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The Tenth Parallel: Dispatches from the Fault Line Between Christianity and Islam
Eliza is an award-winning journalist and poet. She is currently a fellow at the New America Foundation, is a former Neiman Fellow at Harvard University, and a former Wilson Center Fellow.
The tenth parallel—the line of latitude seven hundred miles north of the equator—is a geographical and ideological front line where Christianity and Islam collide. Award-winning investigative journalist and poet, Eliza Griswold spent seven years traveling between the equator and the tenth parallel: in Nigeria, the Sudan, and Somalia, and in Indonesia, Malaysia, and the Philippines. She discovered that religious conflicts are also conflicts about land, water, oil, and other natural resources, and that along the tenth parallel, faith can also be geographic and demographic. Scheduled for rebroadcast starting October 20, 2010 on MHz Worldview channel.
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The great State of Washington is home to numerous legends of lost mines and unrecovered treasure caches in the Northwest. Here are three of these treasure tales from the "Evergreen State:"
Lost Doukhober Silver Mine
For those of you out there who are unfamiliar with precious metals mining ore values, most large modern mining companies can make a tidy profit processing ores that produce less than 1/4 troy ounce per ton of material. So Doukhober's vein was rich beyond the wildest imagination.
Many other prospectors and treasure hunters have tried to find the Lost Doukhober over the intervening years, but without success. Interested? If so, start doing your research and then head for Stevens County.
Vashon Island Gold
Like other entrepreneurs of his era, Hanson did not trust banks and stashed most of his money in and around his property near the town of Burton. Rumor has it that he cached over $200,000 (face value) in gold coins somewhere close to the banks of nearby Judd Creek.
The lucky treasure hunter who locates Hanson's cache will hit the "big one" for certain. Why? Because Hanson's treasure would be worth millions today (either sold for its gold content or better yet, the numismatic value of all those gold coins).
Fort Walla Walla's Gold Bars
According to a persistent treasure legend, a small gang of train robbers hit it big when they pulled off a successful heist of a train near Wallula in southeastern Washington's Walla Walla County. What was their take? A shipment of gold bullion in the form of stamped 100 troy ounce bars.
Exactly how many bars of bullion the desperadoes made off with is uncertain, but it was enough to slow them down considerably as they fled the inevitable posse hot on their trail. Worried about their chances of evading the law, they buried the gold near the site of Fort Walla Walla and hoped to return for it later.
But Lady Luck frowned on the now-desperate band of gold thieves when they tried to catch a fast boat for Portland, Oregon in their attempt to escape the relentless lawmen on their tail. They literally "missed the boat" and ended up shot dead (full of that very non-precious metal known as lead).
Today the Fort Walla Walla site is designated as park and contains both a museum and a hospital. Any treasure hunter searching for those lost gold bars will face much more than the usual difficulties locating and recovering this cache.
(c) J.R. 2009
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Wednesday, December 19, 2012
It's your turn to share your thoughts on the media's coverage of the nation's latest mass shooting.
In the immediate aftermath of the shootings at an elementary school in Newtown, CT some people thought the news media coverage of the event was overkill, if not completely invasive. There was criticism of cable TV networks for interviewing kids coming out of the school following the massacre, and incorrect information was reported in the hours immediately following the news breaking. But others argue that it’s the job of the news media to be aggressive in telling these stories, and that the misinformation was only the results of erroneous information provide by officials. How would you rate the media coverage of the of the Sandy Hook Elementary shootings? Tell us in comments.
Tuesday, December 18, 2012
A list of the charities chosen by the families of the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting in Newtown.
- THE NEIGHBORHOOD FILES
- Elissa Bass
Tuesday, December 18, 2012
Newtown, CT, began the process of saying goodbye this week to the victims of the horrific Dec. 14 shootings at Sandy Hook Elementary School, and it has seen an outpouring of offers of help from Maryland and other parts of the country. Read full Patch coverage on Newtown Patch, including an in-depth profile of the school's principal, Dawn Hochsprung, whom President Obama called a hero for her actions during the assault. If you want to help, below is a list of the charitable contributions identified by some of the victims' families. Charlotte Bacon: Christ the King Lutheran Church, 85 Mt. Pleasant Rd., Newtown, CT 06470. Daniel Barden: In lieu of flowers, donations may be made in Daniel's name to the Sandy Hook School Support Fund, c/o …
Shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School has sparked broader debate over gun control and whether semi-automatic weapons should be banned.
The Sandy Hook shooting has opened a broader discussion over gun control and whether there should be tighter restrictions on semi-automatic weapons like the one used by shooter Adam Lanza. As Columbia Patch points out, citing an article from The Washington Post, current law bans fully automatic assault weapons, but semi-automatic assault weapons are legal, as well as high-capacity magazines. Since the shooting, Walmart stopped selling online the Bushmaster Patrolman's Carbine M4A3 Rifle, which is in the same family of firearms as the weapon Lanza used, The Huffington Post reports. Wheaton Patch is reporting that Dick's Sporting Goods has suspended the sale of "modern sporting rifles" at all of its stores. The shooting has sparked a …
Friday, December 14, 2012
"Such violence directed toward anyone is unspeakable – aimed at little children all the more so," County Executive Isiah Leggett said in a statement.
Montgomery County Executive Isiah Leggett released a statement Friday afternoon in response to a mass shooting at a Newtown, CT, elementary school. Montgomery County police increased presence around schools at dismissal time Friday afternoon “for the comfort of the community." Leggett joined parents, teachers and police officials in expressing sadness and horror. Leggett's words: “Our thoughts and prayers go out to all the families touched by the senseless slaughter perpetrated today at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut. “Such violence directed toward anyone is unspeakable – aimed at little children all the more so. There is no point in trying to make sense of it for it makes no sense. “Ralph Waldo Emerson once said…
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Free Photo Archive of over 26,000 vintage photographs. Find people and the places were they lived. Search for your surnames. Find photos of your ancestors. Make connections with genealogy cousins. Add your family's photos.
Leonard Bates Tozer
Leonard Bates Tozer was born on 31 Oct 1861 in Rochester Mills, Indiana, PA to John Tozer and Susanna (maiden name unknown but could possibly be Bates). He married Mary Allis Kelly on 11 Nov 1887 in Punxsutawney, Jefferson, PA. They had eight children. Leonard died on 13 Apr 1918 in DuBois, Clearfield, PA. He is buried in the Otterbein Cemetery in Mahaffey, PA in an unmarked grave beside his mother Susanna.
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“Nothing can be asserted theologically that cannot also be experienced”?
One line I heard during the Colin Gunton Day at King’s College London, today, was: “Nothing can be asserted theologically that cannot also be experienced”. The speaker was not entirely endorsing this, and was using this as part of a launchpad into an interesting paper about Schleiermacher. But it made me slow down and ponder. Although I think that this sentiment contains a germ of truth, I cannot agree (it is locked into a dated and problematic epistemology). What do you think?
On a different note, one very good paper discussed Augustine and Kant on sin, its origin etc. and while I am grateful to remain a member of the New Testament guild, I find it amazing that some would think that these kind of matters are anything but potentially very enlightening for our own work. This one, for example, took me right back to Romans 5:12 with a keen sensitivity to conceptually related matters of some significance.
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Acquit: The act of freeing a person from the charge of an offense by means of a decision, verdict or other legal process; to discharge
Action: A civil judicial proceeding whereby one party prosecutes another for a wrong done or for protection of a right or prevention of a wrong; requires service of process on adversary party or potentially adversary party
Ad damnum: Clause of a pleading alleging amount of loss or injury
Contact our Orlando Wills & Trusts Lawyer Now!
Adversary: An opponent. The defendant is the plaintiff's adversary
Class action: When different persons combine their lawsuits because the facts and the defendant are so similar. This is designed to save Court time and to allow one judge to hear all the cases at the same time and to make one decision binding on all parties. Class action lawsuits would typically occur after a plane or train accident where all the victims would sue the transport company together in a class action suit. Recent class actions have occurred against tobacco companies
Comparative negligence: A principle of tort law which looks at the negligence of the victim and which may lead to either a reduction of the award against the defendant, proportionate to the contribution of the victim's negligence, or which may even prevent an award altogether if the victim's negligence, when compared with the defendant, is equal to or greater in terms or contributing to the situation which caused the injury or damage
Contested action: An action which involves disputed issue(s) of fact or law
Corroborate: To strengthen; to add weight by additional evidence
Costs: The statutory sum awarded to the successful party when a judgment is entered.
Damages: Monetary compensation or indemnity for wrong or injury caused by the Violation of a legal right. 1. Compensatory damages - Reimbursement for actual loss or injury. 2. Exemplary damages - Monetary award by way of punishment for injury caused by aggravated circumstances or malice, in addition to compensation for the injury. 3. Punitive damages - Monetary compensation awarded in excess of ordinary damages, as punishment for a gross wrong.
Defendant: The party being sued or the party accused of committing the offense charged
Equitable action (equity matter): An action which may be brought for the purpose of restraining the threatened infliction of wrongs or injuries, and the prevention of threatened illegal action; case in which payment of money damages will not be adequate compensation
Evidence: A form of proof or probative matter legally presented at the trial of an issue by the acts of the parties and through witnesses, records, documents, concrete objects, etc., for the purpose of inducing belief in the minds of the court or the jury
Fair preponderance: Level of proof in a civil action; more than half; more convincing.
Homicide: The killing of one human being by another
Judgment: A determination of the rights of the parties in an action or special proceeding. A judgment shall refer to and state the result of a verdict or decision, or recite the circumstances on which it is based
Negligence: Conduct which falls below the standard established by law for the protection of others against unreasonable risk of harm
Sanction: A penalty or punishment provided as a means of enforcing obedience to a law, rule or code; also, an authorization
Voluntary Manslaughter: Manslaughter resulting from an intentional act done without malice or premeditation and while in the heat of passion or on sudden provocation
Wrongful Death: A death that results from a wrongful act or from negligence; a death that can serve as the basis for a civil action for damages on behalf of the dead person's family or heirs
Orlando Wills & Trusts Lawyer Now!
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Although diversity is covered regularly in InsideCounsel's bi-monthly "Driving Diversity" column, it's always beneficial to reinforce such an important issue. This month, I would like to offer my thoughts and suggestions on the importance of diversity, and particularly the legal department's role. Every corporate legal department needs to set the gold standard for diversity in the workplace. The general counsel can't ask other executives of the company to develop diverse functional teams without first building a diverse legal department that demonstrates the values of diversity in the workplace.
Of course, the first task is to assemble a work force in the legal department that incorporates diversity among its legal, paralegal and administrative staff. However, merely building a diverse work force in the corporate setting is not the ultimate goal. This is where the management piece of the equation fits in. When properly managed, a diverse group will demonstrate increases in creativity and productivity, new attitudes among the department members, and the development of new processes and solutions.
How does a general counsel who has built a diverse legal department capitalize on the benefits of a diverse team?Encourage inclusion in making decisions. Actively solicit the views of your team members when making policy decisions that may affect the overall department and its interaction with the broader business clientele. The decision-making process should be a collective, collaborative effort. Recognize the added value that each team member brings to this decision-making process.
The general counsel must maintain an open mind prior to making a policy decision. Remind everyone that there is no one best way to approach a legal problem. Articulate that no one, including the general counsel, has all the answers. When the GC sets the stage in this manner, the department members will feel free to voice their opinions and listen to the opinions of others.Form project teams consisting of members from diverse backgrounds to handle special matters. It might seem the easier solution to build a project team that consists of members with the same background or previous experience with the matter. This group might be able to complete the project quicker but may do so by employing the same, previously used methods. Break that pattern: Construct a team of people and encourage them to use their different views and backgrounds to approach the matter in a new and better way. This will reduce or even eliminate the tendency to resort to getting the job done the same old way.
When your diverse team completes a project with a beneficial outcome, promote the success to your whole department and others in the company. Foster tolerance within the team. For those who are not used to working in a diverse work force, tension--sometimes under the surface--may arise as a result of the challenges posed by the differing views and backgrounds represented in a diverse team. Temper the opinions and egos of your team members so that no individual can undercut the goals of diversity. Encourage your team members who have demonstrated commitment to the goals of diversity to become involved in project teams outside the legal department. They will become advocates to the broader business community in confirming how diversity leads to the best business decisions. Remind everyone within the legal department that she has a role to play in making diversity in the workplace a vital tool. Each legal department member should be aware that she was selected on the basis of the unique background that she contributes. In order for a diverse work force to come alive and thrive, it requires the active engagement of everyone.
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I have tried to display a graphics layer with the WMS functionality of ArcGIS Server, but I cannot see the graphics in the image of the getmap response.
I have done is manually by publishing a service with a graphics on an annotation layer, associated this annotation layer with a specific feature layer, and published it, but the graphics is not appearing, only the features.
And I have done it programmatically by creating a graphicslayer and assign it to a layer, and its the same, graphics are not appearing on the map image returned by WMS.
When I do a REST call to the service I can see the graphics in both cases.
Are graphics not supported with WMS or am I doing something wrong?
I am using ArcGIS Server 9.3.1, Java version.
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Winter attacks! New sidewalk-clearing law focuses on fees, not jail
No one teaches a lesson quite like Mother Nature, and last winter's epic snowstorms revealed flaws in the city's snow removal laws that Charlottesville officials hope have been addressed in a new ordinance approved in August.
"We absolutely think it's going to make a difference," says Jim Tolbert, head of the Neighborhood Planning Department on Wednesday, December 15, the eve of the area's first snowstorm.
The old snow removal ordinance required residents and business owners to clear the sidewalks around their properties within 24 hours of the last snowflakes falling. Failure to do so was considered a crime, a Class One misdemeanor carrying the possibility of a jail sentence up to 12 months and a fine up to $2,500.
As it turned out, the threat of jail didn't have the desired effect. After the city failed to clear its own properties, police enforcement was practically nonexistent. Sidewalks remained impassable for weeks following the December 18, 2009 storm dubbed "Snowpocalyse" that dropped around two feet and the 18-inch February 6, 2010 "Snowmageddon."
"Public Works did a terrible job and didn't seem to learn lessons from the first snowfall," says Kevin Cox, an avid pedestrian and outspoken critic of city's handling of snow issues last year. Cox says he's now hopeful that this is the year snow removal will finally be taken seriously in Charlottesville.
"I think they'll make some effort to enforce it," he says of officials. Public Works boss Judith Mueller did not return a reporter's call.
The new ordinance requires Charlottesville residents and business owners to clear the sidewalks around their property within 48 hours of the snowfall ending. Failure to do so will result in a $75 "administrative fee," and that won't be the only expense a violator will incur: while city officials once ignored the snowcovered sidewalks, now they will use public resources to clear them– and then pass on the bill to the violator.
Cox believes the new ordinance improves the old–- but he says there are questions that haven't been answered. Among them is the problem of snow plows–- operated privately or by the City's Public Works–- pushing snow onto sidewalks that a resident has already cleared.
"Who's responsible then?" he asks, noting that he and others have been asking this question since February but have not been given an answer.
Tolbert has the answer: the property owner is responsible, he says, regardless of how many times it happens. Even if they're diligent about clearing initially, repeat shoveling may be necessary. Failure to re-clear the walkway within 24 hours of receiving a citation will result in the same fee.
Tolbert acknowledges that if we get another massive storm like last year's, there will be challenges all around–- for residents, businesses and government–- and he suggests there may be some flexibility in requirements in unusual circumstances. In addition, he says the warning citations issued 24 hours before the fine is levied, will contain contact information to be used by anyone who is physically unable to perform their required sidewalk clearing duties due to age, illness, or disability.
The best test of the new ordinance, of course, is another significant snowfall, and it's too early to say whether this year will be snow heavy, brutally cold, or neither.
"The mid-Atlantic is notoriously difficult to predict," says state climatologist Jerry Stenger. While the Northeast has experienced massive snowfalls due the so-called "lake effect," when moisture from the Great Lakes is pulled up into the atmosphere, then dropped as snow once it reaches land, the mid-Atlantic is too far away to feel such effect. Stenger says the position of the Jet Stream–- with well defined peak and trough–- has been pulling Arctic air down into our area even as the states in the Southwest are recording record high temps.
"It was 80-some degrees in Arizona!" exclaims Stenger, noting that temps at UVA's McCormick Observatory–- 15 degrees recorded the morning of Wednesday, December 15–- are running more than five degrees below average for December.
Despite difficulty predicting weather patterns for this area of the country, Stenger says there are some models that suggest we could be in for a colder and wetter winter than average, including, he says, a "better than average chance" at a white Christmas.
Snow or not, Charlottesville residents are gearing up to get snowed in after learning tough lessons last year–- including those last-minute searches for shovels when stores all over town had sold out. According to Dinah Jarrell, office manager at Martin's Hardware, the store saw brisker shovel sales earlier this year and has stocked up.
"We have 1,000 shovels, 1,000 sleds and one and a half tractor trailer loads of ice melt," she laughs. And unlike those who are dreading the prospect of another year buried in snow, Jerrell says she and her colleagues have their fingers crossed.
"We're hoping for another winter like last one!"
Anyone share her sentiment?
Correction: Low temps were recorded at the McCormick Observatory.
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This article was originally distributed via PRWeb. PRWeb, WorldNow and this Site make no warranties or representations in connection therewith.
BEAT100 is a fresh new social network that has been designed and engineered in a way that caters for everything an aspiring musician or band needs. Not only can users upload videos into fantastic charts and win cash prizes for moving up, but users can link in their own Facebook, Twitter and other social networks too, meaning their friends and fans can help them move up the charts.
Austin, TX (PRWEB) January 18, 2013
The landscape for musicians today is vastly different than that of even a decade ago. Up until the turn of the millennium, aspiring bands or artists lived with the often blind hope that somewhere, amongst the silhouettes that stood around at a gig, would be someone with a pocket full of record deals. It rarely happened, but it did happen sometimes. What never happened though, was a band receiving an email from a label rep who had just stumbled across them on the internet! The last major UK bands like Oasis and Coldplay became monsters of the industry with none of the digital tools available now, so artists must use every bit of pro-active nous to take advantage of what really is a new 'ball's in your court' situation.
Social networking is a powerful new era already... but it's really only just beginning.
There are always going to be teething problems in every new era. In the early days of internet, there were endless different kinds of websites available with the idea of giving artists a platform to show off their music whilst in some cases even integrating other social networks like Facebook, YouTube and Twitter. All of them have played a part in transforming the whole musical landscape, encouraging more people into becoming musicians even. Today it's almost an even playing field... the power is with musicians to make themselves known by encouraging friends and families to share their links through social networks, sending off links to music pages to every record label in the land. Musicians now have the ability to effectively grow a fan base in town's and cities, even countries.
BEAT100 is a fresh new social networking site that has been designed and engineered in a way that caters for everything an aspiring musician or band needs. Not only can users upload videos into a fantastic chart and win cash prizes for moving up, but users can also link in their own Facebook, Twitter and other social networks, meaning their friends and fans can help musicians move up the charts. Thousands of people every day browse and share music videos already on BEAT100.com and cash prizes are won every WEEK with a dedicated team that will always answer questions; something often frustratingly absent on many other social network platforms. A new chart system is also on it's way which will feature original songs only. Cover songs will then have their own chart.
Once a video is uploaded into the BEAT100 music charts the only thing left for the artist to do is to share the link amongst friends, and there is a very good chance the artist will then be featured in the news section which goes out on the BEAT100 Facebook and Twitter pages, along with other social networks. It's all about free exposure and getting something back for your efforts. There's no middlemen involved, just the artist and the music loving public who use BEAT100 just to browse through the thousands of videos on show every day.
Also, in the BEAT100 news section, users can read general music news with features and daily reports from the BEAT100 reporting team, as well as gig news and both signed and unsigned artist interviews. The aim is to bring musicians everything they need and stack them up neatly under one strong and durable roof, but BEAT100 will continue to adapt and develop and are always open to user suggestions. BEAT100 consider every artist on their site as a member of the BEAT100 family and can also offer real advice and guidance on making it in a music industry that is littered with pitfalls. BEAT100 will always go that extra mile for their members!
The incentive of weekly cash prizes and exposure for moving up the charts is great way of rewarding artists for their efforts. The more the video is shared the better chance of a cash prize.
In all, it's a simple, fresh and easy way to get heard and not only are there thousands of people using the BEAT100 social network every day, but BEAT100 also has an extensive Facebook and Twitter network which increases the potential audience ten fold.
BEAT100 is always developing and plans and are underway in getting involved with music festivals across the country with an official BEAT100 stage, giving BEAT100 artists the chance to perform live to thousands of music lovers.
The structure of the BEAT100 network is also very easy and simple to use with on-going subtle changes being made so to constantly keep up with the ever changing landscape of social media and with thousands of new videos uploaded every week there is always fresh new content available. Whether users want to share or listen to original music, cover songs or new bands or if they are an aspiring artist and want to upload their music to a site with an ever growing audience, BEAT100 offers it all.
For the original version on PRWeb visit: http://www.prweb.com/releases/prwebmusic/network/prweb10329819.htm
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My Favourite Toy
10 March to 6 November 2012
Hove Museum & Art Gallery
Everyone has a favourite toy. They inspire our imaginations, our play, and help us as we grow. In later years, they hold cherished memories and make us nostalgic for times gone by.
Whether it’s a teddy, dolls house or a transforming car, this exhibition celebrates toys of all kinds, from across the eras.
On display are toys from Hove Museum’s very own Wizard’s Attic along with some popular favourites, and others that have not been loved for some time.
Children and young people from Brighton & Hove have helped create exciting displays of their own favourite toys, celebrating our shared affection for these familiar friends.
Find out more:
Step into a world of toys, cinema, local history, and fine art. Hove Museum & Art Gallery also boasts one of the finest craft collections in the country, and is an oasis of learning and enjoyment for everyone. Entrance is free.
Back to top
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http://www.brighton-hove-rpml.org.uk/WhatsOn/Pages/MyFavouriteToy.aspx
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- The Enterprise
- The Recorder
High Road School in La Plata on Friday celebrated 10 years of helping students with special needs.
Director Ericho Little opened the celebration ceremony by telling the audience about how he, Tony Clancy and Autumn Kelly began the school in 2003 with eight students.
“To me, it doesn’t seem like 10 years,” Little said. “It seems like yesterday when we started.”
He cited the school’s philosophy: “Building confidence and competence through personalized academic and behavioral interventions.”
Little told the crowd that when starting High Road School, he soon learned the importance of building relationships with others. He also learned that being a man of large stature was not going to make students obey him. He had to learn to be patient with them.
“It doesn’t matter your size. It doesn’t matter what person you are,” Little said. “You have to show these students that you are dedicated to them.”
He added that the goal for students at High Road is not just to earn a diploma, but also to find a path to follow in life after earning that diploma.
He further told the crowd that the school’s anniversary celebrates what High Road was, what High Road is and the heights the school can still reach.
Little said that when he was growing up, schools like High Road did not exist. He saw students end up in prison who would have benefited from an environment like High Road’s.
Student Chaz Smith recited a poem to the crowd titled “Take the High Road,” which illustrated how the school helps him learn despite his behavioral struggles.
Lorene Garner’s grandson, Paul, 18, attends High Road. Garner and Paul’s mother, Yvette Rosas, said they have nothing bad to say about the school that helps Paul learn despite his having attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, speech delays and intermittent explosive behavior disorder.
“I love this school,” said Rosas, who added that her son will be enrolled in the school until he is 21.
Students come to the school at various ages from sixth to 12th grades and are able to leave when they graduate the curriculum. High Road currently enrolls 30 students.
High Road School provides students with the same curriculum they would receive in public school, but with more of the individual attention that children with special needs require, school officials said.
“It’s just like a regular high school curriculum,” said Kelly Reynolds, transitions coordinator. ”It’s just smaller classrooms. One-on-one staff.”
At High Road School, students receive “a much more structured environment,” Reynolds said.
Sharon Tayman spoke during the celebration ceremony about how the school has helped her grandson, Michael Tayman, who has bipolar disorder, ADHD, attention deficit disorder and oppositional defiant disorder.
“This school works,” Tayman said. “And it works because of the people in it.”
In the school’s 10 years, Little has served in various positions. Clancy went on to found the first High Road School in Providence, R.I., in 2007, and Kelly serves as director of curriculum and instruction at High Road.
Friday’s celebration brought the three founders together again, and they reminisced about the large binder of training information Kelly had in 2003. Both Little and Clancy admitted to referring to material in that binder in the last 10 years in order to provide students with special needs an environment suitable for learning.
Jonae Adams, 19, attended High Road for four years and graduated in June. She returned for Friday’s celebrations. Public school did not provide Adams with the one-on-one attention she needed, she said.
“It was a good experience,” said Adams of her education at High Road. She added that she plans to go to school soon to become a nurse and that she thinks what she learned at High Road will help her be successful.
According to Reynolds, other female students looked up to Adams when she attended High Road and saw her as an example of who they could become.
“These are kids that often would not be able to graduate if we weren’t around,” said Clancy, who was diagnosed with ADD and dyslexia as a child.
Clancy said that local school districts must provide placement for students with special needs. If the public school system cannot provide what a student needs, then the school district provides funding to schools like High Road. Depending on an individual child’s needs, enrollment at High Road can cost between $20,000 and $40,000 per year.
For more information about High Road Schools, go to www.sesi-schools.com.
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Power Strips get filled up fast when you have a lot electronics connected to them. to get a little extra space, Redditor EnglishTraitor uses grounding adaptors to provide a little life for his two-pronged AC adapters.
This trick can only be done safely if you're connecting a two-pronged plug into it. You don't want to use anything with a ground plug because using a grounding adapter increases your chance of an electrical fire. For safety you'll also want to make sure the connection is secure it doesn't wobble. Still, as most gadget owners know, a power strip can fill up quick when you have a lot of bulky AC adaptors plugged in. This might do the trick for that one extra adapter you can't find a place for.
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Center Stage lecture: ‘So you want to be a musician?’Former principal trumpet player for the Cincinnati Symphony and Pops Orchestras Philip Collins presents a free lecture at Tennessee Tech University on Wednesday, Feb. 2, entitled "So You Want to Be a Musician?"
The lecture, part of the Center Stage series, is open to the public and begins at 7:30 p.m. in the Wattenbarger Auditorium of the Bryan Fine Arts Building.
Collins will provide an entertaining lecture summarizing his experiences from more 31 years of performing and recording with the world-class Cincinnati Symphony and Pops Orchestras. He performed for more than 120 recordings including dozens of acclaimed albums with the Cincinnati Pops Orchestra under the direction of Erich Kunzel.
"Rarely can one get a wonderful opportunity like this to learn what goes on behind the scenes in the life of a musician for a major symphony orchestra and to discover some of the challenges of recording more than 100 albums," said TTU trumpet professor Charles Decker.
Collins appeared as soloist with the Cincinnati Orchestra, Cincinnati Chamber Orchestra and on various recital series. He toured North and South America with the Eastman Brass Quintet and recorded with Eastman Wind Ensemble.
Prior to joining the Cincinnati Symphony, Collins was a member of the Cleveland Orchestra, the Rochester Philharmonic, the National Arts Centre Orchestra, and the Eastman Brass Quintet.
He is adjunct professor of trumpet at the College-Conservatory of Music of the University of Cincinnati and his publications include arrangements of sacred music for trumpet ensembles and three trumpet books including "Studies in the Style of Pops Orchestra Repertoire."
Collins is a graduate of the prestigious music conservatory Eastman School of Music and did graduate study at the Cleveland Institute of Music.
For more information, contact Decker at 931-372-3711.
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- If you rent your family home to yourself
- Living temporarily in a property owned by your LAQC, company, partnership, trust or LTC
- Living with your tenants in a property owned by your LAQC, company, partnership trust or LTC
- If you set up an LAQC or LTC for asset protection
Problems arise when an LTC or LAQC buys an LTC or LAQC shareholder’s family home, and shareholders continue to live in the home and claim deductions (such as interest, insurance, rates and maintenance) for the property. In most instances this is considered tax avoidance.
You may believe that if you continue to pay market rent to the company you can continue to claim these LTC or LAQC losses against your income. However, we may still consider the arrangement to be tax avoidance.
The same principle applies if a similar structure is used such as a company, partnership or trust.
The problem arises when a structure (eg company, partnership or trust) is set up which enables an individual to rent their family home effectively to themselves. The individual or their family then continue to live in the home and claim deductions (such as interest, insurance, rates and maintenance) for the property which would otherwise be private expenditure.
For more information about private homes held in LAQCs:
From time to time a shareholder will move into a home owned by their LTC or LAQC which they had previously rented to tenants. There may be good reasons why they do this. For example:
- inability to find tenants
- relationship breakdown
- relationships formed with tenants
- renovating or building your own home.
But, if you live in the property and you’re a shareholder, you generally cannot continue to claim what would otherwise be private expenses, as outlined above.
Whether or not this structuring and claiming of resulting losses is considered tax avoidance depends on a number of factors. For example, whether the arrangement is permanent or temporary, and whether there are commercial factors driving the decision to live in the property.
We look at these arrangements on a case-by-case basis, but in many situations they may be regarded as tax avoidance.
The situation about tax avoidance is less clear when both a shareholder/owner and other tenants live in a home owned by an LTC or LAQC. We consider the proportion of expenses attributable to the shareholder/owner is not deductible. We will look at these arrangements on a case-by-case basis.
Some people claim the main reason for holding their personal residence in a limited liability company is for asset protection rather than the tax minimisation benefits.
In reality, these structures provide little or no asset protection. For shareholders to make use of LTC or LAQC losses, they must hold the shares in their own name. Because the shares of an LTC or LAQC company that owns residential investment property are equal to the market value of the property and represent an asset to the shareholder, less the mortgage, a creditor claim equal to the current value of the property is possible.
We will take a close look at the reasons for this arrangement, but we will generally disregard the asset protection argument when considering whether an LTC or LAQC arrangement is tax avoidance.
So, if you’re considering setting up an LTC or LAQC to own your family/private home for tax loss claim purposes, be aware that we consider these types of arrangements to be tax avoidance.
If you’re moving into a property owned by your LTC or LAQC over the long-term, consider taking the home out of your LTC or LAQC.
If you’re moving into a property owned by your LTC or LAQC on a temporary basis, be careful that you don’t claim a deduction for what would usually be considered private expenses for the period you’re in the home.
We strongly recommend you talk to a tax professional with expertise in this area if you’re considering any of the above arrangements.
Date published: 30 Mar 2011
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“Why do we have to read so much?” said the students who thought Intro to Myth would be an easy A. “And all this writing! You turned it into work!”
“Why are you asking us to think critically about mythology, of all things?” said the students who regarded stories only as entertainment. “I want to read this stuff the same way I read watered-down versions of it when I was ten.”
“Why are you making us read The Silmarillion?” said the less reflective of the Tolkien fans. “I’ve read The Lord of the Rings twenty times, and I thought I could get college credit for stuff I already did in high school.”
Alas, one side effect of attending college is that one may be asked to do college level work. Most of my students were good sports about it. I assured the students who weren’t that they were welcome to keep their copies of the syllabi and read the same books for kicks on their own, and they could get out of the bother of keeping pace, writing papers, or thinking about what they read. All they had to do was go to the registrar’s office and withdraw from my class. Nobody was making them stay.
Nearly all of them stayed.
As I related in my last blog post, my favorite experience teaching in a classroom setting started as a satire-worthy departmental turf war, and ended up as something intermittently sublime.
The blackboard told me more about that class than about any other I taught. The students’ questions had just never called for many diagrams in my composition and poetry classes. One week, the blackboard bore maps of various otherworlds–Hades, the circles of Dante’s Hell, Beleriand. Every session, somebody needed help with chronology (Gilgamesh got into written form before Genesis did, Blake and Milton were not contemporaries, Tolkien and H.D. both wrote their major works during WWII, and so on). And when characters had extra names, we needed tables to keep track of who was who. By the time we got to The Silmarillion, my students knew to keep track of the several names Tolkien gave his Lady of Stars. At the end of every class meeting, I would look at the blackboard and think, If I had walked into this room as an undergrad and seen those class notes, I’d have chased the professor down the hall and begged to know what the class was and how I could get into it.
As lovely as it was to teach exactly the class I would have wanted to take, it was my students’ class, too. They agreed with me that Cuchulain’s fits of battle madness were awesomely bizarre–who could fail to be impressed by a guy who raged so mightily that, on a regular basis, one of his eyes would get sucked back into his skull while the other popped out of its socket and a great fountain of blood shot straight up out of his head?–but they never quite connected with the great 12th century Irish epic The Cattle Raid of Cooley. All that fuss over the theft of one ox!
Okay, but what might the ox mean to the characters, to the original audience, or to Yeats?
There were two ways the students preferred to read: with thudding literal-mindedness, and in a floating bliss of unconscious receptivity. These are both useful, important, and worthy modes of reading. They just don’t happen to be the modes of reading that suit college-level study. I can’t blame my students for regarding with suspicion my efforts to get them to think critically about stories they would have preferred simply to love or to judge. They feared they would lose modes of thought they valued if they learned a new approach, and that does sometimes happen.
To the extent that I got anywhere at all with that fear of theirs, it was by offering them a new form of joy. The beginner’s version is a game of spot-the-allusion. At our big state university, many of the students had never had a chance to play this game with any success. They had been asked to play it with texts like Eliot’s “The Waste Land,” but never had they been led to “The Waste Land” by way of the ancestor texts they would have needed to make sense of it. Eventually I was able to cajole most of them beyond spot-the-allusion to a game of why-the-allusion.
What could Tolkien possibly have been thinking when he wrote the stiffly formal creation stories of Middle Earth? Why does The Silmarillion feel so different from The Lord of the Rings? Well, Tolkien’s choices make a whole lot more sense when you have the pages of Genesis and the Theogony open on your desk right next to the pages of the “Valaquenta.” Where did Gaiman get all the characters in the “Season of Mists” volume of The Sandman? By the time we reached the end of the syllabus, we had spent enough time with Paradise Lost and Yeats’s fairy folklore to talk about how and why Gaiman might have decided which lost gods should vie for the key to Hell.
It still surprises me how few of the final projects tried to wrestle with the hows and whys from the inside. I offered the kids the chance to do creative writing for the final paper, and most of them opted to write twelve-page research papers instead. The big draw was that they got to put their own favorite works of popular culture into our somewhat arbitrary canon of texts-that-fit-into-one-semester and texts-that-don’t-serve-a- departmental-turf-war. Freedom to add anything they wanted to our classroom canon shook awake a lot of students who had initially resisted the work of the class. The paper about William Blake, the Gnostic Gospels, and the horror film Dark City was probably the single best piece of student writing I saw in seven years of classroom teaching, and I got to see it take shape through a series of spectacularly rough drafts.
I don’t expect ever to teach a class like it again. Indeed, one of the many reasons I left academia was that I had no patience left for the kinds of turf wars that got me that teaching gig in the first place. Without the artificial constraints that arose from that turf war, would I still choose the texts that gave the syllabus its best juxtapositions? Without the massive distortion field of the grade, and the imperative to assign stuff that can be graded, it would make no sense to write a final exam. Yet my preparation to write the final exam gave me one of the most joyful moments of my teaching life, when I imagined I glimpsed, so briefly, the whole cosmos of myth.
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Minimalist GNU for Windows
MSYS from Scratch: Interlude
"All is for the best in the best of all possible worlds." -Voltaire, Candid (1759)
Unfortunately, even if we already have all the basic tools in our new mSys; they're far from being the best.
Our gcc and binutils don't actually use /usr and /usr/local dirs to search for includes and libraries, they actually the full path and if we ever change our msys from one directory to another, then nothing would work anymore.
Furthermore, some tools (like autoconf, but we haven't built it yet) hard code paths inside it. We'll also have to rebuild them.
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Whiteness, Non-Whiteness, and Criminal Justice
In response to the shoot-out, manhunt, and arrest of the Boston Marathon bombing suspects, some people are proclaiming that America’s rampant racism and/or Islamophobia is on display when comparing the reactions to the Boston bombing and other recent instances of mass violence:
Young white men and white people in general were never profiled, harassed, assaulted or collectively blamed for the actions of Lanza, Holmes or the countless other white males who’ve gone on a shooting rampage in the recent past.
Even now, investigators are unsure about what provoked Lanza and Holmes aside from a potentially undiagnosed mental illness.
More recently, the media has speculated that Adam Lanza was motivated by bullying he experienced during his time as a student at Sandy Hook Elementary. Conversely, not a single person has inquired about the mental wellbeing of the Boston Bombing suspects. Experts in psychology, violence and mass murder haven’t appeared on cable news or written op-eds for the New York Times and Washington Post with insight into what causes people to snap. No one has speculated about bullying that Tamerlan and Dzhokhar’s may have experienced, particularly Tamerlan, who was in middle school when he immigrated to the United States, an age when bullying is at its peak.
Of course, all of these questions are rhetorical since we already know the answer: Adam Lanza and James Holmes are Christian white males whose names have the appropriate number of consonants. Dzhokhar and Tamerlan Tsarnaev are Muslim (which cancels out white) males who immigrated to the US from a region of the world where names are difficult to pronounce (for us).
Other people are proclaiming that the only reason anyone cares about the rights of the Tsarnaev brothers in the wake of the bombing is because they are white:
You know, the detached academic in me is sort of having fits of laughter/sympathetic embarrassment/epic schadenfreude over how massively the WHITENESS machine is showing its gears.
This is 900000% “Ignore the man behind the curtain.”
Everyone’s sinking their claws in to figure out a way to either delegitimize or enshrine the whiteness of the Tzarnaevs in this massively transparent Big Top show.
Now, there are OBVIOUSLY complicating factors such as the religious background of the Tzarnaevs, not to mention their immigration status (I know one brother was fully naturalized, but I’m not sure if both were, either way, they were/had gone through the immigration system). But, that does not deny that they had the capability of passing and capitalizing on their white appearances.
In other words, it seems that there’s no good way to talk about civil rights in the wake of terrorism and mass violence … if you’re talking to people who regularly proclaim their social justice bona fides.
In the first instance, a blogger asserts that the bombers are being treated as non-white because they’re Muslim immigrants. In the second instance, a blogger asserts that the bombers are afforded all the privileges that redound to white people because they look white.
The presumption of the second blogger is that anyone who thinks civil rights matter only thinks they matter for white people (even if they are ethnically diverse because they still appear to be white). This makes the person who speaks up for civil rights a racist or at least someone who epitomizes white privilege.
And if one doesn’t speak up for the civil rights of these white people (who are ethnically diverse and yet appear to be white), then one is a racist or Islamophone for denying the civil rights of those who aren’t members of the privileged race or religion (even if they appear to be white).
My position is straightforward: The desire to toss around the “enemy combatant” label whenever someone does something terrible allows us to walk all over the civil rights of American citizens (as in the cases of Anwar and Abdulrahman al-Awlaki, and in Lindsey Graham’s wishful thinking about Dzhokhar Tsarnaev) and the human rights of people around the world. When someone commits a terrible crime, there are always calls to suspend their rights, whether or not they appear to be white; we all ought to work dilligently to ensure that — regardless of race, ethnicity, religion, or nationaliy — our laws are being applied consistently. The fact that our government has meted out justice unfairly for much of the nation’s history doesn’t mean that we ought to continue to mete it out unfairly or that we should swing the pendulum in the other direction for a little while to balance things out a bit. It means, instead, that we ought to agitate for equal treatment in every case.
In other words, when a person is suspected of committing a crime, he should be apprehended and subject to both the privileges and penalites of our criminal justice system. We shouldn’t be asking if he’s white, black, Christian, or Muslim before we decide how or if the law applies to him. This means standing up for the rights of the accused in all cases, which is difficult in and of itself in the aftermath of horrific crimes; it’s even more difficult when people who normally care about civil rights are squabbling about race and privilege rather than standing together to demand equal treatment under law.
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How I Write: Lee Martin
Published: November 18, 2005
|Lee Martin's The Bright Forever is likely to be considered one of the best-written novels of 2005, but this will not surprise admirers of his earlier work. A professor at Ohio State University, Martin has written much-praised short stories, memoirs and a previous novel, Quakertown. As with Mystic River, the haunting quality of The Bright Forever lingers in the reader's mind. The novel, set in small-town Indiana, centers on a young girl who goes missing. As Martin weaves a web of suspense, he deftly juggles six different points of view-and invites our contemplation of human character. |
Credits include the story collection .The Least You Need to Know and two memoirs, From Our House and Turning Bones.
Why: I've always, from a very early age, been in love with language and narrative. The reason I think I've made writing my life, in a sense, is because it's the way I interact with the world around me; it's the way I think about what it means to be alive on this planet Earth, and what it means in terms of our interactions with other people. I often think that writing is a very spiritual pursuit, not so much in terms of traditional religion but in the terms of communing with the world and its people.
Routine: If everything's going according to plan, I set aside time every morning to write. ... I just try to do what Isak Dinesen advised, which was to write a little every day without hope or fear. Which I still think is the best writing advice I've ever heard.
Getting ideas: I often get ideas from things I read in the newspapers. I'll read a news story, and it will make me curious about who the people are who were involved in it and why they did what they did, how they found themselves in those circumstances. And so I have to write a story, go to my imagination to figure out how someone might find him or herself in that particular situation. And then, of course, often story ideas come from memory. I have certain memories from childhood, say, that suggest story lines to me. And then I go to my imagination to create the characters and see how I can get them into motion.
Developing characters: I like to get my characters into trouble to see how they're going to respond. And I really do think part of my job as a writer is to start putting my thumb down on my characters, not in the sense that I want to cast them as victim; I want them to create their own trouble and then have to respond to that trouble. The pressure-cooker analogy is one that I often use-I want to get them into that kind of situation where they have to act, and those actions will have consequences that they'll have to deal with.
Using multiple points of view: I think that when you're using multiple points of view, you're coming at a story line from different perspectives, and you can do some interesting things with the way those perspectives play off one another. For example, in The Bright Forever, one thing I hope happens, particularly when these four first-person narrators occupy center stage at various points in the book, is that we start to get some interesting tensions between the way one character views an event or explains it and the way another character does. I'm also hoping that those four narrators become sort of commentors on one another's stories without even knowing it. And I hope that each time a different first-person narrator steps up, he or she not only causes us to glance backward at what other people have told us but also moves the story forward and sort of sets the stage for what's to come next.
Advice: I think it's absolutely crucial that you become someone who reads the way a writer reads-with an eye toward how this writer has made this story or this novel or memoir. You find the pieces that affect you deeply, and you try to figure out the artistic choices that the writer made to create those sorts of effects. And then you develop this really thick skin in terms of being determined to keep working at your craft, understanding that the tangible rewards eventually come after a long apprenticeship.
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2005: Mackenzie left lasting impression
By John Steinbreder
Australia was a golf backwater in 1926, a young country with a youthful enthusiasm for the game, but sorely lacking sophistication and depth. Its layouts were excessively penal and hopelessly cramped. And the men designing courses did not possess the expertise and vision of the notable architects building highly acclaimed tracks throughout the United States and the British Isles.
But all that changed when a boat pulled into the Melbourne harbor that October and discharged a mustachioed English passenger named Alister Mackenzie.
At that time, Mackenzie was an accomplished designer – but not terribly well-known, which was odd considering he had laid out 50 courses in his homeland and written a well-received book called “Golf Architecture.” Then 56, he also had been consulting to the Royal & Ancient Golf Club of St. Andrews, and it was a suggestion from leaders of that association that prompted the president of the Royal Melbourne Golf Club to invite Mackenzie Down Under so he could make recommendations for a course members wanted to build.
Mackenzie accepted the offer, but did not limit himself to his work at Royal Melbourne. In the roughly eight weeks he spent on the island continent, he visited clubs and courses all over the country, advising on new layouts as well as redesigns. When he was finished, he produced plans for what would become the fabled West Course at Royal Melbourne and also provided various degrees of input to nearly a dozen other courses. In the process, Mackenzie brought golf course architecture here to a new level and set a standard for design that pervades to this day.
Mackenzie was the first Western representative of traditional links architecture to work Down Under. He entrusted local associates with overseeing the actual implementation of his work and never returned to Australia to see the fruits of his visions. But even though he did not spend a lot of time there, or actually turn over much in the way of dirt, he deserves credit for transforming a nascent nation into a serious golf society that boasts some of the best courses in the world.
Authors Tom Doak, Dr. James S. Scott and Raymond M. Haddock, who wrote the definitive biography “The Life and Times of Dr. Alister Mackenzie,” refer to his visit there as “two months that changed a continent,” and they say that without a hint of hyperbole. Australia was never the same after Mackenzie, and much as Charles Blair Macdonald led the United States out of golf wilderness with his visionary design work and high regard for tradition, Mackenzie did the same Down Under, almost single-handedly introducing a nation to the right way courses should be built, and to how the game should be played.
Quite an accomplishment for a man born half a world away in Leeds, England.
Though England was the nation of his birth, Mackenzie was a Scotsman through and through.
His parents hailed from that country, and the family returned there each summer to what was considered their spiritual home, a town called Lochinver in the western Highlands.
The eldest of five children, Mackenzie found pleasure in the outdoors as a youth, sailing, fishing and hunting whenever he could. He was particularly fond of stalking the red deer that roamed the Scottish forests of Assynt, and it was there that he began to study and understand the concepts of camouflage that mammals use to hide from human predators. Later on, they would become important parts of his philosophy in golf course design.
Mackenzie received his medical degree from Cambridge in 1887 and served as a Civil Surgeon during the Boer War in South Africa from 1899 to 1902. That’s when he became an expert in military camouflage, applying his skills during that conflict and later in Europe for part of World War I, when he became a lieutenant in the Royal Engineers, and in Ireland during the “Troubles” in the early 1920s.
Mackenzie was an established golf course architect by the time he went to Ireland. A sturdy man of broad intellect, gracious charm and military bearing, he produced his first design in Leeds in 1907, with help from the great H.S. Colt, and built a formidable portfolio of work. Mackenzie favored wide fairways (so minimal time was wasted looking for balls), bold bunkering (that frequently featured wild and rugged growth around the hazards and often presented almost optical illusions in that they appeared to be more in play on certain shots than they actually were, a result of his work with military camouflage) and heavily sloped greens (that were built as much for proper surface drainage as for interesting putting contours). He always gave the higher handicap player a way to the hole as he tempted the better player to take risks in an effort to improve his score.
He arrived in Australia on Oct. 25, 1926, and it took him only 23 days to produce his plans for the new West Course at Royal Melbourne. He walked the property on which that track would be laid out, and spent five days in the South Australia capital of Adelaide. He also traveled to five other sites in what is known as the Sandbelt region outside Melbourne.
Fortunately for Mackenzie, he was able to hand his designs over to a pair of capable men affiliated with Royal Melbourne. One was a club member, Alex Russell, who had won the 1924 Australian Open as an amateur; he and Mackenzie became such fast friends that the doctor named him his design partner. (Interestingly, Russell had a background in military artillery, the perfect offensive counterpart to Mackenzie’s skill as a designer of ground defense.) The other was Michael “Mick” Morcom, the course superintendent at Royal Melbourne, who understood and could execute Mackenzie’s principles of camouflage.
Construction on the West did not start until five years after Mackenzie left Australia. And the finished product was nothing short of spectacular, a championship track that has served as the site of 15 Australian Opens as well as the 1998 Presidents Cup (as part of a composite 18 made with the excellent East Course it abuts in several places). It also is lauded as a superb members’ course and shows Mackenzie at his best.
His greens, some as large as 14,000 square feet, roll as true as any in the world. And while they are indeed built to accept a variety of shots, they are Augusta National-hard when it comes to discerning their many breaks and undulations. Then, there are the holes themselves, such as the par-4 fourth. Off the tee, golfers are faced with what appears to be a treacherous bunker complex that would be difficult to carry with anything but a perfect drive. In reality, however, the average golfer playing from the proper markers can clear those hazards with a reasonable shot. The illusion that those sandy wastelands are much closer makes hitting a drive on that hole more difficult than it might be otherwise.
And once you have cleared them, you are left to admire another trait of a Mackenzie design – after you walk beyond the bunkers and turn back toward the tee, you will see no evidence of those hazards. Which, of course, was exactly his intention.
Another attribute of the West is the obvious similarity to other Mackenzie gems. Standing over a shot in, say, the fairway bunker of No. 10, you very well could be at Augusta National, looking across fine white sand and over a well-sculpted face. It feels that way on several other parts of the course, and even though the West is nowhere near the water, it also conjures up imagines of Cypress Point, especially on the par-3 fifth, whose five greenside bunkers are reminiscent of the ones surrounding the 15th on that famous California track.
The West at Royal Melbourne is Mackenzie’s best and most complete work in Australia, but he left his mark in many other places, beginning with nearby Kingston Heath. Widely regarded as the second-best course Down Under, this Sandbelt layout was designed by Sydney golf professional Dan Souter and opened in 1925. As was frequently the case with new courses back then, the architect included only a few bunkers, the idea being that additions and subtractions could be made after observing play for a spell. That’s where Mackenzie came in, and he created what many golfers believe is some of the best bunkering anywhere – gnarly complexes with wild, windswept looks and torturously deceptive appearances that greatly enhanced the overall quality of the layout.
Equally as significant was the doctor’s work at Royal Adelaide, where he moved several holes of what was considered a first-rate golf course so they interacted more with the sand dunes in the center of the property. He also excavated large hollows, after which he filled only parts in with sand, creating the sense that the depressions were natural.
Mackenzie also traveled to Sydney and walked the finger of land known as La Perouse that overlooks Botany Bay, where Capt. James Cook sailed into Australia aboard the Endeavor in 1770 and made the European discovery of that continent. Mackenzie advised on a plan for a stunning seaside course with spectacular water views that came to be New South Wales Golf Club.
Col. Bertram of the Royal Sydney Golf Club supervised the work, and the course is often compared with Cypress Point, though it is less Mackenzie than many golfers might believe. A top Australian amateur player, Eric Apperly, made substantial changes to the design in 1937. Still, it is rightfully regarded as one of the finest layouts in the world and a must-play in Australia, running as it does along the sharp ridges on the property as well as the jagged coastline.
In his brief time in Australia, Mackenzie was also able to create designs for another Sandbelt classic, Yarra Yarra, in collaboration with Russell, and made design recommendations at two nearby layouts – Victoria and Metropolitan – while assisting Morcum and Russell in rerouting part of Royal Melbourne’s East Course. Mackenzie spent a week during his trip in Brisbane advising on a redesign of the Royal Queensland Golf Club track and revising some of the bunkering at Royal Sydney as well as the Manly Golf Club in New South Wales and Flinders Golf Club in Victoria.
That was a lot of work in just a couple of months. But it takes a lot to change a nation.
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In the 1970s creatives did not trust technology, so much so that while the rest of an office was working on their IBM desktops, creative types were still using typewriters and X-ACTO knives. That was until 1984 when Apple introduced the Mac.
It happened during the Super Bowl with a 60-second Orwellian epic, directed by Ridley Scott. As one industry guru put it, “The commercial changed advertising; the product changed the ad business; the technology changed the world.”
The product of course has transformed our industry, but does the advertising industry pay enough attention to the developments in new products? Conversely, are manufacturers missing a marketing opportunity by not reaching out to the creative houses and their respective production studios?
For me I’m stuck in a paradox. On the one hand beginning the idea generation with a blank sheet of paper and a pencil is the only starting point.
However, at the click of a button the Internet will give inspiration to a hundred ideas and the creative tools will multiply what can be done with those ideas. But with the constant influx of new products and new marketing platforms, there is a real danger of getting completely overwhelmed and losing the ability to create originality or, worse, letting the technology dictate the idea.
To illustrate my conundrum, I recently visited Gitex so that I might get inspiration for the latest innovations that might inform an idea for clients. I was disappointed because as I browsed the ‘Digital Marketing’ room I could only find one company that should have been there and had something of value — a company called Tap It that facilitated NFC (Near Field Communication).
But then I realised that while the event may not have been so relevant to a digital advertising agency, it mattered not because it reminded me that the idea must always come first and the technology is simply an enabler. For example, it’s the mobility that is important not the mobile technology per se.
Case in point; the iPhone has so many applications that it has become solely responsible for doubling global ad-spend in mobile marketing. But of the many branded applications, how many actually stick?
So we should start by pouring our efforts into the idea and then working out how the technology can make it work. For example Charmin’s ingenious Sit or Squat application allows users to find nearby restrooms. This is an idea that adds actual value and transcends the notion of an everyday ‘ad’. Likewise Aisle411 is a company founded by an ex ad-man and his idea was not the result of any technological innovation. He saw shoppers frustrated by walking the same aisles twice to find specific products in large hypermarkets. It’s a simple insight but one that fuelled a mobile tool that can map out and optimise a route for shoppers in respect to their shopping list.
A good example is a small independent agency in London, which when pitching for a major kids brand, hired a clown as a consultant during the process and even took him into the pitch. It was not for a laugh – they genuinely wanted to know what they could never find out through research or just monitoring groups on social media.
The same is true for creativity and technology.
— The writer is the CEO of Digital Republic.
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What Lies Beneath the Surface Tablet's Screen
There would have to be a major cultural shift toward repairing rather than replacing before device manufacturers would feel pressured into changing their wasteful ways. In the meantime, the relatively few consumers who would like to fix gadgets rather than toss them into the landfill are finding they keep getting harder to take apart.
The last thing people probably consider when buying a new gizmo or gadget is how hard it might be to fix, but according to the teardown team at iFixit, Microsoft's shiny new Surface tablet is easier to repair than the latest iPad, but it is still difficult to take apart.
The online teardown site rated the Surface's "repairability" a 4 on a scale of 1 to 10, with 10 being the easiest. That is a marked improvement over the iPad's 2 rating, but far short of the Amazon Kindle Fire's 8.
Getting inside the device was where the Surface scored over the iPad.
"Microsoft made the Surface's internals accessible through the back -- like the Kindle Fire and Nexus 7 -- as opposed to through the front glass/LCD -- like the iPad 3," said Miroslav Djuric, chief information architect at iFixit.
"Aside from the original iPad's clip system -- which allowed the user to open the tablet without having to use a heat gun to unglue the glass -- making the tablet guts accessible from the rear panel usually makes for an easier opening procedure," he explained.
"The Surface falls somewhere in the middle: Users won't have to risk shattering the glass to open it, but they'll have to carefully remove a long, plastic bezel, a tamper-evident sticker, and tons of screws to do anything inside," Djuric told TechNewsWorld. "Thankfully, the battery replacement is quite easy once you're inside. The user just needs to disconnect a ribbon cable and carefully pry the battery off the rear case in order to remove it."
Adventures Through the Tablet Glass
After getting into the device, however, the would-be repairer would still have a ways to go to make those repairs.
"The glass and LCD, which will undoubtedly be the most-broken part of the tablet, is strongly adhered to the VaporMG frame, requiring lots of guitar picks, patience, and heat gun action in order to separate," said Djuric. "It also doesn't help that all of the Surface's other guts are placed on top of the glass/LCD/Vapor MG frame, but that's the usual trade-off with having a tablet accessible from the rear."
This also isn't really all that unexpected. The devices aren't made, as is still the case with desktop computers, to be upgraded or even repaired by the end user. These are devices -- much like a television -- that should be left to the professional to service.
"The more integrated a design is, the harder it is to pull apart," said Roger L. Kay, principal analyst at Endpoint Technologies Associates. "A removable battery takes up more space than a hard-wired one. But then there's just plain old good design. Some are better than others."
Form and Function
One of the reasons that these devices are difficult to repair comes down to consumers often wanting devices that are sleek and lightweight, while still being reliable. It is thus difficult to produce a product that fits all the criteria and can also be easily repaired.
"Consumers consistently are pushing manufacturers toward lighter, sleeker and more portable devices," said Chris Silva, industry analyst at the Altimeter Group. "We've seen with things like iPhone and Macbooks, the more the manufacturers do to make these items sleek and lightweight, the less user-serviceable they are."
That, plus the accelerating pace of innovation among these devices, adds up to a dire electronics-waste impact on the environment, Silva told TechNewsWorld.
"While feature phone innovation did not have as high a correlation to handset replacement every 18-24 months, on the smartphone front devices innovate so fast that users are swapping out devices at least that fast, if not more quickly. Tablets innovate even more rapidly, meaning that the ability to fix one of these devices is less important than our likelihood as consumers to attempt to repair vs. upgrade these items."
In the case of the Surface, this could be a reflection of Microsoft's newness to hardware in this class of products, but it also comes back to the cost to repair vs. the cost to simply replace.
"Their prior experience was the Xbox, which was generally just cheaper to replace, even though it was repairable," said Rob Enderle, principal analyst at the Enderle Group. "As you get to (US)$1,000, it makes more sense to design a product to repair, but as you get to $500, the added cost to make a product easy to repair starts to exceed the benefit."
With the Surface, very little should go wrong -- but if anything were to break, it likely wouldn't be something that an average user could readily fix, so it falls into the replace category.
"This is a solid state device, and the kinds of things that fail on this class of device are generally due to misuse and not because the part itself fails," Enderle told TechNewsWorld. "If the user mistreats the device, the warranty doesn't cover the repair, and if a component fails because it is bad, that cost is passed back to the component supplier."
Repair or Replace?
The issue with the difficulty of repairing is that clearly the companies see this as something that could, or even should be replaced rather than repaired. In these cases, the efficiency of manufacture means that repairing something that has a seemingly minor fault requires major effort. The question is whether consumers should consider this when buying such a product.
"There are lots of different e-recyclers out there," noted Djuric. "Some strip devices to their most basic materials, different metals, plastics, etc., while others refurbish a portion of their devices and make them sellable again."
The overarching problem is how to separate all the parts in an electronic device cost-effectively, Djuric stressed.
"Increasing the difficulty of separating the components hurts the e-recyclers' bottom line, and makes some devices cost-infeasible to refurbish," he said. "Those devices will eventually end up in a pile of raw materials -- at best -- instead of being used elsewhere by another person who can't afford the latest-and-greatest gadget."
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Resort tax collections for fiscal year 2011-12 set a record of $8.1 million, surpassing the previous record of $7.01 million set in 2010-11.
The resort tax, often called the bed tax, is the 5 percent collected by the Manatee County Tax Collector’s office on accommodation rentals of six months or less. It’s official name is the Manatee County Tourist Development Tax. The fiscal year runs from Oct. 1 to Sept. 30.
Sue Sinquefield, head of the office that oversees collection of the resort tax, said the team never planned to set a record.
“We’re just doing our jobs,” she said.
Better collection methods, increasing tourism, a good tip line for reporting violators, and the number of people who have come forward to register and pay tax on accommodations all contributed to the increase, she said.
To rent out an accommodation, an owner or rental agent must be registered with the Florida Department of Business Regulation and then receive a license from the county tax collector, Sinquefield said.
Her office also has field agents who conduct inspections of accommodations in areas known for having high numbers of rental properties.
If agents don’t find the proper documents at rentals, the owners or agents may be liable for resort taxes that should have been paid during the time the owner/agent had no license, but was renting the property anyway, Sinquefield said.
And the 2012-13 resort tax collections already have begun to come in ahead of last year’s record pace.
Resort tax collections for the first month of the fiscal year, October 2012, were $426,289, while collections in October 2011 were $397,000, according to the MCTC website. The tax is collected one month in arrears.
Sinquefield said increases in resort tax collections appear to mesh with increased tourism reports for Manatee County.
The year-to-year resort tax increased 15.5 percent from 2010-11 to 2011-12. Area tourism in 2011 was up 6.7 percent, according to the Bradenton Area Convention and Visitors Bureau, and the BACVB reports tourism is up about 6.5 percent for 2012.
Anna Maria Island and Longboat Key accommodations contribute about 62 percent of the annual resort taxes collected, according to information on the MCTC website. That equates to about $5 million generated for the 2011-12 resort tax fund by the barrier islands.
The resort tax is used to fund the BACVB, the Bradenton Convention Center, the county’s share of beach renourishment projects, the Crosley Mansion, McKechnie Field where the Pittsburgh Pirates hold spring training and several other county ventures.
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The Cincinnati Opera presents what's considered by some to be Verdi's masterpiece. The composer came out of a 15-year retirement to create this Italian opera gem, a tragic work based on Shakespeare's Othello set in Cyprus in the late 1400s. It's the story of forbidden love, war, betrayal and, above all, jealousy.
Otello, a Moor and the Venetian governor of Cyprus, has married Desdemona without her father's blessing.
Otello will be performed at 7:30 p.m. Wednesday and Saturday at Music Hall. Acclaimed conductor Robert Spano will lead the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra in his Cincinnati Opera debut.
Read Anne Arenstein's interview with Spano and get performance details here.
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The big news this morning was that Buffett gives Bank of America (BAC) $5 billion and will get preferred stock yielding 6%, plus warrants. The bullish hype around the move was astounding.
Banking stocks soared in the first 10 minutes of trading on the news. BAC stock was up 25%. But that was the end of the “vote of confidence” response. The Dow plunged from a triple-digit gain to a triple digit loss in a short time.
Is it safe to second-guess an investor like Warren Buffett? Let’s look at the facts.
If it were that simple to end a developing financial crisis, then the Fed should give Buffett $100 billion to invest in big firms, thus stopping the bear market. Actually, the Fed has injected more than $3 trillion into the system over the past three years. It may have saved the system from a serious “readjustment,” but didn’t get the country out of a recession.
I ask, why would a large bank, which is currently getting money from the Federal Reserve at an interest of less than 0.25%, pay 6% to Buffett? Of course, it strengthens the balance sheet, but what is $5 billion when the tangible common equity is $128 billion? The bank just had to settle for over $8 billion a mortgage pushback situation, which is still not resolved. Buffett’s $5 billion will be used up quickly.
I asked similar questions in late 2008 when Buffett tried to instill confidence in similar moves. To me, his actions were additional clues that a very serious credit crisis was in progress even while Wall Street CEO’s of doomed firms assured investors that “all was well.” Let’s look back.
On September 24, 2008, Buffett helped Goldman Sachs (GS) by buying GS preferred stock with a 10% coupon and warrants for $5 billion. The warrants can be exercised at $115. The stock was around $110 last week. So, the warrants are underwater.
How was the timing on that? It was just 20 days into the financial crisis, which didn’t end until five months later, on March 6, 2009.
One week later, on October 1, 2008 he invested $3 billion in General Electric (GE), which needed the cash because the commercial paper market was frozen. The GE stock had a coupon of 10% interest, the same as for the GS investment. He got warrants to buy $3 billion of stock at $22.50. The stock was trading at $15 one week ago. The warrants are underwater.
What do we learn from this: Two very large firms, which had departments or subsidiaries in the business of financing businesses, were willing to pay 10% interest to get cash from Buffett. Wasn’t that enough of a warning about the crisis? The warrants are now basically worthless. So, it looks like Mr. Buffett has made a good rate of interest, but otherwise no gain on the investments. Furthermore, he still had to sweat out the deepening financial crisis in 2008-2009 that brought us to “within 10 minutes of shutting down the entire banking system,” according to Senator Chris Dodd.
The lesson: The “spinmeisters” will not like this, but in my view, such “confidence building moves” are signs of crisis. Just one week ago the CEO of BAC said the firm didn’t need to raise any capital. This is so reminiscent of 2008. Buffett’s investment is to support the markets. History shows that such actions usually fail. The current problems are much bigger than that. Do you really think that Buffett can bail out all the European banks, or European countries such as Greece, Portugal, Spain, Italy, etc?
If he likes the 6% yield on BAC, he can get 46% on Greek 2-year government bonds.
Buffett’s move once again signals that a serious crisis is approaching, similar to the signals his moves sent in 2008. Of course, that is opposite to the intent of the investment.
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STAFFING AND WORKPLACE BLOG -- SCOTT SUTTELL
Manufacturing skills gap not severe -- yet
Blog entry: November 14, 2012, 6:00 am | Author: SCOTT SUTTELL
The country's so-called skills gap in advanced manufacturing “is more limited than many people think and shouldn't prevent, or even stall, the U.S. manufacturing renaissance, at least for a while.”
However, genuine and severe shortages “are likely to develop” soon, and industry and government “need to take steps now to prevent them and make sure that enough new talent enters the right trades.”
So writes Harold L. Sirkin, a partner at Boston Consulting Group, in a strong post for BusinessWeek.com.Plenty of people, little to do
According to his firm's estimates, the United States today is short about 80,000 to 100,000 highly skilled manufacturing workers, with welders, machinists and industrial machinery mechanics in shortest supply.
Even so, Mr. Sirkin writes, “The shortage represents less than 1 percent of America's 11.5 million manufacturing workers and less than 8 percent of its highly skilled manufacturing workers. What's more, only seven states — six of which are in the bottom quartile of U.S. state manufacturing output — show significant or severe skills gaps. And only five of America's 50 largest manufacturing centers (Baton Rouge, Charlotte, Miami, San Antonio, and Wichita) appear to have significant or severe skills gaps.”
A few years down the road, though, he's worried.
“According to government statistics, the average high-skilled manufacturing worker in the U.S. is 56 years old,” Mr. Sirkin writes. “If manufacturing continues to grow as we project, and if the baby boomers continue to retire at present rates, we could face a shortage of 875,000 by 2020. That would be a major problem for our economy.”
He wants government to invest more in training and skills development. He also calls on schools to create “a new type of college or degree program that combines liberal arts with industrial training (and) would create well-educated students capable of earning a good wage.” Mr. Sirkin also wants manufacturing companies to increase their recruiting efforts in high school.
A Bloomberg News investigation finds that more than 100 U.S. airport towers and radar rooms, including three in Ohio, are overstaffed and “have so few flights that they should be shut down late at night under the government's own guidelines, a move that would save taxpayers $10 million a year.”Time is money
Air-traffic controllers, who make a median $108,000 annual wage, “have little to do overnight at those locations, which remain open because of pressure from lawmakers who control the Federal Aviation Administration's budget,” Bloomberg reports.
Members of Congress from both parties have blocked attempts to cut tower hours or merge radar rooms, according to Bloomberg interviews and documents.
A total of 102 FAA-staffed towers and local radar rooms open all night don't have enough air traffic to justify seven-day, 24-hour operations, the FAA found in an internal survey from July 1, 2010, to June 30, 2011. The agency has 294 such facilities.
“The staffing issues were compounded by Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood's April 2011 order that there be at least two controllers at each facility on overnight duty, following a series of lone staffers falling asleep,” Bloomberg reports. “Most towers covered by LaHood's order don't have enough traffic to be open overnight at all, according to FAA data.”
Poor performers at work are a major time-suck for supervisors, according to this story from Staffing Industry Analysts, a sister publication of Crain's Cleveland Business.Take it outside
A survey by Robert Half International Inc. finds that supervisors say they spend 17% of their time — nearly a full day per week — overseeing poorly performing employees. In addition, 95% of respondents said a poor hiring decision at least somewhat reduces staff morale, and 35% say morale is greatly affected.
"Bad hires are costly, not just for the drain they place on the budget but also in terms of lost morale, productivity and time," said Harold "Max" Messmer Jr., chairman and CEO of Robert Half, in a statement. "Underperforming employees also require significant attention from employers, distracting managers from business-critical initiatives and causing other team members to pick up the slack."
The survey is based on interviews with more than 1,400 CFOs from a stratified random sample of U.S. companies with 20 or more employees.
If you're following some of the more salacious elements of the David Petraeus scandal, one question you might have is whether people who have affairs actually have sex in their offices.
Author Arianne Cohen, who studies sex as part of the Sex Diaries Project, writes that such workplace coupling is the stuff of movies and television, but it's exceedingly rare in real life.
“In the 3,500 diaries I've read, a grand total of 11 office affairs actually took place within the workplace walls,” she writes.
It's probably not a surprise that hard workers are the likeliest breed of employee to do this.
“Workaholics logging long hours, particularly those working 12- to 18-hour days, account for seven of those 11,” according to Ms. Cohen,
You also can follow me on Twitter for more news about business and Northeast Ohio.
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As a keen Scratch user (OK, Scratch fanboy) I was rather excited to find that Scratch 2.0 is now in public beta for anyone to try out. I really like it and think it has some major improvements over the older Scratch 1.4. To help explain the changes, I made this video that takes you through some of the new features and explains some of the new UI design.
You can only log into 2.0 using a Scratch account created prior to January 26, although you can still use it without an account. (You just won’t be able to share your projects on the Scratch website yet) A huge cheer to Mitch Resnick and the team at MIT for their work on this… Scratch is a fantastic resource for education and it leads the way as a tool for teaching computational thinking to younger students.
I’ve been teaching Scratch to my students lately, and it’s made me remember just how much I enjoy dabbling with programming. I’m really not much of a code monkey, but I do enjoy writing programs, telling the computer what I want it to do, and then having that feeling of mastery when it actually does what I tell it to do!
I heard a lot about Scratch before I actually started using it myself… people kept telling me how good it was, but for some reason I never really got around to trying it myself. When I finally did take a look at it, I couldn’t believe I waited so long to check it out! It’s a GREAT piece of software that all kids should spend some time learning how to use. I’d encourage you to NOT make the same mistake I did, and wait so long before looking at it.
I taught myself to write computer programs back in the 80s on a second hand Commodore Pet computer. It used a form of BASIC, the same language used on the original Apple II computers, and I thought learning to program was the coolest thing ever. Being able to write instructions into a computer and get it to do stuff was a real buzz for me… a geeky buzz to be sure, but a buzz nonetheless. :-)
Over the past 20 years I’ve taught quite a lot of programming to children and without fail it’s something they get a real kick out of. They really seem to engage with the big ideas of programming – problem solving, thinking mathematically and using logic and reasoning. It’s the practical application of those ideas and the creative thinking required to solve authentic problems that forms the basis of a truly engaging learning experience. While I don’t believe that everyone necessarily needs to become a computer programmer, I do think that everyone would benefit from learning the basic skills and mental gymnastics required to write simple computer programs. I’ve found it to be an incredibly useful skill, and the underlying understanding it gives into computers and how they do what they do has come in really handy over the years.
Scratch takes all of the essential programming constructs like sequencing, conditional branching, control structures, data manipulations, etc, and wraps them in a very friendly, very easy to use environment that even the youngest students can use with just a little knowledge. It’s quite intuitive to learn and you can do simple things fairly easily, yet there is really no limit as to how far you take it. Don’t be like me and hear about it but do nothing… download a copy now, give it to your kids and watch the magic happen.
For this year’s K12 Online Conference I did a presentation about Scratch, called Teaching Kids To Think Using Scratch. It’s trying to squeeze a lot of stuff into a small space, since the presentations are capped at 20 minutes, but I think it’s a reasonable introduction to some of the key ideas behind Scratch.
As you can see in the unscripted footage of the kids towards the end of the video, they talk about solving their own problems and figuring out how to work things out for themselves… to me this is what real learning should be all about. Watch the clip of the two girls working out what the variables should be in order to make the sprite move exactly the way they want, the engagement on their faces, and the expression of triumph when it finally works the way they want… as Lexie says, “Scratch brings out your inner awesomeness!” I think she’s right.
There was so much more I wanted to include in this video, but I simply couldn’t squeeze it all in. Instead, I’m going to add some further resources at www.chrisbetcher.com/scratch, so drop by and take a peek at what’s there (It’s a bit of a work in progress, but it’s an open wiki so feel free to add anything you think might be useful!)
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Athens (CNN) -- Kiki Sarakinou doesn't think the Greeks owe their European peers anything. "Whoever lent us money, we don't owe them anything," she says. "They owe us."
Because, she says, Greece gave Europe culture, thinkers like Aristotle, Socrates, "all the philosophers and mathematicians."
Despite that, Sarakinou will vote for New Democracy, the pro-austerity party in this weekend's elections. "Because there is no option," she says. She is afraid of a return to the drachma -- the currency Greece had before it entered the euro -- the specter of which looms large over the vote. "It would be chaos if we went back to the drachma."
Sarakinou is sitting outside Cafe Peros, a resplendent figure enjoying the country's cafe culture in Kolonaki, one of Athens' most affluent areas.
Sarakinou could be seen as one of the lucky ones. Her husband, a lawyer, has passed away but she is able to support herself independently. Yet "every day is disappointing," she says. "[The country] has just collapsed."
She calls the situation "very sad, [and] bad." The country must take an "honest fight" to corruption to bring itself out of the crisis, she says.
Kolonaki is populated by the city's elite. It is a place where businessmen, politicians and actors gather to chew over the country's political and economic crisis with cigars, espressos and cold beer.
Its wealthy clientele has ensured it is slightly shielded from the crisis, and the square remains buzzing with families, businessmen and the elderly, relaxing into the hot Athens evening.
Yet the area is far from immune. Restaurant manager Dimitris Konstantopoulos says business has dropped by half since last year, and numbers of staff have been cut from 60 to 29.
This time last year the square would have been full, Konstantopoulos says, because "it is the best area in the Mediterranean." But nowadays, people are staying at home, he says; they have no money. "This is a problem."
Just down the road, past Athens' central Syntagma Square, the focus of anti-austerity protests over the past two years, is Psiri, an edgy area which was known as the "Soho" of the city before the crisis hit.
Here, restaurant worker Mario Makris simply drops his thumb down when asked how business is.
"Business has dropped by over 60%," he says.
But Makris says he will vote for New Democracy, because a swing to the left -- which has enjoyed as surge of support on the back of Greeks' despair after almost three years of austerity -- would take the country to hell, he says.
Restaurant owner Paul Papageorgiou says the area has changed, but he blames immigrants -- another ferociously debated topic on Greek streets -- for the country's problems, rather than the financial crisis.
His family has spent decades here, and he has seen it slump from its vibrant years in the early 1990s to an area he says now suffers from crime and is home to drug dealers.
On Sunday, Papageorgiou says, he will vote for extreme right wing party Golden Dawn, one of several fringe parties to benefit from voters' dissatisfaction with traditional political groups in the last election.
Greek citizens -- and the rest of the world -- will have to wait and see if those same extremist parties will play a key role in the country's political future, be it inside or outside the euro.
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This week on Sinica, your hosts Kaiser Kuo and Jeremy Goldkorn are pleased to welcome Geremie R Barmé
, the well-known Chinese historian, author, filmmaker and translator, and the Director of the Australian Centre on China in the World at the Australian National University in Canberra.
And the topic for debate? Today we take a break from our usual focus on current affairs for a more wide-ranging discussion that starts with the history and constant reinvention of Hangzhou's West Lake, and moves on to the Chinese penchant for top-ten lists, the lingering importance of Southern Song general Yue Fei to Chinese patriots, and the perennial issue of history's grip on the Chinese psyche and its role in determining China's place in the modern world. We hope you enjoy the show half as much as we enjoyed recording it. Be sure to let us know whether you agree or disagree with our opinions in the comments section as well.
Enjoy Sinica? Stay up-to-date on all things China by subscribing to the Sinica show through iTunes. The easiest way to do this is to select "Subscribe to Podcast" from the Advanced file menu in iTunes, and provide the URL http://popupchinese.com/feeds/custom/sinica
when prompted. You'll be able to download new episodes automatically as soon as they're released. Note that this podcast is also available as a standalone mp3 file
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HOPKINTON Dont expect to see wind turbines popping up around Parishville and Hopkinton in the near future.
The towns held a joint meeting with Iberdrola Renewables Inc. on Monday night to discuss the power companys interest in creating a wind farm in the area. But about the only thing the power company could say with certainty is that a lot of questions remain.
Iberdrola officials estimated it could take as long as five years before any final decisions are made in the project.
We are still in the very early stages of this process, Iberdrola business developer Jenny Burke said. Just like all of you, we are waiting to find out what the details will be.
Both towns continue to work feverishly on laws designed to govern possible wind development in the area, the first step in finalizing the details of the plan, Ms. Burke said. Throughout the meeting, residents from both towns bombarded Ms. Burke and her colleagues with questions about the proposed turbines, many of which remained unanswered.
According to Hopkinton Town Supervisor Marvin E. Rust, the power company has proposed a 50-megawatt farm in the town. But where those turbines would be placed, how much money the town would stand to gain and the projected costs to Iberdola all remain unknown.
We know what we want to do, but Id be pulling a number out of thin air, said Mark Epstein, senior counsel for the power company. It will take time to figure all those things out.
Iberdrola representatives remain unsure if the towns would even be able to sustain a wind farm. The company placed two test towers in Hopkinton last year, but is still waiting to collect the data to determine whether the region is an ideal location for the turbines. It could be years before residents find out what the companys decision will be.
In a perfect world, I would stand here and tell you that in a year we will be back with all the details, Ms. Burke said. But we just dont know.
Parishville Town Supervisor Jerry G. Moore has said he hopes his town would be ready to vote on a draft of its proposed law later this month, which would be the first of many legal hoops the town would have to navigate before the law would be set in place.
Hopkinton may be even further from completing its law, as Mr. Rust said the town is still months away from finalizing a draft of the plan.
But even when the proposed law is passed by the town board, it will have to appear before a number of other boards and committees before it is passed, meaning it could be months before a law is actually in place.
It is critical in a local law to cover many different aspects in order to protect our taxpayers, Mr. Rust said. We need to cover all our bases, no matter how long it takes.
Officials in both towns were thrown into the middle of a messy debate earlier this year after state lawmakers decided they will have final say when it comes to any energy projects, including the development of wind turbines, which produce 25 or more megawatts of power.
But with the states law still in its infancy, many questions remain about what effect it will have on projects such as the one Iberdrola has proposed in Hopkinton.
We are in the same boat as everyone else, Mr. Epstein said. Nobody knows what is going on with this law or how it will roll out.
Regardless of how the law plays out, he said, town residents will not be forgotten in the process.
Quite frankly, wed be idiots if we just went to Albany and said the heck with the towns, he said. We need communication and cooperation on a local level to make this work.
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California gas prices continue to rise
Some consumers skeptical of reasons given for increase
For the 32nd consecutive day, U.S. gas prices have gone up, reaching the highest point since a record spike in California in October.
On Monday, the statewide average in California was $4.16 per gallon.
In Sacramento, it was $3.97 per gallon, which represented an increase of 48 cents over the past month, according to data from AAA.
A spokesperson for AAA cited numerous reasons for the increase, including oil refineries that she said are down for maintenance; an earlier-than-usual switch from winter-blend fuel to summer-blend fuel; rising crude oil prices; and an improvement in the economy that is sending people back to work and creating a greater demand for gasoline.
But many consumers are skeptical.
“That’s crazy,” said Kathy Roberts, who was pumping gas at a station on Arden Way on Monday. “When you weren’t working, you were looking for work, so you still used the same amounts.”
Copyright 2013 by KCRA.com. The Associated Press contributed to this report. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.
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The Rise of David Levinsky
Part 9 out of 11
"Always referring to her papa and her brother," I thought. "What a
Presently she and her long-faced chum were hailed by a group of
young men and women, and, excusing themselves to us, they ran
over to join them. I felt like a man sipping at a glass of wine when
the glass is suddenly seized from his hand
Some time later I sat on a cane chair amid flower-beds in front of
the Rigi Kulm, inhaling the scented evening air and gazing down
the sloping side of the lawn. Women and girls were returning
from the post-office, many of them with letters in their hands.
Some of these were so impatient to know their contents that they
were straining their eyes to read them in the sickly light that fell
from a sparse row of electric lamps. I watched their faces.
In one case it was quite evident that the letter was a love-message,
and that the girl who was reading it was tremendously happy. In
another I wondered whether the missive had come from a son. It
was for Miss Tevkin's return that I was watching. But the
dinner-gong sounded before she made her appearance
CHAPTER III DINNER at the Rigi Kulm on a Saturday evening
was not merely a meal. It was, in addition, or chiefly, a great
social function and a gown contest
The band was playing. As each matron or girl made her
appearance in the vast dining-room the female boarders already
seated would look her over with feverish interest, comparing her
gown and diamonds with their own. It was as though it were
especially for this parade of dresses and finery that the band was
playing. As the women came trooping in, arrayed for the
exhibition, some timid, others brazenly self-confident, they
seemed to be marching in time to the music, like so many
chorus-girls tripping before a theater audience, or like a
procession of model-girls at a style-display in a big department
store. Many of the women strutted affectedly, with "refined" mien.
Indeed, I knew that most of them had a feeling as though wearing a
hundred-and-fifty-dollar dress was in itself culture and education
Mrs. Kalch kept talking to me, now aloud, now in whispers. She
was passing judgment on the gowns and incidentally initiating me
into some of the innermost details of the gown race. It appeared
that the women kept tab on one another's dresses, shirt-waists,
shoes, ribbons, pins, earrings. She pointed out two matrons who
had never been seen twice in the same dress, waist, or skirt,
although they had lived in the hotel for more than five weeks. Of
one woman she informed me that she could afford to wear a new
gown every hour in the year, but that she was "too big a slob to
dress up and too lazy to undress even when she went to bed"; of
another, that she would owe her grocer and butcher rather than go
to the country with less than ten big trunks full of duds; of a third,
that she was repeatedly threatening to leave the hotel because its
bills of fare were typewritten, whereas "for the money she paid
she could go to a place with printed menu-cards."
"Must have been brought up on printed menu-cards," one of the
other women at our table commented, with a laugh
"That's right," Mrs. Kalch assented, appreciatively. "I could not say
whether her father was a horse-driver or a stoker in a bath-house,
but I do know that her husband kept a coal-and-ice cellar a few
"That'll do," her bewhiskered husband snarled. " "It's about time
you gave your tongue a rest."
Auntie Yetta's golden teeth glittered good-humoredly. The next
instant she called my attention to a woman who, driven to despair
by the superiority of her "bosom friend's" gowns, had gone to the
city for a fortnight, ostensibly to look for a new flat, but in reality
to replenish her wardrobe. She had just returned, on the big
"husband train," and now "her bosom friend won't be able to eat or
sleep, trying to guess what kind of dresses she brought back."
Nor was this the only kind of gossip upon which Mrs. Kalch
regaled me. She told me, for example, of some sensational
discoveries made by several boarders regarding a certain mother
of five children, of her sister who was "not a bit better," and of a
couple who were supposed to be man and wife, but who seemed
to be "somebody else's man and somebody else's wife."
At last Miss Tevkin and Miss Siegel entered the dining-room.
Something like a thrill passed through me. I felt like exclaiming,
"That's the one I met you with, isn't it? Not bad-looking," said Mrs.
"Which do you mean?"
"'Which do you mean'! The tall one, of course; the one you were so
Not the dwarf with the horse-face."
"They're fine, educated girls, both of them," I rejoined. "Both of
them! As if it was all the same to you!" At this she bent over and
gave me a glare and a smile that brought the color to my face.
"The tall one is certainly not bad-looking, but we don't call that
pretty in this place."
"Are there many prettier ones?" I asked, gaily
"I haven't counted them, but I can show you some girls who shine
like the sun. There is one!" she said, pointing at a girl on the other
side of the aisle. "A regular princess. Don't you think so?"
"She's a pretty girl, all right," I replied, "but in comparison with
that tall one she's like a nice piece of cotton goods alongside of a
piece of imported silk."
"Look at him! He's stuck on her. Does she know it? If she does not,
I'll tell her and collect a marriage-broker's commission."
I loathed myself for having talked too much.
"I was joking, of course," I tried to mend matters. "All girls are
pretty." Luckily Mrs. Kalch's attention was at this point diverted
by the arrival of the waiter with a huge platter laden with roast
chicken, which he placed in the middle of the table. There ensued
a silent race for the best portions.
One of the other two women at the table was the first to obtain
possession of the platter. Taking her time about it, she first made
a careful examination of its contents and then attacked what she
evidently considered a choice piece. By way of calling my
attention to the proceeding, Auntie Yetta stepped on my foot
under the table and gave me a knowing glance
The noise in the dining-room was unendurable. It seemed as
though everybody was talking at the top of his voice. The
musicians--a pianist and two violinists--found it difficult to make
themselves heard. They were pounding and sawing frantically in a
vain effort to beat the bedlam of conversation and laughter. It was
quite touching. The better to take in the effect of the turmoil, I
shut my eyes for a moment, whereupon the noise reminded me of
the Stock Exchange
The conductor, who played the first violin, was a fiery little fellow
with a high crown of black hair. He was working every muscle
and nerve in his body.
He played selections from "Aïda," the favorite opera of the
Ghetto; he played the popular American songs of the day; he
played celebrated "hits" of the Yiddish stage. All to no purpose.
Finally, he had recourse to what was apparently his last resort. He
struck up the "Star-spangled Banner The effect was
overwhelming. The few hundred diners rose like one man,
applauding. The children and many of the adults caught up the
tune joyously, passionately. It was an interesting scene. Men and
women were offering thanksgiving to the flag under which they
were eating this good dinner, wearing these expensive clothes.
There was the jingle of newly-acquired dollars in our applause.
But there was something else in it as well. Many of those who
were now paying tribute to the Stars and Stripes were listening to
the tune with grave, solemn mien. It was as if they were saying:
"We are not persecuted under this flag. At last we have found a
home." Love for America blazed up in my soul. I shouted to the
musicians, "My Country," and the cry spread like wildfire. The
musicians obeyed and we all sang the anthem from the bottom of
CHAPTER IV I WAS in the lobby, chatting with the clerk across
his counter and casting glances at the dining-room door. Miss
Tevkin had not yet finished her meal and I was watching for her to
appear. Presently she did, toying with Miss Siegel's hand
"Feeling better now?" I asked, stepping up to meet them. "I hope
you enjoyed your dinner."
"Oh, we were so hungry, I don't think we knew what we were
eating," Miss Tevkin returned, politely
"Going to take the air on the veranda?"
"Why--no. We are going out for a walk," she answered in a tone
that said as clearly as words that my company was not wanted.
And, nodding with exaggerated amiability, they passed out
The blood rushed to my face as though she had slapped it. I stood
"It's all because of Mrs. Kalch's tongue, confound her!" I thought.
"To-morrow I shall be in Tannersville and this trifling incident will
be forgotten." But at this I became aware that I did not care to go
to Tannersville and that the prospect of seeing Fanny had lost its
attraction for me. I went back to the counter and attempted to
resume my conversation with the clerk, but he was a handsome
fellow, which was one of his chief qualifications for the place,
and so I soon found myself in the midst of a bevy of girls and
married women. However, they all seemed to know that I was a
desirable match and they gradually transferred their attentions to
me, the girls in their own interests and the older matrons in those
of their marriageable daughters. Their crude amenities sickened
me. One middle-aged woman tried to monopolize me by a
confidential talk concerning the social inferiority of the Catskills
"The food is good here," she said, in English. "There's no kick
comin' on that score. But my daughter says with her dresses she
could go to any hotel in Atlantic City, and she's right, too. I don't
care what you say."
I fled as soon as I could. I went to look for a seat on the spacious
veranda. I said to myself that Miss Tevkin and Miss Siegel must
have had an appointment with some one else and that I had no
cause for feeling slighted by them
I felt reassured, but I was lonely. I was yearning for some
congenial company, and blamed fate for having allowed Miss
Tevkin to make another engagement--if she had
The veranda was crowded and almost as noisy as the dining-room
There was a hubbub of broken English, the gibberish being mostly
spoken with self-confidence and ease. Indeed, many of these
people had some difficulty in speaking their native tongue. Bad
English replete with literal translations from untranslatable
Yiddish idioms had become their natural speech. The younger
parents, however, more susceptible of the influence of their
children, spoke purer English.
It was a dark night, but the sky was full of stars, full of golden
The mountains rose black, vast, disquieting. A tumultuous choir of
invisible katydids was reciting an interminable poem on an
unpoetic subject that had something to do with Miss Tevkin. The
air was even richer in aroma than it had been in the morning, but
its breath seemed to be part of the uncanny stridulation of the
katydids. The windows of the dancing-pavilion beyond the level
part of the lawn gleamed like so many sheets of yellow fire.
Presently its door flew open, sending a slanting shaft of light over
I found a chair on the veranda, but I was restless, and the chatter of
two women in front of me grated on my nerves. I wondered where
Miss Tevkin and her companion were at this minute. I was saying
to myself that I would never come near them again, that I was
going to see Fanny; but I did not cease wondering where they
were. The two women in front of me were discussing the relative
virtues and faults of little boys and little girls. They agreed that a
boy was a "big loafer" and a great source of trouble, and that a
little girl was more obedient and clinging. It appeared that one of
these two mothers had a boy and two girls and that, contrary to
her own wish, he was her great pet, although he was not the
"I am just crazy for him," she said, plaintively
She boasted of his baseball record, whereupon she used the slang
of the game with so much authority that it became entertaining,
but by a curious association of ideas she turned the conversation
to the subject of a family who owed the hotel-keeper their last
summer's board and who had been accepted this time in the hope
that they would pay their old debt as well as their new bills
Two men to the right of me were complaining of the unions and
the walking delegates, of traveling salesmen, of buyers. Then they
took up the subject of charity, whereupon one of them enlarged on
"scientific philanthropy," apparently for the sheer lust of hearing
himself use the term
I recalled that one of the things I was booked to do in Tannersville
was to attend a charity meeting of East Side business men, of
which Kaplan was one of the organizers. Two subscriptions were
to be started--one for a home for aged immigrants and one for the
victims of the anti-Jewish riots in Russia--and I was expected to
contribute sums large enough to do credit to my prospective
The multitudinous jabber was suddenly interrupted by the sound of
scampering feet accompanied by merry shrieks. A young girl burst
from the vestibule door, closely followed by three young men. She
was about eighteen years old, well fed, of a ravishing
strawberries-and-cream complexion, her low-cut evening gown
leaving her plump arms and a good deal of her bust exposed. One
of the rocking-chairs on the porch impeding her way, she was
seized by her pursuers, apparently a willing victim, and held
prisoner. Two of her captors gripped her bare arms, while the
third clutched her by the neck. Thus they stood, the men stroking
and kneading her luscious flesh, and she beaming and giggling
rapturously. Then one of the men gathered her to him with one
arm, pressing his cheek against hers
"She's my wife," he jested. "We are married. Let go, boys."
"I'll sue you for alimony then," piped the girl
Finally, they released her, and the next minute I saw them walking
across the lawn in the direction of the dancing-pavilion
The man who had talked scientific philanthropy spat in disgust
"Shame!" he said. "Decent young people wouldn't behave like that
in Russia, would they?"
"Indeed they wouldn't," his interlocutor assented, vehemently.
"People over there haven't yet forgotten what decency is."
"Oh, well, it was only a joke, said a woman
"A nice joke, that!" retorted the man who had dwelt on scientific
"What would you have? Would you want American-born young
people to be a lot of greenhorns? This is not Russia. They are
Americans and they are young, so they want to have some fun.
They are just as respectable as the boys and the girls in the old
country. Only there is some life to them. That's all."
Young people were moving along the flagged walk or crossing the
lawn from various directions, all converging toward the pavilion.
They walked singly, in twos, in threes, and in larger groups, some
trudging along leisurely, others proceeding at a hurried pace.
Some came from our hotel, others from other places, the strangers
mostly in flocks. I watched them as they sauntered or scurried
along, as they receded through the thickening gloom, as they
emerged from it into the slanting shaft of light that fell from the
pavilion, and as they vanished in its blazing doorway. I gazed at
the spectacle until it fascinated me as something weird. The
pavilion with its brightly illuminated windows was an immense
magic lamp, and the young people flocking to it so many huge
moths of a supernatural species. As I saw them disappear in the
glare of the doorway I pictured them as being burned up. I was
tempted to join the unearthly procession and to be "burned" like
the others. Then, discarding the image, I visioned men and women
of ordinary flesh and blood dancing, and I was seized with a
desire to see the sexes in mutual embrace. But I exhorted myself
that I was soon to be a married man and that it was as well to keep
out of temptation's way
Presently I saw Miss Tevkin crossing the lawn, headed for the
pavilion. She was one of a bevy of girls and men. I watched her
get nearer and nearer to that shaft of light. When she was finally
swallowed up by the pavilion the lawn disappeared from my
consciousness. My thoughts were in the dance-hall, and a few
minutes later I was there in the flesh
It was a vast room and it was crowded. It was some time before I
located Miss Tevkin. The chaotic throng of dancers was a welter
of color and outline so superb, I thought, that it seemed as though
every face and figure in it were the consummation of youthful
beauty. However, as I contemplated the individual couples, in
quest of the girl who filled my thoughts, I met with disillusion
after disillusion. Then, after recovering from a sense of watching
a parade of uncomeliness, I began to discover figures or faces, or
both, that were decidedly charming, while here and there I came
upon a young woman of singular beauty. The number of
good-looking women or women with expressive faces was
remarkably large, in fact. As I scanned the crowd for the third
time it seemed to me that the homely women looked cleverer than
the pretty ones. Many of the girls or matrons were dressed far
more daringly than they would have been a year or two before.
Almost all of them were powdered and painted. Prosperity was
rapidly breaking the chains of American Puritanism, rapidly
"Frenchifying" the country, and the East Side was quick to fall
The band was again playing with might and main. The vehement
little conductor was again exerting every nerve and muscle. His
bow, which was also his baton, was pouring vim and sex mystery
into the dancers. As I looked at him it seemed to me as though the
music, the thunderous clatter of feet, and the hum of voices all
came from the fiery rhythm of his arm
Finally, I discovered Miss Tevkin. She was dancing with a
sallow-faced, homely, scholarly-looking fellow. The rhythmic
motion of her tall, stately frame, as it floated and swayed through
the dazzling light, brought a sob to my throat
When the waltz was over and her cavalier was taking her to a seat I
caught her eye. I nodded and smiled to her. She returned the
greeting, but immediately averted her face. Again I felt as if she
had slapped my cheek.
Was I repugnant to her? I thought of my victory over the
acrimonious photographer at the railroad station. Had I not won
her favor there? And it came over me that even on that occasion
she had shown me but scant cordiality. Was it all because of
Auntie Yetta's idiotic jest? She beckoned to Miss Siegel, who was
on the other side of the hall, and presently she was joined by her
and by some other young people.
She danced indefatigably, now with this man, now with that, but
always of the same "set." I watched her. Sometimes, as she
waltzed, she talked and laughed brokenly, exchanging jokes with
her partner or with some other dancing couple. Sometimes she
looked solemnly absorbed, as though dancing were a sacred
function. I wondered whether she was interested in any one of
these fellows in particular. I could see that it gave her special
pleasure to waltz with that sallow-faced man, but he was the best
dancer in her group, and so homely that I discarded the theory of
her caring for him otherwise than as a waltzing partner as absurd.
Nor did she seem to be particularly interested in anybody else on
the floor. As I scrutinized the men of her "set" I said to myself:
"They seem to be school-teachers or writers, or beginning
physicians, perhaps. They probably make less than one-third of
what I pay Bender. Yet they freely talk and joke with her, while I
cannot even get near her."
Miss Lazar, half naked, had been dancing with various partners,
most of all with a freckled lad of sixteen or seventeen who looked
as though he were panting to kiss her. She and I had exchanged
smiles and pleasantry, but in her semi-nudity she was far less
prepossessing than she had been in the afternoon, and I had an
uncontrollable desire to announce it to her, or to hurt her in some
other way. Finally, seeing a vacant seat by my side, she abruptly
broke away from the freckled youth and took it
"You'll have to excuse me, Ben," she said. "I'm tired."
Ben looked the picture of despair
"Don't cry, Ben. Go out and take a walk, or dance with some other
"Is this your catch after many days of fishing?" I asked
"Nope. I'm angling for bigger fish. He's just Ben, a college boy. He
has fallen in love with me this evening. When I dance with
somebody else he gets awful jealous." She laughed.
"He's a manly-looking boy, for all his freckles."
"He is. But how would you like a little girl to fall in love with
you?" I made no answer
"Why don't you dance?" she asked
"Not in my line." "Why?"
"Oh, I never cared to learn it," I answered, impatiently
"Come. I'll show you how. It's very simple."
"Too old for that kind of thing." "Too old? How old are you?"
"That's an indiscreet question. Would you tell me your age?"
"Indeed I would. Why not?" she said, with sportive defiance. "Only
you wouldn't believe me."
"Why wouldn't I? Do you look much older?"
"Oh, you cruel thing! I'm just twenty-three years and four months
There!" she said, with embarrassed gaiety.
"A sort of birthday, isn't it? I congratulate you."
"So you won't tell me how old you are, will you?" she resumed
"What do you want to know it for? Are you in the life-insurance
"Look at that girl over there," she said, trying to make
"She's showing off her slender figure. She thinks she looks awful
"You do have a sharp tongue."
"But you remember what Mrs. Kalch said: 'A sharp tongue, but a
The band struck up a two-step
Ben was coming over to her, his freckled face the image of
supplication. She shut her eyes and shook her head and the boy
stopped short, his jaw dropping as he did so
"Don't be hard on the poor boy," I pleaded
"That's none of your business. I want you to dance with me. Come
on. I'll teach you
I shut my eyes and shook my head precisely as she had done to
She burst into a laugh. "Ain't you tired of being a wall-flower?"
"I love it."
"Do you really? Or maybe you want to watch somebody?"
"I want to watch everybody," I replied, coloring the least bit.
"When you were dancing I watched you, and I thought--well, I
won't tell you what I thought."
A splash of color overspread her face
"Go ahead. Speak out!" she said, with a sick smile
I took pity on her. "I'm joking, of course. But I do like to watch
people when they dance," I said, earnestly. "They do it in so many
different ways, don't you know." I proceeded to point out couple
after couple, commenting upon their peculiar manner and the
special expression of their faces. One man was seemingly about to
hurl his partner at somebody. Another man was eying other women
over the shoulder of the one with whom he danced, apparently his
wife. One woman was clinging to her partner with all her might,
while her half-shut eyes and half-opened mouth seemed to say,
"My, isn't it sweet!"
Miss Lazar greeted my observations with bursts of merry approval.
Encouraged by this and full of mischief and malice, I made her
watch a man with tapering white side-whiskers and watery eyes
who was staring at the bare bust of a fat woman
"You had better look out, for his watery eyes will soon be on you."
Miss Lazar lowered her head and burst into a confused giggle
"You're a holy terror," she declared.
I was tempted to take her out into the night and hug and kiss her
and tell her that she was a nuisance, but the fear of a
breach-of-promise suit held me in leash
I rose to go. As I picked my way through the crowd I watched Miss
Tevkin, who sat between Miss Siegel and one of their cavaliers.
Our eyes met, but she hastened to look away
"She has certainly made up her mind to shun me," I thought,
wretchedly. "She knows I am worth about a million, and yet she
does not want to have anything to do with me. Must be a Socialist.
The idea of a typewriter girl cutting me! Pooh! I could get a
prettier girl than she, and one well-educated, too, if I only cared
for that kind of thing in a wife. Let her stick to her beggarly
It all seemed so ridiculous. I was baffled, perplexed, full of
contempt and misery at once. "Perhaps she is engaged, after all," I
comforted myself, feeling that there was anything but comfort in
I was burning to have an explanation with her, to remove any bad
impression I might have made upon her
An asphalt walk in front of the pavilion and the adjoining section
of the lawn were astir with boarders. A tall woman of thirty, of
excellent figure, and all but naked, passed along like a flame, the
men frankly gloating over her flesh.
"Wait a moment! What's your hurry?" a young stallion shouted,
running after her hungrily
In another spot, on the lawn, I saw a young man in evening dress
chaffing a bare-shouldered girl who looked no more than fifteen
"What! Sweet sixteen and not yet kissed?" he said to her, aloud.
"Go on! I don't believe it. Anyhow, I'd like to be the fellow who's
going to get you."
"Would you? I'll tell your wife about it," the little girl replied, with
the good humor of a woman of forty
"Never mind my wife. But how about the fellow who is going to
"I'd like to see him myself. I hope he ain't going to be some boob."
The air was redolent of grass, flowers, ozone, and sex. All this was
flavored with Miss Tevkin's antipathy for me
CHAPTER V THE next morning I awoke utterly out of sorts. That
I was going to take the first train for Tannersville seemed to be a
matter of course, and yet I knew that I was not going to take that
train, nor any other that day. I dressed myself and went out for a
walk up the road, some distance beyond the grove.
The sun was out, but it had rained all night and the sandy road was
damp, solid, and smooth, like baked clay. It was half an hour
before breakfast-time when I returned to my cottage across the
road from the hotel.
As I was about to take a chair on the tiny porch I perceived the
sunlit figure of Miss Tevkin in the distance. She wore a large
sailor hat and I thought it greatly enhanced the effect of her tall
figure. She was making her way over a shaky little bridge. Then,
reaching the road, she turned into it. I remained standing like one
transfixed. The distance gave her new fascination. Every little
while she would pause to look up through something that glittered
in the sunshine, apparently an opera-glass. I had never heard that
opera-glasses were used for observing birds, but this was evidently
what she was doing at this moment, and the proceeding quickened
my sense not only of her intellectual refinement, but also of her
Presently she turned into a byway, passed the grove, and was lost
I seated myself, my eye on the spot where I had seen her disappear.
Somebody greeted me from the hotel lawn. I returned the
salutation mechanically and went on gazing at that spot. I knew
that I was making a fool of myself, but I could not help it. My
will-power was gone as it might from the effect of some drug
When she reappeared at last and I saw her coming back I crossed
over to the hotel veranda so as to be near her when she should
arrive. I found several of the boarders there, including the lawyer,
the photographer, and a jewelry merchant of my acquaintance. We
all watched her coming. At one moment, as she leveled her
opera-glass at a bird, the lawyer said: "Studying birds. She's a great
girl for studying. She is."
"Studying nothing!" the photographer jeered. "It's simply becoming
It's effective, don't you know."
The lawyer smiled sagely, as if what Mendelson said was precisely
what he himself had meant to intimate
I was inclined to think that Mendelson was right, but this did not
detract from the force that drew me to Miss Tevkin
When she reached the veranda the lawyer gallantly offered her a
chair, but she declined it, pleasantly, and went indoors. Her high
heels had left deep, dear-cut imprints in a small patch of damp,
sandy ground near the veranda.
This physical trace of her person fascinated me. It was a trace of
stern hostility, yet I could not keep my eye away from it. I gazed
and gazed at those foot-prints of hers till I seemed to be growing
stupid and dizzy. "Am I losing my head?" I said to myself. "Am I
obsessed? Why, I saw her yesterday for the first time and I have
scarcely spoken to her. What the devil is the matter with me?"
After breakfast we returned to the veranda. The jewelry-dealer and
the lawyer bored me unmercifully. Finally I was saved from them
by the arrival of the Sunday papers, but my reading was soon
disturbed by the intrusions of a mother and her marriageable
daughter. There was no escape. I had to lay down my paper and
let them torture me. There was a striking family resemblance
between the two, yet the daughter was as homely as the mother
was pretty. "She isn't as prepossessing as her ma, of course," the
older woman seemed to be saying to me, "but she's charming, all
the same, isn't she?"
Miss Lazar was watching me at a respectful distance. Mrs. Kalch
was deep in a game of pinochle in a small ground-floor room that
gave out on the veranda. The window was open and I could hear
Mrs. Kalch's voice. She seemed to have been losing. The little
room, by the way, was used both as a synagogue and a
gambling-room. In the mornings, before breakfast, it was filled
with old men in praying-shawls and phylacteries, while the rest of
the day, until late at night, it was in the possession of card-players
I wanted to wire Bender to send a message to Fanny, in my name,
stating that I had been unavoidably detained in the city, but I
lacked the energy to do so. I had not even the energy to extricate
myself from the attentions of the pretty mother of the homely girl
That charity meeting bothered me more than anything else. One
was apt to impute my absence to meanness. I pictured Kaplan's
disappointment, and I felt like going to Tannersville for his sake,
if for no other reason. The next best thing would have been to
have Bender wire my contribution to each of the two funds. But I
did not stir
The hotel-keeper came out to remind me of my train
"Thank you," I said, with a smile. "But the weather is too
confoundedly good. I'm too lazy to leave your place, Rivesman.
You must have ordered this weather on purpose to detain me."
I was hoping, of course, that my presence in this hotel would be
unknown to the Kaplans, for some time at least. Soon, however,
something happened which made it inevitable that they should
hear of it that very evening
On Sundays the Jewish summer hotels are usually visited by
committees of various philanthropic institutions who go from
place to place making speeches and collecting donations. One
such committee appeared in the dining-room of the Rigi Kulm at
the dinner-hour, which on Sundays was between 1 and 3. It
represented a day nursery, an establishment where the children of
the East Side poor are taken care of while their mothers are at
work, and it consisted of two men, one of whom was an eloquent
As the ecclesiastic took his stand near the piano and began his
appeal my heart sank within me. I had once met him at Kaplan's
house, where he was a frequent visitor, and had given him a
check. It goes without saying that I had to give him a contribution
now and to talk to him. At this I learned, to my consternation, that
he was going to Tannersville that very afternoon
"Shall I convey your regards?" he asked
"Very kind of you," I answered, and I added in an undertone, out of
Kalch's hearing, "Please tell Mr. Kaplan I'm here on an important
matter and that I have been detained longer than I expected."
When he had gone over to the next table I said to myself: "I don't
Come what may."
In the evening, as the crowd swarmed out of the dining-room, it
was greeted by a gorgeous sunset. Everybody appreciated its
beauty, but Miss Tevkin and Miss Siegel went into ecstasies over
it, with something of the specialist in their exclamations. As for
me, it was the first rich sunset I had seen since I crossed the
ocean, and then I had scarcely known what it was. The play of
color and light in the sky was a revelation to me. The edge of the
sun, a vivid red, was peeping out of a gray patch of cloud that
looked like a sack, the sack hanging with its mouth downward and
the red disk slowly emerging from it. Spread directly underneath
was a pool of molten gold into which the sun was seemingly about
to drop. As the disk continued to glide out of the bag it gradually
grew into a huge fiery ball of magnificent crimson, suffusing the
valley with divine light. At the moment when it was just going to
plunge into the golden pool the pool vanished. The crimson ball
kept sinking until it was buried in a region of darkness. When the
last fiery speck of it disappeared the sky broke into an evensong of
color so solemn, so pensive that my wretched mood interpreted it
as a visible dirge for the dead sun. Rose lapsed into purple, purple
merged into blue, the blue bordering on a field of hammered gold
that was changing shape and hue; all of which was eloquent of
sadness. It seemed as though the heavens were in an ecstasy of
grief and everybody about me were about to break into tears
some of the old women gasped. "How nice!" "Isn't it lovely?" said
"Isn't that glorious?" said Miss Tevkin. "It's one of the most
exquisite sunsets I have seen in a long time." And she referred to
certain "effects," apparently in the work of a well-known
landscape painter, which I did not understand
I discovered a note of consciousness in her rapture, something like
a patronizing approval of the sky by one who looked at it with a
professional eye. Nevertheless, I felt that my poor soul was
cringing before her
An epigram occurred to me, something about the discrepancy
between the spiritual quality of the sunset and the after-supper
satisfaction of the onlookers. I essayed to express it, but was so
embarrassed that I made a muddle of my English. Miss Tevkin
took no notice of the remark
The sunset was transformed into a thousand lumps of pearl, here
and there edged with flame. In some places the pearl thinned
away, dissolving into the color of the sky, while the outline of the
lump remained--a map of glowing tracery on a ground of the
subtlest blue. Drifts of gold were gleaming, blazing, going out. A
vast heap of silver caught fire. The outlined map disappeared, its
place being taken by a raised one, with continents, islands,
mountains, and seas of ravishing azure
What was the power behind this sublime spectacle? Where did it
come from? What did it all mean? I visioned a chorus of angels.
My heart was full of God, full of that stately girl, full of misery
"If I only got a chance to have a decent talk with her!" I said to
myself again and again
CHAPTER VI IT was Monday afternoon. The week-end boarders
and many others had left, and I was still idling my precious time
away on the big veranda, listening to the gossip of women who
bored me and trying to keep track of a girl who shunned me. My
establishment in New York was feverishly busy and my presence
was urgently needed there. It was more than probable that Bender
had wired to Tannersville to call me home. The situation was
Moreover, I was beginning to feel uneasy about certain payments
that required my personal attendance.
It was a quiet, pleasant afternoon. The boarders were scattered
over the various parts of the hotel and its surroundings.
Twenty-four of them, forming two coach parties, had gone to see
some celebrated Catskill views, one to the Old Mountain House
and the other to East Windham. Some were in the village. Miss
Tevkin, wearing her immense straw hat, and with her opera-glass
in her hand, was looking at birds in the vicinity of the hotel.
Thus rambling about leisurely, she sauntered over to the main road
near the grove. A few minutes later she turned into the same path
where I had watched her disappear on the morning of the day
before. And once more I saw her vanish there
I went out for a walk in the opposite direction. Soon, however, I
turned back, strolling with studied aimiessness, toward that spot
What was my purpose? At first I did not know, but by little and
little, as I moved along, an idea took shape in my brain: If I met
her alone I might force her to listen to me and let her see the stuff
I was made of. I lacked courage, however. While I was priming
myself for the coup I wished that it would be postponed. I
dawdled. There were swarms of strange insects on the road,
creatures I had never seen before. At first I thought they were
grasshoppers, but they were gray and had wings. Every now and
then I would pause to watch them leap (or were they flying?) and
drop to the ground again, becoming part of the dusty road. I
followed them with genuine interest, yet all the time I kept
working on the speech that I was going to deliver to Miss Tevkin
I was lingering at a spot a few yards from the grove on the opposite
side of the main road when suddenly twilight fell over half of the
valley. I raised my eyes. Behold! an inky cloud was crawling over
the mountains, growing in size as it advanced. A flash of lightning
snapped across the heavens. It was as though the sky screened a
world of dazzling glory into which a glimpse had now been
offered by a momentary crack in the screen. The flash was
followed by a devout peal of thunder, as if a giant whose abode
was in those dark clouds broke into a murmur of glorification at
sight of the splendors above the sky. The trees shuddered,
awe-stricken. I went under cover. A farmer was chasing a cow. As
my eyes turned toward the grove they fell on Miss Tevkin, who
was standing at the farther end of it, under its leafy roof, facing
the main road. My heart beat fast. I dared not stir
A shower broke loose, a great, torrential downpour. It came in
sheets, with an impetuous, though genial, clatter. It seemed as
though the valley was swiftly filling with water and in less than an
hour's time it would reach the tops of the trees. I thought of Noah's
flood. I could almost see his dove winging her way over the
waters. The storm had been in progress but seven or eight minutes
when it came to an end. The sky broke into a smile again, as if it
had all been a joke.
Miss Tevkin left the shelter of the trees and set out in the direction
of the hotel. I do not know whether she was aware of my
It was clearing beautifully, when a new cloud gathered. This time a
great, stern force, violent, vengeful, came into play. A lash of fire
smote the firmament with frantic suddenness, shattering it into a
myriad of blinding sparks, yet leaving it uninjured. There was a
pause and then came a ferocious crash. The universe was falling
to pieces. Then somebody seemed to be tearing an inner heaven of
metal as one tears a sheet of linen. This released a torrent that
descended with the roar of Niagara, as though the metal vault that
had just been rent asunder had been its prison. Miss Tevkin ran
back to cover. The torrent slackened, settling down to a steady
rain, spirited, zealous, amicable again
In a turmoil of agitation I crossed over to her. Instead, however, of
beginning at the beginning of my well-prepared little speech, I
blurted out something else
"You can't run away from me now," I said, with timid flippancy
"Please, leave me alone," she besought, turning away
I was literally stunned. Instead of trying to say what I had in my
mind and to force her to listen, I slunk away, in the rain, like a
The shock seemed to have a sobering effect on me. I suddenly
realized the imbecility of the part I had been playing, even the
humor of it. The first thing I did upon reaching the hotel was to
ask the clerk about the next train--not to Tannersville, but direct to
New York. Going to see Fanny was out of the question now
There was a late train connecting with a Hudson River boat and I
CHAPTER VII WHEN I got home and my business reasserted its
multitudinous demands on my attention, the Catskill incident
seemed to be fading into the character of a passing summer-resort
episode, but I was mistaken; the pang it left in my heart persisted
A fortnight after my return to the city I forced myself to take a trip
to Tannersville. Fanny came to meet me at the train. As we kissed
it was borne in upon me that I was irretrievably estranged from
her. I tried to play my part, with poor success
"Are you worried, Dave? What's the matter with you?" Fanny
demanded again and again.
Her "What's the matter with you?" jarred on me
I offered her sundry excuses, but I did not even take pains to make
them ring true
Finally she had a cry and I kissed her tears away. While doing so I
worked myself into a mild fit of love, but my lips had scarcely
released hers when it was again clear to me that she was not going
to be my wife
Our engagement was broken shortly after the family came back to
That burden lifted, it seemed as though the memory of my
unfortunate acquaintance with Miss Tevkin had suddenly grown
in clarity and painful acuteness
Our rush season had passed, but we were busy preparing for our
removal to new quarters, on Fifth Avenue near Twenty-third
Street. That locality had already become the center of the
cloak-and-suit trade, being built up with new sky-scrapers, full of
up-to-date cloak-factories, dress-factories, and
ladies'-waist-factories. The sight of the celebrated Avenue
swarming with Jewish mechanics out for their lunch hour or going
home after a day's work was already a daily spectacle
The new aspect of that section of the proud thoroughfare marked
the advent of the Russian Jew as the head of one of the largest
industries in the United States. Also, it meant that as master of
that industry he had made good, for in his hands it had increased a
hundredfold, garments that had formerly reached only the few
having been placed within the reach of the masses. Foreigners
ourselves, and mostly unable to speak English, we had
Americanized the system of providing clothes for the American
woman of moderate or humble means. The ingenuity and
unyielding tenacity of our managers, foremen, and operatives had
introduced a thousand and one devices for making by machine
garments that used to be considered possible only as the product
of handwork. This--added to a vastly increased division of labor,
the invention, at our instance, of all sorts of machinery for the
manufacture of trimmings, and the enormous scale upon which
production was carried on by us--had the effect of cheapening the
better class of garments prodigiously. We had done away with
prohibitive prices and greatly improved the popular taste. Indeed,
the Russian Jew had made the average American girl a
When I learned the trade a cloak made of the cheapest satinette
cost eighteen dollars. To-day nobody would wear it. One can now
buy a whole suit made of all-wool material and silk-lined for
What I have said of cloaks and suits applies also to skirts and
dresses, the production of which is a branch of our trade. It was
the Russian Jew who had introduced the factory-made gown,
constantly perfecting it and reducing the cost of its production.
The ready-made silk dress which the American woman of small
means now buys for a few dollars is of the very latest style and as
tasteful in its lines, color scheme, and trimming as a high-class
designer can make it. A ten-dollar gown is copied from a
Whereupon our gifted dress-designers are indefatigably at work on
the problem of providing a good fit for almost any figure, with as
little alteration as possible, and the results achieved in this
direction are truly phenomenal. Nor is it mere apish copying. We
make it our business to know how the American woman wants to
look, what sort of lines she would like her figure to have. Many a
time when I saw a well-dressed American woman in the street I
followed her for blocks, scanning the make-up of her cloak, jacket,
or suit. I never wearied of studying the trend of the American
woman's taste. The subject had become a veritable idée fixé with
The average American woman is the best-dressed average woman
in the world, and the Russian Jew has had a good deal to do with
making her one.
My Fifth Avenue establishment occupied four vast floors, the rent
being thirty-eight thousand dollars a year. The office floor, which
was elaborately furnished, had an immense waiting-room with
gold letters on doors of dull glass bearing the legends: "General
Offices," "Show-rooms," "Private Offices," "Salesmen. Please
show samples of merchandise between 9 and 12 A.M.," and
"Information." The "Private Office" door led to a secluded little
kingdom with the inscription "David Levinsky" on one of its
several doors, another door leading from my private office to the
I employed a large staff of trained bookkeepers, stenographers,
clerks, and cloak models. These models were all American girls
of Anglo-Saxon origin, since a young woman of other stock is not
likely to be built on American lines--with the exception of
Scandinavian and Irish girls, who have the American figure. But
the figure alone was not enough, I thought. In selecting my
model-girls, I preferred a good-looking face and good manners,
and, if possible, good grammar. Experience had taught me that
refinement in a model was helpful in making a sale, even in the
case of the least refined of customers. Indeed, often it is even
more effectual than a tempting complexion
My new place was the talk of the trade. Friends came to look it
over. I received numerous letters of congratulation, from mill
men, bankers, retail merchants, buyers, private friends. My range
of acquaintance was very wide.
In hundreds of American cities and towns there were business
people with whom my firm was in correspondence or whom I
knew personally, who called me Dave and whom I called Jim,
Jack, or Ned. So, many of these people, having received my
circular describing my new place, sent their felicitations. Some of
these letters were inspired by genuine admiration for my enterprise
and energy. All of them had genuine admiration for my success.
Success! Success! Success! It was the almighty goddess of the
hour. Thousands of new fortunes were advertising her gaudy
splendors. Newspapers, magazines, and public speeches were full
of her glory, and he who found favor in her eyes found favor in
the eyes of man
Nodelman scarcely ever left my place during the first three days.
He would show visitors over the four floors with a charming
pride, like that of a mother. Among the things he exhibited was
the stub-book of my first check account, a photograph of the
rickety house where I had had my first shop, and letters of
congratulation from some well-known financiers. Bender, with a
big, shining bald disk on his head, slender and spruce as ever, was
fussing around with the gruff air of an unappreciated genius, while
Loeb, also bald-headed, but fat and beaming, was telling
everybody about the scraps he and I used to have on the road
when he was a star drummer and I a struggling beginner
One of the men who came to congratulate me at my magnificent
new place on Fifth Avenue was the kindly American commission
merchant who had been the first to grant me credit when I was
badly in need of it. As I took him over my immense factory,
splendid showrooms, and offices, we recalled the days when it
took a man of special generosity to treat a beginning manufacturer
of my type as he had treated me. That was the time when
woolen-mills would even refuse to bother with a check of a
Russian Jew; he had to bring cash.
In the rôle of manufacturer he was regarded as a joke. By hard
work, perseverance, thrift, and ingenuity, however, we had
completely changed all that. By the time I moved to the avenue
our beginners could get any amount of credit. The American
merchants dealing in raw material had gradually realized our
energy, ability, and responsibility--realized that we were a good
risk, while we, on our part, had assimilated the ways of the
advanced American business man
Another man who came to see my new establishment was Eaton,
the Philadelphia buyer who had given me my first lesson in table
manners. He had a small, but well-established, business of his
own now, and it was with my financial aid that he had founded it.
Our friendship had never flagged. Sometimes I go to spend a day
or two in his cozy little house in North Philadelphia, where I feel
as much at home as I do in Bender's or Nodelman's house
I assigned one of my office men to the special duty of looking up
and inviting Mr. Even, the kindly old man who had bought me my
first American suit of clothes and paid for my first American bath.
He came back with the report that Mr. Even had been dead for
over four years. The news was a genuine shock to me. It was as
though it had come from my birthplace and concerned the death
of a half-forgotten relative. It stirred a swarm of memories; but, of
course, impressions and moods of this kind do not last long. I
received requests for donations from all sorts of East Side
institutions and I responded liberally. Mindels, the handsome
doctor, made me contribute twenty-five hundred dollars to a
prospective hospital in which he expected to be one of the leading
There was dining and wining. I was being toasted, complimented,
One of these dinners was given in my honor by my office
employees, salesmen, designers, and foremen. Bender, who
presided, told, in an elaborate and high-flown oration, of his
experiences as my school-teacher, of our walks after school hours,
and of our chance meeting a few years later
Loeb made a rough-and-ready speech, the gist of which was a joke
on the bottle of milk which I had spilled while in the employ of
Manheimer Brothers and which had led to my becoming a
manufacturer. His concluding words were: "There's at least one
saying that has come true. I mean the saying, 'There's no use
crying over spilled milk.' Mr. Levinsky, you certainly have no
reason to cry over the milk you spilled at Manheimer's, have
I had heard the witticism from him more than once before. So had
some of the other men present. Nevertheless, he now delivered it
with gusto, and it was received with a hearty roar of merriment, in
which his own laughter was the loudest
Among the people who came to rejoice in my success were some
whose appearance was an amusing surprise to me. One of these
was Octavius, the violinist, who had had nothing but contempt for
me in the days when to go twenty-four hours without food was a
usual experience with me. He had scarcely changed. He entered
my office with bohemian self-importance
"Glad to see you, Levinsky. I was glad to hear of your rise in the
world," he said, somewhat pompously. "I can't complain, either,
though. However, our fields are so different."
The implication was that, while I had succeeded as a prosaic,
pitiable cloak-manufacturer, he had conquered the world by the
magic of his violin and compositions. He never referred to olden
times. Instead, he boasted of his successes, present and future.
The upshot of the interview was that I sent a check to the treasurer
of the free conservatory of which Octavius was one of the
I was elated and happy, but there was a fly in the ointment of my
The question, "Who are you living for?" reverberated through the
four vast floors of my factory, and the image of Miss Tevkin
visited me again and again, marring my festive mood. My sense of
triumph often clashed with a feeling of self-pity and yearning. The
rebuff I had received at her hands in the afternoon of that storm
lay like a mosquito in my soul
BOOK XIII AT HER FATHER'S HOUSE CHAPTER I I MADE it
my business to visit a well-known Hebrew book-store on Canal
Street. I asked for Tevkin's works. It appeared that before he
emigrated to America he had published three small volumes of
verse and prose, that they had once aroused much interest, but that
they were now practically out of print. I tried two other stores,
with the same result. I was referred to the Astor Library, whose
Hebrew department was becoming one of the richest in the world.
Sitting down in a public library to read a book seemed to be an
undignified proceeding for a manufacturer to engage in, but my
curiosity was beyond considerations of this sort. Whenever I
thought of Miss Tevkin I beheld the image of those three
books--the only things related to her with which I was able to
come in contact
Finally, on a Saturday afternoon, I found myself at one of the green
tables of Astor Library. I was reading poetry written in the holy
tongue, a language I had not used for more than eighteen years
Two of Tevkin's three little volumes were made up of poetry,
while the third consisted of brief essays, prose, poems,
"meditations," and epigrams. I came across a "meditation" entitled
"My Children," and took it up eagerly. It contained but three
sentences: "My children love me, yet my heart is hungry. They are
mine, yet they are strangers. I am homesick for them even when I
clasp them to my bosom."
The next "meditation," on the same page, had the word "Poetry"
for its head-line
"The children of Israel have been pent up in cities," it ran. "The
stuffy synagogue has been field and forest to them. But then there
is more beauty in a heaven visioned by a congregation of
worshipers than in the bluest heaven sung by the minstrel of
landscapes. They are not worshipers. They are poets. It is not God
they are speaking to. It is a sublime image. It is not their Creator.
It is their poetic creation."
Several of the poems were dedicated to Doctor Rachaeles, and of
these one of two stanzas seemed to contain a timid allusion to
Tevkin's love for his daughter. Here it is in prosaic English: "Saith
Koheleth, the son of David: 'All the rivers run into the sea, yet the
sea is not full.' Ah! the rivers are flowing and flowing, yet they are
full as ever. And my lips are speaking and speaking, yet my heart
is full as ever
"Behold! The brook is murmuring and murmuring, but I know not
of what. My heart is yearning and yearning, and I know not of
what. I cherish the murmur of the brook. I cherish the pang of my
The following lines, which were also dedicated to Doctor
Rachaeles and which were entitled "Night," betray a similar
mood, perhaps, without distinctly referring to the poet's yearnings
"Hush! the night is speaking. Each twinkle of a star is a word from
the world beyond. It is the language of men who were once here,
but are no more.
A thousand generations of departed souls are speaking to us in
words of twinkling stars. I seem to be one of them. I hear my own
ghost whispering to me: 'Alas!' it says, 'Alas!'"
The three volumes were full of Biblical quaintness, and my
estrangement from the language only added to the bizarre effect
of its terse grammatical construction. I read a number of the
poems, and several of the things in the prose volume. His Hebrew
is truly marvelous, and much of the strength and charm of his
message is bound up in it. As I read his poetry or prose I seemed
to be listening to Jeremiah or Isaiah. The rhythm of his lines is not
the only thing that is lost in my translation. There is a prehistoric
vigor and a mystic beauty to them which elude the English at my
command. To be sure, every word I read in his three little volumes
was tinged with the fact that the author was the father of the girl
who had cast her spell over me.
But then the thought that she had grown up in the house of the man
who had written these lines intensified the glow of her nimbus
As I returned the books to the official in charge of the Hebrew
department I lingered to draw him into conversation. He was a
well-known member of the East Side Bohème. I had heard of him
as a man who spoke several languages and was amazingly well
read--a walking library of knowledge, not only of books, but also
of men and things. Accordingly, I hoped to extract from him some
information about Tevkin. He was a portly man, with a round,
youthful face and a baby smile. He smiled far more than he spoke.
He answered my questions either by some laconic phrase or by
leaving me for a minute and then returning with some book,
pamphlet, or newspaper-clipping in which he pointed out a
passage that was supposed to contain a reply to my query. I had
quite a long talk with him. Now and then we were interrupted by
some one asking for or returning a book, but each time he was
released he readily gave me his attention again
Speaking of Tevkin, I inquired, "Why doesn't he write some more
of those things?" For an answer he withdrew and soon came back
with several issues of The Pen, a Hebrew weekly published in
New York, in which he showed me an article by Tevkin
"Have you read it?" I asked
He nodded and smiled
"Is it good?"
"It isn't bad," he answered, with a smile
"Not as good as the things in those three volumes?"
"This kind of thing doesn't pay, does it? How does he make a
"I don't know. I understand he has several grown children."
"So they support the family?"
"I suppose so. I am not sure, though."
"Can't a Hebrew writer make a living in New York?"
He shook his head and smiled
The dailies of the Ghetto, the newspapers that can afford to pay,
are published, not in the language of Isaiah and Job, but in
Yiddish, the German dialect spoken by the Jewish masses of
to-day. I asked the librarian whether Tevkin wrote for those
papers, and he brought me several clippings containing some of
Tevkin's Yiddish contributions. It appeared, however, that the
articles he wrote in his living mother-tongue lacked the spirit and
the charm that distinguished his style when he used the language
of the prophets. Altogether, Tevkin seemed to be accounted one
of the "has-beens" of the Ghetto
One of the bits of information I squeezed out of the librarian was
that Tevkin was a passionate frequenter of Yampolsky's café, a
well-known gathering-place of the East Side Bohème
I had heard a good deal about the resort. I knew that many or most
of its patrons were Socialists or anarchists or some other kind of
"ists." After my experience at the Cooper Institute meeting,
Yampolsky's café seemed to be the last place in the world for me
to visit. But I was drawn to it as a butterfly is to a flame, and
finally the temptation got the better of me
CHAPTER II THE café was a spacious room of six corners and a
lop-sided general appearance.
It was about 4 o'clock of an afternoon. I sat at the end of one of the
tables, a glass of Russian tea before me. There were two other
customers at that table, both poorly clad and, as it seemed to me,
ill-fed. Two tables in a narrow and dingier part of the room were
occupied by disheveled chess-players and three or four lookers-on.
Altogether there were about fifteen people in the place. Some of
the conversations were carried on aloud. A man with curly dark
hair who was eating soup at the table directly in front of me was
satirizing somebody between spoonfuls, relishing his acrimony as
if it were spice to his soup. A feminine voice back of me was
trying to prove to somebody that she did much more for her sister
than her sister did for her. I was wretchedly ill at ease at first. I
loathed myself for being here. I felt like one who had strayed into
a disreputable den. In addition, I was in dread of being
recognized. The man who sat by my side had the hair and the
complexion of a gipsy. He looked exhausted and morose.
Presently he had a fried steak served him. It was heavily laden with
As he fell to cutting and eating it hungrily the odor of the fried
onions and the sound of his lips sickened me. The steak put him in
good humor. He became sociable and turned out to be a gay,
though a venomous, fellow. His small talk raised my spirits, too.
Nor did anybody in the café seem to know who I was or to take
any notice of me. I took a humorous view of the situation and had
the gipsy-faced man tell me who was who
"Shall I begin with this great man?" he asked, facetiously, pointing
his fork at himself. "I am the world-renowned translator and
feuilleton writer whose writings have greatly increased the
circulation of the Yiddish Tribune."
Under the guise of playful vanity he gave vent to a torrent of
self-appreciation. He then named all the "other notables
present"--a poet, a cartoonist, a budding playwright, a
distinguished Russian revolutionist, an editor, and another
newspaper man--maligning and deriding some of them and
grudgingly praising the others. Much of what he said was lost upon
me, for, although he knew that I was a rank outsider, he used a
jargon of nicknames, catch-phrases, and allusions that was
apparently peculiar to the East Side Bohème. He was part of that
little world, and he was unable to put himself in the place of one
who was not. I subsequently had occasion to read one of his
articles and I found it full of the same jargon. The public did not
understand him, but he either did not know it or did not care
As he did not point out Tevkin to me, I concluded that the Hebrew
poet was not at the café
"Do you know Tevkin?" I inquired.
"There he is," he answered, directing my glance to a gray-haired,
clean-shaven, commonplace-looking man of medium stature who
stood in the chess corner, watching one of the games. "Do you
"No, but I have heard of him. You did not include him in your list
of notables, did you?"
"Oh, well, he was a notable once upon a time. Our rule is, 'Let the
dead past bury it's dead.'"
I felt sorry for poor Tevkin. Turning half-way around in my seat, I
took to eying the Hebrew poet. I felt disappointed. That this
prosaic-looking old man should have written the lines that I had
read at the Astor Library seemed inconceivable. The fact,
however, that he was the father of the tall, stately, beautiful girl
whose image was ever before me ennobled his face
I stepped over to him and said: "You are Mr. Tevkin, aren't you?
Allow me to introduce myself. Levinsky."
He bowed, grasping my hand, evidently loath to take his eyes off
"I read some of your poems the other day," I added
"My poems?" he asked, coloring
"Yes; I had heard of them, and as I happened to be at the Astor
Library I asked for your three volumes. I read several things in
each of them. I liked them tremendously."
He blushed again. "It seems an age since they were written," he
said, in confusion. "Those were different days."
We sat down at a secluded table. To propitiate the proprietor and
the waiter I ordered hot cheese-cakes. I offered to order something
for Tevkin, but he declined, and he ordered a glass of tea, with the
tacit understanding that he was to pay for it himself
"Why don't you give us some more poems like those?"
He produced his business card, saying, "This is the kind of poetry
that goes in America."
The card described him as a "general business agent and real-estate
broker." This meant that he earned, or tried to earn, an income by
acting as broker for people who wanted to sell or buy
soda-and-cigarette stands, news-stands, laundries, grocery-stores,
delicatessen-stores, butcher shops, cigar-stores, book-stores, and
what not, from a peddier's push-cart to a "parcel" of real estate or
an interest in a small factory. Scores of stores and stands change
hands in the Ghetto every day, the purchaser being usually a
workman who has saved up some money with an eye to business
"Does it pay?" I ventured to ask.
"I am not in it merely for the fun of it, am I?" he returned,
somewhat resentfully. "Business is business and poetry is poetry. I
hate to confound the two. One must make a living. Thank God, I
know how to look things in the face. I am no dreamer. It is sweet
to earn your livelihood."
"Of course it is. Still, dreaming is no crime, either."
"Ah, that's another kind of dreaming. Do you write?"
"Oh no," I said, with a laugh. "I am just a prosaic business man."
And by way of showing that I was not, I veered the conversation
back to his poetry.
I sought to impress him with a sense of my deep and critical
appreciation of what I had read in his three volumes. I spoke
enthusiastically of most of it, but took exception to the basic idea
in a poem on Job and Solomon
"It's fine as poetry," I said. "Some lines in it are perfectly beautiful.
But the parallel is not convincing."
"Why not?" he said, bristling up.
We locked horns. He was pugnacious, bitter, but ineffectual. He
quoted Hebrew, he spoke partly in Yiddish and partly in English;
he repeatedly used the words "subjective" and "objective"; he
dwelt on Job's "obvious tragedy" and Solomon's "inner sadness,"
but he was a poor talker and apparently displeased with his own
"Oh, I don't make myself clear," he said, in despair
"But you do," I reassured him. "I understand you perfectly."
"No, you don't. You're only saying it to please me. But then what
matters it whether a business agent has a correct conception of
Solomon's psychology or not?" he said, bitterly. "Seriously, Mr.
Levinsky, I am often out of sorts with myself for hanging around
this café. This is the gathering-place of talent, not of business
"Why? Why?" I tried to console him. "I am sure you have more
talent than all of them put together. Do you think anybody in this
café could write verse or prose like yours?"
He looked down, his features hardening into a frown. "Anyhow, I
cannot afford the time. While I loiter here I am liable to miss a
customer. I must give myself entirely to my business, entirely,
entirely--every bit of myself. I must forget I ever did any
scribbling." "You are taking it too hard, Mr. Tevkin. One can
attend to business and yet find time for writing."
All at once he brightened up bashfully and took to reciting a
Here is the essence of it: "Since the destruction of the Temple
instrumental music has been forbidden in the synagogues. The
Children of Israel are in mourning. They are in exile and in
mourning. Silent is their harp. So is mine. I am in exile. I am in a
strange land. My harp is silent." "Is it your poem?" I asked.
He nodded bashfully
"When did you compose it?"
"A few weeks ago."
"Has it been printed?" He shook his head
"I could have it printed in a Hebrew weekly we publish here,
but--well, I did not care to."
"You mean The Pen?"
"Yes. Do you see it sometimes?"
"I did, once. I am going to subscribe for it. Anyhow, the poem
belies itself. It shows that your harp has not fallen silent."
He smiled, flushed with satisfaction, like a shy schoolboy, and
proceeded to recite another Hebrew poem: "Most song-birds do
not sing in captivity. I was once a song-bird, but America is my
cage. It is not my home. My song is gone."
"This poem, too, gives itself the lie!" I declared. "But the idea of
America being likened to a prison!"
"It is of my soul I speak," he said, resentfully. "Russia did not
imprison it, did it? Russia is a better country than America,
anyhow, even if she is oppressed by a czar. It's a freer country,
too--for the spirit, at least.
There is more poetry there, more music, more feeling, even if our
people do suffer appalling persecution. The Russian people are
really a warm-hearted people. Besides, one enjoys life in Russia
better than here. Oh, a thousand times better. There is too much
materialism here, too much hurry and too much prose, and--yes,
too much machinery. It's all very well to make shoes or bread by
machinery, but alas! the things of the spirit, too, seem to be
machine-made in America. If my younger children were not so
attached to this country and did not love it so, and if I could make
a living in Russia now, I should be ready to go back at once."
"'Comfort ye, comfort ye, my people, saith your God,'" I quoted,
"It's all a matter of mood. Poets are men of moods." And again I
quoted, "'Attend unto me, O my friend, and give ear unto me, O
my comrade.'" I took up the cudgels for America
He listened gloomily, leaving my arguments unanswered. By way
of broaching the subject of his daughter I steered my talk to a
point that gave me a chance to refer to his little "meditation," "My
Children." "How well you do remember my poor little volumes,"
he said, greatly flattered. "Yes, 'My children love me.' They are
not children, but angels.
And yet--God save me from having to be supported by them. They
bring in a considerable sum at the end of the week, and they hate
to see me work or worry. But, oh, how sweet it is to earn one's
own living! Thank God, I do earn my share and my wife's. My
children are bitterly opposed to it. They beg me to stay home, but
I say: 'No, children mine! As long as your father can earn his
bread, his bread he will earn.' That's why my humdrum occupation
is so sweet to me." At this he lowered his eyes and said, with the
embarrassed simper which seemed to accompany every remark of
his that implied self-appreciation, "I wrote something on this
subject the other day, just a line or two: 'There are instances when
the jewel of poetry glints out of the prose of trade.'"
The fact that his children contributed to the maintenance of the
family nest was evidently a sore spot in his heart
His face, sensitive and mobile in the extreme, was like a
cinematographic film. It recorded the subtlest change in his mood.
The notion of its being a commonplace face seemed to me absurd
now. It was a different image almost every minute, and my mental
portrait of it was as unlike my first impression of it as a motion
picture is unlike any of its component photographs
I parted from him without referring to his daughter, but I felt that I
had won his heart, and it seemed to be a matter of days when he
would invite me to his house
The next time I saw him, on an afternoon at Yampolsky's café
again, there was an elusive deference in his demeanor. He seemed
to me more reserved and ill at ease than he had been on the
previous occasion. Finally he said, "I had no idea you were David
Levinsky, the cloak-manufacturer."
My vanity was so flattered that I was unable to restrain my face
from betraying it. I answered, with a beaming smile, "I told you I
was in the cloak business, didn't I?"
"I don't think you did. Anyhow, I did not know what kind of a
cloak-factory yours was," he said
"What kind do you mean?" I laughed.
"Well, I am glad to know you are so successful. There was
somebody who recognized you last time you were here. Your
secret leaked out."
"Secret! Well, what difference does it all make? To possess a
talent like yours is a far greater success than to own a factory,
even if mine were the largest in the world."
He waved his hand deprecatingly
Our conversation was disturbed by a quarrel between two men at a
near-by table. I was at a loss to make out what it was all about.
Tevkin attempted to enlighten me, but I listened to him only
partly, being interested in the darts of the two belligerents. All I
could gather was that they were story-writers of two opposing
schools. I felt, however, that their hostility was based upon
professional jealousy rather than upon a divergence of artistic
Finally one of them paid his check and departed. Tevkin told me
more about them. He spoke of the one who stayed in the café
with admiration. "He's a real artist; some of his stories are perfect
gems," he said. "He's a good fellow, too. Only he thinks too much
of himself. But then perhaps this is an inevitable part of talent, the
shadow that is inseparable from the light of genius."
"Perhaps it's the engine that sets it in motion, gives it incentive."
"Perhaps. I wish I had some of it." I reflected that he did seem to
have some of "it." At all events, he did not seem to begrudge
others their success. He spoke of the other people in the café with
singular good-will, and even enthusiasm, in fact
Some of the people present I had seen on my previous visit. Of the
others Tevkin pointed out a man to me who knew six languages
well and had a working acquaintance with several more; another
who had published an excellent Hebrew translation of some of the
English poets, and a third whose son, a young violinist, "had taken
Europe by storm."
An intellectual-looking Gentile made his entry. He shook hands
with one of the men I had seen on the former occasion and seated
himself by his side
"Either a journalist in search of material," Tevkin explained to me
in answer to a question, "or simply a man of literary tastes who is
drawn to the atmosphere of this place."
The café rose in my estimation
I learned from Tevkin that many of Yampolsky's patrons were poor
working-men and that some of these were poets, writers of stories,
or thinkers, but that the café was also frequented by some
professional and business men. At this he directed my attention to
a "Talmud-faced" man whom he described as a liquor-dealer who
"would be a celebrated writer if he were not worth half a million."
The last piece of information was a most agreeable surprise to me.
It made me feel safe in the place. I regarded the liquor-dealer with
some contempt, however. "Pshaw! half a million. He's probably
worth a good deal less.
Anyhow, I could buy and sell him." At the same time I said to
myself, "He's well-to-do and yet he chums around with people in
whom intellectual Gentiles take an interest." I envied him. I felt
I felt still cheaper when I heard that the literary liquor-dealer
generously contributed to the maintenance of The Pen, the
Hebrew weekly with which Tevkin was connected, and that he,
the liquor-dealer, wrote for that publication
It appeared that Tevkin had an office which was a short distance
from the bohemian café. I asked to see it, and he yielded
"You can take it for granted that your office is a more imposing
one than mine," he jested
"Ah, but there was a time when all my office amounted to was an
old desk. So there will be a time when yours will occupy a
splendid building on Wall Street."
"That's far more than I aspire to. All I want is to make a modest
living, so that my daughters should not have to go to work. They
don't work in a shop, of course. One is a stenographer in a fine
office and the other a school-teacher. But what difference does it
His office proved to be the hall bedroom of an apartment occupied
by the family of a cantor named Wolpert. We first entered the
dining-room, a door connecting it with Tevkin's "office" being
wide open. It was late and the gas-light was burning. Seated at a
large oval table, covered with a white oil-cloth, was Wolpert and
two other men, all the three of them with full beards and with the
stamp of intellectual life on their faces
"There are some queer people in the world who will still read my
poetry," Tevkin said to them, by way of introducing me. "Here is
one of them. Mr.
Levinsky, David Levinsky, the cloak-manufacturer."
The announcement made something of a stir.
Mrs. Wolpert brought us tea. From the ensuing conversation I
gleaned that these people, including Tevkin, were ardent Zionists
of a certain type, and that they were part of a group in which the
poet was a ruling spirit. When I happened to drop a remark to the
effect that Hebrew, the language of the Old Testament, was a dead
language, Wolpert exclaimed: "Oh no! Not any longer, Mr.
Levinsky. It has risen from the dead."
The other two chimed in, each in his way, the burden of their
argument being that Hebrew was the living tongue of the Zionist
colonists in Palestine
"The children of our colonists speak it as American children do
English," said Tevkin, exultingly. "They speak it as the sons and
daughters of Jerusalem spoke it at the time of the prophets. We
are no dreamers. We can tell the difference between a dream and
a hard fact, can't we?"--to the other two. "For centuries the tongue
of our fathers spoke from the grave to us. Now, however, it has
come to life again."
He took me into his "office," lighting the gas-jet in it. A few
minutes later he shut the dining-room door, his face assuming an
extremely grave mien
"By the way, an idea has occurred to me," he said. "But first I want
you to know that I do not mean to profit by our spiritual friendship
for purposes of a material nature. Do you believe me?"
"I certainly do. Go ahead, Mr. Tevkin."
"What I want to say is a pure matter of business. Do you
understand? If you don't want to go into it, just say so, and we
shall drop it."
"Of course," I answered
We were unable to look each other in the face.
"There is a parcel of real estate in Brooklyn," he resumed. "One
could have it for a song."
"But I don't buy real estate," I replied, my cheeks on fire. He
looked at the floor and, after a moment's silence, he said: "That's
all. Excuse me. I don't want you to think I want to presume upon
"But I don't. On the contrary, I wish it were in my line. I should be
"That's all," he cut me short. "Let us say no more about it." And he
made an awkward effort to talk Zionism again
CHAPTER III THE real-estate "boom" which had seized upon the
five Ghettos of Greater New York a few years before was still
intoxicating a certain element of their population. Small
tradesmen of the slums, and even working-men, were investing
their savings in houses and lots. Jewish carpenters, house-painters,
bricklayers, or instalment peddlers became builders of tenements
or frame dwellings, real-estate speculators. Deals were being
closed, and poor men were making thousands of dollars in less
time than it took them to drink the glass of tea or the plate of
sorrel soup over which the transaction took place. Women, too,
were ardently dabbling in real estate, and one of them was Mrs.
Chaikin, the wife of my talented designer
Tevkin was not the first broker to offer me a "good thing" in real
Attempts in that direction had been made before and I had warded
them all off
Instinct told me not to let my attention be diverted from my regular
business to what I considered a gamble. "Unreal estate," I would
call it. My friend Nodelman was of the same opinion. "It's a poker
game traveling under a false passport," was his way of putting it.
Once, as I sat in a Brooklyn street-car, I was accosted by a
bewigged woman who occupied the next seat and whom I had
never seen before
"You speak Yiddish, don't you?" she began, after scrutinizing me
"I do. Why?"
"I just wanted to know."
"Is that all?"
"Well, it is and it is not," she said, with a shrewd, good-natured
"Since we are talking, I might as well ask you if you would not
care to take a look at a couple of new houses in East New York."
I did not interrupt her and she proceeded to describe the houses
and the bargain they represented
When she finally paused for my answer and I perpetrated a labored
witticism about her "peddling real estate in street-cars" she flared
up: "Why not? Is it anything to be ashamed of or to hide? Did I
steal those houses? I can assure you I paid good money for them.
So why should I be afraid to speak about them? And when I say it
is a bargain, I mean it. That, too, I can say aloud and to everybody
in the world, because it is the truth, the holy truth. May I not live
to see my children again if it is not.
There!" After a pause she resumed: "Well?"
I made no reply
"Will you come along and see the houses? It is not far from here."
"I have no time."
She took up some details tending to show that by buying those two
frame buildings of hers and selling them again I was sure to
"clear" a profit of ten thousand dollars
I made no reply
"Well? Will you come along?"
"Leave me alone, please."
"Ah, you are angry, aren't you?" she said, sneeringly. "Is it because
you haven't any money?"
The awkward scene that had attended Tevkin's attempt to get me
interested in his parcel haunted me. I craved to see him again and
to let him sell me something. To be sure, my chief motive was a
desire to cultivate his friendship, to increase my chances of being
invited to his house. The risk of buying some city lots in Brooklyn
seemed to be a trifling price to pay for the prospect of coming into
closer relations with him. Besides, the "parcel" seemed to be a
sure investment. But I was also eager to do something for him for
his own sake. And so I made an appointment with him by
telephone and called at his wretched little office again
"Where is the parcel you mentioned the other day?" I began.
"Where is it located?"
"Never mind that," he said, hotly. "There shall be no business
between you and me. Nothing but pure spiritual friendship. I made
a foolish mistake last time. I hate myself for it. If you were a
smaller man financially I should not mind it, perhaps. As it is, it
would simply mean that you help me out.
It would mean charity."
I laughed and argued and insisted, and he succumbed. We made an
appointment to meet at Malbin's, a large restaurant on Grand
Street that was known as the "Real Estate Exchange" of the
Ghetto. There I was introduced to a plain-looking man who
proved to be the then owner of the parcel, and closed a contract
for a deed.
Encouraged by this transaction, Tevkin rapidly developed some
far-reaching real-estate projects in which he apparently expected
me to be the central figure. One afternoon as we sat over glasses
of tea at Malbin's he said: "If you want to drink a glass of real
Russian tea, come up some evening. We shall all be very glad to
I felt the color mounting to my face as I said, "I don't think your
daughter would like it."
"My daughter?" he asked, in amazement. "But I have three
"The one that spent some time at the Rigi Kulm in the Catskills
"Anna?" he asked, with still greater surprise, as it were
"I don't know her first name, but I suppose that's the one."
"If she was at the Rigi Kulm, it's Anna."
"Well, I had the pleasure of meeting her there, but I am afraid I
was somewhat of a persona non grata with her," I said, in a partial
attempt to make a joke of it
He dropped his glance, leveled it at me once more, and dropped it
"Why, what was the matter?" he inquired, in great embarrassment
"Nothing was the matter. A case of dislike at first sight, I
"You'd better ask her, Mr. Tevkin." He made no reply, nor did he
repeat his invitation. He was manifestly on pins and needles to get
away, without having the courage to do so.
"So that's what you wanted to meet me for?" he muttered looking
at the wall
"Well, I'll tell you frankly how it was, Mr. Tevkin," I said, and
began with a partial lie calculated to bribe him: "I became
interested in her because I heard that she was your daughter, and
afterward, when I had returned to the city, I made it my business
to go to the library and to read your works. My enthusiasm for
your writings is genuine, however, I assure you, Mr. Tevkin.
And when I went to that café it was for the purpose of making
your acquaintance, as much for your own sake as for hers. There, I
have told you the whole story."
There was mixed satisfaction and perplexity in his look
The next morning my mail included a letter from him. It was
penned in Hebrew. It read like a chapter of the Old Testament. He
pointed out, with exquisite tact, that it was merely as a would-be
courtier that I had failed to find favor in his daughter's
eyes--something that is purely a matter of taste and chance. He
then went on to intimate that if the unfortunate little situation
rendered it at all inconvenient for me to visit his house he did not
see why he and I could not continue our friendly relations
"If I have found as much grace in thine eyes as thou hast found in
mine," he wrote, "it would pain me to forfeit thy friendship. Let
the unpleasant incident be forgotten, then. I have a very important
business proposition to make, but should it fail to arouse thine
interest, why, then, let all business, too, be eliminated, and let our
bond be one of unalloyed friendship. I have been hungry for a
fellow-spirit for years and in thee I have found one at last. Shall I
be estranged from thee for external causes?"
Whereupon he went into raptures over a prospective real-estate
company of which he wanted me to be a leading shareholder.
Companies or "combines" of this sort were then being formed on
the East Side by the score and some of them were said to be
reaping fabulous profits.
My Hebrew, which had never been perfect (for the Talmud is
chiefly in Chaldaic and Aramaic), was by now quite out of gear.
So my answer was framed partly in Yiddish, but mostly in
English, the English being tacitly intended for his daughter,
although he understood the language perfectly. I said, in
substance, that I was going to be as frank as he was, that I did not
propose to invest more money in real estate, and that I asked to be
allowed to call on his daughter. The following passage was
entirely in English: "I have made a misleading impression on Miss
Tevkin. I have done myself a great injustice and I beg for a chance
to repair the damage. In business I am said to know how to show
my goods to their best advantage. Unfortunately, this instinct
seems often to desert me in private life. There I am apt to put my
least attractive wares in the show-window, to expose some
unlovable trait of my character, while whatever good there may be
in me eludes the eye of a superficial acquaintance.
"Please assure your daughter that it is not to force my attentions
upon her that I am asking for an interview. All I want is to try to
convince her that her image of me is, spiritually speaking, not a
Two days passed. In the morning of the third I received a
telephone-call from Tevkin, asking to meet me. Impelled by a
desire to impress him with my importance, I invited him to my
place of business. When he came I designedly kept him in my
waiting-room for some minutes before I received him. When he
was finally admitted to my private office he faced me with studied
indifference. He said he had only a minute's time, yet he stayed
nearly an hour. He asked me to come to his house. He spoke
guardedly, giving vague answers to my questions. The best I could
make of his explanation was that his daughter had been prejudiced
against me by the fact that everybody at the Rigi Kulm had looked
upon me as a great matrimonial "catch."
"Mv children have extremely modern ideas," he said. "Topsy-turvy
ones." His face brightened, and he added: "The old rule is,
'Poverty is no disgrace.' Their rule is, 'Wealth is a disgrace.'" And
he flushed and burst into a little laugh of approbation at his own
"I suppose your daughter regarded me as a parvenu, an upstart, an
ignoramus," I remarked
"No, not at all. She says she heard you say some clever things."
"Still, your letter was a surprise to her. She had not thought you
capable of writing such things."
What really had occurred between father and daughter concerning
my desire to call I never learned
Tevkin's house was apparently full of Socialism. Indeed, so was
the house of almost every intellectual family among our
immigrants. I hated and dreaded that world as much as ever and I
dreaded Miss Tevkin more than ever, but, moth-like, I was drawn
to the flame with greater and greater force. I went to the Tevkins'
with the feeling of one going to his doom
CHAPTER IV THE family occupied a large, old, private house in
the Harlem section of Fifth Avenue, a locality swarming with our
people. I called at 8 in the evening. It was in the latter part of
March, nearly eight months after my unfortunate experience in the
Catskills. I was received in the hall by Tevkin. He took me into a
spacious parlor whose walls were lined with old book-cases and
book-stands. There I found Anna and two of the other children of
the numerous family. She wore a blouse of green velvet and a
black four-in-hand tie. She welcomed me with a cordial
handshake and a gay smile, as though all that had transpired
between us had been a childish misunderstanding, but she was ill
at ease. As for me, I was literally panic-stricken. It was at this
moment, when I came face to face with her for the first time in the
eight months following that Catskill incident, that I became aware
of being definitely in love with her
The book-cases and book-stands were full to bursting. There was a
piano in the room and two tables littered with books, prints, and
photographs. The space between book-cases and over the piano
was hung with etchings, crayons, pen-and-ink drawings, and
photographs. The other two of Tevkin's children present were a
chubby girl of twelve, named Gracie, and a young man of
twenty-eight, two or three years older than Anna, named Sasha.
Sasha had a half-interest in an evening preparatory school in
which he taught mathematics, being now confined to the house by
a slight indisposition
Mrs. Tevkin made her appearance--a handsome old woman of
striking presence, tall, almost majestic, with a mass of white hair,
with the beautiful features of the girl who was the cause of my
being there. I thought of Naphtali. I had a desire to discover his
address and to write him about my meeting with the hero and
heroine of the romance of which he had told me a few months
before I left Antomir. "I go to their house. She is still beautiful," I
pictured myself saying to him. Her demeanor and the very
intonation of her speech seemed to proclaim the fact that she was
the daughter of that illustrious physician of Odessa. It did not take
me long to discover, however, that under the surface of her good
breeding and refinement was a woman of scant intellect
Seeing me look at the book-cases, she said: "These are not all the
books we have. There are some in the other rooms, too. Plenty of
them. It's quite a job for an American servant-girl to dust them."
Anna smiled good-humoredly
The next utterance of Mrs. Tevkin's was to the effect that one had
to put up with crowded quarters in America--a hint at the better
days which the family had seen in Russia
Anna's younger sister, Elsie, a school-teacher, came in. She had
quicker movements and a sharper look than the stenographer and
she bore strong resemblance to her father. Anna was the prettier
of the two. We went down into the dining-room, where we found
Russian tea, cake, and preserves.
Presently we were joined by George, an insurance-collector, who
was between Anna and Sasha, and Emil, an artist employed on a
Sunday paper, who was between Anna and Elsie. Emil was a
handsome fellow with a picturesque face which betrayed his
vocation. The crayons and the pen-and-ink drawings that I had
Back to Full Books
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Russian multi-purpose icebreaking PSV begins build in Finland
Sovcomflot multi-purpose icebreaking supply ship
A keel laying ceremony was held at the Arctech Shipyard in Helsinki, Finland, on 19 January 2012, marking the start of the construction of a multi-functional icebreaking supply vessel, ordered by Russian shipping company Sovcomflot.
The ship is designed to service the oil drilling platform located on the north-eastern part of the Sakhalin Island shelf, near Russia's Pacific coast, and is one of a pair ordered for the project being undertaken in conjunction with Exxon Mobil.
Vitus Bering and her sistership are designed to operate in 1.7m thick ice. Both of the 3,950dwt 99.2m length oa ships will be equipped with DP systems and will be used for escorting ships in ice conditions in the area around the platform, conducting oil spill containment operations, towing oil platforms and other large objects in the open sea. The power system, comprising four main engines, will provide an aggregate power of 18 MW.
Images for this article - click to enlarge
Unless otherwise stated, all images copyright © Mercator Media 2013. This does not exclude the owner's assertion of copyright over the material.
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As expected, today’s report from the Commission on a Bill of Rights offered little. With a membership evenly split between Tory and Lib Dem nominees, it was set up to fail.
Michael Pinto-Duschinsky, who resigned from the Commission in March, tells me that this problem was exacerbated by the way in which it was run: it was barred from discussing either the European Court of Human Rights or the Convention. He says:
‘The Commission was not able to have a productive discussion because of the determination of the civil service to produce an artificial argument’.
Attention now moves to what the Conservatives will say about the matter in their manifesto. In a paper published as part of today’s report entitled ‘Unfinished Business’ (p182 onwards), Lord Faulks QC and Jonathan Fisher QC warn that the Strasbourg Court’s ‘judicially activist approach’ means ‘the notion of human rights has been devalued in the eyes of the public’. This report, which isn’t supported by all the members of the Commission, adds:
‘Mindful of the Court’s activist approach, there are strong arguments that the cause of human rights, both in the UK and internationally, would be better served by withdrawal from the Convention and the enactment of a domestic Bill of Rights, or at the very least a renegotiation of the UK’s terms of membership so as to free it from the strictures of the Court.’
Pinto-Duschinsky is pleased that this paper has moved the debate on to the role of the Court, and this is the opinion of a growing number of Conservative cabinet ministers. But we know that Dominic Grieve, the Attorney General, disagrees with this view. Between now and the publication of the next Conservative manifesto, there’s going to be an almighty tussle over this issue.Tags: Bill of Rights, Chris Grayling, European Court of Human Rights, UK politics
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Raising two sons and with another (boy!) on the way, Octavia wasn't thrilled about the idea of adding brown bag lunches to her daily routine this year as her oldest son Steven started school. In fact, she dreaded it. "I wanted my kids to love lunch time and not be disappointed!" she says. "I wanted lunches to be as free of processed foods as possible, but also fun, and delicious."
So, after browsing PInterest for ideas, like the cool mom she is, Octavia discovered Japanese bento box kid lunches filled with rice molded into fun shapes. She thought she could use the same techniques to form fun sandwiches and her sandwich art project was born. "I figure if I can start to enjoy making lunches, and use healthy delicious ingredients, my kids will learn to love lunch time, too."
Octavia says that sandwich making is now the highlight of her day. She cuts a jagged line across a sandwich and adds carrot eyes to make a monster face or recreates Angry Birds characters, in all their sandwich glory. Really, Angry Bird sandwiches! Her trick is using food "adhesives" like peanut butter, Nutella, and honey to keep eyes, eyebrows, and noses in place. Sturdy foods like carrot and grape slices can be pressed right into the bread and hold without any food "glue". She hasn't had to use toothpicks to hold anything together yet, but she is careful to show Steven the finished product before he leaves for school, in case the sandwich design doesn't quite hold until lunch time.
Sandwich art keeps Octavia's creative mind flowing for new designs and ideas and translates into a fun lunch away from home for her son. "Since Steven is still learning to read, these super silly faces are a reminder that his goofy mommy loves him very much."
(Images: Octavia Reese-Huizenga, used with permission)
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The program in Government offers an approach to a liberal arts education that emphasizes the literature and methods of ancient, modern, and contemporary students of politics and government.
The object is to place students in the midst of controversy over the great issues of politics and to equip them to deal rationally and prudently with these issues. Students in Government will find courses in American government and politics, business and public management, comparative politics, international relations, political philosophy, and public law taught by an accomplished faculty of teacher-scholars.
The study of Government plays a crucial role in the mission of the College, which is to educate students for “thoughtful and productive lives and responsible leadership in economics, government and public affairs.” Consequently, Government and International Relations majors make up fully one-third of each graduating class, and the Government Department employs as many professors as the political science department at Vanderbilt University.
The major is selected by students preparing for careers in law; local, state and national government; foreign service; business; government relations; and other areas of the private and public sectors in which a broad knowledge of the problems of modern society is appropriate. Advice on specific careers is available through the department chair.
The International Relations program is an interdisciplinary program designed for students preparing for graduate work or careers with an international focus.Learn more
Established in 1972, the Washington Program is the only semester-length program outside of Claremont administered by CMC. Participants in the program work full-time as interns in the Washington, D.C. area; in addition to the internship, students enroll in two courses taught by CMC faculty, and complete a research paper under faculty supervision, for a total of four CMC course credits.Learn more
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EXCLUSIVE: NFL to target offensive players on helmet-to-helmet hits
GREEN BAY – Adrian Peterson turned upfield and galloped on an angle between Green Bay Packers safety Morgan Burnett and the sideline Sunday afternoon at Lambeau Field. Rather than head out of bounds, the 6-foot, 1-inch, 217-pound Minnesota Vikings running back squared his shoulders and lowered his head to initiate contact with Burnett.
Because Peterson lowered his head, he contacted Burnett on the left side of his helmet, in the jaw area. The blow knocked Burnett down, and Peterson gained a few extra yards.
Typically, the defender is flagged or fined for a helmet-t0-helmet collision, regardless of who initiated the contact. As soon as next season, however such a play could draw a flag on the ball carrier, or be reviewed postgame and result in a fine.
"Yes, helmet-to-helmet contact between a runner and defender (especially in the open field) will be reviewed in the off-season by the Competition Committee," said Greg Aiello, the NFL's senior vice president of public relations, in an email statement to OnMilwaukee.com.
Such a play seems to fall in line with the evolution of rules that govern player safety and the prevention of head trauma.
"They talk about it almost every year," Aiello added. "It's an ongoing issue (when are hits to the head/neck area illegal?)."
Aiello cited an NCAA rule that is rarely enforced, but could set the precedent for a new NFL edict.
Under "Section 1. Personal Fouls" the NCAA states in Article 3 that "No player shall target and initiate contact against an opponent with the crown (top) of his helmet. When in question, it is a foul. (Rule 9-6.)."
That rule is muddied however, by a variety of factors. Rule 9-6 applies to blocking below the waist, and rule 9-1-4 section II states that "As ball carrier A20 sweeps around the end and heads upfield, he lowers his head and contacts defensive end B89 who is trying to tackle him. The players meet helmet to helmet. RULING: No foul. Neither A20 nor B89 is a defenseless player and neither has targeted his opponent in the sense of Rule 9-1-3."
Rule 9-1-3 however, is specific to quarterbacks. The NCAA rules do allow for a review of such plays after the game, and allows for disciplinary measures, but such instances are rare.
Tom Fiedler, the assistant coordinator of the Midwest Football Officials Alliance which oversees the officiating in several Division III conferences, including the Wisconsin Intercollegiate Athletic Conference, said such open field collisions don't fall under the defenseless player or targeting rules of the NCAA. But, it could.
"Theoretically, an offensive player could be called," Fiedler said. "It doesn't preclude it from happening. But it just doesn't happen very often. Have I seen it called? I've seen a lot of games this year and last year and it doesn't come to mind. But it could occur. The rules don't preclude it from happening."
If the NFL can clarify the targeting rule and implements it, players agree that the game will evolve much more rapidly into a practice they don't recognize.
The Competition Committee is made up of eight front office executives and coaches and recommends policy and rules changes. The committee often publicizes its agenda in advance of league meetings in late March.
"That would change the game entirely," said Packers running back Cedric Benson, who is currently on injured reserve with a foot injury. "We'd be playing flag football. Almost touch football. You go any further with this thing you're taking contact out of the game. It's just a part of it, I feel like. The whole concussion thing, all that stuff, I think they've taken great measures to protect the head and minimize that, but any further we're no longer playing NFL football."
Benson is a player known for his physical style of running, and has initiated contact with defenders by lowering his head in order to break tackles. He said the primary reason ball carriers lower their heads however is to protect their bodies, and to absorb contact in the shoulders.
"That would really be tough for running backs and receivers because the only thing we really have to protect ourselves is getting our pad level down," said Packers running back Johnny White, who is on injured reserve after suffering a concussion on special teams. "We preach that and practice it ever since coming up playing football. Just like for the (defensive) guys it's hard for them to pull up and hit somebody below the (head) it'd be hard for us to really consciously be able to stand straight up and let somebody hit you. That would put us in a pretty difficult spot."
Across the locker room, several of Benson and White's teammates on the defensive side have gotten flagged or fined for helmet-to-helmet or defenseless player collisions.
Linebacker Dezman Moses was flagged against St. Louis game and defensive backs Jerron McMillian and Tramon Williams were fined for helmet-to-helmet hits against the New York Giants and Vikings.
Yet they know that in the heat of the moment, not every lowered helmet is akin to targeting a defensive player.
"As a running back you want to protect yourself," McMillian said. "You're not going to give nobody a free shot. But, they're going to put their head down, so there's going to be helmet-to-helmet at some point in time. It's not purposefully done. It happens. It's football. For (Adrian Peterson) to be the runner that he is, he's not going to give nobody the freedom to hit him in an open area like that. It's just real tough. People try to protect themselves as well."
Several Packers defenders couldn't imagine playing the game without a ball carrier lowering his head in the open field and weren't sure it should be legislated out of the game. But, they did like the idea that an offensive player's actions could be reviewed after a game, and perhaps being assessed a fine if it was clear a defensive player was targeted with a helmet.
"I'm glad they're trying to evaluate," McMillian said. "I don't know if the evaluation means (it) will help them not fine us for helmet-to-helmet when they (the offensive player) do play a part in it."
Packers safety M.D. Jennings managed a slight smile when talking about the possibility of yet another new rule.
"I don't know how they can go about doing that," he said of its enforcement. "It's definitely changing the game. Ten, 15 years from now, who knows how the game will be."
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Photos and VideosMore Photos and Videos
Facebook helps you connect, unless you make fun of Facebook, in which case you'll be disconnected.
Two Chicagoans who made a big impact on Facebook are now featured in a book about the social networking site’s marketing power.
Chris Hughes, a creator of Facebook and the former social networker for Barack Obama’s presidential campaign and attorney Rebecca Phillips Ketchie, share their stories in a new book titled, “Facebook Fairytales: Modern Day Miracles to Inspire the Human Spirit,” reported Crain’s Chicago Business.
"In February 2007, Chris left Facebook and its 15 million users to move to chilly Chicago, where he'd commence a unique experience that would alter the course of American politics indelibly.” said author Emily Liebert in her book.
The author seemed impressed with Hughes’ story.
“He believed in Barack Obama and his message of change, perhaps more than he believed in his own capabilities of tackling such a daunting task," said Liebert to Crain's.
Ketchie gained nationwide attention and hundreds of followers after creating a Facebook page about her extremely conservative alma mater, “Bob Jones University Survivors.”
She used Facebook as an open letter to the school to demand a retraction for racist comments, and it worked because an apology was offered according to Crain’s.
“The power of social networking is taking over the world,” said Liebert.
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Making smart financial decisions is more important than ever. With the global economy in a steep decline, people around the world are reevaluating their finances and finding ways to cut back in the recession. At New Mogul, you will find all the tools you need to give yourself a financial makeover. Learn how to save money on regular expenses and fight back against the debt that can be devastating. Use our tips to dig your way out of debt and back into a financial situation where you have peace of mind and less anxiety every time you balance the checkbook.
Black Friday is seen as one of the most important times of the year for retailers in this country. With sales remaining steady or dropping in the last few years, this day is the one that can make or break a company’s bottom line. This year, many companies are forgoing the traditional day after Thanksgiving sales in favor of opening Thanksgiving night, or simply not closing at all on Thanksgiving Day. This has created a backlash not only among store employees, but consumers also have to stop and wonder how much is too much?
Not too many years ago, stores would open their doors early the day after Thanksgiving-some as early as 4 or 5am. The last few years, these store openings, along with the special deals they offer, have been happening earlier and earlier. This year is the first year that many retail companies are opening as early as midnight to take advantage of the retail feeding frenzy that is Black Friday.
Store workers are upset because they do not get to spend time with their families during Thanksgiving Day as many will have to be at work hours earlier than the store opening to prepare for the customers that will charge through their doors when they open. Many consumers, driven to extreme behavior previous years, are all ready camping at the stores’ entrances, forgoing the holiday completely.
Thanksgiving has changed, and many would say it is a change for the worse. Instead of a quiet day to spend time with family and friends reflecting on the blessing we have, many people are out in pursuit of the big deal, and our holiday is worse for the wear.
Right now in the US the face of poverty is changing in ways that it hasn’t changed in decades. The face of poverty today is overwhelmingly young, mostly educated, and spans every nationality in the country. With the dearth of well-paying jobs in the country today, the face of poverty is increasingly looking like the faces of our neighbors, friends, and relatives.
The average cost of living for a family of 3 in 2010 was $2830.00 per month. This figure includes the cost of food, housing, utilities, gas and vehicles. This figure is for basic necessities and is only an average-depending on what part of the country one lives in, the figure can be radically higher.
The Federal Minimum Wage currently stands at $7.25 per hour. At a 40 hour work week this equals gross wages of $290.00 per week. Of course with taxes taken out the actual dollar amount the employee takes home can be up to $100.00 less. A monthly gross is around $1160 per month. The difference in what a person needs to make per month to cover basic living expenses and in what an actual salary might be is $16700 per month.
If you double the amount and say that two of the three family members work full time it still only totals $2320.00 per month before taxes are taken out. This is still below the average cost of living for a family of three. Figure in any medical expenses or child care expenses and you have a family working full time and living in poverty.
In order to allow people to meet their basic expenses for cost of living, not including any medical or childcare expenses, minimum wage would need to be set at higher than $17.70 per hour before taxes.
The Freecycle Network was started in 2003 by a small group of people who wanted to share or recycle unneeded equipment, furniture, books and the like in a small area of Arizona. Today it spans 85 different countries and has millions of members to help to recycle unwanted useable products worldwide.
Freecycle.org will set you up with your local group, usually accessed through a Yahoo groups page. There you will find people offering many different items for giveaway, as well as requests for things people want. Freecycle is a great way to assist other people directly in a one-to-one manner by giving away things you don’t need. For those on limited budgets, it can be a good way to ask for things you need but cannot afford to buy.
One of the primary things to remember about Freecycle is that is really is a two way street. When you ask for something, if at all possible, offer something in return. If you have old, gently used clothing that you don’t need, or books you no longer wish to keep, Freecycle can be the perfect place to find new homes for your stuff. If your TV has bitten the dust, you can ask if anyone has one they are wanting to part with-it probably will not be the 32” flat screen stereo monitor all your friends have, but if it works and it’s free, how cares?
Freecycle is not for profit. Volunteers maintain yahoo groups and keep things running correctly for the entire organization. It can provide a great help to those who need it and a way to feel good about giving stuff away to everyone else. Whether you have extra stuff lying around that you would like to clear away or could use a little help in finding some gently used items for free, check out Freecycle!
In this day and age, it’s nearly impossible to find someone who has not struggled financially at one point in time. Almost everyone I know has faced debt up to their eyeballs, a lack of sufficient income to pay their bills, bankruptcy or other serious money troubles. What is a person to do when faced with these kinds of trouble?
While the obvious answer in most cases is increasing your income, the truth is that is easier said than done. Whether pursuing a better paying job is a struggle due to lack of education, lack of training or lack of transportation (or any combination of the these), hardly anything is more frustrating than trying to overcome financial stress.
Fortunately, these days there are many options one can consider to find a new place of employment or to gain training necessary for a better job. College classes can be completed online at your own pace on your own schedule. Many training and certification programs offer evening and weekend classes, so one can earn those hours outside of their regular work hours. Employment ads are no longer just in the newspaper! While they can be located in the newspaper, both in print or online, there are also many websites where you can search the want ads as well. Craigslist is one such website where you can find job listings.
Conversely, if one is able to save money, that can help with the financial strain on a family’s bank account as well. There are many ways to save money from clipping coupons and meal planning to cutting back on the electricity and water use in the home. Also, finding free or low cost forms of family entertainment is vital in the current economy.
Whatever route you take to preserve your family’s financial situation (and your sanity) it is worth the effort.
By now you’ve most likely heard about how electronic cigarettes have really started to change the world of nicotine. It’s likely that you’ve learned how, despite the protests of the FDA, more and more smokers have started using electronic cigarettes and even prefer them to real cigarettes. The list of reasons most commonly heard when you ask someone why they decided to make the change to electronic cigarettes includes everything from:
• A desire to overcome their nicotine addiction once and for all
• They’re tired of spending $1,000’s on cigarettes each year and have become very grateful for a more economical solution
• They’re worried about their future health
• they wanted to improve their social life
• they decided to become more environmentally conscious
Most people don’t realize that they can turn their love of electronic cigarettes into a business idea.
Marketing can be very expensive, and believe it or not, some major retailors struggle to connect with their target market. The electronic cigarette industry has been dealing with this problem for years. This means good news for you. To help offset marketing expenses and make sure that they really are connecting with smokers who haven’t quite made the leap to electronic cigarettes, most of the electronic cigarette companies have created affiliate marketing programs.
It’s in your best interest to check out these various affiliate marketing programs and choose the one that will be the best possible match for you. You don’t have to worry about having a strong grasp of marketing tactics, or a degree in business to make money from the electronic cigarette’s affiliate programs. Anyone that has a little common sense and a basic understanding of social networking will be able to reap positive results.
Signing up for the program will be the first thing you need to do. Once your application has been approved, the e cig company will provide you with links that you can post on your favorite social networking sites. Blogs have become a favorite place for these links to be posted. The great thing about using a blog for marketing the electronic cigarettes is that you can use it to post things like SmokeTip User reviews, fun tips, Green Smoke Consumer reviews, interesting facts, and Blu Cigs ratings. Some people have even set up an entire user friendly electronic cigarettes reviews site where they feature South Beach Smokes reviews and additional information about electronic cigarettes.
Whenever someone uses one of your links to both connect with the electronic cigarette company and makes a purchase, you’ll get a small commission. The great thing about these programs is that you continue to collect commissions every time the person makes a purchase, even if they never use your affiliate links again.
There’s not an adult in the world that hasn’t had to deal with some stress. It’s an unavoidable part of life. It’s important that you understand there’s going to be sometimes when you’re under more stress then you will be at others. If you’re planning on starting a brand new business, you’re going to find that you’ll be immersing yourself in the most stressful time of your life.
If you’re even thinking about starting your own business, you need to be prepared for the amount of stress you’re going to be hit with. You’re going to find that the stress makes it very difficult to do some things like pay attention to details, remember important information, and concentrate on all the little things that need to be dealt with if your business will be the successful venture you’re hoping for.
You also need to keep in mind that stress, especially the massive amount of stress starting a business triggers will take a toll on your body. It’s not at all unusual for people who find themselves dealing with a massive amount of stress to struggle with things like headaches, muscle tension, and joint pain. In order to reduce the risk of further injury, you’re going to want to make sure you take the steps to deal with the physical symptoms of stress as soon as they crop up. Prior to immersing yourself in the stress of starting up a new business you should really spend some time thinking about the therapeutic benefits of hot tubs and soaking tubs.
It’s likely that you’ve already noticed that whenever you’re a bit stressed there’s something about bath tubs and warm water that makes the world seem like a better place, especially when you add a glass of good wine into the mix. There’s something about the warm water that helps you put your problems into prospective. You’re going to find that Whirlpool bathtubs and air tubs do the same thing.
When you start to check out Whirlpool tubs for sale, you’re going to be looking at tubs that jet water around the tub creating a pulsating current which will help your stress melt away. Not only will the warm water melt the tension from your muscles, but the Whirlpools jets will also massage your body, literally forcing the aches and pains away. By the time you get out of your Whirlpool tub or swimming spa you’re going to feel like your old self. Just fifteen minutes in the tub will make it easier for you to deal with all the problems and issues that always crop up when you’re dealing with a brand new business and you’ll be able to enjoy the process.
Biting your nails. Smoking cigarettes. Eating ice cream late at night. These are all bad habits that can have negative consequences if you don’t deal with them eventually. Breaking a habit is hard, but you can enjoy some serious rewards for your hard work if you stick with it. So what is the best way to break a habit? Here are some strategies that might just work for you.
1. Take the 12 Step Approach
Break down your habit by eliminating it in 12 steps. By breaking it up into baby tasks, it won’t feel like such a shock to your system. For example, if you are trying to stop your pack a day cigarette habit, you could break it into steps. During the first day (or week), you smoke as usual but skip that early morning cigarette. Then on the second day, you give up the cigarette after lunch. You keep eliminating cigarettes in steps until you are not smoking at all.
2. Get a Habit Breaking Buddy
Find a friend who will call you out if you relapse. If you are trying to give up your late night snacking, ask your roommate or spouse to speak up if they notice you giving into temptation at night. Just by having some accountability, you will find it easier to stay on track.
3. Replace the Bad With Something Good
Instead of just eliminating the old bad habits, replace them with good habits. If you have been biting your nails, replace the time you spent on that with something else. For instance, if you bite your nails when you are bored or nervous, give your fingers something else to do. Doodle on some paper and chew gum to keep your mouth busy too! Replace bad habits with good ones to be more successful at changing for the long term.
Town halls that host bingo games are becoming harder and harder to find. The decreasing number of venues that offer bingo doesn’t meant that you have to give up playing the game forever. You just need to adjust to the idea that you are going to have to play it somewhere else. Instead of driving in all kinds of weather to a bingo game, you simply need to learn how to play bingo online. Odds are you’ll find you like it lots better than the bingo games held in brick and mortar buildings.
If the idea of playing bingo online makes you nervous, you can relax. Most of the new bingo sites 2012 have set up all kinds of incentives for new members, including free game credits, so you can test the waters before you ever start to play. You’ll find that the chat rooms create the same sense of camaraderie that you felt at your real world games. Best of all, you’ll be playing fast paced, high quality bingo. What more could you possibly ask for?
The biggest challenge you are going to face is finding the free bingo websites that are going to be a good match for you. Luckily there are a few things you can do to make your quest a little easier. Finding bingo sites isn’t hard. All you have to do is Google “online bingo” and you will get thousands of results to help you start your research. Now that you have the names of some websites, you are going to be ready to start choosing the perfect one.
The great thing about the Internet is that it is possible for you to read through all kinds of bingo reviews about a website without ever having to check it out for yourself. Reading through these reviews will help you learn about the quality of the games offered, the ease of making withdrawals from accounts, security, and the reliability of the server the site uses. Most importantly, you will be able to learn if the website you are considering is the real deal or a scam.
In addition to picking out the no deposit bingo sites that have the highest positive reviews, you are also going to want to look at the type of incentives the site is willing to offer. In addition to the new member incentives, many websites reward their members from time to time with free game credits. A high number of free bingo bonus games is another thing you are going to want to look for. If you join a bingo site and decide it isn’t exactly what you were looking for, all you have to do is start the whole process all over again. To save some time in your search, just head over to Big Brother bingo. It’s a classic take on the old game and reviews online show that it is one of the best places for new players to start.
Alone in the woods? “Might as well be.,” muttered Grant as he and his wife cleaned their freshly caught fish to be cooked over the roaring camp fire. At least the way things typically felt when his wife would drag him on these insane journeys into the mountains. Her family had always been the ridiculous outdoors type; walking, biking, riding, and skydiving. Pretty much any crazy thing you can think of with an -ing attached to it, they did.
Well since her father had passed Grant would accompany his wife on an annual camping/hiking trip into the mountains. It was always a pretty daunting undertaking. It, of course, wasn’t that Grant was in anyway nonathletic. Far from it. No. The issue was that Grant was a smoker. And the last time Grant had looked he hadn’t seen any corner stores in the Appalachians. Especially any that sold cigarettes!
But this year Grant wore a smile on his face. His only displeasure now was gathered from the smell of freshly smeared fish guts on his palms. Nope. This year Grant had it all figured out (with help from his wife, of course, to whom he complained often). He had packed an extra bit of luggage, which contained, what Grant called, his “great escape”.
It was his new Smoke51 electronic cigarette. Sure. It sounded ridiculous to Grant too when he had seen it in the store. He immediately pulled up a number of e cigarettes reviews sites on his phone and began to read. It seemed that electronic cigarettes could effectively simulate an actual cigarette in every way minus the repercussions, so no harmful chemicals. No smelly smoke. And no crazy health concerns. This product was beginning to sound better and better.
After a moment, Grant had stumbled across The Safe Cig Review and the V2 Cigs Review and gave them a read as well. There were so many people who had already tried this product; and loved it! Whether they were trying to quit, replace, or simply substitute tobacco, everyone seemed pleased.
Grant grabbed up an electronic cigarette coupon code online and bought a started kit and even snatched a few ecig cartridge refills and went straight home. It was his wife’s idea to bring it on the trip, a thought that had never crossed Grant’s mind. He simply just loved to buy random things that caught his fancy. A habit that often got him into trouble at home.
Now here Grant was. He took a draw of his electronic cigarette and smiled. His wife laughed and kissed him on the cheek. “You look happy, dear.” He sighed. “I am, sweetie. I am.”
There is a brand new show that is stirring up interest from people of all ages, stages, and walks of life. “Extreme Couponing” shows how people save tons of money by shopping sales and using coupons to maximize their money at the grocery store.
Not all of us have time to devote hours to this pursuit, but even a very basic or modest use of coupons can save money at the grocery store. Many stores regularly offer double coupons for purchases and some even offer triple coupons on occasion. The best way to find this out is to check the store’s advertising circular or store website.
Coupons can be found just about everywhere today. They are in newspapers, magazines, flyers, store mailers and many other places. It usually only takes a small amount of effort to find them. Saturday or Sunday papers are a good source of coupons. Most of the major brands advertise their products in this way and you will find more than a few good deals.
Many manufacturers have websites that have downloadable coupons as well. If you have the time, it might be worth checking out some of the sites of your favorite products to see what might be offered.
After you begin to collect coupons it is important to keep organized. You must go through them regularly to toss expired coupons. There was a time when certain coupons would last for three months or more, now most coupons expire with a month or less. An expanding file folder with several pockets can help you keep everything organized.
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The dean of Washington National Cathedral, the Rev. Gary Hall. (WUSA9)
WASHINGTON (AP) - The dean of Washington National Cathedral hopes its decision to host same-sex weddings won't cause more traditional Christians to shun it as a gathering place for memorials and prayer services.
The Rev. Gary Hall says the Episcopal Church blesses same-sex couples and D.C. and Maryland let them marry, so the cathedral will now offer "Christian marriage as an option for them to live a holy life, following Jesus."
He says Christians who insist that marriage is only the union of a man and a woman are forgetting the polygamy of the biblical patriarchs and ignoring what he calls "the deep logic of the Scriptures" to welcome people as they are.
Hall adds that he believes part of the cathedral's mission is to lead the nation and its churches on important issues, and he doesn't think hosting gay weddings will hurt its fund drive to repair damage from the 2011 East Coast earthquake.
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Over the next few weeks in Brussels there is an important debate taking place on the future of gambling in Europe. On one side are the private gambling companies: some of them the big British bookmakers like William Hill, Ladbrokes and Paddy Power, some of them based on the internet like Betfair. On the other side are the national sports lotteries owned or at least run for, the governments of many European countries. They are both lobbying legislators hard to vote their way.
At the moment, in many countries the only way a bettor can place a bet legally is with one of these national lotteries. The private gambling companies say, in effect, “Hang on! We are in a common market. The whole idea is that companies from one country are supposed to operate freely in another country. And you are stopping us from operating.”
The national lotteries on the other side have been lobbying politicians hard saying, “Ah yes, but gambling is different. Gambling, at least the way the private companies practice it, leads to high rates of addiction, corruption and match-fixing. To protect the sport you must stop them from entering your countries.”
Who is right?
Well, like most hard-fought arguments, they are both, to some degree, right. The private companies are being restricted from practicing their trade. On the other hand, the more gambling that is available, the more gambling addiction there will be. What is more complicated is the role of match-fixing in this whole debate.
Here are a couple of facts. No self-respecting match-fixer ever tried to fix a game using a national sports lottery. There are two stages in fixing a match: the first is the actual bribing of the referee or the players; the second is the fixing of the gambling market a little like perpetrating a stock market fraud. The ‘stock market’ of a European national sports lottery is simply too restricted to allow any fixer to use them.
However, the claim that match-fixing would not exist without the private gambling companies is an overstatement. Bernard Tapie and Luciano Moggi were attempting to fix matches, without any connection to private gambling companies. The great South African cricket player Hansie Cronje said much the same thing in his confession after he was caught working with an Indian bookie to fix matches, “As long as there is gambling on sporting events — legal or otherwise — players will continue to be approached, pressured and tempted.”
The key phrase in Cronje confession is, of course, “legal or otherwise”. The bookmakers where most of the fixers place their bets are in the illegal Asian gambling market. This betting market is far, far larger than any legal gambling market in the world. There a fixer can place large sums of money on almost any game, almost always anonymously. Until we get proper oversight on this market, then the fixing of European football matches will continue, regardless of all the talk in Brussels.
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“I want to fly.” It’s every child’s ultimate fantasy. And now, the reality of flying high above sea level, propelled by a jet pack and unencumbered by parachute or artificial wings, is attainable, by the half-hour rental. A handful of outfitters are approved to offer the experience to the public. Less than a month after opening to the public, Fort Lauderdale company Rocketman is poised for aggressive expansion.
“The dream of personal flight” is coming to life thanks to Dania Beach-based JetLev Technologies, which created a prototype water-powered jet pack in 2008 and finalized a commercial release model in 2011. Operating on similar engineering principles as a Jet Ski, the jet propulsion system uses water from hoses to create the thrust that lifts the wearer skyward, with a flexible supply hose tethered to the fuel source and controlled by throttle, flight controls, and flyer body commands.
Sunny seaside destinations with warm, calm waters are the perfect testing markets for the JetLev water jet pack. It’s been available to buy at a price around $130,000 US since 2009, but the latest version is going into resort destinations from Florida to Hawaii.
In addition to their current location on Bayview Drive across from the Galleria, Rocketman is expected to launch out of the Hard Rock Seminole soon, with additional locations being scouted elsewhere in South Florida and in the Bahamas. And what is it about this experience that has people lining up to try it? Of course, there's the eternally desirable prospect of personal flight, but hang-gliding and parasailing also approximate that. This is a different sort of flight, though.
It's powerful, precision-controlled, and intense. Though the staff are incredibly attentive, with one person talking each flyer through every moment of the experience through a state-of-the-art headset, while a second staffer cruises just a few yards behind on a jet ski, the flyer is still truly the one controlling the water jets, and therefore, the height and direction. Strapped into a floatation backpack/chair, the flyer uses right and left handlebars to move up and down, while turning their head right or left to change course. The handles are extremely sensitive: raising them by an inch will cause the flyer to gain a foot or two of vertical height.
No matter how confidently or brashly a new flyer enters the experience, they're still going to go through a trial-and-error period of jerky starts, graceless face-first falls into the water, and panicky spins caused by dropping one hand low and causing unequal power between the right and left jets. By the second 15 minutes, though, a significant number of new flyers are "walking on water" or even getting several feet high in the air.
And the feeling is addictive. Every first-time flyer goes away understanding how they could have controlled the jetpack better, flown a little smoother, gone a little higher...in short, come a little bit closer to being that super-action-hero from the movies. Rocket Man offers six different flight experiences ranging from $99 to $4,000 for a full day. Visit RideRocketman.com to learn more.
JustLuxe is a luxury Web publication providing objective analysis and information to affluent consumers to assist with their decision making, such as chartering a yacht, purchasing a jet membership card, booking a luxury hotel, traveling to a specific destination, or buying real estate. Our writers conduct interviews with industry executives and leaders in their fields, analyze product offerings and review the Web sites of leading companies to ensure our readers have up-to-date data to make informed decisions. Consumers can find purveyors of fine luxury goods, services and travel solutions throughout the pages of JustLuxe via content or with our advertising partners. See our Best of Luxury high-end brands and partners.
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A recent disagreement on the linux-usb-devel mailing list ultimately led to the removal of the Philips webcam driver known as 'pwc'. The driver contains two modules, an open source module that has long been part of the mainline Linux kernel, and a closed source module which ships separately. Craig Rogers explained on the lkml that the closed source module ships in object format and "provides decompression services for proprietary codecs that are used for higher-resolution modes in some Web cameras based on this chip family." A hook in the open-source module allows the compression module to register with the kernel.
The actual disagreement was from the removal of this hook which was only used by the closed source module. Greg KH explained, "see
Linus's comments about 'if a change is needed to be made to the kernel in order to get a closed source module to work, that module must be made opensource' or something close to that." In response, the pwc maintainer requested that his GPL'd code be removed from the kernel, explaining why here in his own words. Greg KH offers his own explanation here.
Separate from the above debate around the removal of the hook, following the request for the driver's removal by its author it was pointed out that the driver is GPL'd, so the source code should legally be able to stay in the kernel regarldess of its author's requests. Linux creator Linus Torvalds replied, "yes and no. From a legal standpoint you're right. However, we should also be polite. If he's the sole author, and he asks for it, I think it's reasonable to honor his wishes. Of course if some new maintainer shows up and decides to infer how the device worked by looking at the original open-source code, that's also clearly fine. I don't want people to play lawyer. Honoring peoples rights to the code they write is more important than just the law."
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The objective of our floating support service is to provide older people with support that encourages independence and enables older people to continue living independently in their own home. The support is delivered by a specialist support worker and focuses on the goals, aspirations and preferences of the individual.
The support offered is a time limited package of practical support to enable the older person to develop the skills and confidence, or receive the appropriate advice, to continue to live independently in their own home. It may include links to other voluntary and statutory agencies, such as handyperson, befriending, homecare and other specialist services, and will encourage social contact where isolation and loneliness are issues.
Referrals for the service are taken from statutory services, self referrals and voluntary sector agencies. The service is funded through Supporting People grant.
Hospital Discharge Support
Within the floating support team are hospital discharge support workers who work specifically with older people returning home after a stay in hospital and who need help and support during this period of transition.
The hospital discharge support workers have built close relationships with local hospital staff in north west London, and with Social Services. The service reduces 'bed blocking' and enables older people to leave hospital when ready, returning to their own home, or to somewhere more suitable of their choice.
The support offered can include arranging for aids and adaptations to their own home; advice about other housing options; help with accessing welfare benefits, homecare and handyperson services, and links to befriending initiatives and community alarm services.
On leaving hospital, Willow provides floating support to the individual for around six months. This period is used to make referrals to longer term care and support services, if this is assessed as needed, to enable the older person to maximise their independence.
The service improves the quality of life for older people and enables them to remain in their own home if that is their choice; it reduces 'delayed discharge' fines for Social Services, levied if older people are not able to leave hospital when ready; it frees up hospital beds and reduces re-admissions through early intervention and 'keeping people safe' initiatives, and it reduces the placements in residential care.
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Hi! My name is Christine and I'm so happy to be here on Ucreate today. How fabulous is it to be a guest on one of my very favorite blogs? Exciting! I am the author of the blog From an Igloo. I post crafty tutorials as well as the odd tasty treat. My favorite thing to post though is sewing tutorials. I want even beginning sewists to know that they can create beautiful and well made things for themselves and their children even without using patterns! I hope you will come and take a peek at my blog and I can inspire you to create something beautiful!
Today I am going to show you how you can create a cute little easy Reversible Sun Top for your little princess (in any size)! Quick to sew and like two tops in one! Also perfect for that little one that seems to spill things on themselves whenever you are out! I have three of those!
Use 1/4 inch seam allowance unless otherwise noted.
What you will need:
- Aprox 1/2 yard each of two different fabrics
- 1/2 inch elastic
- Sewing machine, thread, and all that stuff
When you are done cutting you will have 6 pieces.
2 shirt panels
4 Strap Pieces
To cut these you need to take a couple of measurements from your kiddo.
1. Measure all the way around your child's chest (We'll call this measurement A)
2. Measure mid chest, up over the shoulder to the same spot on the back- This is for the strap length.
(We'll call this measurement B) Be conservative on the measuring so the straps don't end up too long.
3. Measure mid chest down to where you want your top to end. (We'll call this measurement C)
Shirt Panels (cut 1 of each fabric)
Measurement A multiplied by 1.5 + 1 inch
For example my measurement A was 23 inches X 1.5 + 1 inch = 35.5 inches
Now take Measurement C and add 1/2 inch
For example my measurement C was 13 inches + 1/2 inch = 13.5 inches
I am going to cut two panels (one of each fabric) 35.5 inches by 13.5 inches
Straps (Cut 2 of each fabric for a total of 4)
Measurement B multiplied by 1.5 + 1/2 inch by 1.75 inches (all sizes)
For example my Measurement B was 10 inches X 1.5 + 1/2 inch = 15.5 inches .
I am going to cut 4 pieces (2 of each fabric) 15.5 inches by 1.75 inches
Let's get sewing! Take one strap piece of each fabric (so you will have two strap pieces which are different). Right sides together sew down the long edges leaving the ends open. Do this with the other two pieces.
Turn your straps and press. Top stitch in from either side 1/4 inch. This is going to be the casing for your elastic.
Cut two pieces of elastic the length of your measurement B + 1/2 inch. So I cut two pieces of elastic 10.5 inches. using a safety pin insert into the casing of each strap. Sew the very ends just to secure the elastic. Even out the fabric along the elastic to create nice pretty gathers. Set straps aside.
Grab one of your shirt panel pieces and fold right sides together sewing down the short end. You will create a tube like shown. Now opposite your seam sew along the fold 1/4 inch. I like side seams on things. If it doesn't bother you just having one seam you can skip this step. Do the same thing with the other shirt panel.
Take one of your shirt "tubes" and using a ruler mark into thirds. Pin your straps to the two marks you made. Your opposite fabric should be facing up.
Take the other end of your straps and pull under your shirt panel and up to the same spot on the other side. Pin.
Place inside your other shirt panel, right sides together matching side seams. It is a good idea to pin all the way around. I'm going to be a rebel and not pin. I like to take risks like that. Sew all the way around and remove pins.
Turn right side out and press. This is what you should have so far.
Top stitch along the top edge 1/2 inch in. Then in again a little more than 1/2 inch to create a casing for your elastic. The second line of sewing you do make sure you leave an opening of about an inch to insert your elastic. To create an even line of stitching I just place my elastic on top lined up to my first row of stitching to make sure I am going to have a wide enough casing. I am just using the elastic as a ruler, not sewing it!
Cut a length of elastic equal to measurement A. Putting your hand up between both layers of your top insert your elastic. Sew ends of elastic together and then close up the inch you left open to insert the elastic. This is what you will have now. Almost done!
Press up your shirt panels 1/4 inch. I am showing you one panel. Do this with both.
Top stitch the bottom hem in about 1/8 inch. Your hem should be completely even on both sides and the top stitching should show through on the other side on the same spot. This will enclose the raw edge of the bottom of your top. You're done!
Now look into the adoring eyes of your princess when you hand over her new top! My little one thinks having a reversible top is just about the coolest thing ever. When she wears this she switches the pattern a handful of times a day! Better than switching outfits a handful of times a day (or are my girls the only ones that do this).
Thank you for letting me share this tutorial with you all today! I had fun being here and I hope you come on by and visit me in my igloo.
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Adjacent headlines this morning
Call to scrap Holocaust Day
Downing Street is facing calls from its advisers to abolish Jewish Holocaust Memorial Day, established by the Prime Minister four years ago, because it is offensive to Muslims.
'Jews controlled war on Iraq'
Tony Blair decided to wage war on Iraq after coming under the influence of a "sinister" group of Jews and Freemasons, a Muslim barrister who advises the Prime Minister has claimed
Whether it is the same adviser "Mr Thomson (who) wrote a book in 1994 in which he said Freemasons and Jews controlled the governments of Europe and America and described the claim that six million Jews died in the Holocaust as a "big lie"." in both cases is not said. Of course offending the Jews isn't something anyone worries about...
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I hope I've come to a right forum to have answered my questions. :-)
A few days ago I began to be interested in the upcoming C++0x standard. And I was surprised by some of the committee’s decisions. I'd like to know if there's a place to learn the reasoning behind these decisions - why the committee chose such awkward solutions in some cases instead of going in a more straightforward way. I'm not saying the committee decided wrongly, I'd just like to learn their rationales. In particular:
- Template aliases
Why the committee decided to change syntax to
instead of extending the current typedef
using TypeName = SomeType<3,T>
typedef SomeType<3,T> TypeName
Using different syntax for essentially the same thing complicates the language, especially when semantics of the "using" keyword differs from the semantics of "using" declarations.
Why was chosen the "postfix" notation (i.e. attributes are specified after function, parameter etc. names) instead of the "prefix" notation like in C#. IMO the prefix notation is more readable.
Moreover, one would expect that attributes do not change the semantics of the source code, they should be rather "hints". But some of the proposed attributes do not seem to satisfy this criterion.
Why the lambda syntax is so cryptic and does not resemble the more straightforward syntax of anonymous functions in other C-like languages? Perhaps inspiration by Haskel?
- Garbage collector
Why there are attempts to introduce the garbage collector at the language level instead of at the library level? When defined at the library level, the garbage collector could already have been part of the standard instead of postponing it repeatedly to later specs. I don't believe that the GC at the language level can be introduced transparently, without breaking the current code. The GC at the library level should work in cooperation with smart pointers (allocated memory would be available for garbage collection if no shared_ptr was pointing to it), like it does in most of the already existing GC implementations.
IMO, the only thing that GC at the library level now needs to specify are the finalizers - the spec must standardize their syntax (perhaps the Microsoft's syntax from managed C++?) and their relation to destructors (e.g. destructors would call the finalizers implicitly, when they are both defined).
(Concerning the ever-occurring question of managing scarce resources, the unique_ptr might be determined for this task, for instance.)
This question is related to the previous one: Why is shared_ptr restricted to reference counting implementation? From the point of view of shared_ptr users, the exact garbage collection mechanism is irrelevant. But if shared_ptr is adopted to the standard in the current form, relaxing its implementation from reference counting to other GC mechanisms would be very difficult in the later specs.
I drew my information especially from:
http://www2.research.att.com/~bs/C++0xFAQ.html (Bjarne Stroustrup notes)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C%2B%2B0x (Wikipedia overview of C++Ox)
http://www.informit.com/guides/content.aspx?g=cplusplus (Danny Kalev notes)
http://open-std.org/JTC1/SC22/WG21/d...2009/n3000.pdf (current C++0x draft)
> I'd like to know if there's a place to learn the reasoning behind these
> decisions - why the committee chose such awkward solutions in some
> cases instead of going in a more straightforward way. I'm not saying the
> committee decided wrongly, I'd just like to learn their rationales.
A good place to look would be comp.std.c++ :
search on the keywords (search this group button on the page) and you should get threads discussing the topics.
For example, on why aliases instead of typedefs for templates:
First, please feel free to criticize the standards committee. They're doing a great job but they are not gods and sometimes they even make mistakes. That's why the involvement of the C++ community in the standardization process is so important and I always encourage it. If you peruse my columns on Informit (in particular, look at this section which has been covering the C++0x standardization since 2003 http://www.informit.com/guides/conte...lus&seqNum=216 ), you will see that I usually present the criticism and rationale regarding each C++0x feature.
The lambda syntax has been modified three times, and if you look at the previous syntactic notations you'll even be more puzzled. I'm not married to the current notation but I believe it's much better than the original <> notation or the _1, _2 etc notation.
With respect to attributes: the rules are indeed about to change so that the attributes can appear before the function's name. Again, you're welcome to read my latest column about attributes.
With respect to GC: there's been a lot of research and experiments about it. I'm not going to present all the arguments here but suffice it to say that a library-only solution can't work in C++. You also need to address the issue of destructors of objects with static storage duration in a multithreaded environment. You need to address backward compatibility with C and with legacy C++ code and you need to address the new memory model of C++ that's been customized to support multithreading. At the end of the day, the real criticism WRT GC is different: C++0x won't have a GC and that's a real miss (this is the result of the infamous "Kona compromise" which was meant to expedite the standardization process, except that it didn't work -- the standard is already 3 years behind schedule but of course, we won't have a true GC. Now that's something I criticize wholeheartedly!)
With respect to template aliases: typedef works only for complete types so you can't used it with templates, unless you change the rules of the language radically.
Thanks both of you for your answers.
Criticizing the committee decisions seems pointless to me until I have enough information and unless I post my suggestions at right places. Otherwise it is like shouting from an open window - its good for venting oneself, at most. :-)
feel free to criticize the standards committee
But yes, critique... It seems to me that the basic problem with some of the C++0x features is over-complication. C++0x seems to look for all-solving constructs, instead of suggesting solutions that are really useful. It's no wonder that the spec is behind schedule.
Say the "attributes". Who will ever need to use an attribute with a variable or with a block? I would much more appreciate if attributes could be used only for types (esp. classes) and functions (esp. methods). And that later this feature would be extended towards e.g. aspect oriented programming. Not towards a wider range of C++ entities.
The same over-complications with garbage collection.
Actually, I mentioned the GC in my previous post mainly to be able to formulate my last point concerning shared_ptr. But in fact, I was also reacting to how Bjarne Stroustrup was explaining difficulties with GC at http://www2.research.att.com/~bs/C++0xFAQ.html#gc-abi; similar assertions I've heard elsewhere too. It's plain that B.S. is talking about *ordinary* pointers keeping GC allocated memory alive, not smart pointers.
None the less, I don't see why GC memory kept alive by smart pointers would be a problem for legacy and C code. They don't use smart pointers; they can still allocate memory on free storage (but they are responsible for deallocating it); they can use memory allocated on GC heap (but they are not allowed to release it).
template aliases: The link Vijayan pointed me to contains rather long and complex discussion. It'll take me time to digest it. Then I may change my opinion, but at the first reading I don't agree with many of the arguments.
It is hard to understand the C++0x features as individual, isolated features: They are meant to be used in combination and together with older features. For starter, I recommend this article: http://www2.research.att.com/~bs/what-is-2009.pdf . After that, read some of the early sections of the C++0x FAQ (http://www2.research.att.com/~bs/C++0xFAQ.html) before heading to the details.
> For example, on why aliases instead of typedefs for templates:
Thank you, this is exactly the kind of information I was asking for.
However, concerning the typedefs: If I were to choose, I would prefer the second model for defining typedef templates (according to the proposal N1406#2.2, i.e. argument matching and deduction), not the first one (i.e. typedef specializations). But I would also keep the "typedef" syntax, not the "using" syntax. The new "using" syntax would be justified when e.g. function templates aliases would be allowed - which is not the case. In the current C++0x state it seems to me that the only justification for the new syntax is that "the name being defined comes up front where we can see it", as B.S. writes.
Take my opinion as an opinion of a man comming from outside. I would bet that most people would consider this new language feature as another language complication to an already complicated language. As I do.
using vs typedef
Most people will prefer something familiar to something new - even if the new is simpler, more general, etc. Also, adding anything at all will add to the total complexity. This makes it tough to make improvements.
What convinced me to prefer using over typedef was that the very experienced programmers on the standards committee repeatedly got confused and made mistakes when trying to extend the typedef problems to handle templates. Those problems completely and almost instantly went away when we introduced the using syntax. For examples, see http://www2.research.att.com/~bs/C++...template-alias
> Most people will prefer something familiar to something new
I don't thing the problem is in that the syntax is new. But instead that there already exists something very very similar that seems to be a good candidate for the generalization. And even if you have good reasons to establish the new syntax (e.g. to keep the language internally consistent), it is very hard to see any semantical distinction between the two - from the language user point of view. Esp. when one says to himself: Why didn't they modified the syntax of the templated typedef instead of changing the syntax completely? Even after reading all the documents you (all) pointed me to I still only guess the reasons and still have doubts.
I dare to foresay that people will gradually stop using "typedef" and replace it with "using" even in the non-templated version.
> "We tried with the conventional and convoluted typedef solution,
> but never managed to get a complete and coherent solution until
> we settled on a less obscure syntax."
Well, I believe you :-), though I still don't understand.
> For examples, see http://www2.research.att.com/~bs/C++...template-alias
I've already read that (several times) and still don't see anything suspicious :-). Can you, please, be more specific?
> I recommend this article: http://www2.research.att.com/~bs/what-is-2009.pdf
Very good article, it has answered many of my questions – and raised others :-).
I’ve read most of the suggested literature. I’ll try to sum up my findings and ask several questions:
- Attributes and Lambdas
I’ve done with the answer of Danny that the syntax is still about to change. I still think that the syntax is unnecessarily complicated and that the features are aimed in other direction than they should. See "overcomplication" bellow.
- Futures and promises
Do I read the specification correctly, that a promise can be set only once? Thus it cannot be used for implementing the "yield" keyword, generators etc., can it? What C++0x constructs can be used for this purpose instead?
- Garbage collection ABI
The ABI doesn’t allow for copying collectors (and more importantly hybrid generational collectors). Copying collectors need a closer cooperation between the GC and "smart pointers" (the smart pointers need be updated whenever copying takes place). They also need to prevent copying when the memory is pointed to from derived ordinary pointers. The ABI simply doesn’t provide sufficient means needed to support copying garbage collectors. Also, the ABI probably prevents having several GC working at once (different types of object managed on different GC heaps), though I’m not sure.
(Originally I’ve misread the article and was thinking that it talks on GC with ordinary pointers. Sorry.)
As written in my previous post, why the smart pointers are bound to the implementation with reference counting? Why they do not allow transparent change of implementation (in particular a proper GC implementation)?
A constexp function is in fact a "pure" function, i.e. without side-effects, only the keyword is misleading :-). What’s the purpose of heaving constexp on the default constructors in many library classes? (It allows construction of e.g. an *empty* shared_ptr object.) Esp., why the constexp is used only for the default constructors?
Though in general I like the C++0x proposal, in several cases (mostly discussed above) I still feel that the proposal is "overcomplicated".
As an (counter-)example take "constexp". The academician you cite in your article was right when asking "Why don’t you just provide a full compile-time interpreter?" I think that one day this interpreter becomes a reality and requested feature. But you are right too that we don’t need the full interpreter now, because we’re trying to solve a much more modest problem. And this is IMO the correct approach – do not introduce a feature unless you know that you need it.
On the other side, there are e.g. attributes. A very general and complex syntax has been developed. And now we have the syntax, and do not know what to use it for. Very few attributes have been added to the specification, and they still use only a very small part of what the syntax allows. This is what I call the "overcomplication". If we didn’t have such big ambitions, the syntax could have been much simpler and more readable (e.g. similar to the Microsoft’s C++/CLI attributes).
You have raised many interesting points. I'll address only the shared_ptr question. You're essentially asking why shared_ptr must use references counting, right?
The main reason is that shared_ptr is based on a similar class designed for Boost, and that one implemented sharing by means of reference counting. What other models of sharing would you like to see, considering that shared_ptr was designed when C++ didn't officially support multithreading? Recall that you can use the small and efficient unique_ptr class in some cases. Allowing an underlying GC to replace the current shared_ptr model of resource management is quite problematic because GCs aren't deterministic and that means that shared_ptr wouldn't be able to own objects with destructors. This very issue is what makes GC so complex in C++.
> > I recommend this article: http://www2.research.att.com/~bs/what-is-2009.pdf
> Very good article, it has answered many of my questions – and raised others :-).
Thanks and "obviously"
I'm having some trouble posting so I'll answer your questions individually and briefly.
> - Attributes and Lambdas
> I’ve done with the answer of Danny that the syntax is still about to change. I still think that the
> syntax is unnecessarily complicated and that the features are aimed in other direction than they
> should. See "overcomplication" bellow.
I don't think that the lambda syntax will change. If we wanted to change it, it would not be obviously
in which direction to do so. IMO the main problem is not syntax but (1) lambdas are not polymorphic
and (2) they will be seriously overused. In most situations, I prefer a named function object - which
doesn't suffer from (1) and can be used in several places. Lambdas can lead to a lot of cut and paste
> - Futures and promises
> Do I read the specification correctly, that a promise can be set only once? Thus it cannot be used for
> implementing the "yield" keyword, generators etc., can it? What C++0x constructs can be used for this >
It can be set only once. I wanted a message queue, but didn't get it. Try a vector of promises.
> - Garbage collection ABI
> The ABI doesn’t allow for copying collectors (and more importantly hybrid generational collectors).
> Copying collectors need a closer cooperation between the GC and "smart pointers" (the smart pointers
> need be updated whenever copying takes place). They also need to prevent copying when the memory is
> pointed to from derived ordinary pointers. The ABI simply doesn’t provide sufficient means needed to
> support copying garbage collectors. Also, the ABI probably prevents having several GC working at once
> (different types of object managed on different GC heaps), though I’m not sure.
> (Originally I’ve misread the article and was thinking that it talks on GC with ordinary pointers.
It is claimed that the ABI can be used with a copying collector. I'm not sure; it has not - to my knowledge
been done - and I'm not really interested in copying collectors anyway. At the current state of the art a
copying collector requires twice as much memory as no GC. That's a lot and the GC ABI is not really meant
for programs that litter the world with garbage. It is aimed at collecting what's left after you exhaust
the usual structured techniques based on constructor/destructor pairs.
> - shared_ptr
> As written in my previous post, why the smart pointers are bound to the implementation with reference
> counting? Why they do not allow transparent change of implementation (in particular a proper GC
They wanted a shared pointer; a pointer to express shared ownership. Not a pointer to garbage collected
memory. Destructors are called when the last owner goes away. For almost all uses, I prefer unique
ownership as represented by unique_ptr.
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For many of you, living and/or studying on a university campus will be a new experience. During this time you will make new friends, face new challenges, and be a part of a new and ever- changing community. As with any community, safety is an important priority. The University of North Florida is a friendly, caring and trusting community, but we are not immune to problems associated with crime. It is our pledge that we, as your police department, will do everything we can to keep you safe. But for us to do our job, we need YOUR help. As a member of the University community you can help control crime by reporting suspicious activity, taking extra precautions and being aware of the crimes that could affect you. This page is a brief introduction to help you and our community stay safe. We invite you to obtain additional information by contacting the University Police Department at (904) 620-2800.
We encourage you to contact the University Police Department any time you see something or someone suspicious. This could include an unfamiliar person loitering around campus, a person “cruising” the parking lot or someone trying to sell things door-to-door. We are here to respond to your concerns, so please don’t hesitate to call us. We would rather check out 100 “false alarms” than miss one incident truly needing our attention.
We don’t have to tell you that textbooks are expensive. Sometimes textbooks can cost more than tuition. Because of that, textbooks can be very valuable to a thief. Incidents have occurred where organized groups come to a campus and in one afternoon steal thousands of dollars worth of books. Sadly, other students have been known to steal a single textbook to sell for gas money. To prevent you from becoming a victim of textbook theft, never leave your books unattended, even for a moment. It also helps to mark your books with a personal identifier where someone would not think to look, like a specific page toward the middle of the book.
It may seem simple but it is very important to lock your doors, even when you are gone for just a few minutes. Most crimes are crimes of opportunity. It only takes a few seconds for someone to enter your room or your car and take your valuables. We recommend that you always lock your door when your room or your car is unattended. Don’t give someone the opportunity to make you a victim.
This may not be seem the most cool thing, but it could save your life. If you are going out with someone you don’t know very well or if you are going outside of the campus alone, check in with a friend. This way if something happens, there will be someone who can alert the University Police Department that you may be in trouble and in need of help. Remember, the University Police Department is here to serve you, but it takes all of us, you included, to make the University of North Florida a safe campus to live, study and learn.
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Front Page Titles (by Subject) HOW TO STIFLE EMPLOYMENT BY SOCIAL PROTECTION * - Political Economy, Concisely
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HOW TO STIFLE EMPLOYMENT BY “SOCIAL PROTECTION” * - Anthony de Jasay, Political Economy, Concisely
Political Economy, Concisely: Essays on Policy that does not work and Markets that do. Edited and with an Introduction by Hartmut Kliemt (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 2009).
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HOW TO STIFLE EMPLOYMENT BY “SOCIAL PROTECTION”*
In 1998, nearly one European in eight is involuntarily out of work, due largely to the state-sanctioned (indeed forced) return of labor-market practices that were rightly decried as unfair when practiced by private industry in the not-so-distant past.
In 1871, a royal commission in England reported on the “outright compulsion” exerted on workers by “truck,” the payment of wages in kind. The customary (and later, the collectively bargained) wage rate was set in money, but in some trades the less scrupulous masters converted it to a basket of goods of their own choosing and gave that to the laborer. Room was thus made for abuse, cheating, the passing off of shoddy goods, and so forth. But even if the truck was a fair exchange, employees would invariably rather have the money to do with as they chose.
The practice of truck went back a long way. It was widespread in handloom weaving, and there were legislative attempts to ban it between the fifteenth and seventeenth centuries. Truck was likewise entrenched in framework knitting, as well as in the handmade-nail trade that employed sixty thousand nailers in northwest England in the early nineteenth century. Less uniformly, it was resorted to in other hardware trades in the British Midlands. Employers practicing it were generally badly regarded and tended to lose the best employees, who gravitated to employers paying proper money wages. In this way, the labor market started to correct some of the ill effects of the truck system.
Nevertheless, there were repeated legislative attempts to do away with it altogether, with Truck Acts in 1604, 1621, 1703, and, particularly, 1831. All were largely ineffective. Though truck survived in isolated coal mines for a few more years, as a system it was practically extinguished in Britain by the end of the nineteenth century—not by regulation, but by the ordinary interplay of supply and demand. In the United States, in mines and mill towns isolated by geography or langauge, the practice was preserved somewhat longer. As late as the New Deal era, the National Recovery Administration was impelled to turn its attention to employers paying in company scrip to be spent in the company store, an attenuated form of the “outright compulsion” involved in pure truck.
What is the point of turning over these old leaves today? Is it relevant to modern industrial society how Staffordshire nailmakers, Montana miners, or estate laborers in East Prussia, Poland, and Hungary were paid generations ago? Before proposing an answer, two things should be noted. First, as a matter of historical fact, employees hated truck, often reselling the goods in question for far less than their nominal worth. Second, there is a strong potential defense of truck: The goods a worker gets in exchange may go to feed and clothe the worker and his family, while if he gets money, he may improvidently blow it on payday and leave wife and children in misery for the rest of the week. This is the classic paternalist argument for gentle constraint, if not for “outright coercion” of the working classes for their own good. For all its plausibility, it was little used to defend wages in kind. Tellingly, it is not used at all to justify the massive reintroduction of the truck system into the modern welfare state. In fact, the mere suggestion that the manifold aspects of social protection are perfect products of (and difficult to justify without frank recourse to) paternalist doctrine makes the left blush with embarrassment or explode in fury.
For the truck system is back with a vengeance, more uniformly and inescapably than ever, and instead of trying to liberate them from it, state power now turns “outright compulsion” on workers and their employers and forces them to live with it.
It is readily accepted by public opinion that everyone needs some security against the common hazards of illness, unemployment, or in-capacity to work. Plainly, some people will voluntarily buy insurance to protect themselves and their families, but some others won’t or can’t. The incipient welfare state will insure the latter in a fairly minimal way. The notional “premiums” are either borne by general taxation or—politically less unpopular and administratively easier—are charged to payrolls, with the employer seemingly paying all or most of it. Once the system takes hold, there usually develops a strong democratic constituency in favor of extending these policies to cover ever more risks, ever more generously. With social insurance, it is obscure who pays what for whom. As a result, health benefits become progressively more comprehensive, unemployment pay longer-lasting and less conditional, and pensioners get younger as time goes by. The incipient welfare state is transformed into a mature one. Willy-nilly, it conducts itself like the lady who could not say “no”—indeed, to stay in office, modern democratic government must say “yes” even before being asked. (Take France’s new 35-hour workweek.)
More benefits paid out on policies of social protection mean that more premiums must be collected. Whoever pays them in the first place, ultimately they fall upon capital and labor. How much is really borne by employers and how much by employees may matter a good deal to present well-being and future growth, but it is not germane to understanding how truck, the provision of social protection as part of the wage, may generate endemic unemployment.
How this comes about is inherent in the compulsory nature of social protection. It is a benefit in kind. Its money equivalent to all wage-earners cannot be more than its total cost; to most individual workers, it is substantially less. They like the insurance, but if they could, they would rather have what it cost, or even a good deal less, and spend the money as they see fit. Whether they would be wise to prefer the money is immaterial if, in fact, they do. For if they do, they will subjectively undervalue social protection, and its cost will thus be higher than its worth to those it seeks to protect.
However, this is tantamount to saying that the cost of labor—the money wage plus the premiums employers and employees must pay to produce all the social protection on offer—will nearly always be higher, perhaps much higher, than the effective wage—take-home pay plus the money value the worker puts on his prospective social insurance benefits. To offer any given effective wage, employers must incur higher costs under this social truck system than they would otherwise have to do. Consequently, they will “restructure” and eliminate jobs. The resulting unemployment will be endemic, in the sense that it will resist both cyclical upswings and fiscal or monetary stimuli. As long as the cost of labor is generally higher than the value such cost buys for the employee, employment will remain stifled.
The dynamics of this mechanism are intimidating. With more unemployment, more insurance benefits are paid out and more premiums must be charged, which should normally increase the gap between total labor cost and effective wages; enhancing the gap increases unemployment some more, and so on in a vicious circle. It is once this circle gets going (which may be a matter of passing some threshold) that the problem becomes nearly intractable, as it seems to have done in much of the European Union. For it is of little practical use to say that the one real cure of unemployment is to abolish the insurance against it at the very time when this could only be done over the dead bodies of the jobless and the justifiably scared.
[* ]First published in the Wall Street Journal Europe, March 20-21, 1998. Reprinted by permission.
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What makes our Student Finance Office different?
What makes our Student Finance Office different is the individual attention we are able to give every student. This past year, some sort of financial aid was received by 91% of our graduate students and 87% of the undergrads.
Unlike larger institutions, we don’t just give you forms to fill out. Because of our deep roots in the community we help our students access a wide variety of outside resources, from public and private agencies as well as generous individuals, clubs and organizations.
Within OSF Saint Francis Medical Center there is a unique program we call MEEP, short for Modified Education Employment Program. If you’re willing to make a commitment to staying and working as a bedside nurse at the Medical Center (as so many students want to do) you may be eligible for $4000 of financial aid each semester. After you’ve fulfilled your commitment, that debt is totally forgiven. It’s an incredible opportunity.
At this current time of economic crisis, we know more and more students are experiencing financial troubles…but that means we just need to be very creative and use every possible resource. We are deeply committed to helping students get into school, stay in school, and achieve their dreams.
Student Finance Testimonials
Read what some of our students are saying...
"What I love most about Saint Francis Medical Center College of Nursing is that every instructor is there for you from day one to the end. Each instructor cares about your success in the program. They want you to succeed. Students all work together toward the same goal, which is becoming a professional nurse. I chose Saint Francis Medical Center College of Nursing because the NCLEX pass rate was the highest in the area and I wanted to become part of a program that achieves the highest success.
But financially, I wouldn’t have been able to go to College without scholarships. I didn’t get financial aid grants…all I could do was apply for scholarships and boy did I apply! And I got about $8000 in scholarship money!
What I would tell a student who needed help with their education finances is to apply for as many scholarships as they can. Start looking early for scholarships. Go to your local high school resources for local, state, and national scholarships. Go on the web and start looking for scholarship pertaining to nursing, any community service performed, if you are left handed, if you have parents in the military, if you’re a minority, if you’re a single parent, etc. Check with your parent’s employers for scholarships, or maybe even the union at your parent’s job. Get references, write your essay and as they become due make sure you get them sent out on time! The bottom line is..... start early and get organized! Good Luck!"
"What I love most about the College of Nursing is the fact that it has turned my dream into a reality. It seems like just yesterday, people were asking me, “What do you want to be when you grow up?” I would answer proudly, “A nurse.” I am now a step closer to becoming one thanks to the College of Nursing. I try to surround myself with positive individuals because it in turn inspires me and keeps me positive. At the college of nursing, everyone is positive and sincerely cares about your future. Nothing is more frustrating than not being able to accomplish your dreams due to barriers out of your control, such as money. At the College of Nursing, they do their best to overcome such barriers and help you succeed. I have been blessed to receive the MEEP scholarship. This means more to me than words can express. It has opened so many doors to my future. It has opened the door to my dreams.
Saint Francis Medical Center College of Nursing has a mission and philosophy that also aligns with my beliefs: “Care for the sick and the poor and serve with the greatest care and love.” These few words may seem simple but there is much more meaning behind them. These words mean that it doesn’t matter who you are, what you do, or where you’ve come from, we will do our best to care for you without judgment and with nothing but love. This not only applies to the patients in the hospital but to how we, as students, are treated by the College of Nursing faculty and staff. Saint Francis Medical Center College of Nursing is not just a college, it is my home."
"Knowing that a medical facility believed so greatly in my future as an RN that they set aside money to assist me through school has made a world of difference in my life. With MEEP, I was able to concentrate more on my education without worrying about the added expenses that come with school. The honor of receiving the generous scholarship validated for me and for my family that continuing my education was a worthwhile cause. Knowing that an accomplished group of medical personnel see that I have something to offer by partially funding my education is emotionally and even physically energizing. Even the act of completing the application helped me identify and clarify the goals I was seeking in my future nursing career. Supporting the education of nursing students to be leaders is key to aid in shaping the future of health care."
“The opportunity to be a recipient of MEEP has been an extraordinary experience that has significantly assisted in allowing me to attend the College of Nursing! It provides financial assistance towards my nursing education and opens the door for amazing opportunities at Saint Francis Medical Center to work in skilled, acute and complex clinical floor settings after I graduate and pass state boards to receive my registered nurse license.
I chose Saint Francis Medical Center College of Nursing because of the values and learning opportunities that allow me to “serve patients with the greatest care and love”. I knew I would be taught nursing excellence by knowledgeable instructors who are masters in their field of practice and who employ the use of state-of-the-art medical and simulation equipment. From the beginning I have been surrounded with incredible leaders and experts in nursing. My journey of becoming a skilled nursing professional has been facilitated by the excellent education I have received from the faculty and staff. Most importantly though, is the family-oriented environment that is integrated into the academic environment which fosters support and trust between students and faculty.”
"I chose Saint Francis Medical Center College of Nursing because of an experience in the hospital. My mom had just had surgery and her nurse was a former College of Nursing graduate and was a guy. I knew after seeing him care for my mom and living the mission that this is what I wanted to do and where I wanted to go.
What I like most about the College is the Faculty. I would also like to say how amazing it is to have a Dean like Dr. Sue Brown whose door is literally open just about all the time. If she is busy she always lets you know that you can come back and you don’t feel rude.
I also appreciate how the Student Finance Office supports student success. I am a broke college student who was working four part time jobs and trying to make it through school full time. As a guy, sometimes it is hard because we tend to have this thing called pride. I do not like having to ask people or tell them that I am sinking and I need help. The staff in the Student Finance Office are so friendly and personable. I love all of them. They make you feel welcome and are so educated in the funds that are out there. Not only with while you are in school but also how to make yourself financially responsible after school."
“As a non-traditional student, I wanted to earn a BSN in order to have a better advantage in my future career as a professional nurse. I was so happy to be accepted to attend Saint Francis Medical Center College of Nursing because of their reputation for providing an outstanding nursing education. I love that the instructors all want us to succeed. They are very supportive and patient and do whatever they can to help. One quote from one of my favorite instructors before each exam is “be confident in what you know!” and with each semester I am feeling more confident in what I know!
I love the ‘new family’ I have by attending the College of Nursing. I have made more friendships since I started here and the support I have is amazing. It is comforting to know that so many others know exactly what I am experiencing and are there to support me and lift me up. I have also had the most amazing experience with the Student Finance Office. My life circumstances changed dramatically at the beginning of my senior semester. I lost a significant amount of income and worried how I was going to be able to finish my last year of school. I found angels in the Student Finance Office who worked very closely with me to make things happen that will allow me to finish my nursing education! They helped me find resources I would have otherwise not known about and have worked with me to create a personal budget. I don’t know what I would have done if it had not been for their help and the generosity of the College through scholarships and MEEP. I owe them so much thanks and gratitude.”
“My experience at the College of Nursing has been remarkable! There is always someone willing to help you get through this challenge of nursing school. The instructors have not only inspired me to be the best nurse that I can be, they have given me the knowledge and skill to be the best nurse that I can be. I chose Saint Francis Medical Center College of Nursing because after visiting two times, I knew this was where I wanted to be! My aunt is an alumni and she was able to give me great advice. I thought that this school had phenomenal clinical experience that I would not receive at any other college. The clinical setting was definitely what won me over about applying. What I like most is that I am not considered a number. I have found throughout each lecture and each clinical experience a closer bond with the school and my classmates. I have been able to learn from others and build relationships that I will take with me into my future. I think that it is so helpful knowing that if I ever need help there is someone right there to pick me up. MEEP plays a significant part in my career. I could not be more thankful and appreciative to be accepted for MEEP! It means I will be giving my hard work and knowledge to OSF when I graduate…that I will have the chance of providing each and every patient with my greatest care and love. It also means that I will be able to fulfill a dream of a lifetime! “
"I chose SFMC-CON based on its convenient location, large accessible hospital facility, well-known reputation, and vision to "serve with the greatest care and love." SFMC-CON offers an extensive faculty of highly educated professors with advanced clinical skills and innovative approaches, including use of stare-of-the-art simulation equipment. Moreover, SFMC-CON nursing student graduates consistently achieve outstanding passing rates on national licensure exams. Not only does SFMC-CON prepare graduates with the skills required for excellent nursing care, it also sets the stage and develops cognitive abilities for life-long learning."
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Butler County commissioners on Thursday abolished automatic pay raises for 240 non-union employees under their control in a measure that is expected to save $3 million over five years, according to a report on Cincinnati.com.
Reporter Sheila McLaughlin cover the story for the Cincinnati Enquirer:
The new system – developed by Clemans Nelson and Associates, the Loveland firm hired to conduct the $100,000 pay study for commissioners – eliminates annual “step” increases and creates unified pay scales so that workers with comparable jobs are paid similar wages.
Workers will receive raises based on general percentage increases approved by commissioners or through performance-based raises for exceptional work.
Clemans Nelson first presented the plan to commissioners in February but since has revised the report after collaborating with county human resources officials to adjust some job descriptions.
Commissioner Don Dixon, who proposed the pay study in 2009 as the county continued to grapple with budget woes, called the change “exciting.”
“It takes us from a step every year increase if you’re just here,” Dixon said. “It’s a monumental step. It will completely change the way we do business. But the whole world has changed from the way we used to do business.”
For the entire story, visit Cincinnati.com’s post “Butler Co. to nix some pay raises to save $3M.”
Posted in: News |
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Southeast Louisiana State Hospital School is located in Mandeville, LA and is one of 27 schools in Special School District. It is a sp-ed school that serves 37 students in grades K-12.
Special Education schools are public schools that provide special services for children with disabilities (special physical, mental, or learning needs). Many special education schools also provide vocational training, adapted physical education, and assistive technology for their students. See Southeast Louisiana State Hospital School's test results to learn more about school performance.
Student Economic Level (2011)
In 2011, Southeast Louisiana State Hospital School had 92% of students eligible for free or reduced price lunch programs. Louisiana had 66% of eligible students for free or reduced price lunch programs. Eligibility for the National School Lunch Program is based on family income levels.
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WowWee is to launch a new robot this year called the RoboMe, a robot that allows you to give it some personality by plugging in your iPhone or iPod touch to double as the face.
The new toy, which is expected some time over the summer, will work perfectly well without the iDevice, but really comes to life when you add it.
Working with an accompanying app, kids will be able to change the face that appears on the screen and the voice to different accents.
Using voice and face recognition, users will then be able to give the robots commands rather than rely on the included remote control.
Realising the popularity of services like Skype and FaceTime, the app will also let kids talk to each other or - more likely the case - let busy dads who are travelling phone home to talk to their brats.
Where it differs from Skype, however, is that those phoning the RoboMe with the app will be able to control the robot as well.
We aren't sure how it will go down in the office when you suggest to the IT guy that this replaces the expensive telepresence offering you currently have.
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Norway has joined Australia in issuing misleading public statements about the health of the F-35 program. The following quote from Norway shows some serious deceptive behaviour.
“In brief, the new revision as we understand it, is that the test programs for the three variants of the F-35 are disconnected from each other. Further testing of the different variants is to be implemented independently, so they do not slow mutually each other.
In particular the testing of the F-35B (STOVL) has demonstrated problems, but this is a variant that we do not plan to acquire. Further development is extended by a few months (about 10 months for the version that we do plan to acquire).”
Norway, like Australia is trying to push the idea that the major problems announced by the U.S. government are mostly specific to the F-35B short take-off and landing variant wanted by the United States Marine Corps.
Both gloss over problems that are part of all variants of the F-35 program by trying to make the public believe that since it is the A model they are trying to procure everything will work out fine. A report from the Pentagon’s Director of Operational Test & Evaluation shows that things aren’t all that simple.
In it are mentioned not only problems with the STOVL B model but issues that will have an effect on all variants. Things such as engine power, aircraft handling, and a lot of software.
“The DOT&E also reports that the latest date for the completion of development testing on the F-35A and F-35C, in early 2016, will not be met unless Block 2 and 3 software is delivered on time and other “critical” problems, including issues with the JSF’s helmet-mounted display system, are resolved. But the mission systems flight test schedule “still contains significant uncertainty”.
Rather than the rapid software development schedule originally planned, the DOT&E report now says that “the F-35 mission systems software development and test is tending towards familiar historical patterns of extended development, discovery in flight test, and deferrals to later increments.
Flight testing so far has revealed problems with handling in the transonic and medium angle-of-attack regimes, and a problem with screech – destructive high-frequency combustion instability in the F135 afterburner – which is preventing the aircraft from achieving maximum power.
For all variants, earlier plans to achieve flight test goals by raising the sortie rate to 10-12 flights per month per aircraft “are not achievable”, the report says, until reliability and maintainability are improved.
Mission system software is the biggest problem. Currently, the only software for which a test program has been approved is Block 0.5 – but the Block 0.5 effort has failed, since the program office has deemed it unsuitable for training.”
Leading all of this spin is out-going U.S. Secretary of Defense Gates. He stated the following last week.
“In short, two of the JSF variants, the Air Force version and the Navy’s carrier based version, are proceeding satisfactorily.”
Spin report complete.
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bible Romans:5:1 -
Romans:5:1 Discussion Board:
Discuss this passage:
kjv@Romans:5:13-14 > > RandyP :
The Law spoken of here is clearly the Mosaic Law. Without/before the Law sin was not imputed and yet all people died showing proof of a Adamic curse. One does not have to sin in the same form as Adam (freely choosing to eat from the tree of knowledge of good/evil) because his descendants are cut off from the tree of life. This condition causes all the descendants to unavoidably sin, the option of choice in this instance is totally removed. Our options now are in how we will sin. Now that the Law is imputed we fully know that our condition is one of sin as well as our available options. Though we seek to do godly right we can not do so knowing only what is right in our own eyes. In this sense Jesus has become the light in our darkness.
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The early 19th-century Italian composer Giochino Rossini composed nearly 40 operas before he turned 40. Later in life, he turned to other forms. And near the end of his life, he wrote a solemn mass for the dedication of a private chapel. As two local ensembles prepare performances, WRTI’s Susan Lewis explores Rossini’s Petite Messe Solennelle.
Lewis: In some ways, the work summarizes Rossini’s entire art, says Matthew Glandorf, artistic director of Choral Arts Philadelphia.
Glandorf : You get these beautiful, lovely, soaring, natural melodies that you would know from his operas, but you also see somebody who has an absolute mastery of interesting harmonies.
Lewis: Glandorf says you can see that Rossini was studying the music of his contemporaries.
Glandorf: Or shall we even say possibly the next generation. You really find that he's saying, hey look, I can also compose a fugue like the best of them....
Lewis: Choral Arts will perform the work on Saturday, February 9th and is engaging soloists who specialize in period vocal performance, among them Julianne Baird.
Lewis: Another interpretation will be offered later this month by the Philadelphia Singers, which Glandorf welcomes.
Glandorf: I’m hoping that that might open up a dialogue to say there are infinite number of possibilities to approach the interpretation of music, and actually that its radical to approach music differently.
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Podcasts & RSS Feeds
Most Active Stories
Wed August 24, 2011
Detroit leaders promise to take on crime
Federal, state, and local officials say they’re banding together to fight rising gun violence in Detroit.
FBI Special Agent Andy Arena, Michigan Attorney General Bill Schuette, and Detroit Mayor Dave Bing are among those calling for a “holistic”
approach to curbing crime.
Arena says the FBI is pitching in by helping analyze Detroit’s crime data for trends and hotspots. But he says there are also deeper problems to address.
“We’ve gotta give kids, the young people in the city, hope. We have to show them that there’s a way beyond violence and drugs to solve their problems, to have a future. And I know it’s very difficult with the things that they see every day. But we’ve gotta give them hope.”
Arena says the FBI will triple the size of its community outreach in Detroit.
Detroit has recorded 230 homicides so far this year, a 21% increase over last year. The vast majority are shootings.
The assembled group had little to offer in the way of concrete strategies to combat crime. But Detroit Mayor Dave Bing says it starts with leaders and the community taking the problem seriously.
“This is not just rhetoric that we’re presenting to you today. I think the level of commitment, as you see the men and women standing up here…everyone is tired of what’s been happening in our city.”
Detroit Police have changed some policies to deploy more officers on longer shifts. And the Detroit U.S. Attorney’s office says it’s willing to prosecute the most serious gun crimes in federal court.
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Apr. 30, 2009 While caring for stroke survivors can be highly stressful for some families, many families feel little or no strain from caregiving, and even report that being a caregiver can be personally rewarding, according to research published in Stroke: Journal of the American Heart Association.
In a study of 75 stroke caregivers:
- 90 percent reported that caregiving enabled them to appreciate life more;
- 44 percent reported “no strain;” and
- 41 percent reported “some strain.” Furthermore, average depression scores were well below depressive symptom levels typically reported in similar studies recruited from clinical settings, researchers said.
The findings came from a population-based study of the stroke care experience that the authors said includes caregivers who may be coping well and who may not seek out professional assistance.
“Epidemiologically based studies of stroke caregiving provide a unique picture of caregiver strains and benefits compared with clinical studies, which tend to over-represent more impaired patients,” said William E. Haley, Ph.D., lead author of the study and professor at the School of Aging Studies of the University of South Florida, Tampa.
Researchers studied 75 people caring for stroke survivors enrolled in the Reasons for Geographic and Racial Differences in Stroke (REGARDS) study, an epidemiologic investigation of stroke incidence and mortality including a large, racially diverse national sample of adults over age 45. They gathered caregiver reports of the prevalence and stressfulness of patient impairments through an ancillary project, the Caring for Adults Recovering from the Effects of Stroke (CARES) study. Both REGARDS and CARES are based at the University of Alabama at Birmingham.
Among the caregivers in the study:
- The average age was 64; 79 percent were female and 21 percent male.
- Fifty-six percent were white and 44 percent African American.
- About half (53 percent) were spouses of the survivor, while 31 percent were the survivor’s child and 16 percent were another relation.
- They provided an average of 36.9 hours of care per week.
Among the patients, 85 percent had suffered ischemic strokes (caused by blocked arteries) and 15 percent had survived hemorrhagic strokes (caused by bleeding in the brain).
For the study, the caregivers completed a comprehensive telephone interview eight to 12 months after the strokes and researchers measured caregiver appraisals of the stressfulness of patient problems and perceived benefits of caregiving.
While 82 percent of caregivers reported their stroke patient having at least one problem, no individual problem was cited by 50 percent or more of caregivers. Caregivers rated patients’ problems with mood (depression, loneliness and anxiety), memory, and physical care (dressing and bowel control) as their most stressful issues. But the reported prevalence of these formidable problems “was lower than those reported previously in studies using clinical samples,” Haley said.
Care providers also reported an average of nine benefits from their efforts including increasing their appreciation of life, “feeling needed” and “developing a more positive attitude toward life.”
Most research on problems faced by stroke caregivers comes from patients selectively recruited through clinical settings, Haley said.
“These patient samples and their caregivers likely have greater impairment and distress than those not seeking care and include very few ethnic minority participants, even though African Americans have higher rates of stroke than whites.” In addition, Haley said that “the results show that, even in the face of challenging caregiving roles, many families are resilient and find personal benefit and meaning from providing assistance to a loved one.”
This is the first epidemiologically based study to identify the most common stroke-related problems reported by caregivers. The study’s limitations include its relatively small sample size and lack of representation from other minority groups.
“Support for caregivers should include interventions to aid their coping with highly stressful mood, physical care and cognitive problems of stroke patients, but should also attend to perceived benefits of caregiving,” Haley said.
Co-authors are Jessica Y. Allen, B.A.; Joan S. Grant, D.S.N.; Olivio J. Clay, Ph.D.; Martinique Perkins, M.A.; and David Roth, Ph.D.
The National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke funded the study.
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Yesterday I had three different conversations about ‘bath salts,’ a group of synthetic drugs that have been illegal in New York for about a year. After looking into the subject, the absurdity creeps in from every direction. The desperate act of buying unknown substances from a mini mart and then snorting, injecting, or even smoking them is mindboggling for most people. Then you have the government prohibition which has predictably exasperated the problem via the bootleg effect.
Before I get to my point, what are these substances coined ‘bath salts?’ With the rise of mandatory drug screening for employment or a probation sentence the market has created recreational substances that can’t be detected by standard urinalysis. For example, mephedrone, also known as 4-methylmethcathinone, has obviously been marketed to those who can’t afford real meth or can’t find real meth because the cops busted the lab. Genius huh? Not if you ask hospital ER staff. Apparently the fake stuff is more of a health hazard than the real deal.
After allowing these chemicals to be sold legally for years, the government has moved to prohibit and provide stiff legal penalty for those who don’t comply. The market has already reacted with new synthetics creating a law enforcement nightmare. Jails have to deal with a new brand of criminals and as one Allegany County Corrections Officer put it:
“ these people come in whacked out on these bath salts….this is a mental health issue, not a law enforcement issue.”
The emergence of synthetic recreational drugs highlights what Einstein would have coined ‘government insanity.’ They know prohibition doesn’t work but they continue to create new laws and tough sentences for the bootlegger. At the same time, the government is building prison cells and even privatizing the jail business in some states. Already full of meth dealers, pot growers, and painkiller addicts the warden now has to care for a new wave of criminals. Insanity or corruption?
It appears to be the later. Follow me here…. Bath Salts hit the market in 2007ish… sales skyrocket…. Government builds lots of jails nationwide (via mandate) and privatizes many…. Bath Salts made illegal…. The Bootleg Effect…..Jails start to fill up. With the chemists hard at work to create the next legal product one can see a business cycle emerge. For each new recreational chemical we get a law, more jail space, more treatment programs, and now more profit for the warden.
As a human I am discouraged, but as a taxpayer I am horrified. Just when you think the 40 year old “War on Drugs” couldn’t get any worse the government creates a new front.
The war can’t be won by the government, let alone a government so corrupted. The war can only be won by the family and the community. If someone you care about is snorting a powder they bought at the 7-Eleven look them in the eye, understand the problem runs much deeper, and offer support. They need help and love; they don’t need a brand new jail cell.
For a good read on private prisons in the US visit: http://sentencingproject.org/doc/publications/inc_Too_Good_to_be_True.pdf
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Kirk v. Arnold - Statement of Dr. Randi Ettner, Ph. D.
This statement was read by Dr. Randi Ettner, Ph. D., at the press conference announcing the filing of Kirk v. Arnold. Dr. Ettner is a clinical and forensic psychologist who specializes in the treatment of gender conditions and whose practice is located in Evanston, Illinois.
Make a Difference
Your support helps the ACLU defend LGBT rights and a broad range of civil liberties.
As a psychologist who specializes in the treatment of gender conditions, and the author of three books on this subject, I have seen approximately 2500 individuals who have what is known as gender dysphoria—a rare and misunderstood condition that often requires medical interventions. In the most severe cases, the only effective treatment is gender confirmation surgery.
Gender dysphoria, previously known as transsexualism, affects approximately 1 in 12,000 people born male. Often, these individuals’ earliest memories are of wanting to be a girl or believing they are a girl. As children, if they discuss this with a parent, or dress in girl’s clothes, they are typically reprimanded or shamed, and quickly learn that these feelings are “inappropriate.”
What follows is a life-long struggle of trying to live in the birth gender. This fails, as efforts to talk one out of this condition or otherwise “change” them are ineffective and unethical.
Gender confirmation surgery is successful because it makes the body and the inner self congruent. Finally, the transgender person feels whole; and the body and the brain are no longer in conflict. My clients who have this surgery, and decades of research from around the world, confirm that this is the final step in overcoming this lifelong obstacle and living authentically as one’s true self.
Illinois, like the vast majority of states, recognizes the importance of changing a birth certificate to reflect a permanent gender transition. Yet, the State does not recognize gender change in patients who choose to go out of the country for this important surgery.
There are many reasons why my patients have chosen to go abroad for surgery….these reasons range from financial to preferring a particular surgeon’s approach.
The result of the State of Illinois’ refusal to recognize non-US surgeries is that these individuals have documentation that is false and misleading. If one’s essential identity document—the birth certificate-- doesn’t reflect the truth about a human being, than that person is at risk. My clients live in fear of such risks—harassment, shame, the potential for violence, and the destabilization of mental health that results from this incongruency.
My clients want to be able to select the best surgeon for their individual medical requirements. The State should not dictate this choice. For the health and well-being of the plaintiffs in this case, my clients, and others who have this condition and will require surgery in the future, it is critical that we change this policy. The birth certificate is a fundamental identity document. It confirms and affirms an essential truth about an individual. The birth certificate must be changed when someone has surgery outside the United States to accurately reflect reality.
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Former Egyptian intelligence chief Omar Suleiman, one of ousted president Hosni Mubarak’s closest associates, died in the United States while undergoing medical tests, a Suleiman aide and a senior security official said. He was 76.
“He was fine. It came suddenly while he was having medical tests in Cleveland,” said the aide, Hussein Kamal, without giving a reason for Mr. Suleiman’s death. Preparations were under way to bring Mr. Suleiman’s body back home for burial, he said.
A senior Egyptian intelligence official, who did not want to be named, said he had spoken to Mr. Suleiman’s son-in-law who confirmed his death.
Mr. Suleiman stepped briefly into the limelight last year when he was made Mr. Mubarak’s vice-president a few days before the unpopular leader was ousted in a street revolt.
The gamble failed when Egyptians massed in the streets to demand Mr. Mubarak’s removal rejected the political concessions offered by Mr. Suleiman to appease the protests.
A veteran confidant of Mubarak, Mr. Suleiman had headed the Egyptian General Intelligence Services (EGIS) since 1993, taking on a prominent diplomatic role in Egypt’s relations with Israel, Palestinian factions and aid donor and ally the United States.
He was quietly touted as a possible successor to Mr. Mubarak although many Egyptians believed the autocratic president would serve for life or try to hand power to his son.
After more than a year away from the public gaze, Mr. Suleiman returned to the fray this year, making a brief bid for Egypt’s presidency until he was disqualified for failing to win enough signatures to take part.
He later left the country, travelling to Abu Dhabi with relatives, according to a person familiar with the matter.
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Brazos Bend State Park
Things to Do
Activities include, picnicking, hiking, biking, horseback riding and fishing. Six lakes are easily accessible to fishermen, with piers located at 40-Acre, Elm and Hale lakes. Visitors are cautioned to pay due respect to alligators, which are numerous in some areas of the park. The Nature Center houses exhibits pertaining to the three major ecosystems in the park.
The George Observatory is located in the park and is open Saturdays from 3 p.m. to 10 p.m. For information on stargazing programs/passes and other programs, call the observatory at (979) 553-3400 or at (281) 242-3055 (as a satellite of the Houston Museum of Natural Science), or visit the George Observatory website.
Shop for gifts at the headquarters gift shop, the Nature Center, and the George Observatory.
Creekfield Lake Nature Trail
This accessible nature trail and interpretive exhibit pilot project is the first of its kind for the department (1995) and was designed with the assistance of the greater Houston area disabled community in partnership with The George Foundation, Fort Bend County and the United States Fish and Wildlife Service. The trail is fully paved and takes visitors on a 0.5-mile loop tour of an outstanding wetland area. Exciting features along this trail include a series of interpretive panels with tactile bronzes of wetland wildlife, an accessible boardwalk and observation deck for wildlife viewing, and rest areas with shaded benches. A self-guided manual and scavenger hunt is available at the park headquarters and Nature Center or from the Brazos Bend State Park Volunteer Organization web site.
Hike and Bike/Foot Trails
Hike and bike trails are located around 40-Acre, Elm and Hale lakes and interconnect. Alligator viewing is best from the 40-Acre and Elm Lake Trail system. Foot trails take you off the beaten path into the hardwood forest. Always take plenty of water with you for you and your pets. As with all state parks, pets are allowed on leash only, and the leash can be no longer than six feet. Do not allow pets to drink from or enter the water. "Know your Alligator Etiquette" is found on park maps and posted throughout the park. An Outdoor Guidebook will assist you in learning about the park's different ecosystems and outdoor safety. The guidebook is available on the volunteer website or for sale only at the Nature Center Gift Shop.
19 primitive equestrian campsites are located at the trailhead of the 13-mile equestrian/multiple-use trail system. The campground is located under a grove of pecan trees, and each site has a picnic table. Some sites have a campfire ring. Electricity, water and shower facilities are not provided at the campsite. Water for horses and chemical toilets are available.
The park offers a variety of educational opportunities. Check the calendar for upcoming events.
The Brazos Bend State Park Volunteer Organization is one of the largest in Texas State Parks and has been incorporated since 1989. This hands-on group assists with park maintenance and interpretive activities. It operates the Nature Center and its own gift shop. Training is offered in February and September. For information about being a Brazos Bend Park Host, contact the park.
Nearby attractions include the San Jacinto Battleground, San Jacinto Monument and the BattleshipTEXAS; Galveston Island State Park; Brazoria County Access Point (San Luis Pass County Park); Sea Center Texas in Lake Jackson; the George Ranch; Houston's attractions; and West Columbia, which was founded in 1826 and served as the capital of the Texas Republic for a brief period in 1836. West Columbia is the site of Varner-Hogg Plantation State Historic Site and is approximately 25 miles south of Brazos Bend.
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Factory Orders Rise Again
WASHINGTON (AP) — Orders to U.S. factories rose 0.7 percent in April, the second increase in three months and further evidence that manufacturers may be recovering.
Still, the Commerce Department's report Wednesday was below analysts' expectations of a 0.9 percent increase. The department also sharply marked down the March figure to a 1.9 percent drop, compared with the 0.9 percent decline previously reported.
Shipments fell 0.2 percent, the ninth consecutive drop, though at a much slower pace than the 1.8 percent fall in March.
Manufacturers have been hit hard by the recession, the longest since World War II, which has cut back both domestic shipments and exports. The auto sector is also reeling as both General Motors Corp. and Chrysler LLC have filed for bankruptcy in the past month. Their restructuring plans call for sharply reducing U.S. production, which also puts thousands of their supplier companies at risk.
But other recent news has been better. Americans bought more cars in May than in any other month this year, according to data released Tuesday, as deep discounts by GM and Chrysler pushed sales above expectations.
The improvement was reflected in Wednesday's numbers, as orders for motor vehicle parts and assemblies rose 2.2 percent in April. A 5.8 percent jump in transportation equipment, which includes motor vehicles, drove the overall increase in factory orders.
GM's sales in May dropped 29 percent from the previous year, a smaller drop than earlier this year. Ford Motor Co.'s sales fell 24 percent from last May, but were up 20 percent from April, the company said Tuesday. Chrysler's sales fell 47 percent, about the same as before it filed for bankruptcy protection. Overall, industry sales fell 34 percent from a year ago.
Orders for big-ticket durable goods, such as industrial machinery and appliances, rose 1.7 percent, down slightly from the government's initial estimate last week of a 1.9 percent rise.
Orders for non-defense capital goods excluding aircraft, a measure that is seen as a proxy for business investment, fell 2.4 percent in April, a sign that businesses are still cutting back on spending amid the weak economy.
U.S. gross domestic product, the broadest measure of the economy's output, fell at a 5.7 percent annual rate in the first quarter of this year, the government said last week. Most economists expect the pace of decline to slow to roughly 2 to 3 percent in the April-June period.
In April, orders for machinery increased 0.6 percent, while electrical equipment and appliance orders rose 0.9 percent. Consumer goods, such as food, chemicals and paper products, dipped 0.1 percent.
Separately, the Institute for Supply Management said Monday that manufacturing activity in May contracted at the slowest pace in eight months. The trade group's index of manufacturing activity was 42.8, up from 40.1 in April. A reading below 50 still indicates activity contracted, but the figure surpassed economists' forecasts.
And an important measure of new orders placed with U.S. factories rose to 51.1 in May. It was the first time this barometer had grown since November 2007, the month before the recession began.
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Djiboutian Foreign Minister Mohamud Ali Yusuf recently said that Djiboutian troops would serve as part of the African Union peacekeeping force in Mogadishu, known as AMISOM. He noted that Djiboutian soldiers are "ready" and will soon be transported to Somalia with "assistance of France."
His comment was reiterated by Djibouti's ambassador to the United States, Mr. Roble Olhaye.
Speaking on VOA Somali Service, Ambassador Olhaye said the Djibouti government decided to dispatch peacekeepers to Somalia to assist that country's interim government defeat an insurgency raging since early 2007.
"The Djibouti Government made the decision [to send peacekeepers] after the U.N. rejected sending a peacekeeping force to Somalia. It is our duty to help the Somali government, as this is the only option," Djibouti's ambassador to the U.S. said during the interview.
He did not specify the number of Djiboutian soldiers being sent to Somalia, but independent sources put that number at around 500 soldiers.
AMISOM currently consists of 5,000 soldiers from Uganda and Burundi. The force is short of the 8,000 soldiers approved by the AU to help guard government institutions in Mogadishu and train Somali security forces.
Meanwhile, upwards of 800 Somali soldiers are currently receiving military training in Djibouti camps with the help of French military advisers.
Last month, Somali Planning and International Cooperation Minister, Mr. Abdirahman Abdishakur, announced that Nigeria and Djibouti were sending peacekeepers to boost the AMISOM force in Mogadishu.
Somali insurgents oppose the presence of AMISOM and accuse government leaders of being Western puppets.
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Court confirms DMCA ‘good faith’ web site shut down rights
The least worst place
A U.S. court has extended the power of the DMCA even further with a ruling this week that backs up copyright holders' ability to shut down a Web site on "good faith."
InternetMovies.com had asked the District Court for the District of Hawaii to require that copyright holders investigate infringing Web sites before shutting them down. This rational request was rejected by the court, as its granted the MPAA (Motion Picture Association of America) and any other DMCA zealot the right to put the clamp on Web sites at will.
"This decision rules that the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) does not require a copyright holder to conduct an investigation to establish actual infringement prior to sending notice to an Internet Service Provider (ISP) requiring them to shut-down an allegedly infringing web site, or stopping service all together to an alleged violator," InternetMovies.com said in a statement.
In the land of the DMCA, a "good faith belief" of infringement makes it possible to hijack a Web site without investigation.
This decision seems to have thrown a large chunk of the Internet into a virtual Guantanamo Bay. The U.S. military describes its Cuban compound as the least worst place, which is an apt take on where Internet users appear to be.
InternetMovies.com claims to have provided little else other than movie trailers to upcoming flicks. Some would characterize this as a service for the movie industry, but the MPAA saw things in a different light.
After issuing several cease and desist orders, the MPAA shut down InternetMovies.com in 2001. The movie site then fought back by filing a lawsuit against the MPAA last year, claiming it did not provide copyrighted content to users at all.
Despite the recent setback, InternetMovies.com plans to continue the legal battle with the MPAA by filing an appeal with U.S. Court of Appeals of the Ninth Circuit here in San Francisco.
The company hopes to cut off a path for various DMCA zealots trying to shut the Internet down.
"This has serious implications to university campuses as many students and faculty use the school as ISPs and any copyright holder can seek to lawfully shut down whole university networks or obtain individual identity without an investigation under the protection of the DMCA," InternetMovies.com said in the statement.
This recent decision builds on a disturbing trend where no Internet user is safe from copyright holders' prying eyes.
For example, four Ohio State University students had their computers seized in a raid earlier this month and have yet to be charged with a crime. They've been banned from using the Internet at school and still have not received their kit back.
It's dangerous out there on the Web these days. Please, dear readers, surf with caution. ®
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Chefs' Secrets for Healthier Cooking
4 top chefs share tips and recipes for lighter dishes that don't scrimp on taste and style.
By Colette Bouchez
Reviewed by Louise Chang, MD
You want to cook healthier. But where do you start, what do you buy, and how do you keep it from tasting like cardboard?
WebMD posed these questions to four top chefs, some of whom not only gave up high-calorie ways, but changed their lives in the process.
What follows are their tips -- and a few recipes - aimed at helping you cook lighter while still enjoying every mouthful.
Although he'd long been committed to a dinner table loaded with veggies, chef Michel Nischan admits he was a butterfat junkie, too.
"My mom was a farmer and I was raised on vegetables, but when it came to using butters and oils and processed fats in my cooking, well, the sky was the limit," says Nischan, author of several award-winning cookbooks including Homegrown Pure and Simple.
But when Nischan's young son, Chris, was diagnosed with juvenile diabetes, it changed everything.
"As I researched the kinds of foods my son needed to eat -- and why -- my eyes opened and I began to see my responsibility as a chef from a different perspective," says Nischan, who will share his insights in a healthy eating show titled Pure and Simple, starting this summer on the new LIME TV network.
Among the healthy bylaws that govern Nischan's kitchen: Buy seasonal, local fruits and vegetables.
"If you buy local, you not only get the most nutrients and the best prices, but you add a natural variety to your diet that is extremely healthy," he says.
Another tip: Use the right oil or fat at the right time.
Olive oil is healthy for your heart, but degrades when used to saute foods at high temperatures, he says. Instead, he suggests sauteing at high temperatures using flavorless grapeseed oil, then finishing your dish with a drizzle of olive oil before serving.
"All you'll taste is the olive oil," he says.
If it's the rich flavor of fried fish you crave, Nischan says, sear it in grapeseed oil till golden brown, then dip a pastry brush in room-temperature butter and coat the fish before serving.
"Because the butter will be the first thing you taste, the entire meal will taste butter-drenched, but with just a fraction of the calories than if it was butter cooked," he says.
Another of Nischan's tricks is to bypass nonstick pans in favor of cast iron.
"Heat the pan for about 3 minutes over a medium flame, then coat whatever you're going to fry in a thin layer of oil and drop it in the pan," he says.
The temperature exchange between the hot pan and the cool food protects the oil, says Nischan, and you end up using less oil while still searing flavor into the food.
From the time she was old enough to stand on a chair and touch a bowl, Devin Alexander knew she loved to cook. She also knew she loved to eat. And by the time she was teenager, she was packing on the pounds.
"I was the one who always heard 'You have such a pretty face - if only you weren't so fat,' ", says Alexander, now a slim and celebrated Los Angeles healthy eating chef and author of the new book Fast Food Fix.
It wasn't until she became an adult that healthy cooking entered her life. "I decided there had to be a way I could enjoy food and not keep gaining," she says.
After a stint in culinary school, she found it: A style of low-fat cooking that not only helped her shed 55 pounds and keep it off for 12 years, but, as executive chef of Cafe Renee Catering in Los Angeles, help others do the same.
The most important lesson she learned: That how you cook is as important as what you cook.
Get the latest health and medical information delivered direct to your inbox FREE!
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Having imported a model from Robot I was hoping to refine the design and print drawings for the contractor. I created an initial A0 to show the design by selecting all profiles and creating an assembly and generating layouts. For some reason the generated layouts have a different UCS to the model space world UCS. I knew the layout wasn't square to the UCS but I do not know where the massive rotation in the layouts cam e from.
Is there a setting for altering predefined views that are used for generating the drawings?
Piease make sure which element is the main part of such group.
I think this is the one which on front view is laying horizontally in the middle of the view.
It is suggested to change the main part which determinates the positioning in UCS.
If this post answer your question please click "Accept as Solution". It will help everyone to find answer more quickly!
another option, would be to recreate the group and align it properly then.
When you group a structure, it prompts for what to align it to, UCS and WCS are both options, as well as defining your OWN 3 point orientation. When structures have to be skewed to align with real world co-ord data, this is your best option, as all views of the group will be built square from that point forward.
Process and Power Specialist
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Slick Rick, born Ricky Walters in the United Kingdom in 1965, is the most successful British-American rapper in music history. After initially striking gold with 1985's historic single "La Di Da Di," a collaboration with fellow visionary Doug E. Fresh, Rick moved to New York City, where he signed with Russell Simmons and Def Jam Records. In 1988, he released his first solo album, The Great Adventures of Slick Rick. The disc hit No. 1 on Billboard's R&B/Hip Hop charts and was one of the first hip hop records to go Platinum.
While on bail in 1991, Rick hurried to record his sophomore effort, The Ruler's Back. But three weeks of recording sessions were followed by five years in jail, as Rick was charged with attempted murder. In 1994, work-release privileges allowed Rick to live at home, where he conceived a new album. However, after just six months, the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service informed Rick of its plans to deport him. All work-release privileges ceased, and authorities sent Rick back to prison. He served his time dutifully, though, and even released his third album, the aptly-named Behind Bars. His fourth Def Jam recording, The Art of Storytelling, also appeared in 1999.
These days, much of Slick Rick's story remains untold. Clearly, there are moments of deliberate ambiguity in the Slick Rick Experience. Still, plenty of facts uphold the mythos. The eye patch, for instance, is legit, courtesy of a glass shard that flew into Rick's eye when he was an infant. And the British accent is genuine - its casual refinement belies every dumb gangsta stereotype. Throw in some gleaming grills and some bejeweled outerwear, and voila - you have the genius of Slick Rick. He's no reticent wallflower - he's larger than life. Going forward, there is much to celebrate. On May 23, 2008, New York governor David Paterson granted Slick Rick a full pardon. In essence, the esteemed governor closed a dark chapter in the Book of Rick. Now hope springs eternal. Slick Rick, one of hip-hop's founding fathers, is poised to rule again. The master of modulation, meter, and tone is back. This time, he's a permanent resident.
Saturday Beatles Brunch
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Lord of the Rings meme » one/eight characters - Frodo Baggins
“How do you pick up the threads of an old life? How do you go on, when in your heart you begin to understand… there is no going back? There are some things that time cannot mend. Some hurts that go too deep, that have taken hold.”
lotr meme → six quotes [2/6]
it’s like in the great stories, mr. frodo. the ones that really mattered. full of darkness and danger, they were. and sometimes you didn’t want to know the end. because how could the end be happy? how could the world go back to the way it was when so much bad had happened? but in the end, it’s only a passing thing, this shadow. even darkness must pass. a new day will come. and when the sun shines it will shine out the clearer. those were the stories that stayed with you. that meant something, even if you were too small to understand why. but I think, mr. frodo, i do understand. i know now. folk in those stories had lots of chances of turning back, only they didn’t. they kept going. because they were holding on to something.
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On 3rd March 2010, an Indian Navy trainer aircraft crashed into a two-storied building in a congested locality during an air show, killing Commander S.K. Maurya and Lt Commander Rahul Nair . The incident happened when the HJT-16 Kiran MK2 trainer aircraft, built by Hindustan Aeronautics Ltd, crashed in Bowenpally locality near the old Begumpet Airport in the city.
The crash of the naval aircraft has been termed as ‘unfortunate’ by our honorable Civil Aviation Minister Praful Patel Wednesday and he promptly declared that the tragedy wouldn’t affect the event in any way.
‘These kinds of mishaps have happened during such events in the past the world over. It is very unfortunate but I don’t think this (aircraft crash) will any way hamper or affect the event. The show will go on’- this was the disgracefully casual and insensitive declaration by the minster on the death of two naval pilots at the prime of their life.
According to a civil aviation ministry official, there were five such crashes during air shows in the world last year. Similarly there were four such crashes during air shows in 2008 and seven in 2007. In their viewpoint, sacrifice of these naval acrobats is a tolerable episode to trumpet the synthetic glory of our Navy.
I wonder why the prestigious Indian naval air cadets should work like circus artists. May I know from the minister what is the objective in showcasing this stunt show before public other than trumpeting the vanity of our vanguards in defence?
As far as I know, air attack during war is not a colorful parade but a calculative blitzkrieg done under stealth. Practices required for the same are different and are performed in aircrafts designed for it. I wish such air shows were conducted using unmanned aircrafts so that human life is not at stake. I could have understood if such air shows were the events undertaken by sports agencies, like Formula One car race conducted by FIA or other similar adventure sports . There the participants are aware of the risk; they often choose the very best vehicles with superlative safety features and above all they voluntarily choose that profession. How many naval cadets have the option to voluntarily choose the aircraft they need for such acrobatics? What avionics do these flying coffins have? They may often get an economy model of indigenous make or a third-rate Russian trainer aircraft. I am sure at least a few officers are pushed into this aerial extravaganza by the stern command of their superiors to uphold the false pride of the Navy.
Our defence top brass should have the responsibility to the men and women under their command and to the nation as a whole. They cannot keep on shedding the blood of innocent men and women in their hands and such shows give a wrong picture to the nation and to the bureaucracy about our state of military preparedness when we are still dealing with 2nd World War vintage equipment. Our dear naval pilots do not have a death wish and are not adrenaline junkies like Michael Schumacher or late Ayrton Senna.
Above all, I am shocked at the decision of the Navy to continue the air show despite this traumatic tragedy. I am numbed at the willingness and mindset of our politicians, the colleagues of the killed and the elite class in Hyderabad who sat there drinking Pepsi to watch the rest of the air show while the beloveds of the killed wrenched in agony back in Delhi. Will the honor of the Navy collapse if we call off this year’s air shows as a mark of honor to the brave lads who died in the sky for a mere diversion than a mission?
I am reminded of a historical incident told by the famous journalist P Sainath in a speech. After the ruin of Rome in the great fire, the atmosphere was one of depression. The time was also one of rebellion. To deflect the attention from the incident, Emperor Nero hosted a lavish dinner party. The guest list was a virtual “who’s who” of Rome - The elite, the learned and the artists-and everyone was invited. However, there was a problem with illumination. The torches were running short of oil. Nero ordered for his captive prisoners to be tied to the torches so that they could be the fuel for the torches.
Sainath felt that though Nero’s action was barbaric, it was in keeping with his royal attitude of insensitivity. But, Nero’s guests, who devoured the feast - insensitive to the horrendous screams of prisoners being burnt at stake - were the greater culprits. Not one of them raised a voice of protest. They just gleefully gorged the dinner! Now, you may ask who the guests of Nero were.
Nero’s’ guests were educated men of arts. They were people who took pride in describing themselves as cultured persons. They were people who lived in comforts like some of us. They get entry into the social circles of the powerful elite of politicians and businessmen, they visit fun clubs, attend parties and while away time attending events like air shows. They are insensitive to the whimper of ordinary people like the pilots who died.
Indifference is said to be a greater crime than hatred. No matter what we do to enlarge our lives, it is of no consequence if we kill our conscience. To be better as a human being is to connect better with our humanism. To be better, we must be sensitive as well as responsive to what is happening around us.
If we were sensitive to the life of each and every personnel in our Navy, we wouldn’t let these kinds of gory spectacles unfold in the air and yet relish it.
Why don’t we ban such pompous naval air shows if they don’t serve any purpose other than entertainment - especially when we know we aren’t equipped sophisticatedly for such freak sports?
Will the minister Praful Patel and his coterie of defence brass listen to my meek voice?
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Forty-five states and the District of Columbia will each receive $1 million to help improve health premium oversight, the Department of Health and Human Services announced this week.
The money in this round of grants will boost authority on the state level to reject rate hikes that are deemed excessive.
Only 26 states and the District of Columbia have the authority to reject a proposed increase that is excessive, lacks justification or otherwise exceeds state standards. But many states that do have the authority lack resources to exercise it meaningfully, HHS reports, and this lack of authority and resources for states has contributed to unjustified premium increases in some states. On average, health insurance premiums have doubled over the past decade.
"The Affordable Care Act puts in place critical market reforms to improve quality and reduce the cost of health care for employers and individuals. Increased competition, lower insurance overhead, and better risk pooling in health insurance Exchanges in 2014 are expected to reduce premiums in the individual market by anywhere from 14 percent to 20 percent according to the Congressional Budget Office," said HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius.
"Between now and then, we will continue to work with states to ensure consumers are receiving value for their premium dollars and to avoid the kind of double digit premium increases seen recently. The state proposals approved today demonstrate the need and desire for new resources and tools to help them protect against unjustifiable premium increases."
Health care reform provides$250 million over five years to help states improve how they review proposed health insurance premium increases. States applied this summer for the first round of Health Insurance Premium Review Grants.
"States will use these grant dollars in the way that makes the most sense for their insurance consumers," said Jay Angoff, director of the Office of Consumer Information and Insurance Oversight. "As we continue to implement the new health insurance reform law, we will continue to work with states to ensure they have the tools they need to ensure the stability of the marketplace, keep costs low and provide consumers with increased transparency, choice and quality they need to make the best health care decisions for their businesses and families."
How states will use the money:
- Additional Legislative Authority: 15 states and the District of Columbia will pursue additional legislative authority to create a more robust program for reviewing or requiring advanced approval of proposed health insurance premium increases to ensure that they are reasonable;
- Expand the Scope of Health Insurance Premium Review: 21 states and the District of Columbia will expand the scope of their current health insurance review, for example by reviewing and requiring pre-approval of rate increases for additional health insurance products in their State.
- Improve the Health Insurance Premium Review Process: All 46 state grantees will require insurance companies to report more extensive information through a new, standardized process to better evaluate proposed premium increases and increase transparency across the marketplace;
- Make More Information Publicly Available: 42 states and the District of Columbia will increase the transparency of the health insurance premium review process and provide easy-to-understand, consumer friendly information to the public about changes to their premiums; and
- Develop and Upgrade Technology: All state grantees will develop and upgrade existing technology to streamline data sharing and put information in the hands of consumers more quickly.
A detailed state-by-state summary of proposed activities can be found here.
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Getting to Wedded Bliss Is a Labor of Love
Black Love: The Root talks to Divorce Court's Judge Lynn Toler about how to make marriage work.
(The Root) -- With all the fuss over what's keeping black women and black men from jumping the broom, black married couples have been lost in the fray. Yes, of course, they exist! In fact, the vast majority of black women and men do indeed get married.
Of course, many of us are putting our own spin on how we love and make it work. The "traditional" route -- love, marriage, then the baby carriage -- works for some, but for others, love comes in the form of a blended union, a lesbian wedding or a multipartner (not-so-legal) marriage.
In a three-part series on black love and commitment, The Root will celebrate Valentine's Day by taking a look at how black folks are loving each other, the problems the community faces and the solutions for making it work.
To kick off the series, The Root caught up with Divorce Court's Judge Lynn Toler. She took over the bench on television's longest-running court program in 2006, and since then, she's seen it all when it comes to what makes -- and, of course, breaks -- a marriage.
Here, Toler, also the author of My Mother's Rules: A Practical Guide to Becoming an Emotional Genius, breaks down when it actually makes sense to get divorced (rarely); two major issues that black folks overlook when it comes to picking a partner; and how to avoid unnecessary problems -- like Facebook -- in your marriage. "I'm a big fan of black love," says Toler, who has been married for nearly 23 years. "Black marriage is a great thing."
The Root: According to statistics, black couples marry less and divorce more than other segments of the population. What steps can we take to keep the marriages we do have intact?
Lynn Toler: Our people tend to meet each problem as it arises. Black folks that want to make it in an environment where marriage is not as common need to preplan with their partner by having conversations about how they are going to change in order to support the marriage. You have to say, "I am comfortable with this, and I am not comfortable with that." You have to decide how much hanging with the boys and girls is still comfortable. You have to decide if you're comfortable with who of other genders is coming in the house.
When you're in a community that isn't married, the rules about all of that -- texting and on Facebook, who you can talk to, how flirty you can be -- are different. You have to decide to change those habits to support your marriage.
TR: I'm glad you brought up Facebook. It, along with social media in general, is commonly blamed for divorce these days. How do social media play into a healthy marriage?
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How you can help
You can help us make a difference to people's lives, and make sure people with additional support needs get a fair deal. You don't need any previous experience or qualifications. We welcome everyone - including young people and people with learning disabilities - to get involved in Partners in Advocacy.
You can become an advocate, or an assistant in a self-advocacy group, where people tell their stories and support each other to make changes. If you would like to find out more about becoming an advocate, please contact the co-ordinator in your local office. Click on Contact us.
You can be a general volunteer, or join a local group. Click on Inclusion for ways to become involved.
Click here to view a map showing the type of advocacy available by area.
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April 3 (Bloomberg) -- More than 80 percent of Americans are dissatisfied with the direction of the country, the most since the New York Times/CBS News poll began asking the question in the early 1990s, the New York Times reported.
So four out of five Americans think we are heading in the wrong direction as a country?
At first glance, this doesn't seem such a shock. After all, both President and Congress are enjoying record-setting low approval ratings, the subprime mortgage fiasco is throwing thousands of families out of their homes, and we are heading straight into the teeth of a recession. Aren't we?
That is certainly what the New York Times and CBS would like you to think - after all, we are coming into an election year and the current president is a Republican. In keeping with their overwhelmingly liberal views, they want to convince America of what they truly believe - that, thanks to our Republican president, we are going to hell in a handbasket and the only possible salvation is the immediate intervention of a liberal Democrat.
But the amazing thing is that the vast majority of panic and handwringing we see on the news every night is patently false.
Unemployment is up, yes indeedy - it has "spiked" from 4.8% to 5.1%. Batten down the hatches and open the breadlines; a whole three tenths of a percentage point, smaller than the margin of error!
If you take a quick peek at a historical graph, it's immediately apparent that unemployment is at record lows. In the recession of 1980, the unemployment rate was twice what it is now.
And as recessions go, that isn't that bad. The Great Depression had unemployment of 25% - now that would be cause for serious concern. Our unemployment rate of 5.1% is actually considered to be full employment.
There cannot ever be an unemployment rate of 0 unless we are all enslaved, because people are quitting their jobs and finding new ones all the time. Sure, there are layoffs and fewer new jobs; definitely, there are specific states such as Michigan which are in deep trouble. But there are other parts of the country which are booming. As a nation, we are in no real problems regarding employment.
How about home ownership? Yes, people are having their homes foreclosed - because they foolishly borrowed more money than they had, at terms they could not afford.
Have we not all heard of the housing bubble, driving prices of real estate up to ridiculous levels? It's good for prices to drop. They have to drop.
Otherwise, how can we hope for young people starting out to be able to afford their first homes? Take a look at another historical graph of home ownership rates, and we immediately see that they are dropping from record highs. We have now dropped down to rates last seen in 2003, far above the rates seen during the Clinton boom. No grounds for panic here.
What about the war? If you already believe the war is lost, we aren't going to be able to convince you otherwise in this article. Suffice to say that, as wars go, Iraq is a tiddler.
We've lost 4,000 soldiers in combat so far over four years. While we mourn each and every one of them, consider that during the Civil War, at the Battle of Antietam on September 17th, 1862, approximately 3,650 American soldiers were killed on that one day.
Crime? Down to lows not seen in forty years. Taxes? Down too, generally speaking. Teen pregnancies? Drug abuse? Corrupt politicians, even? All these things have been far worse in the past, mostly within living memory.
Are we, then, in a recession, and a bit of a rough patch? Of course we are - how could we not be?
When every news program talks about how terrible things are, reminds us of how we're being clobbered by our foreign competitors, and shows hate and vitriol spewing from every level of the political system, it would be a strong-stomached person indeed who wouldn't feel at all jittery. In our modern post-industrial consumer economy, where national financial health relies on people being comfortable going out and spending money that they may not have just at the moment, naturally the constant drumbeat of the "nattering nabobs of negativity" is perfectly able to talk fluff and nonsense into a very real recession.
Oh, let's not forget the one other thing that's down - the trust Americans have in the media that's been talking up the doom and gloom. Could there possibly be a connection?
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On Thursday, April 19, at the conference "Financial Crisis in Latvia. Analysis. Lessons. Recommendations" organized by the Association of Economists 2010, Prime Minister Valdis Dombrovskis emphasized that in the coming years more rapid growth is expected in Latvia than in Southern Europe.
In his lecture, Prime Minister V.Dombrovskis analysed the progress of the financial crisis, the accomplishments in overcoming the crisis and compared Latvia’s experience with the results in Greece, Italy and Portugal. He stressed that a striking contrast can be observed between the national growth models of Latvia and countries in Southern Europe: from 2000 - 2007, Latvia experienced a tremendous boom during which the average development amounted to 8.8%, but the annual growth in Italy and Portugal was only 1.5%, while in Greece – 4.3%. The 18% decline in GDP that Latvia experienced in 2009 was strongly felt, while the Italian economy lost 5.5%, but Portugal and Greece – only 2.5%. In 2010, even a slight growth could be observed in Portugal and Italy, while a constant and severe recession started in Greece that has lasted for already five years and the total drop amounts to the volumes experienced in Latvia. The recession is back also in Italy and Portugal. Latvia has not returned to the previous, very rapid growth rate that was enhanced by excessive credit growth; however, in 2011, its growth reached 5.5%. In the coming years, Latvia will undoubtedly have significantly higher growth than Southern Europe, stressed the Prime Minister.
Even though the crisis differs by country, the ultimate goal is to regain competitiveness and investors’ confidence.
In many areas, in terms of structural reforms, Latvia has already achieved more than other countries at similar level of economic development – the first unit of measurement of structural reforms is the assessment in the World Bank’s Doing Business Index, where Latvia ranks the 21st among 183 countries. Latvia also ranks the 60th in the world according to GDP per capita adjusted to purchasing power parity and it is indicative of significant opportunities for future growth. Comparatively – Italy ranks the 87th, while Greece the 100th.
The Prime Minister mentioned that the export dynamics play an important role in overcoming the crisis –from Q2 2010– Q3 2011, the export has increased from 18- 32% each quarter, compared with the same quarter of the previous year. The export volumes of Portugal and Italy grew by 15%, while Greece lagged behind other countries. Gross product recovered in all countries under the influence of export growth and it was enhanced by equally rapid growth of production.
The Prime Minister emphasizes that the countries with fixed exchange rates implemented more extensive fiscal adjustment and structural reforms, which resulted in and the result was a more rapid increase in exports and gross product. These conclusions are useful for those euro area countries, which need structural improvements. “The statement that devaluation is needed to improve national competitiveness is not true,” says V.Dombrovskis.
In 2011, the investment ratio of Latvia already reached 23% of GDP and it will, most likely, continue to rise. "The investment ratio in Southern Europe is very low; Greece and Portugal have significantly reduced it, however, the investments of these countries should recover to experience appreciable growth again," says V.Dombrovskis.
In May, 2008, the inflation in Latvia reached its highest point – 17.9%, but afterwards, under conditions of global recession and affected by the ruling deflation, the inflation dropped as a result of credit reduction. Since Southern European countries experienced neither boom nor "overheating", they had low inflation ranging from 2-4% per year.
In 2011, most countries retained low inflation – 3-4%. The impact of deflation and deflation cycle was greatly exaggerated – in 2009; Latvia experienced a slight inflation of 1%. Prices remained at the previous level, because in such a small and open economy many prices are set internationally. The inflation amounting to 4.4% in 2011 that is still the highest potential obstacle to Latvia's plans to join the euro area in 2014 turned out to be much more dangerous. The government plans to reduce inflation to 2.4% this year.
At the conference, the experts and economists were introduced to the premium edition of the book "How Latvia Came through the Financial Crisis" in Latvian in electronic form published for Latvian students and pupils by the Association of Economists 2010. The authors of the book are V.Dombrovskis, Prime Minister and Anders Åslund, economist at the Peterson Institute for International Economics (Washington).
"In the financial crisis-torn Europe, Latvia serves as an example for other countries. We believe that such result has been achieved due to two reasons: first, Latvia simply had no other option under conditions of external liquidity crisis; second, the country adopted and implemented a number of sensible decisions," acknowledge the authors of the book and mention the phenomena which contributed to overcoming the crisis in Latvia.
1. A real sense of crisis can be very helpful. The deeper the crisis, the more people are aware of its existence and it is more likely to implement structural reforms.
2. The crisis may lead to a new way of thinking with new, clearly defined principles. The ideas which came to the fore during the crisis in Eastern Europe were mainly related to public spending cuts and improvement of public sector efficiency and were not new; however, they contradicted selfish interests of previously ruling oligarchies.
3. To overcome the crisis, there is a need for new government. During the crisis, Latvia changed government twice. The leaders who had leaded the country to crisis were not able to implement radical changes. Crisis management requires the opposite approach, i.e., new ideas and commitment.
4. Under conditions of solving the crisis, the knowledgeable policy makers come to the fore.
5. A comprehensive and operational reform program is usually being developed immediately after the formation of a new government. Under conditions of crisis, leaders should focus on key problems, not wasting time on other issues, which do not allow focusing on the essentials.
6. The Parliament's support is needed, but the targets can be achieved also if the government has only a slight majority in the Parliament.
7. Measurements are an extremely important prerequisite to prevent the policy's deviation from the main goals. All that is measured can be achieved. For instance, the World Bank – International Financial Corporation Index (2011), which reflects the quality of business environment, helped Latvia reduce the bureaucratic obstacles.
8. International support and adequate funding is an important factor. The most important institutions for the international loan program of Latvia were the International Monetary Fund and the European Union.
9. Justice also matters. Latvia developed its adjustment program so that greater burden was imposed on the shoulders of the wealthy, at the same time taking care of social security.
10. Also the social pact or cooperation with representatives of the employer's organization, trade unions and local governments is useful. The representatives of all these parties agreed on painful budget cuts, thereby helping maintain the social equilibrium.
11. The most important point is quick and decisive implementation of the anti-crisis program. The reform government rapidly began the reforms, clearly showing the society that the paradigm has changed, and thus gained its trust.
12. The opportunity assigned to the country to monitor the crisis management program is important. The Latvian authorities insisted that they maintain currency stability, although the IMF objected it. Thus, Latvia took the lead of the stabilization program and that was a clear advantage.
13. Ability to present and transparency. Crisis leads to rumours and suspicions; therefore the government program should be accessible for everyone, clear and comprehensible.
Information about the book "How Latvia Came through the Financial Crisis": http://www.mk.gov.lv/en/aktuali/zinas/2011/05/270511-mp-01/
CV of the Prime Minister of Latvia: http://www.mk.gov.lv/en/mp/?lang=1
For the photos of the conference please visit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/valstskanceleja/sets/72157629487878008/
Press Secretary to the Prime Minister
Phone: +371 67082865 / +371 26556965
Information prepared by:
Consultant of the Communication Department
Phone. +371 67082922
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Posted: December 3rd, 2012.
Dear Colleagues, as part of the BCTF Year of Action, the focus in November will be the issue of child poverty in BC. A province-wide action plan is shceduled for November 19 to 23. Each school will be provided with copies of the Reduction Plan petition calling on municipal and provincial governments to develop a comprehensive and accountable Poverty Reduction Plan. Share the petition with your PAC, post the petition in a prominent place in your school, and ask adults in your community to sign the petition.
Posted: November 13th, 2012.
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The Oregonian article was mostly about the tea shop, but there was more to it even though unintentional. A tea shop one block from the one in Lu San Chinese Garden? Louis Lee: "We're trying to find the formula for success in Chinatown." He might well want to rethink that a few more times.
A another tea shop in a true Chinatown like that in San Francisco might well make sense. This shop is in Old Town that is located in neighborhood misnamed as Old Town/Chinatown. A Chinatown Gate doesn't a Chinatown make. There is next to zero Chinese living in Old Town or even working in Old Town. Chinese businesses have long vacated Old Town.
It is interesting that the tea shop owners had a restaurant on the edge of Old Town that they sold and went to work for someone else to make money for their children's college education. Is the tea shop a retirement endeavor?
The absence of Chinese or Asians in Old Town casts doubt on the value of the tea shop as a community center for Cantonese speaking Chinese or others, and it casts doubt on Mr. Lee's grasp of development issues in Old Town and efforts to make Old Town livable and safe.
If Mr. Lee's efforts is directed to making Old Town a Chinese community then he hasn't thought it through. Neighborhood vision and development planning documents looks to an inclusive community. Moreover, that Chinese neighborhood concept has been tried before without success. E.g., Pacific Tower was originally to be for Chinese occupants but attracted no takers.
Nor is it clear that PDC should be using pubic dollars for this endeavor.
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There is no love in belief.
I haven no idea what you mean by that.
Okay, fair enough. Admittedly a bit cryptic. I mean that love is not of the mind while belief is. We can have ideas or beliefs about love, but those are of the brain/mind, while love is as mysterious as the universe. No idea or belief can pin it. It is not OF the mind. It is totally mysterious and as much as we intellectualize it or form beliefs about it .... none of that can come to any final answer. It's a matter of surrendering to a very profound mystery that can never really be known. So we may believe in love, but love is not of belief which is of the mind.
Science is just simply science. No need for belief.
I guess we're even then. Faith is faith, no need for science. That is, unless you're telling me not to believe at all, in which case I would respond by telling you not to be scientific.
Hmmm .... not sure about this one. Not sure what you are saying here.
Although ethics is another conversation.
Non-believers, to me, are just a little closer to the truth.
To you, perhaps.
Well, ya. Faith is essentially belief. One could believe in many things and most belief is based on some kind of prior knowledge. So, faith in what? Where is there need for faith when life is all around us?
If we can get over superstitions or the mind's capability of forming beliefs .... so much the better.
That would be your belief.
I don't see any honesty here. To call it my belief? I have none. I've already said so. It's an opinion for sure, but not a belief!
When there is no "daddy" over-seeing our actions and protecting us from ourselves .... we are left naked, (so to speak). From there/here ..... this is where responsibility really begins.
Responsbility for what exactly?
Responsibilty for all of it. The state of the world. We can't take a back seat
to any of it when we take full responsibility for all of it ... each and every one of us. It's so easy to depend on, rely on, some outside authority, and then leave it to that authority. We may say, for instance, that "society" is responsible for the ills that plague us all. But the fact is that WE ARE SOCIETY. There is a huge sense of responsibility when one has done away with belief. There's nobody ... no over-seer, no daddy, and ultimately no authority who decides what is good or bad. It's done by us. We're it. The way we treat our neighbors, our children, our wives and husbands. There is nobody to depend or defend us. We ARE it. Once seen, it it is both a major responsibility as well as a major relief.
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5 Ways to Stay Motivated When the Perks Disappear
2009 gave employers and employees a run for their money -- literally. Budgets were cut, layoffs made and furloughs instituted, and benefits and perks evaporated. Fortunately, 2010 got off to a better start and hopefully stays on the same course, but companies and employees alike are still feeling the pain.
At the beginning of the year, 37 percent of employers said the economy would force them to make cuts to perks and benefits sometime during 2010, according to a survey by CareerBuilder.com. Fifteen percent of those employers said they would be cutting bonuses, while 10 percent expect to trim medical coverage, and 9 percent will no longer match retirement contributions. Other areas where companies planned to cut spending included special office perks, such as coffee, tea and condiments (5 percent), incentive trips (5 percent) and academic reimbursement (4 percent).
Such perks and benefits being taken away make for a tough situation for employees. Not only are they working harder to keep their jobs, but workers have to do more for less. While some argue that it's hard to keep employees motivated in this situation, others say that they shouldn't focus on incentives, but rather think about the bigger picture.
"When perks and benefits are taken away, management often does this to allocate resources where they're needed, elsewhere. The money being saved by not buying bagels every Friday or purchasing Christmas gifts for employees may be going towards your salary," says Tom Gimbel, founder and CEO of LaSalle Network, a staffing and recruiting firm. "If you had to choose between taking a salary cut and not having free coffee versus being let go, most employees would likely take the former."
Urmil "Tracy" Marshall, coordinator for the Office of Diversity and International Affairs at Fort Valley State University in Fort Valley, Ga., agrees that it's important not to focus on what is being taken away. She says that due to budgetary constraints, furloughs were implemented at the school; but rather than get discouraged, she focused on the positive.
"I reminded myself how blessed I was to even have a job," Marshall says. "We need to remind ourselves of our priorities in life, placing a greater emphasis on what we have -- not what we don't."
Communication is key
Although it's understandable for employees to be upset, frustrated and discouraged when benefits or perks are taken away, Kevin Sheridan, founder and CEO of HR Solutions, which specializes in helping organizations to keep employees engaged, says that employees are less likely to be upset if management communicates with employees.
In fact, 82 percent of employees surveyed in HR Solutions' International Normative Database say that it's important that their organization allow them to choose from a variety of benefits to meet their individual needs. The survey consisted of more than 3.3 million responses from 2,400 organizations.
"If an organization's leadership team simply decided amongst themselves which benefits would be best to cut, employees will commonly become upset and their engagement will be negatively affected," Sheridan says. "Open communication is a key driver of engagement, and employees will immediately recognize the fact that they had no voice in the situation. If leadership had simply asked employees which benefits were important to them, this situation may be avoided."
Attitude is everything
Despite having to deal temporarily with a few displaced benefits or perks, there are benefits to sticking around with your employer until those things are reinstated.
"It's a good time to remember that the perks were never the reason that you liked the job. No one gets up in the morning saying, 'I'm really excited to go to the office because there's free coffee,'" says Paul Glen, author and management columnist. "If people feel that the [cuts] are being made in a good-faith effort to save jobs, they will be even more loyal than before, since they believe that the company is working on their behalf -- not just for executives."
Additionally, according to the HR Solutions survey, 37 percent of employees have thought of resigning in the last six months. Twenty-three percent said they thought about leaving because of pay; 18 percent because of a supervisor or manager; 15 percent because of career advancement; and 5 percent because of benefits. Thirty-nine percent considered it for other reasons.
"This statistic is especially important because many organizations have cut benefits over the last six months, and it illustrates that the majority of employees have not thought of resigning as a result of adjusted benefits," Sheridan says. "These employees recognize the advantages of sticking around with a company, benefits or not, for advantages such as career development and compensation. Also, as soon as the economy picks up, many benefits programs will be re-evaluated; employees sticking around with these organizations will not remain without benefits forever."
Workers should also remember that there could be consequences to abandoning a job just because you lost free coffee or a transportation reimbursement. If you're thinking about leaving your job for such reasons, make sure that your missing perks outweigh any possible career advancement or opportunities you would receive if you stayed.
"In this economy, it may be very hard to find another job, and there's no guarantee that one will have free coffee, either," Glen says. "Also, at the new job, even if it is good, the employee will have less tenure and is more likely to be cut in future layoffs."
If you've had benefits or perks taken away in recent months and need help staying motivated, remember these five tips from our experts:
1. Get over it
"The longer you talk about it to fellow employees, the longer you will have bad feelings, cause others to have bad feelings and be less productive yourself, which is not what will help the company be able to restore what has been taken away," says Aubrey Daniels, author of "Oops! 13 Management Practices That Waste Time and Money (and What to Do Instead)."
2. Find motivation
Sheridan encourages employees to find motivation through career planning with supervisors, interacting with co-workers or being proud of where they work. For example, an employee could volunteer to act as a sounding board for job candidates considering employment at the organization.
3. Create your own perks
Nancy Irwin, a motivational speaker and author, says employees can take turns bringing in coffee, bagels or potluck lunches to help fill the void of things that have been cut.
4. Understand what's still offered and take advantage
Darcy Eikenberg, president and chief creative officer of Coach Darcy LLC, recalls a client who didn't sign up for a course because she thought training costs had been eliminated. She realized that a co-worker was taking the course and getting it paid for from tuition reimbursement, an area that hadn't been cut. "Do a deep dive into your company's programs, policies and even discounts because there's probably something you can use now," she says.
5. Focus on the solution, not the problem
Concentrate on actions today that will affect your organization's success and growth tomorrow, says Jonathan Berger, director of human resources at Direct Agents, an interactive advertising company. "Take this time as an opportunity to offer new ideas to your managers and take an active and entrepreneurial role in helping your company overcome straining times. If you do a good job, you may be rewarded for your efforts when things improve," he says. "In addition, by taking on new challenges and opportunities, you can further develop your skills and make yourself a more valuable asset to any organization."
Rachel Zupek is a writer and blogger for CareerBuilder.com and its job blog, The Work Buzz. She researches and writes about job search strategy, career management, hiring trends and workplace issues. Follow her on Twitter: http://twitter.com/CBwriterRZ.
Permission must be obtained from CareerBuilder.com to reprint any of its articles. Please send a request to email@example.com.
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HPPR hosts & contributors
Thu June 7, 2012
New Massacre Reported In Syria; Clinton Condemns 'Unconscionable' Acts
With reports coming out of Syria about another massacre, Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton today used some of her sternest language yet about what she said is the Assad regime's "unconscionable" crackdown on the Syrian people. Reuters reports she said President Bashar Assad must cede all power and leave Syria.
According to The Wall Street Journal, "Syrian activists reported two [new] attacks by pro-government forces that they say killed hundreds of people." Other reports, including one from Reuters, cite activists as saying that " Syrian troops and militiamen" loyal to Assad killed at least 78 people, including women and children, in central Syria on Wednesday.
As Reuters adds, "their descriptions echoed accounts of a massacre of 108 civilians at Houla on May 25, which was investigated by U.N. monitors and which the chief U.N. peacekeeper said was probably committed by Syrian troops and loyalist 'shabbiha' militia."
The government has denied its forces were responsible for the massacres. Because of restrictions on reporting inside Syria, it's impossible to independently verify the activists' accounts. But videos and photos have emerged of the aftermath from the May 25 killings. And international investigators have issued reports about the thousands of deaths over the past year.
Clinton, who has previously said Russia's unwillingness to fully support international efforts to pressure the Assad regime is helping to prop up Assad, said today that the U.S. is willing to work with Russia and China on a U.N.-backed plan to end the violence.
But, the BBC adds, she "reiterated that Syrian President Bashar al-Assad must leave power."
The U.N. Security Council is set to debate what to do now later today.
Protests against the Assad regime began in March 2011. Since then, the U.N. estimates, more than 10,000 people have died — most of them civilians.
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Monday, April 20, 2009
"The flowering of meditation is goodness, and the generosity of the heart is the beginning of meditation"
"You can not meditate if you are ambitious -you may play with the idea of meditation.
You your mind is authority-ridden, bound by tradition, accepting, following, you will never know what is to meditate on this extraordinary beauty"
"You have to find out what meditation is. It is a most extraordinary thing to know what meditation is -not how to meditate, not the system, not the practice, but the content of meditation. To be in the meditative mood and to go into that meditation requires a very generous mind, a mind that has no border, a mind that is not caught in the process of time.
A mind that has not committed itself to anything, to any activity, to any thought, to any dogma, to any family, to a name -it is only such a mind that can be generous; and it is only such a mind that can being to understand the depth, the beauty and the extraordinary loveliness of meditation"
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The plummeting mercury in Alaska this time of year doesn't keep bikers inside. More and more of them are heading to recreational trails and to the office on "fat bikes." They look like mountain bikes on steroids, with tires wider than most people's arms.
Kevin Breitenbach runs the bike shop at Beaver Sports in Alaska's second-largest city. Aboard a fat bike, he makes his way down a trail that winds through a forest as wet, quarter-sized snowflakes drop from the sky. Visibility is low, and the snow hides the roughest spots on the trail.
Nearly two dozen dog sledding teams set out a week ago on a thousand mile race over some of the most remote territory in North America. The mushers have reached the halfway mark in the race. They're now in the Canadian Yukon. And Emily Schwing of member station KUAC has been following the race since its start in Fairbanks, Alaska.
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Meaning and significance goes way past how much money you make and the title you hold. Most lasting happiness is tied to the larger picture. In this episode, Bonni and I look at the importance of goal-setting and life planning, in order to help you get on track to maximize your full potential.
Archives For Goal-Setting
The New Year is a natural time to think about renewal and how to be more effective as a leader. However, some of the typical things many of us do with New Year’s resolutions often end in failure – 88% of the time, according to one study. I look at how three words can help you set the stage for your development actions this year.
I’m leading a new team right now that is serving a client organization we’ve been working with for many years. Now that the team is assembled, it’s time for us to set some new goals for ourselves on how we’ll measure success with our client. In the past, I’ve served the client myself, so I haven’t had to communicate much with anyone else except the client.
As I started doing goal setting, I did what I’ve pretty much always done before – got into a room by myself and planned it all out. Work done. Onto the next thing. Continue Reading…
The term “learning objectives” might not show up in our everyday conversations, but it’s an important tool for leaders to use in order to develop others. In this episode, we’ll explain what a learning objective is, how to create an effective one, and how to use it in order to create results.
USA: (949) 38-LEARN
Global: +1 (949) 385-3276
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Carey Justice is a Tampa Bay radio talk show host. Her talk show focuses on legal issues and the American justice system. Five years earlier Carissa Stover (her real name) was a state prosecutor, but her disillusionment with the legal system led to her resignation. She is still haunted by the murder conviction of John William Otis on circumstantial evidence which Carey felt was inadequate to sustain a conviction.
Now the governor has signed the execution order for John Otis, and Carey is forced to confront her feelings.
Seamus Rourke is a police detective who was once her live-in boyfriend. His reticence (his only child's death and his wife's subsequent suicide give him plenty of emotional baggage) led to their break-up, but neither of them ever got over the other. Seamus's father is an alcoholic who in big trouble with the IRS. He shows up at Seamus's doorstep when his shrimp boat is seized.
Her distress over Otis's execution order prompts Carey to contact Seamus. While they're both reluctant to renew their relationship, the old feelings are still simmering and various outside events are conspiring to bring them together. Crimes with haunting connections to the one Otis was convicted of are being committed by someone, and it clearly can't be Otis.
Among the many calls on the subject of the death penalty and on the coming execution Carey receives is one insisting that Otis is not guilty. She is convinced this is no mere crank call. She visits Otis in prison and comes away convinced that he is not guilty. The murder of the lead prosecutor at Otis's trial leads Seamus to believe that the case must be reexamined.
Will the two short remaining weeks be enough for Carey and Seamus to be able to save Otis from the only punishment that can't be undone?
It is an indication of the book's weaknesses that the most sympathetic character is the poor guy on death row. In order to provide grounds for the heroine's reasonable doubts about his guilt, the author has loaded Otis with sensitivity and a horrific personal history. He has emerged from an extremely abusive childhood with the soul of a poet. (The title refers to the final line in Robert Frost's "Stopping by the Woods on a Snowy Evening.") The chapters that focus on John William Otis are among the most moving in the book. His insights into the justice system and the potential for miscarriage of justice demonstrate more sensitivity and understanding than those of Carey, the lawyer and former prosecutor. His biggest regret about being executed is that he'll never see snow.
Carey and Seamus, on the other hand, have more than enough self-pity for several characters.
Seamus at least has experienced truly devastating losses. If you do the math, he got involved with Carey less than two years after the deaths of his wife and child, and it has been five years since they split. For five years he's been subjecting himself to the sound of her "hot honey" voice on radio and feeling sorry for himself. It is long past time for him to get over Carey and to get another girlfriend.
Carey seems to have been in the same state of limbo with lots less justification. She's been volunteering for Legal Aid but has pretty much abandoned her legal career. She's been carrying a torch for Seamus all this time. It takes the governor's signature on the order that will deliver Otis to the electric chair ("Old Sparky") to get her moving again. It's pretty hard to feel much sympathy for a character whose reaction to set-backs is to drop out and stagnate. At least Otis has been writing poetry for the past five years.
It seems pretty obvious that Carey and Seamus were too precipitous in ending their relationship, but five years is a long time to remain uninvolved. With neither one of them making an effort to become involved again, you might wonder just how powerful those old feelings really are. The publisher labels this a romantic suspense, but the romance is not the central theme.
The author has successfully presented the arguments opposing the death penalty. Many readers will find themselves reassessing their attitudes on this controversial subject. In fact, she's more successful developing the philosophical foundation of the story than developing the romance. Some readers may decide that the usual happy ending doesn't concern Carey's and Seamus's future but rather the abolition of capital punishment.
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UN / Iran
Independent Films, Web Series, Social Responsibility Movies
The UN Security Council has voted to impose a fourth round of sanctions against Iran demanding that it suspend enrichment activities and peacefully resolve concerns over the nature of is nuclear program. The vote garnered 12 votes in favor in the 15 member council, with Brazil and Turkey voting against the resolution and Lebanon abstaining.
Those voting in favor cited the nuclear proliferation risks of Iran’s failure to cooperate with the International Atomic Energy Agency’s demand for Iran’s full disclosure of its nuclear program. Iran has said the program is only for peaceful purposes. Many of the council members who voted in favor agreed that the resolution should not affect the economic stability of Iran and its general population.
Year of Production: 2010
Country: United States
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Adding two trains would boost commuter rail service to four round-trips a day in a growing area underserved by public transportation. In a letter led by Lipinski, regional leaders asked CN to work with Metra to accommodate the added service in order to improve employment opportunities for the region's residents and promote long-term economic development and job growth. The request follows on the heels of a letter to CN by newly appointed Metra Board Chairman Brad O'Halloran asking for more service on the line.
"The level of service on the Heritage Corridor Line lags far behind what is offered on other commuter routes on the Metra system. We understand that service is constrained by CN freight traffic and infrastructure limitations, but we believe that modest adjustments in freight schedules would make it is possible to add at least one additional train in the morning and one in the evening," Lipinski said. "We urge CN to act in the public interest and work with Metra to accommodate this improvement as soon as possible so people living in communities served by the Heritage Corridor Line can begin to have commuting options already afforded to others in northeastern Illinois.
"The population in Will County and southwest Cook County has grown substantially the last decade. The Heritage Corridor Line is not keeping pace. This needs to end."
Operated by Metra on tracks owned and managed by CN, the Heritage Corridor
Line runs between Joliet and Chicago's Union Station, stopping in Lockport, Lemont, Willow Springs and Summit. A new station in Romeoville is also in the works. Since 1999, the line has run only six trains a day, three trains in the morning rush hour and three trains in the evening rush hour. Metra's other 10 commuter routes offer between 22 and 170 trains a day, leaving a major mass transit gap in the southwest suburbs.
In the letter to CN, Lipinski and local officials note that between 2000 and
2010, the populations of Romeoville, Joliet and Lockport grew by 88 percent, 39 percent and 12 percent, respectively. Southwest Cook County has also grown during the past 10 years, with the populations of Lemont, Willow Springs and Summit increasing by 22 percent, 10 percent and 4 percent, respectively. At the same time, ridership on the Heritage Corridor Line also expanded. In 2002, 572,488 rides were taken on the line. In 2011, that number was 711,632, a 24 percent increase.
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Thanks to the hard work of our employees and the collaboration of our many partners, we have successfully implemented many different programs, ranging from the training of Crees for skilled jobs with Hydro-Quebec (over 50 Crees now occupy permanent positions), the rejuvenation of Cree community and family fisheries, the support of numerous cultural activities including summer gatherings and the enhancement of goose hunting facilities. This is not to mention the hundreds of kilometres of snowmobile and ATV trails already built throughout Eeyou Istchee.
On its 20th anniversary, Niskamoon Corporation salutes The Nation magazine and wishes it many more years of success and positive change.
Algonquins Protest with AFN Chief Atleo for Education Rights
The Algonquin community of Kitigan Zibi held a rally on Highway 105 in protest of the chronic underfunding of First Nations education, particularly for on-reserve schools. New National Grand Chief Shawn Atleo protested in solidarity with the community.
Residents took to the highway at 7:00 am to hand out pamphlets and raise awareness. According to their research, on-reserve schools receive on average 25% less funding than mainstream schools. This means there is virtually no funding available for First Nations language instruction and very little support for off-reserve Natives who are struggling academically.
Kitigan Zibi Chief Gilbert Whiteduck spoke to the Nation just prior to the rally.
Post-secondary funding for First Nations people was another issue that Whiteduck said was bringing his people out onto the streets. Post-secondary education funding is available through one of Indian and Northern Affairs programs. However, Whiteduck and his people are offended by the fact that INAC is currently reviewing the program without the input of any First Nations individuals.
“We have been working hard at this and we believe that education is the way out of poverty. We want our young people to be prepared for the modern world while retaining their culture and language as that is critical, but we are getting the sense that the government of Canada is not taking us very seriously,” said Whiteduck.
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Florida Governor Charlie Crist made waves last week when he fixed a mezuzah, a prominent biblical expression of Jewish faith, to the door of his office in Tallahassee.
Crist, a practicing Christian, received the mezuzah from Jewish state Rep. Adam Hasner, a fellow Republican and majority leader in the Florida legislature.
Israel's consul general in Miami, Ofer Baveli, later visited Crist to explain to him the purpose and importance of the mezuzah, which is fixed to one's doorpost in obedience to Deuteronomy 6:9, in which the Lord commands His people to write the words of His law upon the doorposts of their homes.
Not everyone was happy with Crist's decision to actually hang the mezuzah on his office doorpost.
The American Civil Liberties Union of Florida blasted the governor for turning the state building into what it called a "shrine for religious icons," and said Crist's actions would be portrayed as government endorsement of biblical Judeo-Christian faith.
Crist responded that he was merely exercising his freedom of religion.
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Friends and colleagues agreed when assessing Florentino Fernandez’s life and career. Few fighters matched Fernandez’s punching prowess and friendly, humble demeanor.
Fernandez, a 1960s middleweight contender and Miami resident for more than 50 years, died of a heart attack on Jan. 28. He was 76.
Fernandez’s death also shuts off another light that symbolized the glory days of the famed 5th Street Gym in Miami Beach.
Soon after arriving from his native Cuba in 1959, Fernandez became one of the signature fighters who trained at the revered gym, joining the likes of Muhammad Ali, Luis Rodriguez and Willie Pastrano.
“When Florentino arrived here, he quickly became a hero to many Cuban exiles,” said Ramiro Ortiz, boxing historian and former promoter. “The warmth and support he received from the Cuban community was huge. People liked him not only because of how he fought but how he treated everyone. He never turned down an autograph.”
Nicknamed The Ox, Fernandez scored 43 knockouts in in his 50 career victories. In 2003, Ring magazine rated the 100 greatest punchers of all time and Fernandez was listed at 56.
Retired fighter and promoter Tommy Torino never fought Fernandez in a sanctioned bout, but faced him in sparring sessions at the 5th Street Gym. Torino, who had a 27-fight career from the late 1960s through the mid-1970s, experienced first-hand the effects of Fernandez’s fists.
“How hard a puncher was he? How high is the sky,” Torino said. “When you spar, you usually don’t feel the full impact of a punch. But with Florentino even those punches had an impact. He had a left jab like George Foreman. He would paw with it and suddenly turn it into a weapon.”
Fernandez was victim of an era when boxing had deeper talent in all divisions. As a result, world title opportunities were scant for many fighters. In his only middleweight title bid, Fernandez lost a controversial split decision against Gene Fullmer in 1961.
“If you were rated in the top 10 back then that was comparable to being a world champion today,” Ortiz said, referring to the abundance of world titleholders in contemporary boxing. “It’s a shame Florentino never got another opportunity. Fullmer confirmed to me years later that Florentino was the hardest puncher he ever fought.”
Henry dies at 25
Omar Henry, an unbeaten junior-middleweight prospect from Chicago, died Friday of gallbladder cancer. Henry was 25.
Henry was scheduled to fight Juan Cabrera in the main event of a card Nov. 16 at Gulfstream Park, but withdrew days before the bout after he was rushed to a hospital because of abdominal pains. Tests revealed Henry suffered from gall stones. Subsequent tests confirmed that Henry was in the advanced stages of gallbladder cancer.
In his last bout, Henry won a unanimous decision against Tyrone Selders on June 23 at Hard Rock Live Arena. Henry’s final career record was 12-0-1 with nine knockouts.
Smith wins easily
Hollywood resident Antowne Smith won a unanimous decision over former world lightweight champion Jose Luis Castillo on Friday night in Chicago.
All three judges scored the junior-middleweight bout for Smith, 100-90, 99-91 and 98-92. Smith is now 23-4-1.
• Timothy Bradley will have his first bout since his controversial victory over Manny Pacquiao when he faces Russia’s Ruslan Provodnikov on March 16 at the Home Depot Center in Carson, Calif.
Bradley (29-0, 12 KOs) will make the first defense of his World Boxing Organization welterweight title against Provodnikov (22-1, 15 KOs). HBO will televise the bout.
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The teenage volunteers (from Grayson and Larue counties) were part of an Emergency Management scenario involving a mock pesticide spill that took place at Crop Productions.
Kentucky Emergency Management Administrative Assistant Virginia Posey explained how the disaster brought together a wide range of emergency responsders for a single purpose.
According to Posey, several people were involved in an accident while fleeing from the 500-pound paraquat chemical spill.
The accident took place in front of Midway Plaza. The mock drill involved 10 victims with multiple injuries.
Appropriate personnel, including Clarkson Fire Department and Emergency Medical Services, were notified of the incident.
Hot zones and warm zones were established at Crop Productions and in front of Midway Plaza. Both lanes of Highway 62 for one mile were shut down, and traffic was diverted elsewhere.
Clarkson Fire Department Chief Andy Cain said the situation on site at Crop Productions involved five victims that were injured from the chemical spill.
All of the individuals, which were contaminated, were removed from the scene of the incident and de-contaminated.
After being transported by EMS to Twin Lakes Regional Medical Center, the victims were decontaminated again before entering the hospital.
Emergency Management Director Randell Smith gave an overall wrap-up about Thursdays' mock drill.
"Overall everyone did a good job," he explained, "but there were a lot of deficiencies. There were not enough people with handheld radios, generators were too close to EOC, and we needed the auto accident in front of Crop Productions. The state would not let us shutdown the road though, so that is why we had to have it elsewhere. That made it bad on the fire department having to go back and forth to two different locations. Everyone seemed to work well together though."
The purpose of the mock drill is to prepare first responders in the event of an actual emergency. Drills are held periodically throughout the year at different locations in the county.
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The Bromo-Tengger-Semeru National Park is one of Indonesia’s major sights and destination of not a few busses. You can literally start your travel to the Bromo from every of the country’s bigger cities. Writing that, the main reason why the Tengger caldera isn’t an unhurried place already got spoken out. It is really hard to escape from the touristic bustle and at the latest the plastic bag flooded crater bowl of the Bromo will put you off… The most frequented spot is at the same time the highest peak around: Gunung Penanjakan. From there every morning about 200-300 tourists try to watch the magic colourful sunrise. However, doing so can also lead into quite ugly situations…
“I was first here!” – “No, I was first!” – “You stupid! No you stupid!” – Sounds quite like kindergarten, doesn’t it? Fortunately those phrases were free of four-letter words, not to mention what happened after… Sadly these people weren’t kids, but central Europeans in their best ages, reckoning themselves as being highly civilised. That morning in April the fence around Penanjakan’s observation platform became the venue of a Dutch-French skirmish. When I wanted to leave all that behind by climbing over the fence, their concentrated rants were quickly aiming on me.
Fortunately I had Scottish company; hence in terms of perceived citizenship for any other I came from the English speaking island. If I would have been discovered as German, then surely the joint liability for World War 2nd would have been reheated and thrown right into my face… Unfortunately it is obvious that suchlike childish trench-warfare-like scenes could recur, even if it’s only about a sunrise. Thankfully not all tourists are the same, and when leaving such people behind, stranded in their struggles, then you can even enjoy what the Tengger Caldera is world-renowned for: its sunrise.
Lined up like pearls on a string, the lights of the jeeps are making their way from the caldera’s rim, more precisely from the city of Cemoro Lawang, towards the Penanjakan peak. Several inhaled dense diesel fumes and about 50 minutes later you reach the antenna-topped summit, from where you can enjoy the spectacular picturesque view over East Java’s remarkable volcanic landscape. Shortly before sunrise, but depending on the clouds you can experience the most colourful moment. Hues reaching from deep violet to a reddish blue plus clouds and rugged craters being gently touched by the golden yellow sunlight; actually you can admire every colour that the rainbow has in its repertoire. However, about half an hour after sunrise the colourful enchantment quite quickly yields to the grey impressions that usually dominate volcanic sceneries.
Standing on the Penanjakan peak, the dot on the i is when Semeru is ejecting one of its ash eruptions. Unfortunately the volcano is quite quiet at the moment (as of April 2009) and within several days no ash clouds rose up in the sky. Being 3676 meters tall, Semeru is a giant among the strato volcanoes and at the same it is also Java’s highest mountain. However, the volcano isn’t harmless as in the past 200 years 50 big eruptions occurred. The Semeru isn’t rising up in a densely populated area like the Merapi, but as a subduction zone volcano it is as famous as notorious for its pyroclastic flows. By the way: the toilet at Penanjakan peak can be confidently ranked among the most unpleasant spots in the world. So stick to your hotel in case of number one and number two… :-)
Also the locals are keen on visiting the Tengger Caldera; last but not least due to a saga having a royal background. Tourism is strong and is responsible for some bloopers of course; blunders like an ATM in a Hindu temple in the middle of nowhere or hundreds of annoying ojeks. Ojek, that is the Indonesian word for motor cycle – at the latest when yet another ojek is driving past you roaring like hell, hurling up the ash dust right into your face and polluting the air you get pretty quickly pissed off. Having reached Bromo’s crater rim, there is another shake for your head waiting, as the upper rim is completely littered with old plastic bags. Sadly often the locals are the ones who don’t mind to take litter back to the hotel. However, the Tengger Caldera is a highlight that is experienced best when hiking all the way. From Cemoro Lawang the Bromo crater is about 2-3 kilometres away. You can take a shortcut, that is to climb down the steep caldera wall directly, but due to that way being bloodily peppered with thousands of nasty thorns, that more less has to be put down as little adventure.
Those travelling individually or alone rarely book the bus rides starting in Surabaya or even Yogyakarta. For them the small town of Probolingo is the gate to the huge caldera located in East Java. According to Lonely Planet Probolingo is literally the origin of all things called rip-off, fraud and thievery. Partially that might be true, but when stopping there two times, respectively staying for two days including accommodation, we (a Scottish, an English and a German) never experienced anything negative like that. Far from that, two different worlds were converging at a billiard saloon next to Probolingo’s liveliest crossroad, when we were challenging the locals to a duel of the billiard cues. To some extent the ladies were looking as if beside billiard you could also get other services, but the friendly atmosphere and the game brought us together. Fraud, rip-off & Co. were not an issue at all. In Jakarta that wouldn’t have worked this way.
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French President Jacques Chirac said yesterday in a speech at l'île Longue, the home of the French submarine nuclear force, know as Force Océanique Stratégique or FOST, that if attacked by state-sponsored terrorists, he would consider using nuclear weapons in retaliation. His statement was mild, and did not suggest that France would definitely use nuclear weapons, but his speech was meant to accomplish 4 things in my view:
1. To warn Iran.
2. To let U.S. to know that it is not the only nuclear power calling the shots (no pun intended).
3. To justify the continued existence of a €300 million/year expense (10 % of France’s military budget ) on nuclear arms. France is facing budget deficits that put it outside the EU’s 3% limit. He actually wants to increase spending on the nuclear arsenal in order to modernize it.
4. He wants the French to know that he can talk just as tough as Bush about the threat of terrorism.
His comments came on the heels of the review of French nuclear forces, which is conducted every 5 years.
Don’t blow this off as the French bloviating. France maintains the fourth largest nuclear force in the world, after the United States, China, and Russia. It is said to have approximately 300-350 nuclear missiles and it has long maintained the Force Frappe or Strike Force that consisted of land, sea, and sky nuclear capabilities. This Force, conceived in 1958 under DeGualle, was meant as a deterrent to then Russian aggression. This is now referred to as “force nationale de dissuasion”, loosely translated, “National Force of Deterrence”. Chirac made it clear that there are new dangers that still make such a deterrent relevant. This is not the first time Chirac has stepped out on nuclear weapons. In 1995, he angered many in the international community by conducting nuclear tests in Mururoa despite the NPT. The reasoning then was that the nuclear arsenal was aging, and France needed to make sure it still worked. Whatever.
You can read the original text of Chirac’s speech and you will see that he is using some of the same rhetoric used by the Bush Administration.
Here is a sample:
Pour autant, les dirigeants d'Etats qui auraient recours à des moyens terroristes contre nous, tout comme ceux qui envisageraient d'utiliser, d'une manière ou d'une autre, des armes de destruction massive, doivent comprendre qu'ils s'exposeraient à une réponse ferme et adaptée de notre part. Cette réponse peut être conventionnelle. Elle peut aussi être d'une autre nature.
Translation: The leaders of states who would use terrorist means against us, as well as those who would consider using in one way or another weapons of mass destruction, must understand that they would lay themselves open to a firm and adapted response on our part. This response could be a conventional one. It could also be of a different kind.
Chirac did go on to say that France would continue to support international non-proliferation efforts and would continue to reduce its nuclear arsenal “in compliance with the spirit of the NPT and the principle of strict necessity.”
France no longer maintains land based missiles, having closed those military bases in 1996. But it does maintain air and sea forces. The FOST is composed of a fleet of nuclear ballistic submarines. Initially 6 were built. Three have been decommissioned. There is currently a new one being built and is expected to be operational by 2010. The French Air Force has 60 Mirage planes (according to Wikipedia) that can carry medium range attack missiles. A long-range version is in development as is expected to be operational by 2010.
What does this mean when world leaders are willing to stand up and basically say, hey, we have 'em and we'll use them? Are we headed for a new genre of cold war?
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Governments urged to ratify ILO Convention 189 on domestic work
Published on Fri, 2011-07-15 08:27
Source: Social Watch
International advocates of social and economic justice attending the 5th Social Watch Global Assembly in Manila urged governments to ratify the implementation of Convention 189 on Decent Work for Domestic Workers following its adoption by the United Nations International Labor Organization (ILO) in June.
The delegates voiced their support for the ratification during the workshop on migration issues held on Wednesday.
The passage of Convention 189 has been celebrated by workers around the world as they expect the landmark measure to change the lives of at least 100 million workers globally. It provides that domestic workers who care for families and households must have the same basic labor rights as those available to other workers: reasonable hours of work, weekly rest of at least 24 consecutive hours, a limit on in-kind payment, clear information on terms and conditions of employment; and respect for fundamental principles and rights at work including among others freedom of association and the right to collective bargaining.
Under international law, the next step for ILO-member States will be to submit the new labor standards to the national authorities for enactment or other action, including ratification. Ratification would mean accepting the Convention.
The measure was passed overwhelmingly by ILO members with 396 voting in favor, 16 against, and 63 abstaining. A recommendation, which outlines how to implement the convention, was also approved 434 to 8, with 42 abstentions.
According to migration workshop organizer Wahyu Susilo of Indonesia, the ratification of Convention 189 will be included in the report they will submit to the Social Watch Global Assembly’s Drafting Committee.
“We will recommend a campaign in the national and regional levels to ratify its implementation,” said Susilo, head of advocacy and network division of the International NGO Forum on Indonesian Development (INFID).
The report of the migration workshop group will also evolve on other issues, among them the situation of migrant workers in the Gulf Area, and those in Somalia, Cambodia and Afghanistan after the civil war; and discussions on the complexity of migrant workers relative to economic and gender issues according to Susilo.
Agnes Matienzo of Migrant Forum in Asia (MFA) said there should be a global initiative to introduce Convention 189 to domestic workers, especially domestic helpers, so they will become aware about its existence.
“The best strategy is for governments to ratify the convention. The Philippines has a draft bill on this already,” said Matienzo.
William Gois, MFA regional coordinator, said it took ILO about six years to approve the measure which means that within the organization, there is also resistance to look into domestic work. “ILO managed to bring in the discussions on the need for standard-setting and to look at the informal sector.”
Meanwhile, Abdul Kadir Khalif Sh. Yusuf, of the Somali Organisation for Community Development Activities (SOCON), proposed the identification of civic organizations working on migration which Social Watch can coordinate for action on migrant workers’ issues.
“We can identify Social Watch members who will do advocacy work of presenting to workers their rights. We should think of the migrant workers and their families too,” he said.
At an earlier press briefing, Social Watch global coordinator Roberto Bissio said migration of workers should be connected to the UN Convention on the Rights of Migrant Workers. He also said the forceful displacement of people is a practice that should be evaluated, and that the right to migrate and establish one’s self where an individual wants should be respected.
Emily Joy Sikawze, Co-Chairperson of Social Watch Coordinating Committee, said governments allow human trafficking because they do not take their responsibility seriously.
She said women trafficking happens for various reasons among them sexual exploitation and selling of infants of women-victims.
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TULSA, Okla., Nov. 28 (UPI) -- An Oklahoma energy company said there wasn't enough interest to move ahead with a planned 1,300-mile oil pipeline from the Bakken oil pay.
In April, Oklahoma natural gas company Oneok Partners announced plans to get into crude oil delivery business by unveiling plans for a pipeline from the Bakken formation in the northern Plains states to the Cushing, Okla., market hub.
The project would've carried as much as 200,000 barrels of crude oil per day.
Oneok President Terry Spencer said the project was shelved, however, because of lack of interest.
"Despite the robust outlook for crude-oil supply growth in the Williston Basin in the Bakken Shale, we did not receive sufficient long-term commitments under the terms we needed to construct the Bakken Crude Express Pipeline," he said in a statement.
He maintained, however, that his company was in good financial shape with more than $4 billion worth of projects under way in the Bakken formation.
Spencer's announcement follows a declaration from Canadian energy company Enbridge that rail deliveries from the Bakken play may be "the fastest way" to get around regional bottlenecks in crude oil transportation.
Enbridge said it was committed to a $68 million rail system near Philadelphia that can handle up to 80,000 barrels of oil per day from the Bakken play.
The Association of American Railroad said, for last week, U.S. petroleum deliveries by rail were up 54.2 percent compared with the same time last year.
|Additional Energy Resources Stories|
TEL AVIV, Israel, May 17 (UPI) --Nobel Energy of Houston, which discovered Israel's big gas fields in the eastern Mediterranean, is pressing the government to decide soon on an energy export policy as the prospect of an undersea pipeline to Turkey gains credibility.
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Hate needs no instruction, but waits only to be provoked.”
Katherine Anne Porter
“Love is patient and kind. Love is not jealous or boastful or proud or rude. It does not demand its own way.It is not irritable, and it keeps no record of being wronged.It does not rejoice about injustice but rejoices whenever the truth wins out. Love never gives up, never loses faith, is always hopeful, and endures through every circumstance.”
These are such beautiful words. So powerful. So timeless. They give a profound definition of love that can be “road tested” in any relationship – but especially in marriage. I remember in my teens when I contemplated marriage. I just knew I was going to be a great husband. (I had the same misplaced confidence about my parenting skills before I had children.) Then reality hit.
Skipping ahead some (so as not to unnecessarily depress or disillusion the reader, or to cause myself to want to stick my head in the oven), I find myself now married for the second time, and sometimes the strangest thing happens. Sometime my wife says something about me (a criticism) that I remember hearing from my first wife. Now, you know when that happens, you have to at least try to pay attention. There’s a pretty good chance that, in addition to the spouses, God is speaking to you.
And here can we turn back to Katherine Anne Porter for more illumination. She described marriage as “… the great revealer, the great white searchlight turned on the darkest places of human nature.” I’m telling you, she should have been a theologian. More valuable insight confronts us here, for here we learn that “human nature” has its “darkest places.” (You may have noticed this theme in the Bible as well.) And marriage, she says, acts like a searchlight, seeking out those previously hidden places, and acting as “the great revealer!” Relationships of all kinds will do this of course, but not like in marriage where there is more intimacy, an abundance of time spent together – and no escape! Remember this proverb, “You can fool all of the people some of the time, and some of the people all of the time, but you can’t fool mom.”? Well, it’s the same with your spouse. All the crud and cruelty, the shallowness and selfishness, the defensiveness, the laziness, and all the behavior driven by fear or lust or greed or pride – will all be “revealed.”
Porter provides a great service by letting us know we’re not alone. It doesn’t matter. She’s speaking to everyone. It’s not just you. It’s not just your spouse. In the words of C. S. Lewis, we’re all either “sons of Adam” or “daughters of Eve.” This is what we bring to our marriages – a distinct resemblance to Adam and Eve. Do you remember how they turned on each other? How in the end, the lovers sold each other out, like Julia and Winston in Orwell’s 1984? When our first parents turned from God, the logic and order of their lives was destroyed. (There was “a disturbance in the force.”) Now they would think of themselves first, refuse to take responsibility for their actions and shift the blame to the other – just to mention a few endearing new behaviors. These behaviors would come to them quite naturally, like Porter’s hate, “which waits only to be provoked.” In contrast, something beautiful and so very necessary as love, would be counterintuitive and almost impossible to practice consistently. It must be “learned, and learned again and again.”
Looking at it another way, we could say that the things that are required in marriage are anything but mysterious: Put the other person first. Control your temper. Let the truth prevail. Humble yourself. Be courteous – and so on. Just do these things – just show love in these actual behaviors, and you’ll be fine. It’s clear that anyone can have a good marriage. It’s only necessary to practice these simple behaviors which everyone understands. (It’s not like figuring out the “sound of one hand clapping”, or whether or not a tree that falls in a lonely forest makes a sound.)
But looking at it yet another way, we could say that the things that are required in marriage while simple, are also simply nearly impossible – or at least let’s say “exceedingly difficult.” (Many people seem to find it so at least, if we can gather anything from high divorce rate, as just one measure, or the Six Word Memoir book on Love and Heartbreak. which is full of painful insight.) What’s simple to understand proves not-so-simple to do. We find we disappoint ourselves, our spouse, others we know – and God. What I believe we find is that, without his help, we can hardly do it. Without his help, we have little chance of success. (I’d like to say “no chance”, but I’m trying to be academically credible. Really though, I mean “no chance.”
What then to do? I think I know. Again, it’s simple and it’s not. I’ll give you a hint for now. It’s not more information, more motivation, or just trying harder. It’s not those things – as helpful as they sometimes are. It’s more than that – or maybe less.
I’m going to separate it from this blog entry though, because this is one is long enough, and out of sympathy for my readers, both of whom must be pretty worn out by what I’ve said already. Pray for me then, as I attempt to compose part two – and what is much more challenging and not at all as much fun – living it out.
In the next installment of this discussion we will really see the centrality of downward mobility in marriage as an approach which can lead to fullness of life and love.
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Cinema is action, action, action, but it must always be in the same direction - Raoul Walsh.
That maxim from the veteran director could be applied to many of the movies he made, and Saskatchewan (1954) genuinely lives up to it from beginning to end. In a lot of respects this is a routine film with no special message to sell. However, as with most of Walsh’s work, it remains enjoyable for it’s total lack of pretension and the pacy shooting style.
The plot concerns O’Rourke (Alan Ladd), a Mountie with close connections to the Cree due to his being adopted by them as an orphan. This affinity for the natives is made clear right from the start when O’Rourke and his Cree half-brother, Cajou (Jay Silverheels) are seen hunting together. Their sport is interrupted though when they stumble upon the site of an ambush by Sioux fleeing north after routing Custer’s 7th Cavalry at the Little Big Horn. There is only one survivor, an American woman called Grace (Shelley Winters), who escaped death by hiding herself at the onset of the attack. She proves reluctant to return to the fort at Saskatchewan with her rescuers, the reason being she’s wanted across the border in Montana for murder. With the threat of the Sioux forging an alliance with the Cree and fomenting trouble in Canada growing all the time, the Mounties are ordered to proceed south and link up their colleagues in an effort to drive the newcomers back to the US. That trek is beset with difficulties in the shape of constant Sioux harrying, a volatile and intolerant marshal bent on returning Grace to Montana, and a fresh off the boat commander with a firm grasp of regulations but woeful ignorance of the local conditions. As the possibility of the total annihilation of the command looms ever larger, O’Rourke has little choice but to stage a mutiny and try to get as many people as possible back to safety. All the while the Sioux and Cree are inching their way towards a pact that would surely guarantee war with the Canadians. There’s plenty of bad history in here, not least the fact that those Sioux who did run north had no intention of starting an uprising in Canada, but the sheer pace of the movie and the relentless action make it easy to ignore this and simply wallow in some of the stunning images on view.
Raoul Walsh had a real talent for making watchable and entertaining films from thin, and sometimes pretty trite, material. He was always at his best when filming on location and staging actions set pieces, and Saskatchewan offered ample opportunity for indulging in both. The Canadian scenery provided a breathtaking backdrop and the director’s sure touch meant that events rattle along, peppered with well staged battle scenes. I always find it odd that Alan Ladd’s greatest and most iconic role also signalled his decline. His post-Shane roles were a mixed bag ranging from mundane to reasonably interesting, with Saskatchewan falling somewhere in the middle. The part of O’Rourke doesn’t call for him to dig especially deep or stretch himself, despite the fact that the opening set-up suggests that there will be some inner conflict to deal with. The pull of conflicting loyalties is explicit enough in the script, but there’s never any real sense of the turmoil this must necessarily evoke in O’Rourke. Ladd’s performance is by no means bad, it’s just not particularly involving. The only female of note in the movie is Shelley Winters as the fugitive O’Rourke grows increasingly attached to. I’ve never been a fan of Winters - even when she got to play fairly independent characters such as Grace there was still that slightly whiny and self-pitying quality about her that turns me right off. As the marshal determined to extradite Winters back to the US, Hugh O’Brian makes a satisfying villain. He’s clearly burdened by some dark secret, and is suitably mean when shooting Indians in the back and slugging Winters. For me, the most enjoyable role in the movie was the one handed to J Carrol Naish. His buckskin-clad Frenchman has a good line in quick fire wit and it’s hard not to smile at his self-confessed ambition to start his own tribe, already producing six children in the first six years of marriage to a Cree squaw. Naish was one of those unsung character actors who turned up in countless movies and rarely disappointed.
There are DVD releases of Saskatchewan in Germany, France (although this is almost sure to have burnt-in subs) and Australia. I have the German edition from Koch Media and the transfer is a very pleasing one. The film is presented 1.33:1 and is generally clean with colours that really pop. There are no forced subs on the English track and extras consist of the trailer, a gallery and a booklet (in German of course). I’d describe the film as entertaining without being anything special. Both acting and direction are competent and professional and it’s a lovely movie to look at. This is a lower tier western that sets out primarily to offer pacy and colourful diversion - taken as such it delivers successfully.
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Hovering Tail-In & Side-In
This page shares some of my progress as I learn to fly a 3D Helicopter.
Left-in ... Tail-in ... Right-in
For the last few sessions I've been practicing the training routine from the Past Hover section of RADD's School of Rotary Flight. Basically, it involves the following:
- Hover Tail-in for 10 seconds
- Hover Left-in for 10 seconds
- Hover Tail-in for 10 seconds
- Hover Right-in for 10 seconds
As boring as this sounds, it has been very helpful to gain confidence in the different orientations, rather than focusing in only one. This is especially helpful for my Right-In hover, which tends to be a little weaker than my right-in hover. The other advantage I see out of practicing this way is that it has helped me to work on side-in hover at positions where the helicopter is conceptually "behind" me. In other words, if I am working on a left side-in hover, I find it easier if it is positioned to the left of me slightly. However, if I were to fly the heli right side-in in this same position (to the left of me), the frame of reference becomes closer to a nose-in orientation than a tail-in orientation. At first I found this a lot more difficult, but I am beginning to gain confidence irrespective of some positioning changes now.
Now that I have been practicing full pack hovering (heli is airborne for the entire 8-10 minutes), I am more aware of the occasional glitch that I encounter. Within the confines of my parking garage, I get the occasional sudden drop in main rotor power. I doubt that this is due to a lack of contact in the brushes in my stock brushed motor or a failing motor (as the occurence is quite rare and very brief). Instead, I expect that it is likely due to a momentary interference that cuts the signal to the main rotor. The net effect is that I have twice encountered a sudden drop of ~ 1' in altitude, with the motor picking it immediately back up afterwards.
I have also experimented with flying near my work, where there is probably a significant increase in the amount of RF interference. While practicing hover, I have witnessed an occasional burst of full right yaw, causes an immediate rotation of about 60 degrees. At first I thought this may be due to a failing tail motor (the N30 apparently gets burnt out fairly easily), but I realized afterwards that right yaw can only be due to an increase in motor output, not decrease. Therefore, I believe these sudden glitches (I have only encountered 2 in 10 minutes) are again due to RF interference.
My Blade CP Pro's transmitter is an old-style (analog) model that uses the 72MHz spectrum and thus can is more prone to interference. The Blade CX2 comes with a 2.4GHz spread-spectrum transmitter that is likely much more immune to much of this interference.
I have noticed that while I'm practicing my hovers, I often experience a slow movement up or down that may carry the heli as much as about 3-4', without me touching the throttle. I'm assuming that this is just the inconsistent lift generated in ground effect, but I'm not certain.
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Some hints on useing Nopales (prickly pear paddles) in the kitchen
This is a great green veg.
You dont even have to plant it,
just throw a paddle on the ground and it grows on less than 200mm annual rainfall!
Nopales -Opuntia spp.
they have to be handled with a bit of care
and prepare carefully.
If you do eat some glochids (prickly hairs) they're just a bit irritating.
Chose small, new growing 'paddles' that are about 5-8mm thick and about 15-20 cm long
cut off the bumps where the glochids are with a knife.
wash them if you dont trust that you've got all the prickles off.
The one on the left is not yet preped and the ones on the right are ready to cut and cook.
Here are two ways to cook them.
Cut the nopales into cubes.
Fry onion and garlic for about a minute in a bit of oil,
in this example I fried a dried Guajillo chile breifly (careful not to burn it) and removed before cooking onion.
Then add cubed nopales to pan.
Grind cooled chile and add to pan with salt to taste.
cook for about 10-12 min in own juices til mucilage comes out and it's ready
some people cook in a few changes of water to get rid of the slippery texture,
but i find it loses a bit of flavour, besides it's not as slippery as Okra anyway.
Now here's how to do it on a hotplate or BBQ plate.
Cut nopales so they're joined at the base.
Like a hand with lots of fingers.
Dip into beer (traditionally Tepache) and quickly throw onto hotplate
Cook 4-5min then turn and cook the other side til done.
they can then be cut through as strips and used in tacos or chopped and used in salads or as a side dish.
These were eaten with various combos of the following ingredients:-
shredded beef, fresh, warm maize tortillas,
Sour cream, cheese, avocado, Epazote and purslane lvs and salsa verde.
Taste and texture?
well, ...not too dissimmilar to partially cooked green capsicum, crisp but slippery.
Flavour ... hmmm again, green capsicum comes closest , I think.
it has a nice sort of acidic tang that balances well with the onions , garlic, chile and salt.
It feels good to eat.
...well, I keep cooking and eating it .
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|Home > Opinion > Article|
Colin Powell can unfold road maps and issue timetables to his heart's content, but progress toward peace with security will be made only when the Abbas Government wins that civil war - or at least, in Ariel Sharon's first concession, demonstrates "a 100 per cent effort" to win it.
That ability of Palestinians to take control of the land they live on is at the heart of the matter. An authority that will not exercise authority is no authority and fails the first qualification for statehood. When Arafat refused to use his police power - giving terrorists the licence to kill - Israel's defence forces had to fill the vacuum and moved in. As soon as Abbas and his security minister, Muhammad Dahlan, become the undisputed law in the West Bank and Gaza, Israel can safely withdraw.
We should resist the temptation to lionise Abbas just because he is not Arafat. He was a chief negotiator in Camp David three years ago when the Palestinians turned down a better deal than they will ever again be offered, and said later that "Camp David was a trap and we managed to get out of it". He may be, as George Bush calls him, "a man I can work with", but he has yet to show the daring of a Sadat.
If Abu Mazen can dismantle the coalition of terror, Israel can make peace with his Palestinian Authority. Sharon can help by relaxing some checkpoints, releasing tax revenues and closing the half-dozen illegal settlements.
France can help by reassuming its moral burden in Lebanon. The Assad dynasty in Damascus treats that formerly independent nation - with its capital, Beirut, once called "the Paris of the East" - as part of Greater Syria.
About 40,000 Syrian troops have occupied that country since 1976. Six years later, when Israeli troops moved in to oust the PLO, UN Resolution 520 called for "the withdrawal of all non-Lebanese forces from Lebanon". A generation later, the Israelis pulled out but the Syrians stayed. They're still occupying Lebanon, at the "invitation" of a puppet regime, to protect the terrorist Hezbollah operations in the south.
If Jacques Chirac really wanted to help Abbas win his war to make peace, France would move in the Security Council to end Syria's occupation permitting Iranian-financed Hezbollah to keep terrorist hopes alive. Powell, on his visit to Damascus, can help Abbas by demanding that Syria close down the Islamic Jihad and other terror headquarters in Damascus.
But in the end, it's up to the Palestinian Arabs. Will they choose the rigid jihadish coalition, and another generation of isolation and misery? Or will they accept a better life in a state next to a peaceful Israel?
The New York Times
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|text | handheld (how to)||
Copyright © 2003. The Sydney Morning Herald.
|advertise | contact us|
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The Port of Philadelphia may be crippled through no fault of International Longshoremen’s Association, Local 1291, if the ILA and United States Maritime Alliance, Ltd., do not settle their differences by Dec. 30.
If the Port of Philadelphia shuts down (the last East and Gulf Coast port strike was 1977), it would negatively impact every importer and exporter that utilizes the container port, from manufacturers and truck drivers to farmers and retailers, affect hundreds if not thousands of US jobs, and cost the US economy millions upon millions of dollars a day. A similar 2002 West Coast port disruption was estimated to cost the US economy around $1 billion a day, and that strike lasted 10 days.
“It doesn’t look promising … with both sides pulling out of the talks yesterday,” said Stephen E. Schatz, Sr., spokesperson for the National Retail Federation.
The National Retail Federation issued the following statement from its VP for Supply Chain and Customs Policy Jonathan Gold on the breakdown of contract negotiations between the International Longshoremen’s Association and the United States Maritime Alliance, Ltd.:
“It is extremely disheartening to learn that the two sides failed to reach an agreement during today’s negotiations. NRF urges both sides to remain at the table until a deal is reached.
“It is imperative that both sides verbally announce their intentions to return to the negotiations. A coastwide port shutdown would have a significant impact across all businesses and industries that rely on the ports, particularly retail.
“The last thing the economy needs right now is another strike, which would impact all international trade and commerce at the nation’s East and Gulf Coast container ports. This is truly a ‘container cliff’ in the making.
“The retail industry, once again, calls on President Barack Obama to engage directly in the negotiations. The President should utilize all available tools, including Taft-Hartley, to eliminate even the threat of a strike or lockout. The time for leadership is now.”
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