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I am a philosophy student and an ex-Christian. I lost my faith during my undergraduate education upon realizing that I had accepted my faith without reflection. Like many others my age, I abandoned my worldview and embarked upon a search for answers. The search quickly took on an intellectual character that eventually led me to the joys of philosophy (which, I am happy to say, I have chosen as my career path). And having had a taste of good philosophy and good apologetics, my doubts about Christianity have been intellectually satisfied.
i) This is such a predictable, stereotypical experience. Needless to say, it’s possible to read good philosophy and good apologetics before you go to college. Prepare yourself for the journey. Too many college-bound Christians are like hikers who go hiking without making any preparations. They don’t listen to the weather report before they leave. They don’t pack food and water, or extra clothing. They don’t bring a map and compass. Or a knife. Or a first-aid kit.
It’s also the duty of pastors and parents to prepare their young people. When something is so predictable, when it happens so often, we should learn from the experience of others. No reason to be caught off guard.
ii) Mind you, a crisis of faith isn’t necessarily due to lack of intellectual preparation. It may be part of the natural transition from childhood to adulthood. When we’re kids we can vicariously rely on the faith of our elders. But when we grow up we need to know some things for ourselves. It can’t be a second-hand faith.
iii) While it’s possible to underemphasize the intellectual aspect of faith, it’s also possible to overemphasize the intellectual aspect of faith. There are Christian teenagers who have a very meaningful relationship with God. As such, they may not suffer a crisis of faith if they go to college since their professors are a far less meaningful part of their lives than God. If God is already real to them, then the stock objections which they confront in college are less real to them than the reality of God’s overarching importance in their lives. So it’s equally important to feed one’s devotional life.
Yet despite my admission that God exists and that Christ was resurrected, I have absolutely no idea what it means to have a relationship with God; the concept is completely mysterious to me.
i) Well, in one important sense, everyone has a relationship with God whether they know it or not. So, in one respect, it’s a question of becoming mindful of a preexisting relationship.
Take two half-brothers. Say I didn’t know my half-brother even existed until we were both teenagers. Still, we already have something in common.
Or supposed I’m adopted. I never met my natural parents. Yet we’re related. And not just in terms of shared DNA. I also share some of their personality traits. There’s a psychological bond between us. I’m a part of them and they are part of me. Likewise, their story intersects with my story.
Or take an amnesiac. At the moment he doesn’t remember his family or friends. Yet he already has a relationship with them. Indeed, a very deep relationship. He simply needs to remember.
So, in one respect, it’s not a question of cultivating a new relationship, but cultivating an awareness of a preexisting relationship. A relationship we’ve been taking for granted.
Maybe I never knew, until now, that I was adopted. Now I’m conscious of a relationship which I had all along.
ii) Of course, to be related to God as my Creator is not to be related to God as my Redeemer. So there’s the question of how one enters into a saving relationship with God.
What does it mean to trust God?
i) Perhaps we need to take a step back. What does it mean to trust anything or anyone? What does it mean to trust a friend or parent? What does it mean to trust the laws of nature?
Suppose I drive 5 miles to work. I trust the distance to remain constant. If I drive 5 miles to work, and I return home by the same route, the mileage will be the same. I also assume that I’ll return home in the same year if left. If I return in the afternoon, it will be the same day of the same year as when I left that orning. We take for granted the basic stability of time and space.
But what if the world were like a dream? Like Alice in Wonderland? Like a science fiction story in which places appear and disappear at random. In which we keep moving back and forth in time?
ii) To trust God is, in the first instance, to appreciate our utter dependence on God for anything and everything.
iii) At the same time, there’s a circularity to the question. Only a true believer has reason to trust God. For whether or not we trust God turns on whether or not we think God means to do us good or ill. The devil can’t trust God because the devil is God’s sworn enemy. All he can expect from God is punishment.
And for what?
That’s the wrong question to ask. The correct question is not “for what should we trust God?” but “for what should we not trust God?”
Why talk to God?
i) Once again, we need to take a step back. Why talk to anyone? Sometimes we want something from them, but that’s not the only reason. Why do most folks not like to eat alone? Why do most folks not like to see a movie alone? Why is solitary confinement a form of punishment?
A shared pleasure is part of what makes a pleasure pleasant. The joy goes out of life if you have no one to share it with.
ii) In addition, God is the one person we can safely confide in about absolutely anything. In even the most trusting relationships, most of us keep a few secrets. Out of shame. Or fear of rejection. Or fear of betrayal.
So we keep certain things to ourselves. God is the only person with whom we can completely let our guard down.
What would one say?
i) For starters, you can thank God for all the good things that happen to you. You can thank God for all the bad things that didn’t happen to you. You can thank God for all the bad things that serve a greater good.
It’s a cliché to say we should count are blessings, but as a matter of fact, we ought to make a habit of counting our blessings. Counting our daily blessings on a daily basis. Of how God got us to this point.
Not only should we thank God for what he has done, but we should also thank God that when we go to bed at night we have a reason to get up in the morning. And that’s because God is waiting for us on the other side of sleep. We have that to look forward to. God is in our tomorrows as well as our yesterdays. By contrast, the godless lead hopeless lives.
ii) We should also speak to God because answered prayers shape the future. Prayer is a paradox. We pray because we are helpless. We pray because there are many important things which we are personally powerless to affect or effect. In one respect, prayer is a confession of impotence.
Yet because we’re asking God to do something, prayer taps into omnipotence. There is nothing more potentially powerful in the whole universe than the prayer of the powerless. For the might of prayer is the might of the Almighty God.
Not that God always does what we ask. Prayer is not a power trip. Prayer is not a genie in a bottle. But prayer can be an awesome force for good.
What would one hear?
i) You can’t expect to hear anything in return. But that’s not a reason to refrain from prayer.
Do you only say “thank-you” if you expect to hear a response? No. You should say “thank-you” whenever you have a reason to be thankful. Gratitude is reason enough.
Likewise, do you only ask for something if you expect to get what you ask for? No. In general, we ask people for things, not because we assume that we always get whatever we ask for, but because we won’t get it unless we ask for it.
ii) Suppose your mother or father suffered a stroke which deprives them of speech. Do you stop speaking to them? No. You sit by their bedside and talk to them and read to them. Even if they no longer speak to you, you continue to speak to them.
What about talking to a small child who’s too young to respond? What about talking to your pet dog? What about talking to a friend or family member who’s in a coma?
iii) Suppose a father has an estranged son. His son has ceased to be on speaking terms with his dad. Yet his dad writes the son a letter every week. His son never responds. His dad doesn’t know if his son is even reading the letters. Maybe it’s a waste of time. Maybe his son tosses every letter into the trashcan, unopened.
But the father continues to write a letter every week in the off chance that his son is reading each letter. And, unbeknownst to him, his letters are having an effect.
Perhaps the father dies. All his son has to remember him by is his letters. The letters he saved. But the son continues to read the letters of his late father. That’s his only remaining contact. And he’s a different person because of the letters.
Or suppose you have a falling out with your best friend. After a year has passed, you write him a letter. You don’t know that he will read your letter. You don’t know that you letter will effect a reconciliation. But you miss him, and so you do what you can–in the hope of making things right.
A large part of the Christian life consists in waiting. In learning how to wait. In cultivating patience.
And there are benefits to waiting. Instant gratification can cheapen the value of a thing. If something is worth having, then something is worth waiting for. Waiting intensifies longing, and longing intensifies fulfillment. If it’s worthwhile, then it’s worth the wait. And waiting makes it even more worthwhile.
iv) What what does it mean to "hear" God? To hear a voice?
What about answered prayer? That isn't something you can "hear," yet that's a way in which God "responds" to us. We can "hear" God in what he does as well as what he says.
What is expected of me and what should I expect of God?
The Bible teaches us what God requires of us, and what we can expect from him.
Is there a unique experience to such conversations or should one pray despite the feeling that no one is listening?
You should pray regardless.
However, the questioner can’t hear because he doesn’t know what to listen for. When animal trackers go into the forest, they can “hear” things a city slicker cannot. At one level, both the tracker and city slicker hear the same sounds. But what is meaningless to the city slicker is meaningful to tracker. The tracker knows the code. Knows what the different sounds stand for.
It’s also like reading a novel. As a rule, a novelist stands apart from his novel. Yet, by reading the novel, you get to know a lot about the novelist. In one sense, the novelist is absent from the novel. He’s not one of the characters. He’s not addressing you directly.
Yet, in another sense, the novelist is a more pervasive presence in the novel than any of the characters. The novelist speaks to the reader through the novel itself. He speaks through the voice of other characters. He speaks through the plot. He speaks through the landscape or the cityscape. The entire novel is a personal expression of the novelist.
It would be silly to say you can’t hear the novelist when every word of the novel was written by the novelist. It would be silly to say you can’t see the novelist when you’re seeing the action through the eyes of the novelist.
If we can’t see God in the world, that’s because we’re already seeing the world through God’s eyes. For the world we see is the world God “saw” in his mind’s eye when he planned the world. In that respect, God is allowing us to read his mind, for the world is a revelation of God’s will for the world.
In addition, God reveals to us how he is acting in the world through the leaves of Bible history. Yes, their lives aren’t our lives, yet their lives represent our lives. That’s a sample of God at work. A example of God lifting the veil of his own providence.
What's worse, however, is the feeling that I am motivated not by love but by expectation.
That’s a false dichotomy.
That is, I grew up in the Church and had it impressed upon me that a relationship just comes with the territory of belief.
That’s part of the problem.
I now believe, so I am expected to begin a relationship; I don't otherwise feel led to cultivate a relationship to God.
To some extent, Christian piety is an acquired taste. It’s like a friendship. In general, a friendship isn’t something instantaneous. Rather, the more time you spend with the right person, the more that deepens your affection. While feelings sometimes lead us to foster an experience, fostering an experience can also lead us to feel certain things. It can go either way.
The things the bible says about the matter seem mysterious or rely too heavily on a human relationship analogy (e.g. surely the Father-son analogy only goes so far given God's hiddenness and permission of suffering).
The father/son analogy wasn’t intended to explain God’s “hiddenness” or the problem of evil. That’s why the Bible uses a wide range of metaphors to illustrate God. It’s the combination of metaphors that fill out the picture.
And as for Christ's death, I must admit that I have difficulty feeling grateful for His sacrifice since many parts of the justification story are in tension with my intuitions on justice (e.g. substitutionary atonement).
Well, that’s circular. If you’re grateful for what your rescuer did, then you’re not inclined to be critical of what he did.
Say a lifeguard can only save one of two drowning swimmers. You’re happy to be alive, but you feel survivor’s guilt. Why did he have to die so that you could live? At one level it doesn’t seem fair.
Still, it would scarcely be appropriate to tell the lifeguard, “I find it hard to thank you for saving my life when the other swimmer drowned.”
Regardless of the other swimmer’s fate, you should be grateful to the lifeguard for saving your life. And he may have taken a personal risk in doing so. The rip currents endangered him as well.
Or perhaps the lifeguard was in a position to save both swimmers, yet unbeknownst to you, he had good reason to let the other swimmer drown. Maybe the other swimmer was a pedophile. Good riddance! But the lifeguard doesn’t owe you an explanation. |
Another Evangelical Church Attender That Couldn't Explain the Gospel
As we walked to the Walker Avenue circle, we met a young man who went to an Assemblies of God Church in Greensboro but couldn't really tell me how to be reconciled to God. I explained the gospel to him and encouraged him to read 1st John and examine himself to see whether he is truly in the faith. He seemed somewhat disinterested at the beginning of the conversation per his body language, but when I began to speak of the true gospel and contrasted that with the false gospel prevalent in many seeker churches, that gained his attention. Why are so many young evangelical church attenders clueless about the gospel? Many of the young evangelical church attenders that I have spoken with are clueless about the gospel because they are the product of the churches that they come from. If your "church's" ministry philosophy is a seeker-sensitive, Saddleback, shopping mall model, then most people attending those buildings will not have a clue what the gospel is because preaching and teaching the gospel in an expository fashion doesn't mix well with keeping the funds up so as to pay for such a infrastructure. Thus, the gospel is ditched and is replaced by Moralistic Therapeutic Deism.
Open Air Preaching
People started to gather to listen to the preaching only 5-10 minutes after I started. I had several people yelling things at me from a distance but lacking the courage of their convictions to engage me personally. Three hecklers gathered after 30 minutes of preaching with the first arguing for existentialism, the second arguing that talking about "God" is non-meaningful, and the third asking various questions.
1. Existentialistic relativism
The first heckler was a young lady that wanted to argue for existentialism because I was preaching that if there is no God then there is no inherent meaning in anything and that reality amounts to nihilism. She objected by noting that Sartre was an existentialist and that he said we could create any meaning we wanted to and then impute that meaning to our reality. I responded with something like, "But what happens when the meaning I create and impute to my reality contradicts your created and imputed meaning?" I then explained to her the self-refuting nature of existentialism and used that to preach the gospel of the God who gives the proper interpretation to all of reality and that if you want to know what truth is, know the mind of God as it is revealed to us in the Bible.
2. Meaningless god-talk
The next heckler was a young man that I have interacted with before. Today, he asked me a few questions about the meaning of the word "God" and I gave him the classic catechism definition: "God is a spirit, infinite, eternal, and unchangeable in His being, wisdom, holiness, justice, goodness, and truth". He then asked, "What is spirit?" and I said, "spirit". He said, "you're arguing in a circle and so your talk about god is meaningless" and I then said, "Your reasoning is circular too my friend! Explain to me what matter is if I ask you, 'What is matter?'" He got the point; for his only recourse would have been to answer "Matter" or "Matter is the basic material substance that the universe is made of". I explained to him that in a similar manner "Spirit is the basic substance that God consists of". He seemed to get frustrated at this point and then asked another question about theological determinism and how I could know anything about God. I quickly answered that God predestines everything and then I pointed to the ground under his feet and pulled my Bible out of my pocket and explained to him that God has not only revealed Himself to us through the creation but also through Scripture. He asked, "Well, then why has God hidden Himself?" to which I responded, "He hasn't to all men, but reveals who He is specifically to some men." I then tried to read Jesus' prayer to the Father in Matthew 11:25-27 where Christ says, "I thank you Father, Lord of Heaven and Earth, that you have hidden these things from the wise and intelligent . . .", but when I pulled my Bible out and started reading from it; it was like I pulled out a literal sword and he and his friends left immediately. I then said, "Hey man, you just asked me a question and now you're walking away because I pulled out my Bible? Are you scared of a book?"
3. A Good Questioner and Listener
The third heckler's name was Adam. He asked some great questions about the reliability of the Bible, the nature of God, and salvation and he listened receptively. When I began to explain the gospel to him, he quickly noted that he understood that based upon what I had explained to him from John 6:37-44, there was no way to be reconciled to God unless God came down and opened up his eyes to the truth of the gospel. About four of us said, "Amen, you've got it!" I then told him the best thing he could do would be to put his face in the carpet and beg God for mercy and that if he was genuinely humble, contrite, and repentant, then God will never turn him away. I encourage all to spend time with people that listen receptively like Adam did, for God may use these interactions to bring them to Christ.
After I finished preaching, we had about 20 kids standing around and asking great questions. Many of them were Christians who simply wanted to express their thanks for our efforts. I pointed them to Christ for these things, knowing that we could take no credit whatsoever. My prayer is that God would open Adam's eyes to behold Jesus Christ and that He will continue to give us the ability to do what we are doing each week at UNCG. |
Lillian's List begins 2012 campaign push
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RALEIGH -- The state's current top Democratic woman in office is stepping aside at the end of 2012, but one group said they are working to make sure there are new female faces to fill her shoes.
“The representation for women is woefully low,” said Laura Edwards with Lillian's List.
This year, Lillian's List has 27 Democratic, pro-choice candidates it's endorsing for every elected office from the state house to the Council of State. Political observers said that is still lower than many would hope it would be.
“Only 7 percent of the candidates for the North Carolina Senate are women,” said political analyst David McLennan, “and it is slightly better on the House side. But again nowhere near equality in terms of candidates.”
About 54 percent of North Carolina voters are women, but less than 25 percent of those who represent them are females.
This year, the General Assembly completed the once-in-a-decade process of redistricting.
This is where new legislative district lines are drawn to match new census numbers. Democratic women said they believe they were targeted for defeat through these maps.
“There were a lot of women who were double-bunked,” said Rep. Martha Alexander, a Mecklenburg County Democrat. "That is, they were placed in the same district to have to run against each other. And it just seemed to be an unusual number.
Republicans who helped penned the redistricting maps have said there was no intention to target Democratic female lawmakers.
On Wednesday, Lillian's List handed more than $100,000 dollars to female primary candidates and said it will continue to support them through the November election.
“To have women at the table, to have women in the dialogue, changes the dialogue," said Edwards.
Political experts said they anticipate there will be less women in the General Assembly, on both sides of the aisle, after the November election. |
Ragtime and blues fused ‘All That Jazz’
By Laura Szepesi
Published: Sunday, March 17, 2013, 7:09 p.m.
Updated: Monday, March 18, 2013
EDITOR'S NOTE: Thursday marks the 85th birthday of well-known Connellsville jazz trombonist Harold Betters. We salute him with this four-part series, starting today with a brief history of jazz music.
In 1979, actor Roy Scheider brought the life of Broadway dancer / director Bob Fosse to the big screen in the film “All That Jazz.”
“All” is the perfect way to describe jazz music.
Jazz was born around 1900 in New Orleans — about the same time as the earliest music recordings became available to the public. It grew out of ragtime, which many sources claim is the first true American music.
Like jazz, ragtime has Southern roots, but was also flavored by the southern Midwest. It was popular from the late 1800s to around 1920. It developed in African American communities, a mix of march music (from composers such as John Philip Sousa), black songs and dances including the cakewalk.
Ragtime: Dance on
Eventually, ragtime spread across the United States via printed sheet music, but its roots were as live dance music in the red light districts of large cities such as St. Louis and New Orleans. Ernest Hogan is considered ragtime's father. He named it ragtime because of the music's lively ragged syncopation.
Ragtime faded as jazz's following grew. However, composers enjoyed major success in ragtime's early years. Scott Joplin's 1899 “Maple Leaf Rag” was a hit, as was his “The Entertainer,” which was resurrected as a Top 5 hit when it was featured in the 1974 movie “The Sting” starring Robert Redford and Paul Newman.
Born of ragtime, jazz was also heavily influenced by the blues. Blues originated in the late 1800s, but in the deep South. It is an amalgam of Negro spirituals, work songs, shouts, chants and narrative lyrics.
Fused with blues
Like jazz, the blues comes in many forms: delta, piedmont, jump and Chicago blues. Its popularity grew after World War II when electric guitars — rather than acoustic guitars — became popular. By the early 1970s, blues had formed another hybrid: blues rock.
While ragtime is jangly and spirited, the blues takes after its name: blue, or melancholy. Its name is traced to 1912 when Hart Ward copyrighted the first blues song, “Dallas Blues.”
Jazz — as a mix of ragtime and blues — has fused into many styles since its emergence.
In the 1910s, New Orleans jazz was the first to take off. In the 1930s and 1940s, Big Band swing, Kansas City jazz and bebop prevailed. Other forms include cool jazz and jazz rock; today, there's even cyber jazz.
Jazz: Always changing
The late jazz trombone player J.J. Johnson summed jazz up as restless. “It won't stay put ... and never will,” he was quoted as saying, according to various sources.
Johnson's sentiment is heartily endorsed by Connellsville jazz trombonist Harold Betters. Betters turns 85 years old this week. He will share decades of his memories about music and growing up in Connellsville as his March 21 birthday approaches.
Laura Szepesi is a freelance writer.
Tuesday: Just how did Harold Betters decide to play the trombone?
- Uniontown police investigate shooting injury
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- Recap of the death of Connellsville police officer McCray Robb in 1882
- Connellsville police officer recognized 131 years after death
- Fayette County man accused of receiving stolen property, multiple drug offenses
- Connellsville set to debut model-railroad train in 2014
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- Connellsville council to make appointments, reappointments
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Indian External Affairs Minister S M Krishna on Monday said that upcoming talks between the foreign secretaries of India and Pakistan will focus on terrorism, Express 24/7 reported on Monday.
Speaking to the media in New Delhi, Krishna said that the trust deficit between the two countries needed to be reduced.
Krishna said the issue of Tahawur Rana, who was recently declared not guilty in the Mumbai attacks case, as well as the “extradition of Dawood Ibrahim” will be discussed during the meetings.
India’s foreign secretary is due to visit Pakistan this week, the first formal talks between the two countries on their core dispute since the Mumbai attacks in 2008 froze their peace process. The talks will be held on June 23 and 24 in Islamabad.
According to The Hindu, Krishna termed the aggressive behaviour by Indian and Pakistani warships on the high seas as an “isolated” incident which “doesn’t help”. He said that he was optimistic of both sides clearing any “misunderstanding” that led to the two warships coming dangerously close to each other, The Hindu reported.
According to The Hindu, Krishna expressed his disappointment over the slow pace of the Mumbai attacks trial in Pakistan. “I think it is a sad commentary of what is happening there. Whatever occasion we get to interact with the leadership of Pakistan, we always convey that it is necessary that trial should be hastened,” he said.
“I hope Pakistan realises how serious is the Indian view on this particular question. Our trial has concluded and the appeal is pending with the Supreme Court. Whereas, the trial virtually has not even started in Pakistan,” the minister said.
Pakistan’s Foreign Office spokesperson had earlier stated that the foreign secretaries’ meeting will not be allowed to discuss the issue of Mumbai attacks.
Published in The Express Tribune, June 21st, 2011. |
India has offered to build a pipeline from its territory to the Wagah border for export of oil to meet all needs of Pakistan if Delhi is assured purchases in large quantities over the long run, a move that will deprive energy-rich Gulf countries of a lucrative market.
Pakistan believes that it can get oil supplies from neighbouring India at 30% cheaper prices because of low transportation cost, say officials.
A government official told The Express Tribune that Pakistan and India were likely to strike a deal with the signing of a memorandum of understanding on the concluding day of two-day talks on Tuesday relating to import of oil and liquefied natural gas (LNG) from Delhi. “India has told us that it has a surplus capacity of 50 million tons of oil,” he said.
During the first day of technical-level talks between the two countries in Islamabad, the Pakistani team expressed the desire that it could import all petroleum products including high-speed diesel, furnace oil, petrol and jet fuel from India to meet domestic requirements.
In a unique proposal, Pakistan offered export of naphtha – a surplus product – to India, which Delhi would convert into petrol and then re-export it to Pakistan. “India also needs naphtha for its industries,” the official said.
“The two sides will finalise the prices of petroleum products and transportation charges today (Tuesday),” a participant of the meeting said.
Besides laying an oil pipeline to Wagah, “we can also ship oil through sea route to meet the demand of southern parts while tankers may also be used in this regard,” the official quoted the Indian side as saying.
However, Pakistani officials looked not interested in oil supplies through tankers, believing it would prove expensive. However, import of oil through ships was considered cheaper, but the pipeline was described as the cheapest option.
Pakistan consumes 6.9 million tons of diesel per year, of which domestic oil refineries produce 3.2 to 3.4 million tons and the rest is imported.
Furnace oil demand stands at about nine million tons, of which domestic refineries produce about 2.5 million tons and the remaining is imported. The country is working on some new power plants, which will increase demand of furnace oil in coming years.
Pakistani and Indian officials would also discuss import of 200 million cubic feet of liquefied natural gas (LNG) per day from Delhi, which would be able to swiftly start deliveries.
Pakistani authorities believe that import of LNG from Qatar and other countries like Malaysia would take three years, while India may start supply in six to eight months, the official said, adding the import plan would be finalised during the two-day talks.
The Indian delegation was headed by P Kalyanasundaram, Director (International Cooperation and Corporate Affairs), Ministry of Petroleum and Natural Gas and comprised representatives of leading Indian companies.
The Pakistani team was headed by Shabbir Ahmed, Joint Secretary (International and Joint Ventures), Ministry of Petroleum and Natural Resources, representatives of ministries of commerce, foreign affairs, finance and others.
Earlier Petroleum Secretary Muhammad Ejaz Chaudhry said this dialogue would provide an opportunity for Indian businessmen to explore potential areas of trade with Pakistan.
In a statement issued by the Ministry of Petroleum and Natural Resources, Petroleum Minister Dr Asim Hussain said there was potential for trade in petroleum products between India and Pakistan. “Pakistan is interested in importing furnace oil and diesel,” he said while talking to the visiting Indian delegation.
Published in The Express Tribune, May 29th, 2012. |
April 8, 2009 > Fremont native completes training
Fremont native completes training
Submitted By Jim Flaherty
PFC Kate Flaherty, daughter of Barbara and Jim Flaherty, recently completed 12 weeks of basic training at Marine Corps Recruit Depot, Parris Island, SC.
Flaherty and fellow recruits began their training each day at 5 a. m. by running three miles and performing calisthenics. In addition to the physical conditioning program, she spent numerous hours in classroom and field assignments which included learning first aid, uniform regulations, combat water survival, marksmanship, hand-to-hand combat and assorted weapons training.
Recruits performed close-order drill and operated as a small infantry unit during field training. Flaherty also received instruction on Marine Corps core values - honor, courage and commitment and what the words mean in guiding personal and professional conduct. Training ended with The Crucible, a 54-hour team effort and problem solving evolution.
After four weeks of combat training at Camp Lejune, Flaherty will begin technical training at Twenty-nine Palms in southern California. She is a graduate of American High School's Class of 2006. |
We all know the Bakerella knows her stuff. When I saw her post on these I knew I had to make them. If only I could have photographed mine while they were nice and hot right out of the oven. Oh well! My favorite kinds of recipes are the ones that use ingredients you have on hand and you don’t have to hunt through 15 different stores to gather them all. I threw these together in a jiffy. They would be perfect for breakfast, if you like sweets like me..in the morning. Or any other time too!
1 1/2 c all purpose flour
1/2 c sugar
1 1/2 tsp baking powder
1/2 tsp salt
3/4 c sour cream
1/4 c milk
2 tsp vanilla
1/4 cup melted butter, cooled slightly
6 oz. semisweet chocolate chunks
Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Line muffin tray with 12 regular size baking cups. In a medium bowl, stir flour, sugar, baking powder and salt together with a wire whisk until combined. In another bowl, stir sour cream, milk, eggs, vanilla and melted butter. Stir until combined. Pour into your flour mixture and stir together until combined. Stir in chocolate chunks and divide batter into baking cups. Bake for about 18-20 minutes or until done. Makes 12 regular or 9 larger muffins. Bake a couple minutes longer for taller muffins. |
The members of Trinity United Reformed Church welcome you to their home page. We invite you to explore the pages of this Web site, and to join us in praise, worship, prayer, Bible study, and ministry to each other and the community. We are a church where God's love shows and our faith grows!
We worship on Sundays at 9:30 AM. Our second worship service (different from the first service), is on Sundays at 6:30 PM.
Nursery care is provided during all services. Sunday School for all ages and a Small Group Prayer time are offered on most Sundays after the morning worship service, September through May.
Website last updated on May 12, 2013 |
- Welcome to the DART Trip Planner. DART is the public transit authority for Addison, Carrollton, Cockrell Hill, Dallas, Farmers Branch, Garland, Glenn Heights, Highland Park, Irving, Richardson, Rowlett, Plano and University Park. We operate the Trinity Railway Express (TRE) in partnership with the T.
- Please be aware that the DART Trip Planner will only create itineraries for fixed-route bus and rail service for locations within the DART service area. Fixed-route service to Fort Worth, Richland Hills and Hurst via the TRE is also available through this trip planner. View the DART System Map for more information regarding the DART service area and DART Rail station, park & ride and transit center locations.
- Special DART shuttles, special event service to the American Airlines Center via Victory Station and DART On-Call are not available through the DART Trip Planner. Check the Special Destinations and Current Rider Alerts section on DART.org to view more information about DART shuttles and service to American Airlines Center.
Using Help is easy. Select from the menu on the left for detailed instructions on using each feature.
Trip Plan, Schedules, Find Locations and Next Bus may contain terminology, references or phrases that may not be familiar. A Reference Guide is available for these instances to help you better understand the results obtained through these features.
If you find you are still having problems and the Help Files do not assist you, please contact DART Customer Information at 214-979-1111 to speak with a Customer Service Representative. Send your comments and suggestions about the DART Trip Planner to eelam@DART.org. |
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This home would make a great starter home or investment property. Located in Gibson County, this home has been well maintained and includes two bedroom and a full bath with .44 acre. The property Includes an extra lot perfect for an extra garage or pole barn. On Highway 64 just 4.2 miles from Highway 57 and 8.5 miles from Princeton. Enjoy the larger rooms throughout. Eat-in kitchen with lots of cabinets.
The full basement is partially finished and has been waterproofed - potential for additional living space.Recent updates include floor covering, some plumbing and electrical updates. Newer replacement windows and roof. Covered front porch. Detached two car garage.
Recent updates: carpet and vinyl flooring & electrical & plumbing |
Welcome to BSA Troop 51 based out of Waterford, MI. Please take a look around and have a great day.
How Scouting Started in the United States
One day in 1909 in London, England, an American visitor, William D. Boyce, lost his way in a dense fog. He stopped under a street lamp and tried to figure out where he was. A boy approached him and asked if he could be of help.
You certainly can, said Boyce. He told the boy that he wanted to find a certain business office in the center of the city.
I’ll take you there, said the boy.
When they got to the destination, Mr. Boyce reached into his pocket for a tip. But the boy stopped him.
No thank you, sir. I am a Scout. I won’t take anything for helping.
A Scout? And what might that be? asked Boyce.
The boy told the American about himself and about his brother scouts. Boyce became very interested. After finishing his errand, he had the boy take him to the British Scouting office.
At the office, Boyce met Lord Robert Baden-Powell, the famous British general who had founded the Scouting movement in Great Britain. Boyce was so impressed with what he learned that he decided to bring Scouting home with him.
On February 8, 1910, Boyce and a group of outstanding leaders founded the Boy Scouts of America. From that day forth, Scouts have celebrated February 8, as the birthday of Scouting in the United States.
What happened to the boy who helped Mr. Boyce find his way in the fog? No one knows. He had neither asked for money nor given his name, but he will never be forgotten. His good turn helped bring the scouting movement to our country.
In the British Scout Training Center at Gilwell Park, England, Scouts from the United States erected a statue of an American Buffalo in honor of this unknown scout. One good turn to one man became a good turn to millions of American Boys. Such is the power of a good turn.
Hence the Scout Slogan:
DO A GOOD TURN DAILY |
Jazz chord melody may very well be the
most challenging of all guitar styles to truly master. Players must develop
right-hand thumb and finger independence, a robust vocabulary of jazz
voicings, a strong sense of melody and an arranger's feel for composition.
And these are just the fundamentals. Once you have the "easy" stuff down,
it's all about groove, arrangement, performance and improvisation in real
time, often as a soloist.
<< Click player below for a sample video from the course >>
You probably wouldn't need more than ten fingers to count out the
bonafide masters of this form. Pass, Montgomery, Farlow, Ellis and Breau
would likely make everybody's list. Save one of those fingers for John
Stowell, the guitarists' guitarist and one of the modern masters of jazz
chord melody guitar.
Stowell plays jazz, but he doesn't use any of the clichés; he has an
incredible originality. John is a master creator," says Larry Coryell. Herb
Ellis agrees saying that, "More guitarists would play like John Stowell if
they only knew how." John Stowell's Modern Chord Melody reveals
Stowell's original approach and raises the bar for lucid, insightful
instruction for jazz chord melody and improvisation.
Chord Melody takes the student beyond conventional harmony and chords by
introducing a broader, more contemporary palette of voicings, shapes and
single note ideas. Stowell beckons students to think out of the box, to
create and visualize new shapes and sounds on the instrument. John also
demonstrates a series of new inversions, which can be readily employed in
accompaniments and compositions, and may also serve as templates on the neck
to generate unusual and original sounding melodies and motifs.
Students will play their way through Modern Chord Melody using
Stowell's original tunes as a workbook for demonstrating the new techniques
and sounds presented in the course. Each arrangement showcases key
techniques and approaches in context, after which Stowell explains how to
extract and apply the moves in your own playing, arrangements and
Modern Chord Melody is not for the feint of heart. Much of the
material in this course presents new approaches, voicings and techniques
that will take serious practice time to absorb and master. Modern Chord
Melody will reward the student's diligence with an impressive faculty
for chord melody.
can be applied!
Join for Full Access
Become a Pro or Master Student to get access to all videos, tab, jam tracks, and other assets on TrueFire TV. Learn more »
WHAT YOU GET
Video software (Windows and Mac) with TrueFire's
Lesson Player, PIP, full-screen, looping, slow motion, keyboard shortcuts, plus...
- 40 Video Guitar Lessons
- Practice Rhythm Tracks
- Text Commentary
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- Power Tab |
Post Reply: Post your boards (Pictures or GTFO)
|Topic: Post your boards (Pictures or GTFO)
Posted: May/01/2013 at 4:34am By fj5
Bought some neon yellow vinyl to cover up my 154 Thrive Renegade (wasn't a big fan of the original artwork) and used up pretty much the rest of my stickers.
Stickered up my 150.5 DC Ply too and cleared away most of the stickers from my 157 Burton Vapor.
2013 DC Ply 150.5
2010 Burton Vapor 157
2013 Thrive Renegade 154 |
Johannsen: In a 2005, you discussed the corporatizing of education in a televised interview with Allan Gregg, and at the beginning of that talk he mentioned that you left the U.S. you began to discuss how the University was taking on a more managerial style. Moreover, you mentioned Penn State, and its shift to a corporate model. For instance, there were more part-time faculty positions being added eliminating tenure-track openings. You were witnessing this at Penn State, and suggested a pattern was being set that is now widespread in universities and colleges across the U.S. I am, curious about your departure from the U.S.. It seems clear that you left the U.S. for professional reasons, but did you also leave the U.S. for political reasons?
Henry A. Giroux: Yes, it was for political and academic reasons. I was particularly upset over Bush being elected in 2004, and especially under circumstances that suggested that the election was stolen from Al Gore. Both the election and the growing suppression of dissent in the university, not to mention the attack on public education by corporate interests, suggested that democracy in the United States, however fragile, was being radically undermined.
It was also a period of galloping anti-intellectualism, and that anti-intellectualism was coming from various levels—in the popular media, among elements of the dominant press, the increasing commodification of everyday life, the rise of celebrity culture, and the widespread emergence of the ethos of privatization.
Moreover, the press and other elements of the dominant media by 2004 had become even more complicitous with the forces of political conformity and were reinforcing a form of intellectual banality, commodification, and privatization that both undermined political culture and reinforced a market driven embrace of selfishness and materialism that was sabotaging every vestige of public life. Education as it was deployed by the larger culture was becoming a powerful force for both political illiteracy and for exercising a depoliticizing influence on young people and the larger polity.
Cynicism, disillusionment, and a dispiriting sense of purposeless has cast a shadow over American society seriously draining it of any language or vision that might imagine a different sort of society from the dysfunctional, militarizing, and deeply unequal social order that marked the current historical period.
The propensity to avoid moral considerations was producing not simply a politically illiterate and authoritarian society, but one that was increasingly saturated in violence and a culture of cruelty. Needless to say, all of these forces intensified the increasing militarization and corporatization of higher education, along with the privatizing of everyday life.
I was also disturbed by the increasing political insularity of the academy and the growing refusal of many faculty to connect their work with larger social issues. Many faculty retreated into academic specializations and an arcane language that made them irrelevant to the task of defending the university as a public good, except for in some cases a very small audience. This has become more and more clear in the last few years as academics have become so insular, often unwilling or unable to defend the university as a public good, in spite of the widespread attacks on academic freedom, the role of the university as a democratic public sphere, and the increasing reduction of knowledge to a saleable commodity, and students to customers.
Of course, there are also faculty who are discouraged from speaking critically about social issues because of the increasing assumption in American society that any form of critique which calls official power into question is somehow un-American. This absurd attempt to define any critique of official power as unpatriotic has a chilling effect on faculty, especially when such views and the names of the people to whom they are ascribed are widely disseminated in right-wing and dominant media outlets. Witness the shameless firing of scholars such as Ward Churchill and Norman Finkelstein, among others in the last few years.
In all fairness, there are faculty who speak out against injustices, but there are too few, and when they do they often pay a price for it. One recent example centers around conservative groups in Wisconsin and Michigan using the Freedom of Information Act to request e-mails by a number of professors who have written about and are sympathetic to organized labor. All of these academics, including the renowned historian, Professor William Cronon--who wrote critically on his blog Scholar as Citizen about a conservative organization that was drafting radical bills for right-wing Republican politicians such as Scott Walker--were asked to provide any emails mentioning words such as “Scott Walker,” “Rachel Madow,” “Madison,” and "Wisconsin". This is more than a cheap and transparent act of intimidation, it is also a strategy to shut down, constrain and neutralize any notion of dissent that emerges in the university. Clearly, this is symptomatic of a long historical tradition in the United States to undermine the university as a place to think, speak, and act critically, one that has been highly intensified since the events of 9/11.
I also left the U.S. in 2004 because of the dean I worked under at Penn State University could not imagine schooling as having anything to do with the public good. He did not support my work on this matter [that the university is there for the public good], and he was entirely delighted to see me leave. He was fully immersed in an instrumental culture and had no wider vision of either the role of education or the public role of the university. His world was largely one dominated by mathematical utility and a narrow instrumentalist vision. My wife was also a professor at Penn State and was highly dissatisfied with her position. All of this was resolved after we received wonderful job offers from McMaster University in Canada and so we decided to relocate. Our experience at Penn State reinforced our present conviction that too many administrators in higher education in the United States have assumed the values and politics of a business culture that ironically produced the recession of 2008 with its labyrinth of corruption, greed, unbridled power, and indifference to either the public good or human life.
Johannsen: How is it teaching in Canada for the two of you?
Giroux: My work is supported and honored, whereas at Penn State, my work wasn't appreciated at all. And the same is true for Susan’s work at McMaster. I have an endowed chair professorship and Susan has tenure and is strongly supported by the department and the university. We have terrific colleagues in the Department of English and Cultural Studies almost all of whom are rigorous scholars doing important work connecting the university to broader social issues.
The environment in Canada is much more conducive to doing critical work, though Canada has its own set of problems, but nothing like those emerging in the United States. Unlike Penn State which was a huge recipient of Pentagon funds, and was hostile to any criticism of its connection to the military and intelligence services, McMaster is a very open university that takes its commitment to a quality education and function as a democratic sphere very seriously. We have a wonderful Provost and President who live in the world of ideas, are rigorous scholars, and are heavily invested in connecting the university to major social considerations and important intellectual traditions.
What is distinctive about the U.S. is that higher education is under attack not because it is failing but because it is public. It is now considered dangerous because it has the potential to function as a site where a culture of questioning can operate, the imagination can blossom, and difficult questions can be openly debated and critically engaged. Hence, many conservatives see higher education as a threat to their reactionary and corporate oriented interests and would like to defund higher education, privatize it, eliminate tenure, and define the working conditions of faculty to something resembling the labor practices of Walmart workers. While the universities are increasingly corporatized and militarized, their governing structures are becoming more authoritarian, faculty are being devalued as public intellectuals, students are viewed as clients, academic fields are treated as economic domains for providing credentials, and work place skills, and academic freedom is under assault.
Johannsen: I recently wrote a piece about the privatization of public universities in the U.S., particularly UW-Madison. That flagship school is moving to privatize, and it seems the president of the Madison campus has been able to justify such a move because of what happened with Governor Walker recently and his budget cuts. I realize that this move to privatize public universities is nothing new.
Giroux: Yes, you're right. It isn't new, but it is more expansive, and it's happening everywhere. With the corporatization and privatization of higher education, it is increasingly more difficult for colleges and universities to expand and deepen democratic public life, produce engaged critical citizens, and operate as democratic public spheres. Moreover, higher educating is defaulting on its obligations to offer young people a quality and broad-based education. This is true in part because the liberal arts and humanities have fallen out of favor in a culture that equates education with training. But the demise of higher education as a public good is also evident in light of the election of a number of right-wing politicians who are cutting funds for state universities and doing everything they can to turn them in training centers to fill the needs of corporations. This new and intense attack on both the social state and higher education completely undermines the public nature of what education is all about.
Many university presidents now assume the language and behavior of CEOs and in doing so they are completely reneging on the public mission of the universities. The state is radically defunding public universities and university presidents, for the most part, rather than defending higher education as a public good, are trying to privatize their institutions in order to remove them from the political control of state governments. This is not a worthy or productive strategy. They should be loud and forceful in defending the university as a social good, essential to the democratic culture and economy of a nation. They should be criticizing the prioritizing of funds for military and prison expenditures over funds for higher education. And this argument should be made as a defense of education, as a crucial public good, and it should be taken seriously. But they aren't making these arguments.
You have a situation in which the U.S. is fighting three unjust wars and wasting trillions of dollars in public funds, all the while draining money from important social services and public and higher education. If the government were to invest that money in higher education and public services, these would be far better investments. But administrators and academics in the U.S. for the most part don't make these arguments; instead they have retreated from defending the university as a citadel of public values and in doing so have abdicated any sense of social responsibility to the idea of the university as a site of inspired by the search for truth, justice, freedom, and dignity.
Of course, there are a few courageous university presidents who refuse to reduce higher education to an adjunct of corporate power and needs. Harvard university president Drew Gilpin Faust has both criticized the growing economic justification for higher education and the reduction of pedagogy to producing knowledge and social relations whose value ultimately resides in how closely they are aligned with measurable skills. More recently, Biddy Martin, the university chancellor at the University of Wisconsin in response to the conservative demand for the e-mails of dissenting professors not only bravely defended her faculty’s right to privacy but insisted that they
Continue to ask difficult questions, explore unpopular lines of thought and exercise your academic freedom, regardless of your point of view. As always, we will take our cue from the bronze plaque on the walls of Bascom Hall. It calls for the ‘continual and fearless sifting and winnowing’ of ideas. It is our tradition, our defining value, and the way to a better society.
These are the kind of administrators who both provide a sense of hope for higher education and simultaneously reveal how disengaged ethically and politically so many administrators have become as they define themselves within the gated and closed boundaries of a corporate managerial culture.
Johannsen: I am an advocate for student loan debtors. The fact that students are saddled with so much debt is another part of the problem.
Giroux: You are making an important point. War at home is matched by a war on youth. I wrote about this recently. Young people graduate with an average of $23,000 in student loan debt, and they are the ones saddled with it. Youth have become indentured servants and that turns them away from public service. The loan crisis and the increasing slashing of funds for students, coupled with the astronomical rise in tuition, represent an unparalleled attack on the social state. The hidden agenda here is that when students graduate with such high debts, they rarely choose a career in public service; instead, they are forced to go into the corporate sector, and I see these conditions, in some ways, as being very calculated and as part of a larger political strategy to disempower students.
Johannsen: I have written about the fact that many young people are unable to take part in public service. Moreover, I call us the indentured educated class. Did you know that by June of 2012, outstanding student loan debt will reach $1 trillion in the U.S.?
Giroux: That's unbelievable! And it does not bode well for future generations of young people. But what must be stated is that this financial crisis has to be understood within a broader set of political and economic concerns. The current right-wing of the Republican Party will do anything to dismantle any social protections provided by the social state, and students are the most powerless when it comes to protecting themselves from such legislation. They are bearing the brunt of these attacks.
Of course, we also see evidence of such attacks in many states that are abrogating the bargaining rights of unions, cutting back on student grants and loans, eliminating child labor laws (Maine), and cutting back on taxes for the rich and corporations. Of course, in the Middle East and Europe, young people are protesting in massive numbers against this form of economic Darwinism, but rather than simply protesting against high tuition rates, they see the current attack on education as part of an attack on the public good. Moreover, faculty and students are protesting somewhat in the U.S. in the same way but on a much smaller scale. This looming gigantic debt that students are forced to carry is also indicative of the degree to which young people are no longer viewed as a positive symbol of the future and how society has defaulted on both its social, political, and economic obligations to youth and the conditions that would enable they to enter into a future that is better than they ones to which previous generations had access. All that young people are promised today are the rewards of a shallow materialism and a degree that is defined primarily as a job credential, one that ironically does not even live up to its own claims of guaranteeing either decent employment or a better way of life.
Johannsen: Absolutely. That is why the humanities are so important. They train people to think critically about things, and they allow us to be engaged citizens. That, however, as you have argued, is being eviscerated in this country. That sounds quite grim. Your work is clearly post-structuralist, and I see the influence of the Frankfurt School. I see the traditions upon which you rely, and it is clear that you want to demonstrate the way historical conditions inform the outcome of things. History does not 'repeat itself.' That assertion, allows people to marginalize the discipline. There are obviously historical conditions that have allowed for this new and frightening form of neoliberalism to emerge at this particular moment. I think, however, it is wrong to assume that your work is negative. I think the sense that there is hope and agency is clearest in an article you recently wrote entitled, "Left Behind? American Youth and the Global Fight for Democracy."
Giroux: I am certainly influenced by certain post-structuralist traditions but also a number of other theoretical archives as well–including the brilliant work of Paulo Freire, Zygmunt Bauman, Loic Wacquant, Nancy Fraser, Tony Judt, and others. I am glad you have raised the question about critique and how it is often dismissed as negative. First, critique is far from negative. In fact, at its root is an affirmation of the noble democratic principle that people can hold ideas, social relations, institutions, and values accountable, and that individuals have distinct obligations to connect criticism with the ability to both think otherwise and act otherwise in a democracy that is never finished or complete. As John Dewey and many others have pointed out in a democracy, our first obligation is to question and our second obligation is our willingness to care for others. These obligations are not disconnected and mutually inform the other. Critique is a powerful resource against what Zygmunt Bauman calls “ethical tranquillization,” which now provides “a relief from responsibility.”
Like C. Wright Mills, I believe in modes of analysis that are historical, biographical, and political. But I also believe that a discourse of critique demands more than criticism, it also needs to employ a discourse of possibility, one rooted in real opportunities to see that change is possible on an individual and collective level. Hence, my strong belief in the power of education as the practice of freedom and pedagogy as a crucial practice for the melding of reason and freedom. For instance, people are constantly struggling in the Middle East and Europe, and there is a new understanding among young people who want to be heard and given the power and rights they deserve. Critique is a resource that enables them to narrate their dismay, fears, and hopes for the future. Critique is a way of translating hope into a pressing reality. Young people in many parts of the world want to be treated differently from how they have been treated in the past.
Similar modes of protests exist in the U. S. but on a much smaller scale. The nature of the issues facing U.S. students is a bit more complicated in the U.S. because the assault on the social state, until recently, has been more incremental [i.e. the stripping of public services and so forth], whereas in Britain with the rise of the conservative-liberal government, it was immediate and bold in its assault on the social state and higher education. It has been difficult for [young people in the U.S.] to connect the dots between rising tuition costs and other assaults on their dignity with the ongoing assault on public life and its myriad democratic institutions. Today’s generation faces an enormous battle in turning back the current assaults on the social state, higher education, and the social good. That generation really has to fight for a new political language, social movements, and alliances with students from other countries. They have to convince labor, parents, and the general public that the fight over higher education is a fight that benefits everyone in a sustainable democracy and not just faculty and students. The future doesn't have to mimic the worst parts of the present. There are new ways of sharing information, and as long as they don't give up on the importance of politics, the future is certainly open.
Johannsen: I am glad you mentioned that a discourse of critique must include a discourse of possibility. It reminds me of your work on Benjamin's Angel of History. The Angel of History illustrates that alternative pasts means there is the potential for alternative futures. You've already hinted at agency, but I think that this understanding of possibility is critical. Please expand more on your idea of agency and how it fits into your comments about a discourse of critique/discourse of possibility.
Giroux: All too often the worst thing that can happen to the young is to depoliticize them. When that happens, not only are young people told that they do not count – your agency is worthless, your experiences are worthless, and your voice should remain silent – but they are also told that there is no alternative to current state of affairs. Hence, problems become privatized and removed from larger social issues. This is one task, connecting the personal problems to larger social issues that progressive leftist intellectuals have failed to take on as a major political and educational project. That is why conversations like this, with you, are so important. It is hard to witness how irrelevant academics have become in fending off the current assaults on higher education and democracy.
Clearly, one does not have to give up being an academic, retreat from rigorous research, or renounce the importance of specialization in order to address major social issues. I don't think you give up theoretical rigor by writing in a way that addresses major social concerns and is at the same time accessible to wider informed general audiences. Academics such as Howard Zinn, Noam Chomsky, Stanley Aronowitz, etc. have done that. The academic world needs to be more responsible in communicating with a larger society. Journalists such as Chris Hedges, Bill Moyers, Laura Flanders, Amy Goodman, Dean Baker, Glenn Greenwald and others should be interacting with academics in order to form alliances and social movements dedicated to creating new public spheres, rebuking the conservative assaults on some of our most precious institutions and policies. Journalists, educators, labor, students, and various social movements need to find new ways to expose the individuals, power relations, ideologies, and modes of politics and economics that are gutting the welfare system, generating massive levels of poverty and inequality, promoting a poisonous cult of privatization, and generating a new and more powerful military-industrial complex that looks more and more like a punishing state. We need to communicate with one another more, and imagine a world in which it becomes possible to think and act otherwise.
Johannsen: What are your greatest concerns about higher education being under attack? How can we fight back?
Giroux: First, we need to figure how to defend higher education as a public good. If we can't do that, we're in trouble.
Secondly, we need to address what the optimum conditions are for educators to perform their work in an autonomous and critical fashion. In other words, we need to think through the conditions that make academic labor fruitful, engaging, and relevant.
Third, we need to get rid of the growing army of temporary workers now filling the ranks of academy. This is scandalous; it weakens both the power of the faculty and exploits these workers.
Fourth, we need to educate students to be critical agents, to learn how to take risks, engage in thoughtful dialogue, and taking on the crucial issue what it means to be socially responsible. Pedagogy is not about training, it is about critically educating people to be self reflective, capable of critically address their relationship with others and with the larger world. Pedagogy in this sense provides not only important critical and intellectual competencies; it also enables people to intervene critically in the world.
Fifth, we need to educate young people to deal with new modes of education that are emerging with the new electronic technologies and we need to educate them to not only learn how to critically read this ubiquitous screen culture but also how to be cultural producers. With the rise of new technologies, media, and other cultural apparatuses as powerful forms of public pedagogy, students need to understand and address how these pedagogical cultural apparatuses work to diffuse learning from any vestige of critical thought. This is a form of public pedagogy that needs to be addressed both for how it deforms and for how it can create important new spaces for emancipatory forms of pedagogy.
Students need to learn how to unlearn those elements of a market driven society that deform their sense of agency, reducing them to simply consumers or even worse to elements of a disposable population. So we need to understand who controls the means of public education and the larger forms of what Raymond Williams called the cultural apparatuses of permanent education both in terms of the dangers they pose and the possibilities they harbor.
We need to take on the new media, and in terms of power and public pedagogy, we need to organize a whole range of people outside of the academy. Finally, but far from conclusive, is that we need a new political language with broader narratives. Such a language has to unravel the pervasive ideological, pedagogical, and economic dynamics of a form of economic Darwinism that now governs much of the world. This system must be demystified, politicized, and recognized for the ways in which it has come to pose a dire threat to democracy. We also need to find a language capable of defending government as an element of the common good, one that does not define itself as both a punishing and corporate state. This is not merely a matter of redefining sovereignty, but also rethinking what is distinctive about the social state, social responsibility, and the common good.
But we need more than a broader understanding of what is a good society or a moral and political critique of the existing market fundamentalism engulfing American society, we also need to create new forms of solidarity, new and broad based social movements that move beyond the isolated and fractured politics of the current historical moment. I am not against identity politics or single based issues; at the same time, we need to find ways to connect these singular modes of politics to broader political narratives about democracy so we can recognize their strengths and limitations in building broad-based social movements. In short, we need to find new ways to connect education to the struggle for democracy that is under assault in ways that were unimaginable forty years ago.
Cited in Anthony Grafton, "Academic Freedom After the Cronon Controversy," The New York Review of Books, (April 4, 2011). |
Posted by Yorkshire on 2012/12/26
Not News: Food Stamp Participation Jumped by Over 600,000 in September; Last Pre-Election Number Revised Up
By Tom Blumer | December 07, 2012 | 23:57
The U.S. Department of Agriculture released its latest report on food stamp program participation through September today. I received the email alerting me to the release at 5:17 p.m., so it seems reasonable to believe that USDA and the Barack Obama administration wanted the new data to get as little attention as possible (as will be seen later, it’s currently getting none). If so, they have two probable reasons for wishing to minimize its impact.
The first and more obvious of the two is that the food stamp rolls increased by over 607,000 in September to 47.71 million, yet another all-time record. That’s awful enough, but here’s the real kicker: the participation figure for July, the last month of data available before Election Day, was revised up by over 150,000, changing that month’s reported increase from 11,600 to just under 166,000. As will be seen after the jump, no other month’s data was revised except August, where the changes were infinitesimal
This entry was posted on 2012/12/26 at 14:31 and is filed under economics, Photography, Politically Incorrect, Socialists. Tagged: deficit spending, Democrat leadership, Food Stamps, hypocrisy. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.
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The diagnosis of Trichotillomania (TM) is synonymous with the act of recurrently pulling one’s own body hair resulting in noticeable thinning or baldness. (American Psychiatric Association, Diagnostic and statistical manual of mental disorders, 2000, p. 674) Sites of hair pulling can include any area of the body in which hair is found, but the most common sites are the scalp, eyelashes, eyebrows, and the pubis area. (Kraemer, 1999, p. 298) The disorder itself is categorized in the DSM-IV-TR as an “Impulse Control Disorder Not Elsewhere Classified” along with disorders like Pathological Gambling, Pyromania, Kleptomania, and Intermittent Explosive Disorder. Although TM was previously considered to be a rare disorder, more recent research indicates that prevalence rates of TM may be as high as 2% of the general population. (Kraemer, 1999, p. 298) This prevalence rate is significantly higher than the lifetime prevalence rate of .6% that is cited as a potential baseline among college students the DSM-IV-TR. (4th ed., text rev.; DSM-IV-TR; American Psychiatric Association, 2000, p. 676) The condition appears to be more common among women and the period of onset is typically in childhood or adolescence. (Kraemer, 1999, p. 298) As is customary with most DSM-IV-TR diagnoses, the act of hair pulling cannot be better accounted for by another mental disorder (like delusions, for example) or a general medical condition. Like every disorder in the DSM-IV-TR, the disturbance must cause significant distress or impairment in functioning. (4th ed., text rev.; DSM-IV-TR; American Psychiatric Association, 2000, p. 675)
Alopecia is a key concept that must be understood in order to complete the differential diagnosis of TM. Alopecia is a condition of baldness in the most general sense. (Shiel, Jr. & Stoppler, 2008, p. 14) Other medically related causes of alopecia should be considered in the differential diagnosis of TM, especially when working with an individual who deny pulling their hair. The common suspects include male-pattern baldness, Discoid Lupus Erythematosus (DLE), Lichen Planopilaris (also known as Acuminatus), Folliculitis Decalvans, Pseudopelade of Brocq, and Alopecia Mucinosa (Follicular Mucinosis). (4th ed., text rev.; DSM-IV-TR; American Psychiatric Association, 2000, p. 676) Comprehensive coverage of these medical conditions is beyond the scope of this article – all of the aforementioned confounding variables can be eliminated by a general practitioner.
There are a number of idiosyncratic features associated with TM that bear mentioning. Although the constellation of features covered here is not sufficient to warrant a diagnosis in isolation, they can aid in the differential diagnosis process. Alopecia, regardless of the cause, has been known to lead sufferers to tremendous feats of avoidance so that the hair loss remains undetected. Simply avoiding social functions or other events where the individual (and their attendant hair loss) might be uncovered is a common occurrence. In cases where individual’s focus of attention is on the head or scalp, it is not uncommon for affected individuals to attempt to hide hair loss by adopting complimentary hair styles or wearing other headwear (e.g., hats, wigs, etc). These avoidance behaviors will be the target of exposure and response prevention later in this article.
In addition to avoidant behavior and elaborate attempts to “cover it up,” individuals with TM frequently present with clinically significant difficulty in areas such as self-esteem and mood. Comorbidity, or the presence of one or more disorders in the addition to a primary diagnosis, is the rule not the exception in the stereotypical presentation of TM. Mood disorders (like depression) are the most common (65%) – anxiety (57%), chemical use (22%), and eating disorders (20%) round out the top four mostly likely candidates for comorbidity. (Kraemer, 1999, p. 298) These comorbidity rates are not overly surprising since they parallel prevalence rates across the wider population – perhaps with the notable exception of the high rate of comorbid eating disorders. We can speculate about the source of comorbidity – one possible hypothesis is that a few people who suffer TM also suffer from a persistent cognitive dissonance associated with having happy-go-lucky personality trait which leads them “let the chips fall where they may.” They are individuals prone to impulsivity, but they are subdued and controlled the shame, guilt, frustration, fear, rage, and helplessness associated with the social limitations placed on them by the disorder. (Ingram, 2012, p. 269) On the topic of personality, surprisingly enough, research suggests that personality disorders do not share significant overlap with TM. This includes Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD) despite the fact that BPD is often associated with self-harming behavior. (Kraemer, 1999, p. 299)
Differentiating TM from Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder (OCD) can be challenging in some cases. TM is similar to OCD because there is a “sense of gratification” or “relief” when pulling the hair out. Unlike individuals with OCD, individuals with TM do not perform their compulsions in direct response to an obsession and/or according to rules that must be rigidly adhered to. (4th ed., text rev.; DSM-IV-TR; American Psychiatric Association, 2000, p. 676) There are, however, observed similarities between OCD and TM regarding phenomenology, neurological test performance, response to SSRI’s, and contributing elements of familial and/or genetic factors. (Kraemer, 1999, p. 299) Due to the large genetic component contributions of both disorders, obtaining a family history (vis-à-vis a detailed genogram) is highly recommended. The comprehensive genogram covering all mental illness can be helpful in the discovery the comorbid conditions identified above as well.
There is some suggestion that knowledge of events associated with onset is “intriguing, but unnecessary for successful treatment.” (Kraemer, 1999, p. 299) I call shenanigans. There is a significant connection between the onset of TM and the patient enduring loss, perceived loss, and/or trauma. Time is well spent exploring the specific environmental stressors that precipitated the disorder. Although ignoring circumstances surrounding onset might be prudent when employing strict behavioral treatment paradigms, it seems like a terrible waste of time to endure suffering without identifying some underlying meaning or purpose that would otherwise be missed if we overlook onset specifics. “Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of human freedoms – to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.” (Frankl, 1997, p. 86) If we acknowledge that all behavior is purposeful, then we must know and understand the circumstances around onset if we will ever understand the purpose of said behavior. I liken this to a difference in professional opinion and personal preference because either position can be reasonably justified, but in the end the patient should make the ultimate decision about whether or not to explore onset contributions vis-à-vis “imagery dialogue” or a similar technique. (Young, Klosko, & Weishaar, 2003, p. 123) If such imagery techniques are unsuccessful or undesired by the client, a psychodynamic conversation between “internal parts of oneself” can add clarity to the persistent inability of the client to delay gratification. (Ingram, 2012, p. 292) Such explorations are likely to be time consuming, comparatively speaking, and should not be explored with patients who are bound by strict EAP requirements or managed care restrictions on the type and length of treatment. Comorbid developmental disabilities and cognitive deficits may preclude this existential exploration. I employ the exploration of existential issues of origin in the interest of increasing treatment motivation, promoting adherence, enhancing the therapeutic milieu, and thwarting subsequent lapses by anchoring cognitive dissonance to a concrete event.
TM represents a behavioral manifestation of a fixed action patterns (FAPs) that is rigid, consistent, and predicable. FAPs are generally thought to have evolved from our most primal instincts as animals – they are believed to contain fundamental behavioral ‘switches’ that enhance the survivability of the human species. (Lambert & Kinsley, 2011, p. 232) The nature of FAPs that leads some researchers to draw parallels to TM is that FAPs appear to be qualitatively “ballistic.” It’s an “all or nothing” reaction that is comparable to an action potential traveling down the axon of a neuron. Once they are triggered they are very difficult to suppress and may have a tendency to “kindle” other effects. (Lambert & Kinsley, 2011, p. 233)
There are some unique considerations when it comes to assessing a new patient with TM. Because chewing on or ingesting the hair is reported in nearly half of TM cases, the attending clinician should always inquire about oral manipulation and associated gastrointestinal pain associated with a connected hair mass in the stomach or bowel (trichobezoar). Motivation for change should be assessed and measured because behavioral interventions inherently require a great deal of effort. Family and social systems should not be ignored since family dynamics can exacerbate symptomatlogy vis-à-vis pressure to change (negative reinforcement), excessive attention (positive reinforcement), or both. (Kraemer, 1999, p. 299)
What remains to be seen is the role of stress in the process of “triggering” a TM episode. Some individuals experience an “itch like” sensation as a physical antecedent that remits once the hair is pulled. This “itch like” sensation is far from universal. Some clinicians and researchers believe that the abnormal grooming behavior found in TM is “elicited in response to stress” with the necessary but not sufficient condition of “limited options for motoric behavior and tension release.” (Kraemer, 1999, p. 299) Although this stress hypothesis may materialize as a tenable hypothesis in some cases, it’s by no means typical. Most people diagnosed with TM report that the act of pulling typically occurs during affective states of relaxation and distraction. Most individuals whom suffer from TM do not report clinically significant levels of anxiety as the “trigger” of bouts of hair pulling. We could attribute this to an absence of insight regarding anxiety related triggers or, perhaps anxiety simply does not play a significant role in the onset and maintenance of hair pulling episodes. Regardless of the factors that trigger episodes, a comprehensive biopsychosocial assessment that includes environmental stressors (past, present and anticipated) should be explored.
The options for treatment of TM are limited at best. SSRIs have demonstrated some potential in the treatment of TM, but more research is needed before we can consider SSRIs as a legitimate first-line treatment. SSRIs are worth a shot as an adjunct treatment in cases of chronic, refractory, or treatment resistant TM. I would consider recommending a referral to a psychiatrist (not a general practitioner) for a medication review due in part to the favorable risk profile of the most recent round of SSRIs. Given the high rate of comorbidity with mood and anxiety disorders – if either is anxiety or depression are comorbid, SSRIs will likely be recommended regardless. Killing two birds with one stone is the order of the day, but be mindful that some medication can interfere with certain treatment techniques like imaginal or in vivo exposure. (Ledley, Marx, & Heimberg, 2010, p. 141) Additional research is needed before anxiolytic medications can be recommended in the absence of comorbid anxiety disorders (especially with children). Hypnosis and hypnotic suggestion in combination with other behavioral interventions may be helpful for some individuals, but I don’t know enough about it at this time to recommend it. Call me skeptical, or ignorant, but I prefer to save the parlor tricks for the circus…
Habit reversal is no parlor trick. My goal isn’t to heal the patient; that would create a level of dependence I am not comfortable with… my goal is to teach clients how to heal themselves. Okay, but how? The combination of Competing Response Training, Awareness/Mindfulness Training, Relaxation Training, Contingency Management, Cognitive Restructuring, and Generalization Training is the best hope for someone who seeks some relief from TM. Collectively I will refer to this collection of techniques as Habit Reversal.
Competing Response Training is employed in direct response to hair pulling or in situations where hair pulling might be likely. In the absence of “internal restraints to impulsive behavior,” artificial circumstances are created by identifying substitute behaviors that are totally incompatible with pulling hair. (Ingram, 2012, p. 292) Just like a compulsive gambling addict isn’t in any danger if spends all his money on rent, someone with TM is much less likely to pull hair if they are doing something else with their hands.
Antecedents, or triggers, are sometimes referred to as discriminative stimuli. (Ingram, 2012, p. 230) “We sense objects in a certain way because of our application of priori intuitions…” (Pirsig, 1999, p. 133) Altering the underlying assumptions entrenched in maladaptive priori intuitions is the core purpose of Awareness and Mindfulness Training. “There is a lack of constructive self-talk mediating between the trigger event and the behavior. The therapist helps the client build intervening self-messages: Slow down and think it over; think about the consequences.” (Ingram, 2012, p. 221) The connection to contingency management should be self evident. Utilizing a customized self-monitoring record, the patient begins to acquire the necessary insight to “spot” maladaptive self talk. “Spotting” is not a new or novel concept – it is central component of Abraham Low’s revolutionary self help system Recovery International. (Abraham Low Self-Help Systems, n.d.) The customized self-monitoring record should invariably include various data elements such as precursors, length of episode, number of hairs pulled, and a subjective unit of distress representing the level of “urge” or desire to pull hair. (Kraemer, 1999) The act of recording behavior (even in the absence of other techniques) is likely to produce significant reductions in TM symptomatlogy. (Persons, 2008, p. 182-201) Perhaps more importantly, associated activities, thoughts, and emotions that may be contributing to the urge to pull should be codified. (Kraemer, 1999, p. 300) In session, this record can be reviewed and subsequently tied to “high risk circumstances” and “priori intuitions” involving constructs such as anger, frustration, depression, and boredom.
Relaxation training is a critical component if we subscribe to the “kindling” hypothesis explained previously. Relaxation is intended to reduce the urges that inevitably trigger the habit. Examples abound, but diaphragmatic breathing, progressive relaxation, and visualization are all techniques that can be employed in isolation or in conjunction with each other.
Contingency Management is inexorably tied to the existential anchor of cognitive dissonance described above. My emphasis on this element is where my approach might differ from some other clinicians. “You are free to do whatever you want, but you are responsible for the consequences of everything that you do.” (Ingram, 2012, p. 270) This might include the client writing down sources of embarrassment, advantages of controlling the symptomatlogy of TM, etc. (Kraemer, 1999) The moment someone with pyromania decides that no fire worth being imprisoned, they will stop starting fires. The same holds true with someone who acknowledges the consequences of pulling their hair.
How do we define success? Once habit reversal is successfully accomplished in one setting or situation, the client needs to be taught how to generalize that skill to other contexts. A hierarchical ranking of anxiety provoking situations can be helpful in this process since self-paced graduated exposure is likely to increase tolerability for the anxious client. (Ingram, 2012, p. 240) If skills are acquired, and generalization occurs, we can reasonably expect a significant reduction in TM symptomatlogy. The challenges are significant, cognitive behavioral therapy is much easier said than done. High levels of treatment motivation are required for the behavioral elements, and moderate to high levels of insight are exceptionally helpful for the cognitive elements. In addition, this is an impulse control disorder… impulsivity leads to treatment noncompliance and termination. The combination of all the above, in addition to the fact that TM is generally acknowledged as one of the more persistent and difficult to treat disorders, prevents me from providing any prognosis other than “this treatment will work as well as the client allows it to work.”
Abraham Low Self-Help Systems. (n.d.). Recovery international terms and definitions. Retrieved August 2, 2012, from http://www.lowselfhelpsystems.org/system/recovery-international-language.asp
American Psychiatric Association. (2000). Diagnostic and statistical manual of mental disorders (4th ed., text rev.). Washington, DC: Author.
Frankl, V. E. (1997). Man’s search for meaning (rev. ed.). New York, NY: Pocket Books.
Ingram, B. L. (2012). Clinical case formulations: Matching the integrative treatment plan to the client (2nd ed.). Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons.
Kraemer, P. A. (1999). The application of habit reversal in treating trichotillomania. Psychotherapy: Theory, Research, Practice, Training, 36(3), 298-304. doi: 10.1037/h0092314
Lambert, K. G., & Kinsley, C. H. (2011). Clinical neuroscience: Psychopathology and the brain (2nd ed.). New York: Oxford University Press.
Ledley, D. R., Marx, B. P., & Heimberg, R. G. (2010). Making cognitive-behavioral therapy work: Clinical process for new practitioners (2nd ed.). New York, NY: Guilford Press.
Persons, J. B. (2008). The case formulation approach to cognitive-behavior therapy. New York, NY: Guilford Press.
Pirsig, R. M. (1999). Zen and the art of motorcycle maintenance: An inquiry into values (25th Anniversary ed.). New York: Quill.
Shiel, W. C., Jr., & Stoppler, M. C. (Eds.). (2008). Webster’s new world medical dictionary (3rd ed.). Hoboken, NJ: Wiley Publishing.
Young, J. E., Klosko, J. S., & Weishaar, M. E. (2003). Schema therapy: A practitioner’s guide. New York: Guilford Press. |
- Category: Belize Vacations
- Published on Friday, 26 August 2011 01:02
- Written by Trys
- Hits: 23369
Our Belize Vacations package take in the tropical rain forests, abundant wildlife, fascinating Mayan monuments, awesome underground caves, amazing coral reefs, mangroves and wetlands; they involve activities such as world-class snorkeling or diving along the coral reef, zip-lining through the rainforest canopy, tubing through a caves branch system, jungle horseback riding, river and lagoon wildlife cruising, exploring the ruins of ancient Mayan cities and other activities to experience the beauty of the tropical ecology in Belize. |
Register for Saint Consulting’s Energy Industry Learning Lunch
Thanks for your interest in joining Jay Vincent for a Saint Consulting Energy Learning Lunch on Tuesday, November 6 at 12 noon CST.
The Learning Lunch series is designed to give insight and training for energy industry professionals. In this session, we will discuss managing communications with your leasehold. Free, insightful, useful lunch-hour discussion.
Let us know if you can attend! Please fill out the information below and we will contact you shortly with information on registration and dial-up details for the webinar. |
Follow us on Facebook @ www.facebook.com/T1Truth & Twitter @T1Truth - T1Truth is dedicated to providing just that and allowing the reader to decide if they wish to accept or deny reality.
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Instrument cleanliness is important to any wind instrument, and critical to the proper operation of any brasswind instrument. I would estimate that 60% of trombone slide problems that I encounter involve cleanliness, and dents and alignment are only 40% of the problem. Also, I have witnessed the mangling of too many valve springs on piston and rotary instruments where the player wanted faster action, and all that was needed was a good cleaning. Instrument cleaning is central to my repair operations, and I strive to render each instrument as clean as when it left the factory… or better. To this end, I treat each brasswind instrument I work on to a chemical cleaning of the appropriate level. First, each instrument is disassembled and washed thoroughly with warm (not hot) water, a good degreasing detergent, and appropriate scrub brushes. Once the parts have been thoroughly degreased, then they are immersed for 20-30 seconds in a de-limer/de-scaler solution, to remove calcification. This calcium buildup is the culprit that makes your valves still feel rough and gritty after you’ve washed them at home. Home-cleaning of instruments is good and recommended, but occasionally the instrument should still be professionally cleaned. After immersion in the de-limer/de-scaler, the parts are thoroughly rinsed, then immersed for about 5 seconds in bright dip solution. This acid essentially turns the brass bright yellow again, so that it essentially looks like new. The solution does not react with lacquer, but does make silver-plate turn hazy, so a silver-plated instrument must be completely hand-ragged and silver polished after being chemically-cleaned. This treatment removes any buildup from Monel pistons, making them perform like new or better, and the chemical reaction with the brass not only makes it look better, but gives long-term protection from corrosion.
After being bright-dipped, the parts are carefully rinsed and then thoroughly washed yet again in warm water and detergent, then rinsed again, dried, and inspected. If any green/white deposits remain, these parts are given extra attention and re-cleaned, until the instrument is flawlessly clean. I like to completely dry the inside of the instrument as well as the inside and outside of all parts, so that the lubricants will adhere to the metal better and not be diluted. All slides are checked for proper fit, and alignment adjustments are made as necessary. Valves are precision-aligned with the appropriate felts, corks or rotor bumpers, then the instrument is assembled using the appropriate Hetman lubricants. They are non-toxic, and provide the highest level of performance from your instrument and highest level of protection for the slides and valves. On trombones, I will either lubricate the handslide with Trombotine cream and Hetman HydroSlide, with Slide-O-Mix, or leave the slide dry and let the customer treat it himself. On valved instruments, the springs are evaluated and replaced if necessary, to ensure quiet, fast operation. I carry valve guides for every major make of instrument, and replace them if needed during this operation. The result is an instrument you can play with confidence. This instrument cleaning service is my basic, professional play-condition servicing, which includes removal of minor dents, replacing the water key cork(s) if necessary, and polishing the silver or lacquer. |
Florida Today Coverage and footage of the Guinness Event Worlds Fastest Banjo Player, Grammy Nominated Banjo Player Todd Taylor Sets New World Record.
Erio Meili on May 10, 2009, picking the tune "Sunday", at 330 bpm at the Titanic Harbor Stage, 660 notes per minute (10 notes per second) - former record was...
- Mean Mary
http://meanmary.com Mean Mary playing a fast banjo rendition of Cripple Creek on her Deering Goodtime openback. This video was shot on the steps of a long ca...
- Andrew Kidd
My rendition of an old Earl Scruggs tune called Groundspeed.
This isn't a very good banjo lesson, but none of them are.. hahaha.
Isaac carrell playing for our church. watch to the end, this 19 year old is quite impressive! As well as his 17 year old sister on Mandolin...
Guiness World Record Holder For Fastest Banjo. Todd Taylor Playing EL CUMBANCHERO from the Grammy Nominated Cd 3-FIVE-N. arrangent on Banjo By Todd Taylor Wr...
Now charting on Billboard! - Sleepy Man Banjo Boys 'America's Music' iTunes - http://bit.ly/A3lyIo Amazon - http://amzn.to/xWX0Wf CD - http://www.sleepymanba...
Guinness World Record attempt, Johnny Butten playing dueling banjos at an incredible 260 beats per minute on a Kel Kroydon KK10 banjo from American Made Banj...
- Tim McGaughy
I don't know if it's possible to play any faster than this. Unreal!!! Smokin' Fiddle Blistering Banjo Mercurial Mandolin.
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Basecamp is an excellent online software package that makes project management and collaboration easy.
Created by 37signals, the entire Basecamp system is accessed and managed online, so none of the software or data is actually stored on your computer. You can share the project management with your fellow freelancers or an entire company.
Basecamp helps you manage multiple projects at a time with to-do lists, file sharing, chatting, messages, calendars and time tracking. 37signals offers a trimmed-down free version, which is great for starting out, as well as monthly plans.
We show you how to manage, save and export your projects in GarageBand. view it
We show you how to create a basic project using the sounds included with GarageBand. view it
Here's how to put a project together using up to eight instruments and how to see and use the GarageBand timeline. view it
We show you how you can use Picasa to collaborate with others by building and sharing photo albums. view it
Easily share and collaborate on documents with sharing in Google Docs view it
We show you a couple of ways that you can share your GarageBand songs with your friends and family. view it
We show you some of the options available to you when it comes time to export your GarageBand project. view it |
Today is the annual holiday in memory of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr, civil rights leader who was assassinated in Memphis, Tennessee on April 4, 1968. Being as that tragic event was over 43 years ago, there are many young people now who do not remember Dr. King, who was born on January 15, 1929.
I came across one of his famous quotes recently:
“Cowardice asks the question, ‘Is it safe?’
Expediency asks the question, ‘Is it politic?’
Vanity asks the question, ‘Is it popular?’
But, conscience asks the question, ‘Is it right?’
And there comes a time when one must take a position that is neither safe, nor politic, nor popular, but one must take it because one’s conscience tells one that it is right.”
Today let us reflect about Dr. King’s legacy about what is right to do in political issues, especially this year as we embark upon another Presidential election, redistricting of current maps, civility in public discourse.
And FREE today at the Loft Cinema (3233 E. Speedway) at 5 pm.: “Do the Right Thing” 1989 movie directed by Spike Lee:
“DO THE RIGHT THING, Spike Lee’s incendiary (and controversial) look at race relations in America, circa New York City in 1989, is a joyful, tumultuous masterpiece – perhaps one of the best films ever made about race in America, revealing racial prejudices and stereotypes in all their guises and demonstrating how a deadly riot can erupt out of a series of small misunderstandings.
Set on one block in Bedford-Stuyvesant on the hottest day of the summer, the movie showcases the whole spectrum of ethnically-diverse life in this neighborhood, raises the heat to a high boil, and then leaves it up to us to decide if, in the end, anybody actually does the “right thing.” Featuring a stellar cast including Danny Aiello as Sal, the pizza parlor owner; Lee himself as Mookie, the lazy pizza-delivery guy; John Turturro and Richard Edson as Sal’s sons; Lee’s sister Joie as Mookie’s sister Jade; Rosie Perez as Mookie’s girlfriend Tina; Ossie Davis and Ruby Dee as the block elders, Da Mayor and Mother Sister; Giancarlo Esposito as Mookie’s hot-headed friend Buggin’ Out; Bill Nunn as the boom-box toting Radio Raheem; and Samuel L. Jackson as deejay Mister Señor Love Daddy.
Brash, bold and highly entertaining, DO THE RIGHT THING is a rich and nuanced film to watch, treasure, and learn from–over and over again.”
Let us remember Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. today and what he stood (and marched) for.
UPDATE: My comments on the MLK events in Tucson below in comment section. |
January is Adopt-A-Rescued-Bird Month. Bird ownership requires dedication. Some birds can live to be 60 – 80 years old while smaller birds have shorter life spans. Owners are still encouraged to research the bird they hope to provide a home for in order to make certain that they are prepared for the special needs of their new feathered friend.
Here are three doves who really need a great home.
Pearl, Lacey and Rex have been socialized their entire lives and never flinch at being handled. Their little dove laughs are always a hoot! If you could give these docile darlings a lifetime of proper care, please ask to meet these feathered friends at the Humane Society of Southern Arizona.
Pearl – #743472 – 8 Years Old – Female
Lacey – #743585 – 8 Years Old – Female
Rex – #743586 – 8 Years Old – Male
Check out this dove page to learn about what doves need for care. |
I can’t eat out for a whole month now. Check out the big ouchies that I love so much.
I went to Nordstroms to check out the quality of the Garden Eyeshadow Quad by Dior, which has a rose motif. After swapping all of the eyeshadow releases, I was convinced I was in love. We were set on getting just the eyeshadow, until the nice saleslady noticed my shitty ass Makeup Forever foundation that wasn’t the right shade for me. I knew beforehand too but was too lazy on returning it back to Sephora. She showed me this Airflash Foundation and it seemed too good to be true…until I noticed how matte my face was and how concealed my scars were. And I was told that I only needed to use a moisturizer prior application. But in order to apply this without wasting, I would need to use a half-bristle brush. And thus, now I am banned from eating at Brother’s Sushi for a long time.
Now I know why I don’t shop at department stores. They just know what you want and can get you to throw your meals away for it.
I returned the Makeup Forever foundation for the following items: |
Tire choices for that size are limited. Try 295-15, Firestone or BF G.
1987 Turbo T, sorry all.
Guess you can not edit the Post Title. As a sanity check all my kids are under 6 and the baby has had me up every night for...
Located in Colorado Springs, CO. $14,700 150K miles on the odo. Recent 12” LS1 brakes and new hydro-boost unit. New Kuhomo Ecsta Sports tires, Rev...
Toddmc66 all I can recommend is measure twice purchase once. Will all 4 be the same size wheel? Are you considering a front brake upgrade in the...
Is the GNX dash cluster harness for analog p/n 108180 or digital p/n 108179?
Current tire size is the same as V6UP's. Now here is something interesting, I installed the Boss 338 from my 71 442 that are 18*9.5 w/5.125 in of BS...
Also if you are planning a front brake upgrade this could change the BS.
Measure both rear BS twice, buy once. The Rev 100s are decent
I have 17*9 w 5in BS on the rear.
I'll take the Wilwood proportioning valve. Let me know how you would like payment.
Looking for a TV detent cable.
I have a set of SSBC PC silver, $75 shipped.
Interested in the DS lower air vent trim piece. What color is it? Grey or blue?
I'll take the TV cable.
Let me know you would like payment.
Interested in the TV cable, if it is an original GM for a Buick GN.
Let me know cost shipped to 80916.
The wheel sizes are before the tire size. The 275/40/18 on the Boss 338s (18*9.5) had a 1/4 inch plus from the frame, but all cars are different....
I have Rev 17*9s on the rear with 275/40s with no issues using moog lowering springs. For a while I had Boss 338s on the rear using. Eibach lowering...
Did Campbells automotive provide you a build sheet?
Are you prepared to ship? Colorado Springs, CO 80916, PM me info.
Have you noticed any fluid leaking? Check the fluid level again too.
I would triple check the fluid level. Then do a pressure check on the tranny's port. If you do not have the pressure gauge you can disconnect the...
How would you like payment?
Separate names with a comma. |
New Federal Income Tax Laws
Both federal and state income tax laws change every year. Some tax programs are initiated with planned expirations, and other items like the income tax rates are changed every year to ostensibly adjust to the national economic climate. The new federal income tax lawscan be quite confusing to keep up with because many of them are created for many different reasons.
One of the most basic things you can check is the amount of the standard deduction for tax payers for the current tax year. For 2011 married couples filing jointly can take $11,900. Single people and those filing separately can take $5,950, and $ 8,700 for qualified head of the household.
Lets take a look at some of the anticipated new federal income tax laws and tax credits and deductions.
The federal estate tax will move on with its new five million dollar exemption with a maximum rate of 35%. It was not always five million dollars mind you, and these rates are set to expire after 2012.
Also continuing into 2012 will be the lowered tax rates on long term capital gains.
The child tax credit is still doing it what it does.
Higher contributions are allowed for your 401k and IRA.
The student loan interest deduction is still in play.
The mileage deduction has actually decreased by 2.5 cents.
The gift tax exclusion has increased by $1,000.
The American opportunity tax credit is still rolling strong.
A temporary increase in the earned income tax credit for those with three children or more.
2011 is the last tax year for the special itemized deduction of mortgage insurance premiums.
The piss-poor 30% energy tax credit is gone after 2011.
Beginning in 2013, debt forgiven in connection with the foreclosure of a principal will once again be recognized as taxable income.
There are many more new federal income tax laws that are still fair play for the tax year of 2011. If you use an online tax service like TurboTax then you’ll actually have a hard time missing anything. The software works on the basis of asking you multiple series of questions that insure it knows what you do and don’t qualify for. In fact, their “biggest refund guarantee” has never been contested.
If you’re not planning on actually using them as a filing service, you can still browse their website for general information about tax law changes for the current and future years. |
Why Tutofig ?
You can find here answers & tutorials to all the questions miniature painters and sculptors could have. How to blend colors, how to do a NMM, an OSL, how to sculpt a face, build a diorama... for your 28-54mm miniatures. Tutofig compiles more than 2000 "how to" or step by step, made by impassioned people, in various languages. Being Games workshop addict, who wants to paint armies, or contest painters searching for the last missing tips, you can find here everything you could wish... Learn, rhapsodize on other's work and share your own tutorials !
|Author :||Massive voodoo|
|Categories :||1- Language, 2- Painting, EN, Preparing the mini, Priming|
This time i want to talk about light. As you know Miniature painting lives from Light that you paint on your miniature. Highlighting here and there to give areas a more clear order. Light works only with shadow and shadow only works with light – the so called Dark/Bright Colour Contrast. This article shows my personal view on the topic – additional comments always welcome… |
Monday, January 28 (7-9 a.m.): Cissy Houston talks about her book Remembering Whitney. The new maternity test. Cruise deals. Today's Trends of 2013: Food.(9-10 a.m.): New food guidelines for kids. Reinvent your closet. Today's cooking.(10-11 a.m.): How to be comfy but look good. Working mom. Get your game on with Kathie Lee and Hoda.Tuesday, January 29 (7-9 a.m.): The professionals. Michael Bolton talks about his book The Soul of It All: My Music, My Life. Today gives hope. Emeli Sande performs in studio.(9-10 a.m.): Discovery Channel's Raising Sextuplets. 7 habits for a healthier heart.(10-11 a.m.): Are you your best friend's worst enemy? Emeli Sande performs. Get your game on with Kathie Lee and Hoda.Wednesday, January 30 (7-9 a.m.): Cabaret reunion with Liza Minnelli, Joel Grey, Michael York and Marisa Berenson. Celebrity homes. Today's Kitchen with Mark Bittman.(9-10 a.m.): Steals and deals. Stephen Pasquale on Today. Modern day digital etiquette. When is it okay to?(10-11 a.m.): Cabaret reunion with Liza Minnelli, Joel Grey, Michael York and Marisa Berenson. Enjoy dropping the pounds. Michael Bolton on Today.Thursday, January 31 (7-9 a.m.): Christopher Walken talks about Stand Up Guys. Identity theft. Ed Sheeran performs.(9-10 a.m.): Today's Professionals. Heart healthy week. Power tools that empower women.(10-11 a.m.): Ambush makeovers. Healthy home. Ed Sheeran performs.Friday, February 1 (7-9 a.m.): Kevin Spacey and Robin Wright talk about House of Cards. Wing cook-off. Healthy heart week.(9-10 a.m.): What real estate you can get for your money. Valentine's Day gifts outside the box! Holiday skin.(10-11 a.m.): Super Bowl cook-off. Super Bowl party.
More Articles by This Author...
FLASH SPECIAL: Always - An Irving Berlin 125th Birthday Celebration
UPDATE: Emily Blunt to Join INTO THE WOODS Film as 'The Baker's Wife'; Plus Christine Baranski as 'The Stepmother'?
Taylor Swift Partners with Diet Coke & Target to Find Fashion's Next Star
Apple and Sony iRadio Negotiations Stymied by Song-Skipping
BWW Reviews: ?And the Winners Were?? A Report Card for the Metropolitan Opera's 2012-2013 Season
BWW Reviews: Juilliard Graduates Show Off Their Talent with SEVEN NEW HUES
Regional Orchestra of the Week: Delaware Symphony Orchestra |
The 5th season of Black Gold gets off to a hot start with temps - and tempers - rising, with no end in sight. Brandon struggles to keep a crew on Rig 28, and puts his hands at risk by running a bare bones operation. When a worm hits the dirt, it could be the end of his drilling days. Cheston's found a new gig with plenty of perks, but gets lonely on his own. Will a heartfelt plea from his pal be enough to get him back with Big Dog? And when a gas leak sends the roughnecks running, will they all make it out alive?
More Articles by This Author...
FLASH SPECIAL: Always - An Irving Berlin 125th Birthday Celebration
UPDATE: Emily Blunt to Join INTO THE WOODS Film as 'The Baker's Wife'; Plus Christine Baranski as 'The Stepmother'?
Taylor Swift Partners with Diet Coke & Target to Find Fashion's Next Star
Apple and Sony iRadio Negotiations Stymied by Song-Skipping
BWW Reviews: ?And the Winners Were?? A Report Card for the Metropolitan Opera's 2012-2013 Season
BWW Reviews: Juilliard Graduates Show Off Their Talent with SEVEN NEW HUES
Regional Orchestra of the Week: Delaware Symphony Orchestra |
SCIENCE announced that it is taking viewers further inside NASA's latest mission to Mars with the exclusive world premiere of i.am.mars: REACH FOR THE STARS tonight, September 19, 2012, at 10 PM ET/PT. The special documents the artistic and technical process behind "Reach for the Stars," will.i.am's newest single that became the first song ever to be broadcast from another planet to Earth.
In what is being hailed as "the most complex Mars mission to date," NASA's Curiosity spacecraft successfully landed on the red planet on August 6, 2012. Since then the Curiosity rover has returned stunning photographs and valuable information about the Martian surface that is helping scientists determine if it has the ability to support life.
Recently, Curiosity also returned will.i.am's new song "Reach for the Stars" as - for the first time in history - recorded music was broadcast from a planet to Earth. i.am.mars: REACH FOR THE STARS profiles will.i.am's passion for science and his belief in inspiring the next generation of scientists through STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Math) education.
i.am.mars: REACH FOR THE STARS also gives viewers a window into his creative process, as well as the recording of the song with a full children's choir and orchestra. In addition, viewers also go inside the engineering challenges NASA faced in uploading the song to Curiosity, and the hard work required to make the historic 700 million mile interplanetary broadcast a reality.
"Between MARS LANDING 2012: THE NEW SEARCH FOR LIFE and i.am.mars: REACH FOR THE STARS, SCIENCE is consumed with the bold exploration of the red planet," said Debbie Myers, general manager and executive vice president of SCIENCE. "We hope our viewers are as inspired as we are by the creativity, imagination and daring of both will.i.am and NASA."
i.am.mars will be distributed to schools nationwide through Discovery Education's digital streaming services. SCIENCE and Discovery Education will also work with Affiliates to promote i.am.mars' educational resources for use in schools and with community organizations, brining the magic of Mars to life. |
ESPN has NBA action right through the Playoffs and The Finals in June, all in stunning HD.
Regular Season Games, Prime Time Christmas Day Action, Slam Dunk Monday, NBA All-Star Weekend, NBA Playoffs and The Finals – All Live and in HD
Missed a game? Fear not… Catch NBA Tonight on ESPN and ESPN America delivering highlights and news from around the league, including a recap of the past day’s on-court action and stats as well as a flavorful delight of top 10 dunks, plays, blocks, assists, steals and more…..
Check out the “Live NBA” tab to the right for upcoming live fixtures!
|22 May - 00:30||LIVE: NBA COUNTDOWN|
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Glee Exclusive: Darren Criss and Harry Shum Jr. In, Chord Overstreet Out!
It’s a case of good news/bad news for Glee fans.
And now for the not so good news…
Chord Overstreet‘s series regular option has not been picked up. However, a source close to the show says the actor — who joined the Fox hit last fall in the recurring role of McKinley transfer student Sam Evans — could return as an occasional guest star.
Late Friday, Overstreet issued a cryptic tweet saying, “It’s been a good year. Too bad it’s over. Time for summer and starting fresh.”
The news comes two weeks after series creator Ryan Murphy raised eyebrows when he told Ryan Seacrest that most of the show’s primary characters would graduate by the end of next season. “The show to me is about the way you express yourself as you start to move out into the world as a fresh, young person,” he later clarified to TVLine. “Do we really want to have an eight-year [high school] senior? The only way somebody could stay on the show is if they flunk, and that is always a possibility. I think Brittany is pulling straight Fs.”
Thoughts? Bummed about Chord? Psyched about Harry/Darren? Hit the comments!
Want Glee Scoop 24/7? Follow Ausiello on Twitter via @MichaelAusiello |
You have eden eyes. Eden is the color of water. Your eyes symbolize your great flexibility. You are a creative person. You can think of many good ways to get your point across to people as you have very good communication abilities. When someone feels down or is hurt, you have the remarkable ability to help them and heal them. If you have too little going on in your life, you may be withdrawn and depressed, timid, manipulative, unreliable, stubborn, or suspicious. Some words to describe you: peaceful, sincere, affectionate, tranquil, intuitive, trustworthy, pure, loyal, healing, and stable. |
[url=http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/20070212_high_time_for_voting_reform/]High Time for Voting Reform
By Marie Cocco
WASHINGTON—For those who despair that it’s way too early to start thinking about the 2008 presidential election—and who doesn’t?—there is a more productive way to spend political effort: Start working to ensure that the vote goes better in 2008 than it has in any election since the catastrophe of 2000.
Save for a single Florida congressional district—the one previously held, fittingly enough, by Katherine Harris—the 2006 congressional elections produced clear winners and losers, with relatively few allegations that machine malfunctions or partisan malfeasance changed the outcome. But that doesn’t mean there weren’t machine malfunctions, partisan malfeasance—and a certain chaotic quality to whole affair.
Touch-screen machines mysterious flipped voters’ choices or failed to record them at all, cards to activate the computers went missing, poll workers sometimes didn’t even know how to turn machines on. New identification requirements, and poll workers’ confused interpretations of them, vexed hundreds of would-be voters—including Rep. Steve Chabot, R-Ohio, who was turned away from the polls until he returned with identification bearing his home address.
“Around the country, the individual voting experience didn’t go well,’’ says Doug Chapin, director of electionline.org, a nonpartisan organization that tracks the performance of the voting system.
Help is on the way—from Florida, of all places.
"Behind every great fortune lies a great crime."
Honore de Balzac
"Democrats work to help people who need help.
That other party, they work for people who don't need help.
That's all there is to it."
~Harry S. Truman |
“Emily Owens, M.D.” premiered tonight on The CW and if you read my preview (you did, right?), then you already know that I’m a big fan. As much as I love The CW (and I do), their promo campaign for the show was kind of the worst and ever since I watched the screener, I’ve been telling (begging) people to just ignore the promos, watch the show and see for yourselves just how awesome it is. Hopefully, people listened because I need Justin Hartley on my TV weekly. But on the off chance people still need convincing; here’s a recap of the first episode simply titled, “Pilot.”
We meet Emily (Mamie Gummer, who is fabulous on every level and the spitting image of her mother, Queen Meryl Streep) as she stands outside the hospital; her voiceover describing how excited she is about finally being an adult and taking the next step in her life so she can leave the past behind and then this high school kid starts making fun of her. Emily argues with the girl, insists that she’s not a loser and then embarrasses herself in front of an adult at the school, who comes to see why an adult is yelling at a child. Awkward, but Emily shakes it off and steps inside the hospital to begin her new life.
The first person she runs into is Will (Hartley), her med school crush and she mentally berates herself to be cool so of course she’s the opposite. Will tells her that he’s really glad they’re both doing their internships there because he’s heard hospitals are cutthroat and just like high school. Will puts his arm around her and tells her that the two of them need to stick together and Emily pretty much melts and forgets how to use her brain (But can you blame her? Take a good look at Will. I rest my case). The two head into the locker room and Emily is horrified when she hears someone call her, “Pits.”
Cassandra (Aja Naomi King) was Emily’s high school rival, her tormentor, the person who made her life a living hell (again something that is easy to relate to. Everyone knew a horrible girl like that or maybe you were that horrible girl. To each her own), and of course Cassandra is there for the same reason Emily is, to work with the amazing Dr. Gina Bandari. Will asks about the nickname, but Cassandra says she doesn’t remember why they called Emily that and Emily certainly isn’t volunteering. Cassandra has eyes so she checks out Will and Emily is not amused. The two seem to bond quickly and then Tyra (Kelly McCreary) introduces herself to Emily. She’s the chief’s daughter, she’s a lesbian and she also believes hospitals are just like high school.
Next, we meet Dr. Bandari (Necar Zadegan), who is completely no nonsense and tells the interns that they’re basically at her beck and call and maybe, someday, if they’re lucky, they’ll get to see the inside of an operating room. She introduces them to their resident, Micah Barnes (Michael Rady), who is a little (a lot) nicer than Gina and reminds Emily to breathe as they begin their rounds. The first patient is a 12-year-old girl named Julia, who fainted at school. As Will presents the case, Emily is distracted by his jaw and how much she wants to caress it, but she manages to hold herself together when Dr. Bandari calls on her. The diagnosis is simple fainting and Emily is left alone with the patient to discharge her, but she starts coding.
Emily freaks out and shouts for a doctor before a nurse reminds her that she is one. Emily saves Julia and all the interns are really impressed, until Cassandra points out the flop sweats that Emily was suffering from and said that was why they called her, “Pits.” After that, Emily’s pager is missing and she’s convinced that Cassandra took it from her. There’s an emergency being brought in; two brothers who were in a car accident because one of them was drinking. One brother is hurt more severely and his pregnant wife freaks out on the brother who was driving for being so irresponsible.
As Emily and Will wait for the test results, Emily tries to work up the nerve to tell Will how she feels about him and mentally says that she’ll move closer to him and if he doesn’t move away, that means he likes her too (if you’ve never played this game inside your own head, saying that if “A” happens, it means “B”, then you’re probably not human). But Emily decides not to say anything. Later, she accuses Cassandra of stealing her pager, which she denies. Micah asks the two of them to help a woman who has dementia by tracking down her daughter. But the two women keep arguing and the patient ends up wandering away from them. Luckily, Micah finds her and covers for Emily with Dr. Bandari.
Tyra finds Emily’s pager and asks her for a favor in return. There’s a nurse that’s been staring at her and she wants to find out if she’s a lesbian. It turns out the chief has no idea about Tyra. So Emily awkwardly tries to make conversation and the nurse tells her that she’s not gay, but if she was, she’d never go for someone like Emily (ouch). Will finds Emily standing outside the OR watching a surgery and the two talk about their first cuts. Will tells Emily how impressed he was with her and once again, Emily tries to make herself tell him how she feels, but can’t make the words come out.
Emily figures out that the brother was lying about who was driving because he was the screw up and he didn’t want to see his brother’s life ruined. The daughter of the dementia patient arrives at the hospital, but Emily doesn’t like that she’s so willing to abandon her mother so she refuses to give her the papers to sign. Emily goes to check on Julia and she tells her that she has a date with her crush and encourages Emily to tell Will that she likes him because she thinks he likes her too. Julia asks Emily to be there for her surgery and Emily tells her to ask Dr. Bandari. That request does not go over well and Dr. Bandari lets Emily have it, making it clear that she is on her bad side.
Will comforts her and reminds her that she’s great and Emily finally opens up and tells him that she wants him and she’s liked him for a long time and Will just stares at her with this pained expression on his face (I seriously wanted to die for her. It was the most awkward, uncomfortable moment in the whole world). Will tries to let her down gently and tell her that he just doesn’t see her that way, but they can still be friends, but the damage is done and poor Emily heads to the stairwell to drown her feelings in vending machine food (again, I dare you to tell me you’ve never been at that point).
Micah finds Emily and she tells him that she’s having the worst day, but he points out the people in the hospital are having a much worse day than her. Emily feels bad, but he’s very sweet about it (admittedly, I’m Team Micah right now as far as the triangle goes, even though I feel guilty rooting against Will, but hello, awkward). Emily lectures the dementia patient’s daughter and Cassandra steps in and takes Emily to task. It turns out Cassandra has a brother with cystic fibrosis so she understands the hardship the daughter is going through. Cassandra warns Emily that she doesn’t want her pity and she’s still a bitch. Emily agrees, but wants to know why. Cassandra admits that she was jealous that school came so easily to Emily. She warns her that if she tells anyone, she’ll deny it and spread a nasty rumor about her.
Emily gets to observe Julia’s surgery and something goes wrong (If you followed my “Saving Hope” recaps, you know medical stuff is not my thing so if you’re looking for detailed surgical terms, this is not where you will find them). There’s a lot of blood, Emily helps Dr. Bandari and Julia is going to be fine. That’s all that really matters, right? The surgery was a success. Unfortunately for Emily, Tyra tells her that all the nurses think she’s a weird, predatory lesbian because of what happened with Nurse Jessica. Emily is getting ready to leave and she goes into the stairwell and sees the chief kissing Jessica. She quickly backs away, but they totally made eye contact.
One of the patients Micah had mentioned earlier when he was pointing out who was having a worse day than Emily was a woman whose son had to tell her that she had pancreatic cancer and it turned out that Micah was the son. His mother wanted the news and he told her that there were clinical trials they could try, but it clearly wasn’t good (Rady nailed this scene).
As Emily leaves the hospital, she runs into that high school kid again, who seems impressed that Emily is a doctor. Her voiceover goes into the fact that no one ever tells you that you never really feel like an adult because your insecurities and anxieties never really go away and once you’re an adult, you just feel stupid for having them because you’re supposed to be over it by then and have the answers (so true). Emily is feeling better until she sees Will and Cassandra walking out together and then she just rolls her eyes and thinks that it’s got to get better than this, right?
So there you have it. Yes, the show has its cutesy moments and if you’re not a fan of voiceovers, it’s probably not the show for you. But Emily is not a caricature like certain other people who shall not be named. She feels like a real person and she’s easy to relate to. All of the characters feel very real and well developed. This isn’t “Grey’s Anatomy” and it’s not “Scrubs” either. It’s a really well-written and well-acted show about people who are just trying to figure out life while they do their jobs.
If you enjoyed the pilot, I can tell you that next week’s episode is even better and remember what I said about being Team Micah? I’m already back on Team Will after watching the second episode. Hit the comments and let us know what you think and I’ll see you next week. |
After the runaway success of Mega Man 2, Capcom realized they had a hit franchise on their hands, and it was only natural for them to soon follow up with Mega Man 3 in 1990.The story is centered some time after 2, where Dr. Wily has seemingly reformed after his previous two defeats, and is now working alongside Dr. Light to build a peacekeeping robot called Gamma. However, a batch of robot masters in charge of eight mining operations go berserk and start reaking havoc. Naturally, Mega Man is sent off to stop the rogue machines, this time with the help of his new canine companion, Rush! Along his journies, he encounters a mysterious being called Break Man, who keeps fighting him, as if to test him...Obviously, it turns out Dr. Wily was behind the whole scheme, tricking Mega Man into defeating the robot masters so he could steal Light's prototype robot and use it for his own evil ends. Oh yes, and "Break Man" turns out to be Proto Man, Mega Man's long lost older brother.All in all, 3 was another hit in the series, selling over a million copies and receiving excellent critical reception, although not quite on par with 2. The refined gameplay of 2 was expanded upon further, with the "Items" turned into the far more flexible Rush vehicles, a much higher limit on how many E-Tanks you could carry (nine instead of four), and a new slide move. On top of that, 3 is the longest game in the entire NES Mega Man series, with a whopping 18 stages total! Unfortunately, Keiji Inafune claimed that 3 was his least favorite Mega Man game, due to the strained development of the game keeping it from reaching its full potential in his eyes, as well as losing the simplicity of the previous two games.As with 1 and 2, 3 would later receive a 16-bit upgrade as part of the Europe and Japan-onlyMega Man: The Wily Wars/Rockman Megaworld cartridge for the Sega Genesisnote Aside from being a Sega Channel exclusive for a brief time. It would also receive a Japan-only PS1 re-release as Rockman 3: Complete Works, complete with remixed music and bonus content. The game would eventually get a major re-release as part of Anniversary Collection for PS2, Gamecube and Xbox, and it is now available on Virtual Console.Robot Masters:
All There in the Manual: The only way to learn about the story, since the game's rushed production didn't afford it the luxury of having an intro cutscene.
Continuity Nod: The Eight Doc Robots download the attack patterns of the eight Robot Master bosses from Mega Man 2, and the ending scene that looks up all of Dr. Light's Robot Masters shows the six bosses from Mega Man 1.
Also, stages 1 and 2 of Doctor Wily's fortress bear more than a passing resemblance to the first and fourth Wily stages from the previous game.
Crate Expectations: A form of this appears as canisters with a "?" on them. Shooting them gets you a random item, from a small energy refill to a 1-Up to an Energy Tank. They were exclusive to this game, however the mechanic was modified into Eddie in later games.
Disc One Final Boss: The Wily Machine. As soon as it's destroyed and Dr. Wily starts begging for mercy, "his" head pops off, revealing that he's a robotic fake.
Giant Space Flea from Nowhere: The Doc Robots, arguably. They just appear after the 8 Robot Masters are defeated, and then are then not mentioned or referenced in later games. Heck, even on the stage select screen, they simply appear as mysterious silhouettes, and the usual boss intro screen simply displays a question mark symbol and nothing else.
Hollywood Magnetism: Magnet Man is able to pull Mega Man in towards himself whenever he activates his magnetic field. It'll pull Mega Man in at the same speed regardless of your location on the screen.
Lethal Joke Weapon: The Top Spin is often ridiculed as the worst weapon in the series when it's actually quite potent in the right hands. It's a One-Hit Kill on any non-boss enemy that's not immune to it, meaning a great number of enemies can be wiped out by just spinning into them if you know which ones to use it on. It is also the weakness of Shadow Man and no less than three bosses in the Wily stages.
Nerf: The Shadow Blade is a weakened version of the Metal Blade from 2. Despite its lower range and higher energy cost, it's still an incredibly useful weapon, which goes to show just how broken the Metal Blade was.
Obvious Beta: A much less severe example than most, though there are still some quirks at times (uneven energy use for the Top Spin, all Robot Masters being weak to their own weapons, inaccurate Skull Castle map paths, etc). It's also not possible to do a No Damage Run, as Doc Robot's Wood Man incarnation has an unavoidable attack pattern.
Power Copying: Naturally, but there's a twist this time: the hologram Mega Men fortress boss, instead of mirroring whatever weapon you've got readied, can fire plasma shots in any direction instead of just left or right.
However, to avoid it being useless or having incredibly obvious "use it here" sections, it breaks the normal "angle of reflection equals angle of incidence" rule of physics, and the first bounce will always be a 45 degree upward angle. Subsequent bounces will follow the rule.
Remixed Level: After beating all eight robot masters, you don't go directly to a fortress like in most games. Instead, Spark Man, Needle Man, Gemini Man, and Shadow Man's stages will open back up. They have drastically different layouts and each of them has two Doc Robot bosses, which mimic the robot masters from Mega Man 2.
Sequel Hook/The Stinger: Though it seemed Wily had been crushed by the debris from his collapsing fortress, you can see what looks like his saucer floating away in the distance as Mega Man is gazing up at the sky during the ending.
Wasted Song: A few tunes, like the Skull Castle intermission theme and Proto Man's theme in the cast roll, never played in their entirety. And thanks to the lack of an opening, you're unlikely to pay attention to the main theme of this game when first playing it.
Weaksauce Weakness: Shadow Man, one of the toughest Robot Masters in the game, is weak to the Top Spin (which requires close contact, no less). |
Forecast Texas Fire Danger (TFD)
The Texas Fire Danger(TFD) map is produced by the National Fire Danger Rating System (NFDRS). Weather information is provided by remote, automated weather stations and then used as an input to the Weather Information Management System (WIMS). The NFDRS processor in WIMS produces a fire danger rating based on fuels, weather, and topography. Fire danger maps are produced daily. In addition, the Texas A&M Forest Service, along with the SSL, has developed a five day running average fire danger rating map.
Daily RAWS information is derived from an experimental project - DO NOT DISTRIBUTE |
Bangladesh, Land of the Bengalis, should theoretically be a country we Singaporeans are familiar with, given the proximity and the many historical links as former parts of the British Empire in Asia. However, few of us have any notion of what this country is like except for the many massive famines, natural disasters or seemingly endless political instability that plague this country. In a perverse way, many Bangladeshis, whose relatives work in the construction grounds and clean the streets of Singapore, know so much more about Singapore than we know about their country.
The first meaningful conversation I had with a local was with Bashar, who is the "Canteen Manager" of a café I stepped into on my first morning in Dhaka. Upon learning I was from Singapore, he exclaimed using the most classic Singaporean Hokkien expletives that expressed the speaker's desire to do something nasty to the addressee's mother, "Kan Ni Na Chao Ji Bai, Welcome to Dhaka!" Bashar said he missed Singapore where he worked for 4 years in the 1990s he liked the orderliness, the law and order, safe environment, clean air and the opportunity to make good money. He would love to return to Singapore if he could. He asked if my company needed any staff, be it a foreman, a clerk, a cleaner, or in his words, anything. Thrusting into my palm his name card, he asked me to contact him once I return to Singapore.
since independence after a bloody war against oppressive Pakistan in 1971, the country has remained poverty stricken. Indeed, everytime I told a Bangladeshi that theirs was a beautiful land, the response was inevitably, "but we are a poor country." More than 10 million Bangladeshis work overseas, and millions of rural people are underemployed. Poverty drives more and more people into the cities. Dhaka, a city of merely 1 million in 1971, is today a crowded, polluted metropolis of at least 12 million, perhaps 15 million. Motor vehicles drove wildly as if there was no tomorrow, loud relentless horning, countless rickshaws and screaming street vendors all the madness of this city almost drove me crazy on my first day here.
I visited the Liberation War Museum, a fascinating place about the long forgotten conflict that led to the independence of Bangladesh from Pakistan, the latter an unnatural state with two distinct and separate parts formed from the Muslim regions of the British Indian Empire. Driven by the desire for equal recognition of Bengali, which was also the language of choice of Tagore, the great 19th century Bengali poet and novelist who won the Nobel Prize for Literature, the Bangladeshi people struggled against their West Pakistani rulers. Despite accounting for more than 50% of the then Pakistani population, the Bangladeshis never quite commanded their own destiny. In fact, whenever a Bangladeshi party won the elections, the Pakistani Army staged a coup to set aside the electoral result.
It was 1971's electoral victory by Sheikh Mujib, Father of the Bangladesh, which sparked off a massive genocidal crackdown by the Pakistani Army. Intellectuals and the academia were arrested and murdered in cold blood, while whole massacres were committed at the halls and dorms of Dhaka University. Sheikh Mujib was arrested by the Pakistanis while Ziaur Rahman, an officer in the East Pakistan Rifles, declared the independence of the People's Republic of Bangladesh from a radio station in Chittagong. A guerilla war began and before long, the Indian Army and the Bangladeshi guerillas drove Pakistani forces into surrender, but not before many some said as high as 3 million people - died in this bloody conflict. It was amazing how the thirst for power and greed drives people to commit atrocities. It was also mind-boggling how the generals of Pakistanis could ever imagine they could lord over what was not a small minority group but the largest ethnic group of their country.
Dhaka had just celebrated the Durja Puja when I arrived. This is a colorful festival that celebrated Goddess Durja's victory over Mahishasura, the green skin buffalo demon. Legend says Mahishasura had conquered the heavens with his army of demons and so the Great Hindu Gods created Durja to battle him. Eventually, Mahishasura was defeated after an epic battle during which the demon changed his form between human, buffalo and the elephant. Just before his demise, the demon agreed to be slaughtered by the goddess provided that he was to be worshipped together with her. The goddess agreed, and so all images of Durja showed her spearing gruesome-looking Mahishasura which was beneath her feet.
I walked through dilapidated Old Dhaka adorned with bright coloured bulbs and banners celebrating Durja Puja; the smell of rotting rubbish in the air together with the aroma of burning incense; the deafening horning of the rickshaws, and mosque imams calling the faithful for afternoon prayers alternating with the loud beating drums from the Hindu temples. Welcome to Dhaka. You may love it, hate it but never indifferent. This is an intense city, whether in terms of smell, noise and sights.
Independent Bangladesh's first decade was one of chaos and disillusionment; and of coups and counter-coups. After the euphoria of victory over Pakistan, Sheikh Mujib soon followed the footsteps of many Third World strongmen, that of self-glorification, elimination of political opposition and one party rule. In 1975,
In 1975, Sheikh Mujib was murdered at home by a group of dissenting army officers, together with his wife, three sons and other family retainers. Two daughters were spared only because they were overseas including Sheikh Hasina who later served as Prime Minister. After a series of coups and counter-coups, Ziaur Rahman came to power in 1976, only to be assassinated in an attempted coup in 1981. What a blood-stained history!
I got onto Mahsud, a wheel steamer constructed in 1928 in the shipyards of Calcutta, through the waterways of Bangladesh. This was a different world away from the madness that was Dhaka. This was the land of peaceful farmers and fishermen, green paddy fields, serene villages and the timelessness that had long disappeared in many parts of the world. There was even the occasional pink Ganges dolphin leaping out of the river, which to me was all the more remarkable as I recalled recent reports confirming the extinction of the Yangtze Dolphin of China, the victim of overfishing, poaching and pollution.
However, one should not forget, that it was the lack of economic prosperity that had preserved this land in a time wrap. Corruption, economic mismanagement and misrule meant that the country continues to rely on a fleet of 1920's steamers to connect its many towns and villages scattered across the delta land, in an era where many Asian countries have built modern airports, multiple lane motorways and huge bridges to bring together disparate parts.
In the last one year, the military had intervened in this country to steer the country away from the political stalemate caused by the country's top two rival political parties - the Awami League, run by Sheikh Hasina, surviving daughter of Sheikh Mujib, and Bangladesh Nationalist Party, run by Begum Khaleda, widow of Ziaur Rahman. Both politicians and their supporters, all seen as outrageously corrupt during the years they were in power, are now in jail awaiting trial, whilst a technocrat caretaker government, headed by a "Chief Advisor", is in power. It remains to be seen if they would be successful but I wish them luck. Bangladesh obviously deserves better.
The Grameen Bank and its founder, Muhammad Yunus, are the pride of Bangladesh. They were jointly awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2006, for their success in pioneering microcredit in Bangladesh and elsewhere. By lending small sums of money to desperately poor people and encouraging repayment through innovative loan structures, such as lending to women who are members of a small group that forms a social support as well as behavior pressure group, Grameen Bank has succeeded in improving the standards of living of social groups once deemed unbankable. The Bank also draws up social codes of bahaviour and principles designed to be pro-growth. Here are some of them:
We shall follow and advance the four principles of Grameen Bank: Discipline, Unity, Courage and Hard work in all walks of our lives.
Prosperity we shall bring to our families.
We shall not live in dilapidated houses. We shall repair our houses and work towards constructing new houses at the earliest.
We shall grow vegetables all the year round. We shall eat plenty of them and sell the surplus.
During the plantation seasons, we shall plant as many seedlings as possible.
We shall plan to keep our families small. We shall minimize our expenditures. We shall look after our health.
We shall educate our children and ensure that they can earn to pay for their education.
We shall always keep our children and the environment clean.
We shall build and use pit-latrines.
We shall drink water from tubewells. If it is not available, we shall boil water or use alum.
We shall not take any dowry at our sons' weddings, neither shall we give any dowry at our daughter's wedding. We shall keep our centre free from the curse of dowry. We shall not practice child marriage.
We shall not inflict any injustice on anyone, neither shall we allow anyone to do so.
We shall collectively undertake bigger investments for higher incomes.
We shall always be ready to help each other. If anyone is in difficulty, we shall all help him or her.
If we come to know of any breach of discipline in any centre, we shall all go there and help restore discipline.
We shall take part in all social activities collectively.
From Khulna in the southwest, I visited Bagerhat, an UNESCO World Heritage City. In the 15th century, Khan Jahan Ali, a Turkic warlord cum Sufi mystic, set up a mini state in this region, where he built monumental mosques and madrasahs. Today, some of these remain and have been declared world heritage. I walked through the dilapidated, almost deserted halls of the sixty-domed mosque and scanned the lake outside the pilgrimage shrine of Khan Jahan Ali for the legendary crocodiles (they say the crocodiles would come if summoned by the caretaker of the Khan Jahan Ali's shrine). Bangladesh is a country of some pleasant though not spectacular sights. However, it attracts few tourists and many who come here are greeted by mounds of rubbish, endless roads of potholes, and quite simply, the appalling lack of basic tourism infrastructure. The country continues to rely on inward remittances from its citizens who work overseas and earnings from sale of garment to the West, which now comes under threat from more efficient Chinese producers.
I took the late night bus to Chittagong, the nation's second largest city and most important seaport. This was perhaps the dirtiest city I have ever seen. Piles of rotting rubbish were everywhere, even in the city centre, with huge scavenger birds and crows making further mess of the refuse in the unhealthy humid tropical heat. Chittagong's citizens appeared nonchalant to the dirt and firth around them. Child beggars pulled the sleeves of passersby, and their older, legless colleagues, for lack of a better term, dragged themselves on the pedestrian walks, loudly chiding others for the lack of sympathy.
I sought refuge at the Commonwealth War Cemetery, the cleanest place in the city. Over 700 Commonwealth soldiers killed in the WWII Burma war theatre were buried here. Among the largest contingents were British and Indian forces but there were also large number of West and East African soldiers. In a month's time, I would be in Nagaland in India, on the border with Myanmar, which also play host to a Commonwealth war cemetery.
Tomorrow, I head for the Chittagong Hill Tracts, a mountainous region to the east of Chittagong, on the border with Myanmar. The indigenous people of this region are Buddhist and animist tribes which have closer links to the Burmese and other Southeast Asian peoples. Photos of these peoples at Chittagong Ethnographic Museum revealed that they looked Mongoloid or East Asian in appearance, and that the local tribal kings wore headdress which to me looked very Burmese. A low key insurgency has been going on in the tribal regions where the tribes were unhappy with the influx of Muslim Bangladeshis and the huge dam project that had flooded their tribal ancestral homeland. As a result, all tourists need permit to enter the Hill Tracts, and no mobile and internet connection is available so as to deny communication links to the "terrorists", as the Bangladeshi government calls the insurgents.
So, this is what I have done so far. On Tuesday 20 October, I will fly to Kathmandu, Nepal.
Till then, good bye. |
Google Might Improve Your Relationships
Google’s mission has always been to provide the best possible search results for their users, they recognise that that is how they established market dominance and to their credit they have not gotten lazy about maintaining that dominance.
But how do you provide relevant, useful, and personalised results for everyone based on their individual and unique preferences? Well in the last quarter of last year Google announced an experiment on Google Labs called Social Search.
Google has now unveiled their newest offering, which they’re calling “Search, plus Your World”. This is basically the result of their Social Search experiment with some new features. The nuts and bolts of the idea is that by offering “social” search results as well as the regular results, it will give the search results a more personal and more effect layer of information.
So what is Social Search?
Let’s say you got hit on the head and suddenly found Death Metal appealing, but you didn’t really know where you could go in Dublin to see a good Death Metal band playing. In days gone by chances are you would go to Google and type a search query along the lines of: death metal gigs Dublin January 10th.
In all likelihood you would then need to browse through numerous forums and possibly the odd Death Metal enthusiast’s blog or venue website. It is possible you will find the information because it is out there if you are persistent enough, however it will be time consuming and you will most likely end up taking a recommendation of a gig from someone you don’t know if you can trust on a forum you’ve never visited before.
With Social Search you will now also get some results which display information from your Social Circles. “Social Circle” is the term Google use to describe the people you know, are connected to on various publicly accessible social networks, your Gmail chat contacts, and through your Google+ Profile. People that are friends with your friends (2nd degree connection) are also part of your extended social circles.
So in this new world of Social Search, let’s say you have a friend who has a friend who is a hard-core Death Metal head, and they have posted an update on their Twitter page about a gig they are really looking forward to. This tweet will show up in Social Search, along with information about how you are connected to the person, so you now have a recommendation from someone that you can somewhat gauge the quality of the recommendation.
What this means for your business?
As I hope you can see from the example above Google have made a huge first step in search to not only understand content but also how people interact and their relationships to each other. A case might even be made that because of easier access to the information you are looking for, from your friends and connections, that your existing relationships will be strengthened online.
To my mind this development in search technology means that your customers will have quicker, easier access to the opinions of people they trust about your products and services. This can only place even more importance in monitoring what is being said about your brand on social networks like Google+ and Twitter.
To take it one step farther, the value of these “publicly accessible” social networks has increased with this development because the more active you are on them as a business now, the more likely you will be to show up in a connections social search results.
I’d love to hear how you think this development will change things for you in the comments below.
Will it have a positive or negative affect on your business? Will you be doing anything differently now? |
Please note that the form this list is using is considered to be defunct.
to edit or add a reason to this top-ten list!
Jacob: I kissed bella.....and she broke her hand....punching my face
Jacob and Bella's kiss on the mountaintop.
The Introducing of Seth!
The tale Bree tells Edward (mentally)
When Bella told Alice she could organize her and Edward's wedding!!!
When Charlie tried to give Bella "The Talk"
When Edward asks Bella if Jacob owns a T-shirt
Feel free to keep the list going!
Alice fighting with Jasper!!!!!!!!!!!!
Seth dragging Riley away as he screams for Victoria
Practising fighting scenes
Leah shown as a Werewolf
Victoria and Riley kissing (though Victoria is just playing him)
Bella talking to Jacob in his wolf form.
The Cullens and Wolfpack vs. The Newborns.
The Graduation-Mainly Jessica's speech XD
"I kissed Bella......and she broke her hand.....punching my face..... total misunderstanding"
Victoria lying on the ground dead, all smashed like glass!
The Scene where the Cullens chased Victoria (Ravine scene)
Jasper teaches the Cullens to fight
Jasper in his confederate army suit
When the Cullens and the Wolves chased Victoria! SO EPIC!
The begining, when Edward ask and ask Bella to married him
Riley and Bree TOGETHER!!!!!!
The bedroom scene with Edward and Bella when she finally says "yes", she will marry him
When Bella is petting Jacob in his wolf form
Edward/Seth VS Victoria/Riley
the end in bella and edward's medow talking 'bout telling charlie they are engaged! <3
When Edward Proposes To Bella And She Says Yes Awwwwwwwww
Jacob: Take your hands of me Edward: Take your hands off her
Bella's dream about Jasper
When Edward bit off Victoria's head (it was acctually quite funny!)
When Jasper says: One more thing, Never turn your back to your enemy
When Edward threatens Jacob. That's entertaining!
When Jacob says at least we can kill SOME vampires!
When the Cullens and the werewolfs team up
The newborn army fight scene
This list uses a defunct format. Due to technical restrictions, lists using this format can not be converted to the current format.
However, lists using this format are still kept and may continue to be edited.
This list does not necessarily reflect the opinions of the Twilight Saga Wiki but rather the individual editors of the list.
Edit in regular format |
i don't wear pants? o.O
sorry? xD i'm talking, what's up?
You're welcome. I held off on making the edit for a little bit hoping you'd see it, then I decided you probably weren't and rollbacked the edit, lol. Yeah, I've seen it a few times before; never knew why though. It probably does have something to do with the Rich Text editor. LuckyTimothy 02:45, July 25, 2011 (UTC)
Hey, technically I never left. I come on everyday I just dont edit like I used to. Things are going really good. Email me for details!!! (talk) 19:39, August 27, 2011 (UTC)
hey wats up do you know a david
ya on wiki sorry
In the past week or two, I've done a non-trivial reorganization of the let's call them "family" categories, for want of a better term, lumping a number of frankly useless splits together: "Parents", "Grandparents", "Siblings", etc..
I admit that "Imprinters/imprintees" is awkward, but there's little support for a separation of 'em in the new tree. I'm more than ready to modify the category, since for the moment Pam and I haven't been able to come up with anything better, but I'll want something more substantial than a revert and a short comment.
MinorStoop 03:05, February 17, 2012 (UTC)
P.S. Ah, before I forget - the "official" categories are "Males" and "Females". Given the number of pages under them and no way to rename categories, it's going to be a pain to recategorize all said pages.
- That's quite allright, but you'll understand if I disagree with the throwback of *one* page among ten - the category certainly limps, but Kim alone would stand out. Furthermore, with so few edits of yours in the past year I have no way to know how up to date you are, sorry.
- The problem is that probably there is no single english word encompassing the concept that a couple consist of an imprinter bound to an imprintee, with the variability shown in the saga. On the other side, I'm loath to split the category again - see one of the last messages of Pam on my talk page - index item 32 "Re: Relationships". MinorStoop 08:32, February 17, 2012 (UTC)
Jackson Rathbone's colorblindedness
Re: Roar :D!
Page name changes
Feel free to revert everything back; I am just less than keen to do it myself - I don't know how much effort I've put in this wiki, as stupid as the original books are. (I know, I know, the effort does not make me necessarily right, but I can sulk as the next guy.)
Say, I've changed a number of abilities' names (I don't think there is anything stupider than "aura of happiness"), must not be too far off the mark, since nobody "official name"d me before. Still think that all the various gifts' pages should be merged in one, since they're all actually various application of "telepathy", but I'll wait for a green light, if it comes, to do so.
As for the badly religious username, I haven't got a clue about what's wrong in it (since I'm agnostic, on these matters I tend to live and let live). But, I hope you don't mind, now I'd like to understand this detail - I'm as interested in keeping the peace as anybody else.
Thanks! MinorStoop 19:40, April 15, 2012 (UTC)
- P.S. A couple of details, just to clear up the loose ends.
- "Astral projection" had been classified as "special ability", that's why I added "Werewolves". Since it's not I've removed the page from the category - it will have to be reclassified. Though probably Pam will let us know what she thinks, suggestions?
- As per policy, page names should be uncapitalized unless they're proper names - therefore it's "Tactile telepathy" instead of "Tactile Telepathy". A redirect is now in the way, and should be deleted to make space for the move. Thanks! MinorStoop 19:49, April 15, 2012 (UTC)
- It does not so much look like is a formal policy of the wiki as a quirk of Pam's; since I happen not to like excessive capitalization, I went for it; we'll have to agree to disagre. :)
- As for the religious hating, it was not difficult to guess - can only plead english not being my mothertongue; sometimes this lands me in an awkward position. MinorStoop 06:52, April 16, 2012 (UTC)
- Italian. Got some practice with english - avid reader and all that. The funny thing is that the language overhaul of this wiki was mine; under another username of course. MinorStoop 03:27, April 17, 2012 (UTC)
Really, you can't edit it now? I didn't really lock it, all I did was go to the edit screen and unchecked the comments option. What is it saying when you try to edit? LuckyTimothy 04:47, April 19, 2012 (UTC)
- Thought admins were immune from each other's weapons... MinorStoop 12:06, April 19, 2012 (UTC)
By the look of the user rights page, "Chat moderation" is part of an admin's right. So you know, at least. MinorStoop 13:19, April 20, 2012 (UTC)
I'm there now. You're not hurt or anything, are you? TeamTaycob 02:32, May 15, 2012 (UTC)
On the verge of passing out.
Chat with me, I'm dying.
~If you have to take a while to know who this is, I'm disowning you.
I'll forgive you for abandoning me...
...but that's only because I finally saw Snow White and the Huntsman and I am going to MARRY that movie. TeamTaycob 04:42, June 3, 2012 (UTC)
Long time, no chat.
- Whoa, China is a big fricking deal. Have fun! And summer homework? Daaaaaamn. That sucks. Well, you being gone has made me go nearly insane. Have fun doing what you do. TeamTaycob 14:48, July 6, 2012 (UTC)
This is whast they said to me and my friend
They spammed more, This person has been saying theese words for ages now |
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[Twisted-Python] Twisted server is 5 times SLOWER on Solaris than Linux?
jarrod at vertigrated.com
Wed Jan 17 20:59:19 EST 2007
On 1/17/07, glyph at divmod.com <glyph at divmod.com> wrote:
> On 11:35 pm, jarrod at vertigrated.com wrote:
> >There is a "backend" C module that our Twisted server front ends, and it
> >highly multi-threaded.
> >So the T1000 is PERFECT for our application, except that now Twisted is
> >bottleneck. :-(
> This seems odd to me.
> If all the CPUs are going to be busy doing a multi-threaded back-end's
> work, and Twisted is just doing the I/O, then it seems the T1000 would still
> be a benefit. The benchmark you mentioned was completely static; there was
> no backend library, no multithreaded CPU load. Is the performance disparity
> similar when you're running actual workloads?
snipped a lot of good information :-)
Again, it seems weird to me that this is necessary if the back-end library
> is really utilizing all the CPUs already and you are not I/O bound.
Here is what we are doing basically.
Twisted takes in data and in a C extension we send the data to multiple
backends in parallel to do processing on it.
Then we aggregate the results and send information back to the client.
This is basically a fancy proxy that parallelizes and distributes work to
other machines on the network.
All the clients run in "keep-alive" mode, so they don't create new
connections for each piece of work they send to the system, so
once they are all connected, they stay connected for their lifetime ( long
On the Dell 2850's without any backend code, we see 600ms latency with a
test suite of 400 clients.
With the Solaris SPARC machines T1000 and V210 we see 4000 - 5000 ms latency
with the same no-op code and the same 400 clients.
With the backend code we see about an additional 250ms latency on both
platforms, since the "backend" code is just taking the data and sending it
out across the network to process, it just sits waiting on responses. The
backend code is just not doing enough work to stress the machine basically.
We have LOTS and LOTS of test harness code and profiling code to pinpoint
where bottlenecks are. We are going to have process a couple of terabytes a
day thru this system. Latency thru the system is a high priority because of
what kind of system it is.
We can get up to about 1400 clients on the Dell 2850 hardware before latency
starts climbing out of control.
The SPARC hardware is falling over at 400 clients :-(
Thanks to everyone for all the ideas and help.
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[Twisted-Python] A Python metaclass for Twisted allowing __init__ to return a Deferred
terry at jon.es
Sun Nov 2 19:16:50 EST 2008
> I usually solve this kind of problem like this:
> d = aFuncReturningADeferred()
See? I knew there'd be a 3-line solution somewhere :-)
That's very cute, I'd never have thought of that... Python is so nice.
My (weak?) response is that your solution isn't quite so general. What if I
want __init__ to generate the deferred based on its args, or on the result
of other functions called based on its args? Yes, I can do all that work
before using your lovely d.addCallback(MyClass), but then the logic of what
the class does is starting to leak out into the code that should be calling
the class. And you can't encapsulate THAT code into another class, because
its __init__ would in turn have to return a deferred.
BTW, I sometimes have the feeling that Deferreds are like how M$
characterizes the GPL. Viral. Once you call anything creating a Deferred,
you're hooked - whatcha gonna do with that Deferred boy? Take one sip of
the Deferred Kool Aid and the next thing you know you're on a drip.
> I'll not try to claim anything about the level of elegance, though. :)
History will smile on you JP.
> For less surprisiness, I'd suggest that you at least restrict the result
> of the Deferred returned from __init__ to firing with None or self and
> make the argument to the first callback on the Deferred returned by
> MyClass() just be the new instance.
Hmmm. OK. I think you're right. The caller has no business knowing what the
Deferred returned in any case. And if the class itself wants the result it
can add a callback and stick it on self. That's good, I had been hoping to
return just the instance, but then it occurred to me to send back the
BTW, I started out trying to think of a way to just say
x = MyClass(...)
and have that result in the instance. But the only ways I could think of
doing that were disgusting and broken (e.g., make a *function* called
MyClass and use inlineCallbacks and some other class the metaclass would
build). So the __instantiate__ call seemed like a big win, even though I
don't like it much either.
More information about the Twisted-Python |
Above:Solved - Yellow body
Click a thumbnail to see its larger version and description.
A star-shaped build-up on the Dino Cube mechanism.
- Inventor: Unknown
- Mechanism: Dino/Rainbow Cube
- Patents: Unknown
- Producer: Unknown
- Year: Unknown
- Original Price: $0.00 USD
- Current Price: $683.33 USD
This puzzle has the shape of a stellated octahedron. As the name suggests it is equivalent to a Dino Cube.
It was produced with a wide variety of colors.
The leaflet shown here translates to:
I hope you will have enough patience for this puzzle!
What you hold in your hand is a twisty puzzle witch can be rotate to 8 direction (?), holds more than 1 million combinations in itself.
With the rotation of the tips, the sides color will change. The aim is to make the same circles in the sides.
Good Luck! Have Fun!
If you're looking to buy, eBay is the one place you can find almost anything... if you're willing to wait for it, then pay the price!
Thank you to the following people for their assistance in helping collect the information on this page: Carter, Geert Hellings. If you have any information or images that you would like to contribute to this entry, please click the apropriate add () or edit () icon above, or use the following links to modify this item, add a recent sale price or to add a new link. |
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Cinematographer, DP, Director, Editor, Filmmaker. Specialised in Video DSLR and Digital Cinema Cameras...
616 days ago
Geek dinner w/ @PhilipBloom @ronaldvonk @NinoLeitner and @iGert in Amsterdam.
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332 days ago
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หล่อขั้นเทพพๆ ! >///<
*O*...bello ** YEYE ** bello *O*
mr. I LIKE U mumumuuu
oppa,lama g liat kekekekeke
SO HANDSOME OPPA!!!!!!!!!!
Your face make me crazy oppa ><
Your eye is good, ,
New hair style ;)
your eye bags xD
oppa u c a student of mine said she fell 4 ya already.She was a siwon freak and few seconds she turned over to u.Not fair rite??oppa stay happy oweyz
tan perfecto~ y tan real!!!.... My Prince!~ I Love You Kim Jong Woon~
yeah! suju comeback~! ^^
Stay here for u oppa !
I love u ! Just u oppa !
❤ I just say I love you.∪ ◡ ∪
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Good Morning Arizona Anchor, tweeting work, life and play. Motorcyclist, workout buff, private pilot, home remodeler and lover of life!
150 days ago
Santa arriving in style for shop with a cop event #ibelieve
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I do internet things, isn't it.
TIRESOME DISCLAIMER: These are my views, not anyone else's. RTs != endorsement.
I fought the lawn. #irishmarket #easilyamused
€2: PET THING. #irishshop
Yet again, @suitov has rescued an horrendous day: this time with Make Your Own Biscotti. My hero.
Ladies and gentlemen: my wonderfully nutritious, extortionately expensive BBC canteen sandwich.
Bit glum tonight, so I made some Cornish Havva cake, inspired by @KarenDTregaskin.
Something appalling has happened to the BBC Ringmain.
Best night out ever with Birthday @Girl_al and co. - crazy dancing, great drinks, ruining shirts, you name it.
@zephoria You're at #sxsw? I just lost my grey teddy bear. Devastated. Pls help me find him. Going home tomorrow.
Just got a photo of Bobo bear with a very patient @levarburton. He said @big_poppa_G has serious issues #sxsw2013
@big_poppa_G Boris says thank you for the box #kitten #box
@big_poppa_G ERMAHGERD BEST PRESENT EVAR xxxx
Guess what. I, Helen Nina Elizabeth Purves, have been bought ROSES. RED ONES. By @big_poppa_G in fact.
Free stuff. They were giving Ikea pots away in the city centre and lovely @suitov bagged one for me. Yay
Either this BBC News reporter has been wearing sunglasses, or she has a very interesting skin condition.
Art installation, captured by @suitov. Purves, Helen; Jan 2013. Title: "DO NOT USE"
"It is important to remove hair only by gentle brushing. Do not shave your cat." A present from @big_poppa_G
Brilliant present from @lib_thinks, who knows about my secret crush. Will make @big_poppa_G wear it at sexytimes.
A very merry Christmas to you too, odious little git xxx /cc @itsprobablynot @big_poppa_G
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Governor of the State of Hawaii
In Kona before the sun comes up. Drinking 100% Kona coffee, which is very smooth, and having good conversations.
It was so nice to talk to different people at yesterday's Ohana Festival at the Japanese Cultural Center of Hawaii!
I wanted to share a couple of shots from yesterday's Ohana Festival in Honolulu. Here's Karen Keawehawai'i, emceeing the event.
With Jerry Rauckhorst & Sister Earnest Chung as we wrap up our tour of Catholic Charities.
The new Catholic Charities ofcs took the former 1st Presbyterian Church on Nehoa St. It's huge & consolidated 4 ofcs.
This morning I'm meeting with Jerry Rauckhorst at Catholic Charities & touring their Manoa facilities.
Team AFG 2010: @anuheajams performing @neilabercrombie's event tonight.
Team AFG 2010- @lcampaniano asking Neil questions via skype at tonight's event
Nice seeing Devon Nekoba @localboy56 tonight!
Councilmember Ann Kobayashi reminiscing on our days working on Manoa Finance for our community.
Gen. Ed Richardson is a good friend; we both support the brave men & women in the military.
Mahalo Debbie Shimizu-speaking at tonight's AJA event on behalf of the Natl Assn of Social Workers.
Busy day. Now at a community meeting on Education w/Asst Secretary of Education Peter Cunningham at the Boys and Girls Club of Hawaii.
Speaking to students at the University of Hawaii today. Lots of very bright young people.
A quiet Thanksgiving meal at River of Life Mission. Please be there for our brothers & sisters in need, all through the year. Aloha.
Taking a break to autograph my book, "Blood of Patriots," in Kailua.
Congratulations to Hawaii Job Corps students! Glad to see you doing well!
Pleased to see a great culinary arts program at the Hawaii Job Corps.
Mahalo again to the Waimanalo Health Center! That was a very interesting visit.
I'm told that uninsured visits at the Waimanalo Health Center are up 50%.
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Suda51, Keiji Inafune and Yuji Naka recently joined Mobage, a social games company. Now Suda’s goal is to make “the social game with the most blood”.
Suda51 is known for making crazy but awesome games that are generally very bloody. Most of you should know at least No More Heroes and there is no lack of blood in that one. Now he plans on making a Mobage version of said game and told Famitsu Magazine that he wants to make it the bloodiest one and he wants it to have enough “impact” to have it published overseas. He also states that he has around 100 concepts for social games, so at least one of those should meet his blood-standards.
I’m not sure I like the fact that his foremost goal is to have a lot of blood in his game, but so far he has produced good results, so who am I to complain? |
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August, 2009The North Texas Food Bank has announced that the 2009 Food4Kids Campaign has resulted in a record number of donations totaling $291,331. At the same time, the 2010 campaign has kicked off strongly with $60,000 in lead donation commitments. The letter writing campaign, begun three years ago by long time NTFB supporter Pam Beckert, relies on a Host Committee of community members, who open their address books and write letters of solicitation to their friends. This years campaign was chaired by Joanne & Charles Teichman and Sallie & Brown Plummer.
Lead donors (Super Backpackers) in 2009 who donated $10,000 include: Pam & John Beckert, Jenny Birge, Diane Buchanan & Rick Andrews, Lauren Embrey, Galleria Dallas, Lisa & Peter Kraus, Carol Marvin, Vicki & Hicks Morgan, Joanne & Charles Teichman and Frito Lay.
Included in the results are 100% of proceeds of the sale of an exclusive charm ('Chip for Charity') designed by Catherine Michiels for Ylang 23. The charm can be purchased online at ylang23.com.
The 2010 Food4Kids Campaign was kicked off at a reception at the Goss-Michaels Foundation, and incoming chairs Joyce & Tim Goss and Joanne & Charles Teichman announced that they have already received commitments for $60,000 in lead gifts and are anticipating another record campaign.
About the North Texas Food Bank
The North Texas Food Bank (NTFB) is a nonprofit hunger relief organization that distributes donated, purchased and prepared foods through a network of feeding programs in 13 North Texas counties. The NTFB supports the nutritional needs of children, families and seniors through education, advocacy and strategic partnerships. Founded in 1982, the NTFB is a certified member of Feeding America (formerly America's Second Harvest - The Nation's Food Bank Network). Last year, 26 million meals were distributed. Each month, agency pantries distribute food to more than 50,000 families and on-site meal programs serve 435,000 meals/snacks. Every dollar donated to the NTFB provides four meals for the hungry. Out of every dollar donated, 97 cents goes directly to hunger relief programs. Quotes Jan Pruitt, Director of the North Texas Food Bank, in referencing the economy and need: "There is an urgent need for funds and food right now."
About the Food4Kids Back Pack Program
The Food4Kids Back Pack Program was created because of concerns about children not having enough to eat at home. According to a report by Feeding America, Texas has the highest rate of child hunger in the nation, as one of every four children does not have consistent access to food. North Texas Food Bank officials have received reports from schools of children eating food off the cafeteria floors and out of the garbage. The North Texas Food Bank trains teachers to look for other signs of chronic hunger including short attention spans or behavioral problems. The Food4Kids packs are loaded with easy-to-fix snacks including peanut butter and jelly, pudding and fruit cups, because some kids spend time at home alone while their parents work. Thank you notes from recipients are numerous, including Abigail: "You are so kind to help my family with extra food", and a Carrolton, Texas mom: "If it weren't for this place, I wouldn't know what to do."
How You Can Help
To join the 2010 Food4Kids campaign to make a difference by meeting the increased need of feeding hungry children, please refer to the contact information below. |
The first Cattle Baron's Gala began in Dallas in 1974 to raise money for cancer research through the American Cancer Society. The inaugural event raised $56,000 through ticket sales and an auction. Since then, similar Texas-style parties have sprouted up across the state, including in Tyler.
The annual event is one of East Texas' biggest fundraisers. It raises money for the research, patient services programs and education efforts of the ACS.
This year, local supporters of the well-received event will not only celebrate the community's engagement in a fight against cancer, but will also commemorate the 25 years it's been doing so.
The annual event evolves a little each year, adding new games, gifts and by gaining more supporters and sponsors.
“It's definitely grown,” said Holly Long Burke, a co-chairman for the 2012 Tyler Cattle Barons' Gala. “The community's amazing commitment has gone above and beyond.”
The 1988 entertainer for the Tyler Cattle Barons' Gala was Louise Mandrel. Organizers raised $121,660 and, the event, with the theme Yellow Rose of Texas, was held at a Lindale horse farm.
This year, the Tyler Cattle Barons will welcome the Bellamy Brothers and Eli Young Band. Its theme is Lone Star Legacy.
In 1988, there were about 100 sponsors and 150 volunteers. Today, there are about the same number of volunteers but hundreds of sponsors.
New this year, are pig races and the Cattleman's Club, where attendees receive the VIP treatment. In recent years, organizers added air conditioned tents, gaming and featured country stars who are native to East Texas.
IF YOU GO
When: This year's gala will be held from 7 p.m. to 1 a.m. June 9
Where: Wilson Ranch, 22371 Farm-to-Market Road in Arp
Information: Call ACS at 903-597-1348
Entertainment: Tyler Cattle Barons will welcome the Bellamy Brothers and Eli Young Band; new this year, are pig races and the Cattleman's Club, where attendees receive the VIP treatment. In recent years, organizers added air conditioned tents, gaming and featured country stars who are native to East Texas.
Tickets: $175 and can be purchased at the ACS office, 1301 S. Broadway Ave., or online at cattlebaronsgala.net
The Barons Reception: Open only to sponsors; begins at 6 p.m. and other events begin at 7 p.m.; the Gala will feature cowboy cuisine by acclaimed caterer Don Strange
Tickets to the drawing for the necklace cost $10, three for $25 or 12 tickets for $100
A drawing will also be held for a Cattle Barons' limited edition 2012 GMC Sierra 1500 Crew Cab, donated by Hall Buick GMC
Tickets to the drawing for the truck cost $100 each. Organizers said only 500 tickets will be sold
Eli Young Band is a country music band based in Denton; the band is composed of Mike Eli (vocals, guitar), James Young (guitar), Jon Jones (bass guitar) and Chris Thompson (drums); they released their self-titled debut album in 2002, followed by the Carnival records release “Level” in 2005; their third album, “Jet Black & Jealous,” was released in 2008 by Universal South Records; a second major-label album, “Life at Best,” was released in 2011 by Republic Nashville; it includes their first #1 hit, “Crazy Girl” |
Joe Don Abernathy, 61, turned himself into authorities Monday and posted a $1,000 bond on the misdemeanor charge, according to judicial records.
Abernathy, who reportedly was on his way to work the morning of the accident, wrecked the 2008 Ford Crown Victoria he was assigned about 7:20 a.m. Nov. 5 on County Road 2120, about a half-mile west of County Road 262.
According to a DPS accident report, Abernathy said he was driving when a deer ran out in front of him, and he took evasive action to avoid hitting the animal.
The Tyler Morning Telegraph asked for video of the deer crossing the road the morning of the accident but was told the DPS video system does not record until the overhead emergency lights have been activated.
The DPS report by Investigator David Anthony shows Abernathy swerved to the right, went off the road, across into oncoming traffic and then back off the right side of the roadway where he struck several trees.
According to the arrest affidavit in the case, Abernathy had a strong odor of alcohol on his person.
However, because he was injured, Abernathy was taken to Mother Frances Hospital for treatment, where doctors also took his blood for testing.
The DPS crash report indicates Abernathy's blood alcohol level was 0.16, which is twice the legal limit.
“DPS has been very cooperative from the onset of the investigation, and they have said they will give my office any and all records with Abernathy. It's very unfortunate that something like this can stain the reputation of all of these troopers, but he will be treated like everyone else,” he said.
Bingham said he is looking at a possible earlier incident involving Abernathy where a blood vial had been destroyed.
“There was an earlier case involving Abernathy and a blood vial being destroyed somehow, but that was in another county outside Smith County and had nothing to do with the DPS. It was an entirely different agency,” he said.
Tom Vinger, DPS media representative in Austin, said Monday that Abernathy had tendered his resignation the day after the accident earlier this month.
Vinger confirmed that Abernathy was en route to work when the accident occurred.
Vinger would not say what Abernathy's position at the Tyler DPS was before the accident or whether he was a patrol trooper or assigned to a desk.
Bingham said troopers worked Abernathy's case like a felony case instead of a misdemeanor.
“They did a full traffic reconstruction with their crew, which is usually only for fatalities and felony cases, so DPS went above what they usually do for a misdemeanor. He will be treated like anyone else in this case, because there is no special treatment,” he said.
Staff Writer Dayna Worchel contributed to this report.
From March 1997 Tyler Morning Telegraph reports
RUSK - Rusk Police Chief Larry Robertson wants to know on whose desk at the U.S. Postal Service a highway patrolman's blood sample sat before it was received damaged and unusable at a North Texas laboratory.
The sample, taken Feb. 9 following the arrest in Rusk of a Texas Department of Public Safety trooper on a drunken driving charge, turned up Thursday after being missing in the mail 17 days.
Robertson said the damaged package was delivered about 12:30 p.m. to the DPS lab in Garland. Attached was a note of apology from the Postal Service, which took responsibility for the damage.
Although the blood sample cannot not be analyzed, Robertson said the case against Trooper Joe Don Abernathy will proceed as planned.
When the blood sample failed to reach the Garland lab after an acceptable amount of time, postal inspectors launched an investigation into its whereabouts.
After being unsuccessful in locating the package, Inspector Adam Thomas said this week the postal service did not have it. He suggested the sample may have been on someone's desk in Rusk and possibly authorities had forgotten to mail it.
"I'd like to find out whose desk it was laying on at the post office," Robertson said Friday, claiming his department has been accused of conducting a cover-up.
"If that were the case, it would have been covered up that night (of the arrest)," Robertson said. "We have a well-trained, honest department and our reputation has been talked about during the past 17 days."
Thomas said Friday he still did not know where and why the blood sample was damaged, nor did he know where the delay in delivery took place.
He previously said inspectors had checked sections of the postal service where damaged mail is repackaged, but found no sign of the blood sample.
Robertson said when the package finally was received by the lab, it was postmarked Feb. 10.
The blood would have been key evidence in the case against Abernathy, a 25-year veteran trooper assigned to the Tyler district office. He has been placed on paid leave pending an internal investigation into possible misconduct.
The Cherokee County Sheriff's Department also is investigating a complaint filed by a family alleging Abernathy, who was off-duty, fired shots at their car while pursuing them Feb. 9 in his personal vehicle.
The family sought help at the sheriff's department following the pursuit, and Abernathy subsequently was stopped by police at a Rusk intersection and charged with DWI.
Authorities have not released the names of the family.
Police and court officials have said the DWI case still can be prosecuted without the blood evidence.
Robertson said the case will be based on statements from witnesses and officers.
Updated Tuesday, November 20, 2012 at 9:10 a.m. CDT |
Family members said the girl, taken to a Dallas hospital, suffered intestinal tears, five broken ribs, a bruised spleen, a ruptured aorta artery and bruises to her entire body, including what the family described as a fist print on her forehead.
“One nurse told us it looked like someone stomped on her with their foot,” said Ruby Bowling, the child's grandmother.
Rathbun said the investigation was ongoing. He said the child was savagely beaten.
Rathbun said his department was working with Child Protective Services in the case, and they are looking at recent injuries, including a concussion the child suffered in August.
Family members said doctors were optimistic about the child's recovery.
Family members said they were opening the Bella Bowling Fund at the Citizen State Bank in Chandler in hopes of offsetting some of the medical costs associated with the child's recovery. |
Lindale Independent School District students collectively exceeded the new state testing averages for the State of Texas Assessments of Academic Readiness (STAAR) standardized test.
Lindale student averages in third through eighth grade were higher than the state averages in each of the testing categories of reading, math, writing, science and social studies, the release states.
“I am proud to say that our students performed at a very high level,” Superintendent Stan Surratt said in the release. “Lindale ISD has the reputation of having an exemplary academic standard and the performance level of our students certainly supports this reputation.
In reading, 89 percent of Lindale third-graders passed the test compared to 76 percent for the state, the release states.
Ninety percent of the district’s fourth-graders passed compared to 77 percent for the state.
Eighty-seven percent of fifth-graders passed versus the state’s 77 percent.
The school’s sixth-graders had a passing percentage of 91, higher than the state’s 75 percent.
Seventh-graders passed at a rate of 90 percent and eighth-graders at a rate of 92 percent.
Only Texas fourth and seventh grade students took the writing test, according to release states.
Seventy-four percent of Lindale fourth-graders passed compared to the state’s 71 percent and 88 percent of seventh-graders passed versus the state’s 71 percent.
Seventy-nine percent of Lindale fifth-graders passed as well as 87 percent of eighth-graders.
Eighth-graders were the only students to take the social studies test and the state passing average was 59 percent, the release states.
Lindale’s eighth-grade passing percentage was 79 percent.
In math, the district’s students passed at a percentage of 83 up to 98 percent.
The states averages were between 68 and 77 percent.
The eighth-graders had the highest passing percentage at 98 percent.
“Our teachers and students had a great deal of anxiety over this new state assessment,” the superintendent said. “It was a tougher test and passing percentages were lower across the state. I am very pleased with Lindale’s results. Our teachers go the extra mile to help ensure that every student finds success.” |
LOS ANGELES (AP) — A person believed to be the fugitive ex-Los Angeles cop sought in three killings exchanged gunfire with authorities in the San Bernardino Mountains on Tuesday, a law enforcement official said on condition of anonymity.
The area is in the Big Bear region where a search for Dorner has been under way since his pickup truck was found there Thursday.
A KCAL-TV reporter in the Angelus Oaks area along Highway 38 reported gunfire in his vicinity.
San Bernardino County sheriff's spokeswoman Jodi Miller said a stolen vehicle report from a residence was received at 12:20 p.m.
"The reporting party identified the suspect as looking like Christopher Dorner but that has not been confirmed," Miller said. |
Jimmy Gopperth has scored over 200 points every season he has been at Newcastle Falcons.
Since joining the side, the fly-half has won the Premiership Golden Boot twice.
In many games, he has been his team’s only point scorer.
With three penalties in a recent match against table-topping Harlequins, he helped secure a 9-9 draw for his side.
Gopperth also recently committed his long-term future to the Falcons after signing a three-year extension to his current deal.
But he does not have any superstitions before taking each kick, preferring instead to rely on practice.
He told Sky Tyne and Wear: “I have a routine before every kick that I do and that way, in practice or a game, the body is telling itself the same messages.
“That way, you know it’s time to kick a goal and that seems to have worked for me.”
- Falcons Denied Win By Last Kick Against Quins
- Centurion At Falcons
- You Ask The Questions: Kevin Ball
- Stress Management: Who Would Be A Football Manager?
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Related tags: Rugby
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- Newcastle Falcons Prop Jonny Golding To Retire At End Of Season
- Newcastle Falcons Sign Three More Players For Next Season
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Related tags: Rugbyunion
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Related tags: Newcastle
- Newcastle's Ben Arfa: We'll Be Back Near The Top Next Season
- Newcastle's Ryan Taylor Set For Career-Saving Surgery In US
- Newcastle Defender Mike Williamson: QPR Win Proves There's No Split
- Newcastle United Manager Alan Pardew Reassures Fans On Arsenal Joke
- Champagne And Singing As Newcastle Go Safe In Squeaky QPR Victory
- Newcastle Safe: 2 - 1 Win Over QPR Guarantees Premier League Survival
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"In this corner of the universe, a prizefighter named Bolie Jackson, one hundred and eighty-three pounds and an hour and a half away from a comeback at St. Nick's Arena. Mr. Bolie Jackson, who by the standards of his profession is an aging, over-the-hill relic of what was, and who now sees a reflection of a man who has left too many pieces of his youth in too many stadiums for too many years before too many screaming people. Mr. Bolie Jackson, who might do well to look for some gentle magic in the hard-surfaced glass that stares back at him."
Even though Jackson breaks his hand prior to the fight, he wins because Henry - a boy who adores the fighter and believes in magic - made the "big, tall wish." After the fight the boxer refuses to believe in magic. Henry tells him if he doesn't believe, it won't be true. Jackson just can't believe. Suddenly, Jackson is back in the ring, and counted out."Mr. Bolie Jackson, one hundred eighty-three pounds, who left a second chance lying in a heap on a rosin-spattered canvas at St. Nick's arena. Mr. Bolie Jackson, who shares the most common ailment of all men, the strange and perverse disinclination to believe in a miracle, the kind of miracle to come from a little boy, perhaps only to be found in the Twilight Zone." |
| || |
A custom / modified kit is supplied for those applications not suitable for a standard size kit.
Example: Patio Boat
Patio type boats are a great way to relax and enjoy your days off, retirement or a family get together.
This example has a custom is 30 feet in length and is 8.5 feet wide. The pontoons are 30" diameter giving lots of buoyancy for your quests. Loads of seating and a sundeck make this kit an enjoyable place to spend those lazy summer days.
This can be customized to suit your application. |
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Agronomy and Range - General Publications
See also: Rangeland Management Series, Rangeland Monitoring Series and Small Grains Production Manual
Full Title: Rangeland Monitoring Series: Guidelines for Residual Dry Matter (RDM) Management on Coastal and Foothill Rangelands in California. Properly managed RDM can be expected to provide a high degree of protection from soil erosion and nutrient loss. Applications of specific RDM standards based on research and experience have shown the effectiveness of this approach to grazing management.
Full Title: Rangeland Monitoring Series: Sediment Delivery Inventory and Monitoring: A Method for Water Quality Management in Rangeland Watersheds. This easy-to-use worksheet and photographic record method gives any landowner a simple, straightforward way to monitor streamside erosion and waterway sediment data for use in land management decisions or to demonstrate compliance with water quality standards.
Guide to a standardized method for assessing the condition of riparian areas, for landowners, managers, and resource professionals. Color photos. Available in two free downloadable versions: Low-resolution (quicker download, but lower-quality photo images: 782K) High-resolution (higher-quality photo images, but slower download: 3.1Mb) This publication requires the free Adobe® Acrobat® Reader. You can download a free copy of the Acrobat Reader from Adobe Systems Incorporated. |
- Liturgy and Sacraments
- Retreats and Faith Communities
- Service and Justice
- Faith on Campus
- Inter- denominational Ministry
- Pastoral Care & Support
Change your life. And the world.
Live your passions. Expect a change.
Wherever you are in your faith, Campus Ministry can help you explore and grow through the things you love to do.
Get away for a quiet weekend. Worship with friends at a weekly liturgy. Lead service trips or retreats. Enjoy music, conversation, prayer, questions, laughter and food.
It's all part of Campus Ministry at the University of Dayton, which just happens to be one of the largest in the country.
Go ahead, try new things. Meet inspiring people and learn a little bit more about yourself — and God — along the way.
Feed your soul.
As a campus community, we cherish the liturgies and sacraments that bring us together — that's what the Marianist community is all about. Liturgy at UD is truly the work of the people.
What happens in liturgies here is what the Second Vatican Council called "full and active participation," and we believe that means more than an individual's presence at the liturgy and sacraments. It's about all of us coming together as one.
Whether you're looking for an energetic Mass or intimate prayer time, you're in luck. In addition to daily and weekly Masses in residence halls, the Chapel and the heart of the student neighborhood — we hold special prayer services and Masses. Taize Reconciliation, Advent and Lenten Morning Prayer, Spanish Mass and the Black Catholic Mass are just a few.
Want to be more involved? There are plenty of ways to participate as lectors, Eucharistic Ministers, music ministry and more.
Reflect and Grow.Everyone experiences faith differently — and everyone grows in their own way, too. We're confident you'll find the ingredients and opportunities you need to heighten your spiritual life in our many retreats and faith programs. They happen on and off campus all the time — and they're perfect for keeping you on the right track in your faith life.
Pencil in some time for small faith communities like PORCH groups, which gather weekly for meaningful conversation and prayer. Enjoy free food ¿ for mind and body — in our Hungry Hearts or Perspectives on Faith and Life discussion series. Plus, many events are sponsored by the student-run Catholic Life group, offering fellowship, friendship and new faith experiences for all.
If you're looking for a bigger adventure, like a prayerful weekend in the wilderness or a retreat specifically geared to your class, you'll find it in our retreat options. Take some time out of your hectic schedule for the Busy Person's Retreat. Explore life's challenges — and find sources of light and hope within them — during the Lighthouse Retreat. Or explore faith under the stars as part of the Wilderness Retreat.
Build houses. Build community. And while you're at it, build a whole new wardrobe.
Ready for a challenge? Want to make a difference? Through the Center for Social Concern, you can turn your principles into action and devote your time to several causes, whether caring for the elderly in Dayton or combating sweatshop labor around the globe — not to mention amass a T-shirt collection of all the organizations you join.
More than 30 service clubs are supported by the Center for Social Concern, so you can get involved in their missions on a regular basis. The Center also sponsors plunges — immersive learning experiences that send you to new places so you can experience life in a whole new way — as well as BreakOuts, volunteer opportunities and more. These experiences expand your perspective of the world, your sense of responsibility to others and your overall understanding of your faith.
Here, you'll become not only people of service, but leaders of service as well.
Our doors are open.
Campus Ministry lives where you do, so you can find meaningful ministry right at your doorstep. There's a campus minister in every residence hall and in the student neighborhood.
Whether you're looking for faith opportunities in your residence hall, spiritual direction or a program that help you grow in your faith, you'll find it here.
All are welcome.
At the heart of Campus Ministry is the desire to walk beside you as you develop your faith life, no matter what denomination.
In the University of Dayton's Interdenominational Ministry community, you'll find a friendly group of people who will happily learn and worship with you. Our backgrounds are diverse and our environment is always welcoming. Welcome together on campus weekly in various settings, including a Sunday worship service and Thursday night Bible study. A dedicated team of student leaders helps cultivate our community of faith, and they're always ready to answer your questions and share their perspectives!
Our time together focuses on five principle goals: worship, discipleship, evangelism, fellowship and ministry. Programs include dinners, service projects, retreats, prayer services and more. Won't you come grow with us?
If you're interested in joining us or you have any questions, please contact Rev. LaKendra at 937.229.5800 or email@example.com.
We'll help you jump hurdles.Whether you've reached a fork in the road, are facing a powerful struggle or could simply use a little guidance in your spiritual life, Campus Ministry is here to help you through it all. Your experience is completely unique to you, and we offer spiritual direction, support groups and vocation discernment services that can be tailored to your needs.
Spiritual direction and vocation discernment involve meeting, one-on-one, with someone who's happy to lend you an ear. Through meaningful conversation, you'll be able to give voice to your curiosity, concerns and contemplation about your spiritual journey. Support groups offer a safe, compassionate setting for you to share your experiences with people who are going through something similar.
You can feel good knowing that someone is always available to help you in your time of need. Our commitment to community at the University of Dayton goes beyond the residence halls — in fact, it spills over into everything we do, and every interaction we have. |
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The Florida Geological Survey Digital Collection includes historic resources from the Florida Geological Survey (FGS). FGS is an Office which reports directly to the Deputy Secretary for Land & Recreation in the Florida Department of Environmental Protection. The mission of the FGS is to collect, interpret, disseminate, store and maintain geologic data, thereby contributing to the responsible use and understanding of Florida’s natural resources, and to conserve the State of Florida’s oil and gas resources and minimize environmental impacts from exploration and production operations.
Historic resources from the Florida Geological Survey Digital Collection includes historic FGS:
For a list of all publications, historic through current, see the FGS website.
Florida Geological Survey Fossil Collection in the Florida Museum of Natural History
The Florida Geological Survey fossil vertebrate collection (FGS) was started during the 1910s and was originally housed in Tallahassee. Under the direction of E. H. Sellards, Herman Gunter, and S. J. Olsen, the FGS collection was the primary source of fossil vertebrate descriptions from Florida until the early 1960s. World-renown paleontologists such as George G. Simpson, Edwin H. Colbert, and Henry F. Osborn wrote scientific papers about specimens in the FGS collection in addition to Sellards and Olsen. In 1976 the entire FGS fossil vertebrate collection was transferred to the Florida Museum of Natural History with support from a National Science Foundation grant. The UF/FGS collection is composed of about 22,000 specimens assigned to about 10,000 catalogue numbers, and almost all of them were collected in Florida. The majority of specimens in the UF/FGS collection are mammals, followed by reptiles, birds, and a relatively small number of amphibians and fish. Although there are some sites that are unique to the UF/FGS collection, many of the sites overlap with holdings in the main UF and UF/PB collections. The major strengths of the UF/FGS collection are historically important samples from the early Miocene Thomas Farm locality, the middle Miocene and early Pliocene deposits of the Bone Valley Region, Polk County, and from the late Pleistocene Vero locality, Indian River County. Researchers using the UF/FGS database should be aware that when the catalogue data for the FGS collection was first transferred from the original file cards to a computerized database in the late 1980s, relatively little effort was made to correct or improve entries. The nature of specimen was not indicated on many of the cards, locality information was sometimes vague, and many employed taxonomic names that are no longer in use. While some corrections have subsequently been made to this database, limitations of time and resources have prevented an exhaustive clean-up. Also, when Sellards left Florida for Texas in the 1920s, he transferred some, but not all, of the holotypes in the FGS collection that he had named to the USNM collection, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C.
United States Geological Survey
Water Management Districts of Florida
For information about the Florida Geological Survey:
Dr. Jon Arthur
Florida Geological Survey
903 West Tennessee Street
Tallahassee, FL 32304-7000
Phone: (850) 488-4191 Fax: (850) 488-8086
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The Florida Geological Survey is providing many of its publications (State documents) for the purpose of digitization and Internet distribution. If you cite or use portions of these electronic documents, which the Florida Geological Survey (an office of the Florida Department of Environmental Protection) is making available to the public with the kind assistance of the University of Florida’s Digital Library Center, we ask that you acknowledge or credit the Florida Geological Survey as the information source:
i.e. “Courtesy of the Florida Department of Environmental Protection’s Florida Geological Survey”
Further, since Florida Geological Survey publications were developed using public funds, no proprietary rights may be attached to FGS publications wholly or in part, nor may FGS publications be sold to the U.S. Government or the Florida State Government as part of any procurement of products or services. Our publications are disseminated to citizens “as is" for general public information purposes; many of them reflect the state of knowledge at the time of their publication and they may or may not have been updated by more recent publications. Our electronic documents should not be altered or manipulated (largely or in part) and then republished or reposted on websites for commercial resale.
FGS Publications Committee |
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This is a fantastic video
“The future looks bright for ‘Those good without God’” says the Harvard Political Review in a post entitled “The Rise of the Nonbelievers” in which they discuss the results of the American Religious Identification Survey. Among other things, the percentage of Americans who claim no religious affiliation has risen from just 8% in 1990 to 15% today. More important to me on a personal level, it appears that 23% of my fellow Idahoans are unbelievers, a much higher number than I would have expected. Good to know and I feel less alone somehow. Of course that doesn’t mean that they are all Humanist Atheists like me but at least I know they are out there. Does this mean there is hope?
The answer to that last question could be maybe a little, but not much. The right wing religionistas are still, in too may instances, calling the shots. The try to drag the whoel country down to their level. The United States is no longer first in much of anything , except may number of people in prison. The anti-intellectual right ; the climate deniers, creationists, fundamentalist flat-earthers are having their way in our schools and in the halls of power. The future looks bleak.
I must fight. I can do nothing less. I lack the resources to flee the country and I wouldn’t want to anyway. I would rather proclaim myself and be who I am, come hell or high water. I will speak, write, sing if I have to, but I will do what I can to be heard. I will join my voice with others who share my concerns and together we may yet see the rational triumph over the bookburners, witchunters, and haters of the country. Kick em in the balls, and when they go down, kick em again.
George Carlin, 1999: “Religion easily has the greatest bullshit story ever told. Think about it. Religion has actually convinced people that there’s an invisible man living in the sky who watches everything you do, every minute of every day. And the invisible man has a special list of ten things he does not want you to do. And if you do any of these ten things, he has a special place, full of fire and smoke and burning and torture and anguish, where he will send you to live and suffer and burn and choke and scream and cry forever and ever ’til the end of time! But He loves you. He loves you, and He needs money! He always needs money! He’s all-powerful, all-perfect, all-knowing, and all-wise, somehow just can’t handle money! Religion takes in billions of dollars, they pay no taxes, and they always need a little more. Now, talk about a good bullshit story. Holy Shit!” |
Welcome to Jane Addams Hull-House museum
The Jane Addams Hull-House Museum serves as a dynamic memorial to social reformer Jane Addams, the first American woman to receive the Nobel Peace Prize, and her colleagues whose work changed the lives of their immigrant neighbors as well as national and international public policy. The Museum preserves and develops the original Hull-House site for the interpretation and continuation of the historic settlement house vision, linking research, education, and social engagement
The Museum is located in two of the original settlement house buildings- the Hull Home, a National Historic Landmark, and the Residents' Dining Hall, a beautiful Arts and Crafts building that has welcomed some of the world's most important thinkers, artists and activists.
The Museum and its many vibrant programs make connections between the work of Hull-House residents and important contemporary social issues.
Founded in 1889 as a social settlement, Hull-House played a vital role in redefining American democracy in the modern age. Addams and the residents of Hull-House helped pass critical legislation and influenced public policy on public health and education, free speech, fair labor practices, immigrants’ rights, recreation and public space, arts, and philanthropy. Hull-House has long been a center of Chicago’s political and cultural life, establishing Chicago’s first public playground and public art gallery, helping to desegregate the Chicago Public Schools, and influencing philanthropy and culture. |
From IU-negotiated discounts to hardware recommendations, the UITS ComputerGuide (computerguide.iu.edu) will help you decide on your best computing setup for making the most of IT at IU.
The ComputerGuide covers operating systems, features and peripherals, connecting to IU’s network, and more. Once you know what you need, you can get IU-specific savings on hardware, software, and peripherals from vendors including Apple, Dell, and Sony.
Visit the ComputerGuide now at:
Note: IU students, faculty, and staff can save an additional $75 on select Dell systems of $899 or more. Enter coupon code QJPMFXQ2ZN7L00 at check out. Offer valid until 8/31/2011. For more, see: |
- Can't Miss: The ancient cities and pyramids.
- To Avoid: Watch the dodgy taxi drivers, fraud, kidnappers and thieves.
- Tipping: Waiters: 10-15%; porters: 7 MXP; hotel maids: 3 MXP/night.
71 The AskMen Take
Let’s start with the most important thing: liquor. Corona and tequila were born here, and are both cheap and plentiful. Mexico City is the third largest metropolitan area in the world, with some 20 million residents. With a very violent and interesting history -- Aztecs, ancient cities, Spanish invasions, French dictators, U.S. wars -- Mexico City has been put through its paces. Mexico City has been described as the meeting of the first and third worlds -- the earthy beauty and rhythm of Latin America, alongside the decay and poverty. Mexico City is a very complex, historical city that's well worth a visit. |
The Grecians dominated throughout and created the better chances in an entertaining game, but for all their endeavour, they could not find a way past Gills goalkeeper Stuart Nelson.
"They are just behind us in the league so this is a big result," Allen said. "We all left home at 6am to make sure we got to the ground for eight because of the Siberian blizzard in Gillingham. It took ages to get down here.
"Did we play great individually? Not really. Did they dig in? Yes. Our goalkeeper had one shot to save in the first half and one in the second half. It is a clean sheet and a good point.
"They are all committed, that is why I always change it around and give other people opportunities to play. They have a respect for each other and I trust all the players to play.
"We played some good football. We tried to keep the ball and move it about because they are not an easy team to play against down here because they keep possession - that is the name of their game. So we had to be patient at times, you can't always win it back quick. There were spells in the game when Exeter had a lot of the ball but we did well."
Exeter manager Paul Tisdale felt his side deserved to take the points but he could not fault his players for their performance.
"It was a very good performance and we gave it a really good go and I think we shaded the game," Tisdale said. "I think that the players feel as though we deserved more.
"We've kept a clean sheet and took the league leaders right to the end of the game. We have had another player carried off (Matt Oakley) and we are being stretched to the limit with the squad again.
"We played really well and the players were not just committed, they really tried to do some good things and I would have backed Jamie Cureton to have made the goalkeeper work for at least one or two of the chances he had. We certainly played our game and I find it very hard to criticise the players because they gave it a really good go." |
All About Skarwolf
I have issues with the entire plot of Mass Effect 3. While entertaining I seriously doubt any military commander would sacrifice his entire army for something they don't know how to use. Its completely ridiculous, any military commander with half a brain would've did something similar to Battlestar Gallactica. Evacuate and flee hoping to find somewhere else to live.
This is my suggestion on an entirely different plot;
1. The story begins much the same as current. John Shepard flees earth hoping to gather friendly forces in the hopes they together might stand a chance of fighting the Reapers instead of being picked off one at a time.
2. Priority : Deep Space Recon Station
Your intel reports indicate Cerberus is looking for a relatively secret Space Station that was intended to probe dark space. When you arrive you find Cerberus forces but for the most part the station is empty. When you arrive at the final room you find some intel which indicates a ship arrived recently from Dark Space and this is what Cerberus is after.
3. You begin to hear the illusive man speaking & appearing to you in dreams. You learn from Kelly Chambers that Cerberus did indeed have a control ship implanted but she doesn't think they'll ever use it. You begin to get very suspicious about these visions and dreams. Also your team begins to grow suspicious of your odd behaviour and they all act distant.
4. Priority : Alliance Base
Intel reports indicate the vessel from Dark Space which appears Reaper in origin has landed at an Alliance Base. Cerberus has launched a small fleet to try and capture the vessel & anything of use. You arrive with your team and begin to work through whats left of the base. You come across dead Cerberus & Alliance troops.
After a certain point you start to confront Alliance & Cerberus fighting. Strangely the Alliance troops are attacking you but the Cerberus are not.
You can attack whomever you wish at this point to reach your objective. The command center.
Once you arrive the doors open & standing before you is John Shepard.
Suddenly the illusive mans voice starts to command you to kill him. You fall down and try to fight it but end up reaching for your gun. Suddenly you're knocked down from behind... by your own team member.
The other John Shepard walks up and tells the illusive man to show himself.
He appears and says that what he did was for the best. That you were just a clone of Shepard. The real shepard never died they merely made it look that way. For his last deed the Illusive man activates a control which makes the clone of Shepard dissolve.
The real shepard explains to his team what happened.
That he went on a covert mission to Dark Space to investigate the Reapers point of origin. To learn anything of use to help in the war. Shepard concludes by saying his mission was a success.
To be cont.
Go play Skyrim, make notes and take into account what that game offers.
Now, look at your current project. If it doesn't at the very least equate to Skyrim. Stop what you're doing right now and don't bother.
Skyrim is the benchmark now for what all other RPG's should strive to at least emulate or succeed. Otherwise quite frankly they're not worth the money. I've purchased two games since finishing skyrim. Well not really finishing I still have plenty to do I just kinda got bored so I picked up two other games. I found myself saying... skyrim is way better repeateldy and turned them off.
When I'm about to checkout some new product or game the webpages usually make you select what country you're from. In mose cases they list U.S.A. (english) & UK (english) and everyone else. Thing is I'm neither of those two and will not click them anymore. I want representation for my country, CANADA.
As a result they don't get my business.
My Recent Reviews
Skarwolf does not have any recent activity. What a slacker! Maybe you should send Skarwolf a private message and ask, "Where are you hiding?" |
Captain: Team Miniclip
Team URL: http://uk.movember.com/team/683045
To change the face of men's health
Congratulations to all the hirsuite members of the team. And have a happy, hairy Christmas - from all at Egmont UK
Well done boys!
To the crazy Miniclip MoBros ... you all look amazing and now rest alongside my Mo Idols like Tom Selleck, Clark Gable & Hulk Hogan!?
Let's do it Chia Pets!
lets stick it to Prostate cancer where the sun don't shine
Come on mo bros!
Looking forward to seeing the progress of you all and good luck x |
Kitten survives run through washing machine
Driver, 95, is oldest to pass advanced test
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Rich nations have once again been accused of failing to help developing countries deal with the effects of climate change, as the UN conference wraps up in Doha.
The two-week long conference was due to end last night but continued after midnight.
Negotiators have also been trying to scramble together a last minute agreement to extend the Kyoto Protocol which runs out at the end of this year.
But firm commitments over new emissions targets remain illusive.
“One thing must change,” said Connie Hedegaard, EU Commissioner for Climate Action. “We cannot continue where a small group of countries, Europe and a few more who make commitments, while others voluntarily decide whether they want to do anything or not.”
2015 is the target date for the agreement of a wider UN deal that includes developing and developed nations. If successful, it would come into force five years later.
“What we hope to see is a sense that the machinery is there and that we focus for the next four years – to the 2015 global deadline – on ramping up ambition,” said Liz Gallagher from the NGO CAN-I.
The extra time relieves some of the pressure from the Doha talks, where rare protests have taken place outside and within the conference centre. |
Obama orders 60-day cybersecurity review
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - President Barack Obama on Monday ordered an immediate 60-day review of federal cyber security efforts and named Melissa Hathaway, a top U.S. intelligence official, to oversee the effort, according to a White House statement.
Hathaway, who served as a top cyber security adviser to Mike McConnell, the former director of national intelligence, will conduct the review for the White House National Security and Homeland Security Councils.
The review, which will examine what the federal government already is doing to protect vital U.S. computer networks, underscores mounting concerns about the risks of cyber attacks, and points to a growing market for U.S. contractors.
Northrop Grumman Corp, Lockheed Martin Corp and Boeing Co, the Pentagon's biggest contractors, already are working on a variety of cyber security projects for the U.S. government, many of which are classified.
Industry executives say the sector will be one of their fastest-growing markets in coming years, and analysts say it could generate over $10 billion in contracts by 2013.
Hathaway, who had been coordinating cyber security efforts for the intelligence community, will serve as acting senior director for cyber space during the review period, according to the White House statement, which was released late on Monday.
Obama highlighted the importance of safeguarding the nation's vital computer networks against enemy attacks during his campaign, and has promised to appoint a national cyber adviser to coordinate federal agency efforts and develop a national cyber policy.
Just before he left office last month, McConnell told reporters that the Internet had introduced an unprecedented level of vulnerability. "If you get in our systems and you're trying to destroy banking records or electric power distribution or transportation, it could have a debilitating effect on the country," he said.
The Senate last month confirmed Adm. Dennis Blair to be the new director of national intelligence, replacing McConnell.
Immediately upon taking office, the Obama administration underscored the importance of protecting U.S. information networks in a posting on the White House website.
It pledged to work with industry, researchers, and citizens to "build a trustworthy and accountable cyber infrastructure that is resilient, protects America's competitive advantage, and advances our national and homeland security."
The White House also said it would initiate a drive to develop next-generation secure computers and networking for national security applications; establish tough new standards for cyber security and physical resilience; battle corporate cyber espionage and target criminal activity on the Internet.
(Reporting by Andrea Shalal-Esa; editing by Carol Bishopric)
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Cider Blogs and Tags
I do wonder why we are not seeing very many cider blogs at all yet. To me it seems the arguments for any small business or serious hobbyist publishing a blog are compelling. At least somebody at Westons or Thatchers might be blogging by now? What better way to share the ups and downs of cider making, orchard management, pictures and illustration and anything else the cidermaker wants to write about.
Here are some good reasons to start a cidermaking blog:
- EASY It's almost as easy as writing an email and sending it to ukcider
- CHEAP/FREE You can get a free blog for yourself at one of many providers such as blogger.com or wordpress,org and not have to worry about hosting charges or increasing bandwidth
- CONVERSATION Because blogs allow for comments, you can make contacts, friends and learn from pointers that your audience sends in.
- INSIGHT into the market through engagement with potential customers
- GOOGLE loves blogs, building your visibility and traffic
And to dispel some myths:
Blogging at it's simplest doesn't require any technical knowhow. It's as easy as posting a webmail or bulletin board. You could even compose your entry first in a Word processor and then paste it in if you like.
- Keeping it up
You don't have to write something every day as some people believe ( perhaps after having started diaries as teenagers and then shortly abandoned them? ) Once a week or month would still have a big impact compared to a static "homepage" type site which nobody can interact with.
The rest of this page is for listing cider blogs from the ukcider network. |
University of Limpopo Institutional Repository >
Faculty of Health Sciences >
School of Public Health >
Theses and Dissertations (Health System Management & Policy) >
Please use this identifier to cite or link to this item:
|Title: ||Knowledge attitude and practice of breast cancer examination among women attending Extension 2 Clinic Gaborone, Botswana|
|Authors: ||Tiengo, Jane Gillead|
|Keywords: ||Breast cancer|
|Issue Date: ||2010|
|Publisher: ||University of Limpopo (Medunsa Campus)|
|Abstract: ||Background: Screening for early detection and diagnosis of diseases and health conditions is an important public health principle. Breast cancer examination is whereby a woman will examine the breast by Breast Self Examination (BSE), Clinical Breast Examination (CBE), and Mammogram.
The main aim of the study was to assess the knowledge, attitude and practice of breast cancer examination among women attending Extension 2 clinic in Gaborone, Botswana.
Method: The cross-sectional quantitative study design to examine knowledge, attitude and practice of women attending Extension 2 clinic in Gaborone was carried out between August and September 2009 using an interviewer administered questionnaire designed by the researcher.
Results: The study was conducted among 375 women attended at extension 2 clinic. Study participants had low knowledge of breast cancer examination. The overall mean knowledge score was 49.7%. The commonest presentation of breast cancer which is a painless breast lump only a third 128(34.1%) of the respondents knew about it. The participants had a positive attitude towards breast cancer examination. Practice of breast cancer examination was unacceptable. Out of 238
Of those who practiced breast self examination (63.5% ) (BSE), only 88(23.5%) of the respondents practiced monthly as required. Similarly only 85(22.7%) of the respondents had visited a doctor for clinical breast examination (CBE) in the past year. Mammogram practice was also unacceptable only 6 (1.6%) of the respondents had done mammogram in the past 2 years. There was no association between socio-demographic characteristics with the knowledge attitude and practice of breast cancer examination.
Conclusion: The results of this study suggested that women attending at extension 2 clinic had low knowledge of breast cancer examination. Despite having positive attitude towards breast cancer examination, minority practiced breast self examination, clinical breast examination and mammogram. There was no association between socio-demographic characteristics with the knowledge of breast cancer. Therefore the Government should develop a policy on breast cancer screening. Awareness and advocacy campaign on breast cancer screening should be increased in the country.|
|Description: ||Thesis (MPH)--University of Limpopo, 2010.|
|Appears in Collections:||Theses and Dissertations (Health System Management & Policy)|
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Introduction to principles of chemistry and fundamentals of inorganic and biochemistry. Structure and chemistry of carbohydrates, lipids, proteins, biochemistry of enzymes, metabolism, body fluids and radiation effects. On-line materials includes the course syllabus, copies of the lecture slides and animations, interactive Periodic Table, chapter summaries and practice exams. This course is targeted towards Health Science Majors.
Introduction to principles of chemistry. This course is targeted towards Chemistry Majors.
Laboratory experiments to develop techniques in organic chemistry and illustrate principles. On-line materials include step-by-step prelabs for many of the experiments that students will be conducting.
Theoretical principles of quantitative and instrumental analysis. Emphasis is placed on newer analytical tools and equipment.
Intermediate level course. Includes a discussion of the structure, function and metabolism of proteins, carbohydrates and lipids. In addition, there is a review of enzymes, DNA and RNA.
This course stresses theory and application of modern chromatographic methods. On-line materials include the course syllabus, copies of course lecture slides and animations.
A 'short course' covering the use of a mass spectrometer as a GC detector. Basic instrumentation, data treatment and spectral interpretation methods will be discussed. On-line materials include copies of course lecture slides and tables to assist in the interpretation of mass spectra.
Coverage of statistical methods in Analytical Chemistry. Course includes basic statistics, experimental design, modeling, exploratory data analysis and other multivariate techniques. On-line materials include the course syllabus, homework problems and copies of the lecture slides.
A survey of the basic equipment, data and methodology of Analytical methods that rely on radioisotopic materials. On-line materials include the course syllabus, homework problems. copies of the lecture slides and animations.
Why I missed the exam |
Now that Cataclysm has hit the World Of Warcraft, Druid Leveling Guides are having to be rewritten. Since every part of the world has changed and is now a 'new' zone even those that have levelled multiple characters before are clueless when faced with these new areas and quest chains. Whilst many of the quests remain the same, many are new, and quest chains have evolved.
As well as showing the most quick and efficient paths in levelling your druid, guides can also detail the best talents to spec for specific situations and a wealth of other knowledge. Some guides may tell you how and where to get the correct gear and how to play your challenging new character. Even the most seemingly insignificant piece of information can make a huge impact on your experience.
The druid consists of 3 separate roles in one character. They are capable of being a healer, tank or dps. With each of their forms comes a separate set of statistics requiring different armour. This is part of what makes the class so challenging.
The race you choose can make your druid a little more effective and certain professions can help you in later levels. If you are trying to level quickly it is important to take all minor tweaks into account as combined together they can significantly speed up your time. It can take hours to research the best tweaks to use and a guide will usually contain them all.
Other things to remember about levelling in Cataclysm are that some guilds may have an experience boost. This will increase experience gained from killing monsters and handing in quests and is achieved by a guild reaching level 2. Higher levels for guilds unlock further bonuses including further experience gain and increased mount speeds which can speed up your levelling.
Generally a guide is the quickest way to the level you are trying to achieve, whether it is 60, 70 or 85. Guides will usually omit quests that do not provide a worthwhile gain and include only tasks that provide the quickest route through the game. With the hundreds of quests now available to choose from it is difficult to know which ones are necessary and which could be setting you back.
Many guides today include in game helpers that guide you directly within the game interface. This speeds things up as there are no lengthy pages to read and brings an end to the need for alt-tab. It is one of the most effective ways to use a guide and most are configured to comply with the World Of Warcraft terms and conditions.
If you are trying to level your druid quickly then a World Of Warcraft Druid Leveling Guide is something to consider. Many guides span their levelling over just a few days meaning you can easily build up your character within weeks rather than the months it used to take. With the race to end game content currently on the move it is more important than ever to get there fast. You just need to get Dugi's Ultimate WoW Guide. |
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“He was the most wonderful cat: black—perhaps partly Siamese—with enormous green eyes. And very intelligent. You could tell he had been a writer’s cat. He would sit by me, seriously, as I wrote, while all my other cats filtered away.”
I imagine the same could be said of Emma Straub’s cats.
“Writer’s Cats” I fancy a whole new more sophisticated internet meme. |
Now that we’ve said a lot about individual operators on vector spaces, I want to go back and consider some other sorts of structures we can put on the space itself. Foremost among these is the idea of a bilinear form. This is really nothing but a bilinear function to the base field: . Of course, this means that it’s equivalent to a linear function from the tensor square: .
Instead of writing this as a function, we will often use a slightly different notation. We write a bracket , or sometimes , if we need to specify which of multiple different inner products under consideration.
Another viewpoint comes from recognizing that we’ve got a duality for vector spaces. This lets us rewrite our bilinear form as a linear transformation . We can view this as saying that once we pick one of the vectors , the bilinear form reduces to a linear functional , which is a vector in the dual space . Or we could focus on the other slot and define .
We know that the dual space of a finite-dimensional vector space has the same dimension as the space itself, which raises the possibility that or is an isomorphism from to . If either one is, then both are, and we say that the bilinear form is nondegenerate.
We can also note that there is a symmetry on the category of vector spaces. That is, we have a linear transformation defined by . This makes it natural to ask what effect this has on our form. Two obvious possibilities are that and that . In the first case we’ll call the bilinear form “symmetric”, and in the second we’ll call it “antisymmetric”. In terms of the maps and , we see that composing with the symmetry swaps the roles of these two functions. For symmetric bilinear forms, , while for antisymmetric bilinear forms we have .
This leads us to consider nondegenerate bilinear forms a little more. If is an isomorphism it has an inverse . Then we can form the composite . If is symmetric then this composition is the identity transformation on . On the other hand, if is antisymmetric then this composition is the negative of the identity transformation. Thus, the composite transformation measures how much the bilinear transformation diverges from symmetry. Accordingly, we call it the asymmetry of the form .
Finally, if we’re working over a finite-dimensional vector space we can pick a basis for , and get a matrix for . We define the matrix entry . Then if we have vectors and we can calculate
In terms of this basis and its dual basis , we find the image of the linear transformation . That is, the matrix also can be used to represent the partial maps and . If is symmetric, then the matrix is symmetric , while if it’s antisymmetric then . |
The Gram-Schmidt Process
Now that we have a real or complex inner product, we have notions of length and angle. This lets us define what it means for a collection of vectors to be “orthonormal”: each pair of distinct vectors is perpendicular, and each vector has unit length. In formulas, we say that the collection is orthonormal if . These can be useful things to have, but how do we get our hands on them?
It turns out that if we have a linearly independent collection of vectors then we can come up with an orthonormal collection spanning the same subspace of . Even better, we can pick it so that the first vectors span the same subspace as . The method goes back to Laplace and Cauchy, but gets its name from Jørgen Gram and Erhard Schmidt.
We proceed by induction on the number of vectors in the collection. If , then we simply set
This “normalizes” the vector to have unit length, but doesn’t change its direction. It spans the same one-dimensional subspace, and since it’s alone it forms an orthonormal collection.
Now, lets assume the procedure works for collections of size and start out with a linearly independent collection of vectors. First, we can orthonormalize the first vectors using our inductive hypothesis. This gives a collection which spans the same subspace as (and so on down, as noted above). But isn’t in the subspace spanned by the first vectors (or else the original collection wouldn’t have been linearly independent). So it points at least somewhat in a new direction.
To find this new direction, we define
This vector will be orthogonal to all the vectors from to , since for any such we can check
where we use the orthonormality of the collection to show that most of these inner products come out to be zero.
So we’ve got a vector orthogonal to all the ones we collected so far, but it might not have unit length. So we normalize it:
and we’re done. |
Training of Trainers and training course on Security Sector Reform for UNMISS
4 - 15 February 2013, Musanze district, South Sudan - In the light of its niche “enhancing capacity in Africa through the Training of trainers”, UNITAR and its partner Rwanda Peace Academy (RPA) have put efforts together in order to enhance the capacity of local staff for the United Nations Mission in South Sudan (UNMISS) through the Training of Trainers (ToT) and the training course on Security Sector Reform (SSR) in Nyakinama, Musanze district, from 04 - 15 February 2013.
The training course aimed at enhancing the capacity of the South Sudanese staff working with UNMISS and is one of many other training courses scheduled to be delivered as part of the broader plan to enhance the civilian capacity and the mission exit strategy. Through the National Staff Capacity Building , UNMISS’ objective is to provide "a define set of skills in a number of knowledge areas that will allow national staff to progressively assure high levels of responsibility and develop their professional careers”.
Inspired from the concept developed by the Chairman of the PTP Advisory Board, Mr. Jean Marie Guéhenno, for “Enhancing the Capacity of African Peacekeeping Training Institutions”, and prefaced by Mr. Lakhdar Brahimi, UNITAR, they designed together the tailor made training programme where by UNMISS, through its Intergraded Training Center, determined the training needs and selected the adequate training courses for the South Sudanese National staff.
Although this kind of training will always be an opportunity whereby trainees learn from facilitators and vice-versa, in this particular case, it is a very unique occasion to attend a training course on a peacebuilding related topic in Rwanda. Through its painful experience and its homegrown solution results, Rwanda has become a real laboratory for Peacebuilding through which the people working in post conflict countries could understand and draw lessons on the steps and changes that Rwanda has been through to reach where it is today in building and promoting peace.
With the approach of the ToT course not only is the knowledge transferred to participants on the specific topic, “Security Sector Reform” but it also provides beneficiaries with the skills and techniques on the best ways to pass that knowledge on to other individuals.
Participants will be given the opportunity to put these new skills into practice at the end of the course, but more importantly, the content of the course will be handed over to the UNMISS IMTC and its newly-trained Trainers, thereby leaving a real heritage with the UNMISS IMTC, and therefore ensuring the ownership and sustainability of the initiative. |
|Uncharted 3: Drake's Deception|
|Publisher(s)||Sony Computer Entertainment|
|Release date(s)||NA November 1, 2011|
EU November 2, 2011
JP November 2, 2011
|Genre(s)||Action-adventure, third-person shooter|
|Mode(s)||Single-player, online multiplayer, online splitscreen, offline splitscreen|
Uncharted 3: Drake's Deception is an action-adventure third-person shooter game and the sequel to Uncharted 2: Among Thieves. The game is the third installment in the Uncharted series. It was released on November 1st for North America, November 2nd for Europe and Japan, and November 3rd for Australia. The game is the first in the series to support high-resolution Stereoscopic 3D. It also received the "Best PS3 Game" award at the 2011 Spike TV Video Game Awards. The main plot of the game involves Nathan "Nate" Drake and Victor "Sully" Sullivan trying to find the legendary Atlantis of the Sands.
The story begins with a phrase read by Nathan "Nate" Drake (Nolan North) by T.E Lawrence. The scene then changes to Nate and Victor "Sully" Sullivan (Richard McGonagle) entering a pub in London to meet with a man named Talbot, who is interested in purchasing Nate's ring. During the meeting, Nate and Sully accuse Talbot of offering them counterfeit banknotes, and a fight ensues. After fighting their way past Talbot's whores, Nate and Sully emerge in an alleyway, where they are surrounded and subdued by Charlie Cutter (Graham McTavish), Talbot's cohort. They are then approached by Talbot's client, Katherine Marlowe (Rosalind Ayres), who steals Drake's ring. Nate attempts to go after her, but Cutter guns him and Sully down, seemingly killing them.
The story flashes back to 20 years earlier. A teenage Nathan Drake (Billy Unger) explores a museum in Cartagena, Colombia, in search of Sir Francis' ring, but is thrown out after guards suspect him of being a thief. Intrigued by the actions of Victor Sullivan, who he does not know at this point, Nate follows Sully to a keymaker and pickpockets him. Nate anticipates that he has succeeded until he unintentionally comes across Sully. Sully states that Nate's moves were telegraphed the entire time and threatens Nate to give back his wallet or he'll call the police. Nate then threatens Sully that he'll do the same knowing that it would not look good if middle aged men were following young boys. Sully considers this but still asks for his wallet back. Nate returns it to him before leaving. The scene then changes to Nate on the roof holding the key saying 'Telegraphing my moves, huh,' before returning to the museum. He steals the ring, but before he can leave he is caught by Marlowe, her henchmen, and Sully, who was working for her. Sully tells Nate calmly to give them the ring but Nate refuses. Marlowe attempt to grab the ring by grabbing Nate's closed fist. Nate then opens his fist, with no ring, asking 'What ring?" Marlowe laughs with no humour then slaps him. She makes a second attempt in slapping him but Sully grabs her arm to stop her, appauled by her behaviour. Nate makes a run for it, jumping on roofs, on walls and even someone's apartment! The henchmen attempt to shoot him but Sully either tackles them or shoots them himself. Nate finally comes to a dead end and one henchmen is about to shoot him. Nate grabs a nearby gun but collapses to the ground and shivers violently. A gunshot is fired and it came from Sully's gun. Sully then takes him to a sort of cafe and, with Nate still unsure if he could trust him, says that it was just a job and he doesn't ask his clients questions as well claiming that he's pretty sure he's fired. Sully asks to examine the ring but Nate is still unsure then Sully convinces him that if he wanted to steal the ring he would have taken it from Nate by now. Nate gives him the ring explaining that Francis Drake's motto was 'Greatness from Small Beginnings'. Nate then explains Drake had sailed for six months but he was a professional sailor so it would have taken him a month. Nate says that Drake was hiding something and at that point Sully offers to mentor him. From there they become friends.
Returning to the present day, it is revealed that the meeting was an elaborate set-up by Nate and Sully to get closer to Marlowe, with Cutter being an old friend of theirs. Avoiding the police, the threesome sneak back to the van where Chloe Frazer (Claudia Black) awaits. Chloe spyed on Marlowes car to see where they could get the thing that Nate has been wanting for twenty years. After discovering a sort of passage way mechanism, they travel underground to Marlowe's hidden library. They find Marlowe and Talbot discussing the ring then Marlowe enters the ring in the mechanism, only to discover that the ring was a fake. Talbot then realises that Cutter was a traitor. Marlowe sends mercenaries to find them, therefore leaving the library. As well as discovering T.E. Lawrence's notebook , Nate, Sully and Cutter discover the code on the mechanism, Lond Hidden, then Nate discovers that it's an anagram. The answer was Golden Hind where they find hung on the wall. Nate climbs to retrieve it just when the henchmen come in. Nate falls with the Golden Hind, breaking it, and finds a map showing Francis Drake's secret voyage where he was commissioned by Queen Elizabeth I to search for the lost city of Ubar which is only mentioned in the Quran. The three quickly get out of the underground trainstation where Chloe saves them in time by arriving with the van. Using the items they retrieved, Nate works out that clues to the city's location lie in Crusader crypts in a French chateau and a Syrian citadel. Nate decides that he and Sully will go to the France chateau and Chloe and Cutter will go to the Syrian citadel. Nate and Sully head to eastern France and locate the long-abandoned chateau in a dense forest. The first clue of finding something weird, after being ambushed by Talbot's men, is finding one of Talbot's dead men dried out and green on the ground even though they only arrived moments earlier. After setting a mechanism, Nate and Sully enter a passage way where they find a lab. Pushing the table, they find another passage and set of another mechanism. They find one half of an amulet inside the crypt, but the two are ambushed by Talbot. Talbot sends 'Harriss' to get the half of the amulet. Nate attempts to grab the gun, only getting shot on the side of his shoulder for his reward. Suddenly, these scarabs suddenly ambush everyone, only fearing light which is the only thing protecting them, apart from Harriss who wasn't in the light. Talbot abandons them and Nate and Sully quickly get out. They then find Talbot's men setting the whole place on fire and Nate and Sully make a quick exit. Sully questions Nate about the situation but Nate just says he's not going to abandon it but then he suddenly realises that Chloe and Cutter are in trouble because they may have been followed aswell.
In Syria, Nate and Sully's suspicions are confirmed once they find that the chain is cut and once Nate discovers mercenaries, whom he kills. After fighting a few more henchmen in the old well, Nate and Sully meet up with Chloe and Cutter. After Nate claims that they were 'rescuing them' the old plan off sneaking in then out is abandoned once Cutter shares valuable information about Marlowe being in an order that dates back four centuries.The order seeks to gain power by exploiting the fears of their enemies. The group realise that they need to go on the highest vantage point to search for a particular symbol to locate the crypt. After fighting more mercenaries, getting thrown out of towers, they reach the vantage point. Nate and Cutter locate the symbol and the door but they are suddenly shot by several RPGs. Nate and Cutter are split up from Chloe and Sully but continue to reach the door. To their disappointment, it is only storage but then they locate the symbol on the ground again and find pillars to be their entrance. The group reunite and try to find an entrance to the pillars. Nate, Sully and Chloe go around a corner but the Cutter, being on the other side, is shot by a dart containing hallucinogens by Talbot. Under his influence, Cutter gives Talbot the journal and his gun and Talbot whispers in Cutter's ear to not trust Drake. The rest of the group return to find Talbot holding Cutter. Sully chases Talbot into a corner but Talbot had disappeared. The group find the dart inserted in Cutter's neck, with Cutter repeatedly saying 'Don't Touch Me'. With Cutter struggling, the rest try to figure out the entrance. Chloe then figures it out, it being the middle pillar, and they all enter. Drake volunteers to look after Cutter as they go through a tight space. When they are in the open, Cutter begins to fight Nate. At the end of the fight, Cutter is choking Nate and Sully and Chloe return just in time. Chloe tells Sully, as he was willing to shoot Cutter to save Nate, not to shoot and convinces Cutter that he is killing Nate. Cutter let's go leaving Nate spluttering and coughing on the ground. Cutter is back to his normal self also asking Sully if he really was going to shoot him with Sully replying "Like a Rabid Dog" After operating a mechanism, the group find the crypt where they find second half off the amulet. Nate then reveals that Talbot has the first half of the amulet. Suddenly, they hear Talbot's henchmen and they quickly get out of the place by pushing a loose wall, crushing one henchman in the process. They are ambushed by Talbot himself then suddenly Cutter seemingly reacts to the drug again, pointing it at Nate. Nate, Sully and Chloe are forced to drop there guns but Talbot still gives the command to shoot them. Cutter replies 'My Pleasure' and insteads shoot Talbot and his henchmen. The group flee but when the three of them, Nate, Sully and Chloe cross a bridge it collapses leaving Cutter trapped. He is then approached by Marlowe and amazingly Talbot who was supposedly shot down yet no wound and they set the place on fire as well as grabbing the amulet half. Cutter is forced to jump of but he breaks his leg in the process. Nate and Chloe shoot down the men while they make their way out as Sully supports Cutter. They exit the Citadel and hijack a bus. Chloe says to Nate that it was too close and it's not worth it, therefore backing out. Cutter is forced to back out but tells Nate not to let them win. Because of this Nate and Sully are to travel to Yemen on their own yet Sully knows where to get help.
Drake reluctantly follows Sully's advice to meet with his wife Elena Fisher (Emily Rose), recently enstraged. Though the two argue over the fact that Elena is still wearing her wedding ring, and how Nate seems to be obsessed with his quest, Elena still helps Nate and Sully, giving them a tour of the city. They eventually locate the underground tomb where they discover the location of the lost city, as well as evidence that Sir Francis Drake had also found the tomb, and that what he learned there caused him to abandon his mission. Back above ground, Nate is shot with a dart containing hallucinogens. After stumbling away alone, Nate wakes up outside a café with Marlowe and Talbot. Here, Marlowe comments on his past and his relationship with Sully, and even threatens Elena if he does not cooperate. When Talbot gets news of Sully's location, Nate breaks free and gives chase to Talbot throughout the city; however, Nate is then knocked out by Rameses, a pirate working with Marlowe. Rameses interrogates Nate for information about Iram of the Pillars. When Nate refuses to cooperate, Rameses claims to have captured Sully. Nate manages to escape captivity and eventually reach the cruise ship where Sully is captured.
Nate discover Sullivan sitting on a chair in the cargo hold with a fabric bag on his head, but discovers it is a dummy. Rameses and his men appear, and reveal that Rameses never had Sullivan. Rameses stumbles to safety after being shot by Nate. Nate then throws a grenade in the ensuing battle, which results in a large explosion rupturing the ships hull. Eventually the excess water causes the whole vessel to roll 90 degrees and begin sinking. After navigating through the capsized ship, Nate finds himself in the over-turned ballroom. A mortally wounded Rameses re-appears and shoots the glass roof, resulting in water rapidly flooding in, killing himself in the process. Nate escapes the overturned ship and washes back onto the shore.
He is reunited with Elena, but she informs him that Sully was captured by Marlowe's men and was taken on a convoy into the Rub 'al Khali desert; but they may be able to rescue him if they stow away on a cargo plane due to deliver supplies to Marlowe's convoy. At dawn, the two of them infiltrate the airstrip, where they eventually reach a high wall. Nate gets to the other side but refuses to help Elena up, and claims he doesn't want to risk losing Elena again. She understands and accepts this, and eventually leaves using a nearby jeep. Nate tries to reach the plane as it begins its take-off run, but ultimately fails. Elena re-appears in the jeep and picks him up, allowing him to enter the plane through one of the landing-gear bay doors just as the plane lifts off. Nate is soon discovered by Marlowe's men on board, and a shoot-out ensues, resulting in a massive decompression, which tears the plane apart and sucks Nate out. Falling through the sky, Nate collides with a falling supply crate and deploys the crate's unused parachute; he is able to land safely on the desert floor. Nate finds a weapon in the wreckage and starts to journey through the desert.
After wandering the desert, suffering from heat exhaustion, severe thirst and experiencing hallucinations and mirages, Nate arrives at a ghost town in the desert where he is attacked by Marlowe's men. A troop of men on horseback, led by Salim (TJ Ramini), appear and ride to Nate's rescue. At the horsemen's encampment, Salim tells Nate that the city of Ubar was doomed thousands of years ago by King Solomon when he imprisoned evil Djinn within a brass vessel and cast it into the heart of the city. He agrees to help Nate and leads him to the convoy spotted by his scouts. Nate and Salim destroy the convoy and rescue Sully. Salim then instructs Nate and Sully to follow him into a nearby sandstorm, but the pair lose him amidst the dust and they realise that they have arrived at the gates of Ubar.
Upon entering Ubar, Nate and Sully come across a sophisticated water fountain that Nate drinks from. Suddenly Talbot appears and shoots Sully, apparently killing him. Overcome by rage over Sully's death, Nate gives chase and has to fight more of Marlowe's men, who seem to have been possessed by the Djinn, engulfing themselves in flames as well as showing the ability to teleport. Nate eventually comes to his senses and finds Sully alive. The true mystery of what happened to the people of Ubar thousands of years ago becomes apparent: when King Solomon cast the brass vessel into the depths of the city, it fell into the water and began to taint the water with a powerful hallucinogenic agent. The people were subsequently driven mad, and civilization within the city collapsed. Nate realises that the vessel is what Queen Elizabeth had sent Francis Drake to find, but after learning the consequences of his quest, Drake abandons his mission and returns to England. Nate and Sully search the city and locate Marlowe, who is using a winch to pull the brass talisman from the water. Nate and Sully destroy the winch and the explosion sets off a chain reaction throughout the entire city, causing it to collapse. Nate and Sully attempt to escape the crumbling city, and encounter Marlowe and Talbot shortly before the floor collapses, throwing Marlowe into a pit of quicksand. Nate tries to save her but is unable to pull her out, and Marlowe is submerged in the sand, taking Drake's ring with her.
After desperately trying to reach the edge of the giant sinkhole that the city has now become, Nate and Sully are intercepted by Talbot, close to the exit. An enraged Talbot attempts to kill Nate and Sully, but after a brutal fight, he is shot by Nate and falls out of sight. At the city gates, Salim rides in on his horse and leads Nate and Sully to safety as the city is engulfed by the desert sands. Nate and Sully return to the airport in Yemen, where Sully explains why he took such an interest in the young Nate. He then gives back Nate's wedding ring, which he secretly kept safe when Drake and Elena separated. Nate turns to see Elena joining them. The two embrace each other, and the three fly back home on Sully's new sea plane.
Voice Actors/Characters Edit
Main article: Uncharted 3: Drake's Deception characters.
- Nolan North - Nathan Drake
- Richard McGonagle - Victor Sullivan
- Emily Rose - Elena Fisher
- Claudia Black - Chloe Frazer
- Graham McTavish - Cutter
- Rosalind Ayres - Katherine Marlowe
Uncharted 3: Drake's Deception upgraded the features from previous installments, but included new elements, such as an advanced melee combat system that allows Drake to face multiple opponents at once. Players are able to make use of Drake's surroundings to take down foes, such as smashing a bottle into an opponent's face, pulling the pin on a grenade attached to an enemy's waist. The aim reticule seems to have increased its size, there is also a hit marker when Drake shoots an enemy. Naughty Dog has added automatic pick up for any weapon the player is holding.
Uncharted 3's multiplayer will expand on Uncharted 2 in both cooperative and competitive play. New weapons and gametypes have been revealed, as well as both weapon and character customization. Naughty Dog confirmed the maps will be more dynamic and interesting. Co-op has again been split into three modes, Hunter, Adventure and Arena. Medal kickbacks and power plays are both new features for the Uncharted franchise.
Sony ran a competition to find a new character for the multiplayer game. Combining 6 finalists from America with 10 finalists from Europe, Amy Hennig, Justin Richmond, Emily Rose and Nolan North mad up the judging panel that auditioned the finalists at Sony Studios on 28th March 2012.
The special editions of the game were revealed on June 2, 2011.
Collectors Edition Edit
The collectors edition will cost $99.99 and will contain:
- A Sideshow Collectibles Nate statue
- A replica of Nate's belt buckle
- A replica of Francis Drake's ring and necklace strap
- A "Steelbook" game case
- A "travelling case" for storage
Special Edition Edit
The game box is designed like Nate's diary and will contain illustrated pages and artworks. Inside is a PSN voucher which gives access to the following:
- Multiplayer skin and weapon - "Suited Drake and Pirate AK-47"
- Multiplayer Upper Cut Taunt
- Cash Multiplier
- Special Edition Decals Pack
Explorer Edition Edit
A hybrid of the "Collectors" and "Special" editions, featuring the "Special Edition" as described above, and the "Collectors Edition" as described above, excluding the "Travelling Case." A case is being designed for this edition, although it is unknown if it is the same case that will be used for the "Collectors Edition."
Collector's Pack Edit
According to EB Games Australia if you pre-order the special editions in Australia you will have an exclusive "Collector's Pack" that includes the following:
- PS3 Console Decal
- The "Creepy Crawler Kickback" Multiplayer DLC
- "Callout Mod" for the AK-47
- A Nathan Drake Replica Ring with Necklace Strap
Limited Edition DualShock 3 EditOn November 2, the same release date for the game releasing in Japan, a limited edition DualShock 3 was also released, but the controller is only available in Japan.
Game of the Year Edition Edit
On April 24th, 2012, Sony announced the Game of the Year edition of Uncharted 3: Drake's Deception, but no release date. When released, the Game of the Year edition include the full game as well as all downloadable content released for it as a free add-on. A full list of the 14 DLC packs can be found at the link above.
Uncharted 3: Drake's Deception received universal critical acclaim, receiving numerous "Game of the Year" and "Best Visuals" awards. The game holds 91.76% on GameRankings, based on 70 reviews, and 92/100 from MetaCritic, based on over 90 reviews.
The first review of Uncharted 3 came from the Spanish magazine Playmania, who awarded it 9.9/10, the highest review score they have ever awarded to a game. Greg Miller from IGN awarded the game a perfect 10/10 in all aspects, earning the title: "Masterpiece". Official PlayStation Magazine UK gave Uncharted 3 10/10 and a gold award , stating "Welcome to the new platinum standard". The Guardian magazine gave the game a perfect score of 5/5, stating "Uncharted 3, perhaps for the first time, represents what we all hoped games would eventually evolve into. Its production values are sky-high, and it puts you at the centre of a gloriously rich and irresistible world, controlling a character who is heroic, but also convincingly human. It's also mildly didactic, and feels less dumbed-down than any mainstream movie we've come across in years." Destructoid gave the game 10/10, stating "Uncharted 3 jumps from one extraordinary set piece to the next, pushing the way a videogame narrative can be presented. Equal parts exhilarating and emotional, I can't say I have ever played a more perfectly paced game." GamePro gave a 10/10 too, stating "Overall, the combination of a robust multiplayer, a surprisingly compelling co-op adventure, and a thrilling ten-hour single-player campaign add up to a title that is, quite simply, a must-own."
Edge magazine gave the game a 9/10, stating "The present console cycle is expected to last nearly a decade, and there will inevitably be developers advocating the need for more sophisticated tools. But just like Machu Picchu, the Pyramids and every other engineering marvel of antiquity, Uncharted 3 will stand as a reminder to future generations of gamers that enough problem-solving imagination can turn any old trowel into a magic wand." Eurogamer gave the game a much lower score of 8/10, stating "As a slice of one-view entertainment, Uncharted 3 is peerless... As an expression of all that a video game could be, however, Uncharted 3 is narrow, focused and ultimately shallow."
- Eliza Dushku announced Uncharted 3: Drake's Deception and Uncharted 2: Among Thieves at the Spike VGA's in their respective years.
- In an interview on August 17th 2011, Arne Meyer of Naughty Dog revealed that Uncharted 3 was currently over 50Gb in size, above the maximum capacity of a blu-ray disc and more than twice the size of Uncharted 2.
- The teaser premiered on the Entertainment Weekly's Popwatch exclusive reveal of Uncharted 3, however that version is ten seconds longer than the Spike VGA trailer with an updated Naughty Dog logo introduction.
- In an October entry to the PlayStation Blog, it was revealed that all retail copies of Uncharted 3: Drake's Deception will include a voucher code to access the Starhawk multiplayer beta early. The Starhawk beta will be released sometime in early 2012.
- This is the first and so far only game in the series not to feature extra singleplayer bonuses such as an in-game store, or medal tracker. (Although they could possibly be added later.) It does, however, still retain the treasure list and bonus features. (The movie cutscene viewer, however, was added as part of Update ver. 1.02 on November 28)
- Everyone in the game has a more movie-like appearance than in any other game.
- Many old weapons have a shorter role, such the AK-47 and the Wes-44, it also occur to some new weapons, such as the new M9.
- Some weapons from the previous games have been replaced with different weapons such the M4 replaced with the M9 or the Desert-5 replaced with the Mag-5.
- Unlike the first two games, this is the only Uncharted game where it cannot change the single-player character appearance.
Released Content Edit
- A dynamic theme, a static theme and two avatars have been released. The Dynamic Theme and Drake Avatar are available on the PSN store, while the static theme and Uncharted 3 avatar are available through a code which is received when you sign up for updates at the game's official site.
- In December, shortly after the announcement of Uncharted 3, Naughty Dog released part one of a behind the scenes video. Part two has not yet been released.
- On March 8th 2011 Naughty Dog released a cutscene which introduced Uncharted 3's Villain, Katherine Marlowe.
- On April 18th,a multiplayer trailer was released as well as an interview showing off some of the new features that will be available in the Uncharted 3 multiplayer.
- During E3 a new trailer was released, showing us Elena and Chloe's return.
The following images are cropped to fit in the gallery frame. Please click on an image to view all of it.
- ↑ http://www.thesixthaxis.com/2011/07/08/uncharted-3-uk-release-date-pushed-forward/
- ↑ http://ie.playstation.com/ps3/games/detail/item328375/Uncharted-3-Drakes-Deception%E2%84%A2/
- ↑ http://ie.ps3.ign.com/articles/117/1172151p1.html
- ↑ http://kotaku.com/5837459/japan-gets-official-uncharted-3-control-pad/gallery/1
- ↑ http://www.computerandvideogames.com/323193/reviews/uncharted-3-drakes-deception-review/
- ↑ http://www.gamespot.com/uncharted-3-drakes-deception/reviews/uncharted-3-drakes-deception-review-6341906
- ↑ http://www.gameinformer.com/games/uncharted_3_drakes_deception/b/ps3/archive/2011/10/24/uncharted-3-rev-dummy.aspx
- ↑ http://www.gametrailers.com/gamereview.php?id=14237
- ↑ http://ps3.ign.com/articles/121/1210241p1.html
- ↑ http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/gamesblog/2011/oct/25/uncharted-3-drakes-deception-review
- ↑ http://www.insidegamingdaily.com/2011/10/24/uncharted-3-drakes-deception-review/
- ↑ http://www.gamerankings.com/ps3/615426-uncharted-3-drakes-deception/index.html
- ↑ http://www.metacritic.com/game/playstation-3/uncharted-3-drakes-deception
- ↑ http://gamingeverything.com/10506/first-uncharted-3-review-is-in/
- ↑ http://uk.ps3.ign.com/articles/121/1210241p1.html
- ↑ http://www.officialplaystationmagazine.co.uk/review/uncharted-3-drakes-deception-review/
- ↑ http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/gamesblog/2011/oct/25/uncharted-3-drakes-deception-review
- ↑ http://www.destructoid.com/review-uncharted-3-drake-s-deception-214385.phtml
- ↑ http://www.pcworld.com/article/243732/review_uncharted_3_drakes_deception_is_challenger_for_game_of_the_year.html#gpr
- ↑ http://www.edge-online.com/review/uncharted-3-drakes-deception-review/
- ↑ http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2011-10-21-uncharted-3-drakes-deception-review
- ↑ http://www.nowgamer.com/news/1019717/uncharted_3_bigger_than_50gb_bluray_disc_naughty_dog.html |
Ulla Blab from Elon, NC, volunteers her artistic talent to fashion soft, handcrafted "buddy pillows" in whimsical designs for our children undergoing cancer treatment. Her volunteer efforts began six years ago at the request of her daughter-in-law, Laurie Blab. Whenever Laurie would pass the pediatric unit on her way to her own chemotherapy treatment, she felt touched to do something special for these children. Laurie brought Ulla an example of a little pillow she thought would be the perfect size to comfort a child and Ulla made Laurie a couple of samples to consider. The two women agreed on the design that would serve as the pattern for over 500 handcrafted pillows since 2003.
Inspiration for the pillows comes from many sources: German fairy tales, books, magazines, friends and family. Ulla's oldest granddaughter, Sydney, age 8, offers ideas from her story books and has learned some of the simple stitches already.
Each pillow is a small production. Ulla must first make a design drawing, transfer the design to felt, hand-stitch the design to the custom pillow, add additional items to complement the scene, and seal it with love. Ulla does all of her cutting during the day and stitches during the evening hours while talking with her husband of 43 years, Alfred Blab, or listening to music together.
"Ulla's pillows have become more intricate over the years and have impeccable workmanship. Her designs are magical. It is such a joy to watch the children try and pick their favorite pillow. It is a hard choice…they seem to love them all," says Tina Shaban, manager of the Patient and Family Resource Center.
Laurie Blab lost her battle to cancer in the spring of 2003 at the age of 34. In honor and memory of her daughter-in law's courage and compassion, Ulla Blab continues to create her specialty pillows in an assortment of colors, characters, and designs. There are over 2000 hand stitches in each unique pillow. "Every stitch reminds me of that sweet, sweet girl," says Ulla of her daughter-in-law, Laurie. "If I can make one child's life brighter, it is well worth it." |
IPHONE – TECHNOLOGYChina’s digital add-ons a threat? Fake goods that are better than the original, thats the new phenomenon hitting China right now. The country is no longer simply copying products- it is now creating genuinely novel innovations, to enhance already existing brands. The most famous are those connected to Apple products. FRANCE 24 – [...]Read More... |
From Uncyclopedia, the content-free encyclopedia
“I can't go to prison! I'm too pretty! I'll get raped!”
“May I say what a charming blouse that is you have on!”
“Look, stop turning everything dirty will you! I am trying to fuck the Queen!”
“You just sit down there and drink your tea! Before I have to force it down your throat! ”
The Rik Mayall, Comedy giant in the world of light entertainment was born, by his own admission, like 'a tripod'. He considers his fans to be 'his ordinarys' to whom he may, if he's feeling generous, give free autographs to in order to brighten up their otherwise hopeless lives.
Rik has been in a number of classic televisual feasts during his many years of being known throughout the world. There's The Young Ones, Bottom and that other one with Nigel Planer that not many people have actually seen. Rik is usually seen in shows and performances with his partner Ade Edmondson, whom he regularly fantasises about in his book Rik Mayall: Bigger Than Chegwin, Better Than Piles. Despite living an action-packed life of adventure, sordid masturbation and nob gags he now lives a much quieter life in the country on his farm where he regularly loses arguments with Quad Bikes.
edit Early Life
The Rik Mayall was born on Augustus the 37th, 220.127.116.11. When he was born he delighted the nurses with an impromptu stand up routine where he read out some abysmal poetry he had written whilst inside the womb. Shortly after the nurses had tried to stuff him back in he decided that such a routine will undoubtedly get the fanny and thus a TV legend was born!
Rik's first paying gig was when he was 7 months old when he performed down at 'Madame Burlesque's House of Tittery'. He read out a poem about clouds and sausages before being booed and pelted with cabbages and used condoms. Undeterred, he decided that if he was going to break out of this shit cycle, he was going to need a partner to blame for each subsequant failure. He placed an advert in the local tabloid and, 20 years later, he received a reply.
edit The Dangerous Brothers
Rik created the Dangerous Brothers with new comedy partner (and nothing else, matey!) Ade Edmondson, 'dangerous' because they regularly ended up nearly killing themselves on stage in each performance. Rik always denied that Adrian was the influence for this violent act, calling him a "lovely guy" and "not my sexual partner, fuckhole!", but was forced to eventually reconsider after he discovered that Ade had kidnapped his family and drowned the family dog.
During one famous episode things got to such a point that Rik tied Ade to a chair and cut off his ear with a razor. He then, in a continual camera shot, went out to his car, got the spare can of petrol, came back and... no, hang on. Wrong movie.
The Dangerous Brothers started their double-act at the now demolished 'Club De Bollox' in London. They claim to have nothing to do with its destruction. Their act usually began with a light-hearted knock-knock joke that always went wrong, followed by a short sketch, usually containing a multitude of nob gags and fart jokes before, in the second part, a friendly beating took place in which Rik was nearly killed by Ade.
Soon their act was discovered by annoying loud-mouth and cunt, Alexi Sayle who decided that a little old-fashioned violence and near-death was exactly what Channel 4 needed. So, he signed them up to a 1,000 show minimum contract and regular oral servicing at his request. Ade responded by killing Alexi's wife and shitting in their goldfish bowl. Rik merely signed the contract.
The Dangerous Brothers lasted for 3 shows before the Channel 4 studio was burnt to the ground. Ade, who smelt of petrol and matches, denied all involvement and then blamed Rik, kicking him in the bollocks and shouting "Hah, girlie!" really loudly.
edit Theatre Work
Despite what he says, Rik Mayall has only ever appeared in one serious theatrical show. In 1995, after he, shall we say, 'persuaded' Stephen Fry to give him a starring role. Stephen, after he had cleaned up, agreed and the show went into production. Unfortunately, Stephen did not know what he had let on. Brought up on a life of reading dictionaries, drinking Earl Grey tea and denying his homosexuality he was totally unprepared for the uncouthness mastery that Rik brought to the backstage.
Finally, after Rik rolled off 1,537 nob gags and 477 fart jokes in succession in just 3 days (a world record), followed by numerous shouts to the audience to "Just fuck off home!" throughout all of Stephen's jokes, Stephen fled fearing that his Englishness may be in danger. Ironically, he fled to Belgium.
Rik, understandably annoyed, got on the phone to Ade and told him the problem. After he rang again (after Ade told him to "Fuck off!" and hung up), he promised his arse to him if he could help. Ade, after drinking the blood of orphened puppies, agreed. Stephen was eventually found 5 days later suffering from a nervous breakdown (caused by Rik), broken fingers (caused by Ade) and a sore arse (caused by himself). Stephen eventually returned to Britain in 2001 just as QI was about to start. Rik has never appeared on the show.
edit Television and Film Work
The following is a list of all the shows that Rik Mayall has been in...
- The Dangerous Brothers
- Kevin Turkey
- The Young Ones
- The Nude Statesman
- The Filthy Fuckers and Catflap
- The Bottom Adventures
- Believe Nothing (You Read in the Papers About Me)
- The Comic Strips
- All About The House with George
- The BBC News for Speeding and Waving Replica Firearms About in Public
- The Nearly-Obituary Hour
The most famous of these shows is The Bottom Adventures where Rik and Ade, who play characters Prickhard Richard and Eddie Shitler travel to various dogging sites so that Eddie can record Richie taking it up the arse by many different strangers, the resulting footage then being used as blackmail material for Eddie to get whatever he wants.
Rik has also starred in the film Gest House Paradiso. In the film he and Ade play butlers to David Gest as David goes through a standard day of sex, buying stupid sunglasses and making shit up about himself. It was a flop causing Ade to eat 17 kittens and dig up the Queen Mum's grave.
edit Book Work
To date Rik has written just two books, and even one of them he needed help with. The first, published in the 80's was The Young One's Standard Cash-In Attempt and sold a groundbreaking 17 copies! His second book, The Rik Mayall - Bigger Than Chegwin, Better Than Piles broke all known literary records by selling just two copies. Harper Collins, on the brink of cancelling printing, was... shall we say, 'persuaded' by Mayall to keep production going. Currently there are 999,998 unsold copies of the book lying about in an un-named warehouse. Harper Collins secretly wish for a fire so that they can claim the insurance back on them. Ade has been in touch.
The book does not conform with any of the standards that you see in current literary works. There is no punctuation, no capital letters, it is written entirely in crayon and has 15,773 uses of the word 'cunt' within its text (a world record).
The following are a couple of excerpts from this truly incredible work...
|hey there rik mayall here and if you dont believe me then you can fuck off cos it is alright look i got my name tag and everything and my name is even written on the front so thats proof enough so go away if you dont want to read more its rik here and not prick as people like to shout out in the street to me i dont care i give them autographs and never see them ever again on ebay or anywhere and ive got a huge nob|
Rik also talks about meeting Ade for the first time...
|there was one time right and im not lying and if you think i am then fuck off home cos i have a huge nob so there but anyway i was sat down in college or something and the teacher came in and i thought that i had to give him a blowjob which i didnt like but i did because i thought you had to and then there was this laughter in the back and it was this bald guy called ade but i called him eddie which caused him to pull out two of my fingernails got d love him and want his arsebabies but not like that you sick fuckhole|
And, as you'd expect, plenty of jokes!
|there was a guy and he walked into a bar and went weeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee|
edit Later Years
These days Rik is much more mellow. Settling in a nice farmhouse in Devon, he has almost managed to kick his knob-gag addition, bringing himself down to just 27 a day. In his spare time he enjoys eating toast, farting and falling from Quad Bikes. He brushed aside his recent near-death saying that he had no idea what went wrong, and that Ade walking away just before with brakeline cutters was completely unrelated.
Today Rik only has two children currently being held captive by Ade and is still making the monthly cheques out to ensure that Ade doesn't come and kidnap the rest of them. In return Ade keeps a lively correspondance by post, regularly including items such as children's fingernails, ears and hair to keep Rik on his toes.
edit Rik, If You're Reading This...
Love your work! |
Somehow I missed “Polygamy Day 6” but the folks over at Pro-Polygamy.com are happy to bring me up to date:
Okay, okay, I enjoy the prurience as much as the next guy (name available on request). But there is a real issue here for anybody interested in social order. My own not very well tutored guess is that along with a rising incidence of warlordism, polygamy is bound to be on the rise as well (for a good overview, see Philip Longman on “Why Men Rule,” here).
Current News Angle: It’s fascinating to watch how this issue plays itself out in Republican politics, particularly as it relates to the candidacy of Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney, and the question whether a Mormon can secure himself with the religious right. The National Review fires a shot across his bow here, including the imperishable one-liner from Kate O’Beirne:
Fn.: And yes, I realize the issue is not as simple as I make it sound. Look here. |
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I am Azschrielle Jackson, a senior at the University of North Florida. My purpose here at UNF is to pursue a Bachelors Degree in Music Education and a Bachelors Degree in Music Performance. I am a native of Jacksonville, FL and graduated from Douglas Anderson School of the Arts. My current affiliations on campus include being a member of the UNF Chamber Singers and UNF Chorale, an active member of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People at UNF, and the President of the Sophisticated Sigma Alpha Chapter of Delta Sigma Theta Sorority, Inc. Along with being a student, I commit myself to the service of the African American Student Union and its members. I am very excited about being your Coordinator for the 2012-2013 academic school year. I look forward to assisting you through your journey of being a better professional and equipping you to be tomorrow’s leader.
Azschrielle S. Jackson
My name is Rashaad Ethridge and I’m a junior here at the University of North Florida pursuing a Bachelors Degree in Political Science with a concentration in Public Law as well as a Bachelors Degree in Philosophy with a concentration in Legal Studies. My current affiliations here on campus include being the Vice President of Membership of Alpha Kappa Psi, The Professional Business Fraternity, FACES Modeling Troupe, Incorporated, Phi Alpha Delta Professional Law Fraternity, The Respect, Check, and Protect Yourself Movement at UNF, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People at UNF, and the Pre-Law Society. I am a native of the lovely Jacksonville Metropolitan Area where I am a proud Alumnus of Robert E. Lee Senior High School. I am very excited to serve as your Co-Coordinator for the 2012-2013 academic school year. I look forward to assisting you through your journey of being a better professional and equipping you to be tomorrow’s leaders!
Rashaad S. Ethridge |
Life's tough. It's tougher when you're stupid.
Not much of a track crash... only 3 guys down in that picture. I don't even call it a wreck at the velodrome unless a minimum of 2 ambulances are needed to ferry the injured.BTW, what does it say about the magnitude of the crash when the guy with a cracked skull and 3 crushed vertabrae gets the SECOND ambulance.Big Mike
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Wells' 18 points lead women's hoops over Quinnipiac, 75-63
DURHAM, N.H. – Making her first start of the season, junior guard Lauren Wells (West Chester, Pa.) set a career high with 16 points and four three-pointers in the first half alone, finishing with 18 points to lead the University of New Hampshire women's basketball team to a convincing, 75-63, victory over Quinnipiac University Wednesday night at Lundholm Gymnasium.
Denise Beliveau (Framingham, Mass.) notched her second double-double of the season, scoring 19 points and pulling down 12 rebounds, and Cari Reed (Oswego, N.Y.) matched a career high with 14 points.
Wells, who was named the America East Player of the Game, tallied her 18 points on 7-of-14 shooting from the floor, including 4-of-7 from deep. Her four three point field goals were also a career best.
Kelsey Hogan (Nashua, N.H.) registered eight points, five boards, and matched her career high for the second time this season with seven assists in the win. Jill McDonald (Middlebury, Vt.) chipped in with eight points, six rebounds and two blocks.
UNH (2-7), which snapped a six-game skid while improving to 2-1 on its home floor, shot 49 percent (25-of-51) for the game and hit a season-best 50 percent from beyond the arc, hitting 12 three-point field goals on 24 tries.
New Hampshire raced out to a 14-2 lead in the opening seven minutes of play, as Quinnipiac (3-7) missed its first 13 field-goal attempts. The Wildcats led by as many as 20 points in the first half before entering the intermission with a 41-23 advantage.
Following UNH's 14-2 run to kick off the action, the Wildcats would add to their lead when Wells banged in a trifecta to spark a 13-8 scoring stretch in favor of the home team that extended the lead to 14.
Quinnipiac would respond with a 7-1 run, cutting the score to 28-20 in favor of the 'Cats, as Ellen Cannon capped off the run with a 3-pointer at 8:54.
Following a 2:12 scoreless streak between both squads, Beliveau got things started for the Wildcats once again, sinking a 3-pointer that set off a 13-3 run that closed out the first half, giving New Hampshire an 18-point lead at the break.
Cannon sank a three to start the second stanza, but it was all UNH for the next 4:05, posting a 12-8 run that was once again sparked by a Beliveau 3-pointer, extending the lead to its highest margin of the contest with a 53-31 advantage with 15:11 remaining.
However, the Bobcats would come back strong midway through the stanza, cutting the lead to seven points, finishing off the run on a Brittany McQuain jumper with 3:20 to play.
The two teams would remain scoreless for the next 1:23, until Wells sealed the game for UNH, driving to the free throw line and draining a shot with two defenders in her face to set the score at 68-59 with 1:37 to play. That jumper gave the 'Cats much needed life, as it sparked a 9-4 scoring run to close out the contest and preserve the win.
Jacinda Dunbar, Courtney Kaminski and Cannon led the Bobcats with 14 points apiece in the loss.
Following the Christmas holiday, the Wildcats return to action against St. Joseph's University, the host school of the 20th annual Hawk Classic in Philadelphia, Pa., at 2 p.m. on Tuesday, Dec. 28. |
CAMBRIDGE, MASS— Student-athletes at the University of New Hampshire continue to excel in the classroom and as a result the Wildcats finished second in the running for the 2007-08 America East Academic Cup with an impressive cumulative grade point average of 3.12. UNH has won the Academic Cup twice, in 1998-99 and 1999-2000.
The University of Vermont narrowly edged out UNH to take home the hardware with a 3.14 GPA.
The University of Maine (3.10), Stony Brook University (3.06) and Binghamton University (3.04) were the other institutions in America East to compile grade point averages of 3.00 or better in 2007-08.
The Academic Cup is presented to the institution whose student-athletes post the highest grade-point averages during that academic year. More than 3,200 student-athletes competed at nine America East institutions in the 2007-08 season. The conference’s student-athletes compiled an average of 3.02 on the team grade-point averages, which were calculated by dividing the total team quality points by the total credits completed for grade. The overall institutional GPAs were calculated using the same formula for all student-athletes at each respective school.
The Wildcats also improved two spots from a year ago, placing fifth in the battle for the America East Stuart P. Haskell Commisioner’s Cup. UNH won the men’s cross country title and was co-regular-season champions in women’s soccer. The Wildcats also finished second in five other sports, including women’s soccer, women’s indoor track & field, women’s lacrosse and men’s and women’s indoor track and field. Boston University won the cup with six league titles and three regular season crowns. |
Urban Sprouts Child Development Center
Urban Sprouts Child Development Center offers educational programs for infants and preschoolers. The curriculum is designed to help children develop socially, emotionally, physically and cognitively. The center is designed to feel warm, inviting and cozy. Crafts and artwork cover the center's walls. The decor also includes woven baskets and wooden furnishings.
- Hours: 7a.m.-6:30p.m.
- Religious affiliation: No |
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