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Now, as she is recounting her time line, you learn that at some point around 2006, she found herself sitting on a couch alongside Bert Jansch, the Scottish folk singer and acoustic-guitar master. “Pretty much the week my last album was released I found out I was pregnant,” she recalled. “And then at five and a half months I was told to stop touring, for the health of the baby. When I stopped touring, I pretty much just sort of handed myself over to Bert.” Jansch and Orton even did some gigs together, though critics were harsh. “We started to do these little gigs together where we’d do covers of Pentangle songs and old folk songs. They were awful,” she says.
Parenting, unless outsourced, offers little time for anything beyond parenting, and when she found herself writing music in the few nighttime minutes she had to herself (“in the hours when spiders mend their webs,” as she sings in her lullaby to her daughter, “See Through Blue”), she began to realize that that a career change was not in the cards. And yet, it’s awkward to start again. She performed a small concert in Manhattan last August, at the Rockwood, and if you were there, you saw the frustration of a forty-one-year-old singer having to essentially pretend that performing was all new to her. (She was in town doing “Late Night with David Letterman.”) And yet, when she sang “Magpie,” the single off the new album, the room went dead quiet.
Orton recorded “Sugaring Season” last winter in Portland, Oregon, where most of it was done in just a few takes: she’d been inspired by Roberta Flack’s album “First Take.” (Marc Ribot added some guitar in his apartment in Brooklyn, and some strings were added in Manhattan.) As it happens, “Sugaring Season” was worth her fans’ wait; it’s a collection that seems to draw even more deeply from nineteen-sixties British folk for songs that end up sounding both fresh and haunting, thanks partly to a collaboration with Tucker Martine (he has worked with “My Morning Jacket” and “the Decemberists”), and a driving band, punctuated by the excellent Brian Blade on drums.
As is perhaps telegraphed by the titles (“Call Me the Breeze,” “Poison Tree,” “Magpie”), “Sugaring Season” is a bluesy, indie-rock eclogue, full of mystical chords and sometimes even jazz-like rhythms. The title refers to that time in New England’s cold months when warm days run the sap up in a tree: a moment, she notes, of spring in the midst of winter.
Arthur interrupted with a call for broccoli.
“And people were always talking about sugaring season,” Beth said.
“It’s like Vermont!” he offers.
“No it’s very flat,” she says.
The husband is relishing his wife’s biography, anyway, as is sometimes a husband’s wont—especially when the husband was himself raised almost entirely on traditional music: shape-note singing permeated Amidon’s mosh pit-free Brattleboro upbringing, his parents folk singers.
Eventually the conversation circles back to Bert Jansch, who died of cancer last year, after a comeback; he was the British guitar player’s guitarist, hailed by everyone from Jimmy Page to Johnny Marr.
“Much of ‘Sugaring Season’ is in alternate guitar tunings,” says Amidon.
“Is it?” she looks hard at her husband.
“Yeah?” he said sitting up a little.
Onstage, Orton and Amidon perform separately, dueting only on occasion, such as for “Call Me the Breeze,” a song that Orton co-wrote with Tom Rowlands, of Chemical Brothers, with Amidon on banjo. They wrote it years ago, and Orton kept it alive, which is part of her point these days, that her spirit remains.
Actress Barbara Barrie is 78. Actress Joan Collins is 76. Actor Charles Kimbrough (“Murphy Brown”) is 73. Singer General Johnson of Chairmen of the Board is 66. Actress Lauren Chapin (“Father Knows Best”) is 64. Country singer Judy Rodman is 58. Comedian Drew Carey is 51. Country singer Shelly West is 51. Actor Linden Ashby (“Melrose Place”) is 49. Actress-model Karen Duffy is 48. Drummer Phil Selway of Radiohead is 42. Drummer Matt Flynn of Maroon 5 is 39. Singer Lorenzo is 37. Country singer Brian McComas is 37. Singer Maxwell is 36. Singer Jewel is 35.
The Panasonic LUMIX DMC-GH2 is a Micro Four Thirds camera that offers a plethora of features for advanced photographers to play with, but it also has an automatic mode so that inexperienced users can also get in on all the fun. Its image quality is great and so is its build quality. It has a touchscreen as well as plenty of buttons, and its dedicated manual features are all easily accessible on the camera's body.
The Panasonic LUMIX DMC-GH2 is a digital camera that has it all. It can shoot high-quality stills, it performs well as a high-definition video camera, and it offers you the luxury of using both a touchscreen and physical buttons. It's very much a camera for the enthusiast photographer who likes to have a lot of switches and controls at their fingertips, but it's also designed to be super-easy to use straight out of the box thanks to its Intelligent Auto mode.
The GH2 is a Micro Four Thirds camera and it can accept different lenses in Panasonic's G Vario lens line up. We used a 14-140mm, 10x optical zoom lens for our tests, which equates to a focal length of 28-280 in 35mm speak. The sensor in the GH2 is 14 megapixels, which is a 2-megapixel improvement over 2009's Panasonic LUMIX DMC-GH1.
The Panasonic LUMIX DMC-GH2 GH2 has a slightly different control layout to the GH1. Primarily, the control dial for changing exposure settings has been moved to a thumb position from an index finger position, and the dedicated movie recording button has been repositioned from the rear of the camera to the top of the camera next to the shutter button. We think these changes make the camera easier to use. The addition of a touchscreen is great for some features, such as pointing to a particular focus point in a frame; of all the vendors doing touchscreen cameras today, we think Panasonic has the best and easiest to use implementation.
We love the inclusion of multiple dials and switches on the GH2's body, which allow you to quickly make changes to focus and shooting mode settings. The left side has a dial and switches so that you can quickly change focus modes, while the main mode dial has a switch encircling it that allows you to quickly select the shooting mode (single shot, burst, multiple exposure or timer). For changing the aperture and shutter values, there is a single thumb dial on the hand grip, and you can press it to change between the aperture to the shutter settings.
Conventional menu buttons are located on the back of the camera, and the top of the camera has a Fn button that can be programmed with your favourite function. By default it makes the camera switch to Intelligent Auto mode, which is quite handy when you want to quickly change from a manual mode.
To frame your photos, you can use the high resolution (460K dots) 3in LCD screen, which is hinged so that you can also take shots from weird angles or self portraits. There is a built-in electronic viewfinder (EVF) that gives you the same view and on-screen information as the LCD screen, and it automatically switches on when you bring it close to your eye -- you don't have to press a button to activate it.
As for the GH2's image quality, there is very little to fault. Coupled with the 14-140mm lens we used for testing, the camera produced very crisp images with very little noise and no noticeable chromatic aberration. When using manual mode, the exposure meter on the screen shows you if you've got the exposure spot on, or if you've under or overexposed your shot. It's one of the more handy indicators of the on-screen display, especially because what you see on the screen isn't exactly what you get when you take a picture -- we've found Olympus cameras to be among the best when it comes to WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get).
When shooting in dim light you'll get good performance up to ISO 800, and even ISO 1600 will good unless you view the images at their full size, but anything higher will have noticeable feathering and discolouration. Image stabilisation is built-in to the lens, and you can take quite crisp handheld shots down to 1/10th of a second or lower if you have really steady hands.
Video footage is jittery if you move the camera while shooting (this is pretty much the same as every other digital camera on the market), but images are crisp and focusing performance is excellent. When you zoom in and out of scenes, the autofocus only takes a couple of seconds to readjust.
The bottom line is that the Panasonic LUMIX DMC-GH2 Micro Four Thirds camera is an excellent product. Its combination of manual and automatic features make it ideal for any type of user and if you want to make the most of its manual features the learning curve isn't too high -- all the manual features you'll need to change will be right at your fingertips. It takes clear and vibrant images and its video mode is also very good (as long as you keep the camera still). Basically, if you're in the market for an interchangeable lens camera that can capably shoot Full HD video, the GH2 is well worth considering.
In late 2005, the booming U.S. housing market seemed to be slowing. The Federal Reserve had begun raising interest rates. Subprime mortgage company shares were falling. Investors began to balk at buying complex mortgage securities. The housing bubble, which had propelled a historic growth in home prices, seemed poised to deflate. And if it had, the great financial crisis of 2008, which produced the Great Recession of 2008-09, might have come sooner and been less severe.
Boeing Co. has won a contract from the Marine Corps to send a pair of ScanEagle unmanned aerial vehicle mobile deployment units to Iraq, the company said.
Terms of the deal were not disclosed. The First Marine Expeditionary Force will use the ScanEagles for intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance during operational missions.
Each mobile deployment unit includes several UAVs, plus the necessary computers, communication links and ground equipment necessary. The ScanEagle is a joint development project between Chicago-based Boeing and The Insitu Group, Bingen, Wash.
"ScanEagle's ISR capabilities will give the warfighter an immediate, clear picture of the battlefield," said Kim Michel, director of Boeing's advanced unmanned systems division. "Additionally, its communications relay technology will allow Marines on the ground to more easily receive and share information."
Company officials said the ScanEagle is a low-cost, long-endurance UAV that is designed to operate for more than 15 hours. It is four feet long and has a 10-foot wingspan. Future models will go for more than 30 hours, Boeing said.
The ScanEagle UAV first flew in 2002 and recently participated in the U.S. Joint Forces Command's Forward Look exercises from December 2003 to June 2004. Forward Look was a series of demonstrations and experiments to improve interoperability among multiple UAVs in operational scenarios.
With 2003 prime federal IT revenue of $3.4 billion, Boeing ranked No. 4 on Washington Technology's 2004 Top 100 list, which measures federal contracting revenue.