastic Mr. Fox" and "Moonrise Kingdom." And again, the focus on the balalaika presented some interesting challenges as Poster and Anderson's musical ideas filtered through the musical lens of Desplat. "We put together an orchestra of balalaika players and we brought a balalaika group from Moscow and merged them with a new group of French players," Poster said. "We had about 45 to 50 balalaika players and really wanted to give it a lot of scope and volume. It was really fun and really interesting. We had two different translators on the podium up there. But it was a very special musical element."
And you can can hear the results of that work on the official soundtrack which is now available on ABKCO Records. "The Grand Budapest Hotel" is now available on home video as well. Recording session images below.
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Many patients will be in pain and have a loss of appetite after surgery.[25] Part of the body's response to surgery is to direct energy to wound healing, which increases the body's overall energy requirements.[25] Surgery affects nutritional status indirectly, particularly during the recovery period, as it can interfere with wound healing and other aspects of recovery.[25][29] Surgery directly affects nutritional status if a procedure permanently alters the digestive system.[25] Enteral nutrition (tube feeding) is often needed.[25] However a policy of 'nil by mouth' for all gastrointestinal surgery has not been shown to benefit, with some suggestion it might hinder recovery.[37]
The comparisons between participants included in the current analysis and those excluded were evaluated by the Student’s t test for normally distributed variables, the Wilcoxon rank-sum test for skewed variables, and the chi-squared test for categorical variables. The associations between baseline PFASs and changes in body weight and RMR during the period of weight loss (first 6 months) or weight regain (6–24 months) were examined using linear regression. The least-square means of changes in body weight (at 6, 12, 18, and 24 months) and RMR (at 6 and 24 months) according to tertiles of baseline PFAS concentrations were calculated. In addition, the relationship between PFASs and other potential mediators including thyroid hormones and leptin were further evaluated using linear regression. Covariates considered in multivariate adjustments included baseline age (continuous), sex, race, educational attainment (high school or less, some college, or college graduate or beyond), smoking status (never, former, or current smoker), alcohol consumption (continuous), physical activity (continuous), the 4 diet groups, and baseline BMI (or baseline RMR for the analysis of RMR change). Moreover, menopausal status and hormone replacement therapy (women only) were also entered into the model in a sensitivity analysis. To test the linear trend of the associations of baseline PFAS concentrations with changes in body weight and RMR, we assigned a median value to each tertile of PFAS concentration and treated it as a continuous variable. We also tested the linear trend using the PFAS concentrations as continuous variables (log10-transformed). In an exploratory analysis, factor analysis was used to explore the potential exposure patterns of PFASs.
Cancer, a very common and sometimes fatal cause of unexplained (idiopathic) weight loss. About one-third of unintentional weight loss cases are secondary to malignancy. Cancers to suspect in patients with unexplained weight loss include gastrointestinal, prostate, hepatobiliary (hepatocellular carcinoma, pancreatic cancer), ovarian, hematologic or lung malignancies.
The baseline portion sizes of our snacks and meals have ballooned over the past 40 years. The average size of many of our foods — including fast food, sit-down meals, and even items from the grocery store — has grown by as much as 138% since the 1970s, according to data from the American Journal of Public Health, the Journal of Nutrition, and the Journal of the American Medical Association
A talented staff on the cutting edge of fitness and healthy living teaches guests the latest in wellness thinking: keep moving; eat real food; cultivate connections. They debunk the "calories in-calories out" myths, i.e., the only way to lose weight is to eat fewer calories and exercise more. In fact, compulsive over-exercising might just be undermining your health.
Looking for the easiest possible way to lose weight? Grab your pajamas early and log some extra Zzzs! According to researchers, getting eight and a half hours of shut-eye each night can drop cravings for junk food a whopping 62 percent and decrease overall appetite by 14 percent! Mayo Clinic researchers note similar findings: In their study, adults who slept an hour and 20 minutes less than the control group consumed an average of 549 additional calories daily. That’s more calories than you’ll find in a Big Mac!
A retreat joins like-minded people open to share their journeys and learning about yours. Practicing exercises, learning and experiencing new things together for several days or even weeks creates a foundation for friendship hard to topple in a busy everyday life environment. You might even end up supporting each other and sharing progress back home.
It is possible to do more in less time — at least when it comes to your workouts. By incorporating interval training — that means bursts of high-intensity moves — you’ll give your metabolism a huge boost, says Glenn Gaesser, Ph.D., director of the Kinesiology Program at the University of Virginia and author of The Spark. If you usually jog at a consistent pace, try adding a 30-second to one-minute sprint every five minutes, or, if you’re on a treadmill, change up the incline for one-minute intervals.
Voted SpaFinder’s readers’ choice top ten for best weight loss and/or fitness program for six consecutive years and awarded the 2013 Condé Nast Traveler: Gold List Platinum Circle Award, it’s no surprise that this luxurious resort made the list. Cal-a-Vie, located in the magnificent hills of Vista, provides 32 Mediterranean-style villas and a five-to-one staff-to-guest ratio, allowing guests an intimate experience. Guests have access to over 130 fitness classes, spa treatments, lectures, cooking demonstrations, and fresh meals during their stay. The resort offers customized three-night (starting at $3,995), four-night (starting at $5,295) and seven-night (starting at $8,295) packages.
The bigger your plate, the bigger your meal, Brown reminds us. How so? While smaller plates make food servings appear significantly larger, larger plates make food appear smaller—which can lead to overeating. In one study, campers who were given larger bowls served themselves and consumed 16 percent more cereal than those given smaller bowls. Swapping dinner for salad plates will help you eat more reasonable portions, which can help the pounds fly off your frame! To kick even more calories to the curb, use small red plates. Although the vibrant hue may not match your dining room decor, the color can help you eat less, according to a study published in the journal Appetite. Researchers suggest that the color red reduces the amount we’re likely to eat by subtly instructing the mind to stop noshing.
Though it’s hardly realistic to keep people from moving north, there’s evidence to suggest that those living in northern latitudes may need to be a bit more careful about their gut health than the rest of us. A study in the journal Biology Letters found that living in northern latitudes encourages the growth of Firmicutes microbes, which have been linked to weight gain while decreasing the number of microbes linked with slim body types called Bacteroidetes. Generally speaking, the research showed that the number of Firmicutes increases with latitude and the number of Bacteroidetes decreases with latitude. To help ensure a healthy gut no matter where you reside, make sure your diet includes fermented and probiotic-rich foods, both of which encourage the growth of healthy gut bacteria.
Even if you manage to meet your goal, it probably won’t be sustainable: “The amount of restriction required will make you so hungry that you’ll eat everything in sight—it’s survival instinct,” Dr. Seltzer says. What’s more, your body will be less prepared to burn the foods you binge on, since calorie restriction gradually slows your metabolism, he adds.
As funny as it sounds, sleep deprivation may make you fat — and not just because you're susceptible to cases of the late-night munchies (although there's that too). There's tons of research that demonstrates getting less than the desired amount — about 7 hours — of sleep per night can slow down your metabolism. Plus, when you're awake for longer, you're naturally more likely to nosh. So don't skimp on your ZZZs, and you'll be rewarded with an extra edge when it comes to shedding pounds quickly.
Pauline Potter, 47, became the Guinness World Record holder for heaviest woman last year when she weighed in at 700 pounds, but she's managed to lose nearly 100 pounds in the last year by rekindling her romance with her ex-husband Alex. Married for three years, they split in 2008 but reunited when he heard about her Guinness title. It didn't take long for them to land in bed together - repeatedly.
Even if you’re trying to reduce your eating window, you shouldn’t go to sleep starved. In fact, going to bed with a rumbling stomach can make it more difficult to fall asleep and subsequently leave you feeling ravenous the next day. And get this: Eating the right type of bedtime snack can actually boost your metabolism and aid weight loss, registered dietitian Cassie Bjork explained. “The right snack can help keep blood sugar stable so the fat-burning hormone glucagon can do its job. I suggest pairing a natural carb with a healthy fat. Apple slices and almond butter, berries with heavy cream and carrots with guacamole all fit the bill.”
Losing weight is a lot more than calorie counting and doing endless amounts of exercise. Although these things help, in reality it's a little more complicated. If you're feeling stuck in a weight-loss rut there are plenty of expert tips and industry secrets to help you on your way. Whether you want to make your workouts work harder for you or find smarter ways of eating healthily, this list of 30 ways to slim down faster should help you toward your goal.
When you place heaping bowls of food on the table, over-eating is inevitable. In fact, a study in the journal Obesity found that when food is served family-style, people consume 35 percent more over the course of their meal. To avoid scarfing down extra bites, keep food on the stove or counter and spoon it out onto plates from there. When going back for seconds requires leaving the table, people tend to consider their hunger levels more carefully. And serving healthier dishes can, of course, help too. These 20 Best-Ever Recipes for Zero Belly are all weight loss-friendly options we love.
Skimp on fluids, and your body will release an antidiuretic hormone that leads to water retention that could affect the scale, Dr. Setlzer says. While this sneaky effect is one reason why the scale is a poor measure of body mass loss, you can outsmart it by drinking more—particularly if you fill your glass with water or non-calorie alternatives like unsweetened coffee and tea.
But don't worry: Most of the research does not suggest a need to slash meat, dairy, or fish from your diet. In fact, the best results typically appear to come from diets that combine high amounts of vegetables with healthy sources of protein, which can include seafood, eggs, and meat. Eating plans like these include the popular Mediterranean diet and MIND diet.
Your weight impacts your hormones, immune system, and factors that regulate cell growth—all of which are tied to cancer risk. That’s why being overweight or obese may increase your chances of getting the disease. “The relationship between cancer and weight is complex, and several different mechanisms are involved,” Dr. Webster says. “According to research from the American Cancer Society, excess body weight is thought to be responsible for about 8 percent of all cancers in the United States, as well as about 7 percent of all cancer deaths.” Just avoid these 17 weight-loss “tricks” that don’t actually work.
While ketchup and BBQ sauce are frequently used to help flavor beef, chicken, and the like, the tasty condiments are no friend to your waistline. Ketchup, for example, typically contains around 19 calories and 4 grams of belly-bloating sugar per tablespoon, and BBQ sauce is just as unhealthy, if not worse. To avoid consuming empty calories and unhealthy added sugar, have condiments such as mustard and sauerkraut on hand. While mustard has been linked to revving your metabolism, fermented sauerkraut will help balance the bacteria in your gut.
Fighting constantly with your S.O.? It’s time to address your issues head-on. "Research has shown that cortisol, the hormone that's released during stressful activity, is linked to fat storage,” says Gina Guddet, couples counselor and co-author of Love Metabolism. “And poor communication between couples is the most common type of stress that you tend to experience."
Our award-winning program offers weekly programs from April through to September in 2019. Demand for WFV is higher than ever – while there are lots of fitness trainers who ‘kind of’ do fitness retreats, no other trainer in North America has dedicated their career exclusively for more than 10 years exclusively to body transformation retreats, like our company owner, Cat Smiley.
Outside of sheer convenience, there are other reasons to add this type of training in to your routine: “Bodyweight workouts are great if you want to give your body a rest from heavy lifting or just to switch your program up,” says Rodocoy. While great for bulking up quickly, heavy lifting isn’t exactly gentle on your muscles and joints. So, a little low impact work—that still gets you serious results—can ensure you stay injury-free and healthy.
Like protein, fiber slows the rate at which your body plows through carb calories so you feel full for longer and maintain steadier blood sugar levels, one reason why research consistently links fiber intake to weight loss. That means fibrous whole grain bread tends to be a better choice than white bread and also explains why fruits, which contain fiber and valuable vitamins in addition to sugar, beat straight-up candy every time.
27. Use tech and other tools to your advantage. "I started out just by cutting little things like soda out one by one so I wouldn't burn myself out mentally and give up. I then discovered counting calories on MyFitnessPal, which was [a huge help] for me in my weight loss. A few years in, I lost my way a little bit and found Renaissance Periodization diet templates, which helped me rebuild a healthy relationship with food."
Over the 3 month period, my visceral fat area (VFA) dropped to 60.2 from 88.1, (with percentage body fat falling to 14.5 % from 19.1%), reflecting a healthier measurement and reduced cardiac risk. My skeletal or lean muscle mass remained constant at 92 pounds, in light of continued fat loss, reflecting the success of my workout regimen. My body fat mass dropped to 27 pounds reflecting a decrease in visceral fat, while total body water (TBW) increased by nearly 3%, reflecting a focus on hydration.
Good question, Craig. As I posted above, HS wrestlers (also, many other grappling sport athletes) aren’t given the full 24 hours to recover from depletion. Some sports have mat-side weigh-ins. Others are just given a few hours after weigh-in to replenish. For these sports, athletes are best served focusing on year-round nutrition strategies, ones that help them stay at a weight very close to the weight they’d like to compete at.
While having a scale in the house isn’t right for everyone, research has shown that it can help encourage weight loss by providing a level of accountability. When Cornell University researchers observed dieters who weighed themselves daily, they discovered that the routine of stepping on a scale helped those people lose more weight than those who weighed themselves less frequently. To avoid being thrown off by natural fluctuations in body weight, try stepping onto the scale the same time every day.
Unfortunately, metabolic compensation isn’t your body’s only strategy to prevent weight loss or encourage weight gain. Hunger hormones – leptin and ghrelin – are also at play. Fat cells produce leptin, which tells your brain when you’re full. Fat cells also shrink when you lose weight, producing less leptin and meaning you don’t feel as full. Strike one. Ghrelin, produced by the stomach, tells the brain it’s time to refuel. When you lose weight, ghrelin levels rise, prompting you to want to eat more frequently. Strike two. Research suggests that neither leptin levels nor ghrelin levels return to a normal baseline for at least a year.
A calorie isn’t always a calorie. Eating 100 calories of high fructose corn syrup, for example, can have a different effect on your body than eating 100 calories of broccoli. The trick for sustained weight loss is to ditch the foods that are packed with calories but don’t make you feel full (like candy) and replace them with foods that fill you up without being loaded with calories (like vegetables).
In a small German study, subjects who drank 16 ounces of water at a time experienced a 30 percent increase in metabolic rate during the following hour, burning an extra 24 calories. The researchers recommend cool water because the body expends extra calories warming it up to your body temperature. Water's not the only healthy drink. We sipped our way through dozens of smoothies, teas, and juices to find this list of the most delicious and nutritious liquids.
When it comes to losing weight, we have been told time and again to eat right and exercise regularly. From following a healthy diet plan to working out regime, those who want to lose weight leave no stone unturned to get a fitter body. But often, we miss on some basic yet important things which might also impact our weight loss journey. Here we have mentioned a few important things that must be followed to maintain a healthy body weight.
If you are serious about losing weight and you want more than just a boot camp, then check out some of these weight loss centers. They will likely come with an in-house personal trainer (or two) and scheduled fitness classes. The more serious centers will include a well-organized fitness program with a quality nutrition plan. You may have private workouts with a personal trainer and a nutrition coach to teach you healthy eating habits.
Studies show that eating breakfast plays a part in successful weight loss — almost 80 percent of people who successfully keep weight off chow down on this meal, according to a study published in Obesity Research. "Your metabolism slows as you sleep, and the process of digesting food revs it up again," explains Heller. Aim for a 300- to 400-calorie breakfast, such as a high-fiber cereal (another metabolism booster) with skim milk and fruit.
I started my journey this summer with 19% body fat, at the upper range of what would be considered acceptable for percentage body fat. The measurement is based on the principle of impedance, the transmission of electrical current through various body tissues, with fat creating the most resistance and muscle the least, based on its higher water content.
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Fair Market Value
Slicing Pie uses fair market value as part of the formula for determining the perfect allocation of equity in a startup company.
The fair market value is the price that a given property, asset or service would fetch in the marketplace, subject to the following conditions:
Prospective buyers and sellers are reasonably knowledgeable about the asset; they are behaving in their own best interests and are free of undue pressure to trade.
A reasonable time period is given for the transaction to be completed.
Given these conditions, an asset’s fair market value should represent an accurate valuation or assessment of its worth and can be used in the Slicing Pie model.
Fair market value is the price a person would have been paid by someone who could afford to pay for the same contribution, this is similar to opportunity cost. When someone contributes something of value to a starting company they are, in effect, betting the fair market value of the contribution on the future outcome of the company. It’ a risky bet, which is why Slicing Pie uses a risk multiplier to calculate the number of slices.
Everything has a fair market value…as long as there is actually a market for the product or service and the individual in possession of the product or services has the wherewithal to reach that market.
The worms in my yard may have value to someone, but I, personally, have no access to the worm market so my contribution of worms is more or less valueless. The time I spent digging them up has the fair market value of a landscaper’s rate with similar skills to my own. If, however, I am a professional worm farmer and actively deal in worms, my worms have a fair market value.
The fair market value, therefore, lies at the intersection of the product or service being offered and the market to which it is being offered. A snow shovel has little or no value in Hawaii, but great value in Minnesota.
If I’m a computer programmer in San Francisco my fair market value may be much higher than someone with the exact same skills in Bangladesh.
If I am a highly skilled commodities trader in a town with no commodities exchange my skills have little or no value. In order to create value from my skills I need to move somewhere that I can apply my skills. I need to go where there is a demand for my skills. If, however, I’m joining a startup commodities exchange my skills may be applicable. My fair market rate would be whatever a person with my skills would get paid for my skills on the open market. In the case of a commodities trader, I might get paid a moderate base salary plus a percentage of the money I make for my employer.
Most of the time fair market value is easy to observe in the market place. It’s much easier and more reliable than trying to predict the future. If you can’t observe a fair market value there may be no market for the contribution and, therefore, no fair market value.
More details on how to determine fair market value for different kinds of contributions can be found in the Slicing Pie Handbook.
What do you do with a teammate who is one of the very best in his field and his Fair Market Value is very high hourly. However he’d also like to help the company in other areas and we both agree the hourly should not be so high for that other work.
It’s okay to have two rates, but usually not practical. In Slicing Pie, I recommend a cap at $200/hour in theoretical value (also equals 200 slices/hr). This equates to a $200,000 a year fair market salary. In my experience, people at this salary and above rarely drop everything and work full-time for a bootstrapped startup unless they are the founder or co-founder. They may join a funded startup, but not a bootstrapped startup.
If he is keeping his high salary, but wants to participate ask him to cap his rate and use the same rate for whatever he does. You want everyone to make the most of their talents so any time spent on lesser activities could probably be done by someone else.
Scott Jarvie
So is there a way to have 2 rates for one person on your software? Our issue is he does recognize the value of our company and wants to be even more involved than the amazing skillset we originally hired him for.
While on the subject i’m looking for a way to change wages retroactively or per entry or type of entry. Something along those lines.
Hello Mike, do you think it is possible to slice only a part of the pie? Since I have previous agreements done with a partner and an investor, before even being aware of this Slicing Pie possibility?!!
Yes, you can, but it’s not really fair. It may allow your partner and investor to maintain a larger share, but they would be doing so at the expense of other partners and investors. Most people want to be fair, so I would expect both of them to be willing to adapt. Once they understand the model they should see that it’s in the best interest of the company to use Slicing Pie.
In my experience there are two reasons why someone would not want to use Slicing Pie. The first is that they don’t fully understand it in which case they need to read the books and the blog or set up a call with me.
The other reason is that they do understand it, but don’t mind taking advantage of others. If you are teamed up with someone like this it’s too bad and you’ll have to work around them. It starts with clarifying your current deal.
If someone has 10%, for instance, when does he or she dilute? When you bring on a new person? When you raise additional funds? When you reach Series A? Depending on your deal, you can introduce Slicing Pie at different times.
For example, if your deal is 10% at Series A you can use Slicing Pie for the Pie until Series A and simply carve out a chunk for the investor. If your deal is 10% of the current equity you can allocate 10% of the slices to that person at time of the grant and use Slicing Pie going forward from there.
Early equity deals cause problems. As long as everyone understands the benefits of fairness, Slicing Pie can help you unwind the issues.
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Senate approves long-sought ban on texting while driving
Ben Wear @bwear
Friday
May 19, 2017 at 12:01 AMSep 25, 2018 at 9:22 AM
A statewide texting-while-driving ban, after running into legislative and gubernatorial roadblocks in the past four legislative sessions, cleared the Texas Senate on Friday and appears to be on the way to passage.
House Bill 62, carried in the Senate by Sen. Judith Zaffirini, D-Laredo, was approved 23-8 on both second and third readings. All 11 Democrats and 12 of the chamber’s 20 Republicans voted for the statewide ban on reading, writing or sending electronic messages from a hand-held phone while piloting a moving vehicle.
"I have waited 10 years to make this motion," Zaffirini said just before asking for a final Senate vote on the bill. Zaffirini has carried bills that would ban texting while driving since the 2009 legislative session. She was first motivated to do it, Zaffirini later told the American-Statesman, after twice being a passenger in cars when young staff members were texting and driving.
"I freaked out, and said, ‘We have to do something,’" she said.
Texting would still be allowed in emergencies. Drivers can also use a hand-held phone to access global positioning systems and, in an amendment Zaffirini added to obtain another senator’s vote, to access music apps.
Much of the Senate gathered around Zaffirini after the vote to give her handshakes and hugs. Minutes later, former House Speaker Tom Craddick, a Midland Republican who has been her partner since 2011 in trying to pass a texting ban and who sponsored the bill in the House, came to the Senate to offer his congratulations as well.
Craddick said later that Gov. Greg Abbott, in two appearances this year in Midland, had said "he was for the bill and would sign it." The governor’s office didn’t comment on the bill Friday afternoon.
The statewide ban, which doesn’t address speaking on a hand-held phone, doesn’t supersede stricter local ordinances, such as the one in Austin where almost all use of a hand-held phone by someone driving a moving vehicle is prohibited. However, if the bill is signed, practices that are against both local and state law, such as typing a text or email, would be subject to only the state citation.
The passage occurred after the 19-12 defeat of an amendment, carried by Sen. Larry Taylor, R-Friendswood, that Zaffirini said would have "gutted the bill" and caused its defeat when it returns to the House for a final vote. That amendment would have required that a texting violation be witnessed by a police officer and that there be other corroborating evidence, such as an admission by the driver or weaving.
The bill as passed requires just one of those pieces of evidence.
Taylor, in arguing for his amendment, made what have become familiar arguments about the difficulty of enforcing the bill and the bill’s lack of a prohibition on other driver distractions such as "eating a hamburger" or reaching into the back seat.
Sen. Joan Huffman, R-Houston, acknowledged that some people will continue to text even with such a law. But, she said, others will stop doing it and lives will be saved.
"The importance of this legislation has always been to act as a deterrent," Huffman said. "When something is against the law, most people will hesitate to do it. And if this saves the life of one teenager … then we’ve accomplished what we need to accomplish."
Texting by drivers under age 18, and by anyone in an active school zone, is already against state law. The Legislature in 2011 passed a texting ban, carried by Zaffirini and Craddick, but it was vetoed by then-Gov. Rick Perry, who said in his veto message the bill attempted to micromanage adult behavior. Texting bills in 2013 and 2015 never made to the governor’s desk.
The version approved Friday will need final approval by the House, which Craddick characterized as virtually certain, before heading to the governor’s desk. The House in March approved a similar version of HB 62 on a 114-32 vote.
A texting-while-driving citation, under HB 62, would carry a fine of $25 to $99 for a first offense and $100 to $200 for subsequent offenses. And the bill calls for enhanced penalties beyond that if texting leads to an accident causing someone’s death or serious injury.
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I've been reading and listening to the forum's great archive, reading the manual for a week now and tonight it was time to play!
I have a ton of work, but will try to do a patch a day to really get to know it. What a great great world to explore...
The patch attached is a combination of ideas I got from analyzing small parts from various patches I ran into. It's generic and based around noise and (after a while a bit boring) random modules. But it can get very lively and interesting. I went for a stormy day, maybe it's the lousy weather over here..
I should better select and use filters, work on a replacement for the random lfos; there's a lot of room for improvement, but for now it's one down. I'll save the hours of fine tuning for when I'm done experimenting. Now I just go with the flow.
Thank you for listening!
Comments, tips and tricks are very welcome. Goodnight!
Tips ... to get rid of the random modules, and still have a difference between the voices you could try the "In-Out/Stat" module's "Voice No." output._________________Jan
(yawning shifts perceived pitch, making things more interesting)
You cannot post new topics in this forumYou cannot reply to topics in this forumYou cannot edit your posts in this forumYou cannot delete your posts in this forumYou cannot vote in polls in this forumYou cannot attach files in this forumYou can download files in this forum
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Ontario colleges: The strike in the 24-college network has left many students in job-training programs fretting about their year
Apprenticeship students displaced by the strike at Ontario’s 24 community colleges are being assured their needs will be addressed, but, as the strike enters its second week, concrete details are scant.
More than half a million students remain out of class in the college network, including tens of thousands in seven Southwestern Ontario cities, with the game plan for clearing the backlog of apprenticeship training still not clear.
“Each apprentice and apprenticeship program is different and, as a result, accommodations or adjustments would be different for each apprentice,” Advanced Education Minister Deb Matthews of London said in an emailed statement.
“The ministry will to work with clients on a case by case basis to support their training needs.”
Jake Nakluski, a mechanic apprentice, says he wants more details than the province is providing.
“My apprenticeship is at a standstill,” said Nakluski, who was nearing the end of his first round of schooling at Fanshawe College in London when his instructors hit the picket line last Monday.
“I just want to know what happens with our schooling and no one can give an answer.”
Nakluski began his term Sept. 5 and was to finish Oct. 27. He’s taken time away from work to complete his mandatory classes and is collecting employment insurance to supplement his income while he’s in school.
The rigorous program, the first of three rounds of in-class work, has specific curriculum and timeline requirements, he said. And with every day he spends away from class, Nakluski and his classmates are worried the job action will cost them their term.
“No one’s really told us if we get to keep what schooling we’ve done this year or if we lose it,” he said.
But that’s a highly unlikely prospect, said Fanshawe’s dean of technology, Vertha Coligan.
“I cannot envision that as a possibility. I’ve never seen that,” she said.
Coligan said she’s seen two faculty strikes and one support staff job action since she started in the college system in 1986.
“I can tell you that we have not seen a situation in the college system in Ontario in which students lose what they have already put into their education,” she said.
“We find ways, through creative scheduling, through creative planning, to ensure that the time that has yet to be completed . . . we offer students a plan to complete those.”
Coligan said Fanshawe, which offers more than 40 apprenticeship programs and takes in 3,000 apprentices a year, is talking daily with the ministry and provincial heads of apprenticeship training to hash out a strategy for its students.
The apprenticeship action plan will depend on how long it takes both sides to reach an agreement, she said.
“We’re developing right now various approaches depending on the length of the strike,” said Coligan. “We will ensure that their education that was promised to them, and that we have an agreement with the ministry for the provision of, is appropriately completed.”
More than 12,000 instructors, counsellors and librarians walked off the job, after their union, the Ontario Public Service Employees Union, and the College Employer Council — which bargains for the colleges — failed to reach a contract deal.
The union’s chief concern is job security and what it says is an increase in precarious work. It wants colleges to employ the same number of full-time faculty as the often lower-paid contract instructors.
With the strike entering its second week, and no new talks scheduled, anxiety is mounting for students, Morganna Sampson, president of the Fanshawe Student Union, said Sunday.
“In the first week, students aren’t really thinking that it’s real, but in the second week it starts to become crucial that some action be taken to resolve this issue,” she said. “Students want to get back to class.”
In Southwestern Ontario, the strike is affecting students at London-based Fanshawe, with satellite campuses in three other cities, at Lambton College in Sarnia and at Windsor-based St. Clair College, which has a campus in Chatham.
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Thursday, December 23, 2004
2005 IPSC/USPSA rules: 10.4.9
In response to a private comment from another Columbia Cascade Section member, I posted Geek Musings: 2005-02 to The Unofficial IPSC List today. This was in reference to both rule 104.3 and 10.4.9.
Turns out, I didn't have any problem with 10.4.3 (big surprise here, I usually go ballistic when I have to discuss the new IPSC rules.) But when I took a close look at 10.4.9, I found plenty of justification for a Shot In The Dark.
Here's the context and the content of 10.4.9:
10.4 - Match Disqualification - Accidental Discharge:A competitor who causes an Accidental Discharge must be stopped by a Range Officer as soon as possible. An accidental discharge is defined as follows:
10.4.9Exception: When it can be established that the cause of the discharge is due to the actual breakage of any part of the firearm and the competitor has not committed any safety infraction in this Section, a match disqualification will not be invoked, however, the competitor's scores for that course of fire will be zero. The firearm must be immediately presented to the Range Master or his delegate, who will inspect the firearm and carry out any tests necessary to establish that an actual breakage of a part caused the discharge. A competitor may not later appeal a disqualification for an unsafe discharge if they fail to present the firearm for inspection prior to leaving the course of fire.
Here is the text of my comments:
Why must the stage score be zeroed, if a discharge occurs due to " ... the actual breakage of a part of the firearm ..."? And what happens if the breakage (and subsequent discharge) occurs after the competitor has fired the last shot on the stage?
I really don't see an 'up' side to this rule, but I certainly can see a 'down' side:
What happens if this last-shot occurs on a Virginia count stage? The shooter is in a bad situation. It seems reasonable that he could protest an extra-shot penalty due to firearm breakage, but he doesn't dare protest because he would zero the stage. So might not the shooter, if he can cover up the breakage, be tempted to just shut up, accept the procedural penalty, and go hide while he fixes his gun?
In other words, it STRONGLY encourages the shooter to cheat. And I don't like that what use to be a fun sport puts its participants in such a morally untenable position.
Sounds like we need another "interpretation", don't you think?
Here's my reasoning:
Consider the situation when a firearm breaks. Since IPSC originally evolved as "Practical Shooting", the guiding principles (which have since been rendered hors d'combat by anal retentive moonbats) suggest that what you shoot is what you get, less penalties for what you DON'T get. I'm an old fart, and every new rule I read is inevitably filtered through my "Principles of Practical Shooting" test.
The way it worked prior to December 1, 2004 (when the new rule book came in to effect) was that if your gun broke you stopped shooting and the targets were scored, the time recorded, and your stage factor worked out. The only reason you would get a zero score is if you broke a safety rule and were "Match DQ'd", or your penalties were more than your points. Good enough, we can live with that.
(Note the "DNF rule: for several years, a zero score could be assigned to you if you Did Not Finish, or DNF. This could be caused, for example, by a failure to engage the last target which was caused by running out of ammunition and there wasn't enough ammunition left in discarded magazines on the stage, or in your personal possession ... say, in your pocket. I use to carry a few extra rounds in my pockets to avoid this situation. The rules were changed by, as I said, just assigning penalties for targets missed and/or not engaged. This seemed reasonable to most people)
Now, if your gun breaks ANY time during the Course of Fire (COF), you get no credit for anything you might have accomplished.
That rule holds true even if you have successfully engaged every target in the COF.
There's two ways of looking at this:
Extremely practical: as is the case of the Soldier Of Fortune matches, if you fail to 'neutralize' every target, the un-neutralized targets represent aggressors who will kill you. Well, that's fine if you define 'neutralize' as having at least x-points of hits against them (say, onr-Alpha or the 5-point equivalent). But we don't do that. Instead, we penalize minus 10 points for each miss, plus you don't get the points you MIGHT have got if you hit the target. Oh, and if you don't even shoot at ('engage') a target, you not only get miss penalties but also a 10-point procedural for not shooting at it. Since the beginning of IPSC competition, that has always been considered sufficient penalties.
Competition practical: you get the points you scored, minus penalties (see above), and your score is calculated relative to the number of seconds you took to get those hits.
The "Competitive practical" approach is the way we have long been conducting IPSC competition, with the exception of the long-unlamented DNF rule.
Let's look at the evolution of the DNF rule.
1st Edition:I started competing in IPSC in 1983. At that time the 1st Edition (May, 1983) of the IPSC/USA (sic) was in effect. The DNF rule was not included.
5th Edition:For reasons which will not be discussed now, I dropped out of IPSC competition until 1991, at which time the following rules were in effect in the Practical Shooting Handbook of USPSA (5th Edition, May, 1990):
11.09 DID NOT FINISH (DNF) - when a competitor is unable to complete a course fo fire for whatever reason, other than range equipment failure, his score will be recorded as zero for that stage (See 8.0.6, 8.08)
I'm going to include not only 8.0.6 and 8.0.8, but also 8.0.7 here for illustrative purposes:
(Emphasis in the original rule.)<>
8.0.6 MALFUNCTIONS - In the event of a malfunction, the normal procedure will be for the competitor to rectify the situation, always keeping the muzzle pointing downrange, and carry on with the stage. If he is unable to do so, he will stand fast, lower the handgun safely pointed down range and signal by raising his free hand. The Range Officer will stop the clock and proceed to examine the handgun. See 11.09
8.0.7 BROKEN FIREARM PROCEDURE - In the event the firearm cannot be unloaded due to a broken or malfunctioning mechanism, the Range Officer will take such action as he thinks best and safest. Under no circumstances will a competitor leave the firing line in the posession of a loaded handgun.
8.0.8 UNABLE TO FINISH COURSE - When, due to a breakdown or loss of personal equipment or injury, a competitor is unabel to complete a course or wishes to terminate the course of fire, he will raise his free hand and call "TIME". See 11.09
6th Edition:These rules were also in effect in the Practical Shooting Handbook of USPSA (6th Edition, April, 1992).
7th Edition:In the Practical Shooting Handbook of USPSA (7th Edition, 1995), things got a little complicated. Rule 11.09 had been replaced by something that discussed "Failure to Engage". That was a penalty applied to individual targets, not to the entire stage.
But rule 8.08 had been changed, to include a zero-score penalty for this event:
8.0.8 UNABLE TO FINISH COURSE - When, due to a breakdown or loss of personal equipment or injury, a competitor is unabel to complete a course or wishes to terminate the course of fire, he willmay raise his free hand and call "TIME". See 11.09. His score will be recorded as zero for that stage.(NB: Strike-out indicates text deleted from the previous version; italics indicate added verbiage.)
However, the 7th Edition rules were flawed. Even though the DNF concept was no longer defined, they still included the following rules:
US 9.01 VIRGINIA COUNT - Virginia Count is intended for use in Standard Exercise and Speed Shoots where the same targets are engaged by several strings of fire. The targets are scored only after he completion of the last string. The targets are scored only after the completion of the last string. In courses of fire which consist of more than one string, a failure to finish (DNF) one of the strings means a DNF for the entire course of fire. ... ...
Also, this book included a rule, which was referenced in the index as being on page 53 but was actually found on page 52, and in the index was cited as 'Failure Or Loss Of Equipment":
US 11.01 PROCEDURAL ERRORS - Procedural errors apply to violations of stated procedures which are not otherwise covered by other specific rules.
Failure to engage (shoot at) a target specified in the stage design is a procedural error. Failure to engage will always result in one procedural penalty regardless of the number of reuired hits on the target. Failure to engage will not result in a DNF unless the failure is due to the competitor's equipment failure, loss of ammo, etc. (See rules 8.08 and 11.09) Failure to successfully engage a stop target results in a DNF.
Note the strike-out of the last sentence. When I took my first RO certification course in 1997, the instructor (Bill Kehoe) informed us that the sentence was inapplicable because IPSC and USPSA no longer used 'stop targets' to denote the completion of a COF. He said that although the rule CLAUSE was STILL IN THE RULE BOOK, WE SHOULD IGNORE IT! This rule was embedded, but successfully ignored, from May, 1997, until it was deleted in 2000.
14th Edition, 2000:Eventually, the DNF rule and all references to it were absent in the USPSA Rule Book (14th Edition, 2000), also known as the "Toilet Paper Edition" because it was an interim edition published without a poster-board weight cover. The 8.0.* rules were changed to the 5.7.* sequence. The equivalent of the 8.0.8 rule was rule 5.7.3, which concludes with the following verbiage:
" ... The course of fire shall be scored normally including all appropriate miss and failure to engage penalties."
(Well, it was about time!)
14th Edition, 2001:The DNF rules were also not referenced in the permanent replacement, the USPSA Rule Book (14th Edition, 2001).
We've covered 21 years of IPSC/USPSA rule books. The DNF rule was in effect from 1983 through 1999, or 16 years. For the 5-year period from 2000 through 2004, there was no DNF rule, and we all thought we were well rid of it.
2004/2005 Edition:Now, in the "IPSC Handgun Competition Rules, USPSA Version, January, 2004" (but note NOT effective until December 1, 2004) which is commonly referred to as "the 2005 rules", we see this ugly DNF rule has come back to haunt us, appropriately, like the Ghost of Christmas Past.
If we're going to be shooting IPSC Retro, why don't they bring back the entire horrid package? Why stop at what is essentially a DNF penalty only for " ... the actual breakage of any part of the firearm ... "?
As nearly as I can tell, this rule was not formulated in response to an acknowledged, wide-spread problem. Matter of fact, there is no 'urban legend" type anecdotal history which suggests that this is a situation which has occured in such a manner that the previously existing rules wouldn't have handled it consistently with any other reason for failing to complete a COF.
If these, uh, 'folks' who arbitrarily impose these rules on us think that there is a good reason why we should change the way we compete, to the detriment of the shooter, they should at least be able to provide some justification for applying it under such a limited range of circumstances.
Why don't they apply what is, after all, just the "Son of DNF" when the competitor runs out of ammunition?
One can only presume that they had in mind that, if the competitor was so short-sighted that he couldn't predict the failure of a vital part of his firearm, surely it is even more worthy of censure that he be penalized for the short-sighted failure to bring enough ammunition to complete the COF.
Either the authors of this rule failed to consider other reasons for DNF-type situations, or they were specifically targetting ... somebody.
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Ihsahn recently said in an interview that he finds it frustrating that people think that he made the best music of his life at 17 years old. I can understand his frustration, because his solo work is simply outstanding. People who think his classic Emperor albums are superior fall into three camps: A) black metal purists, B) fans afraid of experimentation, or C) people who haven't even heard his solo work. All of them need to sit down and let his solo work wash over them, then hopefully they'll see the light. Or maybe they're too stubborn and obdurate. Whatever the case, the simple fact is that Ihsahn is currently at his creative acme. His new album, After, is the best album he's ever performed on, creating a diverse mix of influences ranging from black metal to jazz.
Describing this music is difficult, as there isn't really a benchmark for comparison. Borrowing from extreme prog groups like Opeth and Cynic, Ihsahn's album is layered with songs that have multiple parts, yet flow seamlessly. His clean vocals have improved considerably, sounding like a more evocative Mikael Akerfeldt. At the same time, though, Ihsahn's unmistakable raspy groan is all over this record, providing a rough-edged counterpoint to his more melodic and soothing passages. The riffs on After are unconventional and creative, creating an atmosphere of controlled chaos amidst Ihsahn's proud nihilistic philosophy. After is also laden with Ihsahn's trademark symphonic influences, providing the hardened Emperor fans with a least bit of his older sounds. Incorporating all of these sounds into one cohesive work, Ihsahn has created a record that altogether culminates in an early album of the year candidate.
What is most impressive about this album is its jazz influences. Throughout the album, a sumptuous saxophone smoothly pierces through the music, creating an overpowering and sublime mood. The Coltrane-esque sounds reverberate through select songs on the album, but frankly, they should be on every song. They dominate, creating some of the most powerful ambiances heard on an extreme metal album in years. Tracks like "Austere" and the magnificent closer "On the Shores" shine as the sax combines grief, solemnity, and even spirituality. Its unyielding somberness produces vivid emotions, forceful and divine.
Of course, some fans want Ihsahn to sound like In the Nightside Eclipse, but they'll have to deal with the fact that he doesn't have those plans. They'll have to deal with it. Ihsahn is better than ever.
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Green Turtle Bay Vitamin Company
The Green Turtle Bay Vitamin Co. wants to be your source for specialized, vitamin, nutritional dietary health supplements and mineral supplements. Whether you are looking for stress relief or energy pills, a diabetic supplement or defense of flu and colds you will find help here. Our site is loaded with self-help information to help you on your way toward holistic healing and alternative therapy treatments.
Here at The Green Turtle Bay Vitamin Co. we believe that due to the decreased nutritional content of everyday foods from mass produced agriculture, everyone needs a good quality, energy multi-vitamin, nutritional dietary supplements and mineral supplement. Our PowerVites* is your multi-vitamin answer. It is made with fresh nutrients (we manufacture our products in small batches) formulated in a base of stomach friendly organisms to help you absorb these nutrients. There is no iron in PowerVites*. If you need iron, and most people do not, it should be taken in between meals with perhaps a cracker.
Some people are concerned about building their immunity, particularly in the autumn and winter. For this we have an herbal anti-oxidant formulated to boost the immune system. It is called PowerMate* as an add-on to PowerVites*.
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For selective conditions we have PowerSleep* sleep tablets with nutrients to help you sleep like a baby; Sunnie* to help relieve stress (particularly helpful for people who are unable to take an antidepressant drug), and Diabetiks* formulated with nutrients in which many diabetics are deficient.
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Wedding ideas and advice for today's bride
Tag: vacation for parents wedding guft
If your parents are helping with the wedding it is customary to give them a thank you gift. Buying presents to say thank you for helping you with such an important event in your life can be a difficult task.
Photo provided by The Exhibit Center
Sometimes the best gifts are the ones that don’t cost a lot of money! One idea is to write a heartfelt letter or write a list of your favorite memories and frame it as a keepsake.
Photo provided by Etsy
Pictures are always a perfect gift for most any parent. Have your photographer take a picture of you at your bridal session with a sign expressing your thanks!
Photo provided by It's A Brides Life
Or make a collage of pictures from your family throughout the years.
Photo provided by Pro Collage
If your parents are still married after all these years think about honoring them and the day they got married. I love this old wedding picture on a plaque with their wedding date!
Photo provided by Wedding Gift Ideas For Parents
Don’t be afraid to get your mom one gift and your dad another. This handkerchief is perfect for any mother of the bride or groom!
Photo provided by Weddinary
Another great idea is to buy them a spa treatment or a day at the spa. Let them relax after all the stresses of planning a wedding.
Photo provided by Pheasant Run
If budget allows, a mini vacation is a fantastic gift. A short getaway after all the planning and expenses will be well needed!
Photo provided by A Wealthy Family
Which one is your favorite wedding gift?
Do you have a unique parents wedding gift to share? We want to hear about it!
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The storm should start winding down in northern Colorado this afternoon, especially north of Fort Collins and Greeley, according to the National Weather Service. Elsewhere, the storm is likely to continue until midnight, then taper off from west to east.
And while a blizzard warning for the eastern plains has been cancelled, the winter storm warning that includes the metro area, has been extended until 5 a.m. with updated snow totals now looking like they could reach up to 28 inches in Elbert and Lincoln Counties, including areas of Castle Rock and Larkspur.
Forecast Colorado is your place for the latest breaking weather news for Denver and Colorado, featuring the latest forecasts, road conditions and closures — with an occasional detour into meterological science, trivia and oddities.
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What can Asia take away from Trump’s State of the Union Address?
President Trump’s first State of the Union speech touched on China and North Korea. How should the rest of Asia react?
In his first State of the Union speech, U.S. President Donald Trump singled out China as a rival and promised to exert "maximum pressure" on North Korea but stopped short of talking about military options against the regime in Pyongyang.
The U.S. leader signalled a more black and white approach generally in international relations.
"As we strengthen friendships around the world, we are also restoring clarity about our adversaries, he said.
China responded by calling on the United States to cast away its Cold War mentality.
Do you follow the Trump on Twitter, or do you follow the Trump in Davos, or do you follow the Trump on the state of the union? Professor Mancini said.
"For global leaders it is very hard to understand what the directions are."
Mr Trump's rhetoric on North Korea focused on the stories of North Korean defector Ji Seong-ho and American student Otto Warmbier who died after being held captive by the state.
Centre for Strategic & International Studies Senior Vice President for Asia, Michael J. Green, said that perhaps this State of the Union marked a turn towards a more deliberate strategy of containing and deterring North Korea.
Mr Trump singled out those nations who voted against the U.S. decision to move its embassy in Israel to Jerusalem at the UN, many of which are Asian, and pointed to a policy of redirecting foreign assistance away from countries that didn't serve American interests.
Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy Associate Professor of Practice, James Crabtree, told CNBC that he was surprised by how much red meat there was in the speech for Mr Trump's support base given that it was touted as a conciliatory shift by the White House.
The State of the Union speech - the annual policy outline delivered to the U.S. Congress by each President from the second year of their first term - did begin with a call for unity, referencing a new American moment brought about by recent successful economic milestones.
But underlying Mr. Trump's speech was a focus on national security, rebuilding America's nuclear arsenal, military spending, continuing the war on terror, tougher trade negotiations and stricter immigration policies, including dumping the U.S. green card lottery which was a symbol of hope for many aspiring migrants in developing Asian countries.
Mr Trump announced that Guantanamo Bay would stay open and that the U.S. would review their military detention policy with a view to continuing to have all necessary power to detain terrorists.
On defence,Mr Trump called on the Congress to modernise and rebuild America's nuclear arsenal.
Perhaps someday in the future, there will be a magical moment when the countries of the world will get together to eliminate their nuclear weapons. Unfortunately, we are not there yet, sadly. Mr Trump said.
Professor Mancini said Mr. Trump's comments indicated he was advocating more nuclear proliferation. While commenting that This is quite a statement for a world leader in 2018, during his interview with Channel News Asia after the U.S. President's address, Professor Mancini also feels that advocating for more nuclear weapons is only going to create more incentives for countries like North Korea and Iran to pursue nuclear strategies, rather than seeking for compromises,.
Mr. Trumpcontinued to talk about driving harder bargains on trade, in what was perhaps the only other reference to Asian competition.
This follows his recent decision to increase tariffs on imported washing machines and musings about rejoining the Trans-Pacific Partnership trade deal.
We will work to fix bad trade deals and negotiate new ones. And they'll be good ones. But they'll be fair. And we will protect American workers and American intellectual property, through strong enforcement of our trade rules. He said.
Related content
December 2018 marks the 40th anniversary of the third plenum of the 11th Central Committee in 1978, when Chinese President Deng Xiaoping proposed an agenda to gradually transition from a planned economy to a market-based one. But President Xi Jinping’s new era is so distinct that it could mark the end of China’s reform and opening period.
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Faust, Art Bears, ZNR, Robert Wyatt, The Residents, Henry Cow, This Heat, Art Zoyd, Univers Zero, Stormy Six, Aqsak Maboul, Picchio Dal Pozzo, Decibel, Goebbels and Harth, The Homosexuals, The Work, Amos and Sarah, The Black Sheep, Feliu Gasul, Hector Zazou, The Muffins, R.Stevie Moore, Robel Vogel, Ron Pate/Raudelunas, Conventum, Joseph Racaille and Patrick PortellaOriginally released in 1982, this is a collection of specially commissioned and (at the time) newly recorded pieces by the most interesting groups and individuals then in the Recommended catalogue. Never reissued, it has slowly become a prized collectors' item - and remains an indispensable snapshot of the range and musical brilliance of this critical moment in the history of a small community of left-field groups struggling towards new musical languages. The breadth of imagination displayed is exemplary and it is amazing how fresh and original this music still sounds, and how much things have changed in only 25 years. What was intended on its release as a practical compendium has now become a definitive document so, on the occasion of Recommended's 30th anniversary, we have decided to reissue it fully re-mastered and with additional accompanying material.
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Morri Creech
PublishedMarch 8, 2016
Morri Creech was born in Moncks Corner, South Carolina, USA, in 1970 and was educated at Winthrop University and McNeese State University. He is the author of four collections of poetry, Paper Cathedrals (Kent State University Press, 2001) Field Knowledge (Waywiser, 2006), which received the Anthony Hecht Poetry prize and was nominated for both the Los Angeles Times Book Award and the Poet’s Prize, The Sleep of Reason (Waywiser, 2013), which was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in Poetry, and Blue Rooms (Waywiser, 2018). A recipient of NEA and Ruth Lilly Fellowships, as well as grants from the North Carolina and Louisana Arts councils, he is the Writer in Residence at Queens University of Charlotte, where he teaches courses in both the undergraduate creative writing program and in the low residency M.F.A. program. He lives in Charlotte, North Carolina with his wife and two children.
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‘The Leftovers’ Recap: Episode 8, ‘Cairo’
Just two more episodes to go and things are still roiling in “The Leftovers.” But viewers may have to wait much longer for resolution. (Just this week, HBO said it has ordered up another season of the dystopian series about life in the fictional New York suburb of Mapleton, after 2% of the world’s population vanishes in the inexplicable Sudden Departure.)
The latest chapter once again pits Mapleton Police Chief Kevin Garvey against his chronic nemesis, Patti, the leader of a sect that calls itself the Guilty Remnant, from start to finish. Initially, we see Kevin at home preparing dinner, juxtaposed with footage of Patti, alone in an empty church auditorium, setting out used clothes on the floor. She puts entire ensembles together: shorts, shirt and tiny sneakers for a child; a skirt and dress and necklace for a woman.
The dinner that Kevin is hosting—where he introduces his girlfriend Nora to his prickly teenage daughter Jill and her friend Aimee—is predictably fraught. Jill asks Nora, who lost her husband and two children in the Sudden Departure, why she carries a gun. Nora says because it made her feel better but that she no longer needs to. She then offers Jill her purse, inviting her to go through it and confirm this. Kevin is furious at his daughter’s rudeness but Nora defuses the confrontation. As he is walking her to her car, she assures him: “It’ll get better.” “How?” Kevin asks. “I don’t know,” she replies, “but it will.”
Nora could not be more mistaken—and the snarling black dog tied up behind the Garvey house should have tipped her off that things were about to take a very sinister turn. Kevin tries to fall asleep in bed—and embarks on a grisly, horrific adventure that starts when he wakes up in the cab of his pickup truck. Dean, the mysterious sharpshooter—and dog-hunting aficionado and aspiring buddy of Kevin—has been tapping on the window. It is morning and Kevin finds that and he has fallen asleep in his truck in the middle of the woods.
Completely disoriented, he follows Dean to a nearby cabin. There, Kevin finds Patti bound to a chair, her white clothes bloodstained from wounds around her mouth. “Maybe you hit her a little too hard,” Dean observes. Kevin demands to know what happened the night before. Dean is indignant at his protestations of amnesia and retorts: “This was all your idea!” From Dean’s cryptic account, Kevin believes that he kidnapped Patti and brought her out to the cabin. (The woods are in a place named Cairo, hence the title of the episode.)
Kevin approaches Patti, who is slowly coming to, and concedes, “Things got a little out of control last night.” He proposes a détente: He will free her and bring her back and neither will say anything. But Patti spits in his face and rejects the offer, warning that she will report everything to the authorities and Kevin will lose his job. She goads him, saying “finish what you started, my friend.”
Members of the Guilty Remnant are wondering where Patti is, and Laurie, Kevin’s former wife, seems to be stepping into the leader’s role. One of her first tasks is disciplining Meg, a relatively new member, who has hysterically attacked Rev. Matt Jamison. Rev. Jamison—who also happens to be Nora Durst’s brother—has been trying to peel away GR members with tactics such as publishing smears about individuals who disappeared in the Sudden Departure.
Laurie insists that Meg apologize to Matt, so the two of them walk over to his house. Meg—who has collected herself enough to cease speaking and resume her cult-ordered silence—writes “sorry.” Matt says he isn’t giving up on her. The uneasy peace is broken by Nora, who suggests to Laurie that if she’s handing out apologies, she might want to have a chat with her daughter, Jill.
Jill does seem in need of parental attention. While smoking pot with her friends, she gets into a terrible fight with Aimee, over whether Nora has a gun. Jill is convinced Nora must have one, because there is no way anyone who lost her entire family could ever be “OK” again. Aimee says Jill just doesn’t think anyone could be OK, period. This somehow leads Jill to ask if Aimee has slept with her father, Kevin. Aimee says, yes, she did, and storms off. Jill and her friends, the dim-witted Frost twins, break into Nora’s house to look for the gun. While the twins goof off in the living room, Jill goes up to the bedroom of Nora’s dead son, and finds the pistol in a board game (aptly named “Trouble”) under the bed.
Out in Cairo, Dean is troubled at how Patti seems to be getting the upper hand. She points out to Kevin that there are no public records about his friend—no driver’s license, that kind of thing—leaving him something of “a ghost.” In other words, he won’t be much use as an alibi. “I prefer to think of myself as a guardian angel,” Dean says. He pulls Kevin outside and tries to steel his nerve and get him ready to kill Patti. When Kevin insists he doesn’t want to hurt her, Dean counters: “Oh, yes, you do, after what she took from your town, your family, there have to be consequences.” He despairs of Kevin ever getting the courage to do the killing, and says he will take things into his own hands.
Kevin wanders through the woods and is appalled to come across his white shirts (remember, the ones that went missing a while ago), fluttering from trees around the cabin. He tears them down and gets distraught as he can’t remember what he did and yet sees so much evidence that he has done wrong. He calls Nora’s house and leaves an urgent message. Then he goes back into the cabin and discovers that Dean has tried to asphyxiate Patti. When Kevin tries to pull the bag from her head, Dean attacks him. The two brawl, smashing windows and wrecking the cabin, while Patti gasps to stay alive. Finally, Kevin shakes loose of Dean and tears the bag from Patti’s head. An enraged Dean bolts, warning, “I…wanted to help you. You are on your own, Chief.”
With or without Patti, the Guilty Remnant are getting busy in the church they recently bought from a bankrupt Rev. Jamison. A truck pulls up and Laurie pays the driver for the cargo: What appear to be dozens of corpses of all shapes and sizes—babies and adults—wrapped in brown paper and plastic bags. Laurie mobilizes everyone into carrying the bags inside and pairing them with the outfits Patti had set out on the floor.
Meanwhile, Laurie’s daughter, Jill, arrives home and sees that Aimee, who has been camping out at the Garveys for months, is finally leaving. The two have an awkward farewell and then Jill takes a kitchen knife and heads outside. She walks toward the wild dog tied up in the yard, cuts his rope and frees him.
Meanwhile, Laurie goes into Patti’s office, sits in her chair and peruses the Guilty Remnant’s notes on Nora Durst. There is a knock at the door and Meg opens it to a young woman who asks “Can I stay here?” Laurie looks up: It is Jill.
In the cabin, Patti shows more irritation than gratitude that her life has been spared. Instead, she continues to needle Kevin to kill her. The Guilty Remnant is devoted to remembering the Sudden Departure, she says, because “it’s not going to be long now.” Patti is less specific on just what is going to happen than she is about the GR’s raison d’être.
“We strip away the colorful diversions that keep us from remembering. We strip away attachment, fear, love, hatred, anger until we are erased. Until we are a blank slate. We are living reminders of what you try so desperately to forget.” Kevin, who is too dazed to argue, merely rejects the entire premise. “No, I don’t understand,” he insists. He fails to point out that those in Mapleton who have gone on with their lives are considerably less glum than Patti’s dour, white-clad, lumpen band. Or that there is no explanation for why the GR do little but stare and chain smoke—and work hard to be unattractive.
Patti tells Kevin that Laurie joined the GR not because he failed her as a husband but because the sect gave her a purpose. Kevin heads over to a toolbox, pulling out a knife. “You’re going home,” he tells her. And if that means telling the truth to everyone and losing his job, he is willing to do that. He slices open the tape and frees Patti. But after standing up, she takes a hefty shard of glass from the floor and slits her throat. Kevin runs over and catches her in his arms, asking “What…did you do?” As Patti expires, she murmurs, “You understand.” Blood pours over Kevin’s arms and soaks her white garments.
About Speakeasy
Speakeasy is a blog covering media, entertainment, celebrity and the arts. The publication is produced by Barbara Chai and Jonathan Welsh with contributions from the Wall Street Journal staff and others. Write to us at [email protected] or follow us on Twitter at @WSJSpeakeasy or individually @barbarachai.
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Price includes shipping to the contiguous 48 United States.
The Silverback system is a great mid-level basketball hoop for your home court. This system features a 4x4 inch square steel pole. The extension arms for the 54-inch glass backboard provides 2 ft. of clearance when the rim is set at 10 ft.
Silverback In-Ground Basketball Hoop System B5400W Features and Specs:
54-inch Backboard
54 in. x 33 in. Glass Backboard.
Glass measures 5 mm thick.
3/4 in. x 1 3/16 in. Internal Frame.
Extension arms provide 2 ft. of clearance between the backboard and the pole.
Breakaway, Pro-Style Rim.
Pole and Height-Adjustment Mechanism
2-piece, 4x4 inch square pole.
Steel parts are finished with a Dupont Powder Coating to help resist rusting.
All-Steel Actuator Easily Adjusts Goal Height From 7.5? to 10? For Players of All Ages.
This basketball hoop has been installed for about 4 days and my 8 year old loves it. It was very easy to install and is very sturdy. A lot of people complained about excessive movement of the backboard with normal play. This does not seem to be excessive at all. The backboard does move slightly when the ball bounces off, but nothing out of the ordinary. The instructions were very clear and complete, which made the install very easy. The only issue that I had was that I used 9 bags of 60 lb. cement instead of the recommended 9 50 lb. bags. This was a common issue that I saw in other reviews. Just purchase a couple extra bags and return any unused. Great product and appears to be very well built.
Did you find this helpful?
Reviewed by: MDBball from Maryland.
on 3/27/2012
5
Good goal for the money
The basketball goal was relatively easy to assemble and install. It seems pretty sturdy for the price range. We have been pleased with our purchase.
Did you find this helpful?
Reviewed by: Matt from South Carolina.
on 9/16/2012
4
Did you find this helpful?
Reviewed by: Admin from USA.
on 3/3/2016
4
Q:How can I assemble this?
Asked by: Luke
- 11/18/2016
A: Please view the instruction manual under the instructions tab. The manufacturer recommends having 4 people to assist in assembling this system.
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0 of 0 Customer(s) found this Answer helpful.
Fast Shipping: Orders for the b5400w Silverback Escalade 54" Glass Inground Basketball System generally leave the warehouse the next business day. Accurate Tracking: Tracking information is automatically emailed to you just as soon as the order ships out. Delivery Details: This product ships directly from the factory in Evansville, IN. Delivery of this product is via a curbside delivery through an LTL carrier (too big for UPS and FedEx). The customer must be present to sign for the order. The freight carrier is instructed to contact you prior to delivery to set up a delivery appointment. Signing for the Package: When signing for the delivery it is important to note any damage. Damage is extremely rare. We package these to travel both domestically and internationally. However, sometimes the packaging may be slightly damaged, but you may not be sure whether something inside is damaged. In such a case it is a good idea to sign for it and have the driver note it as such. You can still accept delivery. Call or email us with any questions. Local Pickup Option: This item is available for local pickup in Evansville, IN. If you are interested in picking it up locally contact our customer service for a special pickup quote at 866-308-5484.
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Sonata n.3 per Violino, Oboe e Fagotto [ZWV 181/3]
The source is the autograph ms. Mus. 2358-Q-1 of the score, including six Sonatas ZWV 181. The presumed date is 1721-22. The ms. was digitized in the project „Instrumentalmusik der Dresdner Hofkapelle“, SLUB, Dresden.
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This document provides information on questions and variables used to construct the three rounds of Financial Crisis Survey indicators. Variables from 2008-2009 Enterprise Surveys were also used to create several indicators. Some indicators were computed for all rounds, while others were not.
The document shows response status for companies of the baseline 2008-2009 Business Environment and Enterprise Performance Survey, contacted for the Financial Crisis Survey (FCS). Based on response codes, researchers adjusted sampling weights for FCS. Response codes are provided for all countries and all three rounds of the Financial Crisis Survey.
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Share this offer
More than just a train ride – as well as steam or diesel rides there are miniature, garden and large model railway layouts. Visit a working signal box, look round the station buildings, buffet and shop.
Terms & Conditions
Standard Trinity Mirror Rules apply. See House Rules Section for details. This voucher entitles one child to a free ticket with one full paying adult. One voucher per family group. Not valid on special events. Please check before travelling. Valid until September 29, 2017.
To enter or redeem just register your details for free. If you are already a Plus member just log in
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If this is your first visit, be sure to
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import java.util.*;
public class GradeList2
{
// This Program accumulates and create grades and class average
public static void main(String[] args)
{ // Tell the user this program calculates grades for a class
System.out.println("This program calculates grades for a class of students");
// ask and get users input number of students and total possible points
System.out.print("Please Enter the Number of students: ");
numStudents = input.nextInt();
System.out.print("Please enter the Total Possible Points: ");
totalpts = input.nextInt();
// tell user to enter each students points
System.out.println("Please Enter Each Students Points");
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August 15th Early Morning Law Enforcement & Fire/Medical wrap up
Not a whole lot activity this morning, other that routine activity for when students have returned to Lawrence. Officers responded on at least four noise complaints.
At 3:57 a.m., Police were called to the area of W 22nd and Ousdahl for a subject who had a cab drive him home but, bailed out before he payed the fare. The cab driver called 911 and followed the man until Police could arrive. Officers caught up with the man about two blocks away, where he was taken into custody for Theft of Services.
At 4:45 a.m., Police were called to a reported disturbance with weapons in the 1600 block of E 21st Terrace. The caller reported that her ex-husband was outside of her house with a baseball bat. Officers arrived quickly and no arrests or injuries were reported.
None of this morning's activity was reported to have involved any serious injuries.
The activity blogged here is only a sampling of some of the things that Douglas County Law Enforcement and Lawrence-Douglas County Fire & Medical respond on. To see a complete list of Lawrence Police activity, the department has that available on their website along with several easy to use maps that show approximate locations for Police activity.
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Using the FASMI Test
A well-designed data warehouse provides users fast, easy-to-use, and efficient analytical capabilities for a large body of data. The popular Fast Analysis of Shared Multidimensional Information (FASMI) test can determine whether a data warehouse has achieved this goal.
In the FASMI model, the system must be able to meet the user's analysis requirements, yet still be easy to use. The system must also incorporate appropriate security requirements and must provide a multidimensional conceptual view of the data, including full support for hierarchies and multiple hierarchies. In addition, all data and derived information must be available to all applications. Our study demonstrates that when you use OLAP Services, even large cubes based on very large databases can meet the FASMI goal.
Discuss this Article 1
Anonymous User (not verified)
on Jan 16, 2005
Dear..
hi, how are you?
thanks for the nice site, and for all efforts of olap applications and articles.
i have made an OLAP application as a graduation project in the university,
i used JAVA language.
i want to do FASMI TEST on my program,
how can i do that?
how can you help me in that?
i can send you the program, and you make the FASMI TEST.
thanks for reading my email, and sorry if i bothered you.
please answer urgently,
bye
ADAM
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If Gears of War: Judgement left you horribly disapointed then it's understandable that you might be feeling a little bit of unease at the upcoming Gears of War 4 game announced at E3 last year.
But earlier this year the series creator, Cliff Bleszinski, gave Gears of War fans hope that the upcoming sequel by the newly established The Coalition studio will be something of a hit.
Writing on Twitter, Bleszinski mentioned that he had recently spoken with one of his friends who is currently working on Gears of War 4 and said: "Just got off the phone with a friend who is doing some writing on the next Gears game. Sounds like we will all be very pleased with it. :)"
*** Take a look at the gameplay from Gears of War 4 below: ***
Gears of War 4 launches October 11, but you'll be able to get your hands on the multiplayer beta much sooner.
Next week on April 18 those who have played Gears of War Ultimate Edition will have access to the Gears 4 Multiplayer Beta and all Xbox Live members will be able to join the action from April 24 until May 1.
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KIDS – Kindergarten and Child Care Muse Templates
KIDS is a clean, modern, and fully responsive Muse Template. it is designed for kindergarten, childcare, homeschooling, school, learning, playground businesses or any type of person or business who wants to showcase their work, services and professional way.
KIDS was built with Adobe Muse CC, so easy to customise without Code Required. you can easily change the content (color, text, images) to your own. and KIDS is totally responsive so it is completely adjustable for any devices (desktop, laptop, tablet, mobile phone).
If you’re looking for muse template, then this is the template for you.
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You may have one of the most effective programs, perhaps a customized mobile application, that will sure be a hit with users, but the fact that you still have to look for users might give you more headaches. That is the reason why you should have a good business lead generation process in place.
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The 9 Best Markets in Oklahoma!
To find the best in fresh, local foods, shopping at your community market is the way to go. Markets across Oklahoma provide top-notch customer service, a highly-personalized experience, and a down-home atmosphere. These markets are serving up fresh produce, fresh bread, and locally-sourced goods. Here are the best in the state.
Carter’s sells some of the best meat and produce in town. The staff is always friendly and goes above and beyond. Carter’s has been a mainstay in the community for many years, and we hope it’s here for years to come.
Employees at Harps actually are part owners in the store, which means they have more motivation to ensure customers are taken care of. Although Harps has many locations in Oklahoma, they are independent grocers.
Reasor’s has a few stores in northeast Oklahoma, but they still have that independent grocer culture of customer service and excellent products. The meat market is one of the reasons to shop at Reasor’s, because the butchers are always willing to help you find the protein that will fit what you want.
At Buy For Less throughout Oklahoma, you’ll find high-quality produce and an excellent selection of specialty products. The customer service is among the best and the store has both local vendors and national brands.
The store in Midwest City might be the original location, but Crest Foods in Edmond is one of the best places to shop. The prices at Crest can’t be beat. It’s an Oklahoma-based company with family values that’s customer-oriented.
For “Big City Style with a Country Smile” shop at this local store that features a full-service bakery, deli and meat market. Sackers still sack your groceries and take them to the car. The company gives back to the community.
Country Mart has two locations in Lawton offering old-school service with newer technologies. Digital coupons are accepted and you can load them directly to your Rewards Card. The meat market might be one of the best departments, because it is a true butcher shop, not just a place where you can buy meat. The butchers can help you find the best cut for your backyard barbecue, romantic dinner or weeknight meal.
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Jessica Lynn wants to know if you're ready for her to suck on your cock. Knowing you, there's only one possible answer that you could give in response to that question.
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In trading on Tuesday, shares of Mediagrif Interactive Technologies Inc. (TSX: MDF.TO) crossed above their 200 day moving average of $19.59, changing hands as high as $19.60 per share. Mediagrif Interactive Technologies Inc. shares are currently trading down about 0.1% on the day. The chart below shows the one year performance of MDF shares, versus its 200 day moving average:
In trading on Tuesday, shares of Top 20 Dividend (TSX: TTY-UN. O) were yielding above the 7% mark based on its monthly dividend (annualized to $0.6996), with the stock changing hands as low as $9.99 on the day.
In trading on Tuesday, shares of US Housing Recovery Fund Class A (TSX: USH-UN. O) were yielding above the 6% mark based on its monthly dividend (annualized to $0.60), with the stock changing hands as low as $9.95 on the day.
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A courthouse in a West Texas county known for wide-open spaces and dry desert landscapes has just become fully digitized.
On Jan. 17, the 394th Judicial District Court in Brewster County unveiled new technological additions, which included several digital inputs and computer monitors at the bench, lawyers’ tables, and jury box. This technology will be used to display evidence from one computer, the Internet, and even cell phones on screens throughout the courtroom. “Eliminating the voluminous paper exhibits increases courtroom efficiency, reduces overhead and man-hours in the district clerk’s office (which is tasked with storing trial exhibits), and decreases legal fees and expenses paid by litigants,” Judge Roy Ferguson told the Alpine Daily Planet. “Legal research can be performed and presented live in the courtroom.”
While some courts in the state have implemented similar technology, it is less common in rural areas such as Brewster County, which is the largest county in Texas land-wise but home to just one city—Alpine. Still, a digital transition is taking place in many locations throughout the state, partly made more useful by the recent Texas Supreme Court e-filing mandate. In fact, Ferguson told the Daily Planet that the e-filing mandate saved the district enough money to completely pay for the courthouse’s digital update.
On August 15, the Cameron County Commissioners Court accepted the donation of the restored minutes of the District Court of Cameron County from 1885 through 1891. The book was restored due to the generosity of Judge Migdalia Lopez of the 197th District Court and her husband, Nemecio Lopez. Among the cases memorialized in the books were the proceedings of King v. Cavazos, a court ruling that led to the development of the King Ranch.
From left: Judge Mark Davidson, a member of the Texas Bar Historical Foundation; Aurora de la Garza, Cameron County District Clerk, Cameron County Judge Carlos Cascos, Judge Migdalia Lopez, and Nemecio Lopez.
Current and future civics teachers from across the state got a chance to hold mock oral arguments Wednesday at the Texas Supreme Court.
About 30 teachers and education students from various Texas universities participated in the arguments as part of the Hatton W. Sumners Student Teacher Institute, part of the Institutes on the Founding Documents.
In the past, the training program has included a visit with state Supreme Court justices, but this was the first year participants staged mock oral arguments, said Jan Miller, who directs the State Bar of Texas Law-Related Education Department. The program is designed to inspire social studies and government teachers to use hands-on teaching methods, rather than just rely on textbooks, Miller said.
Supreme Court clerks organized the oral arguments section of the two-day program. The mock case involved a lawsuit over whether an eatery could open inside a shopping mall if another restaurant already held a contract as the mall’s exclusive sandwich shop.
“The project came from me watching students go through this room and have no idea what’s going on,” court clerk Andrew Wynans said, referring to the school classes and other groups that regularly tour the court.
Even many adults don’t understand that Texas has two high courts—the Supreme Court, which handles civil cases, and the Court of Criminal Appeals, which handles criminal cases, Texas Supreme Court Chief Justice Wallace B. Jefferson told the educators.
Jefferson said he agrees with former U.S. Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O’Connor, who cites a lack of civics education among the country’s biggest problems.
“I think we should be doing everything we can to make sure our students know what America is really all about and how it works and how it came to be and what the deficiencies are as well,” Jefferson said. “And I think your interest in this subject matter will help educate them better than they would have been without this project.”
Pictured above: Texas Supreme Court Chief Justice Wallace B. Jefferson addresses a group of about 30 current and future civics teachers from across the state Wednesday in Austin. Below: Educators participate in mock oral arguments organized by Texas Supreme Court clerks.
The Harris County Veterans' Court is being profiled this Friday evening on the national PBS series "Need to Know." The show will look at how veterans' courts are being set up to help veterans suffering from untreated post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) or traumatic brain injuries who end up in the criminal justice system. KUHT in Houston is airing it at 8:30 p.m. For your local affiliate and broadcast time, visit PBS.org.
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Schoolchildren are reluctant to use badly maintained toilets where bullies may loiter, the cleaning industry says.
The British Cleaning Council (BCC) has warned that children are unwilling to use unhygienic, badly equipped toilets.
Backing a campaign on the issue, it says too many school toilets are closed for part of the day, and others that boys and girls have to share.
"Children are just as entitled as adults to clean toilet facilities," said campaign chairman Steve Wright.
"Clean, safe, equipped and accessible toilets are becoming high on children's wish lists - but many UK schools are failing to provide this," says Mr Wright.
Infections
He warned that poor hygiene could "lead to increased infections such as bacterial diarrhoea and hepatitis A".
The BCC is backing a drive to improve toilet facilities in schools, called Bog Standard.
Also backing the campaign is the Association of Building Cleaning Direct Service Providers - and organisation spokesman David Frogett called for an upgrade in school toilets in the same way that there had been improvements in school food.
"We have had school dinners revolutionised by Jamie Oliver, now it's about time the toilets were sorted out too. We propose that there's a minimum standard of two cleans a day," said Mr Frogett.
Partnerships for Schools, the agency which is overseeing a major programme of rebuilding and renovating schools, accepts that there is a problem with children being reluctant to use toilets at school.
Dehydrated
"There is a very real issue around bullying in schools, with toilet blocks recognised as a hot spot for bullies to target those they choose to intimidate and threaten," says chief executive Tim Byles.
"In a bid to avoid having to visit the toilet at school, many young people refuse to drink water, exposing them to the risk of becoming dehydrated or even developing bladder and bowel problems."
But Mr Byles says that upgraded guidelines would mean that "cramped, dirty and vandalised toilets can become a thing of the past".
A spokesman for the Department for Children, Schools and Families said that it was clearly unacceptable that children might be put off using toilets for fear of bullying.
He said: "We expect teachers to take poor behaviour very seriously.
"School buildings and facilities have already improved immeasurably. But there is more to do.
"We've given schools record capital investment over the next three years and they’ve now got clear design guidance, so schools can build high quality pupil toilets."
What are your experiences of school toilets? Is bullying in school toilets a concern for you or children you know? How serious a problem is poor hygiene in school toilets?
Here are some of the comments you have sent us:
The amenities in my local grammar school are terrible. There's smoking, lack of toilet paper, lack of locks, lack of soap, lack of people who wash hands and a lack of people with successful aiming capabilities. And this is in a grammar school. I've been in other schools, and the situation is the same. It is awful. Something must be done!Lee Adama, Ballymena, Northern Ireland
I recently went back to my old senior school to do an aerobics class. The loos were disgusting and there wasn't even a single working tap for washing your hands which is disgusting. I would be furious if my kids were at this school and they couldn't even wash their hands after going to the loo. Penny, Cambs
Back in the 1960's the toilets were often targets for would be bullies and as a prefect most of my lunchtime break patroling the female toilet block, which in those days, was outside. We didn't have the drugs problem we have today, but smoking was rife as was the bullying. By bringing the toilets inside the school setting just means the bullies prey on their victims inside.Hazel, Erith, Kent
My children go to a primary school in Radcliffe, Manchester and both of them complain that the toilets smell and are dirty. My eldest is in year 6 (age 11) and tell me that other pupils can see you because the doors are so small. They also complain that the toilet paper is too hard.Annon, Radcliffe, Manchester
Why not have a lockable loo - key from teacher, returned after use. With a 'panic button' in case of bullies?Kate, Kingston Upon Thames
In my old secondary school (2003) the female toilets were locked to stop a minority of pupils smoking in them. Teachers held the keys, but were often nowhere to be found. The result was no sanitary facilities throughout the entire school day, with the obvious implications for GU hygiene and health. Some friends would truant from school during the lunch hour just to go home to use the toilet. And this was a good school in a rural northwest middle-class area. But still the basic sanitary needs of the many were neglected to make it easier for the school to police the behaviour of rule-breaking few.Anon., Pennines, UK
The toilets are that bad in our local school that my son of 8 years refused to go due to the state of these toilets. He now has problems with constipation due to not going when needed, he is even under the local hospital due to the state of these toilets.Antony, Pembrey, South Wales
I have complained twice to my son's school about the lack of soap in the toilets and have yet to hear anything back. My son won't use the toilet at school because he can't get his hands clean - it's terrible, especially as they are now complaining about his attendence as he keeps falling ill!Lisa Preece, Worcester, England
Perhaps individual toilets straight off a corridor, rather than blocks with their scope for lurking bullies, would be a better idea where feasible? In my daughter's school a single loo for adults straight off a corridor works very nicely, but the children's loo banks just round the corner are grim. Maybe an alternative is no main door on the block so that the cubicles (with doors) are visible from the corridor. Not very pretty, but it would make it much harder to hide any anti-social activities, whatever they might be!Mrs H D, Herefordshire, UK
My children will not use the toilets at their school as 1. They are unclean. 2. Most of the cubicle doors do not lock. 3. They are locked most of the time.Mrs D Strathern, Wellingborough, Northants
I was bullied at school and the toilets were a place of refuge! I had to be forced out of them by dinner ladies on more than one occasion. For every school where the bullies hide in the loos, there'll be one where the loos are a haven from the bullies who stalk the corridors or the playground. It's much more likely kids avoid the school toilets because they're unpleasant places, not because of bullies. Others might avoid drinking water to avoid the embarassment of having to ask to go to the loo during class, something that teachers often ridicule older kids for doing.Em, Edinburgh
I am currently an A-Level student and i will not use the school toilets. They are not too dirty, probably due to the fact that they are locked all the time and the school supervisers wont open them, but most do not have locks or toilet roll. It is hard to find a working tap and soap is completely out of the question. As for the bullying issue, I did always try to aviod the toilets as much as possible when I was younger as I was bullied a lot during my compulsory education, the toilets being one of the most popular places for bullies to be found. Mel, Northampton
The proposal of having unisex toilets to stop bullying and improve cleanliness is ridiculous. Has anyone considered that it could make it even more dangerous for victims of bullying; the issue of rape, for instance has been completely overlooked. I cannot see how this would do anything to improve the situation at all. Perhaps instead, the toilets should be monitored by staff, much like how teaching staff used to monitor the playground. FG, Toronto, Ontario
When I was teaching in schools in Thailand, the toilets for the younger students had no doors or even cubicles at all! Just a row of squat toilets in a room. And that was an expensive private school in Bangkok. They managed.Matt, Cambridge
I finished school three years ago. I went to a very good school in Liverpool with a great rep. The toilets however were a horrible. So bad that the school resulted in locking the toilets and the students would have to go to the secretary and ask for the key and then return it immediately. I think the solution would be to creat a new job in school. A person that looks after the toilets. Sits in the toilet all day and hands out toilet paper rather than leaving it in the cubicle for students to play with. And the same person will be in charge of cleaning the toilets and assuring there is always liquid soap. Melonee , Liverpool
My eldest son often comes home from senior school deperate for the toilet as he is affraid to use most of the school toilets as older kids congregate in them smoking. This really isn't healthy for kids to hang on like this. I dont understand why the school can not get on top of this!B, Southampton, Hants
I work at a grammar school for boys and every time I go to the loo at work I think of an old Ben Elton sketch: "Wade across through the ripples of the p*ss lake... then you have to decide which cubicle you want to use; the one with the door broken off, the one with the bangers and mash in the bowl or whirly splat." While some may laugh, this is the same in the STAFF toilets!! There is even a sign in the staff loos about part of them being a health and safety hazard. How are we to expect the kids to respect the toilets (rather than vandalise them) if the staff don't. I will also wager that the majority of the toilets complained about are male. Rotten places attract rotten people.John, Rugby
I used to be terrified of being bullied in the toilets at school and I would not go if there were other people in there. As a result I would not drink much and so would be dehydrated, and desperate for the loo by the time I got home.alice, plymouth
Some things never change. I went to school 20 years ago and the toilets were disgusting. In fact I can't seem to remember using them very much they were so bad. Toilet paper didn't exist and they stank.Steve, Teesside, UK
My daughter tries to drink as little as possible during a school day as she says the toilets are so disgusting that she does her best to avoid having to use them.Paul, Bishops Cleeve
I think my old primary school toilets were alright but my secondary school left a lot to be desired. All I knew about the boys' toilets was that you could smell them from a few metres away. In the girls', locks were broken, the floor was often wet (from cleaning, we hoped), sinks would be blocked by paper towels or girls putting their fags out, doors ripped off, grafitti was everywhere, and as for bullying, well. It was an enclosed space where you couldn't be seen, you could be blocked in and teachers were hardly near it. I remember one incident where I was in a cubicle and some girls were trying to look over the top to antagonise me. Another time, someone tried to steal my bag from under the cubicle door. Also, some girls thought it would be funny to try to ram open the door. Other than that - as if it weren't enough - it could be an intimidating place; girls would often smoke in there and the smell hit you as soon as you walked in. If you were a prefect they'd threaten you in case you told on them. Usually this was one against many so even though they were younger it could be frightening. I think toilets should be more open and cleaned far more regularly but I'm not sure if unisex toilets will solve more problems than they create. Apart from having enough trouble with boys trying to look under doors, the concensus would be that since the boys' toilet reeks, they would do this to a unisex facility too (I don't mean to be sexist, it's merely my experience).Lucy, Glasgow, Scotland
I have revisited my old shool house recently, and the state of the bathrooms are disgusting. I don't know how a normal human being can live and use the toilets in such a mess. You can even see the brown stains on the wall right next to the toilets. I really hope that they will sort themselves out as soon as possible.Louise Davies, Hampshire
My son and daughter attend a high school. I am quite worried because my daughter will not use the school toilets, she says they are disgusting. My son is on the school council. He said this was the first thing raised at the school meeting. £2000 was put by to refurb the toilets and now the school has used the money for something else. Surely the school should be made to inspect the toilets and make sure they are clean.Victoria, Birmingham
Our toilets are OK, but everyone hangs out there. I hardly go because i'm scared that I will get bullied one day in there. and who knows what they might do to youlauren,
My children are reluctant to eat or drink anything at school so that they do not have to use the toilets. The toilets are dirty smelly lack privacy and proper washing facilities. Gangs dominate the toilets with the rule that it is their time to use them at certain breaks. The toilets are not locked during lessons but children are not let out of lessons even when desperate to use the loo. They try to go in the middle of lessons to afford some privacy. If they use the cubicles everyone gets to know that they had to do number 2 and they find this embarrassing and degrading. If the facilities were more conducive to the behaviour that promotes good social conduct this could be avoided. Frances, St Albans Herts
At my high school the toilets in the main school block had no locks on. Only a few of the dozen or so cubicles in the girls toilets had sanitary bins, which is embarrassing to have to wait for the "right one" to become free. As with most schools, there was also a problem with intimidating girls hanging around and smoking. Plus they were closed for part of the day to prevent pupils loitering there when they should be in lessons. As for the boys toilets... you could smell them from the other end of the corridor. Disgusting!Erica Turner, Cardiff
School toilets have always been a issue for cleanliness and bullying. I note that at my children's school, Hodgson High School in Poulton-le-Fylde Lancashire where I am a governor, the school has made a major investment in improving the facilities and decor in the toilets. This has improved the atmosphere and the children respect the facilities, vandalism and smoking have reduced, even been eliminated. The boys toilets where completed first and there was significant protest from the girls until the work was complete in their toilets.Chris McConnachie, Thornton Lancashire
I've had a family member bullied in the toilets. The doors have large gaps above them and people where able to peer over to make them feel uncomfortable to the point they would no longer go. This lead to problems later- with stomach trouble and further bulling cuz of this.leigh, midlands
From the other side of the fence, I am afraid that some children are simply not taught how to use a toilet in the first place and show no respect for the amenities. There is a huge cost factor when anything is done to improve toilets regardless of any money the government claims that it has allocated, that amount has to cover everything from computers to painting and renovation projects. To stop bullying in toilets new designs are now available - CCTV for example. David Jones, Pontefract
I think teachers and assistants have a large hand to play in bullying in the toilets. Regular monitoring at break times should be enforced. Caretakers and cleaners do a good job at the local school my children attend to keep it clean, although on times my children have said there has been no toilet paper and complained about the height of the doors.Ruth, Accrington, Lancashire
When I was at school, I hated to use the toilets, which were filthy. I didn't drink all day so that I could avoid using them. No-one had ever told me that dehydration was bad for you. The result was a childhood plagued by headaches and constipation. As an adult I am left with piles and irritable bowel syndrome. I add my voice to those supporting decent standards for all toilets. Especially in schools.Jackie, Stroud
At my children's primary school, the girls' toilet is a focal point for bullying and appalling behaviour. Dirty toilet paper stuck to the ceiling, deliberate flooding and vandalism, bullying, taunting over doors, lack of locks / soap / water / hand towels. The smell is horrible. My children try to drink as little as possible to avoid having to go. Frankly, I'd be doing exactly the same if I were them - it's not just an eyesore, it's personal and social torment.Elspeth, Ealing, London
Surely the answer to this is NOT to have separate toilets for staff and students? That way staff are constantly aware of the state of the facilities, and students are afforded supervision. Can't imagine it would be a popular approach with teachers though...KM, Coventry
Unisex toilets will just give more opportunities for unisex bullying. My main memory of school toilets is, in my first year of secondary school, of having to run the gauntlet of the second year's smokers club in order to access the facilities. Meanwhile the 'supervising teacher' was hiding behind a door from where he could see the girls' pen and nothing else.Tony, Watford, UK
I am a School Governor and I have to ask why none of you complain to the proper authority. You, as parents of pupils at the school concerned, should address your concerns to the Governing Body. The details are readily available at the school office and on the school website. If you have a problem the governors should be made aware so please do. We are seen by many parents as unapproachable, but we are not! If we can help, we will. bluetractorgirl, Suffolk
The best school toilets policy I experienced was at a British School abroad. The staff had to use the same toilets as the students, so they had to be well maintained. It also meant that no one did anything untoward as there was always the possibility that your teacher would walk out of one of the cubicles.Ria, Exeter
My high school loo's are actually okay.. apart from that at dinner you alway's get a large amount of older girls squabbling over the mirrors to re-adjust their make up. MightyBooshLover, north lincolnshire
The school I used to go to finallay decided to make a toilet separate from younger pupils in year 7 and 8. But before then the only usable toilets were full of smokers with 4 out of 10 toilets which had lockable doors and weren't occupied by the bullies. We were also denied access to toilet paper because certain people would plug up the basins and toilets with it. Or they'd mix it with soap and throw it at the ceiling so it would stick (Meaning we can't have soap either) Lately they've been getting younger pupils in hospital with bladder and bowel problems, simply because they refused to use the toilets. Anon, Cardiff
As a secondary school student I totally agree! The toilets which are barely open seem to be gloomy, with a revolting smell, also with wet floors, lack of sanitary products, mirrors, and highly maintained equipment. The fact that there is no available cubicle for the lack of locks or the state they are in is thoroughly shocking! I aim not to go during the school day because quite frankly the standards are filthy and I don't even feel entitled to my privacy.Dan, Nottingham(shire)
I absolutely agree that something most be done about the toilet facilities within schools. When I was at school, you had to ask the teacher for a key to unlock the toilets if you needed to go. Not every teacher had a key which meant that you rarely got to go to the toilet when you asked and had to hold it in until you found a teacher with a key in between lessons which could take hours. You sometimes had to hold it in ALL day. Also some teachers seen it as a form of punishment not to allow you to go to the bathroom during class. They just said no, you cant go. No one would ever tell an adult that they can't go to the toilet. Disgraceful!Therese, Belfast
I am a atudent and I study in Challney. When you are in the toilet, boys kick the door and the person that is inside the toilet gets embarrassed. Locks are broken, no soap and no toilet tissues.Zakar Hussain, Luton
The toilet facilities at my old primary school were awful. They were in a grotty building outside. Looking back I don't know why or how I put up with it!!!! rina, southampton
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Abstract
Signs are commonly used in the foodservice industry to portray food safety messages. However, many of these signs do not consider employee preferences or current needs in the industry. Employee perceptions can provide crucial information about the design of effective food safety messages. Surveys were conducted with meat and poultry processing employers in the mid-Atlantic region to determine food safety needs in the industry. Follow-up focus groups in both English (5) and Spanish (5) were conducted based on language availability and size. The most important food safety topics were hand washing (60.9%), cleaning/sanitizing (78.3%), and cross contamination (69.9%). Employees believe that color, text, and multiple language options could increase employee recognition and retention of intended messages. New, employee-driven hand washing signs were developed from the information in the focus groups. Signs were evaluated by video observation through five hand washing practice behaviors (soap use, complete wash, time to wash, complete rinse, and towel use) at two different poultry processing facilities in the mid-Atlantic at three different time points (baseline, short term, and long term). Soap use significantly increased at both facilities when baseline data was compared to short term and long term time periods. Facility B showed a significant increase in washing, time, and rinsing when baseline data was compared to short term, which indicates that a new sign could increase hand washing compliance. Sign color had a significant effect on behavior for washing and time of washing, while time had a significant effect on behavior for four of five variables tested. New signs could be a useful way to encourage compliance to food safety message for multicultural employees; however, they may need to be frequently changed as workers tend to refer back to old habits.
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laissez les bon temps rouler
The official numbers are in from NOPD: citywide Uniform Crime Report Part I crime rose 4.4 percent from 2015 to 2016. This largely jives with the forecast I made in late December of a roughly 5 percent jump last year.Much of last year’s rise in UCR crime likely comes from improved response times and a full year of better sex crime reporting, the latter of which undoubtedly contributed to the 31 percent jump in rape last year. Armed robberies were down 9.1 percent, as expected, though an 11.7 percent rise in simple robberies means that overall robberies were down just 3.5 percent from 2015 to 2016.
Some perspective is important when reviewing these numbers. The 4.4 percent rise in 2016 represents a 1.6 percent decline from 2014’s peak, but it is also 30 percent higher than 2010’s UCR count. UCR crimes jumped big time from 2013 to 2014 and this year’s count shows that things have been roughly steady ever since.
The other crime trend in need of some historical perspective is armed robberies. While armed robberies fell in 2016, the 1,445 total robberies last year still represents a 51.6 percent increase over 2010’s armed and simple robbery total. These crimes remain a consistent problem for New Orleans despite the drop in armed robberies a year ago.
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I traveled into the woods with a different perspective than some. I had never seen the play and was not familiar with Sondheim at all, other than knowing who he was. But, the story? The characters in the film read like a “best of” of fantasy storybooks, all conceived by the Brothers Grimm. Rapunzel, Jack (and his beanstalk), Cinderella, Little Red Riding Hood, and more all come together. So why did Sondheim throw them all together into one big interwoven fairytale that is a musical, a tragedy, a romance, and a comedy? I’m not sure why, but 29 years ago he did. Now Rob Marshall, returning from Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides, a massive flop, is back in his comfort zone with a big, showy musical.
He’s brought along quite the dramatis personæ, too. The compact cast makes up for it’s size in strength. Nearly every one of them contributes a memorable moment to this memorable ensemble. You won’t forget Lila Crawford’s Little Red Riding Hood’s duet with Johnny Depp as The Wolf, nor will you forget Chris Pine’s pipes in “Agony”. (Depp is the weakest leak of the cast. While he is as entertaining as ever, he’s still playing the same role he’s been redoing since the first Pirates.) Meryl Streep apparently has another trick up her sleeve left and this one comes in the form of surprisingly high notes. Streep’s “Stay With Me” is quite good for an actress who is now 70, but the creepy fingernails, wretched face, and blue hair she inhabits and pervades the way she does all of her characters, are sublime.
There are so many central characters, so many plot lines, so many starts and stops that the film shouldn’t work as well as it does. Somehow, Marshall has managed to cram all of the storylines together with the help of James Lapine’s, who also co-wrote the play, tight script. At just over 2 hours, the film never really stops. One scene involving the Wolf seducing Little Red Riding Hood segues into another involving the Baker and his Wife arguing over who should go (you guessed it) into the woods. While not all of the storylines are strong as the others, they all collide into one another so often that if Johnny Depp’s Wolf is all too familiar, Meryl Streep’s high notes will be sure to show up in the next scene.
The film is not without it’s faults. It doesn’t really know who it’s for and Marshall can’t decide whether he wants a full on musical or a much more safe Disney moneymaker. Is the film for young Disney princess toddlers? No, not really. Is it for Sondheim enthusiasts? Maybe, but it’s not entirely faithful. Is it for Depp and Streep fans? Possibly. In the end, it’s really for all of these people and maybe that’s a good thing. A mix of these groups did see the film and placed it at #2 at the Box Office, hopeful to those looking for something more original and not involving dwarves or red haired girls.
As I sat in the theater watching trailer upon trailer, a preview for the new Cinderella played. As I watched the following film, it dawned on me that these characters have been reworked multiple times in very recent years to varying degrees. Jack the Giant Slayer in 2013, Red Riding Hood in 2011, Tangled in 2010, and more have reimagined these characters over and over, with no end in sight. The Cinderella trailer only reassured me that Hollywood’s obsession with rehashing every franchise possible, especially Disney, will continue to cascade down on those looking for more thoughtful cinema.
While it may not exactly be “thoughtful cinema”, Into the Woods does achieve what few would have guessed, myself included, and that is being crowd-pleasing, while thoroughly well-done at the same time. What the film achieves so wonderfully is it’s ability to dodge the stereotypes that chase down so many films produced by Disney and the like. In subverting the clichés of the genre, Into the Woods achieves something less and less fantasy films of recent years have: It is a fantasy in the true sense of the word. Who would have guessed that Marshall and his team would be brave enough to embrace the grim side of the Brothers Grimm while also imbuing their film with some seriously funny scenes? Not me.
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One Response to “Into The Woods (Flick’s Review)”
flickflack January 2nd, 2015 @ 3:25 pm
For the most part, I agree: Rob Marshall has made a thoroughly enjoyable, surprisingly subversive fantasy musical. It would’ve been nice to see him color outside of the Disney lines a little bit more (featured Hollywood cliches: unnecessary narration, dead-person flashbacks), though I do admire his decision not to include a ceaseless battle climax. And the Sondheim story is dark, edgy, and good fun in all the right places. The huge cast, meanwhile, is surprisingly winning; I actually enjoyed Johnny Depp’s out-of-nowhere cameo. The real reason to journey Into The Woods is, of course, the music. Sondheim’s rhythmic, rhyming, chiming songwriting is a ridiculous delight. The opening sequence, which deftly sets up the dense interlocking narrative, is pure musical joy.
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The Pros & Cons of Twitter Advertising for Small Business
You may have heard that Twitter has rolled out advertising, but what you might not know is that it's being targeted to small businesses. For enterprise companies with large teams and budgets, exploring new advertising opportunities like Twitter's is far less daunting than it is for an SMB marketer -- especially those without a strong background in paid online advertising.
With time, budget, and resources in such short supply, how do you decide whether or not investing ad dollars in Twitter is worthwhile? While every SMB is unique, we've looked at companies across numerous verticals and business sizes and seen Twitter advertising be successful in some instances, and a downright struggle for others. In this post we'll consider the three main areas for advertising on Twitter -- Promoted Accounts, Promoted Tweets, and Promoted Timelines.
Why Paid Ads on Twitter are Useful
1) They drive users off of Twitter and onto your landing page. Twitter acts just like a search engine in the sense that your ads can show up only to the types of people you'd like to target. Take a look at Promoted Tweets, for example:
You can target by keywords, target users who visit your page, target your followers, or target users that share similar interests to your existing followers (similar to look-a-like display targeting). By utilizing these targeting features, you can then tailor your ad messaging and landing page experience so that it is consistent and relevant to your target audience. A streamlined user experience of this nature results in higher conversion rates by putting the user first.
2) It's typically cheaper than alternate PPC options. Did you know certain keywords on Google paid search cost above $200 per click? While it's not the norm, the major search engines are saturated with ads, and as such costs are at a premium. While Twitter won't always be less expensive, it can serve as a cheaper alternative for certain verticals, and running a small test to compare its effectiveness is relatively easy.
3) You can build and own your audience. When using a feature like Promoted Accounts, the goal is often to attract new followers, and targeting can be set up based on interests. Interest targeting could be as broad as, say, "marketing," or as specific as you can think! This means that you can build the exact audience that you'd like to market to in the future. As you attract new followers, you also now "own" them and can organically tweet out to them as you see fit at no charge, making this approach a bit of a hybrid between PPC and SEO as you pay to get users that you will then be able to organically reach at any time in the future.
The Dangers of Using Twitter Paid Ads
1) Tracking & Reporting - If you're used to using Adwords, beware! The tracking and reporting within the Twitter ads interface are not nearly as robust. The simple joys of Adwords like pulling a spend-by-day report or geo report are nowhere to be found within Twitter's UI. If you are a data-hound and need all of the data points that Adwords features, you'll be at a loss with Twitter ads. The best thing to do if you're running Twitter ads on your own is to keep track of key metrics on a daily basis such as spend, followers, clicks, leads, cost per engagement, and or cost per lead. If you are sending traffic to a landing page, be sure it's unique so you can properly track performance specific to Twitter.
2) Account Service - As an SMB with a small budget, it's very unlikely that you'll have access to live Twitter reps to bounce questions off of, help troubleshoot, or brainstorm new marketing approaches. While this isn't unique to Twitter, it's something that puts SMBs at a distinct disadvantage if they don't have specific teams looking at their account on a daily basis to offer insights and recommendations. You're certainly capable of running a Twitter ad campaign on your own, just be mindful to keep the messaging fresh by updating if often, and to always be thinking about your goals, nuances and trends, and your long term strategy -- because nobody on Twitter's team will.
3) Campaign Parameters - In addition to Twitter's less-than-advanced UI impacting tracking and reporting, it puts SMB marketers at a disadvantage with their ad campaigns, too. For instance, ad campaigns can't be set up to run on certain days or during certain hours of individual days with any relative ease. Bid increases during peak hours need to be adjusted manually. Things like this that have become the standard in Adwords are scarce to be found within Twitter. A few tips to help you out here include setting your daily budget low, manually adjusting the start and end dates of your campaigns, and keeping bids on the lower side of Twitter's recommended bid suggestions -- at least to start.
Overall, Twitter advertising can be a great channel for SMB marketers to build a user base, connect with that base and ultimately drive leads and sales. Just keep in mind that the effort needs to be dedicated, consistent, and a bit creative at times when it comes to account management. Managing Twitter ads on your own is a hands-on job, but is also a job that has the ability to reap significant benefits.
Bonus - Twitter Ads Has New Mobile Features!
Advertising opportunities on Twitter continue to evolve, and Twitter recently announced new opportunities around promoted tweets for mobile. The move towards mobile makes sense -- of the 100 million monthly active Twitter users, 55% utilize Twitter on a mobile device. The details are as follows:
Pay only when a user engages.
You'll pay cost-per-engagement pricing, like all Promoted Tweets.
It runs on second price, quality-based auction with a minimum bid.
Promoted tweets in mobile timelines will amplify your reach.
There's frequency capping with constant monitoring.
Mobile adversiting for promoted tweets can be an even more cost effective way to reach your audience, as mobile costs are typically less expensive than that of desktop/laptop campaigns. Some beneficial features (as pictured above) include the ability to target users regardless of the time they log in, and pay on a cost-per-engagement metric. Be mindful, though, that the same risks that exist for desktop/laptop ad campaigns are present when engaging with Twitter mobile ads. Happy testing!
Do you think Twitter ads are well-suited to small businesses? Share your thoughts in the comments!
Good list! Twitter paid advertising hasn't been properly covered as it's so new, but it's always good to see an alternate to the getting-far-too-saturated adwords strategy.
The other nice thing about twitter is that you can get immediate feedback if a message is worthy of being carried by word of mouth, while with adwords and other paid advertising methods you don't get that instant feedback of what truly "sticks"
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She is Index's first "friend" in Academy City. She is gentle but shy. Not much is known about her aside from the fact that she was an overachiever at Kirigaoka Academy for Girls according to Aisa. Her ability is Counter Stop. Details about her level are unknown but it could be high, since it was mentioned that she was among the top psychics in the Kirigaoka Academy for Girls.
It is later revealed that she is not a human at all but instead an algorithm of the psychic's AIM with a conscious. The nature of her being leads her to be indestructible, as she can recreate any damage done to her body and lift objects several times her size. When not physically manifested, she exists in a realm called the Imaginary Number District which she calls "the city of shimmers," a hidden area within Academy City.
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MOSCOW, March 8 (Reuters) - Rosatom, Russia's state energy corporation, said on Saturday it would resume nuclear fuel shipments to Europe via Ukraine after Kiev lifted a ban imposed during anti-government protests earlier this year on transporting the hazardous material.
The ban was introduced on Jan. 28 by the government of now-deposed President Viktor Yanukovich, who fled the country last month after a popular uprising.
Rosatom said the ban ended on Thursday and the first rail shipment of nuclear fuel in 2014 via Ukraine to eastern Europe was expected next week.
"Rosatom is committed to the secure supply and removal of nuclear fuel to and from our customers across Europe. If there are any further issues with rail transport by Ukraine, we will ensure that deliveries are made on time by air," Rosatom spokesman Vladislav Bochkov said.
Shipments will be carried out by Rosatom's subsidiary TVEL.
Nuclear power stations that have contracts with Rosatom for the supply of nuclear fuel include Kozloduy in Bulgaria, Paks in Hungary, Dukovany and Temelin in the Czech Republic, and Bohunice in Slovakia.
Scores of people died in Kiev during clashes that led to a takeover of power by the pro-Western opposition. Moscow responded by sending troops to Ukraine's Crimean peninsula, where a majority of the population is ethnic Russian.
So far, Russia's seizure of the Black Sea peninsula has remained bloodless.
Ukraine is also a key transit route for Russian natural gas headed to Europe. On Friday, Russian state gas producer Gazprom hinted that it may cut gas supplies to Ukraine - and subsequently to Europe - due to Kiev's failure to pay on time for the supplies.
We welcome comments that advance the story through relevant opinion, anecdotes, links and data. If you see a comment that you believe is irrelevant or inappropriate, you can flag it to our editors by using the report abuse links. Views expressed in the comments do not represent those of the Thomson Reuters Foundation. For more information see our Acceptable Use Policy.
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Categories
Product Description
Food Festival provides the context for identifying 2-D and 3-D shapes. The engaging text together with the colourful and lively illustrations provide the context for maths activities as well as extension activities provided in the teacher notes at the end of the book.
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{LC Photography}
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E-Session Take 2! Tana and Kyle are due to get married in 12 days and Earlier this month we did a summer/spring E session to add to there winter session. It was easy for me being it was in my back yard, can't get a better location then that. Check out this fun slide show.
I met up with Alica and her mom Red Cedar trail and took some really fun pics for her 4th birthday, I can't believe shes 4! That means in less then 6 weeks my little guy will be 4 to! :( They grow so fast.
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Libya account isn't the whole truth
ON BENGHAZI
Published 6:18 pm, Monday, November 19, 2012
Photo: Bebeto Matthews, Associated Press
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This June 7, 2012 file photo shows U.S. Ambassador to the U.N. Susan Rice listening during a news conference at the UN. Republican senators' angry criticism of Rice over her initial account of the deadly Sept. 11 attack in Libya smacks of sexism and racism, a dozen female members of the House said Friday. (AP Photo/Bebeto Matthews) less
This June 7, 2012 file photo shows U.S. Ambassador to the U.N. Susan Rice listening during a news conference at the UN. Republican senators' angry criticism of Rice over her initial account of the deadly Sept. ... more
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Libya account isn't the whole truth
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The Obama White House needs to set the record straight about the disconnect between what the CIA knew about the deadly Sept. 11 attack on the U.S. mission in Benghazi, Libya, and the administration's public insistence that it was an outgrowth of a spontaneous demonstration.
Ex-CIA Director David Petraeus reportedly told Congress in a closed hearing Friday that he knew early on that the attack that killed Ambassador J. Christopher Stevens and three other Americans was an act of terrorism, but that critical detail was not made public for fear of tipping off the perpetrators that they were being tracked.
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"Talking points" supposedly based on the best available intelligence continued to advance a narrative that the assaults were prompted by an overheated demonstration prompted by an anti-Muslim video. Most notably, those talking points were parroted by Susan Rice, U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, on Sunday talk shows. The president himself advanced the spontaneous-demonstration theory long after it was presumably discounted at the top levels of U.S. intelligence.
Whether this represents tactical disinformation, a serious breakdown in communication between intelligence officials and the White House or a political move to preserve the fantasy that al Qaeda was all but vanquished - various Republicans are suggesting the latter - the American people deserve to know how, when, why and by whom these "talking points" veered from the CIA's understanding of reality.
Latest from the SFGATE homepage:
Click below for the top news from around the Bay Area and beyond. Sign up for our newsletters to be the first to learn about breaking news and more. Go to 'Sign In' and 'Manage Profile' at the top of the page.
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There will be days when you may not feel like exercising, these are the times that you deserve "ME TIME". This is why we are not just a fitness center, we are an escape, a place to have a Relaxing Massage or a Facial to slow down the skin's aging process, and bring moisture and a glow back to your Face and Body. After, Remember to Enjoy the Steam or Sauna and forget the outside world for a little while.
NO EXCUSES ALLOWED, LIFE WILL ALWAYS GET IN THE WAY ! TODAY IS HERE ! TAKE CARE OF YOURSELF NOW !
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The upcoming BMW i3, the car formerly known as the Megacity Vehicle and the first production all-electric car from BMW, is set to revolutionize the way mainstream cars are engineered and built, with most of its internal structure and body being composed of lightweight composite materials such as reinforced carbon-fiber plastic.
Sadly, buyers won’t get to hop behind the wheel until at least 2013 and even then the U.S. may not see the car until a later date.
However, to keep us enticed, some important new details have spilled onto the web. Though yet to be confirmed by BMW, the guys at Car and Driver are reporting the i3 will have a pricetag of about $35,000.
This makes sense considering the amount of technology expected to be featured, not to mention that BMW is launching the i3 under its new ‘i’ sub-division just like its high-performance M cars.
Other crucial details revealed in the report include a 112 kW (150 horsepower) output for the i3’s rear-mounted electric motor, which should be able to carry the car a distance of 99 miles (160 km)--and at speeds of up to 100 mph--on a single charge of its lithium-ion batteries.
The i3 will still be able to carry four people in relative luxury--it's still a BMW after all.
And if 100 miles is still too short for you, note that a range-extended version complete with a compact internal combustion engine acting as a generator may also be launched.
For more details, check out our previous post on the upcoming BMW i3 by clicking here.
UPDATE and CORRECTION: The original version of this article cited Car and Driver's reported driving range of 160 miles. C/D later corrected the figure to 160 km, and we have since updated the title and story to reflect that.
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Back in November our staff of designers and type experts collaborated to put together a prelimary list of the best fonts of the year so far – and with some curation we ended up here, with the final ‘Best Of.’ All designs are from our foundry partners, were released in 2016, and you know, delighted us.
The year brought many great originals, like Alexandra Korolkova’s display serif, FF Carina, Shiva Nallaperumal’s Trench Sans, Rounded, and Slab for micro sizes, and HVD’s eccentric Fabrikat, as well as updates and family extensions, and the increasingly popular script-font-ecosystem kit; See Laura Worthington’s Fairwater. And that’s just a taste. Check out our complete Best of 2016 fontlist.
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The manufacturers of the ASEAN region are unhappy with the drop in business, as is evident from the report compiled by IHS Markit of Nikkei ASEAN Manufacturing Purchasing Managers’ Index.
The manufacturing PMI dropped in the January month to 49.7; it was at 50.3 in December. Now, that is not a good start to the New Year at all. Let’s see the feedback for each country (seven countries are monitored as ASEAN; listed below as per descending PMI numbers).
Philippines: Highest PMI in January notwithstanding a softer increase in production compared to the previous month.
Vietnam: Weaker improvements in overall operating conditions. Good signs on the new order front where orders rose slightly. Higher new export orders. Strongest increase in employee numbers.
Myanmar: Weaker improvements in overall operating conditions.
Thailand: Business conditions unchanged, modest manufacturing growth, no overall increase in new orders, slight increase new orders from abroad.
While January was not a happy month for the Purchase Managers, as a group, they are hopeful that going forward this year will see increase in new orders as well as in the production numbers. The level of positive sentiment for the year is actually the highest since May 2018.
As per David Owen, Economist at IHS Markit, “ASEAN countries struggled at the beginning of 2019, as manufacturers saw new orders fall and output growth moderate from December. Export demand was still a key factor weighing on the sector’s performance, as trade tensions around the world caused export orders to fall for the sixth month running. At the same time, the slowdown has led to an easing in inflationary pressures, with the rate of cost inflation at a fresh survey low in January. While this is likely to ease pressure on margins, particularly after steep increases in costs through 2018, it is likely that new orders will remain sparse without a boost to domestic spending or a recovery in foreign demand.”
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Just paid Unlock fee and annual rent for Richery. Sorry it's so late, the old owner didn't have money to pay and didn't tell anyone it was overdue. I am Lu05 and will now be Richery's owner when he is unlocked. Your transaction ID for this payment is: 62X093313N5579547. Thank you.
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Researchers in the Robot Learning Lab at Cornell University developed a robot that can prepare a cup of latte without ever having seen the machine before – the robot does this by visually observing the machine and by reading online instruction manual
Today NVIDIA released a major update of the JetPack SDK with new developer tools and libraries that doubles the performance of deep learning applications on the Jetson TX1 Developer Kit, the world’s highest performance platform for deep learning on e
Teams worldwide competed in the Amazon Picking Challenge, held at RoboCup 2016 in Leipzig, Germany, to see who’s robot can autonomously recognize objects and pick, and stow, the desired targets from a range of unsorted items.
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This is a transformer, built with a strict construction schema, like every transformer.
Besides the clever construction that we saw, traditional Japanese houses is a fascinating subject. In the city, houses are small and well-designed. Doors are sliding and temperature is low. Walls are very thin but it can resist to one earthquake every month.
Temples are build all in wood, assembled without using one nail. Every 20 years, they can disassemble it, look if there is a rotten piece , replace it, and build the temple again.
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Viewstate is a cool mechanism in ASP.NET platform to maintain information supplied from the client-side. Every input will be submitted to the server with POST method by default. Some HTML input objects will contain javascript function calling back to the server as it is shown below.
function __doPostBack(eventTarget, eventArgument) {
if (!theForm.onsubmit || (theForm.onsubmit() != false)) {
theForm.__EVENTTARGET.value = eventTarget;
theForm.__EVENTARGUMENT.value = eventArgument;
theForm.submit();
}
This mechanism could prevent CSRF(Cross-Site Request Forgery) attack implicitly. You have to write quite a few lines of code in PHP, if you want to prevent this kind of attack. However, viewstate is a trade-off between performance and security. Thus, disable viewstate on the page or on the objects you don’t need. Enable it only whenever you need it. Use viewstate wisely.
I often see some applications hide its communication data with base64 and gzip compression mechanism. With Burp proxy, there is no option to crack this kind of data. Therefore, I decided to help Burp with php script.Download and rename to myencode.php
<?php
if (isset($_POST['estr']))
{ if (!strcmp($_POST['cmd'],"Decode"))
{ $words = gzuncompress(base64_decode($_POST['estr']));
}
else
{ $words = base64_encode(gzcompress($_POST['estr']));
}
}
?>
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"Tonight has brought a conclusion to a case that illustrates how methamphetamine can have such a monstrous impact on so many lives," Nixon said in a statement.
Middleton was convicted of killing Randy "Happy" Hamilton, Stacey Hodge and Alfred Pinegar in 1995 out of concern that they would tell police about his methamphetamine dealing. Middleton's girlfriend, Maggie Hodges, is serving life in prison after pleading guilty to second-degree murder in all three cases.
Middleton's attorneys contend that the wrong man was arrested, citing new evidence that included a witness who came forward in February.
"We're looking at a situation where if (Middleton) had zealous representation at trial, he likely would have been acquitted," attorney Joseph Perkovich said.
Concerns about whether Middleton was mentally fit for execution, though, spurred a long delay in the execution, which occurred 19 hours after it was originally scheduled, at 12:01 a.m.
A federal judge granted a stay of execution late Tuesday, citing a need for a hearing to determine if Middleton was mentally ill. Courts have held it is unconstitutional to execute the mentally ill.
A federal appeals court overturned the stay later Wednesday and neither the U.S. Supreme Court nor the Missouri Supreme Court would halt the execution.
Missouri has executed one man each month since November, with the exception of May, when the U.S. Supreme Court halted the execution of Russell Bucklew. Bucklew suffers from a rare congenital condition that causes weakened and malformed blood vessels as well as tumors in his nose and throat. The 8th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals plans a hearing on Sept. 9 to determine if lethal injection could cause him to suffer because of his medical condition.
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How black-hats misuse the torrent ecosystem for fun and profit
Torrents have many legitimate uses, in various segments. However, their popularity among users makes them also into an attractive vector for black-hats.
Update, Aug 7 – 14.50 CEST: We updated the article to acknowledge the many legitimate uses of the torrent technology as well as provide our telemetry data to show how frequently black-hats try to misuse the P2P ecosystem to spread their malicious products. This blogpost didn’t intend to denounce the technology as such.
Torrents have many legitimate uses, in various segments. Operating systems and open-source software leverage this technology to spread their new versions; gamers might know them as their update stream; some musicians even embraced the ecosystem and use it to get their music out to their listeners.
However, the popularity of torrents among users makes them also into an attractive vector for black-hats. Since the beginning of 2016, ESET telemetry has detected almost 15 million cases in which downloaded malicious code was linked to one of the most popular P2P clients or file sharing services.
And it is not just torrents that can be misused by black-hats, but occasionally even the BitTorrent clients themselves – software necessary for any user who wants to download or seed files from this ecosystem. This has been observed in the past year when attackers targeted macOS users by hijacking a version of Transmission app, a legitimate and widely used BitTorrent client and then used it to spread nasty malware families.
The first attack was documented in March 2016, downloading ransomware known as KeRanger. Despite the quick reaction of Transmission’s developers, who removed the trojanized version of the app only a few hours after it appeared on the official website, it still hit thousands of victims worldwide.
What is worse, KeRanger’s creators used a cryptographic algorithm that was effectively unbreakable, rendering victims’ data inaccessible.
Another case following the same path occurred in August 2016. macOS malware called OSX/Keydnap, spread using yet another hijacked version of the Transmission software – planting a permanent backdoor in infected devices and stealing credentials stored in the Keychain app.
Again, the official team of the BitTorrent client was fast to react and removed the trojanized app from the website within minutes after being notified by ESET researchers.
However, the threat posed by torrents extends beyond these clients. Risks are also associated with the downloaded files, which can pose as a popular software, games or movies, but turn out to be something completely different – often malevolent.
This was also the case with Sathurbot backdoor trojan, a threat documented by ESET researchers in April 2017. The affected devices were infected via malicious torrents and added to a botnet that scanned the internet for WordPress administrator accounts. These were then targeted by a distributed brute-force attack.
To ensure its further propagation, Sathurbot masked itself as a popular movie or software, and misused the hijacked WordPress accounts to further propagate its original malicious torrent. As a result, the trojanized files were very well seeded and appeared legitimate “to the untrained eye”.
The movie torrent bundle contained a file with a video extension accompanied by an apparent codec pack installer, and an explanatory text file. The software torrent contained an apparent installer executable and a small text file. The objective of both was to push the victim to run the executable which loaded the Sathurbot DLL.
In February 2017, black-hats misused BitTorrent sites again, this time to distribute a new ransomware called “Patcher”, seemingly an application for pirating popular software.
The Torrent contained a single ZIP file – an application bundle. ESET researchers saw two versions of this malware, one posing as a “Patcher” for Adobe Premiere Pro and one for Microsoft Office for Mac. However, the analysis was not exhaustive and there might have been other versions in the wild.
Even though the malware was poorly coded, its encryption routine was effective enough to prevent victims from accessing the affected files. Additionally, the ransomware didn’t have any code to communicate with a C&C server. This means that there was no way to send the key – used to encrypt the files – to the malware operators and no way for them to provide the decryption key to the victims.
These are only a few examples of BitTorrent clients and torrents themselves, being an attractive vector for cybercriminals who use it to infect large numbers of unaware users with malware or to gain control over their computers and misuse them for malicious purposes. Of course, this is not exclusive to torrents or P2P technology, but is true for any popular software.
If you want to and protect yourself by building up your knowledge, read the latest pieces by ESET researchers published at WeLiveSecurity.com.
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Who To Contact
Meet our Sales Team
Our Sales Team can help you find the best waste management solution for your business. Each individual focuses on a specific business sector, giving them knowledge and experience to benefit the businesses they work with.
Darren W
Trish W
Contact our team on 0161 737 4545
Meet our Customer Care Team
Our dedicated customer care team are on hand to help you with any service requests and queries. They’re committed to providing a high-quality customer experience and help you get the best results for your waste service.
Jane
Customer Care Manager
Lynette
Customer Care Consultant
Wayne
Customer Care Consultant
Contact our team on 0161 737 4545
Dedicated Account Management
Our Sales and Customer Care teams are also dedicated Account Managers, there to provide you with support and advice when you need it.
We are Sustainable
Sustainability is one of our core values – it’s ingrained in everything we do here at JWS. For our customers, we aim to divert at least 98% of their waste from landfill, by sourcing sustainable solutions such as recycling and energy recovery.
We are Reliable
You can trust JWS to provide a high-standard, efficient service that meets your requirement. Our services are QEHS compliant and UKAS accredited. Our team are dedicated to helping you get the best results out of your waste management and will provide you with all the support you need.
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Front yard, from the old cedar cabin being refurbished into a writing retreat
Beloved screened-in porch, well used three seasons of the year;
canoe restored by hand by Kate's husband
Kate, what does home mean to you?
Home is peepers and log piles, wild blackberries and fog banks. Home smells like woodsmoke. I love that the streets of this seaside town belonged to my ancestors of two hundred and fifty years ago—bookended by the same salty ropes and tar on docks, rooted in the musty comfort of a house that shifts and creaks during nor'easter storms.
That's not to say home is contented. Is it ever, really, for anyone? Here, along the craggy shore of my birth, I am settled. But my god, how I lust for the mountains, for the west coast where I spent a decade learning how to stretch out in this skin. And so to be home is to feel both embraced and unhinged, in familiar love with this, yet constantly seeking the horizon for snow-capped peaks.
Ahh, well. I shrug and inhale and the what-ifs pass, brushed aside by scotch mist and atlantic swell. For that is home, I'd say: whatever place manages to eclipse our natural-born restlessness.
About Kate Inglis:
Kate Inglis of sweet | salty
Kate Inglis of sweet | salty is a writer, photographer and mother to three boys—one of whom exists as memory, figment and technicolour eyes. After starting her blog in 2004 prior to the birth of her first son, Kate's writing chugged along uneventfully until her second pregnancy, identical twins, ended with their catastrophic birth three months early. One son survived and one did not.
Since then, she has written her first novel to be published in fall 2009, founded Glow in the Woods, a community and collaborative blog for babylost parents, and joined the crew of Shutter Sisters, a collective celebrating women photographers.
Kate lives on the edge of a meat-grinder sea on the far eastern coastline of Nova Scotia. She can show you where they used to hang pirates and where you can step barefoot on dead jellyfish for cheap thrills.
Kate, as always, your words send me spinning in beauty, imagination, and memory. Thank you so much for sharing.
Readers, come back tomorrow and all month long to enjoy lots of wonderful moms talking about home life.
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Dry Cleaners Laundries in Clarksville, TN
YP - The Real Yellow PagesSM - helps you find the right local businesses to meet your specific needs. Search results are sorted by a combination of factors to give you a set of choices in response to your search criteria. These factors are similar to those you might use to determine which business to select from a local Yellow Pages directory, including proximity to where you are searching, expertise in the specific services or products you need, and comprehensive business information to help evaluate a business's suitability for you. “Preferred” listings, or those with featured website buttons, indicate YP advertisers who directly provide information about their businesses to help consumers make more informed buying decisions. YP advertisers receive higher placement in the default ordering of search results and may appear in sponsored listings on the top, side, or bottom of the search results page.
Tips & Advice
What is a green dry cleaner?
A green dry cleaner is one that uses solutions other than the longtime industry standard chemical perchlorethylen (perc). The most common method of green dry cleaning uses liquid carbon dioxide as a cleaning solution.
Do all dry cleaners offer alteration services?
The majority of dry cleaners offer alteration services. However, you should not assume that any dry cleaner you walk into will offer onsite alterations or express service or other specific services. Sometimes, not all locations of a dry cleaning chain will have on-site alterations, but will send the garments out to be altered at a partner tailor. In general, it’s always best to call or drop by and inquire about services rather than just showing up with items.
How does wedding dress preservation work?
Wedding dress preservation oftentime uses special cleaning technology to clean and treat the delicate, precious materials. It starts with an assessment, and involves certain steps like spot-treating hem stains. It is also important that the cleaner use virgin solvent that has never come into contact with any impurities. Part of the treatment step involves applying a special protective coating that will safeguard the gown for long periods of time. After the gown has been cleaned and treated, it will be sealed in an airtight box. The protective coating and airtight storage should protect it from the discoloration that often happens to pale-colored garments if they hang in a closet for lengthy periods of time. Wedding dress preservation is a much more expensive process than standard dry cleaning, and may cost $500 or more.
How long does it take to get a garment dry cleaned?
It typically takes 3-4 days to get garments dry cleaned, although just to get one garment may only take 2 days, and can sometimes be express-processed for an additional fee. Certain items require careful handling and take longer--for example, if you’re dropping off a comforter, it may not be ready for 7-10 days.
What are the benefits of dry cleaning?
The benefits of dry cleaning start with the fact that the solvents used in the process are more effective and less prone to damage certain kinds of fabric than standard laundry with hot water and detergent. Dry cleaning is also better at dissolving and removing oil and grease stains, and in general removing any stain that hasn’t set in the fabric. Dry cleaning is also less prone to shrink fabric or cause it to lose color.
Can cotton clothes be dry-cleaned?
Experts generally advise to not dry clean cotton clothing. It is recommended to wash them at home, or simply have them laundered on cold wash if you send all your clothes out.
How does dry cleaning work?
Dry cleaning works by using liquid solvents instead of water and detergent to clean clothes. It is a bit of a misnomer, since the process is not actually dry. The most commonly used liquid is perchlorethylene (known as perc), a colorless, non-flammable chlorocarbon chemical. However, since it is classified as a toxic pollutant and environmental hazard, many dry cleaners have begun to utilize other solvent solutions.
Can a dry cleaner take all stains out?
A dry cleaner does their best to take all stains out, but it’s never 100% certain that they will be able to do so. If a stain has set into the fabric, chances of removing it are slim. Point out heavy stains when you drop off your items, and that way your dry cleaner will be able to pre-treat the stains specifically before dry cleaning, and then do a post-spotting procedure. At drop-off, the dry cleaner should be able to let you know whether the stain looks like it’ll come out.
What can be taken to the dry cleaner?
Fabrics that can, and probably should, be taken to the dry cleaner include leather, suede, real fur, wool, silk, rayon and linen--in general, anything with a lining should be taken to the dry cleaners. Also, delicate or dressy synthetic blends are usually best taken to the dry cleaner for gentle handling. Besides clothes, many people bring bed linens (i.e. comforters) and drapes to the dry cleaner.
DO NOT GET YOUR CLOTHES DRY CLEANED FROM THIS PLACE!!!!! THEY TELL YOU ONE PRICE THEN WHEN YOU GO TO PICK UP YOUR CLOTHES THEY SAID THEY HAD TO DO EXTRA WORK BUT DIDN'T TELL YOU THAT!!!!!! WILL NEVER AND I MEAN NEVER DO BUSINESS WITH THESE PEOPLE!!!!!! I WOULD HAVE GIVIN THEM A ZERO BUT IT WAS ON HERE. VERY VERY BAD BUSINESS
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'A Terrible Beauty' is a unique film that offers a fresh approach to the 1916 Rising in Dublin. It tells the little-known stories of the ordinary Irish Volunteer, British soldier and civilian caught up in the fighting. It is centered on two linked events during that Easter week, the battles of Mount Street Bridge and North King Street, culminating in the massacre of fifteen innocent young men and boys.
Welcome to 1916film.com!
'A Terrible Beauty' is a 90-minute feature docudrama, which takes a unique look at the events of Easter Week 1916 in Dublin. Focusing on the ferocious Battle of Mount Street Bridge and the engagements around Ned Daly's Four Courts garrison, this is the first film to tell the story from three different perspectives, showing the human cost of the fighting on all sides. First hand accounts tell the little-known stories of the 'ordinary' people involved in the Rising; Irish Volunteers, British Soldiers and the innocent civilians caught in the middle. This gives the viewer an up close and personal view of the often brutal and bloody fight which affected the lives of the men and women caught up in the chaos.
Since making the film we have begun a new project which aims to tell more of the lesser-known stories of the 1916 Rising. 'Stories from 1916'aims to shed more light on the many individual accounts of the 'ordinary' men and women involved in the Rising. While working on A Terrible Beauty, we realised that there is a huge wealth of fascinating stories that have never been told. Men and women who played a vital role, not just in Easter week 1916, but also in the War of Independence that followed, have never had their voices heard. With this project we aim to rectify this.
Our weekly podcast looks at the stories of civilians, women, British soldiers, and Irish rebels. Listen below or head to the site to read our articles and watch our mini-docs.
LATEST NEWS
28/03/16 - A new edition of the 'A Terrible Beauty', featuring a brand new cover design is out now! Get your copy today by CLICKING HERE!
23/03/16 - We couldn't be happier with the turnout for our screening in St. Louis last Sunday! The Q&A afterwards turned into a really interesting chat on the Rising. Thanks a million to all who attended the screening and exhibition. Looking forward to the next trip!
08/03/16 - Had an absolutely great day last Saturday! Thanks a million to everyone who came out to watch the screening of 'A Terrible Beauty' and attend the 'Stories from 1916' exhibition.
01/03/16 - Really looking forward to the St. Louis premiere of the film on Sunday March 20th (2.30pm) at the Missouri History Museum. After the show, there will be a Q&A session with producer Dave Farrell and actor Colin D. Farrell. Advance tickets to the show can be bought by CLICKING HERE!
Also on the day, the 'Stories from 1916' team will host their free interactive exhibition at the museum from 10am-5pm. Hope you can make it St. Louisans!
16/02/16 - On Saturday March 5th, the Clontarf Historical Society will host a screening of 'A Terrible Beauty' at the Clasac Building on the Alfie Byrne Road in Clontarf (3pm). Tickets to the show are €8 and can be bought in advance at www.clasac.ie, by emailing [email protected] or phone 01-8338711. After the show, we will be on hand to answer any questions.
Also on the day, the 'Stories from 1916' team will hold an interactive exhibition at the same venue. The exhibition will run all day from 10am-6pm and is free to attend. Hope to see you there!
01/02/16 - Lot's of new screenings are planned over the coming months. Next venue up is the Carnegie Arts Centre in Kenmare on Thursday the 3r of March at 8pm. Keep up to date with all of the latest screenings by CLICKING HERE!
26/01/16 - Great to get a mention on Liveline today! Joe Duffy and our good friend Paul O'Brien were singing our praises as they discussed the merits of RTE's 'Rebellion' series. Thanks so much to both for their ringing endorsements!
01/01/16 - Happy New Year to all! We've had a great 2015 and have had the pleasure of meeting many new friends as we tour the film. Thanks so much to everyone who has supported us, attended a screening or even just got in touch to say that you like what we do. It is very much appreciated by all of us at Tile Media. Let's hope this year's centenary celebrations honour all of the men, women and children who were caught up in the monumental events of 100 years ago. Here's to a great 2016!
17/11/15 - We were delighted to release our latest mini-doc over the weekend. It tells the story of Tommy O'Connor, the IRB's Trans-Atlantic courier during Ireland's revolutionary period. Tommy carried vast sums of money raised in America back to Ireland to fund the revolutionary war and many coded messages between the Irish leadership on either side of the Atlantic. During the Rising , Tommy and his brother Johnny fought under the command of Ned Daly in the Four Courts area of Dublin. This is his story, told by his relatives. The title, "A Courier's Tale", is taken from the book "A Courier's Tale, a biography of Thomas D O'Connor," by his grandson, Tommy Vogt. Check out the video below.
28/10/15 - A Terrible Beauty screened last Sunday as part of the 'Street Stories 1916' events, run by the Stoneybatter & Smithfield People's History Project. It was a great evening, with a really engaging Q&A afterwards, and then a nice pint at the Cobblestone to continue the conversation! Thanks to the Stoneybatter & Smtihfield People's History Project for screening the film and to everyone who came out to watch.
23/10/15 - WE WON AN IFTA AWARD!!! As you can tell, we are very happy to announce that our amazing cameraman, Colm Whelan, took home the 2015 IFTA Award for Best Camera in a television programme, at last night's event. Well done to Colm on a very well deserved award.
16/10/15 - After a great weekend at iBAM in Chicago, we moved onto the Garden State of New Jersey to screen A Terrible Beauty at two community events. The first, last Tuesday, took place at Our Lady of Sorrows Church Hall in Linwood and was hosted by the Irish American Cultural Society of Southern New Jersey. The second, on Wednesday, was hosted by Amergael and took place at the Ocean County Library in Surf City. Many thanks to our hosts for both event and everyone who came out to watch.
13/10/15 - Last weekend, we took A Terrible Beauty and our Stories from 1916 project to the iBAM festival in Chicago's Irish American Heritage Centre. It was a fantastic weekend all round and it was great to be exhibiting the SF1916 project again, after the very successful first exhibition at the Milwaukee Irish Festival last August. Thanks to everyone who stopped by our room for a chat and came out to watch the movie. See you next year!
05/10/15 - On Saturday last, we gave a talk at Pearse Street Library on the challenges of making historical documentaries in Ireland, before screening A Terrible Beauty to a fantastic audience. It was all part of DCC's 2015 Festival of History. Thanks to DCC for inviting us to take part and to everyone who came out for the event.
26/09/15 - Today, we were delighted to screen A Terrible Beauty as part of Fingal County Council's 1916 memorabilia day at the Grand Hotel, Malahide. Thanks to everyone who came out to the screening and Fingal County Council for hosting it.
We'll also be screening at the next memorabilia day in the Fingal CoCo offices in Blanchardstown on Saturday the 6th of November (12-4pm). Hope to see you there!
17/08/15 - Milwaukee Fest 2015!
Dave and Colin have been busy over in Milwaukee! here's just a glimpse of the first few days of their trip - meeting with Ancient Order of Hibernians meeting. Setting up the Stories from 1916 exhibition in the Cultural Village of the festival, Screening of "A Terrible Beauty". They even had to battle with a freak storm during the set-up (See the flooded Tent!) But Over all it seems Dave and Colin had a successful trip and met some great people, photo on the bottom left (L-R) Nick Michael (Deputy Irish Consulate to Chicago), Dave, Colin and Minister of State for the Arts, Heritage and the Gaeltacht Joe McHugh. Plenty More on the Milwaukee Trip to Come!
12/08/15 - Milwaukee Irish Fest Screenings!
Tile Media are mounting a full scale interactive exhibition of the storiesfrom1916.com at the Milwaukee Irish Fest in the USA from the the 13th to the 16th August and will be screening ATB daily in the Volta Cinema in the Cultural Village at the festival.
03/06/15 - Manchester Screening!
Close to home for our next screening at least for ATB writer and director Keith Farrell's! Long time Manchester resident Keith now lives in Sale so does not have far to travel when A Terrible Beauty screens at the Robert Bolt Theatre in the Waterside Centre in Sale at 7.30pm on Monday the 15th June as part of Fest 2015.
06/05/15 - Stories From 1916 Goes live! Stories form 1916 is a Non-Profit Living History Project: After months of preparation the site is finally live. Over the next year we will be talking to relatives and loved ones of those involved in the rising. So far we have published four great pieces - take a look at our completed segment on Tom and Lucy Byrne. You will also see the begining of three more fantastic stories which we will continue to add to over the coming weeks. (Click Here)
09/02/15 - We had a hugely successful screening last night with 'A Terrible Beauty' closing out the 2015 Capital Irish Film Festival in Washington DC. We were delighted to attend what was a sold out show and had a very engaging Q & A session afterwards. Thanks to everyone who showed up and made it so special.
07/02/15 - As part of the festival, Producer Dave Farrell and Project Manager Colin Farrell were part of a video conference session with the film students from James Madison University. It was a really interesting session with some very enthusiastic kids. Hopefully we were able to provide them with some insight into working in the industry.
07/02/15 - We got to present a copy of our DVD to Ambassador Anne Anderson last night at the opening of the 2015 Capital Irish Film Festival in Washington DC. Hope she enjoys it!
22/01/15 - We have just got our second batch of 'A Terrible Beauty' DVD's back from the printers. CLICK HERE to order yours today! Thanks!
01/01/15 - Wishing all our friends and supporters a very Happy New Year!
We expect 2015 to be a very busy year for us and we hope to tell many more of the little known stories of the 1916 Rising with our 'A Terrible Beauty: 1916 - 2016' living history project. You can find out more information about what we have planned on the 'Stories' page of this site.
11/12/14 - We're delighted to announce that we have two more international screenings lined up for early 2015. On Sunday, February 8th 'A Terrible Beauty' has been selected to close the 2015 Capital Irish Film Festival in Washington DC (7pm). Then on Saturday, March 7th the film will screen as part of the 'Secret Histories' series at the Edinburgh Filmhouse (3.20pm).
26/11/14 - Yesterday we were delighted to meet up with some of the family of Patrick Rankin, the only Newry man to take part in the 1916 Rising. We hope to feature Paddy's story as part of the 'living history' project 'A Terrible Beauty: 1916 - 2016' in the new year so keep an eye on the 'Stories' section of the site for updates. You can read Paddy's two BMH Witness Statements, which tell his account of his time fighting for Ireland's freedom, by clicking HERE and HERE. Many thanks to Carol, Joe and Tim for taking the time to meet with us.
In this 'behind the scenes' look at 'A Terrible Beauty' director Keith Farrell and producer Dave Farrell discuss how the stories told in the film evolved.
Trailer for 'A Terrible Beauty'
We need your stories!
The most important aspect of the 'Stories from 1916'project, which grew out of A Terrible Beauty, is the collection of stories related to the ordinary people who took part in the 1916 Easter Rising.
If you or your family have a story to share please participate in the project by telling us using the form below. We'll respond to everyone who submits a story as soon as we can.
**We will NEVERshare your personal information with any third party**
Name *
Name
First Name
Last Name
Email Address *
Your Story
Thank-you for sharing your story and participating in the A Terrible Beauty 1916 - 2016 project. A member of our team will contact you by email in the coming days.
Support the project
Our living history project, 'Stories from 1916' has grown exponentially since it began, putting a severe strain on our resources. To continue to collect and share the many family stories of the ordinary men and women of the 1916 Rising from around the world we need your support.
Currently we don't receive any funding for the project whatsoever. Your donation will be used to continue to tell the little known stories of the ordinary men and women of 1916.
For more information on the project visit: www.storiesfrom1916.com, www.facebook.com/storiesfrom1916 or follow us on Twitter @storiesfrom1916
PRESS SNIPPETS
IRISH CENTRAL - 15/10/14
"A Terrible Beauty is a docu-drama of extraordinary power...this film is so gripping in its cinematography, capturing the claustrophobic atmosphere of urban warfare, and so successfully inventive in its storytelling style that it manages to satisfy on many levels beyond those merely factual."
chicago tribune - 26/09/14
IRISH AMERICAN NEWS - SEPTEMBER 2014
"You won't have seen a better film about the 1916 Easter Rising this Easter, and you won't see one any other Easter...it offered something rare: a completely fresh take on the subject."
Evening Herald - 22/04/14
"...the distinction of Keith Farrell's film is that it is so attentive to it's chosen characters that the viewer genuinely registered both sides of the story."
"[A Terrible Beauty is] a satisfyingly complex and detailed account of what happened during that blood-soaked week."
Irish Independent - 26/04/14
"A Terrible Beauty is a great docudrama...[Tile Films] have created a balanced and gripping film, which deserves an audience."
Leftlion.co.uk - 23/05/14
"...[an] exceptionally well-made docudrama...A Terrible Beauty sets the bar high for the documentaries that are bound to follow over the next few years."
History Ireland Magazine - May/June 2013
"Director Keith Farrell builds the tension...and reveals the human cost of the conflict in a series of compellingly re-staged battle scenes. Moving, balanced and meticulously researched, A Terrible Beauty restores the ordinary soldier to the heart of the story."
Jameson Dublin International Film Festival
"A brilliantly shot drama-documentary about the men and women of the Easter Rising in Dublin in 1916 told from both sides."
Crystal Palace International Film Festival
Latest Audio
Interview from Near FM's 'Lifeline' show on 18th April 2014 with director Keith Farrell and actor Colin D. Farrell who plays 'Frank Shouldice' in 'A Terrible Beauty...'
Interview from Raidió na Life with one of our key contributor's Míchaél O'Doibhilin.
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Wednesday, September 14, 2005
Ante Diem XVIII Kalendas October
The Ludi Romani, the great games in honor of Jupiter (Jove) continued this day and were celebrated through to the 19th.
Drusus, the son of Tiberius, died at Rome this day in 23 AD.
Domitian became emperor this day in 81 AD. He was granted immediate tribunician power.
This was the second day of the Egyptian Feast of Lights, during which Neter images and tombs were brilliantly illuminated all through the night.
September is the 'magical' seventh month (after March).
The Day of the Holy NutIn England, this is the Devil's Nutting Day, or the Day of the Holy Nut. Hazelnuts collected on this day have magical properties. Double nuts (two on a stalk) ward off rheumatism, toothache and the spells of witches. But don't gather them if they're unripe. The hazel is a powerful tree (the tree of wisdom, in Celtic mythos) and gathering unripe nuts can be dangerous.
The story goes that The Devil's Nightcap (there are several hills with this name) near Alcester, in Warwickshire, was formed when the devil was out nutting and met the Virgin Mary. He was so surprised and shocked that he dropped his bag of nuts, which became the hill.
Generally people do not go nutting on any Sunday in Autumn because you might meet Old Nick gathering nuts.
"This day they say is called Holy Rood DayAnd all the youths are now a-nutting gone."
It's interresting to note that Old Nick during the Middle Ages is closely associated with Woten or Odin (of the Norse Mythos). In modern times Old St. Nick or Santa Claus has the same association with Odin. St. Nickolas is one of the patron saints of sailors, and Greek sailors are supposed to bring in their boats on this day. See below.
Holy Rood DayThis is also Holy Rood Day, commemorating the rescue of the relic of the True Cross by Emperor Heraclius of Constantinople when it was carried off by Chosroes II, King of Persia in 614. Rufus (The World Holiday Book), says that historians now believe the Church instituted this feast to replace rites honoring Demeter and Persephone (perhaps the Eleusinian Mysteries?).
Many churches in Britain were dedicated to the Holy Rood or Cross. One at Edinburgh 'became the nucleus of the palace of the Scottish kings. Holyrood Day was one of much sacred observance all through the middle ages. The same feeling led to a custom of framing, between the nave and choir of churches, what was called a rood-screen or rood-loft, presenting centrally a large crucifix, with images of the Holy Virgin and St. John on each side. A winding stair led up to it, and the epistle and gospel were often read from it. Some of these screens still remain, models of architectural beauty; but numbers were destroyed with reckless fanaticism at the Reformation, the people not distinguishing between the objects which had caused what they deemed idolatry and the beautifully carved work which was free from such a charge.
Tickle (Ordinary Time), notes that this holiday was originally observed in September, then moved to May, perhaps to bring it closer to Easter, when the symbol of the cross is most visible. Then the Church reversed its position and moved it back to the 14th of September. Tickle also notes that the Wednesday, Friday and Saturday directly after Holy Cross Day are Ember Days, days devoted to prayers for the clergy.
"Holy-Rood, come forth and shieldUs i' th' city and the field;Safely guard us, now and aye,From the blast that burns by day;And those sounds that us affrightIn the dead of dampish night;Drive all hurtful fiends us fro,By the time the cocks first crow."Robert Herrick; 'The Old Wives' Prayer'
In Greece, this is the day when seamen bring their boats in until April, according to this proverb:
"On the day of the Cross, cross your sails and tie your ropes; rest in harbor. On St. George's Day, rise and set sail again."
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An adult student auditing my class on Detective Fiction wrote elegantly about her new experience in the classroom for The Buffalo News. The article is available at the link below. I would be the “very tolerant professor” referred to in the article.
I was described as very tolerant because of my willingness to read and grade and comment on her assignments. This should have been a given, but of course, it did not reflect the world she grew up in, a world where women were not respected as scholars. And the world we grow up in continues to affect us.
I have a wife, three daughters, two sisters, seven nieces, and seven sister-in-laws covering a wide range of ages, so I think about these things more than many folks. They have faced different amounts of past market discrimination. Simply put, past market discrimination is when the actions of the past limit the pool of appropriate candidates for various careers.
Until women became members of Congress, or held other high ranking political office, it was difficult for them to run for President. Once women were allowed into the military, it took time for them to reach the highest ranks, and they still haven’t really. The first female four-star generals are among us. The first five-star female general remains in the future.
This also affects careers far less high-sounding than president or general. For example, sports-casting. Until CBS invited Phyllis George (a former Miss America) to become an NFL sportscaster in 1975, there simply were no women with that experience. Lesley Visser, more recently Michelle Tafoya, and others followed. But the largest pool of NFL sportscasters are former players and coaches, which excludes women.
While the NHL and the NBA have had preliminary explorations of female players, the NFL has not. However, the NFL has had explorations with a female coach, Jen Welter who had an assistant coaching internship with the Arizona Cardinals, and a female full-time official in Sarah Thomas. There is a growing corps of female NFL sportswriters who may qualify for future sports-casting positions.
This may sound funny, but I look forward to the day when there is a wise and gnarled old female sports-caster commenting on the NFL. Lots of the male sportscasters are handsome. Many more are not. Some such as John Madden and Paul Maguire were fun bigger-than-life characters, and how handsome they were (or were not) was not an issue.
Phyllis George (66), Lesley Visser (62), Michelle Tafoya (51), and Andrea Kremer (56) are aging remarkably well. As a healthy middle-aged man I am appreciative of their appearance. But they haven’t held their positions for so long because of their looks, they’ve had their jobs because they are good at what they do.
I look forward to women who do what John Madden, Al Michaels, and Paul Maguire did, sports-casting into their 70’s, bringing experience, cantankerousness, and fun to the job. And with no concern for their appearance.
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Welcome to Fifth Grade
My name is Kelly Adams. I grew up in Rhode Island, on a river in the woods. I graduated from the University of Pennsylvania with a major in Diplomatic History and a minor in Spanish. I moved to Boston after graduation and worked in Corporate America for 5 years. Then, I went back to school and received my Masters in Education from Tufts University. My first teaching job was in 2nd grade in Massachusetts. I moved to Arlington in 2005 and started teaching 5th grade at Jamestown Elementary School. In 2012 I switched to Ashlawn and love being and Ashlawn Eagle. I enjoy spending time with my family, reading, running and of course teaching!
I am thrilled to be part of the Ashlawn staff. I grew up in a small city in Western Massachusetts. I graduated from the University of New Hampshire with a Bachelor of Science in Communication Disorders and a Master of Education in Elementary Education. Since joining APS, I have also earned an endorsement as a Math Specialist and in Gifted Education. While not at school, I love running, biking, and swimming. I also love spending time with my three boys. We like being outdoors and watching football and hockey together. A book I remember most from my childhood was Where the Red Fern Grows. I love teaching at Ashlawn because of its welcoming feel and sense of community.
I grew up in Arlington and am a product of Arlington Public Schools. I have a Bachelor of Arts in Elementary Education and a Master of Arts in Gifted Education from UNC-Wilmington. I have four children who keep me very busy! I love to read and my favorite book is Bridge To Terabithia. My favorite part of teaching at Ashlawn is our school spirit. It’s great to be an Eagle!
I grew up in neighboring Fairfax County and attended The College of William & Mary for my undergraduate degree. I recently graduated from Teachers College, Columbia University with my Masters in Elementary Inclusive Education. As a native Virginian, I am excited to be back home after a few years in New York City. Outside of the classroom you can find me enjoying time with my family, attending as much community and professional theater as possible, and scouring the public library for more good books to get lost in. While my favorite fiction genres are fantasy and mystery, I love the children’s books Because of Mr. Terupt, Last Stop on Market Street, and anything by Jacqueline Woodson. This year I am looking forward to building community with my students, their families, and fellow staff to create an environment where everyone reaches their fullest potential as readers, writers, and global citizens!
Hi everyone! My name is Jennifer Lifland and I am super excited to be joining the Ashlawn staff this year on the 5th grade team! I love teaching 5th grade students and am excited to start my 7th year with my favorite age group! I am originally am from Morristown, NJ and made my way to Virginia by way of JMU, GO DUKES! I love to travel, run, and read in my free time, but my biggest hobby is being a HUGE Washington Capitals fan! I am looking forward to getting to know everyone! 🙂
With over 30 years experience in APS spanning every grade K-8, I am still very passionate about teaching! I am dually certified in special education (pre-K through 12) and general education (grades 3-6) with a Bachelors (BS) in Special Education from JMU (Go Dukes!) and a Masters (MA) in Curriculum and Instruction from Virginia Tech. I enjoy cooking, knitting/crochet, walking, reading, and following sports, but most of all keeping up with my own 2 kids, Marie and David. A favorite book remains The Wonderful Wizard of Oz by L. Frank Baum as I still remember being rapt as a first grader when Miss Millard read it to our class. The best moments in teaching are when students notice their own growth, spiraling them to leaps of increased effort and achievement.
I am a special education teacher here at Ashlawn. My favorite part of being at Ashlawn is the amazing community support between students, staff, and families. I received my bachelors degree in Consumer Journalism at the University of Georgia and received my masters in Special Education: Learning Disabilities at American University in Washington DC. My favorite childhood book was Are You My Mother by Dr. Seuss. My whole family thought it was so funny, and I enjoyed reading it at night with my mom!
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Thursday, October 28, 2010
The Temple of Set by Michael A. Aquino
The Temple of Set is one of the most famous, dangerous and secret organizations of those who call themselves Satanists. Founded in 1975 by Michael Aquino in San Francisco, its initial membership came from the Church of Satan (C.o.S) founded by Anton LaVey; the split came as a result of members who felt there was something real and important about the magic they were exploring.
There is a great difference between The Temple of Set and the Church of Satan. The C.o.S use the names Satanist and Satan symbolically. They do not believe that a real Satan exists. They use it as a way to draw attention and to mock Christianity. The Temple of Set (called Setians), believe that a real form of Satan exists called " The Prince of Darkness". They call him "Set” the TRUE Prince of Darkness". Satan is the name given to the Prince of Darkness in the Bible. Set was/is, the Egyptian god of death and the underworld.
The Prince of Darkness has been represented by a large variety of gods and spirits throughout history. Set, Odhinn, Loki, Mercury, Prometheus, and Coyote are just a few names called the Prince of Darkness. One aspect of the Prince of Darkness held by many Setians is that the Prince of Darkness is self-created. Setians believe the Book of Coming Forth by Night to be the literal word of their God Set. Set, who as their divine "Heavenly Father" supposedly came to save the day and "ordained" the Temple of Set to supercede the Church of Satan.
The Satanic religion promises to raise the individual to personal godhood, free from enslavement to any other "God" or gods.
The members of the temple of set are very intelligent. They do not let just anyone in. You must prove yourself worthy to be a member. Philosophy is the basis of the organization and those who are unable to keep up with it are not allowed in. There are several levels one can acquire and the higher you go the more secrets you learn. They take oaths of secrecy and that is why so little it truly known about the internal workings. Michael Aquino was an army Lt. Col and worked in the CIA also. Makes you wonder if he used his position to spy and check out people in the organization.
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Bagged my first (intentional) DayZ kill. Friend got ambushed in a pub/bar/cafe upstairs so I went round the back and saw the shooter by a window, looting my friend. Shotgun to the chest and I figured we were even.
Dude must have been pissed though. M4 with scope and silencer, with around 150-200 rounds on him. My friend said the guy had said sorry before opening fire so I have no regrets.
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Dozens of adult companies are using "copyright trolling" tactics to supplement their income, and Larry Flynt's Hustler is one of them. The company recently demanded a 600 euros settlement from a Finnish Tor exit-node operator, who also happens to be the Vice-President of a local Pirate Party branch.
Faced with the growing threat of online file-sharing, Hustler committed to “turning piracy into profit” several years ago.
The company has not been very active on this front in the United States, but more so in Europe. In Finland for example Hustler is sending out settlement demands for hundreds of euros to alleged pirates.
A few days ago one of these letters arrived at the doorstep of Sebastian Mäki, identifying the IP-address through which he offers a Tor exit-node. According to Hustler the IP-address had allegedly transferred a copy of Hustler’s “This Ain’t Game Of Thrones XXX.”
The letter is sent by lawfirm Hedman Partners who urge Mäki to pay 600 euros ($800) in damages or face worse.
However, Mäki has no intention to pay up. Besides running a Tor exit-node and an open wireless network through the connection, he also happens to be Vice-President of a local Pirate Party branch. As such, he has a decent knowledge of how to counter these threats.
“All we can do at the moment is fight against these trolls, and they are preying on easy victims, who have no time nor energy to fight and often are afraid of the embarrassment that could follow, because apparently porn is still a taboo somewhere,” Mäki tells TorrentFreak.
So instead of paying up, the Tor exit-node operator launched a counter attack. He wrote a lengthy reply to Hustler’s lawyers accusing them of blackmail.
“According to Finnish law, wrongfully forcing someone to dispose of their financial interests is known as blackmail. Threatening to make known one’s porn watching habits unless someone coughs up money sounds to me like activities for which you can get a sentence.”
Mäki explains that an IP-address is not necessarily a person and that Hustler’s copyright trolling is likely to affect innocent Internet users. Because of this, he has decided to report these dubious practices to the police.
“I am also concerned that other innocent citizens might not have as much time, energy, or wealth to fight back. Because your actions have the potential to cause so much damage to innocent bystanders, I find it morally questionable and made a police report.”
Whether the police will follow up on the complaint remains to be seen, but Hustler will have to take its hustling elsewhere for now. They clearly targeted the wrong person here, in more ways than one.
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Pages
Saturday, June 15
Baby: Be Careful this Dengue Season
My daughter's been having an on and off fever for four days now. I've been controlling her fever with paracetamol since it started. When the third day of fever struck, I had to bring her to the pediatrician to just make sure it wasn't dengue fever, which is caused by mosquitoes and is prevalent in tropical countries like the Philippines during the rainy season.
Her pediatrician ruled out dengue because Allie doesn't seem bothered with her fever. Her disposition is still the same -- a happy little baby, magulo, malikot, sayaw ng sayaw. He said that if Allie had dengue, then she would feel miserable even if she doesn't have a high temperature. Allie still plays and runs and dances when in between high temps. Her temperature never went above 39C. The interval of her on and off fever gets better every day. I'm glad that we went to the pediatrician because he got to check if it was an infection. No daw. The doctor said it was viral; just let it run its course, control the fever and it should go away after the fifth day. We're now on our fourth, and I just wish the virus would go away. But if she still has fever by tomorrow night, I have to let her pediatrician know.
Here is Allie after I gave her paracetamol. She's enjoying her plastic turtleshell while watching on her tablet. No fever.
Unfortunately, there is no vaccine to prevent dengue. The best way to prevent it is to not get bitten by infected mosquitoes. Here are some ways to avoid mosquito bites:
1. Drive down mosquito breeding grounds. During rainy season in the Philippines, the mosquito population really goes up because mosquitoes usually breed in stagnant water. One way to reduce mosquito population in your home is to get rid of those places where they breed. Remove old tires, pots and pans that collect rain outside your home. Make sure water drains properly in and around your home.
Singapore's National Environment Agency has this checklist, as well as some useful illustrations:
How to prevent dengue if you're living in a condominium
How to prevent dengue if you're living in a landed property
2. Apply mosquito repellent. DEET and picaridin are synthetic chemicals made to repel mosquitoes. Natural mosquito repellents include oil of lemon eucalyptus and oil of citronella. According to the FDA, never use products containing DEET on infants below two months, and, dig this folks, oil of lemon eucalyptus they said is not suitable to kids less than 3 years old. So make sure you read the cautionary texts on your insect repellents okay? You can also ask your pediatrician.
Hmm, so those mosquito patches that are DEET-free? They have oil of lemon eucalyptus, and the FDA says it's not for kids under 3 years of age. Oh my goodness, I've been using those things on Allie. I should stop; besides, they don't work that well anyway. Allie still got bites.
Although I know DEET is the most effective mosquito repellent, I am still iffy about using it on Allie. If you want to use DEET on your kids, make sure the DEET content does not go above 30%. Picaridin, the other synthetic mosquito repellent, works as well as DEET and better tolerated on the skin and fabric-friendly too. By the way, I read from What to Expect that the following things don't work: wristbands soaked in chemical repellents, pills with garlic or vitamin B1, ultrasonic devices, bird or bat houses, and bug zappers.
3. Place mosquito-repelling plants in your garden. Citronella, rosemary, catnip, lemongrass, peppermint, marigold and basil are some mosquito-repelling plants that you can grow. They smell good too.
4. Make a mosquito trap. If you're up for it, you can also channel your inner MacGyver and DIY a mosquito trap like this from Green Planet 4Kids. Head on there for the step-by-step instructions. Very easy to do. I'm sure your kids will enjoy making it with you.
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As a visionary leader, mentor and strong advocate of the Industrial Hygiene/Occupational Health (IH/OH) profession globally, Stephen C. Davis recognized the importance of investing in the next generation of IH/OH professionals. To honor his legacy and provide opportunities for the profession’s future leadership, the Stephen C. Davis Future Leadership Institute Memorial Grant has been established.
The AIHA Future Leaders Institute is specifically tailored to provide targeted training and professional development opportunities for industrial hygienists in the first 15 years of their professional careers in industrial hygiene and related disciplines.
Tax Deductible
This grant is made possible via individual and/or corporate donations. Donations to AIHF are tax deductible, as provided by law.
AIHF
The mission of the American Industrial Hygiene Foundation (AIHF) is to advance the profession by awarding scholarships for students in industrial hygiene and related disciplines, and funding training/professional development opportunities for industrial hygienists in the first 15 years of their professional careers in industrial hygiene and related disciplines.
Making a Donation is Easy
To make a donation, simply complete the donation form and return it via mail, email, or fax to the attention of Laurie Mutdosch, Manager, AIHF. Please note… credit card payments cannot be accepted via email.
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Moto Z Play is real, see these photos
When Motorola launched Moto Z and Moto Z Force in June this year, another phone was doing the rounds of internet. Although in the background and without an official word, Moto Z Play has been rumoured for quite some time now. Now there are a couple of new photos posted on Reddit and Instagram, that claim to be of the Moto Z Play.
The latest photos look quite similar to the earlier leaks and also closely share the design with the Moto Z and Moto Z Force. The only major visible differences are a glass back panel and the Moto logo above the display. Due to the logo's placement, the Z Play also look more symmetrical than it pricier siblings.
The earlier leaked photos had shown an identical phone in black colour.
Both the sets of images show the MotoMod connectors at the bottom of the back panel, which confirms that it will also be compatible with the modular design elements.
According to several reports, the Moto Z Play will have a 5.5-inch display with 1080p resolution. The phone has been rumoured to come with Snapdragon 625 along with 3GB of RAM. The Z Play will come with 64GB of internal storage.
On the back, the Moto Z Play will carry a 16-megapixel camera and on the front, it will have a 5-megapixel camera. The phone will be powered by a 3,500mAh battery and run on Android 6.0 Marshmallow.
Earlier in a July, an import listing on Zauba showed that the phone has already arrived in India. Another report showed a similar listing for the budget phone, Moto E3 . It wouldn't be surprising if the company decides to launch both the phones in coming weeks in India.
Motorola is yet to announce the Z lineup of smartphones in India.
Do You Like This Story? Awesome! Now share the story Too bad. Tell us what you didn't like in the comments
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Talking Football Lingo as the Super Bowl Approaches
January 28, 2014
With the Super Bowl just around the corner, our own Ben Zimmer talked to Seattle's KUOW about the origins of some football language. Some of the terms, like "the 12th man" and "the Legion of Boom," have special resonance in Seattle, home of the Super Bowl-bound Seahawks.
Just like learning acronyms at a new workplace, catching on to the Seahawks’ lexicon can be daunting for the uninitiated. Ben Zimmer, linguist and self-described “word nerd,” helps us break down the terms that are flying around as often as a 12th Man flag.
Don’t feel bad if you’re a bit behind: Players have to learn these terms too since nicknames and lingos can be specific to a team or vary between teams. The term “Omaha” for the Indianapolis Colts could mean something very different than how the Denver Broncos use it.
“All of these code words and codes that hide other codes are extremely complicated. At the same time, they have to be transparent enough for players to understand and the opposing players can’t be in on it,” Zimmer said on KUOW's The Record.
Pigskin
Sometimes the ball, sometimes the game, the term pigskin dates back to 1894, when the football really was made out of pig skin.
“Hut, Hut Hike!”
Here, quarterbacks are borrowing from another type of team leader: military drill sergeants. “Hut” was a useful syllable for accent – short and sharp – for military marching cadences and has been used since WWII. It can also be easily overheard over a distance, which is particularly important if the opposing fans are trying to drown out your commands.
“You can hear it clearly over a distance so that’s helpful if you’re a quarterback just as it would be for a drill sergeant leading a march," Zimmer explained.
“Sam, Mike, Will”
The three men in this phrase refers to a 4-3 defensive alignment, where four linemen are on the line of scrimmage and three linebackers behind them. “Sam” is the strong side linebacker, “Mike” is the middle and “Will” is the weak side. Interesting historical fact: the names used to be women’s names in the 1950s.
12th Man
If you’re in Seattle you’ve seen this number looming everywhere recently: produce displays, on the sides of buildings or on the daily attire of your peers. However, it’s an adopted term for the city. The phrase is trademarked by Texas A&M, and the Seahawks pay an annual licensing fee to use it. The school originally came up for the term dating back to the 1920s when one of the fans actually suited up to play.
However, just because the Seahawks fans weren’t the originals, it is a long-standing tradition in Seattle. “Seahawks fans have been using that [term] back since the days in the Kingdome, back in the 1980s, when they first got this reputation for being extremely noisy and all that crowd noise helped out the team,” Zimmer said.
“Legion Of Boom”
Legion of Boom is a creation of the Seahawks. It’s a nickname for the defensive line and is a play on DC Comics’ Legion of Doom. “When Richard Sherman used it in his notorious post-game interview after the conference championship, he shortened it to just 'LOB.' But people outside of Seattle might not have been very familiar with that expression and some people even thought he was referring to [the retail brand] LL Bean,” Zimmer said.
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David Bates Photo will be closed from March 31th through April 8th. Orders placed through the online galleries will be processed in the order received starting on Monday, April 10th. This also applies to contact form submissions, emails and voice messages.
Sorry for any inconvenience this may cause and thank you for your patience.
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Acknowledging that there is no publiic good to have you walking around with 30 round clips and that the tradeoff of you getting off on the thrill of that just might not be worth the danger of same maniac using the same to slaughter people.
columbia wrote:Acknowledging that there is no publiic good to have you walking around with 30 round clips and that the tradeoff of you getting off on the thrill of that just might not be worth the danger of same maniac using the same to slaughter people.
I do not agree that there is no public good to “30 round clips.” I do not “get off” on carrying a firearm. I do not agree with any of your premises. In fact, I believe that so-called assault weapons cannot be banned under Heller because that case held that the Second Amendment protects the ownership and possession of guns “typically possessed by law-abiding citizens for lawful purposes,” and in fact millions of semi-automatic rifles are owned by law-abiding citizens for lawful purposes. Moreover, while the Court in Heller did say that “nothing in our opinion should be taken to cast doubt on longstanding prohibitions on the possession of firearms by felons and the mentally ill, or laws forbidding the carrying of firearms in sensitive places such as schools and government buildings, or laws imposing conditions and qualifications on the commercial sale of arms,” that does not mean that a gun ban would be constitutional as a “reasonable regulation,” as otherwise the Court would have held that the District of Columbia’s ban on handguns was such a reasonable regulation. An exception cannot swallow the rule.
columbia wrote:Based on your posting history on the subject, it seems to rise to the level of a fetish.Maybe it's not and you just have a PR problem like the NRA?
I completely and vehemently object to this.
You clearly aren't a guy guy. That's fine, I have no basic quarrel with that. But you are projecting your viewpoint on to Shyster's words and coming away with a completely ill-informed view.
People who like guns - who enjoy collecting them, who admire them as works of art and engineering, who choose to wear them on their bodies as implements of defense - do not worship guns. They do not get together every first Thursday of the month to masturbate over the newest issue of Guns & Ammo. They do not fantasize about guns. They view guns ad a tool, nothing more. Some - the overwhelming minority - use them as implements of fear and terror. But the vast majority - I'd guess well over 90% of gun owners - take the responsibility that comes with gun ownership as almost sacred. I don't believe in god, but if he/she does exist I'm pretty sure they'd want me to keep the muzzle pointed downrange and to check the breach every time someone handed me a gun.
Honestly, have you ever been a part of a gun safety or shooting class? I cannot tell you the number of times instructors press certain points home..... ALL GUNS ARE LOADED.... DO NOT point a gun at something you aren't willing and able to destroy....
And I think it is partly because of this basic element of not getting it that results in many of the 'pro' and 'con' advocates simply speaking past each other. The cons can't get past the seeming absurdity of 30-round magazines, and the pros can't understand why anyone would question why a lawful citizen wouldn't want a 30-round magazine available to defend their sovereignty. (I guess that latter point might be more accurately characterized as wondering why it's anyone else's business what one thinks is appropriate in determining how to protect themselves.)
You seem eager to call out certain elements that illustrate either an inherent bias or a fundamental lack of understanding of just how seriously most gun owners approach their responsibilities. But it's definitely one or the other of those two. The former is, of course, out of bounds. The later, if that be the case, is..... alterable.
Pitt87 wrote:Just looked at my first paycheck of the new year an wanted thank our President for the pay cut today. No tax increases on middle class didn't even last long enough to be inaugurated for a second term.
What short memories people have. The GOP House was against extending the payroll tax holiday to 2012 but it made it through eventually and neither the Democrats or the GOP had plans to extend it in 2013.
No need to be indirect, but you should be sure you fully understand my comment before you assume I was referring to the payroll tax... I consider myself a pretty meticulous tax planner, so I was prepared for a check-based increase. What I was not prepared for was virtually no consideration in the middle-income rates. It is this administrations' tax policy, that, over the last 4 years, has targeted those that they claim to protect. Payroll tax is one component of the total tax that Barack Obama committed both before and after the election -- check the tape, to use his words -- to rallying his party around the in support of the middle class' 'share', only to completely abandon them in negotiations. As a result, revenues are up, spending cuts have been suspended, and everyone with a job, even those that are careful tax planners like myself, have a nice wet chunk taken out of their gross pay with little recourse to make up the deficit.... at least those that have higher rates aren't impacted until their first quarter payment is due...
Publicly, he espoused a commitment to cutting total taxes on 160 million Americans in the 'middle class', yet he managed to levy an immediate cashflow out of those paychecks immediately, while artfully neglecting to resolve the tax issue for the group that can least likely absorb a 2% tax hike.
I'm having a hard time understanding which tax you are saying has gone up on you.
tifosi77 wrote:And I think it is partly because of this basic element of not getting it that results in many of the 'pro' and 'con' advocates simply speaking past each other. The cons can't get past the seeming absurdity of 30-round magazines, and the pros can't understand why anyone would question why a lawful citizen wouldn't want a 30-round magazine available to defend their sovereignty. (I guess that latter point might be more accurately characterized as wondering why it's anyone else's business what one thinks is appropriate in determining how to protect themselves.).
So where does it stop?Are you cool with the guy next door having a bazooka? Maybe a tank or an armed drone patrolling the neighborhood?
You clearly aren't a guy guy. That's fine, I have no basic quarrel with that. But you are projecting your viewpoint on to Shyster's words and coming away with a completely ill-informed view.
People who like guns - who enjoy collecting them, who admire them as works of art and engineering, who choose to wear them on their bodies as implements of defense - do not worship guns. They do not get together every first Thursday of the month to masturbate over the newest issue of Guns & Ammo. They do not fantasize about guns. They view guns ad a tool, nothing more. Some - the overwhelming minority - use them as implements of fear and terror. But the vast majority - I'd guess well over 90% of gun owners - take the responsibility that comes with gun ownership as almost sacred. I don't believe in god, but if he/she does exist I'm pretty sure they'd want me to keep the muzzle pointed downrange and to check the breach every time someone handed me a gun.
Honestly, have you ever been a part of a gun safety or shooting class? I cannot tell you the number of times instructors press certain points home..... ALL GUNS ARE LOADED.... DO NOT point a gun at something you aren't willing and able to destroy....
And I think it is partly because of this basic element of not getting it that results in many of the 'pro' and 'con' advocates simply speaking past each other. The cons can't get past the seeming absurdity of 30-round magazines, and the pros can't understand why anyone would question why a lawful citizen wouldn't want a 30-round magazine available to defend their sovereignty. (I guess that latter point might be more accurately characterized as wondering why it's anyone else's business what one thinks is appropriate in determining how to protect themselves.)
You seem eager to call out certain elements that illustrate either an inherent bias or a fundamental lack of understanding of just how seriously most gun owners approach their responsibilities. But it's definitely one or the other of those two. The former is, of course, out of bounds. The later, if that be the case, is..... alterable.
Just thought this needed to be repeated. I think tif makes a very eloquent case here as to why gun owners take such offense to being demonized like this.
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Skyrim Falskaar mod download proves PC superiority
Console owners of Skyrim may have accepted that their adventure has officially come to an end with Bethesda’s confirmation that they won’t be supporting the game any more with regards to more DLC expansions after Dragonborn. For PC players though, it seems that the party is only just beginning. The highly anticipated Falskaar mod has just been released, a massive expansion that has been one year in the making and it’s now available to download for absolutely nothing.
This isn’t your average mod either. Oh no, Falskaar has been created by 19 year old Alexander J. Velicky who hopes that his effort will lead to securing an actual job with Bethesda as a level designer. To give you an idea of what has gone into Falskaar, it’s better you check out the official download page here over at Skyrim Nexus.
Falskaar features over 20 hours of extra gameplay, including what’s considered the icing on the cake – a dungeon called Watervine Chasm that apparently takes around two hours to complete. In terms of size, the creator has said that Falskaar is roughly the size of 2-3 Skyrim holds – so imagine the likes of Whiterun, The Rift, and Falkreath combined. Staggering.
There are new spells, items, dragon shouts to learn but perhaps the most impressive thing of all, is that Falskaar contains an fully original voice cast from actors and actresses – you’ll see an example of the level of professionalism for the voice quality by watching the teaser trailer below.
It looks like the ultimate Skyrim mod that PC players have been waiting for and an unrivaled example why it is always good to play Elder Scrolls games on PC. It goes without saying that there is no chance that this will be available on Xbox 360 or PS3 – a fan made expansion offering over 20 hours of new content, for free is absolutely fantastic either way you look at it.
Head to the link above for the full lowdown and instructions on how to download. If you are already enjoying Falskaar, let us know your initial impressions of it below – how good is it compared to Dragonborn and Dawnguard?
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A gentle <b>deodorant</b> formulated to regulate perspiration throughout the day, fragranced with the unique notes of <b>Acqua Di Parm</b>a Colonia Essenza. Provides an immediate freshness that lasts all day long. This alcohol-based formula is designed to respect the skin and ensure an effective and long-lasting deodorising action.
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What causes sexual attraction in humans. The Connection between Scent and Sexual Attraction.
Feb 14, - Human biology and evolutionary psychology has some answers. Pheromones are known to be involved in sexual attraction in animals, and. Jul 12, - Reasons for sexual attraction range from brain biology to fashions. physical attraction for each other,we would know a lot more about human. Sep 25, - Science explains why you're sexually attracted to certain people, and totally turned off by others.
Video by theme:
THE SECRET OF SEXUAL ATTRACTION (Documentary)
Feb 14, - Human biology and evolutionary psychology has some answers. Pheromones are known to be involved in sexual attraction in animals, and. Jul 12, - Reasons for sexual attraction range from brain biology to fashions. physical attraction for each other,we would know a lot more about human. Sep 25, - Science explains why you're sexually attracted to certain people, and totally turned off by others.
Booming causes us to be evolved to one side more than another. But women tend to be awfully or sexually attracted to men with strong. May 18, vauses We've over for women that time—and not far benevolent specific, Tamil actress in sexy saree we record about prepared attraction in folk, it's tempting to facilitate. 10 Rider-Backed Downstairs for Definite Attraction That you should mechanism your curves—for reasons more than what causes sexual attraction in humans fondness. According to The Holy.
A recent study suggests that women may subconsciously capitalize on this by dressing in red when they are most fertile. The theory is that women might be sniffing out men's major histocompatibility complex MHC , a group of genes that effect the immune system. They influence gonadal hormone secretion, for example, follicle maturation in the ovaries in females and testosterone and sperm production in males.
Faithfulness and trustworthiness are very important to both men and women. Many studies have been done on MHC and scent preference, but Gildersleeve says evidence about whether it impacts partner choice is still mixed. Want to learn more about Sex and Psychology?
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World
Earth has entered a new age, the Aquarian Age, which implies major changes for both humanity and nature. The Piscean Age was the end of man’s emotional development. This period has resulted in the development of emotional willing, emotional thinking and emotional actions. This has caused sufferings for humanity and problems of different kinds. During the New Age, the Aquarian ...
The world, society is heading towards nuclear war, increased violence, anarchy, disintegration of society. If nothing is done in the nearest future, our current as well as past civilizations will be but memory. Most of our present civilization will be destroyed by wars, natural disasters, epidemics of diseases and more. This will hit everyone, regardless of material status, political or ...
The “Spiritual Master Teacher – Unifier” (Saint Germain) is initiating the new era to those who are to survive the endeavors that are now waiting. Massive changes are imminent for earth, for all countries and communities where man’s inner nature and nature revolt which gives man the choice – to work on his emancipation or perish in what is to ...
Dr. Sandor A Markus urges all people, leaders, decision-makers in the world to connect and interact with the “International Academy for Global Human Culture”, the AIC’s eight-point program to create a better world and a more humane society to live in. This call is based on the experience that Sandor A Markus had in the Hungarian Great Plains in 1953 ...
Most of the more than 7 billion people on Earth today are threatened by destruction unless they choose the path of the Soul (Spirit) instead of the Mind’s. (2014-01-02) The Earthly civilization is on the brink of a global disaster if it does not change path. The intellectually related thought structure that characterizes religion, politics, leadership, education, societal development, individual ...
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Order Karelia Slims Online
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Larry Gerson
obituaries are appearing in the following:
Published in The Palm Beach Post from June 26 to June 29, 2013
GERSON, Larry A.Larry A. Gerson, 59, of Jupiter, passed away on June 22, 2013. Larry graduated from North Shore High School in 1971. He graduated from the University of Florida in 1975. Larry...
Read Obituary
Published online on June 24, 2013 courtesy of Dignity Memorial.
Larry A. Gerson 59, of Jupiter passed away on June 22, 2013. Larry graduated from North Shore High School in 1971. He graduated from the University of Florida in 1975. Larry worked as a Certified...
Read Obituary
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10 huge blunders of the current generation
It's been a great generation for solid gaming, but there's been a lot of confusing decisions made by plenty of publishers, developers, and hardware makers. Here are 10 big blunders that had a hand in defining the current generation.
'Xbox 360s around the world were failing at an insane rate, and it became clear that Microsoft had bungled quality control during the manufacturing of the first model of Xbox 360 units.'
MS didn't make a mistake with their quality control, that would suggest they were not aware of the technical issues of Xbox360. Fact is they knew the hardware was flawed before it even shipped for retail.
Yup. The first run of Xbox 360's had a reported 68% defect rate during testing. Then that was lowered to around 40%. Then around 30% with the Elite. Microsoft has claimed that the S model has remedied the RRoD issue, but in reality the defect rate is still around 25%. That's horrible. The acceptable defect rate across most hardware industries is usually between 1 to 3%. 5% is sometimes acceptable, but never more than that. That should put things into perspective and make people understand just how badly Microsoft fucked up with the 360. It's a completely unreliable piece of hardware.
And while the 360 has sold more than 70m units, I wonder just how many of those were purchased by previous 360 owners replacing broken consoles? Most of my friends have 360's, and each of them have been through at least 2 purchases, some of them more. Same with a lot of the people I met online on XBL.
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Pages
Saturday, July 23, 2011
Meet the 2nd New Author!
Just as what I said in the previous entry, the other author will be soonly introduced. So, here it is!
This time, it's a GUY! XD
He can speak, translate, and understand Korean language. :)
and for me, he's really motivated to do his responsibilities as an author and admin.
He is Min. :D
He's not really used in blogging as much as the other new author do, but he's willing to learn everything.
I also asked him to write something about himself.. Here it is.. :D
Hello everyone~! This is Min, I am 24 years old. And I am the new administrator of the Hello! Project fanpage on Facebook and blogger for Chuu! Sugoi! Idol blog!
And like I said before on my Requirements for being an Administrator, I just love Hello! Project~! I love their style of music and the each members.
And also, like Miu-san who became admin. right before me, from now on I'll be helping out with updates related to Hello! Project.
Even though I don't know a thing about Blog and still learning about Facebook's functions, I will try my best to upload or updates news about Hello! Project."
Please welcome our two brand new authors Miu and Min.
Hope You guys will enjoy being part of the CCS team.
BANZAI~!!
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Four Vietnamese killed, injured in factory explosion in RoK
This photo posted on the website of Foosung Precision Industry Co. shows its fluoropolymer lined products (Photo: Yonhap) Hanoi (VNA) – Two Vietnamese were killed and two other workers also from Vietnam were injured in an explosion that occurred at a chemical plant in Wonju city, the east of the Republic of Korea (RoK), on November 10. The RoK’s Yonhap News Agency reported that the incident took place at around 9:45am (Korea time), sending out plumes of black smoke from the plant of the Foosung Precision Industry Co., which makes fluoropolymer lined tanks, pipes and valves. A worker in his 20s suffered third-degree burns to his face, while the other surviving worker in his 30s had second-degree burns to his legs and a broken left leg, a fire-fighting official said, adding that the two dead were taken to Wonju Medical Centre. An official of the Wonju Severance Christian Hospital said treatment was underway for the injured but did not provide any further details on their medical conditions. An official of the Foosung Precision Industry declined to give any details of the incident. This company said its fluoropolymer products are used in semiconductors, petrochemical engineering, food processing, pharmacy, papermaking and metal treatment, according to Yonhap.-VNA
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File Details
File Title: .Effects of water quality and surface temperature on the scaling characteristics of cooling tower waterEffects of water quality and surface temperature on the scaling characteristics of cooling tower water
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microsoft.public.internetexplorer.general
I noted that the performance is not as good as IE7 due to the following
reasoins and need futher clarification:
1. Whenever I launch IE8, my Norton Phising Protection is turn off and need
to fix it repeatedly. I still want the Norton protection. What must I do to
fix it ?
2. In IE7 when I click once at the V button after the URL,all my previous
URL would appear. This is not so in IE8. The responsiveness is very
uncertain, sometime I need to click up to 5 time only the previous URL would
appear. My I know how to get things right?
3 I noted that the font is very much thinner than IE7 and less clear. Is it
due to Beta Version?
Web Interface:http://www.microsoft.com/communities...xplorer. beta
- - -
1. In Internet Explorer> Safety> SmartScreen Filter, is SmartScreen filter
turned on? It's common for third-party programs/add-ons/features to be
incompatible with a beta product (IE8.) I would disable the Norton Phishing
Filter and use IE8's SafetyScreen.
2. Is AutoComplete for web addresses enabled from Internet Options> Content>
AutoComplete? If it is, there's nothing more you can do. Try clicking once
and waiting. The slow, inconsistent operation of the Address Bar drop-down
list will probably be fixed in later releases.
"Mr. Low" <[email protected]> wrote in message
news:[email protected]...
> Hello,
>
> I just upgraded from IE7 to IE8 Beta2.
>
> I noted that the performance is not as good as IE7 due to the following
> reasoins and need futher clarification:
>
> 1. Whenever I launch IE8, my Norton Phising Protection is turn off and
need
> to fix it repeatedly. I still want the Norton protection. What must I do
to
> fix it ?
>
> 2. In IE7 when I click once at the V button after the URL,all my previous
> URL would appear. This is not so in IE8. The responsiveness is very
> uncertain, sometime I need to click up to 5 time only the previous URL
would
> appear. My I know how to get things right?
>
> 3 I noted that the font is very much thinner than IE7 and less clear. Is
it
> due to Beta Version?
>
> I hope somebody could help on the above.
>
> Thanks
>
> Low
>
>
> A36B58K641
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Goes To Sleep Book Review
Kasia Dudziuk is the co-founder of this brilliant personalised childrens’ book “Goes To Sleep”.
Kasia Dudziuk has over 10 years experience as a designer and illustrator. She has more than 70 published titles under her name. Her expertise varies from working with character brands such as Winnie-the-Pooh and Mr. Men.
Truly Personalised. These “Goes to Sleep” series of children’s book give you the chance to let your child be in the very middle of such a wonderful bedtime story.
Logan completely loved the fact that the book was for him and that he was the ‘main character.’
I love the little quote on back of the first page! It makes you realise how important family time actually is with your little ones.
What’s great about these ‘Go To Sleep’ stories is that you are able to personalise them to your child!
That’s right, this book allows you or your child to go wild. You can choose your own character for a boy or girl, go crazy with any colour hair and skin tone. Then you can also select your child’s favourite animal to feature in this magical story.
Making their bedtime adventure something unique.
More about the book
“Goes to Sleep” book is based on leading research by Children’s Sleep Specialists from the Children’s Sleep Charity, Harvard Medical School and the Royal North Shore Hospital in Sydney Australia.
Gathering all the best research and advice, Kasia Dudziuk tested this ‘Goes To Sleep’ book with hundreds of parents and their children.
By making this book an essential part of a child’s routine, helping both children and parents get the best possible nights sleep.
I couldn’t wait to read this with Logan, he’s not the best of sleepers and can sometimes be a tinker to put to bed never mind getting him to sleep. Nor can he actually lay still for more than 5 minute he’s a very active child, so I will try ANYTHING to help at bedtime!
Not only does this book create a personalised Bedtime Routine that encapsulates all the best possible practices, but it also has some of the most gorgeous illustrations and rhymes in helping you enjoy your evenings with your child.
My Thoughts
I have loved reading this story book to Logan to help get him settled.
The first night I read this story, Logan would gather some teddies and pretend that they was part of the story too and followed each page and there adventure. This was lovely to see.
While reading it through, Logan like that each animal had their own name and said ‘they suited that name’. He especially loved ‘Ellie’ the Elephant as he also has an Elephant called Ella which was actually mine!
Logan was so intrigued to which animal would be on the next page and what there adventure would be to help ‘Logan’ fall asleep. He also thought that his little ‘dream cloud’ was ‘very cute’
I would recommend this story book to any Mammy and Daddy. It is a very good and easy read for your child to enjoy being read to or read themselves before they go to sleep.
GIVEAWAY
We have a lovely giveaway for you to win. The author and illustrator have kindly given us two books to giveaway.
You will have the chance to win one of two personalised ‘Go To Sleep’ books.
If you would like a chance to win, just enter the Rafflecopter giveaway form below.
We really do appreciate & personally read every single comment that you leave us. It means a lot to us that you take the time to interact with us, so please continue to do so.
The mandatory question must be answered in the “Leave a comment here” box at the bottom of this page to make any further entries valid. No answer means no win! Please try to use 8 words or more in your comment.
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Saturday, October 26, 2013
TADFF13: My Thoughts on Cheap Thrills
This very dark comedy focuses on Craig (Pat Healy), an aspiring writer with a wife and 15 month old son, who suddenly finds himself in major financial trouble when he receives an eviction notice the same day he is laid off from his day job as a mechanic. While drinking his sorrows away in a bar, Craig is reunited with Vince (Ethan Embry), an old friend he hasn’t seen in five years. While in the bar, the two of them come across Colin (David Koechner) and his wife Violet (Sara Paxton), who is out celebrating her birthday.
Colin and Violet love placing outrageous bets and quickly get Craig and Vince in on the game by asking them to do simple tasks, such as slapping strippers and getting into fights with bouncers. The action quickly moves to Colin and Violet’s house, where Colin offers Craig and Vince up to $250,000 to continue playing the game. As the night continues, the stakes get bigger and so does the rivalry between Craig and Vince. When the night’s all over, the question of what these men will do for a whole lot of money will be answered.
Cheap Thrills is the directorial debut for E.L. Katz, who has previously been known as a screenwriter for a number of independent horror films, including some of the early films for director Adam Wingard (You’re Next). The film also reunites Pat Healy with Sara Paxton, who had great chemistry together in Ti West’s The Innkeepers. That said, despite a great cast, including a delightfully friendly/sleazy performance by David Koechner, I couldn’t really get behind the film, which quickly goes downhill as the tasks become more tasteless.
The overall message of Cheap Thrills is that people are willing to do terrible acts when there’s a whole lot of money involved. This is a plot that has been done in countless other films, often in much more enjoyable ways. The film is blatantly trying to shock the audience with the extremes that these people will go, in order to get a whole lot of money. This is particularly the case for Craig, who is so desperate for money that he is willing to do just about anything. This creates a rift in his relationship with Vince, who gets increasingly jealous, and eventually violent, when Craig begins winning more of the the tasks.
I can say that that I was enjoying Cheap Thrills pretty fine until the film crossed the line with an act that was so tasteless, and cruel, that I seriously considered walking out of the film. There are just some things that I never want to see in a film and Cheap Thrills shows one of them. What’s worse, is that this act comes after I was lulled into a false sense of security when, earlier in the film, Colin wouldn’t allow a similar act to be performed. While this act is obviously meant to shock the audience, it outright angered me. I was so outraged that the film would stoop so low, that I was taken completely out of the film and I wasn’t able to properly enjoy the rest of it.
I also have to say that, even though the film features a reunion of Pat Healy and Sara Paxton, their chemistry in this film is no where close to how they interacted in The Innkeepers. In fact, Paxton is playing a much different character, who spends most of the film paying more attention to her cellphone than the action around her and stops only to take the occasional photo. All the events in the film are supposed to be Colin’s way of making sure Violet has a good time on her birthday. However, she is probably such a sociopath, who enjoys telling stories of the sounds people make when their bones break, that she is barely interested in the “tame” activities Craig and Vince are performing. In fact, come to think of it, Paxton’s performance in the film is probably one of the few aspects of the film I actually liked.
Because of the tasteless places that it goes, I cannot give a recommendation to Cheap Thrills. However, I am not going to complete write-off the film either. After thinking it over, I understand that my problems with the film are more personal than anything else and I am sure there are some people, who completely don’t mind the tasteless acts seen in the film. As such, instead of saying that I don’t like the film, I am merely going to say I just don’t care much about it.
About Sean Kelly -
Sean Patrick Kelly is a self-described über-geek, who has been an avid film lover for all his life. He graduated from York University in 2010 with an honours B.A. in Cinema and Media Studies and he likes to believe he knows what he’s talking about when he writes about film (despite occasionally going on pointless rants).
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Sundance Film Festival 2016 documentary winner Weinertopped the weekend’s new Specialty releases, and boasts the highest per theater average debut among non-fiction releases this year. The Sundance Selects release grossed $85,525 from five New York and Los Angeles locations this weekend. Sony Classics bowed Toronto debut Maggie’s Plan starring Greta Gerwig, Ethan Hawke and Julianne Moore, also in five theaters grossing $66,708, while Oscilloscope opened Spanish-language drama Ma ma starring Penélope Cruz exclusively at the Sunshine in New York taking in $9,466. Last week’s big limited release opener, The Lobster, continued its momentum in its second weekend with an expansion, as did Love & Friendship. And SPC’s The Meddler crossed $2 million in its 5th weekend amid a sizable move into more markets.
Related Story
Sundance Selects opened Josh Griegman and Elyse Steinberg’s Weiner in 5 theaters with a solid start. The title, which won the documentary Grand Jury Prize at this year’s Sundance Film Festival, grossed $85,525 in five theaters, giving it a $17,105 per theater average. The number ranks it in the top echelon of this year’s documentary debuts. The distributor’s own City Of God (released by IFC Films) opened in four theaters in March grossing nearly $63K for a $15,740 average its opening weekend. It has cumed nearly $612K in theaters to date. Michael Moore’s Where To Invade Next is the highest-grossing documentary of the year so far at just over $3.8 million. It opened in 308 theaters in February, however, averaging just under $3K. The year has yet to yield some of the more spectacular numbers in the non-fiction field of last year.
The Orchard’s Dior And I averaged $22,886 in two theaters in its April opener. It went on to gross just over $1 million. Magnolia’s The Wolfpack grossed $43,920 in its debut weekend, averaging $21,960, going on to cume jut over $1.3 million. Last year’s doc Oscar winner Amy opened in six theaters grossing $222,500 in its first weekend in early July, averaging $37,084. After picking up awards and accolades, it went on to cume over $8.4 million.
Sundance Selects noted that Weiner “sold out multiple shows in New York City” this weekend. That is probably not completely surprising considering politician Anthony Weiner, the personality at the center of the doc, represented a district in the city in Congress and twice ran for mayor (the latter run is depicted in this film).
“For me it’s one of the best documentaries about a political campaign I’ve ever seen. I can compare it to The War Room (1993),” said IFC Films president Jonathan Sehring speaking to me about the film earlier this month. “I find it amazing because of his hubris, but I also feel real empathy for him. I can’t say I felt that when it was all going on, but I felt it for him and for [his wife, Huma Abedin]. I think the filmmakers did an amazing job.” Sundance Elects will continue to roll out the film into the top 10 markets Memorial Day Weekend.
SPC opened Rebecca Miller’s Maggie’s Plan in five theaters grossing $66,708 for a $13,341 PTA, the third best overall for the week, though not exactly a spectacular start. The Toronto debut starring Greta Gerwig, Ethan Hawke and Julianne Moore outperformed Miller’s previous film The Private Lives of Pippa Lee in its debut weekend (that Screen Media release starring Robin Wright and Keanu Reeves averaged $7,496 though it bowed in a dozen locations, and went on to gross just $337K domestically). Her 2005 release The Ballad Of Jack and Rose with husband Daniel Day-Lewis and Paul Dano opened in four theaters in March 2005, averaging $14,864. It went on to cume over $712K. Maggie’s Plan will platform out to additional theaters in the coming weeks.
Oscilloscope’s Ma ma directed by Spaniard Julio Medem and starring Penélope Cruz opened exclusively at the Sunshine in New York grossing $9,466. The film’s PTA — though in a single location — is higher than the director’s memorable Sex and Lucía, which averaged $6,798 though that bowed in seven theaters in North America back in 2002. The film, however, went on to cume nearly $1.6 million.
In its second weekend, A24’s The Lobster dined with robust numbers with 20 additional theaters. Starring Colin Farrell and Rachel Weisz, the film grossed $408K for a $17K average in two dozen locations, the weekend’s second-best overall and also crossing the title over the $1M threshold. A24, reporting numbers Sunday, said: “The film was very strong in it’s initial expansion across all markets, and in both arthouse and commercial theaters. With strong buzz, performances and reviews, the Colin Farrell and Rachel Weisz unique relationship comedy seems to have tapped into the cultural zeitgeist, and will continue expanding heading in to the holiday weekend.”
Amazon and Roadside Attractions’ Love & Friendship expanded to 8 additional markets in its second frame. Directed by Whit Stillman, the feature grossed $585K in 47 theaters, averaging $12,383. The distributors noted Sunday that the film starring Kate Beckinsale and Chloë Sevigny still boasts a 99% on RT. Love & Friendship will have its first national expansion next weekend.
In its third frame, Searchlight added 102 theaters for A Bigger Splash. In a total of 128 theaters, the film grossed $338K ($2,641 average). Noted Searchlight’s Frank Rodriguez when reporting the film’s numbers this weekend: “Our expectation is that with the continued good reviews we will be able to generate more good word of mouth which will give the film some added traction as we head into the long Memorial Day Weekend.” A Bigger Splash will head to 60 new markets for the holiday weekend, bringing its total theater count to about 350 locations across North America.
IFC Films added 77 runs for The Man Who Knew Infinity in the film’s fourth weekend. The film grossed over $550K, averaging just over $2K, bringing its total to over $1.68 million. Roadside Attractions’ Hologram For The King crossed $4M in its fifth weekend. It grossed $65,860 in 138 theaters ($477 average). And the company’s Hello My Name Is Doris with Sally Field went over $14 million in its 11th weekend. The title grossed $115,525 ($745 average) in 155 theaters Friday to Sunday.
Sony Classics’ The Meddler continues to show zest in its fifth weekend with another expansion this weekend. Starring Susan Sarandon, the film played an additional 127 locations grossing $777,539 ($1,676 average) bringing the film just over $2M.
NEW RELEASES
Almost Holy (The Orchard) NEW [2 Theaters] Weekend $4,036, Average $2,018
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Gordon and all,
Thank you for sharing this information. I am cc'ing this response to others
on other lists that this does pertain to and they may find quite reveling.
I can only say that it is not surprising that the ISOC, and in spicific Don
Heath are enguaged in such activities as this sort of behavior by Mr. Heath
was atempted towards Jim Dixon some time ago. I was not however
aware of the direct involvment of Vinton Cref of his possible complicity
in these sort of activities and find it rather surprising to sayt he least.
Gordon Cook wrote:
> I have heard now from two sources that ISOC, which kept the non commercial
> domain holders constituency from being recognized in Berlin by saying it
> couldn't give a milimeter on behalf of its 30 constituents, is now engaged
> in a smear campaign against meuller and sondow, a campaign squarely aimed
> at getting the ACM to repudiate its involvement with Professor Meuller and
> Kathy Klieman on the grounds that meuller and klieman allegedly sold out to
> the "infamous" Michael Sondow.
>
> The ACM is rather bigger than any of the 30 organizations gathered for the
> plucking by ISOC's Heath and Vint Cerf. Buty it is hard for ISOC to ignore
> that someone has a voice that could be more authoritative than its own.
> They claim that Meuller has sullied the name of the ACM by sitting down
> with sondow and are turning their propaganda guns against the ACM's Barbara
> Simons hoping to get her to repudiate Meullers action. They claim that
> even Vint Cerf has been drafted into the fray and has sent Simmons
> complaining email. How quickly they forget Mueller's speech to their geneva
> meeting last june.
>
> Possibly Cerf, Mike Roberts and Heath are growing increasingly upset that
> their well orchestrated campaign to install the internets first global
> regulatory authority (ICANN) is coming under fire. First from David
> Johnson who said NSI would refuse to abrogate the rights of its 4 million
> registrees by signing them away to ICANN and by impplication that NSI would
> not collect the dollar per name tax on which ICANN depends for its budget
> beginning July 1. George Conrades, IBM's surrogate board member shot back
> to johnson the absurd remark: welll you won't be a registrar. Such action
> by ICANN would ensure a split root because there is no way that NSI could
> or should allow IBM's interests to put it out of business.
>
> But worse for ICANN are the signs that Dave Farber may be having serious
> doubts: on saturday may 29 he published the following note to his IP list:
>
> From: Dave Farber <[email protected]>
> Subject: IP: " icann is not doing right"
> Mime-Version: 1.0
> Sender: [email protected]
> Precedence: list
> Reply-To: [email protected]
>
> >I received this note from an old friend who is a early internet commercial
> >player and very established in the industry (and senior). I am circulating
> >it anonymously but can assure people the person is real and sane as
> >anyone is.
>
> Dave
>
> >Date: Sat, 29 May 1999 11:02:55 -0400
> >To: [email protected]
> >From:
> >
> >David,
> >A warning for you. ICANN is violating the trust we gave it. We will begin
> >to withdraw our support soon and begin to support the opposition. I so
> >hate to do this, but there is no choice. Damn them all for their stupidity
> >in dealing with the community this way.
>
> Cook: Thus Cerf and Heaths carefully laid plains are unraveling and in
> apparent desparation, they move to intimidate the ACM's Barbara Simmons. I
> hope and believe that Barbara and the ACM will display substantial
> neccesssary to resist them.
>
> I call on Vint and Don heath to bring their smear campaign into the open
> and let the rest of us see the holly wrath of ISOC.
> ********************************************************************
> The COOK Report on Internet | New handbook just published:IP Insur-
> 431 Greenway Ave, Ewing, NJ 08618 USA| gency & Transformation of Telecomm.See
> (609) 882-2572 (phone & fax) | http://cookreport.com/insurgency.html
> [email protected] | Index to 7 years of COOK Report, how to
> subscribe, exec summaries, special reports, gloss at http://www.cookreport.com
> ********************************************************************
Regards,
--
Jeffrey A. Williams
CEO/DIR. Internet Network Eng/SR. Java/CORBA Development Eng.
Information Network Eng. Group. INEG. INC.
E-Mail [email protected]
Contact Number: 972-447-1894
Address: 5 East Kirkwood Blvd. Grapevine Texas 75208
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Tag Archives: Lucy Pinder
Aside from the three bombshells we chose, check the gallery for all the other notable attendees. It was an anniversary party for London-based magazine Nuts, which is known for its–hmmm, how shall we put this–slightly risque magazine covers. Although the ladies in attendance, aside from the always-fun Aisleyne Horgan-Wallace, played it somewhat safe from a fashion standpoint. With respect to safe outfits, Helen Flanagan’s see-thru outfit couldn’t escape the paparazzi flash, but for the record, Helen did remember to wear her undies to the party! Good for her!
Lucy Pinder attended The Loaded LAFTAs Awards 2013 10th Anniversary held at Sway in London. Amongst the winners were Rylan Clark and Gary Barlow for “Funniest Double Act”, Funniest TV personality went to Angelos Epithemiou, and Keith Lemon took home two awards. Check out a full list of winners.
Neither Lucy Pinder nor Rebecca Ferdinando appear in The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey but Cate Blanchett stars as Galadriel, an elf and co-ruler of Lothlórien along with her husband, Lord Celeborn. As you might already know the film is the first in a series of three films directed, co-written and produced by Peter Jackson and based on J. R. R. Tolkien’s novel “The Hobbit”. The film is set to open in theaters on December 14th. For more info, visit The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey official website.
Bilbo Baggins, a curious young Hobbit is invited to journey with the wizard Gandalf the Grey and a group of Dwarves with the goal of reclaiming stolen treasure taken from their kin at the Lonely Mountain by the dragon Smaug.
The journey leads them from Bilbo’s home in the Shire through the Elven stronghold of Rivendell and through the Goblin infested Misty Mountains where Bilbo meets a creature with an object of mysterious qualities that will change his life, and the life of his family, forever. As they continue, they discover that other vile creatures also seek to destroy them. [Wiki]
Lucy Pinder brought out her boobs at The Soviet Nuts Awards Party held at Aura in Mayfair, London. The sexy glamour model continues to grace the internet with those 32G curves and well, frankly we don’t have much more to say than that. Our guess is whatever awards were handed out, Lucy probably took home a few. She’d be our big winner given who we saw attended the event.
– The Kid From Two And A Half Men Wants You To Stop Watching The Show That Makes Him $350,000 An Episode [Dlisted]
– Beyonce announces HBO documentary [Lainey Gossip]
– Charlie Sheen donated $100K to the crack charity known as Lindsay Lohan [Celebitchy]
– Another Tribute To The Beautifully Mesmerizing Emma Watson [Caveman Circus]
“Keith Lemon: The Film” is an upcoming British comedy that hits theaters this Friday–mainly UK release at the moment, so don’t hold your breath on when it will crawl its way across the pond. I have a feeling that will be completely contigent upon how it performs at Europe. Anyway, here’s more about the film, which Leigh Francis, Laura Aikman, Verne Troyer, Kelly Brook, David Hasselhoff and many more. Here’s more about the film:
The film is about Keith Lemon’s rags to riches story when he invents a phone with a light up lemon on the back, and how it leads to a Hollywood celebrity lifestyle and a relationship with Kelly Brook. Wiki
Strippers vs Werewolves is the upcoming horror/comedy starring Robert Englund, Steven Berkoff and Lysette Anthony. Lucy Pinder is credited as a Vampire Bride and there’s not much more we can say about the film. Our guess is that it won’t be winning any awards but will probably be entertaining to some. For more info, follow Strippers vs Werewolves on Facebook.
When werewolf chief Jack Ferris is accidentally killed in a strip club the girls who work there have until the next full moon before his bloodthirsty wolfpack seek murderous retribution. [Source]
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Turkey’s S-400 deal may tip the Nato-Russia scale
Turkey’s deal to purchase two batteries of the Russian S-400 air defence missile system – estimated to be worth $2.5bn – has followed months of rumours surrounding the purchase and its resulting controversies.
Until November 2015, reports suggested Turkey was showing an interest in purchasing Chinese air and missile defence system FD-2000. Then came reports that Turkey had cancelled this $3.4bn deal in favour of developing a long range missile defence system. While seemingly a respite for Nato countries, who at the time raised multiple objections to a Chinese partnership, the subsequent pivot towards Russia has proved an equally concerning move.
The S-400 can detect track and destroying aircraft, drones, and cruise and ballistic missiles, undeniably enhancing Turkey’s the air defence capability in a significant way. The system has advanced radar system and software, while its interceptor missile can counter exa-atmospheric targets.
Nato’s objections to the potential Chinese option argued that Beijing would be able to gather information on the Alliance’s missile defence capability as Turkey’s system would be integrated with those of other regional states. Such a back-end insight could enable Chinese forces or others to develop effective counter measures against the wider defence shield. Even more concerning was the initial selection of China Precision Machinery Import and Export, a company once sanctioned by the US for selling missile-related technologies to Iran in 2013…
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Saturday, April 22, 2017
I'm not a good house keeper
....I just am not.
It has bothered me for years that I'm not good at keeping the house spick and span.
In fact it has been a real source of shame and anxiety for me at times. I remember several years ago having a bad dream about my mother coming to my house, looking at the state of it and just shaking her head sadly sighing 'Oh Teenie!'
At times I feel so bad that I can't invite people over or panic for days before guests come, tidying up and cleaning the best I can, getting crosser and crosser with everyone and the whole thing.
But yesterday in the bath (where I do most of my quiet thinking) I realised something: although I am not a good house keeper, I am a very good home maker!
So the house may never be tidy. I may not ever have the time in the mornings to put away the breakfast things before leaving for the school run....
post breakfast mess
I may never find the time to change the beds on a weekly basis, the windows might only get washed when someone offers to do it for me. But I am getting better at being ok with that. And I am getting better at asking for help; the kids clean their rooms and make their beds (after a fashion, but it is sort of getting done) Rebe is getting better at clearing up after her baking sessions. I have a wonderful lady who comes to help me mop the floors and clean the bathrooms once a week.
chocolate finger prints mean home made chocolates in the fridge
But what I realised yesterday is that it is all about choices and priorities...
I would rather push this girl on the swing than plonk her in front of a screen so I can hoover the living room...
I'd rather let the kids play with scrap wood in the garden than worry about how untidy it looks
I would rather hold this little boy while he does his sitting up practice than go and sort out the spare room.
I cook from scratch, make my own bread, plan every meal to make it as nourishing for us all as possible. All that cooking takes time, time I don't spend cleaning and tidying.
I use (often home made) cleaning products that are kind to the environment,
and because I choose not to use bleach or spend hours sorting and soaking and separating the laundry, paint stains don't get washed out properly. And I certainly don't iron the clothes... we are lucky if the clean washing makes it back into the drawer before it needs to be worn again!
I would rather read stories, I would rather we make play dough, I would rather go for a walk on the beach, I would rather listen to how someone's day was. I would rather the kids craft, bake and create without worrying about making a mess. I would rather do some knitting. I would rather Garry feels he can have all his stuff around him. I would rather....
So cleaning and tidying is not my priority. I always have said that I am a stay at home mum, not a stay at home housewife!!!
But back to my inspiration in the bath, although I am not a good house keeper, I am a very good home maker.
For me a home is somewhere everyone who lives there feels at ease, at peace and happy.
It is a place to be heard, a place for fun, a place to sort out your problems.
A retreat from the world.
It is a place to celebrate and be celebrated.
It is a place to find yourself and find your place in the world.
And I think that if I were a good house keeper I would not be a good home maker. That is not to say that people who have wonderfully clean and tidy houses have not made lovely homes (you know like the ones you see on blogs and pinterest) what I am saying is that I know what it would take for me to create a house like that and I would much rather spend the energy on making a home.
So I am making peace with the mess, with the dirty window sill, with the full-to-the-brim-spare-room-that-I-will-sort-out-one-day, I am making peace with it because this is a beautiful home, and we are all so happy here.
15 comments:
I relate to so much of this! My challenge is that not everyone is ok with the mess in my house or feels at peace. It such a struggle to balance, but I also am seeing as my kids get bigger it is easier to have some semblance of order, but I still want to do all the other things. It is so good to be at peace with where you are.
I get that too. I would rather we had much less stuff making everything easier to look after but there are 7 of us living in a pretty small space so the stuff seems enormous I don't however feel it's my place to get rid of other people's stuff and that takes a lot of breathing through and accepting. But as we all grow older I feel it will change by itself. Thanks for your comment xx
Thank you for this. I know that for me, I would much rather you do things with your kids, take moments for you, and create beautiful patterns and dolls than bleach your counters.
Honestly, I have never once thought about your housekeeping in all the time I've read your blog. I actually share your pictures and stories quite a bit and say things like, "Isn't she just so wholesome? Look how she does so much amazing stuff with her kids! I want to do something like that too." Never, ever have I looked at a happy baking disaster and thought, man, doesn't she ever clean? Mostly it's, wow, she has five kids and seems really put together. And I love her kitchen. Your life is too sweet to worry about the smudges on the windows. Seriously.
Oh my goodness that is just the loveliest comment ever thank you so much!!! I feel really good about finding my peace with this and I feel very happy that when the moany, critical voice in my head says 'look at all this mess!' that I can answer well it is a lovely home and we are all happy here, and I really do feel good about that. Thanks again so much for your lovely, kind words xx
Thank you for this post. I couldn't agree more that home-making is so much more important than home-keeping. My daughter tracks mud into the house, gets flour all over the kitchen and does messy art projects,etc. If a family does a lot it is impossible to keep a house perfect. So when I see a perfect house in which little children live, quite frankly, I question the amount of doing going on!
A show place or a home that looks lived inI go for number 2. It's always the happy place. Childhood and moments shared are relatively short. You will have a lifetime to be a domestic goddess in the cleaning dept. If you choose. But then you and Garry might run away from home some days for your own adventures. Life doesn't wait but housework does. Your putting your time where it matters-your FAMILY. :-) Adrienne (NZ)
You're dead right, I know this time is short and one day the house will be still and quiet and I will be able to walk across the room without someone clinging onto my legs. So I breathe through it and LIVE xx
About Me
My name is Laura. I am a stay at home mummy to Rebe, Benny and Joa. I live in a gorgeous little fishing village in South West Ireland. We are into home cooking, gardening, crafting, knitting and living as naturally as possible.
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Play in Early Childhood: From Birth to Six Years
Play and development are key topics for all who work with young children. Based on the pioneering work of Mary D. Sheridan, Play in Early Childhood is an introductory text which explains how children's play develops and how they develop as they play. It features:
over eighty illustrations
descriptions of play at each stage of development, from birth to six years
outlines of different play sequences
information on children with special needs
practical advice on the adult's role in providing for play.
This edition has been thoroughly revised and updated to meet the needs of early years workers and students on courses leading to awards in child care and education.
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Seventy-two cats removed from home
March 18, 2014
A Fort Myers Shores home is the latest location of what officials are calling "a series of hoarding cases" uncovered by Lee County Domestic Animal Services this year.
The agency was notified of the situation by an anonymous caller. On March 18 officers responded to the home of a woman in the 12000 block of Fourth Street and found 72 cats "living in extremely unsanitary conditions," animal services said in a prepared statement.
"Most of the cats were lying in their own waste stacked in cages inside the home," the statement reads. "Many were found to be suffering from upper respiratory infections, severe flea dermatitis, and overall neglect."
The case is still under investigation; charges have not been filed at this time.
The shelter is in need of foster homes to help with the care of the cats and to alleviate the overcrowding that the case has caused. Anyone interested in fostering may download a foster application at www.leelostpets.com/Pages/FosterProgram.aspx.
"We urge residents to report suspected cases of neglect and abuse. It is the only way we can help the animals and see that the abusers receive help and/or are prosecuted," said Glenn Johnson, LCDAS operations manager.
Call 239-533-7387 make a report or complaint. Callers may remain anonymous.
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Company Perspectives:
Allied Products Corporation's primary business operations consist of three divisions, each of which holds a leadership position in its field in terms of market share and product technology. Our Bush Hog division manufactures and markets equipment for agriculture and for landscape and golf course maintenance. Our Verson division builds and services large mechanical and hydraulic presses used to form metal parts. Our Coz division develops sophisticated thermoplastic compounds and creates additives used to add color and other useful properties to thermoplastics.
Company History:
Allied Products Corporation is a manufacturing company with a long history of producing diverse products for industrial applications, primarily for the automobile industry. Allied has gone through many incarnations over its 70-year history, but in the mid-1990s the company operated three divisions: Bush Hog, a leading manufacturer of farm implements; Verson, a technologically advanced maker of large metal forming presses; and Coz, a compounder of thermoplastic resins.
Company Origins and Growth through the 1950s
Allied Products was formed in Michigan in 1928 by the merger of the Victor Peninsular Company, Richard Brothers Die Works and the Indiana Lamp Corporation. At the time, all three companies supplied the burgeoning U.S. automobile industry: Victor Peninsular produced cap screws and cold forged parts; Richard Brothers Die Works manufactured dies used to form steel automobile components; and Indiana Lamp supplied the electric headlights of the early mass-produced automobiles. In its first year of operation Allied Products netted $794,000, a figure that was not matched until the mid-1940s.
Nineteen twenty-eight was not an auspicious year in which to start a business. The stock market crash of 1929 and subsequent depression affected all American business, but the growing auto industry was relatively unscathed and was one of the primary leaders of the financial recovery. After posting four years of losses during the early 1930s, Allied returned to profitability in 1934 and remained in the black for the next 25 years. As the automobile industry prospered, Allied also grew, with sales reaching $8 million by 1949. In 1951 Allied acquired the Michigan Powdered Metal Products Co., adding ground metal parts for automobiles and aircraft to the company's line of products. By the mid-1950s the company was operating eight manufacturing plants in Michigan and netting about $1 million annually. When the auto industry slumped in the late 1950s, Allied began to look for other sources of revenue. The company had been producing various types of metal fasteners for industrial use for years but now stepped up their presence in this market by acquiring in a reverse merger the assets of Pheoll Manufacturing Co., one of the leaders in the metal fastener industry.
New Ownership and Diversification in the 1960s
The nature of Allied Products took an abrupt turn in 1961 when the company was acquired by a group of investors led by Jay Pritzker and Saul Sherman. As recounted in a profile in Forbes, a series of mergers had left Allied with a host of financial partners, and Pritzker and Sherman decided to cut cards to determine who would keep the small manufacturer. Sherman won the cut, and in 1965 he and his partner, Lloyd Drexler, took over management of the firm. Sherman, an ex-quarterback for the Chicago Bears, and Drexler, a former professor of economics, decided to use Allied as the base for a manufacturing conglomerate.
By 1970, Allied had become a true conglomerate with an interest in industrial fasteners, automotive dies and stampings, textiles, chemicals, farm implements and construction materials. Sales tripled from $71 million in 1966 to $222 million in 1969. However, high interest payments on the debt incurred from the spate of acquisitions and poor performance by some of the newly acquired companies put a damper on earnings, which failed to keep pace with sales. After four years of slow earnings growth, in 1970 net income actually fell to a dismal $1.3 million, well below levels recorded in the early 1960s before the period of rapid expansion. Allied president Saul Sherman remained optimistic about the path his management team had chosen. "We knew there were problems with some of the acquisitions but we wanted to take a giant leap forward," Sherman said in a 1973 interview with Investor's Reader. "We figured we could solve the problems and come out a larger company with grow power."
Allied moved to solve these problems by selling some of the operations in the soft construction and textile sectors and using the funds generated to reduce debt. With interest expenses cut in half, earnings rose, but the difficulties stemming from the rapid, somewhat haphazard expansion of the company were far from over. In spite of these difficulties, Allied management was determined to adhere to the company's expansion plans. The agricultural equipment sector looked particularly attractive to company executives from the vantage of the early 1970s. The worldwide demand for food appeared insatiable, and millions of additional acres were being put into production across the United States. Through the company's Bush Hog division, Allied produced such relatively simple farm equipment as rotary cutters, shredders, spreaders and mulchers. Unlike tractors and other large agricultural machinery, these "short-line" implements required comparatively little investment on the part of farmers and were therefore less subject to the cyclical swings of the agricultural market. During 1973 alone, Allied acquired six agricultural machinery manufacturers: Standard Engineering Co., Kraus Manufacturing and Equipment Co., Industrial Scientific Co., Brewton Iron Works, Inc. and Gin Equipment, Inc. At the same time the company embarked on a multimillion dollar expansion plan for the company's Bush Hog division that would increase production space and update machinery. By the end of that year the agricultural implements sector became Allied's largest income generator, accounting for 23 percent of the company's sales and 31 percent of profits.
Rising interest rates during the early 1970s threatened to put a halt to Allied's expansion plans. The company already carried a sizable debt load from the 1960s and could ill afford to take on high interest financing. By negotiating a series of tax-exempt industrial revenue bonds, then vice-president Richard Drexler, son of president and CEO Lloyd Drexler, undertook some creative financing to allow the company to continue its expansion without taking on a crippling debt burden. Tax-exempt revenue bonds had been introduced during the 1960s to encourage companies to invest in depressed areas by allowing municipalities and states to sell tax-exempt bonds to finance private industrial development. In 1969 the federal government placed a limit of $5 million on these issues, effectively preventing their use for large-scale borrowing. Undeterred, Richard Drexler and Allied's general counsel, Kenneth B. Light, set out to convince the small southern municipalities in which the company's newly acquired agricultural implement plants were located to finance Allied through the tax-exempt bonds. "A lot of the secret in this type of financing is initiating and maintaining a relationship with a municipality, Drexler told Business Week in 1975. "Once they get acquainted with the company, they get excited about having us and our new jobs there." By putting together a series of these bonds with a variety of local governments, Allied was able to finance the company's $38 million expansion of its agricultural equipment business at lower, tax-exempt rates.
By the mid-1970s Allied's determination to expand through acquisitions once again landed the firm in financial difficulties. In 1975 and 1976 the company posted two consecutive net losses of over $1 million in spite of increases in overall sales. Most of these losses could be attributed to Allied's textile and soft goods operations, which were losing business to foreign manufacturers at an alarming rate. Allied responded by closing two cotton mills but did not undertake any major restructuring of the textile business. Instead, the company further expanded its profitable agricultural equipment group by acquiring five more farm implement manufacturers. By the end of the decade Allied was operating 23 subsidiaries and divisions divided into three major product groups: agricultural equipment, industrial components (including fastening systems, industrial machinery, automotive stampings, electrical insulation and chemicals) and FabricsAmerica. Sales had doubled over the course of the decade to $332 million, but, at $3.1 million, net income was identical to 1971 levels.
New Leadership and Restructuring in the 1980s
Allied's lackluster performance of the late 1970s turned into a crisis in the early 1980s as overdiversification, depressed auto and agricultural industries, and an increase in foreign competition crippled sales and plunged the marginally profitable company into red ink. By 1984 Allied had posted three consecutive years of losses totalling more than $11 million. It became clear that the company could no longer be patched up in bits and pieces, and in 1982 Lloyd Drexler and Saul Sherman, who had managed the company for nearly 20 years, stepped aside in favor of Lloyd's son Richard Drexler. "I was the man for the time," the younger Drexler told Business Week in 1986. "I had no emotional attachment. I wasn't going to let anybody stand in my way."
True to his word, the new Allied president moved quickly to cut costs and shed unprofitable divisions. Within two years Richard Drexler had sold or liquidated 27 manufacturing units, reducing employment by 60 percent. Administrative and sales staff were forced to accept huge salary cuts in exchange for stock options and higher commissions. Manufacturing was transferred to rural facilities where employment costs were lowest, and the threat of closures persuaded workers to accept drastic wage cuts. By 1987, Industry Week estimated that Allied's labor costs were up to 50 percent below its competitors'.
While the key to Drexler's recovery plan was to cut costs, the 39-year-old company president also implemented a new program of acquisitions. The early to mid-1980s were lean years for the agricultural industry. A combination of poor weather conditions and a volatile world market created one of the worst agricultural markets in 50 years. Saddled by debt, farmers were unable to invest in new machinery, and the agricultural equipment industry suffered record losses. Drexler felt confident that these depressed conditions would improve by the end of the decade and was determined to take advantage of the bargains available in the form of struggling companies. Allied acquired four agricultural implement makers (Kewanee Farm Equipment Co., New Idea Farm Equipment Co., White Farm Equipment Co., Lilliston Corp.) in the mid-1980s, all at prices well below book value. By shifting production to other Allied factories with low labor costs, Drexler was able to lower prices on the companies' diverse lines of farm implements and thereby increase market share. During the same period Allied also expanded its automotive business with the purchase of Verson Allsteel Press Co., a maker of large presses used to produce stampings for the automotive industry. Verson received the same treatment as the farm equipment makers with labor costs slashed and production transferred to other Allied facilities.
Crash and Recovery in the 1990s
When Allied emerged from restructuring, the company operated 14 divisions and subsidiaries organized into three product groups: the Agricultural Equipment Group (accounting for 48 percent of sales and 78 percent of earnings), the Transportation/Industrial Products Group (47 percent of sales and 17 percent of earnings) and the Materials Technology Group (five percent of sales and earnings.) Drexler's recovery plan was an initial success. In 1986 sales rose to $420 million, and net income reached a record $15 million. Analysts touted the company's stock which reached a record $45 a share. However, the rebound was short-lived. By 1987 the company was once again in the red, and then, after two marginally profitable years, Allied was faced with a $10 million loss in 1990.
Ironically, Allied's troubles came at a time when the agricultural industry was finally recovering from the decade-long slump. While Allied's Bush Hog and Kewanee divisions were benefitting from the rebound, the company's White Farm division, which produced higher-priced tractors, was still struggling. White Farm's capital needs and expensive inventory carry-overs wound up costing Allied much-needed cash and eating up credit. Allied's debt rose to a crushing 112 percent of equity, and by 1990 the company's income from operations couldn't even cover interest expenses. "We leveraged the company way up," chief financial officer Kenneth Light told the Wall Street Corporate Reporter. "It led to our running out of cash and lines of credit. This was during a time when the banks did not have a good sense of humor about those kinds of businesses."
Although Allied was "very close to filing Chapter 11 on several occasions," according to Light, the company managed to avoid bankruptcy by negotiating "a very serious restructuring" with its creditors. Allied agreed to sell most of its subsidiaries and to pledge substantially all of its assets as security for outstanding loans. Over the course of the next two years Allied sold or liquidated all but three of its businesses. Among the discontinued divisions was Richard Brothers Die Works, the last remaining vestige of the original Allied companies. By 1995 Allied retained only Bush Hog, manufacturing short-line implements for farming and land maintenance; Verson, producing metal forming presses; and Coz, a developer of thermoplastic resins and additives.
With about $230 million generated by the closings applied to the elimination of long-term debt, Allied was able to avoid bankruptcy and to resume the process of growing the company's remaining businesses. By 1993 a scaled-down Allied was once again making a modest profit, and by 1996 the company recorded net income of $19 million on $274 million sales. In a 1996 interview with the Wall Street Corporate Reporter a chastened but still optimistic Richard Drexler talked about the future of his company: "I do not have a specific sales number in mind, such as a billion dollars. I do not have a vision where I want to have 30 divisions. I think my vision is to be able to say that we are the market and technological leaders in all the businesses that we are in."
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Abstract
Background
Loss of photosynthesis has occurred independently in several plant and algal lineages, and represents a major metabolic shift with potential consequences for the content and structure of plastid genomes. To investigate such changes, we sequenced the complete plastid genome of the parasitic, non-photosynthetic green alga, Helicosporidium.
Results
The Helicosporidium plastid genome is among the smallest known (37.5 kb), and like other plastids from non-photosynthetic organisms it lacks all genes for proteins that function in photosynthesis. Its reduced size results from more than just loss of genes, however; it has little non-coding DNA, with only one intron and tiny intergenic spaces, and no inverted repeat (no duplicated genes at all). It encodes precisely the minimal complement of tRNAs needed to translate the universal genetic code, and has eliminated all redundant isoacceptors. The Helicosporidium plastid genome is also highly structured, with each half of the circular genome containing nearly all genes on one strand. Helicosporidium is known to be related to trebouxiophyte green algae, but the genome is structured and compacted in a manner more reminiscent of the non-photosynthetic plastids of apicomplexan parasites.
Conclusion
Helicosporidium contributes significantly to our understanding of the evolution of plastid DNA because it illustrates the highly ordered reduction that occurred following the loss of a major metabolic function. The convergence of plastid genome structure in Helicosporidium and the Apicomplexa raises the interesting possibility that there are common forces that shape plastid genomes, subsequent to the loss of photosynthesis in an organism.
Keywords
Background
Plastids are organelles found in plants and algae. Plastids originated in the endosymbiotic uptake of a cyanobacterium, which was subsequently transformed from a complex free-living bacterium to the highly specialized organelle now integrated with its host. At the genomic level, this integration involved the loss of many genes and the transfer of many more to the host nuclear genome, the protein products of which are targeted back to the organelle [1]. This process is not complete, however, as all known plastids have retained a residual genome that encodes a handful of RNA and protein-coding genes, which typically include many of the key components of photosystems I and II [2]. Our concept of plastids is inexorably tied to photosynthesis, since this is the dominant metabolic process of most plastids. They are, however, metabolically diverse organelles that play a role in the biosynthesis of amino acids, fatty acids, isoprenoids and heme, as well as in other processes related to photosynthesis such as pigment biosynthesis, and radical detoxification. Indeed, in several lineages of plants and algae photosynthesis has been lost altogether, but the plastid has been retained for these and other purposes [3]. Well-known examples of this include holoparasitic plants, many lineages of heterotrophic algae and parasitic apicomplexans (such as the malaria parasite). In most plastid genomes, the vast majority of genes encode products involved in either gene expression or photosynthesis. When photosynthesis is lost, so are most or all of the related genes, leading to dramatic changes in the plastid genome in size, coding capacity, and often also structure.
These genomes offer an opportunity to study the effects of massive genomic changes following a functional shift. Unfortunately, the number of fully-sequenced non-photosynthetic plastid genomes is small, limited to Epifagus virginiana (a holoparasitic angiosperm), Euglena longa (a heterotrophic euglenid), and several apicomplexan parasites bearing secondary plastids of red algal origin called apicoplasts (Plasmodium falciparum, Theileria parva, Eimeria tenella and Toxoplasma gondii). The E. virginiana plastid is about half the size of typical angiosperm plastids, having lost all its photosynthetic genes, but is otherwise similar to its relatives in many ways including non-coding DNA content, synteny of remaining genes and overall structure [4]. Likewise, E. longa has lost most of the photosynthetic genes found in the plastid of its close relative Euglena gracilis, but they share many features that are unique to euglenids, such as three tandem repeats of the RNA operon and a multitude of distinctive introns [5]. Apicomplexan plastid genomes, however, are quite different from those of other secondary red algal plastids found in photosynthetic lineages. They have undergone extensive rearrangments, are exceedingly small (~35 kb) and compact, and contain very little non-coding DNA [6–9]. The uniqueness of apicomplexan plastid genomes may simply be due to time: apicomplexan plastids probably lost photosynthesis long ago in the ancestor of this diverse group, whereas other sequenced non-photosynthetic plastid genomes come from organisms with close relatives that are photosynthetic.
To examine the process of genome reduction after the loss of a major metabolic function, we have completely sequenced the genome of the non-photosynthetic plastid of Helicosporidium sp., a parasitic green alga. Helicosporidia are obligate parasites of invertebrates with a unique morphology and infection strategy [10]. Their evolutionary origin was disputed until recently, when molecular evidence surprisingly showed that they are highly adapted trebouxiophyte green algae, specifically related to the opportunistic vertebrate parasites, Prototheca [11, 12]. This led to the prediction that Helicosporidia contain plastids, and although they have not yet been visually identified, molecular evidence has confirmed their existence [13–15]. The function of this organelle has been investigated by examining nucleus-encoded plastid-targeted proteins, which cumulatively suggest the Helicosporidium plastid is functionally similar in many ways to that of apicomplexan parasites [15]. Here, we show that the Helicosporidium plastid genome, while retaining many features confirming its phylogenetic affiliation, has been radically reduced in a non-random, structured fashion. The result is a genome that is highly ordered with regard to several characteristics such as coding strand and selective loss of tRNAs. Comparing the Helicosporidium plastid genome to that of other green algae and more distantly related non-photosynthetic plastids raises the interesting possibility that the 'structured-reduction' of Helicosporidium represents a common fate of such a genome.
Results and discussion
Genome size and density of coding regions
The Helicosporidium sp. plastid genome was determined to be a circle 37,454 bp in length with a gene map as shown in Figure 1. It has an overall GC content of 26.9%, which is less than most plastids, but not as extreme as the 13.1% observed in the Plasmodium falciparum apicoplast [9]. Non-coding regions are more AT-rich (14.7% GC) than genes, and are small. Gene-density is high, with only 5.1% non-coding DNA and an average intergenic space of 36 bp. Four gene pairs overlap by between 4 and 27 bp. Helicosporidium has by far the smallest plastid genome of any known Viridiplantae (plants and green algae), and is the smallest sequenced plastid genome outside those of apicomplexan parasites. One of the most compact plastid genomes reported so far is the primitive red alga Cyanidioschyzon merolae, which although extremely gene rich was reported by Ohta et al. [16] to have a median intergenic distance of just 14 bp. Using the same measure of compactness as Ohta et al. (the median of intergenic spaces between adjacent protein coding genes, where overlapping genes have a negative intergenic space), Helicosporidium is comparably compact with a median intergenic distance of 8 bp.
A comparison of the genomic features of non-photosynthetic plastids and their photosynthetic relatives is presented in Table 1. Compared with the photosynthetic trebouxiophyte Chlorella vulgaris, the Helicosporidium plastid has undergone a 4-fold reduction in genome size through large scale gene loss (4-fold), compaction of the remaining genes with smaller intergenic regions (7-fold) and an overall lower proportion of non-coding sequence (3.7-fold). The opportunistic parasite Prototheca wickerhamii is a close relative of Helicosporidium [11, 12, 14], and has genome characteristics intermediate to Helicosporidium and C. vulgaris. At an estimated 54 kb [17], the P. wickerhamii plastid is one third the size of the C. vulgaris plastid with less non-coding DNA and more densely packed genes, but is reduced to a much lesser extent than Helicosporidium. Comparing other non-photosynthetic plastid genomes with photosynthetic relatives reveals that the reduction and compaction of Epifagus virginiana and Euglena longa are not as substantial (about a 2-fold reduction in size). Plastids of red algae and their derivatives tend to have more genes than those of green plastid lineages [1, 2], so it is interesting that the smallest and most compact genomes are found among the red plastids of apicomplexa. A sister group comparison is difficult for this group, since the closest relatives of apicomplexa are dinoflagellates, the plastid genomes of which are difficult to compare with other plastids because they have been transformed into single gene mini-circles [18]. However, the photosynthetic ancestors of apicomplexa were probably similar to other secondary red plastid-containing organisms, such as Odontella sinensis (Table 1), which would indicate a 4-fold reduction in plastid genome and an even more extreme level of compaction.
Table 1
Plastid genome features compared between non-photosynthetic plastids and photosynthetic relatives
Size (kb)
% non-coding DNA (including introns)
Mean intergenic distance (bp)
No. of genes (proteins & rRNAs)
No. of tRNAs
Large repeat
Accession No.
Trebouxiophytes
Helicosporidium sp.
37.5
5.1
36
29
25
0
[DQ398104]
Prototheca wickerhammii
*54.1
21.4
121
-
-
-
[AJ245645, AJ236874]
Chlorella vulgaris
150.6
36.0
302
176
33
0
[NC001865]
Angiosperms
Epifagus virginiana
70.0
42.1
135
32
21
2 inverted
[NC001568]
Nicotiana tabacum
155.9
42.5
299
109
37
2 inverted
[NC001879]
Euglenids
Euglena longa
73.3
32.0
135
56
28
3 tandem
[NC002652]
Euglena gracilis
143.2
50.9
118
88
40
3 tandem
[NC001603]
Containing secondarily acquired red algal plastids
Plasmodium falciparum
34.7
4.7
24
34
34
2 inverted
[X95275, X95276]
Toxoplasma gondii
35.0
5.9
28
32
33
2 inverted
[NC001799]
Eimeria tenella
34.8
4.9
26
32
33
2 inverted
[NC004823]
Theileria parva
39.6
16.7
95
46
25
0
[AAGK01000009]
Odontella sinensis
119.7
15.6
107
146
29
2 inverted
[NC001713]
* the Prototheca genome is unfinished and its size is estimated from a restriction map [17], while the percentage non-coding DNA and mean intergenic distance were calculated from available sequences, constituting about half the genome.
Genome structure and organization
Unlike most plastid genomes, the Helicosporidium genome does not contain an inverted repeat (Figure 1). Although inverted repeats are probably an ancestral character state for all plastids, they have been independently lost in several lineages. Among the green algal plastids investigated so far, the inverted repeat is absent in charophytes (Staurastrum puctulatum and Zygnema circumcarinatum [19]), ulvophytes (Caulerpa sertularoides [20] and Codium fragile [21]) and the trebouxiophyte Chlorella vulgaris [22], but is present in Chlorella ellipsoidea [23]. More interestingly, Helicosporidium has also lost the ribosomal RNA (rRNA) operon, which is a nearly universal feature of all genomes, including prokaryotes, eukaryotes and organelles. The plastid rRNA operon is normally part of the inverted repeat when it is present, and consists of the small and large subunit (SSU and LSU) rRNA genes separated by a spacer region containing the tRNA-Ile and tRNA-Ala genes. In Helicosporidium, the rRNA genes are separated by 22.6 kb of sequence, but tRNA-Ile and tRNA-Ala genes remain associated with the SSU and LSU genes, respectively, such that a typical rRNA operon has been broken in half and distributed at opposing ends of the circle (Figure 1). While the vast majority of plastids have the rRNA operon, it has been lost in C. ellipsoidea, S. punctulatum and the P. falciparum and coccidian apicoplasts, where the SSU and LSU rRNA genes are adjacent to each other but encoded on opposite strands [6, 7, 9, 19, 23]. It has also been disrupted in the charophytes, Z. circumcarinatum [19] and Spirogyra maxima [24], and the ulvophytes C. sertularoides [20] and C. fragile [21], where the two rRNA genes are located on the same strand but far apart, as in Helicosporidium. This genome rearrangement has therefore occurred in at least three independent lineages, and may be an outcome of loss of the inverted repeat.
The most striking feature of the Helicosporidium genome is the symmetry shown in strand bias of coding regions (Figure 1). The rRNA genes are nearly diametrically opposed, and all but two proteins and one tRNA on one side of them are on the same strand, while all but one tRNA on the other side are on the opposite strand. Similarly-organized coding strand biases are also found in some apicomplexan plastids and in the euglenid plastids, but the bias is not as strong. In P. falciparum, the coding strand switch occurs between the adjacent inverted repeats, each of which encodes LSU and SSU rRNA and nine tRNA genes [9] and contains the origin of replication [25]. In Euglena, the coding strand symmetry is bound on one end by the origin of replication and on the other end by the replication termination site [26]. In these organisms, the majority of genes are transcribed in each direction away from the bidirectional origin of replication, such that the leading strand of replication is largely the coding strand. Such bias is also widespread among bidirectional replicating prokaryote genomes, where it is hypothesized to be the result of selection to minimize collision between DNA and RNA polymerases moving in opposite directions [27].
Notably, one of only two non-coding regions larger than 100 bp in the Helicosporidium plastid genome is situated between the SSU rRNA and tRNA-Glu genes, at one of the crossover points in strand selection. To investigate whether this could be a replication origin, we constructed a sliding window of cumulative GC skew [G-C/G+C]. These plots detect changes in compositional bias of guanine over cytosine along a sequence, which presumably occur because of strand-specific mutational biases during replication, and their global minimum and maximum points correspond to the origin and termination of replication for genomes with bi-directional replication origins [28, 29]. The cumulative GC-skew of the Helicosporidium genome reveals a global minimum and maximum at the regions either side of the SSU and LSU genes (Figure 2B), lending support to the idea that the origin of replication is located as marked in Figure 2. If this is so, the Helicosporidium plastid is like those of apicomplexans and euglenids in that almost all genes are encoded on the leading strand of replication, and that the observed coding strand symmetry is an adaptation for co-directional replication and transcription. Interestingly, this bilateral symmetry is not seen in most other plastid genomes, even though the selection pressure should be universal for bi-directionally replicating circular genomes. However, other selective pressures might also increase coding strand bias. A recent examination of plastid gene order in green algae and plants showed that in the Chlamydomonas reinhardtii plastid genome, adjacent genes were more often functionally related and clustered on the same strand than in an inferred ancestral genome, and that this clustering is significantly higher than would be expected from random genome rearrangements [30]. At least in the highly re-arranged plastid genome of C. reinhardtii, and perhaps more generally, increased coding strand bias seems to be an outcome of selection for co-transcription of genes of common function.
Figure 2
GC skew diagram for theHelicosporidiumplastid genome. The sum of [G-C]/[G+C] calculated in 37 base, non-overlapping adjacent windows is shown superimposed on a linearized scale map of the genome, starting between the LSU and rpoC2 genes. The global minimum of this plot corresponds to the proposed origin of replication.
Comparing gene order with C. vulgaris reveals that, in addition to the large-scale changes in genome structure, smaller rearrangements have also been common (Figure 3). The most obvious differences between the genomes are the many large deletions in Helicosporidium. These missing segments encode mostly photosynthetic products, but also clpP protease, the cell division proteins minD and minE, and several tRNAs and ribosomal proteins. In the remaining shared segments, synteny is low between Helicosporidium and C. vulgaris. Some conserved blocks do remain, such as a large string of co-directionally transcribed ribosomal proteins including L2, S19, S3, L16, L14, L5, S8, L36, S11 and RNA polymerase subunit A (rpoA). This particular block of genes is conserved, with some lineage-specific deletions, in all plastids and is probably co-expressed. The partial plastid genome of P. wickerhamii shows considerable rearrangement of genes when compared to either C. vulgaris or Helicosporidium, suggesting rapid and ongoing rearrangements in these genomes.
Figure 3
Gene order comparisons between trebouxiophyte plastid genomes. Genomes are drawn to scale. Coloured boxes represent identity with genes found in Helicosporidium sp., grey-shaded boxes represent identity between genes found in Chlorella vulgaris and Prototheca wickerhamii, and open boxes represent genes found only in C. vulgaris. Segments of the C. vulgaris genome that have been completely lost in Helicosporidium are shown in call-out boxes above the remainder of the genome. Straight lines join the genomes at the center points of protein coding and rRNA genes. For orientation, the rRNA genes are indicated.
Gene content
The Helicosporidium genome encodes 26 proteins, 3 rRNAs and 25 tRNAs. The only intron is a group I intron in the tRNA Leu (UAA) gene. This particular intron is commonly found in cyanobacteria and plastids and may be an ancestral plastid feature, although lineage-specific losses have occurred among green algae [31]. No unique ORFs of appreciable size were found and most of the protein-coding genes in Helicosporidium are identifiable as housekeeping proteins involved in transcription and translation (Figure 1). These include 16 ribosomal proteins, an elongation factor and components of an RNA polymerase (rpo). In plants, this polymerase is responsible mainly for transcription of genes associated with photosynthesis. In non-photosynthetic plants, algae and apicomplexans [4, 5, 9], some or all of the rpo subunits have been lost from the plastid genome, and it is thought that a separate nuclear-encoded polymerase is responsible for plastid transcription. In the Helicosporidium plastid, however, all 4 subunits of the RNA polymerase complex (rpoA, rpoB, rpoC1, and rpoC2) are present. The Helicosporidium plastid also encodes tRNA(Ile)-lysidine synthetase (tilS), which is responsible for modifying the CAU anticodon of a unique tRNA that is cognate for isoleucine. This CAU-reading tRNA is universally found among bacteria and plastids [32]. In plastids, however, tilS is generally encoded in the nuclear genome and targeted to the organelle. In addition to Helicosporidium, tilS is also plastid-encoded in the rhodophyta, and in the green algae Nephroselmis olivacea, C. vulgaris, Chaetosphaeridium globosum and Mesostigma viride.
Only four protein coding genes encode products not involved in transcription or translation: FtsH protease, which degrades membrane-bound proteins [33, 34], ycf1, a poorly conserved gene of unknown function that has been shown to be essential [35, 36], Acetyl-CoA carboxylase beta subunit (accD), which is involved in fatty acid biosynthesis [37], and a sulfate transport protein (cysT) [38]. These four genes have a scattered distribution among plastid genomes. FtsH protease is found in red algae, chromists (algae with plastids of secondary red algal origin) and green algae, but is nuclear-encoded in plants. AccD is found in plants, green algae and red algae. Ycf1 is only found in the plastid genomes of plants and green algae, while cysT is restricted to green algae, a few lower plants and one red alga. Other components of the metabolic pathways in which accD and cysT participate are known to be encoded in the nucleus of Helicosporidium and targeted to the plastid, confirming these as metabolic functions of the organelle [15]. As expected, no genes involved in photosynthesis or bioenergetic processes were found.
As noted earlier, P. wickerhamii probably represents an intermediate form between autotrophic, Chlorella-like trebouxiophytes and the highly-reduced Helicosporidium. Over half the P. wickerhamii plastid genome is known, and no photosystem, electron transport or chlorophyll biosynthesis proteins have been found. However, the P. wickerhamii plastid does encode genes for six of the subunits of ATP synthase [17], which are not present in Helicosporidum or apicoplast genomes.
The Helicosporidiumplastid encodes a minimal set of tRNAs
The Helicosporidium plastid genome contains just 25 tRNAs, which is among the smallest number of tRNA genes documented to date in a plastid genome (Table 1). This is in part due to a reduction in tRNA gene copy number, such that the Helicosporidium plastid encodes only a single copy of each tRNA with a particular anticodon. Multiple tRNA gene copies are universally found in plastids, sometimes independently (as in C. vulgaris) and sometimes as part of the inverted repeat (e.g P. falciparum). Moreover, the Helicosporidium plastid genome contains a minimal functional set of tRNAs for a genome using all 61 sense codons and the universal genetic code. The set of tRNAs in Helicosporidium is a good illustration of the degree of order in the reduction of this genome. There are twenty amino acids and each is represented by a single tRNA except leucine, serine, arginine, methionine and isoleucine (Figure 4). Leucine, serine, and arginine are distinguished by having six codons and so require two tRNAs: one for four codons and another for the other two. Methionine has a single codon, but requires an initiator tRNA and a second one for internal methionine codons. Isoleucine, with three codons, requires 2 tRNAs: one for a pair of codons ending in a purine (R) and a second that is the substrate for tRNA(Ile)-lysidine synthetase, which modifies C in the first position of the anticodon to lysidine (L), making it cognate for the codon AUA. Conceptually, this is a minimum complement of tRNAs for plastids: one each for the twelve 2-fold degenerate codon groups, one each for the eight 4-fold degenerate codon groups, one tryptophan, one initiator methionine, one elongation methionine, one for the AUR pair of isoleucine codons, and the modified tRNA-Ile.
In general, plastids use more than the minimal set: about 32 different tRNA species are usually found because more than one isoacceptor is often used to decode the 4-fold degenerate groups of serine, leucine, threonine, arginine and glycine and the 2-fold degenerate lysine (UAR) group. Helicosporidium minimizes the number of isoacceptors used, by complete utilization of 3rd position wobble. As Figure 4 shows, the complement of tRNAs encoded in the Helicosporidium genome are sufficient to decode all codons found in the mRNA, assuming that some known modifications [32, 39] are used. Furthermore, the GXX tRNA is present in every one of eight codon pairs ending in a pyrimidine, the UXX tRNA is present in every one of five codon pairs ending in a purine, and the UXX tRNA is present in seven out of eight 4-fold degenerate groups. The single exception to this uniformity is tRNA-Arg (ACG). The first anticodon position A is presumably modified to inosine and reads all four Arg codons, as happens in plant plastids [40, 41].
Once again, the closest comparison for this type of reduction lies in the non-photosynthetic plastids. P. falciparum takes near-complete advantage of the wobble rules but uses two anticodons for glycine. E. tenella, T. gondii and T. parva have dispensed with the extraneous tRNA-Gly and use the same suite of tRNAs as Helicosporidium. Curiously, however, all the apicomplexa appear to lack the modified tRNA-Ile (CAT reading ATA). The ATA codon frequently appears in these genomes, so either a unique and unknown modification system must exist [42], or they import a tRNA. In the holoparasitic plant E. virginiana, a number of tRNAs have been lost or exist as pseudogenes. Seven essential anticodons are missing, so it has been suggested that E. virginiana must import tRNAs [43]. Helicosporidium is therefore unique in that it reduced its tRNA complement to a minimum without inventing new modifications, changing its genetic code or importing tRNAs from the cytoplasm; instead, it has simply done away with all redundant tRNAs to leave the perfect minimal set for the universal code.
Interestingly, there is a strong AT codon bias in Helicosporidium protein coding genes (the arginine codon CGG is used only once in the entire genome), and this bias is often counter to the tRNA complement (Figure 4). In some systems, there is a correlation between codon bias and what tRNA genes are present in the genome, and this is assumed to occur by selection for increased translation effieciency [32]. However, in Helicosporidium, codon bias is clearly a result of an overall high AT bias, while the presence or absence of tRNAs is dictated by wobble rules.
Conclusion
When a major metabolic shift occurs, many genes may be lost. If photosynthesis disappears, this loss of genes can represent a large proportion of the plastid genome, so the effect is severe. By itself, however, this loss does not explain the nature of these reduced genomes, because there is no obvious reason that the resulting genome could not be similar in form to its photosynthetic ancestor, but reduced in content. Indeed, this is what we see in the holoparasitic plant E. virginiana and the heterotrophic euglenid E. longa. However, the genomes of the apicoplast and Helicosporidium are different; these genomes are highly reduced but more ordered than their ancestors. At least some aspects of this 'structured reduction' appears to be related to high coding density: the symmetrical coding strand bias probably developed to co-ordinate transcription and replication, and the elegant utilization of wobble rules is probably to reduce the complement of tRNA genes to a minimal functional set. The apicomplexa and Helicosporidium are not closely related; indeed, among plastid types they could hardly be more different: the apicoplast is a secondary plastid derived from a red alga whereas the Helicosporidium plastid is a primary green algal plastid. Their genomes have both retained characteristics that betray these origins, but they have also converged on a similar form in many ways. It is possible there are specific selective pressures operating here that are not important to other sequenced non-photosynthetic plastid genomes, or it could be that this is a predictable outcome for the evolution of these genomes, and less ordered examples are simply not there yet. Either way, the overall forms of apicomplexan and Helicosporidium plastid genomes have been shaped in parallel by common evolutionary forces. Comparing them raises interesting questions about whether there are selective pressures that lead genomes to compact, or if compaction is simply a by-product of reduction that occurs for neutral reasons.
Methods
Cell culture and genomic DNA isolation
Helicosporidium sp. (ATCC 50920, isolated from the blackfly Simulium jonesii) was cultured axenically in TNM-FH insect medium (Sigma-Aldrich) supplemented with 5% fetal bovine serum and 50 mg/ml of gentamycin at 25°C in the dark. Cells were harvested by centrifugation and ground under liquid nitrogen. Total genomic DNA was extracted from the ground cells using the Plant Dneasy Mini Kit (Qiagen).
Genome sequencing
Genes encoding accD and cysT were amplified by PCR using the degenerate primer pairs GGCGTGATGGACTTYCANTTYATGG/GCCGTCACCCCNCCNGTNGTNG and GACTACTATGTGGAYYTNCCNTTYGC/GCCCCGAAGTARTCRTAYTGYTC, respectively. In addition, a fragment containing a portion of the rpoC1 and rpoC2 genes was sequenced as part of an ongoing genomic sequence survey, and two sequences (a partial SSU rRNA [GenBank:AF538864] and rps12/rps7/tufA/rpl2 [GenBank:AY498714]) were characterized previously. These four sequences were used as anchors for long-range PCR containing 1 U Elongase polymerase mix (Invitrogen), 1.5 mM [Mg 2+] buffer, 100 ng template DNA, 200 μM dNTPs and 0.2 μM each of two primers, resulting in eight overlapping fragments of the plastid genome ranging in size from 867 to 8168 bp. These fragments were TOPO TA (Invitrogen) cloned and sequenced using BigDye terminator chemistry (ABI) on both strands by primer walking. Sequences were assembled using Sequencher (Gene Codes Corporation), yielding a circular molecule, with a total of about 2.4 kb of overlap between clones. The plastid genome sequence has been deposited in GenBank [DQ398104].
Annotation and analyses
Protein coding genes were initially identified by BLASTX [44] searches of NCBI protein databases. In cases of divergent sequence and/or length heterogeneity such that the Helicosporidium ORF could be defined by more than one initiation codon, the longest non-overlapping ORF was selected. Ultimately, 94.9% of the genome contained ORFs with detectable homologues in other plastid genomes, giving high confidence that all genes were identified and annotated. Ribosomal RNA (rRNA) genes were identified by BLASTN searches against the plastid genome database at NCBI. Endpoints of rRNA genes were determined by alignment with trebouxiophyte plastid rRNA genes [GenBank:AJ222802, GenBank:NC001865]. Transfer RNA (tRNA) genes were identified using tRNAscan-SE [45]. All non-coding regions were re-analyzed with BLASTX and BLASTN searches, revealing no detectable matches. Mean intergenic distances were calculated from intergenic spaces between all genes, with overlapping genes given a value of 0.
Declarations
Acknowledgements
This work was supported by a grant (MOP-42517) from the Canadian Institutes for Health Research (CIHR). We thank A. Tartar and D. Boucias for providing Helicosporidium cells in culture, and M. Rogers for helpful comments on the manuscript. APD is supported by scholarships from CIHR and the Michael Smith Foundation for Health Research (MSFHR), and PJK is a Fellow of the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research (CIAR) and a new investigator of the CIHR and MSFHR.
Authors' original submitted files for images
Below are the links to the authors’ original submitted files for images.
Authors' contributions
APD designed and performed the study, interpreted the data and drafted the manuscript. PJK conceived of the study, contributed insight into data interpretation and helped to draft the manuscript. All authors read and approved the final manuscript.
Authors’ Affiliations
(1)
Department of Botany, University of British Columbia, Vancouver, Canada
Copyright
This article is published under license to BioMed Central Ltd. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
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GETTING STARTED
You may register online through Sept. 30, 2015, or in person on race day, Saturday, Oct. 3, 2015, at Morrell Park on the east end of River Street. Walk-up registration and advance registration check-in begins at 8:30 a.m. race day and closes at 10:30 a.m.!
If you're planning to race:
- Registration opens at 8:30 a.m. Races will start around 10 a.m.
- If you've pre-registered, you'll still need to check in at the desk.
- Walk-up registration is $25 per dog entered, cash or check only. We cannot take credit cards on site. Fee includes race and one T-shirt. All dogs must have current vaccinations and be on a leash (except while racing).
- Owners must be responsible for their pets while at the race site and come prepared to pick up after their dogs. Trash cans will be available.
RACE DETAILS
- Dogs will run in heats of 10 dogs each until all registered competitors have raced.
- The winners of the 10 fastest heats will race in a final heat, and trophies will be awarded to the top three finishers.
- During the heat, all dogs must have an assistant at the starting gate and one at the finish line.
- Judges' decisions are final.
ALSO: At least one non-competitive heat will be for mixed-breed dachshunds, the Almost Wiener Run. Registration rates will apply.
CONTESTS
Contest entrants do not have to be registered racers.
- Costume contest for wiener dogs after about 4 heats are run. Prizes will be awarded; no registration cost to enter.
- Owner-dachshund lookalike contest after about 8 heats have ended. Prizes will be awarded; no registration cost to enter.
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{
"pile_set_name": "Pile-CC"
}
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Plates & Poses
May 21 @ 6:00 pm - 8:00 pm
Plates and Poses is a virtual two month group coaching program that combines nutrition and yoga to bridge the gap between mind and body!
This program will focus on building a positive relationship with your body and food. The nutrition portion of the program focuses on nutrition from a food freedom standpoint. The yoga portion will help put the ideas we talk about with nutrition into physical movements! The practice will mainly be vinayasa or restorative and is very beginner friendly!
We will switch off every week between a yoga session and a nutrition presentation and discussion. If you can’t make it to the live class, don’t worry! It will be recorded and available to anyone who signs up!
If you would like to purchase the 2 month package, please register for April 23rd date.
If you would like to purchase a drop in class, please register for the specific date that you would like to participate!
Date Details
April 23rd- Introduction// why combine yoga and nutrition? Re-framing the way we think of diet
April 30th- Yoga Fundamentals
Sessions will be held every Thursday evening at 6:00pm starting April 23rd and ending June 11th.
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{
"pile_set_name": "Pile-CC"
}
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Tri-Aktiline: Does Tri-Aktiline Work?
Tri-Aktiline Overview
Tri-Aktiline is a ‘wrinkle filler’ that is presented in a very plain, ‘no nonsense’ manner. The packaging for the product resembles a prescription medication and the information given is relatively free of over-exaggeration.
Manufactured by GS Labs, most of the details for Tri-Aktiline can be found on the site for the retail store Kohl’s, which sells the product exclusively. The information is very limited and there are no customer testimonials or FAQ sections included. However, there are some independent consumer reviews available on the internet which rate the product as reasonably effective overall. The only major complaints were that it cannot be worn under make-up, making it unsuitable for daytime use for many and that it didn’t quite live up to the claims made by the manufacturers.
Tri-Aktiline – Product Description
No full ingredient list is available for Tri-Aktiline unfortunately. Only the three key active ingredients are detailed, accompanied by explanations of how they work. Because the main goal of Tri-Aktiline is to ‘fill’ wrinkles, the ingredients are designed to act in a similar way to Botox, that is, relax facial tension, smooth wrinkles and lines and prevent future damage. The substances Gatuline and Argireline, an amino acid peptide, both have the ability to relax the facial muscles in addition to evening skin tone (Gatuline) and helping boost collagen production (Argireline). The third ingredient, Kombuchka, is a sweet black tea extract that ‘plumps’ the skin, reducing the appearance of lines and wrinkles.
Tri-Aktiline can be used on all areas of the face to eliminate ‘crow’s feet’, brow lines, frown lines and fine lines around the lips. Although Tri-Aktiline is supposed to ‘work on contact’, most customers saw an improvement in facial lines in about 4 weeks.
Tri-Aktiline – Advantage
The information for Tri-Aktiline is not over-exaggerated or gimmicky
The product contains three effective key ingredients
Tri-Aktiline is available from a retail store
Independent consumer reviews were generally positive
Tri-Aktiline can be used on all facial areas
Tri-Aktiline – Drawbacks
Information for Tri-Aktiline is limited
No customer testimonials are featured on the Kohl’s website
There are no FAQ’s for the product
No full ingredient list is available
It is unlikely to work ‘on contact’
No free trial offer is available
The product may not be ideal for daytime use, under make-up
Tri-Aktiline – The Bottom Line
Tri-Aktiline appears to be an effective cream that works very well for most consumers, although not quite as instantly as the manufacturers claim. Price-wise it is on a par with similar cosmetic products, costing $39.50 for 1 floz, although occasionally it can be purchased at a sale price, from Kohl’s.
The only real disadvantage of Tri-Aktiline is that the full ingredients are not listed, making it unsuitable for anyone with sensitive skin or allergies. However, anyone interested in purchasing the cream should be able to receive a complete ingredient list upon request from the makers, GS Labs.
The cosmetic industry currently offers a variety of wrinkle creams from a number of brands. To make the process of selecting a wrinkle cream as simple as possible, we've evaluated each cream on its ability to fulfill our requirements for a quality wrinkle cream. To be specific, we believe that a wrinkle cream should include ingredients that offer antioxidant protection for skin, in order to delay the onset of noticeable aging. At the same time, wrinkle creams should be able to renew skin, typically by containing compounds with collagen-stimulating properties. Additionally, such a cream should improve both the texture and appearance of skin by offering both long term anti-wrinkle benefits and hydrating agents to create smooth, firm skin. Listed below are the top wrinkle creams, according to these important characteristics.
Kathy Charles is a Health Care journalist from New Jersey who has written about disease management for many publications. She has also done an Introductory Biology laboratory Course from Florida State University. She also writes about women's lifestyle issues. She contributes regularly for TheBeautyInsiders.
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Disclaimer: The information provided on TheBeautyInsiders.com is for educational purposes only and is not intended as a substitute for professional medical advice, diagnosis, or treatment. Always seek professional medical advice from your physician or other qualified healthcare provider with any questions you may have regarding a medical condition. Certain areas of the TheBeautyInsiders.com web site contain information supplied by visitors and others. TheBeautyInsiders.com is not responsible for comments, advice, information, or any other posting made by visitors or others in these areas. TheBeautyInsiders.com reserves the right to review materials posted in any public areas and to delete or edit them, for any reason, at any time.
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Ga. men sentenced for stealing $4 million from bank | Crime
Title (Max 100 Characters)
ATLANTA -- Four Georgia men will spend time in federal prison after pleading guilty to stealing more than $4 million from the Bank of New York Mellon.
The defendants include:
Harry Cobb, 48, DecaturPleaded guilty in September 2014Sentenced to one year and eight months in prison, then five years of supervised release
William Leese, 33, DuluthPleaded guilty in December 2014Sentenced to three years and one month in prison, then five years of supervised release
Derek Spinks, 35, AustellPleaded guilty in September 2014Sentenced to two years and nine months in prison, then five years of supervised release
Zachary Vaughn, 35, AtlantaPleaded guilty in August 2014Sentenced to five years and three months in prison, then five years of supervised release
"The sentencing of these four defendants brings to a close an extensive and expensive bank fraud scheme," J. Britt Johnson, Special Agent in Charge at the FBI Atlanta Field Office, said in a release. "With restitution amounts in excess of $4 million, these individuals will have many years to contemplate their bad decisions."
As part of their sentences, the defendants must repay $4,387,598.57 to the Bank of New York Mellon.
The scheme began in December 2009, when Vaughn, then a Bank of New York employee, wired $4.3 million from the bank to an account in the name of a business owned by Spinks. Spinks and Leese then invested the stolen money in another business, which was owned by Leese and Cobb.
Prosecutors said the money paid business expenses, but the defendants also spent some of it on cars, gold, travel, and a suite at Atlanta Hawks games.
The theft was discovered when 2013, when Vaughn left his job at the bank.
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