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In terms of execution, the Presidents Cup has consistently gone the Ryder Cup one better. It eschews the dinners and functions the competitors loath, as well as the narrow "almost 50" age window for potential captains. It grows less rough to encourage more birdies and mandates less benching to encourage more team harmony. The pairing system, which allows one captain to match his players against specific opponents put up by the rival captain, produces more satisfying showdowns. For U.S. players, the Presidents Cup is invariably judged more fun.
It was true again in Montreal, where the vibe was as mellow as Malibu. But as much as golf functionaries might have appreciated the smooth machinery and lack of incident, the Presidents Cup, yet again, was played in a buzz-free zone.
Most of America's most important daily newspapers -- including The New York Times, Washington Post, Chicago Tribune and Los Angeles Times -- chose not to staff the event. Jack Nicklaus, in an overzealous gesture of sportsmanship, unnecessarily slackened the tingling tension of endgame competition when he asked Phil Mickelson and Woody Austin to concede a 43-inch putt Vijay Singh would have needed to earn him and partner Mike Weir a tie in their Thursday foursomes match. Whereas Nicklaus arguably made the Ryder Cup with his concession to Tony Jacklin in 1969, a few more like the one given to Singh could end the Presidents Cup. Of course, the big lead the U.S. gained after the afternoon Saturday session didn't help, but as the players mingled and milled around the final green Sunday evening, there was the inescapable feeling it really didn't matter who had won.
Such a condition, while previously fine in counterbalance to the overzealous Ryder Cup, is precarious now. Because of the FedEx Cup, professional golf has entered a streamlined age, where events without the highest stakes and standards become expendable, erstwhile bonanzas turned burdens. It's also an age in which the PGA Tour's most fundamental problem -- simply getting its increasingly set-for-life top members to play -- is growing more difficult. At the very least, it now takes a huge purse, a good course and convenient scheduling for an event to have a fighting chance to get the game's best. Often, it's not enough.
In this climate the Presidents Cup could find itself wanting. It offers no remuneration, no World Ranking points, no obvious mark in history. While its individual parts are stellar, the international team collectively remains a bit amorphous as a dragon the Americans long to slay. The host sites to this point have been good but not great. And the matches are now held at a time of year when the golf season is, more definitively than ever, over for the top players.
The Ryder Cup is in the same boat, except for one important difference: a team bonded by fire that presents an easy-to-grasp enemy, which translates to competitive heat and high drama. So suddenly, it's legitimate to ask, "Does the Presidents Cup bring enough to the table to remain relevant to the game's biggest stars?"
Of course, the one star who matters the most has always seemed to play team events with a difficult-to-read ambivalence, and the way Tiger Woods pulled his drive into the water on the final hole of his singles match against Mike Weir -- the kind of mistake he never makes when tied or leading on the 72nd hole of a stroke play for pay event -- only added to the impression.
It's no secret Woods would rather not play a team event every year. Indeed, if he hadn't been so heavily criticized for skipping this year's first event of the FedEx playoffs in New York, Woods may very well have decided to miss his first Presidents Cup. But Woods may be approaching the point in his career and life where getting ripped by the media will no longer dissuade him from doing what he chooses and believes is best.
Meanwhile, the game's second most viable star, Mickelson, could potentially use the threat of not playing in future Presidents Cups as a lever to persuade the tour to make some of the changes he is seeking in the implementation of the FedEx Cup.
In an effort to head off such an insurrection, the tour has been predictably sensible. To create some breathing room for team play that did not exist this year nor will for the Ryder Cup in 2008, the 2009 Presidents Cup at San Francisco's Harding Park will be held Oct. 5-11. The 2011 event in Melbourne, meanwhile, is scheduled for November.
But while San Francisco offers enough star-quality resources, Australia will be a litmus test of the Presidents Cup's true growth. The same site in 1998 produced the most desultory American performance to date -- a 20½-11½ pasting. If Woods and/or Mickelson decide against the trip, it could start the Presidents Cup the way of the once proud, now in shambles World Cup.
Asked about the future of the event, the assessments of several principals ranged from defensively optimistic to non-committal. The former stance, not surprisingly, was taken by PGA Tour commissioner Tim Finchem. "I saw the enthusiasm, and I don't know why you are asking me about this," he said Sunday after the matches. "All I see are guys who love this competition. It's hard for me to imagine a situation where a guy wouldn't make every effort to participate because I know how much they care. Based on that, my comfort level for the Presidents Cup is high."
Ty Votaw, the tour's vice president of communications and international affairs, seemed even more comfortable. "I think in terms of the Ryder Cup and the Presidents Cup, the players really don't have a choice," he said. "They can't skip them. It's God and country."
Votaw's criteria indeed holds up for the great majority of players, who are actually most enticed by the opportunity to deepen friendships with peers. "I'd play whenever and wherever they have it," said Scott Verplank. "I think everyone likes representing their country. But it's really the experience we have all week. You'd almost be an idiot not to play if you make the team." Added David Toms, "Sure, the FedEx Cup complicates things. But I think this event and the Ryder Cup both still have to be up on that pedestal where they are never messed with. I think you have to tweak everything else around that."
But it gets more complicated for the big guns, whose absence would truly wound the Presidents Cup. While Mickelson took the same tack as Verplank and Toms, he did so only after declining to say specifically whether he was confident he would keep playing in the matches. "What do you mean?" he said, before giving a more general answer. "No, I don't think players will start skipping. I think there's too much enjoyment by the players in these team competitions. I don't see the Presidents Cup as a casualty of the FedEx Cup. I think it does too much good on the international level for all of golf to put it in jeopardy."
Also vague was the International player with the most marquee, Ernie Els. Asked if he considered it more likely that he would skip FedEx Cup events or the Presidents Cup, he hesitated: "If I say the Presidents Cup, I'll be kicking my teammates." After pausing, Els continued, "The FedEx Cup turned out to be a big deal and a pretty good deal. It's a good question. I can't answer that one. We should have a debate about it, focus on getting the right dates and work it out."
The two figures with the most influence on the future health of the Presidents Cup are, fittingly, the two greatest ever to play the game, Woods and Nicklaus.
Woods, too, danced when asked if he was reassessing his commitment to the Presidents Cup. "Any time you get a chance to make this team and represent your country, it's always fun," he said. "You know, the guys have traveled to Australia and traveled to South Africa, and we've always played."
But when asked if the Presidents Cup would lose something for him if Nicklaus were no longer the captain, Woods seemed to suggest he would be more likely to play if the Golden Bear, who has now captained four Presidents Cups, stayed on the job. "I've always loved playing for Jack, and hopefully he'll come back," said Woods. "It's always great to see him, great to have him around. He's the greatest player of all time, and to have him as [our] captain and lead us, it doesn't get any better than that."
It would be hard to imagine Finchem not going back to Nicklaus if he knew it increased the chances of Woods playing. Without Nicklaus, the only icon of comparable stature would be Arnold Palmer, who would be 80 before the matches in 2009. More likely, leading captain candidates would be FOTs -- Friends of Tiger -- such as Mark O'Meara, Fred Couples or Ben Crenshaw.
For his part, Nicklaus appears anything but eager to step off the Presidents Cup stage. While emphasizing that he was not seeking the captaincy again, he was clear he would accept if asked. "If they want me around for awhile, then I'm around for as long as they want," he said. In fact, early in the week, he didn't rule out taking another Ryder Cup captaincy if he got the call. And Sunday he was unusually emotional as he conveyed why the experience of leading the U.S. team has become so fulfilling.
"You know," he said, as his team surrounded him on the podium during the winner's press conference, "the reaction that I get from these guys and the support that I've gotten from them -- not only the support I've tried to give them, but the support they've given me -- is just something you don't [experience] very many times in a lifetime."
But Nicklaus, who will be 68 in January, knows his future captaincy would be at least as practical as it would be romantic. "Right now, the players are playing and they're enthusiastic about playing the Ryder Cup and here," he said. "I didn't envision that happening. I thought they would get tired. To this day, that hasn't happened."
And perhaps it won't -- at least for the next several years -- if the Presidents Cup keeps retaining Captain Nicklaus. At the very least, it would be the sensible thing to do.
Cybercrime is evolving. The lone hacker who steals and resells credit card numbers is being replaced by a well-structured business model. The game is no longer simply about hacking for fame, but rather about creating a business where you have frequent customers who buy your stolen product. The latest research report from web security company Finjan gives a peek at what exactly is going on.
The company's second quarter 2008 report is based on data from its Malicious Code Research Center (MCRC), which specializes in the detection of dangerous vulnerabilities that could be exploited for malicious attacks. According to Finjan, "cybercrime activities on [the] Internet are booming as never before." The company's employees, masked as potential customers, did some digging while talking to cymbercrime affiliates, and their research showed how the market for pilfered data has evolved over the past couple of years.
In 2006, vulnerabilities were being sold online to the highest bidder. Last year, software packages that provided various ways of attacking websites and stealing valuable data were sold by professional hackers. These toolkits started to contain multiple exploits for new vulnerabilities and became more sophisticated, including update mechanisms for new software flaws and Trojans that adapt to the country of the victim. By the first quarter of this year, criminals began to log into their "data supplier" and could download any information need for their illegal activities.
Now, Finjan claims the situation has gotten even worse. Cybercrime companies that work much like real-world companies are starting to appear and are steadily growing, thanks to the profits they turn. Forget individual hackers or groups of hackers with common goals. Hierarchical cybercrime organizations where each cybercriminal has his or her own role and reward system is what you and your company should be worried about. Targeted attacks against financial institutions, enterprises, and governmental agencies, coupled with excellent management of stolen data, makes these "businesses" highly successful, and makes any organization using the Internet vulnerable.
Finjan describes the employee structure that these cybercrime companies employ as being similar to the Mafia. In both cases, there is a "boss" who operates as a business entrepreneur and doesn't commit the (cyber)crimes himself, with an "underboss" who manages the operation, sometimes providing the tools needed for attacks. In the Mafia, several "capos" operate beneath the underboss as lieutenants leading their own section of the operation with their own soldiers, and in cybercrime, "campaign managers" lead their own attacks to steal data with their "affiliation networks." The stolen data are sold by "resellers," similar to the Mafia's "associates." Since these individuals did not partake in the actual cybercrime, they know nothing about the original attacks. They do, however, know about "replacement rules" (for example, stolen credit cards that have been reported) and other company-specific policies, just like the sales representatives you talk to in your average store.
Commodities (stolen credit cards and bank accounts) are priced low, while prime articles (stolen healthcare related information, single sign-on login credentials for organizations, e-mail, and FTP accounts) are much more expensive. Not too long ago, credit card numbers and bank accounts with PINs were selling for $100 or more each, but prices have since dropped to $10-20 per item.
Successful attacks can cause long-term damage to the company's victim: loss of valuable data, loss of IP, loss of productivity, impact on profits or stock price, brand damage, law suits, and class actions. Finjan suggests deploying innovative security solutions (such as real-time content inspection) designed to detect and handle recent threats. These solutions analyze and understand what the code intends to do before it does it, without relying on signature updates or databases of classified URLs, therefore assuring that malicious content will not enter the network, even if its origin is a highly trusted site. It's not a surprising suggestion, given that Finjan offers such products, but that said, the company's 21-page report is an informative read, although you'll have to fill out a survey to gain access to it.
April 18, 2015 kclark, Wellington, westpbc.
WELLINGTON — The village is celebrating Earth Day and Arbor Day with a community event on Sunday evening.
Activities run from 4-7 p.m. at the Wellington Amphitheater, 12100 Forest Hill Blvd. Families can get free tree seedlings and native shrubs, meet Smokey the Bear and enjoy food trucks, face painting and a coloring mural.
The Village Council will kick off the evening by planting a Wild Tamarind Tree in honor of Arbor Day.
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Egyptian Foreign Minister Sameh Shoukry on Thursday urged Arab League member states to create a joint Arab military force to face regional security challenges.
Arab foreign ministers held a plenary session in the southern Sinai resort of Sharm El-Sheikh to prepare for the upcoming Arab League summit, focusing their discussions on the Yemeni crisis.
Shoukry, who chaired today’s meeting on behalf of Egypt as the host, expressed his hope the Arab League would take positive steps to implement Egypt’s previous proposal to form a joint Arab force.
The foreign minister told delegates Egypt's proposal aims to strengthen the Arabs’ ability to take their fate into their own hands.
Egypt's President Abdel-Fattah El-Sisi has called on several occasions for a joint Arab military force to "fight terrorism" after the Islamic State militant group beheaded 20 Egyptian Copts in Libya in January.
Shoukry said “national security” in the Arab World still faces significant “challenges” as “sectarian conflicts” expand and double the challenge “terrorism” poses.
He also reiterated Egypt’s political and military support for the Arab military operation under-way against Houthi rebels in Yemen.
The Arab Summit will be held on 28-29 March in Sharm El-Sheikh.
Four Arab Gulf states, including Bahrain, Kuwait, Qatar and the United Arab Emirates, as well as Jordan, Morocco, Sudan have all joined the Saudi-led coalition against the Houthis.
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ELBERTON, GA - A veterinarian in George is nursing a rescue dog back to health one meal at a time. Dr. Andy Mathis with Granite Hills Animal Care in Elberton sits inside a cage to soothe Graycie who was scared and having trouble eating. He stays inside her cage to eat side-by-side with her.
On the Granite Hills Animal Care Facebook page, Mathis explains someone called about finding a stray dog the night of Friday, January 29. The caller said the dog was in bad shape and was found on a dirt road.
Mathis said to bring the dog in and the care center would evaluate her. Graycie was emaciated and dehydrated, weighing 20 pounds. She was also hypothermic, anemic, and had a vaginal prolapse.
Graycie was first treated at the University of Georgia and after that she was returned to the Granite Hills Animal Care facility and slowly began to improve.
According to the Granite Hills Animal Care Facebook page, Graycie started eating on her own, gaining weight, tests showed that her blood levels were slowly improving and the prolapse problem was fixed.
To continue to encourage Graycie to eat, Mathis decided to sit in her cage with her so they could eat side-by-side. Mathis also reported that Graycie is spending her days curled up on towels under heat lamps, waiting for her next meal or barking at the other cats and dogs.
Before Graycie is ready for her forever home, she has to learn to trust people, walk on a leash, go to the bathroom outside, and receive a clean bill of health.
Mathis also gives credit to his entire team, affectionately called #‎TeamGraycie, for aiding in her recovery and thanks the public for the outpouring of positive thoughts and donations.
Graycie, also known as Graycie Claire, was given her name because of her gray coloring and the addition of the second name is in keeping with Southern tradition.
Strata Data Conference kicks off in San Jose, CA today and the new release announcements are rolling in.
Spark: The big data tool du jour is getting automation Spark is the hottest big data tool around, and most Hadoop users are moving towards using it in production. Problem is, programming and tuning Spark is hard. But Pepperdata and Alpine Data bring solutions to lighten the load.
This is a big week in the analytics world as both Gartner's Data & Analytics Summit in Grapevine, TX and the Strata Data Conference in San Jose are taking place. Many vendors are attending and exhibiting at both; some vendors are only at one, but just about everyone in the analytics world is exhibiting at one of them, at least.
Strata, which kicks off today, is more of an announcement vehicle for vendors though, and today three big names in the Big Data world -- Cloudera, MapR and AtScale -- have new releases to announce. I'll cover these three vendors' announcement in some depth. I'll also close with a short summary of announcements -- mostly made yesterday -- from an array of other vendors.
As Cloudera is one of the two companies behind Strata Data (O'Reilly being the other), perhaps it's fitting that we start with its announcements. To cut to the chase, Cloudera is releasing a new version of its Altus cloud service with a key new feature being released, and another one slated for release in the near future.
Altus is Cloudera's Big Data pipeline as a service cloud offering. When announced, Altus included the ability to run scheduled jobs on a clusterless/serverless Cloudera instance. Essentially, Altus launched as a Hadoop job service that didn't require the user to worry about the details of clusters, storage and so forth. Then, in a subsequent release, the Altus Analytic DB, based on Impala, was added.
Today, Cloudera is adding support on Altus for Cloudera Shared Data Experience (SDX). This facility allows for the unified management of multiple clusters, including mixes and matches of on-prem and cloud-based clusters. This addition to Altus is being released today, Cloudera tells me.
In addition, Cloudera is announcing, though not yet releasing, a new component: Altus Data Science, which will be based on Cloudera's Data Science Workbench. Like other hosted Hadoop and Spark machine learning services, including those from Qubole and Databricks, Altus Data Science will allow data scientists and data science-savvy data engineers to build and schedule data/machine learning pipelines without needing a dedicated Hadoop or Spark cluster up and running. And just like other vendors, Cloudera now sees Data Science and other value-added workloads to be the real gems amongst its deliverables. The days of selling vanilla Hadoop clusters are ending, it would seem; something more turn-key is now required.
MapR, is also technically a Hadoop distribution vendor. But the company has always really seen itself as an Enterprise data platform provider. Along with that, the company is today announcing support for containerized applications that use the MapR Converged Data Platform to run under Kubernetes, the leading container orchestration platform.
Using the Kubernetes Volume Driver, containerized applications can read from and write to the MapR-XD data store simply by addressing the container's local storage. The MapR Kubernetes Volume Driver then takes care of conveying those reads and writes to whatever persistent storage media is being managed under MapR-XD, bypassing the ephemeral storage cache normally allocated to a Kubernetes container.
MapR tells me that the Kubernetes support works on-premises, as well as in managed Kubernetes cloud services, like those from Amazon, Microsoft and Google. The company also explained that unlike its previously announced Persistent Application Client Container (PACC) technology, which required the use of a specific Docker image, this new functionality will be compatible with any such image, as the connectivity to MapR-XD is provided by the Kubernetes Volume Driver.
This is pretty neat stuff, and it proves that the data and analytics container revolution, though quiet, is being fought, and slowly won.
AtScale, the Microsoft SQL Server Analysis Services (SSAS)-like BI platform that runs on top of Hadoop and Spark, is announcing its 6.5 release, with three major new features.
To start with, AtScale is adding automated modeling features to the product. What this means is that instead of requiring users to create their entire Universal Semantic Layer model from scratch, the product can now intuit some of that structure by looking at existing analytics assets already built on top of the underlying data.
Specifically, the product is able to inspect the assets contained in a Tableau workbook and from them determine which columns in which tables likely contain measures and dimensions. It can also determine table relationships by looking at the Tableau workbooks, and the data model within them. This means AtScale is now doing some modeling on the fly, like certain of its BI-on-Hadoop competitors have been doing for some time.
Other new features include execution of n-tile calculations on the server side and a Perspectives feature, which provides simplified or audience-specific filtered views of your models. The n-tile calculations join the estimated distinct count calculations as important row-access-level work that is done on server-side.
The AtScale Perspectives feature rather closely resembles the SSAS feature of the same name. However, SSAS Perspectives are merely a convenience feature, and don't prevent access to data in the model not present in the Perspective. AtScale Perspectives, meanwhile, do in fact act as a security mechanism, the AtScale team told me. So any notion users might have that they can ignore the Perspective and connect directly to the model is apparently incorrect.
Mapbox released it Mapbox Visual for Microsoft Power BI, giving Microsoft's self-service BI platform access to mapping functionality beyond its built-in map visualizations and those provided by ESRI's ArcGIS Maps for Power BI.
Salesforce announced the addition of "conversational queries" to its Einstein Analytics platform.
Host Analytics announced the Beta release of its "Project Orion" technology that will make Enterprise Performance Management (EPM) accessible to business users, and others without significant financial/accounting backgrounds.
And Datawatch announced a new release of its Monarch Swarm product for team-oriented data prep and analytics -- this time with "Personalized Machine Learning" that drives detailed ranking and data recommendations.
One other announcement, being made today, is the launch of the StreamSets Data Protector product, which identifies personally identifiable information (PII) in data as it is ingested, and then layers on corresponding data security and broader data governance.
So many of the new product and release announcements correspond with overall trends in the industry. The growing importance of container technology; serverless, cloud-based implementations of data technology; increased support for machine learning and AI; the importance of data protection and GDPR (the EU's General Data Protection Regulation); and the growth in BI of sophisticated features on the one hand, and simplified use and operation on the other.
These trends move past the gee-whiz factor and address genuine customer pain points. That's good to see, and it's likely we'll see even more of it, in future announcements, at future events.
Cloudera's service will make it easier to run and pay for Hadoop and Spark jobs running on its distribution in the cloud.
Now offering specialized editions tailored for data scientists, data engineers, and BI users, what are the next steps that Cloudera will take to broaden its appeal to the enterprise? And how will it approach the cloud?
Netflix's new post-apocalyptic thriller Bird Box is set in a world where just looking outside the window can get you killed, so we're here to explain the movie's mysterious monsters and its nail-biting ending. Sandra Bullock stars as Malorie, a woman who is trying to keep her two children - simply called Boy (Julian Edwards) and Girl (Vivien Lyra Blair) - alive five years after almost everyone on Earth was killed by the arrival of entities that drive anyone who sees them to violent suicide.
Directed by Susanne Bier and based on the novel by Josh Malerman, Bird Box switches between two time periods: the immediate aftermath of the outbreak, and Malorie's fight for survival, and her efforts five years later to get herself and the kids safely down the river to a promised sanctuary. To begin with she finds herself with a large group of people in a safe house, and even manages to secure a treasure trove of food supplies. However, it isn't long before disaster whittles down their numbers to just Malorie, the two children, and romantic interest Tom (played by Moonlight's Trevante Rhodes).
Malorie and Tom are eking out a mostly peaceful survival in the woods when they receive a call on the radio from someone called Rick (Pruitt Taylor Vince), who tells them that if they can make it down the river there's somewhere safe for them. It's a big risk to take, and one that Malorie is resistant to at first, but Bird Box's ending reveals why she decided to take her kids on such a dangerous trip.
Page 2: What Are the Monsters in Bird Box?
After the sweet but too-trusting Olympia (Danielle MacDonald) lets a stranger, Gary (Tom Hollander), into the house, it's eventually revealed that he is one of the people who can survive looking at the entities, but are corrupted in the process and driven to fanatical worship. Recognizable by their warped irises, these disciples are obsessed with getting other people to look at the entities, which they believe are beautiful. As Olympia and Malorie go into labor simultaneously, Gary reveals his true colors and begins ripping down the covers from the windows. Cheryl (Jacki Weaver) and Olympia both see the entities and promptly kill themselves, though Malorie is able to convince Olympia to hand over her baby girl before she dies. Gary also kills Douglas (John Malkovich) before he himself is finally killed by Tom.
At this point Bird Box moves forward five years in time, to shortly before Malorie takes the kids on the trip down the river. She and Tom are now a couple and have a mostly stable set-up where they can grow their own food, but they've already stripped almost all of the nearby houses bare of resources. After a frightening encounter with a roaming group of marauders corrupted by the entities, they receive a call on the radio from a stranger called Rick, who says there is a sanctuary that can be reached by two days travel along the river. Tom is keen to find out more about the sanctuary, while Malorie is far less trusting, believing that it could be a way to lure them out so that the entities can get them.
The next day, the whole family heads out on a supply run to a neighboring house, but while they're inside the group of marauders arrives at the house. Tom tells Malorie to take the kids and head for the boat if he doesn't return, and then goes to the front of the house to confront the marauders. He succeeds in wounding one of them with the shotgun, but quickly realizes that his blindfold is too much of a handicap. Tom removes his blindfold and successfully manages to kill most of the attackers, but one marauder (played by David Dastmalchian) spots Malorie and the children and takes off after them. Tom pursues him, but catches sight of one of the entities. His irises warp, but with great effort he manages to shoot the final marauder before he is compelled to shoot himself in the head.
Malorie is distraught upon realizing that Tom must have sacrificed his own life to save them, and decides to carry out his dying wish to try and get herself and the children to the sanctuary. The movie then jumps forward to the moment when their boat is about to go over the rapids, the most dangerous part of the river, and Malorie must choose which of the children has to take off their blindfold in order to tell her which way to row. Ultimately she cannot bring herself to choose either of them, and instead decides to tackle the rapids blind - for better or worse. It's a rough trip, during which the boat eventually overturns, but they manage to make it to shore and start searching for the sanctuary by listening to birdsong.
The final part of the journey proves to be the most difficult. Walking blindfolded through unfamiliar woods is treacherous, and Malorie trips and falls down a slope, briefly knocking herself out. The children wander off in different directions and the entities whisper to them in Malorie's voice, encouraging them to take off their blindfolds. Malorie manages to find Boy by the ringing of his bicycle bell, but Girl has dropped hers and won't come when called, because - as Boy explains - Malorie has been so harsh with them that Girl is afraid of her. Panicking, Malorie apologizes and finishes the story that Tom was telling them earlier, promising that one day the children will be able to play freely with other children and climb trees. To her relief, Girl finally returns, and the three of them make their way to the sanctuary.
Banging frantically on the door as the entities gather behind her, Malorie begs the people inside to at least let her children in. Eventually the door opens and the three of them are ushered inside, where their eyes are quickly checked for signs of infection. Once they are cleared, Malorie realizes that the sanctuary is actually a school for the blind, so most of the inhabitants are completely immune to the entities. Inside the school is a courtyard filled with birds and covered by a green canopy. Malorie tells the children that they can set the birds in their bird box free now, and they do so, watching the birds fly up into the canopy.
Malorie is then reunited with her OB-GYN, Dr. Lapham (Parminder Nagra), who has also survived and is relieved to see that Malorie made it as well. She asks the children what their names are, and they tell her they are called Boy and Girl. Malorie then decides to finally give them names, calling the girl Olympia (after her mother) and the boy Tom (after his late adoptive father). Olympia and Tom then run off to play with the other children, and Bird Box ends on a hopeful note, with Malorie looking up at the canopy full of birds.
Page 2: What Are the Monsters?
Children of the Wild Pipeline Procession The theater ensemble 'Children of the Wild' will host six 'Pipeline Processions' in Western Mass and New Hampshire, hiking to places directly in the line of Kinder Morgan's proposed natural gas pipeline.
ASHFIELD -- Art met activism Monday in a rural and isolated area of Ashfield.
The roving theater ensemble "Children of the Wild" led local residents on a surreal "pipeline procession," hiking through the woods as a quartet of ghoulish musicians performed dirges and ashen-dressed actors dramatized themes of hope and despair.
The procession began at the Beldingville Road home of Jim Cutler and traveled to a powerline that would be widened and dug up to accommodate the proposed Kinder Morgan natural gas pipeline known as Northeast Energy Direct.
The event was a fundraiser for Pipeline Awareness Network of the Northeast (PLAN-NE), a regional coalition fighting the pipeline in three states.
Donations also helped the Wastelands Project, an art-theater concept that will carry Children of the Wild and its busking folk band in a sailboat across the Great Lakes from Buffalo to Duluth next fall.
The group seeks to change cultural consciousness so as to "rewild industrial spaces and the human spirit." Attendees were asked to imagine what must be abandoned, and what must be nourished "for life to grow out of the ashes of these industrial fires."