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Hi everyone, it’s been while since our last Status Update and in that time we’ve been hard at work on a great many things from Sponge itself, to Block19, Ore, State of Sponge and even planning for our Minecon booth! In development news, we’ve retired mainstream development of 1.8.9 and are now concentrating our efforts on 1.10.2. Our main branches are now bleeding and we’re working to fix tickets and prepare for API 5 release. For your viewing pleasure, here’s a look at our development efforts: SpongePowered at Minecon 2016 As most of you would know, Minecon is only a month away and we’re pleased to announce that we’ll be running a booth alongside our good friends at MCProHosting. We’re very excited to once more have the opportunity to entertain and inform the awesome Minecraft community, we’re sure it’ll be a blast. Thanks to the superb modelling skills of @Mumfrey, we have a mockup of our current booth design (Liable to change) for everyone to take a look at: You’ll be seeing plenty of Spongineers there, some will be beaming with excitement, while others will be looking pretty groggy without their usual 18 cups of coffee per day. As things stand, you’ll be seeing the delightful faces of: @Aaron1011, @Dockter, @gabizou, @Grinch, @Me4502, @Mumfrey, @Owexz and @Zidane, as well as plenty of friendly contributors around the place. You’ll hear plenty more about our plans in the coming weeks, in the meantime we’d love to know how many friendly faces we’ll be seeing around the venue, so let us know if you’re going to come and visit below. Docs Update Javadocs links are now everywhere, thanks to some awesome work by 12awsomeman34. We’re awaiting the release of SpongeAPI 5 so we can start adding the new features too, but until then the SpongeDocs will stick to the official Beta release (4.1.0). We’re also debating whether or not to keep the Bukkit-to-Sponge method comparison table, which is becoming less useful as API development progresses. We still need more contributors - there are conspicuous voids that we cannot fill, such as the permissions API. The pages won’t magically fill themselves, so we’re always on the look-out for people who can explain elements of the SpongeAPI. If you feel confident enough to write a doc, the staff will be delighted to help out. You could even volunteer to become an editor yourself - fame, fortune, glory! ORE Update Work on ORE has been progressing smoothly, with most of the bugs now in the process of being ironed out we’ll be further testing the system and getting it ready for production use. As many of the staff will be busy in the leadup to Minecon, we have decided to postpone migration to ORE until after the event in order to ensure a smooth transition process. If you’d like to take a look at ORE’s current state, you can visit: https://ore-staging.spongepowered.org/ You can also take a look at ORE’s source code here: https://github.com/SpongePowered/Ore State of Sponge The next State of Sponge will be hosted on the 29th of October at the usual time of 21:00 UTC. Get ready for an exciting array of Vanilla and Modded fun, with a showcase of the latest Sponge features as well as some exciting community plugins, all livestreamed for your viewing pleasure. The ever-irascible @Zidane will be once more leading our discussion and Q&A session, joined by the rest of the Sponge crew for a delightful [Morning/Afternoon/Evening, depending on your timezone]. We hope to see you all there! |
Govt also decides to appeal against his bail in Islamabad High Court ISLAMABAD: A day after an anti-terrorism court granted bail to the alleged mastermind of the 2008 terror attacks in Mumbai, the government detained him under Maintenance of Public Order, Express News reported on Friday. Zakiur Rehman Lakhvi, the commander of banned outfit Lashkar-e-Taiba, who was allegedly involved in planning, financing and executing the attacks on Taj Mahal hotel in Mumbai, was granted bail by ATC judge Syed Kausar Abbas Zaidi against submission of surety bonds worth Rs0.5 million. State prosecutor Mohammad Azhar Chaudhry also told AFP on Friday he will challenge the court order. The approval of bail drew swift condemnation from New Delhi, which urged the Pakistani government to appeal. “I am completing all the legal formalities and then I will challenge this order in Islamabad on Monday,” government prosecutor Chaudhry told AFP. The 60-hour assault on Mumbai was blamed on the banned militant group Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT). Lakhvi remained in the high security Adiala prison in garrison city of Rawalpindi even after Thursday’s court ruling. “Today I am trying to get a copy of the written (bail) order and then I will file an appeal in Islamabad High Court,” Chaudhry said. The court’s ruling on Thursday came a day after Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif vowed to crack down on terror groups in Pakistan, after Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan gunmen massacred 148 people, mostly teenagers, at a school in Peshawar. Nawaz on Wednesday announced that a six-year moratorium on the death penalty would be lifted for those convicted of terror offences. Indian Home Minister Rajnath Singh had said granting the bail was “very unfortunate”. “India has given enough evidence (against Lakhvi). We expect the Pakistan government to appeal at the earliest,” he told journalists in Delhi. Read full story |
EasyJet has been forced to apologise after it twice told a passenger that his Scottish banknote was not accepted as currency. A member of the cabin crew on a flight from Venice to Amsterdam first refused Bruce Anderson’s payment when he attempted to buy food for his two children, saying they did not recognise the notes, which are designed differently to English equivalents but are legal tender. The self-employed contractor from Stirling then wrote to the carrier to complain, only for a customer service advisor to respond confirming that Scottish banknotes were not accepted. “I am sorry you feel our cabin crew were not very friendly when making a purchase on board,” the airline said to Mr Anderson. “I would like to assure you that we take complaints about unhelpful staff very seriously, because our customers are at the centre of what we do. Easyjet operates from four airports in Scotland Credit: Getty “I do apologise that you could not make the payment in your preferred currency, as easyJet doesn’t accept Scottish pounds.” The airline, however, admitted to Scotland on Sunday, that both employees had not accurately relayed the airline’s official stance, and that the banknotes had been rejected “in error” and the employee who responded to Mr Anderson’s complaint had “misunderstood” the carrier’s policy. EasyJet operates routes from four Scottish airports, including dozens from Edinburgh, two domestic routes from Inverness, a host of European flights from Glasgow and three services from Aberdeen. Mr Anderson told the newspaper: “I found it depressing that they wouldn’t take Scottish banknotes. “I ended up having to pay them in euros when there is a horrendous exchange rate. “The thing is, they would have taken English money. My children then asked me why they wouldn’t take daddy’s money, which was upsetting. “I suppose that’s potentially five million customers who are going to be slightly annoyed by this. It reminded me of being in London where cabbies are reluctant to take Scottish cash.” A spokesperson for EasyJet said: “EasyJet accepts both the euro and sterling, including the Scottish pound, for our onboard retail services on all flights. “Mr Anderson’s currency was not accepted on board his flight from Venice to Amsterdam in error on July 12. “The Italian crew on the day did not on this occasion recognise the currency, and EasyJet are working with our team in Venice to ensure that this does not happen in future. “Unfortunately the agent who wrote to Mr Anderson on 28 August misunderstood our currency policy and so incorrectly advised him.” |
Signup to receive a daily roundup of the top LGBT+ news stories from around the world Scottish Liberal Democrat leader Willie Rennie is the latest party leader to speak out in favour of equal marriage in Scotland as part of the Equality Network’s It’s Time campaign. The MSP said: “I support equal marriage because it’s about fairness, about everyone being treated equally in a fair society. It’s about the chance for everyone, no matter where they come from to enjoy the same freedoms and opportunities that everybody else has. Equal marriage is about gay people getting the same rights as everybody else. Just now we don’t have that, and we need to change it and change it quickly.” Yesterday, the leader of the Scottish Conservatives Ruth Davidson reaffirmed her support for equal marriage in Scotland by saying “it’s a matter of love” in a video for the It’s Time campaign. Although both Ms Davidson and Scottish Conservatives Deputy Leader Jackson Carlaw have signed the Equality Network’s Equal Marriage Pledge, the majority of all 15 Tory MSPs remain undecided or are opposed to the Marriage and Civil Partnership (Scotland) Bill. There are currently at least 89 Members of the Scottish Parliament out of a total of 129 who have stated their support for the bill including all cabinet ministers, the leaders of each of the four parties and every Liberal Democrat MSP. The Liberal Democrats are the fourth largest party in the Scottish Parliament with 5 MSPs. Mr Rennie said: “When MSPs are considering which way to vote on this issue, they need to think about their friends, about their neighbours, about the person down the street, about fairness in Scotland… That’s what they need to think about; what is the effect on people. If legislators don’t do that they’re not doing their job properly.” The Equality Network’s It’s Time campaign is modelled on PinkNews’ Out4Marriage campaign. |
Controversial politician Narendra Modi, the favorite to be the next Indian prime minister, has acknowledged for the first time that he is married, confirming long-running rumors. Many thought that BJP leader had remained alone his adult life, having come through the ranks of a grassroots Hindu nationalist organization that requires a vow of celibacy. Previous media reports suggested he walked away from an arranged marriage when just a child, but this has never been confirmed by the ascetic 63-year-old, who would frequently extoll the merits of his single status during stump speeches. “I have no family ties, I am single. Who will I be corrupt for?” he said during campaigning in February. The Brief Newsletter Sign up to receive the top stories you need to know right now. View Sample Sign Up Now But as he filed papers Wednesday, to stand as a MP for western Gujarat state’s Vadadora constituency, he finally acknowledged, in an affidavit, that he had a wife. Rumors had been circulating for years that a 62-year-old retired school teacher in Gujurat, Jashodaben, had been married to Modi. A magazine tracked her down in 2009 but she refused to give speak to them. However, she finally gave an interview in February and confirmed that the couple separated three years into their marriage — at the ages of 17 and 18 respectively — and since then “we have never been in touch.” The revelation was quickly seized upon by senior opposition figures, including Congress Party general secretary Digvijaya Singh. Modi accepts his Marital Status. Can Women of this Country trust a Man who stalks a woman, deprives his wife of her right? Vote against Modi — digvijaya singh (@digvijaya_28) April 10, 2014 Singh’s reference to “stalking” pertains to a 2009 controversy in which a female architect was put under surveillance — allegedly on the orders of Modi. Meanwhile, Sonia Gandhi, president of the ruling Congress Party, launched a scathing attack on Modi Wednesday, accusing him of presenting a false image of Gujarat, India’s most developed state, where he is chief minister. “Some people are talking of themselves in a big way. It is an old habit. They are projecting an image as if Gujarat is the only state that has developed,” Sonia said at a rally in this south Karnataka town bordering Andhra Pradesh, according to Indian Express. “It is another matter that the poor have made sacrifices for this development.” More than 814 million Indians will vote over the coming five weeks, with parts of 14 states and the capital New Delhi currently casting ballots. Analysts say these may be the most important polls in four decades. Write to Charlie Campbell at charlie.campbell@time.com. |
MUMBAI: The demonetisation drive has eaten into the growth momentum of the biscuits sector , which has seen sales fall by up to 1.5 percentage points, according to market leader Parle Products "Biscuits as a category saw growth of about 5 per cent in 2016, except in the past two months, when the sales were hit due to demonetisation."The momentum in consumption, which had picked up after the monsoon, was affected severely by demonetisation. The result was shaving off of about 100-150 bps from category growth," Parle Products Category Head Mayank Shah told PTI.The government on November 8 had banned old Rs 1,000 and Rs 500 banknotes worth around Rs 20 trillion to control black money and counterfeit currency. Noting that demonetisation has had a significant impact on consumer demand and rotation of capital in trade, Shah said the effect would continue till the government is able to infuse adequate currency into the system."We see it continuing till the government pumps back sufficient currency into the economy. Only about one-third of what has been demonetised has been replaced till date."In the meanwhile, we are effectively looking at change in spending or paying habits of consumers, but this may take time," Shah said.Parle Products, which owns biscuit brands like Parle-G and Monaco , enjoys around 40 per cent share of the estimated Rs 25,000-crore biscuits market. Shah said rural demand will be a strong growth-driver in 2017."While urban consumption is growing, rural demand has been sluggish due to the late arrival of the monsoons. But since then we have seen revival in rural consumption as farmers expect a bumper harvest and therefor we see rural demand to be a strong growth-driver in 2017," he said.The note ban has yanked a whopping Rs 1.2 trillion or 10.2 per cent from the market capitalisation of consumer goods companies.Out of this, as much as Rs 99,000 crore value erosion is from FMCG stocks alone. The worst hit have been ITC and HUL, according to exchange data.For the consumer goods sector as a whole, sales are down a whopping 40-70 per cent, according to analysts. |
A character on the show says, 'Romney’s a clown and I don’t want him standing next to him.' | REUTERS 'Mad Men' cites Romney, but not Mitt “Mad Men” is a show set in the past, so you don’t expect much in the way of current affairs from the AMC show. And, yet, there it was on Sunday night: A mention of Romney. Story Continued Below Of course, since the show, in its current season, is operating in the year 1966, that would be George Romney, the father of Mitt and the then-governor of Michigan. Henry Francis, a character in the show who had served as director of public relations and research for New York governor Nelson Rockefeller in past seasons and now works for New York City Mayor John Lindsay, is heard on one scene saying into the phone: “Well, tell Jim his honor’s not going to Michigan. Because Romney’s a clown and I don’t want him standing next to him.” Tagg Romney, one of Mitt Romney’s sons, sounded off Monday morning on the mention of his grandfather on the popular TV show, saying on Twitter, “Seriously, lib media mocking my dead grandpa?” He tweeted a few minutes later, “George Romney was as good a man I’ve ever known. Inspirational leader, worked for civil rights, promoted freedom. We need more like him.” Via Mediaite, Watch the clip below: |
Push The Bar Back to the Hips… But Not Too Far: Snatch & Clean In the snatch and clean pull from the floor, the bar must move back slightly from its starting point on the platform. This is minimal horizontal movement, but very important to re-establish balance once the barbell and lifter become a single unit following the bar’s separation from the platform. Because the barbell will start over approximately the balls of the feet, and eventually needs to move closer to over the middle of the foot, this backward movement will cover the distance between the barbell’s starting point and the plane over the middle of the foot. How close the bar must be to over the middle of the foot will depend on how heavy it is relative to the lifter—the heavier the bar, the larger the percentage of the combined mass it represents, and as a consequence, the closer to above the middle of the foot it will need to be for the combined mass to be balanced over the foot. There's another issue with regard to the idea of pushing the bar back, and that's the forward movement of the shoulders during the first pull. In the initial pull from the floor, the angle of the back will shift to some extent while the bar is moving backward, and the shoulders will move forward of the bar rather than being approximately above the bar where they start. How significantly the back angle shifts will depend on a few things. First, it will depend on the lifter’s proportions and how they influence the starting position. That is, a longer-legged lifter will likely start the bar slightly farther forward over the foot compared to a shorter-legged lifter. This will typically mean a more significant shift in back angle naturally in the first pull. Next, the closer the angle of the lifter’s back in the starting position to the ultimate angle it will need to be as the bar is passing the knees, the less it will shift. Finally, the stronger the lifters legs are, the less the back angle will shift; conversely, longer-legged lifters who tend to have weaker legs comparatively and worse mechanics in the starting position for the knees will tend to shift more in the first pull. If the bar is allowed to move where it wants, it will continue hanging straight down from the shoulders—meaning that as the shoulders move forward with the shifting back angle, it will move forward away from the lifter, and the actual distance will be greater than the distance the shoulders move, because the legs will simultaneously be moving backward as the knees extend. This is the reason for the instruction to push the bar back toward the hips during the pull. However, it can be overdone. A lifter can bring the bar too far back relative to the feet, which can create at least two basic problems. First, it shifts the combined lifter-barbell center of mass too far back, directing the lifter and barbell backward too much relative to vertical. Depending on the degree, this can mean a backward jump, which if small can be acceptable, but on a bigger scale, will cause a miss. Second, with the bar contacting the body with the hips so far back relative to the feet, it gains excessive forward momentum as the hips extend in the second pull and push the bar with them, causing the bar to swing forward away from the lifter. The key is to maintain immediate proximity of the bar and body throughout the pull until contact is made at the hip (snatch) or upper thigh (clean) by the bar and body coming together and meeting in the proper position over feet—not one traveling exclusively to the other. In other words, the body must move properly while the barbell shifts backward slightly from its starting position and then moves into an essentially vertical path once it reaches the middle of the foot. While the bar can’t be left too far forward and the hips allowed to reach for it, the barbell can’t be pushed all the way back to the hips before they have moved forward over the feet during the double knee bend. Keep this in mind while doing your snatch and clean pulls in particular, as it’s easier to focus on this detail in a pull than during an actual lift. The proper movement trained in the pulls will carry over to the snatch and clean. As it gets better, more focus can be applied in the lifts themselves for the final minor adjustments. Always remember that pushing the bar back to the hips is a cue to be applied properly—not a description of a dramatic movement of the bar. |
Last year's rally, via pderienzo's pictures NYC may be the marijuana arrest capital of the world, and the NYPD's aggressive stop and frisk strategy which has yielded those high numbers of arrests for low-level possession may very well be a form of institutionalized racism. But if you're someone for whom those terrifying statistics don't matter, you can get your chance to rally for marijuana rights tomorrow at Washington Square Park with the Cannabis Peace March. The organizers seem to have learned their lesson from last year's rally, which was set to start at 11 a.m...except almost nobody showed up for nearly an hour. This year's rally starts at high noon on the east side of the park, with speeches and singalongs; then gatherers will march down Broadway to Foley Square, with the event ending around 2 p.m. You can check out more photos from last year's "May Jay Day" here, and watch a video taken by NYU Local on the event below. Maybe the Marijuana Fairy will bless the occasion with some mysterious untraceable packages. |
It is a Sunday afternoon, the Sunday after Thanksgiving, and Fran Lindau gets a call. A student on the semester-long study abroad program she directs in Monteverde, Costa Rica, has been raped during a weekend trip to the beach. A friend of the assaulted woman is calling: she does not wish to go to a clinic, but could Lindau arrange for her to get emergency contraception? From here things are set in motion. After doing some research, including calling a doctor in the U.S. and accessing a Princeton University-sponsored website on emergency contraception, Lindau and her fellow professor and partner Catherine Murray obtain an over-the-counter packet of birth control pills, which can be used in high dosages for emergency contraceptive purposes, as the product known as Plan B is not a legal drug in Costa Rica. Murray purchases the birth control while Lindau drives to the beach to pick up the victim and three other students who had accompanied her there. Upon returning to Monteverde, Lindau asks again if the victim will go to a clinic; again, she declines. Lindau gives her the birth control pills with instructions on the appropriate dosage -- four pills now, another four in twelve hours – and asks her to come to her office first thing in the morning. It is not until lunchtime the next day, until after Lindau has had the opportunity to interview the student and her three friends, that she reports the incident to her supervisor, the executive director of the Monteverde Institute (MVI), Debra Hamilton. Lindau will be reprimanded for this delay, as well as her unauthorized efforts to assist the victim in procuring over-the-counter medication (more on this below); she gets fired Dec. 18. Murray resigns 12 days later, under pressure, after both she and Hamilton express doubts that their working relationship could be remedied by mediation. Yet from Lindau and Murray’s perspectives – and the rape survivor's, too – it was only after the incident was reported to Hamilton that it began to be mishandled. The victim felt harassed by Hamilton into signing a legal waiver and was distressed by her insistence that Monteverde staff would have to report the crime against her wishes – which Hamilton said was her legal obligation though she stressed that neither the victim’s name nor any details of the assault were shared with the police. As the victim wrote in an account that has been posted online (and whose authorship has been verified by Inside Higher Ed), “I cannot continue in the knowledge that [Hamilton] has not only not been reprimanded for how she treated me, but that the very people who helped me have been punished instead.” Unraveling the response to this incident, and where it seemed to go wrong and why, offers a glimpse into the complexity of responding to cases of sexual assault in study abroad, the competing legal frameworks that study abroad programs exist within, and the tensions that can result when the best interests of the institution and the student are arguably not one and the same. This is the kind of story where nobody wins, and the reverberations have been significant: the study abroad provider Living Routes, which operated the program in question in conjunction with its Costa Rican partner organization, the Monteverde Institute (MVI), was forced to shut its doors last month after suddenly losing its affiliation agreement with the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. The university, which provided academic credit for Living Routes programs, cited concerns about the provider’s response to a health and safety incident that occurred on the Monteverde program “on or about” Dec. 1 and a delay in informing the university that the incident had occurred. In fact, the university learned of it from a member of the Monteverde community who wrote to UMass Amherst faculty with concerns about the handling of the incident and the victim’s treatment. ‘We Didn’t Think Twice’ Let’s rewind again to that Sunday, Dec. 1, when Lindau gets the call from the victim’s friend. “Given the circumstances that this was a rape case, we didn’t think twice before saying of course we’ll help,” said Murray, who was a professor of service learning on the Living Routes program and director of short-course development for the MVI, which hosts a number of study abroad programs run by American universities. Noting that the pharmacy would have closed before the students returned from the beach, and that the effectiveness of emergency contraception declines the longer you wait to take it, Murray said that she was unpersuaded by what she described as one MVI board member’s after-the-fact recommendation that she should have left it to the student to work out the situation herself – or at the very least, that she should have just driven the student to the pharmacy to let her buy her own drugs. Murray’s concern, she said, was not “what do you do to ensure that the Monteverde Institute is completely white and blameless and doesn’t get their hands dirty by helping students.” “I acted as a human being and a woman supporting a woman in a tragic situation,” said Murray, who emphasized that she and Lindau had educated themselves on emergency contraception issues in the past, before the incident occurred. “You can tell me what is the best legal course of action, but that is not how I react to an emergency like this," she said. “I acted as a human being and a woman supporting a woman in a tragic situation.” --Catherine Murray Complicating matters is the fact that the legal status of emergency contraception is murky in Costa Rica, a predominantly Roman Catholic country. Costa Rica’s national rape response protocol outlines an emergency contraception regimen, but the relevant subsection also includes a perplexing parenthetical caveat that it has not been approved by the institution’s board of directors (which institution, exactly, is not clear as it is an inter-institutional document). As Larissa Arroyo Navarrete, a Costa Rican lawyer who specializes in sexual and reproductive rights, explained via email, emergency contraception is not forbidden by law in cases of rape, but there is no registered product intended solely for emergency contraceptive purposes (i.e., Plan B). Hospitals can access and prescribe a regimen made up of a high dosage of regular birth control pills, but do not as a rule provide it. According to Lindau and Murray’s accounts, Hamilton overreacted regarding the potential safety risks of the emergency contraception, calling them at their home, where the student was temporarily staying, on the Monday evening after the assault to say that she had been informed by a Costa Rican doctor that the side effects can include severe hemorrhaging and birth defects and that the professors needed to watch the student overnight; if she hemorrhaged, Hamilton allegedly told Lindau, it would be “on your heads.” Hamilton declined to comment on Lindau’s account of the conversation, subsequently explaining via email that she preferred not to get into a “she-said,” “she-said” situation but that she hoped her silence would not be taken as assent with Lindau’s characterizations. When asked about the drug (Noryglene) and the dosage, James Trussell, a professor of economics and public affairs who runs the Princeton website on emergency contraception, said there is no risk whatsoever of these or other serious side effects. Earlier that same Monday, Lindau and Murray had arranged for the victim to meet with an American doctor who lives in Monteverde but is not licensed to practice there. The student had continued to decline to visit the clinic and Lindau and Murray wanted her to get the best care possible in light of that decision – and in any case, as Murray said, she thought the student would get better advice from an American doctor than she would have from the local health center. The physician, Noemi Gamel, who formerly was a pediatric hospitalist and faculty member at the University of Texas Health Science Center in San Antonio, said she took a basic medical history with an eye toward allergies and possible drug contradictions and, in consultation with the pharmacist, advised the victim about antibiotics she could obtain over the counter to help prevent a sexually transmitted infection. She also advised the student, who was returning home in a week, to see her doctor in the U.S. for HIV testing and counseling. Her lack of a license to practice medicine in Costa Rica was not relevant to the situation, Gamel said, because she did not perform an exam, did not charge the student for her services, and did not prescribe medicine (the drugs being available over the counter). She was providing medical advice as a friend with medical expertise, she said, not practicing medicine. “With the limited resources available to Ms. Lindau, she ensured that the student received as close to ‘best practices’ care as possible in this community,” Gamel wrote in a letter to the MVI board. “Emergency contraception is highly safe and is available over the counter in the United States thanks to its safety profile. I obtained the antibiotics over the counter for the student after discussion with the pharmacist. As such, I do not feel Ms. Lindau or Ms. Murray were practicing medicine. Speaking as a physician, I applaud Ms. Lindau and Ms. Cath Murray for proactively helping this student at a time of intense crisis. I wish that all people who work in education would be as engaged and accountable to their students as these two women.” “I sleep well at night knowing that we did the right thing,” Gamel said in an interview. “Quite honestly, if we had sent this girl back pregnant or with an S.T.D., that would have been worse.” Protocols and Laws Citing confidentiality and privacy concerns, Hamilton declined to comment when asked whether Lindau and Murray crossed a line in aiding the student. But an internal investigative report, provided by Lindau, describes the “administration” of medications -- a term Murray objects to as inaccurate – without prior approval as a violation of MVI protocol. “The staff's delay meant that we ... didn't have the chance at the very start to work together as a full team to respond to a traumatic, complicated situation.” --Debra Hamilton, Monteverde Institute The relevant protocols in this case include a generic emergency response plan, non-specific to sexual assault, included in the MVI course coordinator manual – which was written by Lindau and lists her as one of three people to contact in case of emergency -- and the Living Routes response plan for sexual assault (pages 50-51 of this document), which Lindau said she followed. She said that she first told her contact at Living Routes of the assault on Monday, after informing Hamilton. Hamilton said that one lesson of this incident is that emergency response protocols “need to be really explicit. The roles that we play as professors and administrators have to be really well defined.” (Perhaps notably, Lindau wore three hats: as professor, as on-site director of the Living Routes Costa Rica program, and as academic director of the MVI). The care of the student must be paramount, Hamilton said in an interview, “but at the same time, there are broader issues and this requires a team approach. The team approach is incredibly important for all sorts of reasons…. Protocols and rules of law are designed for the safety and protection of students. We are the advocates and the bridges to professional services; we are not the professional providers.” In a follow-up email, Hamilton added that the delay in notifying her as executive director foreclosed the possibility of such a team response. “Once they were aware of what happened, the failure of staff to immediately report the incident to the Executive Director of the Institute was in violation of MVI protocol and common sense,” she wrote. “The staff's delay meant that we -- the MVI Executive Director, the MVI staff, and the MVI board -- didn't have the chance at the very start to work together as a full team to respond to a traumatic, complicated situation.” However, another variable here is the rape victim's own account, in which things seemed to go wrong when the MVI executive director and board – and the lawyers – entered the scene. Legal Obligations It is now Tuesday, Dec. 3, two days after the students returned from the beach. In a meeting, Hamilton presents the victim with a one-page document that she asks her to sign in order to acknowledge receipt. The document is copied in large part below. “Your safety and health is our first concern,” the document says, in part. “As an Institution that works with students, we offer to facilitate the following, as well our legal obligations regarding this matter. [sic] According to our legal counsel, we must facilitate the following but it is your legal right to accept or deny these services.” “1) Reporting of the crime: if you are not willing or able to report this crime, the Monteverde Institute must report it. This can be done without your presence. Please inform me of your intention so that we may proceed with our legal obligations.” (Again, Hamilton said lawyers advised her that it was the MVI’s obligation to report to the police the bare fact that its staff were aware that a sexual assault had occurred, but that neither the victim’s name nor the circumstances of the assault were shared: “no details were given and obviously no charges were filed,” Hamilton said.) “2) Medical attention: I have been informed by Fran that you do not feel comfortable seeking medical attention. I was informed of your discussion with a local doctor who advised you to take antibiotics. A legal prescription is required for those medications, which we can facilitate by taking you to the local emergency clinic to see that doctor.” (Yet Gamel, the American doctor, said the antibiotics the student obtained were all available over the counter.) “3) Psychological services: Suffering a trauma is a complicated issue. We will provide a trained psychologist or psychiatrist to offer you council." [sic] “4) We will provide housing for you if you prefer to be with others than your host family. If you stay in San Luis with your host family, transportation will be provided as you should not walk up the trocha.” (The trocha was a steep, ascending pathway that the victim traversed daily on her way to class; in a written account sent directly to Inside Higher Ed, the victim wrote that she expressed befuddlement at this passage, at which point Hamilton told her she was "forbidden from walking up La Trocha because of the high dosage of hormones that [I was] on." Hamilton denied saying this.) "5) “We strongly encourage you to call your family. We will assist you in returning home if you so desire.” Liz Demmon, another participant in the study abroad program and an incoming freshman at the University of Colorado at Boulder, said she joined the victim partway through her meeting with Hamilton, at which point she found the victim crying and Hamilton holding a document. Demmon described the document as “poorly written and slightly insulting to the victim.” “She had to sign this document 2 and a half days after the incident. I understand liability, but this meeting was more insensitive than it was helpful for anyone,” Demmon said via email. On Dec. 8, Hamilton gave the victim another document to sign, this one being a legal waiver that released Living Routes and the MVI from any complaints or charges related to the sexual assault. According to the victim’s account, she was walking back from town with Demmon “when Ms. Hamilton pulled over on the side of the road and attempted to make me sign another waiver.” She refused to sign the document, which she described as “meaningless… it only insinuated further that I was seeking to lay blame for the incident on [Living Routes]/MVI, which I blatantly said I wasn't trying to do during our first meeting.” The sense that she was being treated as a legal liability, rather than as a person suffering a trauma, pervades the student's accounts. “I am troubled when I hear about how the student views my interactions with her, but I obviously can't negate how she feels,” Hamilton said, via email. “The letter describing services available to her was requested by Living Routes and by MVI’s legal counsel. The second letter, which she did not sign, was also requested by Living Routes and by MVI’s legal counsel. I regret that the student felt that those letters were insensitive or that my request to review the letter and ‘drop it off at the Institute if she wished to sign it’ was intrusive – but it was my responsibility as Executive Director of the MVI to ask -- I had clear direction from Living Routes, the MVI Board and legal counsel on this matter.” "It was a struggle to balance all of the needs," Hamilton said in an interview, adding, "I really deeply care about this person.” Living Routes has closed its Amherst office; it expects to dissolve as a nonprofit organization this spring. Its former executive director did not respond to a request for an interview. The president of the Monteverde Institute board, Randal B. Smith, declined to comment beyond affirming that Hamilton retains the board’s full confidence; in an open letter Smith wrote, posted online, he described Hamilton’s handling of the events as “exemplary.” He criticized letters circulated by former and “disgruntled” MVII employees as “misguided,” saying that “It greatly saddens me to read the hurtful words being presented out of context and without merit by these individuals.” “[W]hen communication breaks down inside of our own organization, we must act,” Smith wrote. “When an individual intentionally ignores MVI protocol, we must act. When an individual operates without concern for management or the board of directors, we must act. If an individual willfully chooses not to inform those that are most impacted by their decisions, we must act. If an individual does not seek the professional guidance of their Executive Director, we must act.” |
Perhaps a model whose debut is obvious to us now, hindsight always being 20/20, Yamaha has just dropped the 2016 Yamaha MT-10 on us at this year’s EICMA show. The Yamaha MT-10 helps round out Yamaha’s MT brand, with affordable and edgy models available from 125cc all the way up to now 1,000cc. Without even riding the Yamaha MT-10 we are fairly certain that this street bike, with its Yamaha YZF-R1 race track DNA, is a hoon to ride with its over-abundance of personality – it would have to, with a face like that. As we mentioned, at the Yamaha MT-10’s core is a the venerable YZF-R1’s cross-plane, inline-four, 999cc engine. This means that the MT-10 also gets some of the R1’s electronics, including a three-level traction control system, three riding modes through Yamaha’s “D-Mode” throttle mapping, as well a slipper clutch A little something for everyone, long-distance riders will enjoy the addition of cruise control (4th, 5th, and 6th gears only), while canyon carvers will find the short wheelbase as a benefit. There is no word yet if the 2016 Yamaha MT-10 will come to the USA, potentially supplanting the Yamaha FZ-1 from its perch. Considering how different those two bike demographics are though, we have a hard time seeing it. Perhaps they’ll live side-by-side to each other, or perhaps US immigration won’t let the MT-10 past quarantine. Time will tell. Highlights of the 2016 Yamaha MT-10: Natural and versatile forward leaning riding position Wide and upright tapered handlebars Aggressive mass forward body design Shortest-in-class 1,400mm wheelbase for light and neutral handling Lightweight aluminium Deltabox main frame with optimized strength/rigidity balance YZF-R1-derived race-developed suspension with revised settings 320mm dual front discs with radial mount 4-pot calipers with ABS Lean and athletic mass forward body styling with iconic MT family DNA 17-litre fuel tank Lightweight 5-spoke cast aluminium wheels Specially-developed Bridgestone Battlax Hypersport tyres 12v DC outlet as standard equipment, to power Genuine Yamaha heated grips Newly designed LCD multi function instrument panel QSS (Quick Shift System) available as an option Powerful and aggressive mono-focus dual LED headlights LED position light with newly designed lens LED turn signals and license plate light Source: Yamaha Motor Europe Be sure to stay up-to-the-minute with all our EICMA coverage. |
*(Go nudge Hix about writing a new "Uncollected Editions" for us, won't you?) Thanks to Collected Editions contributor Hix * for the tip -- a number of online retailers are now listing collections of DC Comics'sevent for pre-order.Based on these solicitations (which, please note, are preliminary and subject to change), it looks likeand its miniseries will be collected in a total of nine collections -- one foritself and two each for the miniseries "eras" -- all paperback, and all arriving in October-November 2015. Each collection costs less than $20.What looks good here, for me, is that all of these collections will be out relatively soon, before the end of the year. I am admittedly a tad surprised to see them all in paperback and not hardcover (though who knows, maybe there will be a), but I guess when you're dealing with twenty issues per era, two competitively-priced paperbacks per era maybe makes sense.One twist is that whereas I might expect the collections to be released in their publication order --(or "Crisis," as the collections are calling it) and pre-(or "Infinite Earths") -- they're actually being released as listed above:. Granted I believe the miniseries eras are modular in terms of when you can read them, and again all of this is subject to change, but it struck me as odd.Online retailers have these listed as coming out starting the week of October 11 and going into the first week in November, which I think means that your local comics shop should basically have these in each of the four full weeks of October.No telling at this point exactly which of the miniseries will appear in which Book One/Book Two of their eras. However, if you missed it the first time, here's links to the Collected Editions guide to theminiseries and the trades that lead into each one:So whichcollection are you most looking forward to? |
Elsa and Anna bring their story to life on ice in “Disney On Ice: Frozen.” (Photo: Submitted ) Story Highlights Disney On Ice: Frozen gives life to the characters, set and story. Dressing up, singing and dancing along is encouraged. An icy blast is blowing over Nashville this week, and it has nothing to do with hockey season. "Disney On Ice: Frozen" has flurried into town, bringing the beloved characters, set and songs from the hit movie to life at Bridgestone Arena, with shows continuing through Sunday. "Anna, Elsa, Kristoff, Sven — they look like they stepped right off the screen," said Melodee Clysdale, one of the ensemble ice dancers in the show — she portrays a townsperson, a butterfly in Olaf's "Summer" and other characters. The Canadian skater has been with Feld Entertainment, which presents Disney On Ice, for 20 years, and she ensures viewers that the set of Arendelle looks authentic. "The show itself is visually stunning," Clysdale said. "When Elsa builds her ice palace, it's literally created out of mist and fog and raptures up from the ground, and panels lower from above. It enchants you." "Frozen" fans of all ages can see Anna's journey to find Elsa and put an end to winter as the characters glide, twirl and dance to favorite songs, including the award-winning "Let It Go." And singing along is encouraged. "The kids are singing and dancing along with the show — we can hear it backstage," Clysdale said. "They're singing at the top of their lungs." The audience also is welcome to dress in full costume. "We bought an Elsa dress and she's going to be wearing it," said Old Hickory resident Jason De Koff of his 5-year-old daughter, Tegan. "She's been looking forward to (the show) ever since we bought the tickets." Holly Cline of Dickson also will fashion her 2-year-old daughter, Olivia, in her own Elsa dress for their second Disney On Ice performance. "We'll probably go every year," Cline said. "Even if we didn't have kids, I'd probably still go. It's really good." NEWSLETTERS Get the Ms. Cheap newsletter delivered to your inbox We're sorry, but something went wrong Ms. Cheap shares her favorite bargains and frugal finds in this weekly newsletter. Please try again soon, or contact Customer Service at 1-800-342-8237. Delivery: Fri Invalid email address Thank you! You're almost signed up for Ms. Cheap Keep an eye out for an email to confirm your newsletter registration. More newsletters While the "Frozen" cast and story take up the majority of the performance, fans also can catch Disney characters from Goofy to Ariel, as well as hosts Mickey and Minnie Mouse in the opening act and finale. While the performance targets children, it appeals to all ages, from the songs to the scary snow monster to the overarching message. "It's a strong family bond theme, a theme of love overcoming everything," Clysdale said. "It's our family tradition to bring our show here to your family." If you go When: 7 p.m. Thursday, 10:30 a.m. and 7 p.m. Friday, 10:30 a.m., 2:30 and 6:30 p.m. Saturday and Sunday Where: Bridgestone Arena, 501 Broadway Tickets: $40-$120 Details:www.disneyonice.com Reach Jen Todd at 615-313-2760 or on Twitter @jentoddwrites. Read or Share this story: http://tnne.ws/1x2K2nT |
Amidst scandals of Mafia involvement in migrant rescue efforts in Italy, some 4,400 mostly sub-Saharan African migrants arrived on Italy’s shores between Thursday and Friday. As usual, the migrants were picked up just miles from the Libyan shoreline and shuttled by Coast Guard vessels, the Spanish navy and various NGOs all the way to Italy. On Thursday, rescue vessels picked up 2,900 migrants while on Friday, rescuers added another 1,500 people to their number in a series of operations coordinated by the Italian Coast Guard. Prior to Thursday’s new arrivals, Italy had already taken in more than 45,785 migrants since the first of the year, an increase of 35% compared to the same period in 2016, which saw a record-breaking number of migrants arrive. According to Italy’s Ministry of the Interior, the region hardest hit by the waves of new migrants has been Lombardy, home to Italy’s business capital of Milan. According to reports, many African migrants disembarking in Italy do not intend to stay in the country and immediately travel north to attempt to cross the border into France, Switzerland or Austria. Tighter border controls, however, have meant that the vast majority end up staying in Italy against their will. A report last November by the Confcommercio group on the statistical connection between crime and immigration found that in a given area, if the number of immigrants increases by 1 percent, the crime rate in the same area goes up by 0.4 percent. The study revealed that for the first time, the crime rate in the north of Italy, which has the highest concentration of immigrants and asylum seekers, was surpassing that of the south. The crime rate among legal immigrants is nearly exactly double that of Italian citizens, with 8.5 criminal convictions per 1000 as opposed to 4.3 convicted criminals per 1000 among citizens. Among illegal immigrants, however, the crime rate soars to more than 50 percent (148 criminals out of every 247 persons). A spokesman for the European border control group Frontex said Friday that the agency was deploying eleven ships, eight of them Italian, and three aircraft and three helicopters as part of Operation Triton, which aims to monitor traffic in the Central Mediterranean Sea. In a report released earlier this spring, Frontex denounced human traffickers’ exploitation of NGOs to efficiently transport African migrants from Libya to Italy. Many NGOs have become material accomplices to people smugglers by providing a reliable shuttle service for migrants from Africa to Europe, lowering smugglers’ costs and improving their “business model,” the report stated. The assistance by NGOs has virtually eliminated the need for traffickers to procure seaworthy vessels capable of making the dangerous voyage across the southern Mediterranean, the report noted, since traffickers need only transport their passengers a few miles off the Libyan coast where they will be picked up by “rescue” vessels. But NGO collusion with human traffickers is not the only story to give Italians cause for alarm. Last week Italian media outlets revealed that one of Italy’s largest migrant welcome centers was run by the Calabria-based branch of the Italian mafia called ‘Ndrangheta. Before dawn on Monday, more than 500 Police agents descended on the Isola di Capo Rizzuto migrant reception center, arresting 68 people, many of whom belonged to the Arena clan of the ‘Ndrangheta. According to a statement by Catanzaro police, those arrested are being accused of “mafia association, extortion, carrying illegal weapons, fraud, embezzlement to the detriment of the state, and theft.” The Arena clan reportedly made millions through its involvement in the running of the reception center. Follow Thomas D. Williams on Twitter Follow @tdwilliamsrome |
An ISM volunteer holds up Rachel Corrie’s US passport as another peace activist sits in shock, Al-Najjar Hospital, Rafah, Occupied Gaza. Rachel was killed by an Israeli bulldozer driver while protesting the demolition of a Palestinian home. (Mohammad Al-Moghair) On 16 March 2003 in Rafah, occupied Gaza, 23-year-old American peace activist Rachel Corrie from Olympia, Washington, was murdered by an Israeli bulldozer driver. Rachel was in Gaza opposing the bulldozing of a Palestinian home as a volunteer with the International Solidarity Movement. Rachel and seven other ISM activists were in the Hi Es Salam area of Rafah, Gaza, trying to prevent the razing of Palestinian land and property. Present were two Israeli occupation army bulldozers and a tank. For a period of two hours, the activists played ‘cat and mouse’, attempting to prevent the illegal demolitions by physically blocking the passage of the two bulldozers. Rachel Corrie (ISM Handout) “Rachel Corey [sic], 23 years old from the state of Washington, was killed while she was trying to prevent Israeli army bulldozers from destroying a Palestinian home. Other foreigners who were with her said the driver of the bulldozer was aware that Rachel was there, and continued to destroy the house. Initially he dropped sand and other heavy debris on her, then the bulldozer pushed her to the ground where it proceeded to drive over her, fracturing both of her arms, legs and skull. She was transferred to hospital, where she later died. Another foreigner was also injured in the attack and has been hospitalized - at this stage his nationality is unknown.” (15 March 2003) A press release from the International Solidarity Movement stated that: “Rachel had been staying in Palestinian homes threatened with illegal demolition, and today Rachel was standing with other non-violent international activists in front of a home scheduled for illegal demolition. According to witnesses, Rachel was run over twice by the Israeli military bulldozer in its process of demolishing the Palestinian home. Witnesses say that Rachel was clearly visible to the bulldozer driver, and was doing nothing to provoke an attack.” (15 March 2003)The photos below clearly show that Rachel was well marked, had a megaphone which removes any doubt that the activists’ presence was somehow invisible to the driver, and she clearly posed no threat to the bulldozer driver. Picture taken between 3:00-4:00PM, 16 March 2003, Rafah, Occupied Gaza. Rachel Corrie (L) and Nick (R) oppose the potential destruction of this home (to the west of the Doctor’s home where Rachel was killed). In the instance pictured, the bulldozer did not stop and Rachel was pinned between the scooped earth and the fence behind her. On this occasion, the driver stopped before seriously injuring her. Photo by Joseph Smith (ISM Handout). Picture taken between 3:00-4:00PM on 16 March 2003, Rafah, Occupied Gaza. A clearly marked Rachel Corrie, holding a megaphone, confronts the driver of one of two Israeli bulldozers in the area that were attempting to demolish a Palestinian homes. She was confronting the bulldozer in order to disrupt its work, and prevent it from threatening any homes. Photo by Joseph Smith. (ISM Handout) Picture taken at 4:45PM on 16 March 2003, Rafah, Occupied Gaza. Other peace activists tend to Rachel after she was fatally injured by the driver of the Israeli bulldozer (in background). This photo was taken seconds after the bulldozer driver dragged his blade over her for the second time while reversingback over her body. He lifted the blade as seen in the photo only after he had dragged it back over Rachel’s body. This image clearly shows that had he lifted his blade at any time he may have avoided killing her, as the bottom section of the bulldozer is raised off the ground. Photo by Richard Purssell. (ISM Handout) Picture taken at 4:47PM on 16 March 2003, Rafah, Occupied Gaza. Rachel Corrie lies on the ground fatally injured by the Israeli bulldozer driver. Rachel’s fellow activists have dug her a little out of the sand and are trying to keep her neck straight due to spinal injury. Photo by Joseph Smith. (ISM Handout) Rachel in Najjar hostpital, Rafah, Occupied Gaza. Rachel arrived in the emergency room at 5:05PM and doctors scrambled to save her. By 5:20PM, she was gone. Ha’aretz newspaper reported that Dr. Ali Musa, a doctor at Al-Najjar, stated that the cause of death was “skull and chest fractures”. (Mohammad Al-Moghair) A later report from ISM Media Coordinator Michael Shaik in Beit Sahour offered more details about the events: “The confrontation between the ISM and the Israeli Army had been under way for two hours when Rachel was run over. Rachel and the other activists had clearly identified themselves as unarmed international peace activists throughout the confrontation. The Israeli Army are attempting to dishonour her memory by claiming that Rachel was killed accidentally when she ran in front of the bulldozer. Eye-witnesses to the murder insist that this is totally untrue. Rachel was sitting in the path of the bulldozer as it advanced towards her. When the bulldozer refused to stop or turn aside she climbed up onto the mound of dirt and rubble being gathered in front of it wearing a fluorescent jacket to look directly at the driver who kept on advancing. The bulldozer continued to advance so that she was pulled under the pile of dirt and rubble. After she had disappeared from view the driver kept advancing until the bulldozer was completely on top of her. The driver did not lift the bulldozer blade and so she was crushed beneath it. Then the driver backed off and the seven other ISM activists taking part in the action rushed to dig out her body. An ambulance rushed her to A-Najar hospital where she died.” Colleagues of Rachel comfort each other in Najjar hostpital, Rafah, Occupied Gaza. Ha’aretz newspaper reported that a second activist was also injured at the same location. (Mohammad Al-Moghair) Members of the Israeli army and associated Israeli settler paramilitary units have been responsible for the killing of 2,181 Palestinians and the injuring of another 22,218 between 29 September 2000 and 14 March 2003. In addition to the killing of Rachel Corrie by the bulldozer driver, Israeli troops have shot and killed several other internationals in different incidents during the Intifada: German doctor Harald Fischer, Italian cameraman Rafaeli Ciriello, and British United Nations worker Iain Hook. Related links * BY TOPIC: Rachel Corrie Nigel Parry and Arjan El Fassed are two founders of the Electronic Intifada. Michael Brown and Ken Harper also contributed to this report. Last updated: 21 March 2003 (added detail to captions in images and context to second paragraph). |
Get the biggest daily news stories by email Subscribe Thank you for subscribing We have more newsletters Show me See our privacy notice Could not subscribe, try again later Invalid Email Video Loading Video Unavailable Click to play Tap to play The video will start in 8 Cancel Play now A museum is investigating a real-life curse of the mummy’s tomb after a relic almost 4,000-years old started moving on its own. The 10-ins tall statuette of a man called Neb-Senu, which dates back to 1800 BC, mysteriously spins 180 degrees with nobody going near it. Curators were left scratching their heads after they kept finding it facing the wrong way and rigged up a time-lapse camera to catch whoever was moving it. But incredibly the camera shows the figure moving of its own accord in front of crowds of visitors who pass by with hardly a second look. Now TV brainbox Brian Cox, who presents programmes such as the Wonders of Life, is among a group of experts being asked if they have any idea what is causing the phenomenon. The statue has been in the Manchester Museum for over 80 years. Scientists who explored Egyptian tombs in the 1920s were popularly believed to be struck by a ‘curse of the Pharaohs’. Museum curator Campbell Price believes there could be a spiritual explanation to the spinning statue. (Image: Manchester Museum) Egyptologist Mr Price, 29, said: “I noticed one day that it had turned around. I thought it was strange because it is in a case and I am the only one who has a key. “I put it back but then the next day it had moved again. We set up a time-lapse video and, although the naked eye can’t see it, you can clearly see it rotate on the film. “The statuette is something that used to go in the tomb along with the mummy. “Mourners would lay offerings at its feet. The hieroglyphics on the back ask for ‘bread, beer and beef’. “In Ancient Egypt they believed that if the mummy is destroyed then the statuette can act as an alternative vessel for the spirit. Maybe that is what is causing the movement.” Other experts have a more rational explanation - suggesting that the vibrations caused by the footsteps of passing visitors makes the statuette turn. (Image: BBC) That’s the theory favoured by Professor Cox - but Campbell said he was not convinced. He added: “Brian thinks it’s differential friction where two surfaces, the serpentine stone of the statuette and glass shelf it is on, cause a subtle vibration which is making the statuette turn. “But it has been on those surfaces since we have had it and it has never moved before. And why would it go around in a perfect circle?” * How our sister website the Manchester Evening News is reporting the story . |
YOKOHAMA -- Three residents of Kawasaki Ward in the city of Kawasaki submitted a declaration to the Yokohama District Legal Affairs Bureau on March 16 seeking relief and preventive measures after being subjected to hate speech in their local community, which they say constitutes a violation of their human rights. This is apparently the first nationwide case of local residents seeking assistance from a legal affairs bureau after being targeted by hate speech in a specific area. The residents are first-generation Zainichi Korean Cho Yang-yub, 78, third-generation Zainichi Korean Choi Kang-ija, 42, and Choi's husband Shoichi Nakane, 53, who is Japanese. According to the declaration, a group of men who reside in the city of Kawasaki staged a demonstration on Jan. 31 at a park in Kawasaki Ward against Zainichi Koreans. When Jo, Choi and Nakane came to the park to protest, the demonstrators repeatedly shouted slogans at them through a megaphone such as "Get out of here, you Korean cockroaches" and "I'm going to slowly strangle you with a silk cord." Those engaging in the hate speech then continued their demonstration while walking to the Keikyu Kawasaki train station through the ward's coastal area, which is home to many Zainichi Koreans. A total of 12 such demonstrations, including the one on Jan. 31, have taken place in the city of Kawasaki since 2013. Last year in December, the Tokyo Legal Affairs Bureau issued an admonishment to the former leader of the anti-Korean organization Zaitokukai after the group repeatedly engaged in threatening actions in front of Korea University in the Tokyo suburban city of Kodaira. Currently existing laws, however, make it difficult to implement regulations against discriminatory speech that is aimed at the unspecified general public. Upon submitting their declaration to the Yokohama District Legal Affairs Bureau, the three held a press conference at Kawasaki City Hall wherein they described the serious nature of the hate speech incidents. The three also used their real names when filing the statement, saying "We have done nothing wrong." "A man once came up to me in broad daylight and said, 'Koreans are our enemies -- and enemies are to be beaten to death'," Choi said. "I believe that one day, I may indeed be killed." She added, "We just want to be able to live peaceful lives by going to work normally and spending leisurely days off with our families." "The (hate speech) incidents were very painful for me," said Jo. "At night, I remember what happened and I cannot get to sleep." |
James Rexroad Last November, I was on my way to the New York City marathon when I got word that my father had two clots on his brain and needed emergency surgery. My family urged me to go ahead and run anyway. It was to have been my first marathon since I gave up running years ago, and my first high-profile race since writing my book “Born to Run.’’ I had trained to run it barefoot, and even announced my plans to the world in an article in The New York Times. “It’s what your father would want,” my mother said, encouraging me to stay in New York. But it’s not what my father would do. So the day before the race, I turned around and headed home. During my father’s recovery, I teetered on that ledge we all encounter when the curtain drops on our main event before it ever goes up. Without a challenge ahead or a beat-down still smarting behind, there’s no urgency to snap back into serious training. You’re off schedule and like it that way, letting one week of occasional runs drift into three, working out by feel instead of formula — until you realize you feel lousy and have barely worked out at all. Just about the only time I pushed myself was every other week or so, when I met a band of local trail runners who have an absurd mail-carrier ethic when it comes to snow, rain and gloom of night. No matter how dark or cold, they never cancel, bobbing along by headlamp through ice storms, face-whipping branches and far too uncommon self-doubt. It’s not the punishment they love, I eventually realized; it’s the goofy thrill of banding together in the face of slippery awfulness. While many of them had finisher’s medals from Boston and New York and Chicago, their stories were never about marquee races or fast times. Instead they talked about Mrs. Smith’s Challenge and Megatransect and Super Hike, backyard events with no more prestige than a Sunday softball game. They never crowed about nailing qualifiers or lucking out in lotteries, but good lord could they go on about tailgating with microbrews and Old Bay burgers while cheering their friends to the finish. Before long, these war stories made me forget my disappointment over missing New York and rekindled my first long-distance love: an event that not only gave birth to modern endurance sports, but could be their redemption. It’s called the “Fat Ass.” These events are trail races governed by three rules: no fees, no awards, no whining. Distances are typically 50 kilometers or 50 miles, but vary according to a race director’s whims or ability to borrow his buddy’s GPS device. There are no lotteries, no expos, no qualifying times, no triple-digit entry fees subsidizing multimillion-dollar “running clubs.” No one will urinate on you from the upper span of the Verrazano Bridge, and you won’t shiver for hours in a corral before the starting gun. Everyone charges off as equals, Braveheart-style. On the other hand, you get what you pay for. Aid stations are as makeshift as the course measurements. Some are spartan: friends sharing a jug of water and family-size M&M’s. Others are bizarre. Two volunteers at a Maryland race had their hearts set on serving deep-fried turkey, but surrendered to the impossibility of carrying enough poultry and oil into the woods for 300 runners. They settled instead for handing out fistfuls of fresh-cooked French fries. My debut in the series was in 2006, a 50K (about 31 miles) in a lonely Delaware forest on a freezing January morning. Since it was my first race on trails and my first of any kind after a six-year layoff, I decided to stick tight to a seasoned vet named Hunt Bartine so I wouldn’t be stranded if I couldn’t follow the trail or handle the distance. My plan was working nicely, until Mr. Bartine suddenly stopped and started cursing. Somehow, he’d wandered off a trail which he, personally, had marked the week before. It took a good 10 minutes of thrashing through brambles before we got back on course. Five hours later, I popped out of the trees and crossed the finish line. The winners were still there, ladling out steaming cups of vegetable barley soup to the runners-up. The format spontaneously burst into existence, by some weird synchronicity, in three different places in the same year. In February 1978, a few American sailors in Hawaii decided to swim 2.4 miles off Waikiki Beach on Oahu, then bike 112 miles around the island and run all 26.2 miles of the Honolulu Marathon course to see who among them was the toughest — the true iron man. Meanwhile, a gang of Colorado slackers were busy ritualizing an act of vengeance; previously, they’d pushed and pedaled their clunky, one-speed town bikes all 38 miles from Crested Butte to Aspen to settle the score with some rich Aspeners who’d parked their motorcycles in front of a favorite Crested Butte bar. In 1978, just for the fun of it, the Butte-heads declared the Aspen ride an annual event. And in San Francisco, a runner who couldn’t find a race decided to fake one. Joe Oakes needed a 50-mile qualifying time to apply for the Western States 100. He tried to sign up for a 50-mile relay, but solo runners weren’t permitted. So Mr. Oakes entered seven times under seven different spellings of his name. Team Oakes pulled it off, and from identity fraud a movement was born. “There is so much greed and so much money in sports these days,” Mr. Oakes later explained to Ultrarunning magazine. To rebel against ever-escalating entry fees, he created the “Recover From the Holidays Fat Ass 50-Mile Run.” “There is not a nickel involved in any of these events,” Mr. Oakes has said. “You just show up and run. It’s very simple.” Soon, these races were popping up in Philadelphia, Toronto and England, gradually spreading as far as Siberia and South Africa. The rules have never changed and the name has stuck, albeit translated into regional languages. Since those freewheeling founding days, big money has invaded mountain biking, marathoning and the Ironman. Gone is the era when a buck could get you into the New York City marathon. Last year, even the Leadville 100 — one of the original, old-school, mining-town, backcountry ultra series — was taken over by corporate ownership and franchised. But off in the woods, Fat Asses are flourishing. “Let’s stop paying high prices for commercial cookie-cutter road races and let’s start exploring!” the founders of the New York Trail and Ultrarunning Club declared in December. Within 80 days, that grumble of a mission statement has attracted more than 200 members. The appeal isn’t strictly about cash; it’s about connection. These races are hometown and homemade. It’s not Hollywood; it’s your high school play. That’s the choice I was faced with when, a few months ago, I was offered complimentary entry into the Boston Marathon, one of most storied, exclusive races in the world. I thought about it — but not for long. Instead of 26.2 miles, I’ll be paying back my missed New York marathon with 20 percent interest by lining up for the 31-mile HAT Run along the Susquehanna River near my home in Pennsylvania. I won’t be barefoot, since it’s a rocky trail, but I’ll be able to wear the same homemade huaraches that my friend “Barefoot Ted” McDonald gave me when I paced him at Leadville. In a way, I never did resume training; I’ve just been spending more and more time playing in the woods. The prospect of another gigantic “cookie-cutter” left me cold, but a six-hour Braveheart re-enactment was a different story. The HAT Run costs $65 to enter, but every cent comes back to the runners in gift bags, park permits and food. (The current race directors are the same two guys who once tried to fry turkeys, and they still serve smoking-hot “UltraFries” midrace.) “We’re filling up faster than we want,” said Tim Gavin, an organizer of the run. “Long-timers aren’t used to this kind of rush for spots.” Fortunately, Mr. Gavin’s spill-off has created its own throwback movement. Every March, the Buzzards running club holds a free-for-all marathon near Harrisburg, Pa. The Buzzards synchronize the race date each year with the HAT crew so that anyone who doesn’t get into HAT, or doesn’t want to pay, has a free alternative. And down in Mexico, the semi-mythic loner called Caballo Blanco continues to resist offers of corporate sponsorship for his Copper Canyon Ultramarathon with the Tarahumara Indians, the event I chronicled in my book. Caballo messaged me last week, after more than 300 Tarahumara and international runners turned up for his most recent race. “Together, we all created peace in a small town at the bottom of nowhere,’’ he wrote. “Nowhere but beauty. What more is there?” |
National Security Adviser H.R. McMaster has fired another pro-reform staffer who arrived with Donald Trump’s January team. The White House’s National Security Council has hundreds of long-term staffers, nearly all of whom were appointed by former President Barack Obama. Trump supporters say those staffers are the source of many media leaks intended to embarrass and weaken Trump. According to Conservative Review: Cohen-Watnick, 31, was originally brought on board by [Trump’s first] NSC chief Gen. Michael Flynn … McMaster has, in the past, attempted to rid the council of Cohen-Watnick, but was overruled by President Trump, Steve Bannon, and Jared Kushner. He has been described as an “Iran hawk” who wanted to revamp counter-Iran efforts in the Middle East, and sought to reform the intelligence community to rein in the “deep state” of unaccountable bureaucrats with rogue agendas. Cohen-Watnick is the latest Trump loyalist to be fired by Gen. McMaster, whose security council continues to be overwhelmingly staffed with Obama holdovers (almost all of whom have retained their positions). McMaster has opposed many of Trump’s national security reforms. For example, McMaster has opposed Trump’s policy of emphasizing the ties between Islam’s violent scriptures and the Islamic terrorism or jihad. The reformers, including Cohen-Watnick and also-fired Middle East director Derek Harvey, have made little headway in clearing out Obama’s deputies at the NSC since the firing of Trump’s first NSC director, Mike Flynn. Read it all here. |
Phan Loc Bayou Lucerne (detail) © Cay Sehnert 2005 All Rights Reserved PEOPLE WILL NOT give it credence that the best-selling author of True Grit and four lesser-known books would go off and leave the business for good, that he would abandon his readership to avenge some part of his blood, but that is what’s happened. It has been twenty years since the author going by the name of Charles Portis published his last book. Of course, I’m mimicking Mattie Ross in the opening lines of the famous 1968 western, grafting the heroine’s words about avenging her father’s death onto my own, but the Portis write-up is itself a genre full of grafts and repetitions: he’s a “writer’s writer,” a reclusive “cult novelist” with an “oddball” cast of characters running the gamut from outlaws, shit-kickers, and wizards, to loners, rejects, geezers, and misfits, not least of which is “the world’s smallest perfect man” (a midget!), but also not forgetting the fortune-telling Joann, a “college-educated chicken.” In short, a lot that signifies a terrific “quirkiness” on the part of both author and reviewer. More erudite folk have compared him to Twain and O’Connor, to Gogol and Chekhov (for who could deny that in a swamp somewhere in America’s south is a portal to Russia?). And it’s not a bad question: how to prove allegiance to Portis while shrinking the sum of his parts into a single essay. Thankfully, it’s been done, by Ron Rosenbaum, Roy Blount Jr., Donna Tartt, and Ed Park, among others. What has also been done, what’s almost frightening, is that since the Coen Brothers remade True Grit, we seem to be living in a post-Portis society. If Ron Rosenbaum, while rejecting out-of-hand any genius in the popular Grit, was responsible for getting Norwood (1966), Dog of the South (1979), Masters of Atlantis (1985), and Gringos (1991) back into print, then the Coens are responsible for returning the author to 1969, where he stands camera left, just behind the figure playing the one-eyed marshal, Rooster Cogburn. It’s been suggested that Portis is or ought to be ashamed to have written True Grit, and maybe he is, but he didn’t write it, actually, not quite. He channeled an unmarried septuagenarian named Mattie Ross who reaches into her memory and conjures a vision of herself at fourteen, of the winter of 1873 when The Coward Tom Chaney murdered her father and stole his ponies and she tumbled into a snake pit and lost an arm, and she writes this “true account,” which, in pioneer days and after, was well-trod terrain, a known genre. And how might this character imagine such a tale ought to sound? Probably it would read something like The Expedition of the Donner Party and its Tragic Fate by Eliza Poor Donner Houghton (who was four at the time of the infamous ordeal). Coincidentally, as Overlook Press releases a new edition of True Grit, this month marks the centennial anniversary of Eliza’s foreword to her account, in which she asks, Who better than survivors knew the heart-rending circumstances of life and death in those mountain camps? Yet who can wonder that tenderest recollections and keenest heartaches […] left opportunities for false and sensational details to be spread by morbid collectors of food for excitable brains, and for prolific historians who too readily accepted exaggerated and unauthentic versions as true statements? […] Who can wonder that I then resolved that, “When I grow to be a woman I shall tell the story of my party so clearly that no one can doubt its truth”? Eliza P. Donner Houghton Los Angeles, California, September, 1911. Thus, Mattie Ross’s incongruous ranging between bitter defense — “People do not give it credence […] although I will say that it did not happen everyday” — and pure, saccharine, bad writing: Little did Papa realize that morning that he was never to see or hold us again, nor would he ever again harken to the meadowlarks of Yell County trilling a joyous anthem to spring. True Grit is marketed as a revenge tale, and it is, but the narrator’s revenge is more immediately directed not at the man who killed her father but at one Lucille Biggers Langford, who makes false statements “in her Yell County Yesterdays” about Mattie’s father. Mattie, settling a score with Lucillle, is compelled to wrestle her “account” away from the town historian / gossip columnist, peppering her narrative with scare quotes — “papa was not wounded in that ‘scrap.”‘ These little scraps are culled, one can only guess, from Ms. Langford’s Yesterdays. “I think I am in a position,” Mattie insists, “to know the facts.” More than gold pieces and ponies, stolen stories are what’s at stake here. As one Amazon reviewer of Eliza Donner’s Expedition frames the problem: “Given her tender age, most of the information […] is based upon the recollections of other survivors, including those of her older sisters,” and the reviewer’s main beef with her account is that it “seems to be subjectively sanitized.” In other words, edited heavily for content. Not to mention that if you have to call a thing “True” it’s probably not. So even as the jacket copy tells us that True Grit is “eccentric, cool, straight, and unflinching, like Mattie herself,” at some point we must concede to the fact that her narrative is so unreliable it’s not even funny. And I mean that literally. Like the one-eyed Rooster Cogburn playing shoot-the-biscuit-in-the-air, the straighter “Mattie Ross from Near Dardanelle” attempts to shoot, the more she misses. And the more inaccessible her character becomes. And the more obscure, in every sense, Portis remains. Mattie’s tragic flaw is that she’s presumed to be able to tell her own harrowing tale, and with one hand, no less. To borrow a phrase elsewhere from Portis, Mattie’s account is “swollen with pride, all bloated up like a dog’s tick with blood.” (This is a character in Gringos reminding a hippie of the story of Nebuchadnezzar.) But that’s the biggest gag in any Portis novel: someone attempting to write a book, or solve some puzzle, or even try to know anything in general. Surely, there is no finer example than the following scene from Dog of the South, in which Dr. Reo Symes (a traveling salesman and former medical practitioner) expresses to Ray Midge his “great regret” that he never met John Selmer Dix, M.A., author of With Wings As Eagles — the “greatest writer who ever lived,” the one who, in Symes’s estimation, “puts Shakespeare in the shithouse”: “He died broke in a railroad hotel in Tulsa. The last thing he saw from his window is anybody’s guess. They never found his trunk, you know. He had a big tin trunk that was all bound up with wires and ropes and belts and straps, and he took it with him everywhere. They never found it. Nobody knows what happened to it. Nobody even knows what was in the trunk.” “Well, his clothes, don’t you think?” “No, he didn’t have any clothes to speak of. No change of clothes. His famous slippers, of course.” “His correspondence maybe.” “He burned all letters unread. I don’t want to hear any more of your guesses. Do you think you’re going to hit on the answer right off? Smarter people than you have been studying this problem for years.” Words that are not lost on me as I attempt to understand, with the few resources available, Charles Portis the person. Words not lost as I sit down to write anything, but especially this — an attempt to peer at a brilliant, funny, but altogether unknown-to-the-public author. As I wonder what he sees from his Arkansas window at night before bed, whether he uses slippers, and, if so, to whom this footwear would be famous. What he might and might not care to read, if he were to read this. “Writing is hard,” says Jimmy Burns, narrator of Gringos, “it’s a form of punishment in school, and rightly so — and I stood paralyzed before all the ways this simple message might be put.” Burns’s task is to ghostwrite a last will and testament, which his friend, Alma Kobold, will then sign. Mine is this: however wrong in my guesses, to give readers every assurance that True Grit is yet not apocryphal; that that experiment in ventriloquism, Mattie’s less-than-forthright account, is an integral part of Portis’s five books; that, all told, they comprise a single, complete work — call it a Pentateuch — not culminating in Gringos, his last novel chronologically, but going on forever, like an unfilmable (unless by Charlie Kaufman) Möbius strip. Or a song so incredibly sad, and so long, that you just want to die laughing. ¤ It begins and ends with Norwood. Published in 1966, two years before True Grit, it’s a novel about a guitar-playing grease monkey, a Lefty Frizzell fan and Louisiana Hayride hopeful (in certain locution, a “bumpkin”), who returns from service to Ralph, Texas, on a “hardship discharge” to care for his slow-witted sister — “in many ways, she was like a great big baby” — after their father dies. But let me back up here just a bit. That same year, Portis wrote a colorful, in-depth report on “The New Sound from Nashville” for the Saturday Evening Post, where serialized versions of Norwood and True Grit would later appear. It’s a nice supplement to the novels, and, given the “very active jukeboxes and shaky tables” he describes, you get the feeling this isn’t a piece anybody had to twist Portis’s arm to write: On Saturday nights, performers on the Grand Ole Opry step out the stage door and cross an alley and go in the back door of Tootsies to get aholt of themselves between sets with some refreshing suds. Songwriters — “cleffers,” as the trade mags say — sit around and chat and wait for artistic revelations. Deals are closed here. New, strange guitar licks are conceived. But be careful forming quick opinions, he suggests, as this is “the milieu of commercial country music, the Southern honky-tonk. Sometimes it’s called ‘hillbilly music,’ which is only half-accurate because the southern lowlanders have contributed just as much as the hill folks.” Portis also reveals that not even ten percent of the audience is from anywhere near Nashville, Tennessee. “Middle-class Nashvillians,” he writes, “anxious lest they be mistaken for rubes, are quick to inform the visitor that they have never attended the show. It is not for them, this hoe-down.” Half exposé, half-hoe-down celebration, this article appeared in The Post not so long after Portis left The Herald Tribune, where he had covered the Civil Rights Movement and worked beside the slick New York, New Journalists Tom Wolfe and Jimmy Breslin (though in a rare, candid, and fairly rambling 1991 interview with Roy Reed, also of the Trib, Portis says he only met Breslin once, and Reed says he called Breslin out on his methods, which were confabulatory, or, in other words, the stuff of New Journalism and fiction). So the ex-reporter from Arkansas likely has a clear sense of social justice, but also a personal connection to characters viewed by much of the reading world — then, and now — as backwoods or backwater. That is, as certifiably Other. That sympathy is plain by the end of “The New Sound”; after tallying up the numbers of those recently hit with “disaster and sudden death” — Hank Williams, Johnny Horton, Patsy Cline, Hawkshaw Hawkins, Cowboy Copas, Jack Anglin, Texas Ruby, and Gentleman Jim Reeves — Portis concludes: It’s not an easy life at all. There’s fame in it, of a sort, and money, and that keeps a lot of them going. But there’s some deeper feeling too that keeps them out on the road, with a night here, and a night there, and a long drive in between, singing their songs, some trash, some gold, about hearts and wrecks and teardrops. They can’t talk about those things, so they sing them. As I said, one of the great supplementary materials of the Portis Pentateuch, and I recommend locating an original copy, to see it, as your scholar of archaeology would say, in situ. ¤ In Odessa, Ukraine (or is it Texas?), there’s a saying that goes, “There is a little joke in every joke,” and this is true for Portis. Though his novels contain many gags, they trade in matters dead serious — one reason I dare any book reviewer to holler “shit-kicker” at Norwood Pratt and keep moving. Norwood is often summarized as a story about a big dumb ex-Marine who sets off for the Big Apple with a guitar on his back to retrieve seventy dollars from another Marine, but that’s a ruse. The eponymous character wants to flee his home in Ralph, Texas, because his sister no longer needs him. After urging Vernell to take a waitressing job, even instructing her in the simplicity of taking orders — “He may want some tea, too. All right, put a big T under the number two” — we learn that the gig “worked out too well. Money and position went to Vernell’s head.” First, Vernell brings home “choice downtown gossip” and makes “familiar references to undertakers and Ford dealers,” and the next thing you know, “with absolutely no warning,” she marries “a disabled veteran named Bill Bird” — an “older man” who has “drifted into Ralph for no very clear reason after being discharged from the VA hospital in Dallas.” She takes to Bill for his “thoughtful air and his scholarship,” and so begins Portis’s preoccupation with the Nebuchadnezzar type, or with the hilarious effects, unobserved by the braggart, of having the gall to presume self-possession. Bill Bird tapped the newspaper with his pipe. “I was reading an interesting little piece there in the Grit. A retired high school band director in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, has taught his fox terrier to play ‘Springtime in the Rockies’ on the mouth harp. He holds it on with a little wire collar device. Like this.” “Well, I’ll be,” said Vernell. “A dog playing songs. I’d like to see that. I bet that’s cute.” “That wasn’t what I meant,” said Bill Bird. “I mean I suppose it is cute, but it’s more than that. It goes to show that animals are a lot smarter than people think. I honestly believe that one day we may be able to talk to them. By that I mean communicate in some fashion. There’s a lot of interesting research going on in that field.” “What else can he sing, that dog?” “Well, it doesn’t say. It just says he is limited to a few simple melodies because of his small lungs. Now he doesn’t sing, Vernell. He plays these songs on a mouth organ. A harmonica. His name is Tommy.” “I’d like to hear that scamp play. They ought to put him on television sometime.” Bill Bird hummed the opening of “Springtime in the Rockies” and thought about it for a minute. “That’s not exactly a simple tune, you know. I think it represents a pretty amazing range for a dog.” “You must know something about every single subject in the world, Bill. Somebody could just sit here and write a book just listening to you.” “Oh I don’t know about that, Vernell. I will admit this: I have always been curious about things. The world about me. Like most of your scientists, I am interested in the why of things, and not just the what. Sometimes I think I might have been happier if I didn’t have such a searching mind.” Little doubt, it seems, that the reader of Norwood knows this person. Or is this person, and doesn’t know it, but can nevertheless plainly see why Norwood needs to get the hell out of Ralph. But that’s not the inciting moment. In fact, Norwood Pratt makes no move, ever, unless something gets put into writing. After Vernell learns all-too-well to write up orders, after Bill Bird “filled up the cabinet with dozens of little bottles with typing on them, crowding Norwood’s shaving gear out and onto the windowsill,” Norwood leaves the house to watch the girls at the skating rink where he meets a man who hands him a brochure: a “non-cancellable guaranteed renewable” policy. The insurance salesman is also “in mobile homes and coin-operated machines.” And more importantly, for someone who wants to recover 70 bucks, the stranger runs “a debt-collection agency in Texarkana.” All of which falls on deaf ears until the man tells Norwood his name: “You’re not Grady Fring the Kredit King?” “I am indeed.” “No reasonable offer refused.” “The very same.” “You can’t convince Grady your credit is bad.” “Right again.” And here Grady has him. Norwood has seen the advertising copy on the wall — knows it by heart! — and it’s all the credit Fring needs to get him to drive two stolen cars across the country. Ever after, the “big dumb peckerwood sumbitch,” as one of Norwood’s disgruntled traveling companions will call him, is in tension with the con artist, the smooth-talking know-it-all — the writer. Norwood opens with the young Marine receiving his walking papers, an act that involves a string of professionals working something out: When the question of “What’s going to happen to Vernell?” is posed to Brother Humphries, the chaplain replies with “a thoughtful, ‘I don’t know. I’m trying to work something out.'” And then it isn’t until Brother Humphries talks to “a man in Texarkana who worked something out with the Red Cross man at Camp Pendleton” who “worked it out with the major who handled hardship discharges” that Norwood Pratt is free to go. Portis, too — once he’s worked out a few things. As the dog playing “Springtime in the Rockies” on the mouth harp will tell you, it’s not exactly a simple tune. ¤ The last public sighting of Charles Portis was at the Oxford American Gala in Spring 2010, receiving an award in a tuxedo one minute, and heading for his pickup truck in a windbreaker and blue jeans shortly after. But if you want to see Portis as a kid, or a part of him, “Combinations of Jacksons,” published in The Atlantic in 1999, is required reading. In this brief memoir (or so-called — we’ll just have to trust him), Portis tells of the “underwater breathing contortions” he would perform as a child in Smackover Creek, in order to give his imagined “pursuing enemies the slip”: The trick looked simple enough in the movie serials, which pulled me along from one Saturday to the next with such chapter titles as “Fangs of Doom!” and “In the Scorpion’s Lair!” First you cut a reed. You put one end of the reed in your mouth and lay face up, very still, on the bottom of a shallow stream. The other end was projected above the surface of the stream, and through this hollow shaft, as you lay buried alive in water, you breathed. He tells of the need to “expose a small but conspicuous hand above the surface of the water to keep [the bamboo tube] upright.” Which is very cute — I can see it now — like a terrier behind a harmonica. But of deeper significance, perhaps, is the glimpse Portis offers of his real family members — mostly the men, the Jacksons, but I’m more interested in the women, about whom, even in this great age of information, we know precious little. Of his usually “placid” mother, Portis writes, “In any kind of refined-foot contest, she said, she would pit her Waddell-Fielding-Arkansas feet against all comers with Portis-Poole-Alabama feet.” Hers were proud feet, then — better feet, perhaps, than Portis’s father’s. And then there’s his sister, who, when Portis was “younger and in her keeping,” would take him “against his will” to certain films he had no care for. After delighting in the dual nature of the phrase, “picture show” — “The tale unfolding on the screen was a picture show, and the theater building itself was also a picture show. El Dorado had four” — Portis complains of being dragged to “the quiet Rialto, where an attentive and well-mannered audience remained seated: In these stories there would be some strange men scheming against each other and beating each other’s brains out to see who got to marry Bette Davis, or it might be Joan Crawford. The winning suitor would get to spend every minute of the rest of his life in the company of a harridan. I was soon asleep. Of the more run-down venues he preferred, he writes: No rats, though, in disgusting numbers, pattering about underfoot at the Star, as was widely believed. The story was kept alive by my fastidious older sister (Star = rats at play) and others like her who had never set foot in the place. So. Another storyteller in the family. But the pictures the young Portis was drawn to, what was “much on [his] mind in those days,” were the kinds found in “the pulp pages of ‘funny books,’ known as comic books in other parts of the country.” He writes, Both names were misleading for the kind I liked, the ones featuring costumed vigilantes […]. Under any name the books were quite a bargain early on, at sixty-four pages in color for a dime. Or a kind of color. The palette was limited; Superman had blue hair. This passage recalls a bizarre scene toward the end of Norwood, when Norwood and his new sweetheart Rita Lee are waiting for a bus to Memphis. As Edmund Ratner, midget and ex-circus freak, writes letters “on some thick blue notepaper,” Rita and Norwood take turns reading “confession magazines and comic books”: She read about a miser duck called Uncle Scrooge, and his young duck nephews, whose adventures took place in a city where all the bystanders, the figures on the street, were anthropoid dogs walking erect. Norwood read about Superman… Did you ever see that dude on television? he said. Rita looked up with annoyance from her duck book. “Who?” “Superman.” “Yeah, and I know what you’re going to say, he killed himself, the one that played Superman.” “It looks all right when you’re reading it. I didn’t believe it on television.” “You’re not supposed to really believe it.” “You’re supposed to believe it a little bit. I didn’t believe none of it.” Here it is difficult to tell whether Norwood is responding to George Reeves’s suicide — the bizarre and much-debated circumstances surrounding his death — or to Reeves’s acting skills. Or perhaps he is simply commenting on books, in general, being better as books. Or none of the above. Later, on the bus, Rita says, “What we ought to do is get us some Western outfits that would be just alike except mine would be for a girl. You see, they would match.” Inexplicably, this seems to upset Norwood, and we’re told: “That night a suicidal owl flew into the windshield but didn’t break it and later they saw a house or a barn burning in an open field. No one seemed to be around to put it out.” What is Portis working out? I don’t know. Or maybe I have an idea, but can’t say. In the same way Norwood “doesn’t know” when Rita asks him what his “singing style is like.” “Yes you do,” she says. “Who do you sing like? “Have you ever heard Lefty Frizzell sing ‘I Love You a Thousand Ways’?” “No,” she said, “I’ve never even heard of Lefty Frizzell.” “I don’t guess I can explain it then,” he says. So they turn their attention to a scar on the back of Norwood’s neck, from having fallen off a water truck in North Korea. In “Combinations of Jacksons,” Portis describes the utter failure and “childishness” of his “underwater breathing experiments”: “As I lay there more or less supine on the creekbed,” he writes, “struggling to breathe and to hold my upper body down, then my telltale feet would rise. Feet unfettered float, for all their bones, and when toes break the surface and bob about, they will catch the eye of the dullest observer.” Which makes a dull observer wonder: were these feet more Portis, or more Waddell-Fielding? ¤ As Mattie Ross says at the end of Grit: “People like to talk.” Given this, it makes both perfect sense and none at all that we know virtually nothing about Charles Portis. We know he was born in El Dorado, Arkansas, in 1933 three days after Christmas. We know his parents were Alice Waddell and Samuel Palmer Portis, that there were three other children, and that a few years before graduating from the University of Arkansas at Fayetteville with a degree in journalism, he served in the Korean War. Glaringly absent from this outline, however, is whether the author himself has ever married or had any children of his own. One is left to assume that he has not. Baird Shuman nearly broaches the issue in the anthology Great American Writers: Twentieth Century, saying, “It is surely significant that each of Portis’s novels explores in some respect the nature of marriage and committed relationships.” But Shuman leaves it at that. Perhaps he sensed what the presumably unmarried septuagenarian might say: “It is nobody’s business if I am married or not married. I care nothing for what they say. I would marry an ugly baboon if I wanted to.” Mattie’s words, but the narrator of True Grit has something here: it’s nobody’s business. But even if Portis has, like John Selmer Dix, burned all of his correspondence, he has left the gossipers one letter, one that seems to have gone unread. After the title page of Norwood is a page bearing the smallest of dedications: “For A.” It’s a mystery that begs the question: for whom was Charles Portis writing? Who was or is his ideal reader? Perhaps “A” stands for “Author” (after all, he’s a writer’s writer), or “Arkansas,” or for an even wider base than that: maybe “A” stands for “All” who care to read him. In some ways I think each of these is true, but, then again, not entirely… In that rare, lengthy, and oft-quoted interview to which Portis relented in 1991, he says that the inspiration for True Grit, his second novel, came from working in Fayetteville at the Northwest Arkansas Times. He says, “I edited the country correspondence from these lady stringers,” — a designation you will find nowhere but in connection with Portis’s name all over the web — women whose handwriting was good and clear. Much better than mine. Their writing, too, for that matter. From those who weren’t self-conscious about it. Those who hadn’t taken some writing course. My job was to edit out all the life and charm from these homely reports. Some fine old country expression, or a nice turn of phrase — out they went. We probably thought we were doing the readers a favor. Certainly this accounts for Portis’s sensitivity to “colorful” women, and lends us a modicum of insight into the question of why he would attempt such an experiment — to reach across time and gender, to step outside of his own age and mental and physical experience, and tell the story of one lonely Other. But it doesn’t fully explain who or what he’s after in the four other novels that grapple with the same themes. Certainly it doesn’t explain who pursues him. In the same interview, Roy Reed asks Portis about his family (towards the end, as if Reed knows better): “There are three of you boys and one girl, right?” “Yes,” Portis says. “My sister was the oldest. I was two years younger. She died in 1958.” Her name was “Alice Kate,” he says, “which she didn’t like. She preferred ‘Aleece,’ spelled A-L-I-E-C-E. But I think that was partly to prevent confusion with my mother, who was also Alice.” Reed then asks, “She died of what?” and Portis responds, “A cerebral hemorrhage. She was just twenty-eight. Married and with two small sons.” Portis then says that their father “never really got over it. She was his favorite. She had a very quick intelligence.” And the matter is dropped. Just knowing what we know of people, we have to wonder what impact this had on the 26-year-old man. Especially given the time. Aliece Portis, the one who used to drag her little brother (who was not so far behind her in age) to the picture show, who invented zany stories about the Star Theater and spread them around town, died the year Portis graduated from college – a major event she may or may not have been there to witness — and only a few years after he returned from war. Portis came from “a family of talkers,” he says (i.e., not writers), but earned himself a degree in journalism, or some wobbly “position to know the facts.” Which might — and this is pure conjecture — promote a sense of guilt. Whether it’s the guilt of the living, or of being a writer, or of any kind of success at all, a certain anxiety pervades his novels. Nevertheless, whenever Portis talks, whatever he says, it can’t be just one quirky man alone in a vacuum; his is a family grammar. His influence, necessarily, is what is familiar, what is known. As well as what, after a certain point, cannot ever be known. ¤ So Portis eludes us. If he is oddly preoccupied with identity, with secret societies and false information, Masters of Atlantis is where it all comes to a cone-shaped head. Ron Rosenbaum covered the book fairly extensively in “Our Least Known Great Writer” in Esquire, but the first scene of this over-the-top satire bears repeating: [Lamar Jimmerson] was walking about Chaumont one night with his hands in his pockets when he was approached by a dark bowlegged man who offered to trade a small book for two packages of Old Gold cigarettes. The book had to do with the interpretation of dreams. Corporal Jimmerson did not smoke, nor did he have any interest in such a book, but he felt sorry for the ragged fellow and so treated him to a good supper at the Hotel Davos. The man wept, overcome with gratitude. He said his name was Nick and that he was an Albanian refugee from Turkey. After supper he revealed that his real name was Mike and that he was actually a Greek from Alexandria, Egypt. The dream book was worthless, he said, full of extravagant lies, and he apologized for imposing in such a way on the young soldier. […] Perhaps he could repay the kindness in another way. He had another book. This one, the Codex Pappus, contained the secret wisdom of Atlantis. He could not let the book out of his hands, but, as an Adept in the Gnomon Society, he was permitted to show it to outsiders or “Perfect Strangers,” who gave some promise of becoming Gnomons. Lamar, who was himself an Entered Apprentice in the Blue Lodge of the Freemasons, expressed keen interest. It was a little gray book, or booklet, hand lettered in Greek. There were several pages given over to curious diagrams and geometric figures, mostly cones and triangles. Mike explained that this was not, of course, the original script. And the Gnomons, for all their conical headgear and secret handshakes, contra their name, prove to know nothing, to be masters of little, to possess no usable secrets, no wisdom. Much like Portis’s books. Or so he implies. In Dog of the South, we see the same preoccupation with pseudonyms played out over a series of Nabokovian or Quilty-like moves. Guy Dupree has taken Ray Midge’s Ford Torino and his wife Norma — along with his credit card; Dupree, who once worked on the same copy desk at the same paper as Midge, thoroughly compromises the protagonist’s credibility as he heads for Mexico, leaving in his wake a trail of hotel receipts and threatening letters to the president signed “Think Again” and “Hoecake Scarfer” and “JoJo the Dog-Faced Boy.” Even still, Midge can’t help but admit that the man behind the names “had once been a funny fellow”: Dupree could always make me laugh when he did a thing called The Electric Man. As The Electric Man or The Mud Man he could make anyone laugh. And sometimes he would go out one door and come in at another one, as though he had just arrived, having moved very quickly in concealment between the two points. It wasn’t so funny the first time — but he would keep doing it! This funny man, you’ll note, is funny in the way Portis is funny, performing the switcheroo, the gag of “this or that” — the doppelganger writer — the impossibility of being either an absolute villain or hero. It isn’t funny in itself, but he keeps doing it! Kind of like the prolonged gags in Masters, kind of like Mattie Ross’s account and that unbelievably stilted voice. And like Norwood Pratt, Ray Midge follows the writing. In the end, when Norma becomes “restless again,” he makes no attempts to follow; no credit card receipts inscribe his course. Such are the Portis character’s walking papers. ¤ Is Charles Portis ashamed to have written True Grit? The real question is: should we cut off an author’s limb to spite his body? If there is any shame here, it’s that so many have failed to see the work in context. Portis may be speaking to this in a short story he wrote for The Atlantic in 1996 titled “I Don’t Talk Service No More.” In it, another of his veterans tells us “you can get into the library at night easy enough” and “make all the long-distance calls you want to if you have the keys, and smoke all the cigarettes you want to, as long as you open a window.” He’s in a psych ward making calls, talking service to anyone who’ll listen, and, except for the window, every wall is padded with a sad, familiar thing: “three walls of paperback Westerns,” he says. Neap of the Fox Company Raid is on the other line: Neap said, “I don’t talk service no more,” but he didn’t hang up on me. Sometimes they do […] I sit here in the dark at the library desk smoking my Camels and I think they sit in the dark too, on the edges of their beds with their bare feet on the floor. Sounds awful, but Portis writes, “It’s not so bad here if you have the keys. For a long time I didn’t have the keys.” All of which, for me, conjures the (near) impossibility of talking dogs — or of a kid hiding under the covers, wet from the swamp, holding a bamboo breathing tube. “Where are your slippers?” you want to ask him. “Did you brush your teeth?” But he doesn’t respond. Now he’s cradling a telephone, humming into the receiver, a little off key. I won’t give it away, but Gringos is where Portis works it all out. Or at least where you know that things are not so bad. Contact is made. When a normally tight-lipped UFO-chaser wants to tell Jimmy Burns about an intense alien encounter, Jimmy allows him that: he tells us, “You must let a haunted man make his report.” One reviewer has complained that the novel “goes out with a whimper,” and this is true. It ends with Jimmy remembering “My Darling Clementine.” You are lost and gone forever… We can’t talk about these things, so we sing them. |
Jordan must take immediate action to assist up to 12,000 refugees who have been denied entry to the country and are struggling to survive in desperate, freezing conditions in “no man’s land” on the Jordanian side of the border with Syria, said Amnesty International. Those stranded include pregnant women, young children, elderly people and people suffering from serious medical conditions. Testimony from Syrian refugees and international aid workers in Jordan collected during a recent research trip to the country, suggests that hundreds of refugees have been arriving on a daily basis in recent weeks but have been denied access to Jordan by the authorities. Analysis of satellite imagery also confirms that the number of refugees arriving at the border has increased in recent months. “As the conflict in Syria continues, it is critical that Jordan, and Syria’s other neighbouring countries, keep their borders open to those fleeing bloodshed or persecution. By denying sanctuary to civilians seeking safety on their soil, the Jordanian authorities are fuelling a humanitarian disaster on their doorstep,” said Sherif Elsayed-Ali, Head of Refugee and Migrants’ Rights at Amnesty International. “Thousands of people have risked their lives to make the arduous journey through war-torn Syria only to reach Jordan’s border and find themselves callously turned away and left in limbo a stone’s throw away from refuge.” By denying sanctuary to civilians seeking safety on their soil, the Jordanian authorities are fuelling a humanitarian disaster on their doorstep Sherif Elsayed-Ali, Head of Refugee and Migrants' Rights at Amnesty International Share this Twitter Facebook Email UNHCR announced on 8 December that the number of refugees on the border has risen sharply since the start of November, from 4,000 to 12,000 following the recent intensification of conflict in Syria. The authorities have given no official reason why they are refusing access to the refugees. Since 2011 Jordan has granted refuge to more than 632,000 Syrian refugees but its policy on allowing those fleeing the conflict has become increasingly restrictive. Jordan is one of five countries in the region hosting 95% of refugees from Syria and is struggling to cope with the added strain of this influx. Only 52% of Jordan’s humanitarian funding requirements for refugees have been met by international donors and the authorities are calling on the international community to substantially increase their commitments. In 2012, Jordan stepped up restrictions at both official and informal border crossings and since mid-2013 the majority of its borders have remained closed to most people seeking refuge from Syria, with a few exceptions for particularly vulnerable cases. In July 2014 Jordan further increased restrictions on Syrians trying to enter through its eastern border crossings. Since then, there is evidence of rising numbers of Syrians stranded at the border in “no man’s land” just north of the “berm”, which is a raised barrier of sand marking the Jordanian limit of the Jordan-Syria border near Rukban and Hadalat crossings. Some refugees are forced to wait for up to three months before being allowed to enter Jordan, while others are turned away. Some have chosen to return to Syria after spending several weeks waiting in dire conditions. Struggling to survive in dire conditions Since this build-up of refugees at the border zone began in July 2014, the authorities have restricted access to the area for international organizations. Evidence gathered by Amnesty International suggests that refugees waiting there are facing appalling conditions. During winter, temperatures in the desert border zone can plunge to freezing. Refugees stranded there are living in makeshift shelters with dwindling supplies and are bracing themselves for even more hardship as the coldest winter months approach. They have limited access to food, water, blankets and medical supplies provided by international aid agencies. Warde, a Syrian woman in her sixties, was only allowed into Jordan in July 2015 after one of the border guards eventually took pity on her. She had been stranded in no-man’s land for a month along with around 2,000 people. They relied on handouts from international aid agencies for food and non-food items, surviving on one meagre meal a day. “We stayed in the dirt…It was terrible… We made our own tents with our blankets – we would sew them together… as protection against the sun and the wind,” she said describing the dreadful conditions. “Some children and women died there while they were waiting and they were buried there. Others left to go back to Syria … When I told a [Jordanian] solider ‘I am an old woman and I’ll die here’ he said ‘there’s a shovel over there, we can dig your grave’.” When I told a [Jordanian] solider ‘I am an old woman and I’ll die here’ he said ‘there’s a shovel over there, we can dig your grave’ Warde, Syrian refugee stranded at Jordanian border Share this Twitter Facebook Email The rise in the influx of Syrians to Jordan’s borders in recent months is the result of an intensification of hostilities inside Syria combined with the fact that the two other countries neighbouring Syria who have received considerable numbers of refugees - Lebanon and Turkey - have also effectively closed their borders to Syria’s refugees. “It is clear that Jordan and other countries in the region are under incredible strain from the influx of refugees. However, the Jordanian authorities cannot watch as thousands of desperate refugees fight for their lives in the freezing cold with little access to food, clean water or warm clothing and shelter,” said Sherif Elsayed-Ali. The Jordanian authorities cannot watch as thousands of desperate refugees fight for their lives in the freezing cold with little access to food, clean water or warm clothing and shelter Sherif Elsayed-Ali Share this Twitter Facebook Email The Jordanian authorities must also lift restrictions on international organizations seeking to provide assistance to refugees who are seeking to enter Jordan. There is no justification for leaving refugees stranded at the border for weeks or months. At present, Azraq refugee camp in east Jordan is not at full capacity and three other transit sites have space to host more refugees. Host communities in urban areas should also be supported to be able to receive refugees who want to live in urban areas. “The international community must also do much more to help support Jordan and share responsibility of tackling this crisis,” said Sherif Elsayed-Ali. It is urgent that the international community steps up its commitment both in terms of humanitarian and other financial assistance to Jordan and by resettling greater numbers of refugees from Syria. Satellite imagery evidence On 8 December 2015 Human Rights Watch released satellite imagery taken on 5 December showing more than 1,450 makeshift shelters on the Rukban border crossing. Amnesty International’s analysis of earlier satellite imagery of the Rukban border crossing shows 705 shelters on 24 September compared to 175 shelters shown in satellite imagery analysis carried out by Human Rights Watch of the same border crossing on 20 April 2015. Prior to this on 3 November 2014 the UN’s analysis of imagery showed 155 structures while in July 2014 it showed 90 shelters. Analysis of satellite images of Hadalat border crossing also shows an increase in number of shelters present. Images obtained by Amnesty International for 15 October show 92 shelters compared to 70 seen on satellite imagery analysed by the UN for 21 April. Satellite imagery of probable refugee shelters at the Hadalat border crossing, October 15, 2015 © CNES 2015, Distribution AIRBUS DS ( image corrected August 2016) The shelters are mainly made of blankets, tarpaulin and other materials. According to aid workers and refugees who have come through the border, each makeshift shelter holds six or more people, sometimes up to 20 people, including many children. Amnesty International believes that anyone from Syria seeking asylum should be considered to be in need of international protection due to the widespread human rights abuses being committed in the conflict, including war crimes and crimes against humanity. Closing the border to those in need of asylum is in violation of the principle of non-refoulement – the obligation not to return individuals to a situation where they would be at risk of persecution or international human rights abuses. Background: Tightened border controls Access through the official border crossing between the Jordanian city of Ramtha and Dera’a in Syria was restricted in 2012 blocking entry for certain categories of refugees, including Palestinians fleeing Syria, unaccompanied men who cannot prove family ties to Jordan, and people without identity documents. In mid-2013 the western and eastern border crossings were also essentially closed to Syrian refugees, with a few exceptions made for the war-wounded and most vulnerable, according to Jordan’s own criteria, some of whom are sent back to Syria following treatment, in contravention of international obligations. In May 2014 Jordan began stopping Syrians arriving at its international airport from entering unless they had a Jordanian residency permit or met a limited number of special exceptions. Since December 2014 the authorities have allowed some refugees who arrive at the border to travel to a transit camp in Ruweishid where they are screened by the authorities before eventually being transported to Azraq refugee camp. An estimated 40 people are allowed into Jordan per day. However higher numbers of Syrians are allowed in by the Jordanian authorities but do not pass Jordan’s opaque screening process and are then forcibly returned to Syria. Hundreds if not thousands are likely to have been returned this year alone. UNHCR figures show registered new arrivals of Syrians in Jordan have dropped significantly from 310,000 people in 2013 to 82,400 people in 2014 and just 25,532 as of October this year |
Being someone who’s reviewed a lot of games, I often take the time to address how much of an impact a game’s soundtrack has on the overall experience during my time with the game. When a game’s moments are either enhanced or highlighted by a musical composition, that’s when I know that it’s done its job. But sometimes, developers go above and beyond this and create ambient music that provide the color, tone, and the mood of each scene. If you’ve played Bioshock Infinite, you’ve probably heard of a haunting female voice that sings during the title screen and have probably heard a similar sounding woman in the Columbia Fair just before you obtain your first Vigor. That voice is none other than Jessy Carolina, a talented musician from New York. We got a chance to interview her recently and talked to her about her musical career and how she got involved with Bioshock Infinite. Tell us a little bit about the bands that you’re a part of. I play in two different bands. The first being Ommie Wise, was featured in the game performing an original song I wrote titled “Wild Prairie Rose”. We started playing together as Ommie Wise about two years ago working out songs that we’d individually written as solo performers and were performed as such. The three writers in the group include myself, my husband Mario J. Maggio, and Noah Harley. Although I’m not very into labeling what genre our songs and style fall into, I guess I’d have to say it’s closer to folk… weird folk. We released our first album on vinyl and CD with Wind Some Lose Some Records, based out of Copenhagen, Denmark a little while back and will be recording some new material this summer which may include a recording of “Wild Prairie Rose” which should be released in October 2013 if all goes as planned. The second band I perform with is Jessy Carolina & The Hot Mess. We’ve been together for a number of years and perform traditional jazz. It was because of this group that I was originally asked to perform “After You’ve Gone” for Bioshock Infinite. What made you interested in this style of music? When I began to actually listen and appreciate music, I listened to primitive American music and that’s what I wanted to play. I listened to recordings of Blind Willie Johnson, Memphis Minnie, Jelly Roll Morton, The Carter Family, The Carolina Tar Heels, Roscoe Holcomb, Elizabeth Cotton, Woody Guthrie, Bessie Smith, and many many others. I was fascinated by this music because it was good. It meant something, it was real. People who wrote the music cared about what they wrote, and people that performed it also cared for it. I didn’t want to hear popular music on the radio after I found good music to listen to. How long have the bands you’ve involved with been around? Ommie Wise has been together about two years and The Hot Mess has been around in different variations for a little over 4 years. Are you or any of your bandmates gamers? I guess you could say my husband Mario (Ommie Wise and Hot Mess) is a gamer. He finished playing Bioshock Infinite within a few days and really loved it. Had you heard of Bioshock prior to getting this gig? I hadn’t heard of Bioshock, but I hadn’t really heard about anything having to do with video games since The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time came out. I loved that game! How did you hear about this gig? Along the same lines, were you told what the recordings were going to be for? I was asked if I was interested in performing “After You’ve Gone” for a video game that was coming out, and I thought that sounded cool, so I did it. What songs did you perform in the game? I performed “After You’ve Gone”, CCR’s “Fortunate Son”, my original “Wild Prairie Rose”, and Mozart’s “Lacrimosa”. How much involvement did the developers have when recording the songs? Jim Bonney, who was heavily involved with music for the game, was at every recording session with me. He’d let me know what kind of characters would be performing the songs in the game and the story that was going on around them which really helped give me an idea of how to arrange and perform some of the songs. When I first heard “Wild Prairie Rose” at the beginning of Bioshock Infinite, I actually stood there for a good period of time listening to the song, not realizing that it was looping the whole time! I’ll admit: It’s probably one of my favorite songs in the game. Can you tell us what the inspiration was for the song? Well, thank you very much! I’m glad you liked it! I did my early growing up years in the Red River Valley in North Dakota. The song is about a songbird, the western meadowlark (state bird of ND) and a flower, the wild prairie rose (state flower of ND). I guess I was just missing the beauty of where I grew up and decided to write a song about it. The song involves the elopement of a bird and flower. The flower gradually dries out and dies as the bird abandons her to move onto another young flower to use. The story doesn’t mirror anyone in particular, but takes after the fashion of American murder ballads. When they asked you to sing Creedence Clearwater Revival’s “Fortunate Son” what kind of instruction did they give you? Were you told that they had other contemporary songs interpreted in the style of the period? (e.g. Girls Just Want To Have Fun by Cyndi Lauper, Everybody Wants To Rule The World by Tears for Fears to name a few) I didn’t receive any instruction on how to sing the song. When I went into the session they asked if I could belt it, in other words, sing it loud. I did a few takes like that in a style similar to the CCR version. Then I tried a few different styles on my own to see if that was something they might like just so they had some different options to choose from. They told me there was going to be fighting all around and that the character would be leading a revolt of some kind in a factory setting, and then the character would probably be shot. I think they might have tweaked that idea a little bit after choosing the gospel version of the song. I was really surprised to see that they chose that version and was really flattered that they picked something weird that I tried out. I didn’t really know anything about the other songs in the game until later. I came into the process just as they were finishing up the game and everything was kind of rushed. Were there any other songs you performed that didn’t make it in the final game? Sure, Ommie Wise hashed out a few different folk songs including Frankie and Johnny, but they ended up choosing “Wild Prairie Rose” which is an original of mine. I tried out a few different CCR songs and different vocal stylings for them. I like the version they picked. Have you had a lot of people coming up and saying that they found you through the game? There have been a few people that have written The Hot Mess because there seems to be some confusion about the band being in the video game on YouTube. The Hot Mess is not in the video game at all, just me and Ommie Wise. I’ve tried to keep up with writing everyone back to correct that, including the people that posted on YouTube. There have also been people that write Ommie Wise to figure out how to buy the music. I just try to keep up as best as I can and really appreciate the interest. 2K Games, the publishers of Bioshock Infinite, just today released the sales numbers for the game: 3.7 million copies sold since its launch! How do you feel about having your music being heard by so many people all over the world? It’s kind of nuts when I think about it, so I don’t really think about it. I haven’t been swarmed with people asking about it, so it doesn’t really affect me everyday. I think it’s pretty awesome for sure. I just hope that if people like it they’ll take the time to check out the other stuff we’ve done and support the music. Have you seen the final game, specifically, the portions where your music is played? What are your thoughts? I’ve seen my husband play portions of the final game, and I came away very impressed and humbled to have been able to participate in such a wonderful project. I’m very proud to have been involved and have my music in it. I would love to do something like that again. Did your husband talk to you about the story, the theme, and ending of Bioshock Infinite after he beat it? It was quite the hot topic for the past few weeks or so, given the way the story concluded. He finished the game and asked if I wanted to know what happened. I had tried to play the game but it was pretty hard being that I absolutely suck at video games, and expecting a baby it made me VERY nauseous. I’m pretty sure I threw up after the first ten minutes playing it. So, yeah, I asked him to tell me about it because it’s gonna be a while til I can try it again! I thought the story sounded really awesome and creative. The ending was something I didn’t expect at all, which is a good thing! I actually really do suck at video games, but if I was gonna try and play one, Bioshock Infinite would definitely be the one I would play and try to beat. It’s really incredible. Where can our interested readers see your band play? Jessy Carolina and The Hot Mess performs regularly around NYC, we’re also working on a few upcoming tours of the east coast for now. Ommie Wise can also be found in NYC and also abroad. Best bet is to friend us on Facebook and keep up to date that way. Many thanks to Jessy Carolina for spending some time with us for this interview. Make sure to check out both Ommie Wise and Jessy Carolina and The Hot Mess on their Facebook page and their site, linked below. 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WASHINGTON — Libertarian Party presidential candidate Gary Johnson said he can pull votes away from both the Democrat and Republican contenders in the election once more Americans realize that they agree with many of his views. “I’m trying to appeal to the majority of Americans whom I think are libertarian, it’s just that they don’t know it,” Johnson said on a CNN program broadcast Sunday. “And libertarian, with a broad brush stroke — fiscally conservative, socially-accepting liberal.” Johnson, whose party has never won more than 1 percent of the vote in a presidential election, has surfaced as a third option at a time that presumptive Republican nominee Donald Trump and Democratic front-runner Hillary Clinton have high unfavorability ratings in polls and have faced stiff opposition from within their own parties. A self-made millionaire, triathlete and former two-term Republican governor of New Mexico who climbed Mount Everest in 2005, Johnson, 63, secured the party’s nomination at its convention last week. William Weld, a former Republican governor from Massachusetts, is the Libertarian Party’s candidate for vice president. About half of Americans are declare themselves independents when they register to vote, Johnson said. “It’s about a 50-50” in terms of how ideologically different he is from either Clinton or Trump, he said. Johnson said his differences with the mainstream element within the Republican Party include his support for legalizing marijuana and ending “military interventions that, at the end of the day, make the world a less safe place.” He said, though, that the Libertarian Party is not isolationist and favors a bigger role for Congress in decision-making regarding defense. “Let’s use diplomacy to the hilt. Let’s involve Congress in declaration of war,” Johnson said. “Let’s involve Congress in how we move forward with regard to our military, something that they have completely abdicated to the executive and to the military.” Johnson cited a long list of objections to Trump’s positions, including the idea of building a wall along the U.S.-Mexico border, and description of Mexicans as murderers and rapists “when in fact they’re law-abiding citizens, more law-abiding than U.S. citizens.” While pointing out that he is “not advocating the legalization of any drugs outside of marijuana,” Johnson said the U.S. needs to change its approach and understand that 90 percent of the drug problem is related to prohibition, not drug use. Decriminalizing the use of other drugs would be a step in that direction, he said. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency LLC. |
A federal district court judge in Ohio has ordered Eric Chason and Kevin Bollaert, the founders of the “revenge porn” site You Got Posted, to pay a woman $385,000 for posting sexually explicit images of her on their website. The suit, filed by a “Jane Doe” plaintiff in May 2013, involved photos that were taken of the plaintiff when she was underage. After finding several sexually explicit images of herself as a minor on the site, which were distributed without her knowledge or consent, the plaintiff sued the site’s operators. The default judgment included a $150,000 award to the plaintiff for each of the two child pornography counts and $10,000 for the right of publicity count. It also included a $75,000 punitive damages award, a penalty that is typically used to deter others from engaging in similar conduct. The precedent set by this case could serve as a deterrent against other would-be child porn and revenge porn site operators. It could also enable other exploited individuals to similarly pursue child pornography and right of publicity claims in combination, as well as request the court to issue a punitive damages award. While money damages certainly do not make such plaintiffs “whole,” as the civil system is designed to do, they nevertheless provide a means of recourse when the criminal system does not provide for a just result. Marc Randazza, the plaintiff’s attorney in this case, who has referred to the defendants as "scumbags," commented: The message this $385,000 judgment sends to people who run revenge porn sites is unambiguous. These sites irreparably harm their victims, and often without any criminal action against them. In this case, a civil suit allowed our client to obtain justice against the people who exploited her. In a related legal action, on December 10, 2013, the California Attorney General’s Office has previously indicted and arrested Bollaert in connection with his involvement with ugotposted.com. Bollaert had been charged on criminal counts including identity theft, conspiracy, and extortion. California Attorney General Kamala Harris commented on the charges. This website published intimate photos of unsuspecting victims and turned their public humiliation and betrayal into a commodity with the potential to devastate lives. Online predators that profit from the extortion of private photos will be investigated and prosecuted for this reprehensible and illegal Internet activity. Hopefully the legal actions taken against these rogue site operators will make others think twice before starting websites dedicated to revenge or child pornography. |
Can pornography actually affect brain chemistry to cause a drug-like addiction? That's the warning in a high profile campaign currently running in the US. Writer David Sergeant talks about his own battle to give up the habit which he says has the potential to destroy normal sexual relationships. According to the popular theory of neuroplasticity the brain is able to form newer and quicker pathways to pleasure while watching porn. He says the pornography industry separates human beings from each other and also potentially supports sex trafficking. However, sexual psychophysiologist and neuroscientist Nicole Prause says that the idea that sex addiction is a scientific fact is being driven by religious and vested interests. She says the idea that porn causes physical addiction and a breakdown in the ability to enjoy real life sex has no scientific basis. However such theories suit the purposes of religious groups and those who offer expensive cures for the 'problem'. |
Monsignor Carlo Liberati, the Catholic archbishop of Pompeii. (catholicism.org) Because of their "stupidity," "pagan and atheist" ways, and "laws that go against God," Italy and all of Europe will be Muslim in about 10 years, said Monsignor Carlo Liberati, the Catholic archbishop emeritus of Pompeii. In a Q & A on Jan. 9 with the Italian Catholic journal La Fede Quotidiana, and translated in the Daily Mail and Express, the archbishop was asked if he was worried about terrorist attacks in Italy. He said, yes, but the real problem "is something else." "Italy and Europe live in a pagan and atheist way," he said, and "they make laws that go against God and follows practices that are proper to paganism." "All of this moral and religious decadence favors Islam," said the archbishop. "In 10 years we will all be Muslims because of our stupidity." Archbishop Liberati further said, "We have a weak Christian faith. the Church nowadays does not work well and seminaries are empty. Parishes are the only thing still standing. We need a true Christian life. All this paves the way to Islam. In addition to this, they [Muslims] have children and we do not. We are in full decline." "We help without delay those coming from outside and we forget many poor and old Italians who are eating from the trash," he said. "We need policies that take care of Italians first, our young people and the unemployed." "What is the point of so many migrants that, instead of expressing thanks for the food we give them, they just throw it away, and spend hours with their cell phones and even organize riots?" |
Please enable Javascript to watch this video EDMOND, Okla. — Flowers, candy, and public displays of affection. It’s supposed to be the most romantic day of the year. But Valentine’s Day can be hurtful for those without a special someone. At Edmond High School, there are no lonely hearts this year. “All the girls were surprised this morning,” Laura Pitcock said. According to KFOR, all 1076 female students were surprised with candy and cards. “He wanted to stay anonymous, but I have a feeling a good deed like this is going to get out,” Sarah Cameron said. Secrets are hard to keep, especially in high school. It didn't take long for the Bulldog student body to learn who was behind this random act of kindness. Dan Williams is the secret Romeo. “To know that someone cares about them, that the best feeling in the world I think.” Williams worked all summer to raise enough money for his Valentine’s Day surprise. His good deed is creating a tidal wave of love on campus. “Even if it’s just for a day, it really means a lot,” Molly Feigel said. |
As posted yesterday – the Copenhagen Suborbitals DIY spacesuit team will arrive here Monday with Cameron Smith and John Haslett and as always there are tonnes of to-do´s to be crossed. Cameron just told me that that he is still working at least 22 items before leaving to make it all work. I guess you don´t just bring a space suit on a plane, which are normally rigged up with racks, hoses, pipes and controls. All this has been modified to fit a small suitcase for easy travel and testing here in Copenhagen. Nice work! Did we miss something?. Image: Cameron Smith Did we miss something?. Image: Cameron Smith Personally I would just wear the suit all the way on the air-plane but I guess that would probably alarm certain others passengers and there is probably not enough ice in the liquid coolant container for crossing the Atlantic. Today I created the mounting device for installing the mock-up seat inside the Tycho Deep Space II boilerplate. This way we can easily pull the seat out for modifications and testing without a whole bunch of people inside the capsule goes crazy. Once Lamm applies his overlay, you can see a wall of emerald buildings rise above the park and abruptly flatten once it reaches Harlem. Image: Nickolay Lamm Mock-up seat inside Tycho Deep Space II boilerplate ready for action. Image: Kristian von Bengtson From Aug 19-28 there will be space suit testing and seating construction in my department of Copenhagen Suborbitals. This is what a crewed space program is all about! Ad Astra Kristian von Bengtson |
Mailing Standards of the United States Postal Service Domestic Mail Manual > 500 Additional Services > 508Recipient Services 508 Recipient Services Overview 1.0 Recipient Options 2.0 Conditions of Delivery 3.0 Customer Mail Receptacles 4.0 Post Office Box Service 5.0 Caller Service 6.0 General Delivery 7.0 Premium Forwarding Services 8.0 Firm Holdout 9.0 Pandering Advertisements 10.0 Sexually Oriented Advertisements Addressees may control delivery of their mail. Without a contrary order, the mail is delivered as addressed. Mail addressed to several persons may be delivered to any one of them. The addressee may refuse to accept a mailpiece when it is offered for delivery. After delivery, an addressee may mark a mailpiece “Refused” and return it within a reasonable time, if the piece or any attachment is not opened. Mail that may not be refused and returned unopened under this provision may be returned to the sender only if it is enclosed in a new envelope or wrapper with a correct address and new postage. The following may not be refused and returned postage-free after delivery: An addressee may request the postmaster, in writing, to withhold from delivery for a period not to exceed 2 years any foreign letter or printed matter with a specified name or address on the outside. If a person claiming to be the addressee of certain mail is unknown to the delivery employee, the mail may be withheld pending identification of the claimant. Generally, a returned mailpiece that was undeliverable-as-addressed or refused by the addressee may not be remailed unless it is placed in a new envelope or wrapper with a correct address and new postage. A returned shortpaid mailpiece can have the necessary additional postage affixed to the original piece and does not have to be placed in a new envelope or wrapper. The following conditions also apply to the delivery of Priority Mail Express, Registered Mail, Certified Mail, mail insured for more than $500.00, Adult Signature, or COD, as well as mail for which a return receipt is requested or the sender has specified restricted delivery. In additional to the standards described under 1.1.7, mail marked “Restricted Delivery” is delivered only to the addressee or to the person authorized in writing as the addressee’s agent (the USPS may require proof of identification from the addressee (or agent) to receive the mail, and under the following conditions: The carrier release endorsement “CARRIER—LEAVE IF NO RESPONSE” instructs carriers to leave the parcel if no one is available to accept the parcel or when the addressee has filed a written order to allow a carrier to leave the parcel. A parcel may be left in an unprotected location, such as a stairway or uncovered porch, only when it bears the “CARRIER—LEAVE IF NO RESPONSE” endorsement. The endorsement must appear directly to the left of the postage area (preferred) or directly below the return address as specified in 102.4.1 and 202.4.3. A carrier release endorsement may be used on only: For mail that is jointly addressed: Unless otherwise directed, an addressee’s mail may be delivered to an employee, to a competent member of the addressee’s family, or to any person authorized to represent the addressee. A person or several persons may designate another to receive their mail. A minor’s guardian may control delivery of mail addressed to the minor. If there is no guardian and the minor is unmarried, either parent may receive delivery of the minor’s mail. Mail may be delivered under the order of the guardian or conservator for a person legally declared incompetent. If there is no legal representative, the mail is delivered as addressed. Mail addressed to a deceased person may be received at the address of the deceased by anyone who would normally receive the addressee’s mail at that address. The mail may also be forwarded to a different address, such as that of an appointed executor or administrator, if an order of request is filed at the Post Office. All mail addressed to a governmental or nongovernmental organization or to an individual by name or title at the address of the organization is delivered to the organization, as is similarly addressed mail for former officials, employees, contractors, agents, etc. If disagreement arises where any such mail should be delivered, it must be delivered under the order of the organization’s president or equivalent official. Mail addressed to a governmental or nongovernmental official by title or by organization name, but not to the address of the organization, is delivered to the organization if the organization so directs. Mail addressed to a patient or inmate at an institution is delivered to the institution authorities. If the addressee is no longer at that address, the mail must be redirected to the current address, if known, or endorsed appropriately and returned by the institution to the Post Office. Mail addressed to a person at a hotel, school, or similar place is delivered to the hotel, school, etc. If the addressee is no longer at that address, the mail must be redirected to the current address, if known, or endorsed appropriately and returned by the institution to the Post Office. Mail addressed to a prisoner is subject to the mail security standards in the Administrative Support Manual. Registered Mail addressed to a person at a hotel or apartment house is delivered to the persons designated by the management of the hotel or apartment house in a written agreement with the USPS (Form 3801-A). If the sender restricts delivery of the Registered Mail, it may not be delivered to that designated person, unless the addressee authorized that person in writing to receive restricted-delivery mail. If persons make conflicting orders for delivery of the same mail, and they cannot agree among themselves who should receive the mail, the mail may be delivered to a named receiver or third party unanimously agreed to by the disputing parties. If the disputing parties are unable to select a receiver, they must furnish the postmaster all available evidence on which they rely to exercise control over the disputed mail. The USPS may hold or return mail pending resolution of the dispute. Mail is delivered under a court order issued for mail claimed by different persons. The procedures for establishing a commercial mail receiving agency (CMRA) are as follows: Procedures for delivery to a CMRA are as follows: In delivery of the mail to the CMRA, the addressee and the CMRA agree that: The procedures for an office business center (OBC) or part of its operation acting as a CMRA for postal purposes are as follows: City delivery is provided according to USPS policies and procedures, the characteristics of the area to be served, and the methods needed to provide adequate service. Requests or petitions to establish, change, or extend city delivery service must be made to the local postmaster. Changes in the type of delivery authorized for a delivery point may be considered if service by existing methods imposes an extreme physical hardship on the customer. Customers must provide authorized mail receptacles or door slots, except for mail receptacles authorized by the USPS to be owned and maintained by the USPS. The purchase, installation, maintenance, and replacement of mail receptacles used by customers for mail delivery are not the responsibility of the USPS. However, the USPS may authorize neighborhood delivery and collection boxes and parcel lockers to be purchased, installed, maintained, or replaced by the USPS. Mail receptacles or door slots are not required at businesses and offices that are open and have someone on hand to receive the mail when the carrier calls. If a lock is used on a mail receptacle, the receptacle must have a slot large enough to accommodate the normal daily mail volume. A door slot for mail must meet specific criteria: Apartment house mail receptacles must be approved by the USPS. The purchase, installation, maintenance, and replacement of mail receptacles, boxes, or parcel lockers are not the responsibility of the USPS except for neighborhood delivery and collection boxes and parcel lockers authorized by the USPS to be owned and maintained by the USPS. When apartment buildings are substantially renovated or remodeled to provide additional apartments, or a material change is made in the location of boxes, obsolete receptacles must be replaced by currently approved receptacles. Rural stations and branches are established, and rural delivery is provided, according to USPS policies and procedures, the characteristics of the area to be served, and the methods needed to provide adequate service. Requests or petitions to establish, change, or extend rural delivery service, signed by the heads of families wanting this service, must be given to the postmaster of the Post Office from which delivery service is desired, or from which the route operates, as applicable. On the customer’s written request, the postmaster may approve an exception to the currently authorized method of delivery, if the type of rural delivery authorized imposes an extreme physical hardship. An ordinary parcel too large to fit into a customer’s mailbox is not left unless the customer has filed a written order with the postmaster relieving the USPS and carriers of all responsibility in case of loss or depredation of any such parcel left outside the box. Mail is delivered to a customer’s mailbox if a quarantined disease exists, provided that delivery can be made without exposure to contagion. No mail is collected from such box while the quarantine is in force. Generally, mailable matter is collected from a rural mailbox if postage is fully prepaid or money equal to the required postage is left in the mailbox. Money in a rural box is left at the customer’s risk. When postage or money is insufficient to cover postage, the mail is not collected, or if the sender cannot be identified, the mail is treated as unpaid mail. Mailable matter not bearing postage found in, placed on, attached to, supported by, or hanging from rural boxes is handled under the applicable standards. Highway contract routes are established, and delivery service on such routes is provided, according to USPS policies and procedures, the characteristics of the area to be served, and the methods needed to provide adequate service. Requests or petitions for new routes, or for extensions of service or changes in the line of travel or schedule of highway contract service, must be directed to the USPS distribution networks office with supervision over the transportation of mail in the area involved. An ordinary parcel too large to fit into a customer’s mailbox is not left unless the customer has filed a written order with the postmaster relieving the USPS and carriers of all responsibility in case of loss or depredation of any such parcel left outside the box. Generally, mailable matter is collected from a mailbox if postage is fully prepaid or money equal to the required postage is left in the mailbox. Money in a mailbox is left at the customer’s risk. When postage or money is insufficient to cover postage, the mail is not collected, or if the sender cannot be identified, the mail is treated as unpaid mail. Mailable matter not bearing postage found in, placed on, attached to, supported by, or hanging from boxes is handled under the applicable standards. Curbside mailboxes meeting the applicable standards in 3.0 must be placed where they protect the mail and can be conveniently served by carriers without leaving their vehicles. These boxes must be on the right side of the road in the direction of travel when required by traffic conditions or when driving to the left to reach the boxes would violate traffic laws by the carrier. Except as excluded by 3.1.2, every letterbox or other receptacle intended or used for the receipt or delivery of mail on any city delivery route, rural delivery route, highway contract route, or other mail route is designated an authorized depository for mail within the meaning of 18 USC 1702, 1705, 1708, and 1725. Door slots and nonlockable bins or troughs used with apartment house mailboxes are not letterboxes within the meaning of 18 USC 1725 and are not private mail receptacles for the standards for mailable matter not bearing postage found in or on private mail receptacles. The post or other support is not part of the receptacle. Except under 3.2.11, the receptacles described in 3.1.1 may be used only for matter bearing postage. Other than as permitted by 3.2.10, or 3.2.11, no part of a mail receptacle may be used to deliver any matter not bearing postage, including items or matter placed upon, supported by, attached to, hung from, or inserted into a mail receptacle. Any mailable matter not bearing postage and found as described above is subject to the same postage as would be paid if it were carried by mail. Customers must keep the approach to their mailboxes clear of obstructions to allow safe access for delivery. If USPS employees are impeded in reaching a mail receptacle, the postmaster may withdraw delivery service. Manufacturers of all mailboxes designed and made to be erected at the edge of a roadway or curbside of a street and to be served by a carrier from a vehicle on any city route, rural route, or highway contract route must obtain approval of their products under USPS Standard 7, Mailboxes, City and Rural Curbside. To receive these construction standards and drawings or other information about the manufacture of curbside mailboxes, write to USPS Engineering (see 608.8.0 for address). The local postmaster may approve a curbside mailbox constructed by a customer who, for aesthetic or other reasons, does not want to use an approved manufactured box. The custom-built box must generally meet the same standards as approved manufactured boxes for flag, size, strength, and quality of construction. A mailbox with a lock must have a slot that is large enough to accommodate the customer’s normal daily mail volume. The USPS neither opens a locked box nor accepts a key for this purpose. The post or other support for a curbside mailbox must be neat and of adequate strength and size. The post may not represent effigies or caricatures that tend to disparage or ridicule any person. The box may be attached to a fixed or movable arm. Any advertising on a mailbox or its support is prohibited. Subject to state laws and regulations, a curbside mailbox must be placed to allow safe and convenient delivery by carriers without leaving their vehicles. The box must be on the right-hand side of the road in the direction of travel of the carriers on any new rural route or highway contract route, in all cases where traffic conditions are dangerous for the carriers to drive to the left to reach the box, or where their doing so would violate traffic laws and regulations. Every curbside mailbox must bear the following address information: The mailbox may bear the owner’s name. If more than one family wishes to share a mail receptacle, the following standards apply: Generally, curbside mailboxes are to be used for mail only. However, publishers of newspapers regularly mailed as Periodicals may, on Sundays and national holidays only, place copies of the Sunday or holiday issues in the rural route and highway contract route boxes of subscribers if those copies are removed from the boxes before the next scheduled day of mail delivery. A receptacle for newspaper delivery by private carriers may be attached to the post of a curbside mailbox used by the USPS if the receptacle: Manufacturers of wall-mounted centralized mail receptacles used for mail delivery must receive approval under the specifications and procedures in USPS Standard 4. The specifications and other information can be obtained by writing to USPS Engineering (see 608.8.0 for address). The installation of proper equipment is required for delivery service. The type of equipment must be approved by the USPS under 3.3.1 and must be appropriate for the structure. Customers should discuss the types of approved equipment permitted for their structures with their postmaster before purchasing and installing delivery equipment. Post Office Box (PO Box) service is a premium service offered for a fee (See Notice 123—Price List) to any customer and for no fee to customers who are not eligible for carrier delivery (also see 4.5.2). The service allows a customer to obtain mail during the hours the box lobby is open or access is otherwise available and is provided only through receptacles owned or operated by the USPS or its agents. PO Box service does not include alternate means of delivery established to replace or extend carrier delivery service. A postmaster (or designee) and a box customer may not make any agreement that contravenes the regulations on PO Box service or its fees. Competitive PO Box service (see 4.5.4) is available in designated postal locations and offers service enhancements for PO Box customers. Post Office Box, PO Box, or the # symbol when a Post Office street address is used as allowed under 4.5.4, designates this service in an address. Competitive PO Box service is available for customers located within the service area of a competitive mailbox service provider. Market-Dominant PO Box service is available to serve customers not served by a nearby competitor. Box customer applies only to the person who signs the application as an individual or to the organization on whose behalf an individual signs the application. There are five box sizes and availability of sizes varies by facility. A customer is assigned a box size based on the customer’s needs and the availability of boxes. The postmaster may require a customer to use a larger size box if the customer’s mail volume increases beyond the capacity of the present box. The fees for boxes increase with box size. The following chart describes approximate box capacities and frontal dimensions. A number is assigned to each PO box. Mail intended for delivery through a box must show the assigned PO box number in the address immediately above the city, state, and ZIP Code. When no box of the appropriate size is available, the postmaster may handle the application for box service in one or more of the following ways: Online customers cannot apply for a box that is not available but can place themselves on a waiting list for the box. Customers must pay the correct fee for the service they receive, regardless of the box size applied for. PO Box service is available in 3-, 6- or two 6-month (semi-annual) prepaid periods. The 3-month option requires establishing an automatic recurring renewal payment available online or at select post offices with automatic recurring payment functionality. The 3-month option is not available at Post Office locations on the semi-annual (April/October) payment schedule. The postmaster may require a box customer to use caller service under 5.0 based on the volume of mail received, or the level of service requested by the customer, or the availability of boxes. A customer required to use caller service in this manner may submit a written request to the postmaster for a new determination not more than semiannually. Existing box customers will not be allowed to use additional boxes at Post Offices having a waiting list for PO Boxes. A customer may apply for PO Box service by completing a Form 1093 at a Post Office or online and presenting it to any postal retail facility. When the application is presented, the applicants (including both spouses or any other individual listed but minors) each must present two items of valid, current identification; one item must contain a photograph of the applicant and the other must contain sufficient information to confirm the applicant’s identity. Furnishing false information or refusing to furnish required information may be sufficient reason for denial of the application or discontinuance of service. When any information required on Form 1093 changes, the box customer must update the application. Application procedures are as follows: PO box service may be transferred, without payment of an additional fee, to any box of the same size and fee group at a different facility of the same Post Office. To transfer service, the box customer must submit a new application to either facility. A box customer may transfer service no more than once in any semiannual payment period and must submit a completed Form 3575 at the time of transfer. In accordance with the standards in 4.2, any individual box customer or organization may receive through the box any mail properly addressed to the box number. Only mail and official USPS notices may be placed into a PO box. A box customer must remove mail promptly from the box. If mail will not be removed from the box for more than 30 days and an overflow condition is probable, the customer must make prior arrangements with the postmaster. When mail for a customer’s PO Box exceeds the capacity of the box on 12 of any 20 consecutive business days (excluding Saturdays, Sundays, and national holidays), the box is in an overflow condition. Customers whose box is in an overflow condition must use caller service, change to a larger box, or use one or more additional boxes to which mail will be addressed. A PO box may not be used for, or in connection with, a scheme or enterprise that violates any federal, state, or local law; breaches an agreement with a federal, state, or local agency whereby the box customer has agreed to discontinue a specified activity; or violates or attempts to evade any order of a court or administrative body. A PO box may not be used when the primary purpose is to have the USPS forward or transfer mail to another address free of charge. Customers may file change-of-address orders as follows: PO Box fees are based on the box size (see 4.1.3) and the fee group to which the box’s 5-digit ZIP Code is assigned. A change in PO Box service fees applicable to a 5-digit ZIP Code can arise from a general fee change. In addition, the USPS may assign a fee group to a new ZIP Code, may reassign one or more 5-digit ZIP Codes to the next higher or lower fee group if fee group assignments were in error, or may regroup 5-digit ZIP Codes. Except when boxes from two or more ZIP Codes are being merged into one location, a ZIP Code may be moved only into the next higher or lower fee group. If boxes in two or more ZIP Codes merge, the fee group will be that of the receiving location, even if one of the fee groups changes by more than one level. No ZIP Code may be moved into a different fee group more than once a calendar year. A change in Post Office Box service fees takes effect on the date of the action that caused the change unless an official announcement specifies another date. If PO Box service fees are increased, no customer must pay the new price until the end of the current service period, and no retroactive adjustment will be made for a payment received before the date of the change. The fee charged is that in effect on the date of payment. All fees for PO Box service are for 3-, 6-, or two 6-month (semi-annual) prepaid periods, except as noted under 4.4.5, 4.4.7, and 4.4.9.The general rule is that a fee may be paid up to one year in advance; however, when boxes from two or more ZIP Codes are being merged into one location, a customer has the option, prior to the merger, to renew at the current fee for another rental period, even when this results in a fee being paid more than one year in advance. Customers may pay the fee using any of the following methods: Except under 4.4.6, the beginning date for a PO Box fee payment period is determined by the approval date of the application. The period begins on the first day of the same month if the application is approved on or before the 15th of the month, or the next month if approved after the 15th of the month. Fees for service renewal may be paid any time during the last 30 days of the service period, except under 4.4.3, but no later than the last day of the service period. Federal agencies whose payment period coincides with the federal fiscal year may pay their box fees during the first quarter rather than in advance. Postmasters at offices with fewer than 500 PO boxes may set April 1 and October 1 as the beginning of payment periods for box customers in their offices. Payment periods beginning other than April 1 or October 1 are brought into alignment with these respective dates by adjusting fees as follows: Except for customers at Post Offices subject to 4.4.6, a PO Box customer of record may change the payment period by submitting a new application noting the month to be used as the start of the revised payment period. The date selected must be before the end of the current payment period. The unused fee for the period being discontinued may be refunded under 4.6, and the fee for the new payment period must be fully paid in advance. Except when boxes from two or more ZIP Codes are being merged into one location, a change of payment period date must not be used to circumvent a change in box fees. The USPS does not set or collect fees for boxes owned by an academic institution if the boxes are separate from designated USPS areas and serviced by employees or agents of the institution. In postal facilities primarily serving academic institutions or their students, box fees may be adjusted to fit the semester schedules, using the matrix below. Charges are rounded up to the next multiple of $0.10. No refund is made for discontinued service when a box is obtained under this standard. PO Boxes are assigned to fee groups; see Notice 123—Price List or contact your local Post Office, and classified as competitive or market-dominant based upon the Post Office location. Customers may qualify for Group E (free) PO Box service at a Post Office if their physical address location meets all of the following criteria: Only one Group E (free) PO Box may be obtained for each potential carrier delivery point of service, under the following conditions: New customers in competitive locations receive 13 months of service for a 12 month PO Box payment, are not required to pay the key deposit for the first two PO Box keys, and may receive expanded hours of PO Box access and earlier deposit of mail into the PO Box. Customers in competitive locations may also complete a customer agreement to receive one or more of the following enhancements: When PO box service is terminated or surrendered by the customer, the unused portion of the fee may be refunded as follows: When a postal facility is discontinued or relocated, a box customer at that facility may obtain a refund of unused box fees if box service at that location is discontinued and additional travel of 1/4 mile or more (from the physical address on the customer’s Form 1093) is required to obtain equivalent service. For this purpose, one-sixth of a semiannual fee is refunded for each month left in the payment period. The refund is computed from the first day of that month (if the effective date of the facility discontinuance is on or before the 15th of the month) or from the first day of the next month (if the effective date is after the 15th of the month). Two PO Box keys are initially issued to each new box customer. Except for new customers in Competitive PO Box groups 30-44, which has no key deposit for the first two keys, box customers must pay a refundable key deposit on each key. When box service is terminated, the key deposit is refunded to the customer for each key (including additional keys in 4.7.2) that is returned to the Post Office where the box was issued. A box customer may obtain additional keys at the Post Office where the box is located by submitting Form 1094 and paying the refundable key deposit (4.7.1) and the non-refundable key fee (see Notice 123—Price List) for each additional key. Worn or broken keys are replaced without charge when returned to the Post Office where the box is located. A customer using a PO box may not obtain or use keys other than those issued by the USPS. The box customer may request that the PO Box lock be changed by paying the non-refundable lock replacement fee in (see Notice 123—Price List). Lock fees are charged for replacing keyed locks and for re-setting combination locks. Customers may turn in PO Box keys for the old lock and get a refund of the key deposit. Two keys are provided with the new lock, with a refundable deposit for each key charged under 4.7.1. The lock replacement fee also applies as a late payment charge when the customer renews a box more than 10 days after the renewal due date, whether or not the lock is actually changed. A postmaster may refuse to approve or may terminate PO Box service, including that of a Group E (free) PO Box customer, if: the applicant or box customer submits a falsified or incomplete application for box service; within the 2 years before submitting the application, the applicant physically abused a box or violated a standard on the use of a box; refuses to update information on the box application; conducts himself or herself in a violent, threatening, or otherwise abusive manner on postal premises or there is substantial reason to believe that the box is being or will be used for unlawful activities as described in 4.3.5 and 4.3.6. The customer is notified of the Postmaster’s determination to refuse or terminate service and of the appeal procedures. The applicant or box customer may file a petition appealing the postmaster‘s determination to refuse or terminate service within 20 calendar days after notice as specified in the postmaster‘s determination. The filing of a petition prevents the postmaster‘s determination from taking effect and transfers the case to the USPS Consumer and Industry Affairs, who issues the final agency decision. The Consumer Advocate’s decision constitutes the final agency decision. A PO box is surrendered if: A PO box is not surrendered if: Fees are charged for each separation provided per semi-annual (6-month) period. See Notice 123—Price List. Caller service is a premium service available for a fee to any customer who: Caller service does not include general delivery service. Customers who use this service pick up their mail at the Post Office call window or loading dock during the time period designated by the postmaster. Customers who receive mail for clients may participate in caller service subject to 1.0, and 2.0. Agreements between a postmaster and a caller that contravene the standards for caller service or its fees are not valid. A caller is an individual, or the organization represented by the individual, signing the application. Reservation of caller numbers makes it possible for the caller of record to hold caller numbers for future use. Destination caller service is caller service provided at the postal facility to which the caller‘s mail is addressed. Origin caller service (accelerated reply mail) is described in 5.8. The Address Management Service System (AMS) office assigns caller numbers. Customers may reserve caller numbers for future use or obtain caller services by paying the reserved caller number fee or caller service fee in 5.1. Subsequently, the postmaster or his designee will contact AMS which will issue the number. Availability of this service may be restricted and numbers are not issued immediately upon payment of the fee. Except under 5.2.7, caller service customers must use their assigned caller service number in their mailing address as their “Post Office Box” (PO Box) number, which should be placed immediately above the city, state, and ZIP+4 Code. A postmaster may exempt any customer continuously receiving firm holdout service since July 3, 1994, from the standard in 5.2.6 that correspondents must use the assigned Post Office box (caller service) number in the address. The USPS may restrict caller service if such service adversely affects postal operations. When mail for a customer’s Post Office box(es) exceeds the capacity of the box(es) on 12 of any 20 consecutive business days (excluding Saturdays, Sundays, and national holidays), or when the customer seeks multiple caller service separations, the postmaster can require the customer to use caller service, change to a larger box, or use one or more additional boxes (subject to availability) to which mail will be addressed. A customer required to use caller service because of the mail volume received may, once per semiannual payment period, make a written request to the postmaster for a new determination of whether current mail volume requires continued use of caller service. Federal agencies and the various schools and departments within educational institutions are considered separate customers for 5.2.9. Caller service may be provided to the following: To reserve a caller number for future use or to apply for caller service, the applicant must complete all relevant spaces on Form 1093, Application for Post Office Box or Caller Service, and submit it to any postal facility that provides public window service. The facility need not be the one where destination caller service is desired. An incomplete or falsified application is sufficient reason to deny or discontinue service. An application is not considered approved until the USPS verifies the applicant‘s identity. Caller service may be transferred, without payment of an additional fee, to a different facility of the same Post Office if that facility has caller service. To transfer service, the caller must submit a new application either to the facility where service is currently provided or to the facility where service is desired. A caller may transfer service no more than once in any semiannual payment period and must submit a completed Form 3575 at the time of transfer. Caller service may be provided to a minor (a person under 18 years of age) unless the minor’s parent or guardian submits a written objection to the postmaster. An individual caller or organization may receive mail properly addressed to the caller number. Mail addressed only to a caller number is delivered to the caller so long as no improper or unlawful business is conducted. A caller who, as a regular practice, wants to call for mail at a postal facility more than once in any 24-hour period must obtain the postmaster’s approval of the pickup schedule. When any information required to be provided by the caller on Form 1093 changes, the caller must notify the Post Office of such changes. Caller service may not be used for, or in connection with, a scheme or enterprise that violates any federal, state, or local law; breaches an agreement between the caller and a federal, state, or local agency for the caller to discontinue a specified activity; or violates or attempts to evade any order of a court or administrative body. Caller service may not be used when the primary purpose is to have the USPS forward or transfer mail to another address free of charge. Customers must pay the caller service fee listed in 5.1. The fee must be paid for each caller number or separation used, with the following exceptions: Customers must pay the annual reserved caller number fee in 5.1 once each calendar year for each number reserved, subject to the following: A change in caller service fees (including reserved number fees) can arise from a general fee change. Any change in caller service fees takes effect on the date of the action that caused the change unless an official announcement specifies another date. If a caller service fee is increased, no customer must pay at the new price until the end of the current service period, and no retroactive adjustment is to be made for a payment received before the date of the change. The fee charged is that in effect on the date of payment. If a caller uses a physical Post Office box to obtain a caller number, the applicable fees for both Post Office box service and caller service must be paid. The basic caller service fee is for a 6-month period. The fee must be paid in advance for each 6-month period. The fee may be paid for two periods at a time (i.e., up to 1 year in advance), but not more. The fee that must be paid is the one that is in effect on the day that the fee is paid. Fees may be paid using cash, credit or debit card, or check or money order payable to the postmaster. A mailed payment must be received by the postmaster on or before the due date. Except under 5.5.8, the beginning date for a caller fee payment period is determined by the approval date of the application. The period begins on the first day of either the same month if the application is approved on or before the 15th of the month, or the next month if approved after the 15th of the month. After that, caller fees for renewal of service may be paid any time during the last 30 days of the service period, but no later than the last day of the service period. A caller of record may change the payment period by submitting a new application noting the month to be used as the start of the revised payment period. The date selected must be before the end of the current payment period. The unused fee for the period being discontinued may be refunded under 5.6, and the fee for the new payment period must be fully paid in advance. A change of payment period date may not be used to circumvent a change in caller service fees. Postmasters at offices with fewer than 500 Post Office boxes may set April 1 and October 1 as the beginning of payment periods for caller service customers in their offices. Payment periods beginning other than April 1 or October 1 are brought into alignment with these respective dates by adjusting fees as follows: When caller service is terminated or surrendered by the customer, the unused portion of the fee may be refunded as follows: When a postal facility is discontinued or relocated, a caller service customer at that facility may obtain a refund of unused caller service fees if caller service at that location is discontinued and additional travel of 1/4 mile or more (from the physical address on the caller’s Form 1093) is required to obtain equivalent service. For this purpose, one-sixth of a semiannual fee is refunded for each month left in the payment period. The refund is computed from the first day of that month (if the effective date of the facility discontinuance is on or before the 15th of the month) or from the first day of the next month (if the effective date is after the 15th of the month). The reserved number fee is not refundable. A postmaster may refuse to approve caller service if the applicant submits a falsified or incomplete application for caller service; within the 2 years immediately before submitting the application, the applicant violated a standard on the use of the service; or there is substantial reason to believe that the service is to be used for activities described in 5.4.3, or 5.4.4. A postmaster may terminate caller service if the caller or its representative falsifies the application for the service; refuses to update information on the application; violates any standard on the use of the service; conducts himself or herself in a violent, threatening, or otherwise abusive manner on postal premises; or uses it for any unlawful activity as described in 5.4.3. The caller is notified of the postmaster’s determination to refuse or terminate service and of the appeal procedures to that determination. The applicant or caller may file a petition opposing the postmaster‘s determination to refuse or terminate service within 20 calendar days after notice, as specified in the postmaster‘s determination. The filing of a petition prevents the postmaster‘s determination from taking effect and transfers the case to the USPS Consumer Advocate. The Consumer Advocate‘s decision constitutes the final agency decision. Caller service is deemed surrendered if the caller submits a permanent change-of-address order, fails or refuses to pay the appropriate fees by the due date, or submits a written notice to discontinue service. Accelerated reply mail (ARM) is origin caller service provided at a postal facility other than the one to which the caller’s mail is addressed. ARM is subject to the applicable standards for caller service and the additional standards in 5.8. ARM must be obtained at an originating mail processing facility that is fully automated to process prebarcoded mail. The caller’s mail must meet the standards for barcoded First-Class Mail and must be certified by the mailpiece design analyst at the origin facility where ARM service is requested. The barcode on the mailpiece must represent the ZIP+4 code or the mailer’s unique 5-digit ZIP Code printed on the mailpiece. The caller’s mail must bear facing identification mark (FIM) A. Caller service must also be obtained at the destinating postal facility. The address on all mailpieces to be received through ARM must be the Post Office box address assigned where destination caller service is authorized. Mailpieces that show a dual address must show only the Post Office box on the line immediately above the city, state, and ZIP Code line. The mailer may either pick up ARM at the origin facility caller service window or have it reshipped, through PFS Commercial (7.0) service, to the destination caller service address or to another address specified by the mailer. After updating a change to the destination address for the PFS Commercial service, the mailer must provide a 30-day advance notice and submit an amended ARM application, completing only the “Applicant Information” and “Priority Mail Express PFS Commercial.” An applicant who is a commercial mail receiving agent (CMRA) must also meet the applicable standards in 1.0, and 2.0. An applicant for ARM must meet the application procedures in 5.3. Besides completing Form 1093, an applicant for ARM must also complete Form 8061 and submit both forms to the facility where ARM service is desired. ARM service is not provided until the USPS verifies the applicant’s identity and service availability at the requested facility, and makes scheme preparations. When the application is approved and the caller service fee received, an ARM number is assigned. A separate basic fee must be paid for each facility where ARM service is provided. An ARM authorization may not be transferred to another facility. Payments for ARM service must be received at least 45 days before the applicable semiannual period. Payment of the renewal fee is due at least 45 days before the last day of the last month of the current period. Payment may be made for the next semiannual or annual period, as appropriate. If, on notice, the customer does not pay the fee by the 30th day before the end of the current payment period, the barcode sortation scheme is revised to remove the separation for the caller. Once that change is made, the caller must reapply to obtain further ARM service. A refund is made only for future prepaid periods if a caller discontinues ARM service. No refund is made for the remaining part of the current fee period. General delivery is intended primarily as a temporary means of delivery: General delivery is normally available at only one facility under the administration of a Post Office with multiple facilities. A postmaster may authorize more than one facility to offer general delivery service in accordance with customer and operational needs. A customer may use only one such location. A postmaster may refuse or restrict general delivery: A general delivery customer can be required to present suitable identification before mail is given to the customer. Prior to mailing, customers should contact the destination Post Office to determine the authorized facility or facilities and their applicable ZIP Code(s). Each general delivery mailpiece is held for no more than 30 days, although a shorter time period may be requested by the sender. Premium Forwarding Services offers three options as follows: Premium Forwarding Service Residential (PFS-Residential) provides certain residential customers (see 7.2.4), an option to have all mail addressed to their primary address shipped to a temporary address by a weekly Priority Mail shipment. Service is available for a period of not less than 2 weeks and not more than 1 year. This optional service is separate from the forwarding service offered in 507.2.0. Customers must pay a nonrefundable enrollment fee and a weekly charge for each Priority Mail shipment for each week of service requested. Except under 7.1.4b, the amount due for the total weeks requested must be paid in full. See Notice 123—Price List. Customers may extend PFS-Residential for up to 1 year maximum service from the initial start date, by contacting the Post Office of the primary address, or, for customers enrolled online, at www.usps.com/manage/forward.htm. Except under 7.2.4b, an extension is processed only after the Post Office receives payment of the shipment charges due for the total weeks of extension requested. Except under 7.2.4b, a customer who terminates service early may request a refund for any unused pre-paid weekly shipment charges from the Post Office serving the primary address. Participation in PFS-Residential is subject to the following additional standards: PFS-Residential is available only from and to domestic addresses, cannot be combined with any ancillary or extra services, and is not available for: Premium Forwarding Service Residential shipments are dispatched weekly (on Wednesday) as Priority Mail with USPS Tracking service. Regardless of any mailer‘s ancillary service endorsement on a mailpiece, and provided it fits within the shipment container, all mail is included in the weekly Priority Mail shipment, except as follows: Premium Forwarding Service Commercial (PFS-Commercial) provides business commercial customers the option to have USPS gather their mail addressed to business PO Boxes (including Caller Service) or business street addresses within the same servicing postal facility, and dispatch the mail as Priority Mail Express or Priority Mail shipments to a new address in bulk. An annual enrollment fee is required, and applicable postage is charged for each shipment of mail under 7.3.3b. Email notifications are sent with the USPS Tracking number for the expected delivery date or when there is no mail available to forward. See Notice 123—Price List for postage prices and fees. Customers must enroll for PFS-Commercial and pay the annual enrollment fee online via the Business Customer Gateway at https://gateway.usps.com/eAdmin/view/signin. Customers must specify the business PO Boxes (or Caller Service) or business street delivery addresses, destination address, and frequency (Monday through Saturday). Service is activated electronically, upon receipt of an email confirmation. Only the authorized recipient (or legal agent) of the business’ (or organization’s) mail may activate the request for PFS-Commercial service. PFS-Commercial service is subject to these conditions: Premium Forwarding Service Local (PFS-Local) provides residential/individual and business/organization Post Office Box holders the option to have the USPS gather their mail addressed to their PO Box (excludes no-fee Group E PO Boxes) and dispatch the mail to their delivery street address when both addresses are within the same local servicing postal facility. An annual enrollment fee is required, and a reshipment fee is charged (see 7.4.3b) for each reshipment container. Email notifications are sent regarding reshipments or when there is no mail available to forward. See Notice 123—Price List for postage price and fee. Customers must enroll for PFS-Local and pay the annual enrollment fee online via USPS.com at https://www.usps.com/manage/forward.htm for residential/individual boxholders or the Business Customer Gateway at https://gateway.usps.com/eAdmin/view/signin for business/organization boxholders. Customers must specify the active PO Box, a deliverable destination address, and frequency (Monday through Saturday). Service is activated electronically, upon receipt of an email confirmation. Only the residential/individual use PO Box customer or authorized recipient (or legal agent) of a business’ (or organization’s) PO Box mail that is on file may activate the request for PFS-Local service. PFS-Local service is subject to these conditions: PFS-Local is not available for: Firm holdout service allows a customer to obtain street-addressed mail from the Post Office when the customer normally receives 50 letters or more on the first delivery trip, or when the customer is a news agent or publisher’s representative and receives publications that qualify for newspaper treatment. To obtain firm holdout service, a customer must fill out Form 3801. The form must include the signature of each employee or agent authorized to pick up the mail. There is no fee for firm holdout service. On the postmaster’s approval, based on the availability of resources, the customer may pick up mail at a postal unit once each delivery day at the time and place of delivery specified by the postmaster. A customer may cancel a firm holdout at any time. The postmaster may cancel firm holdout service when the mail volume falls below the 50-piece requirement on each delivery day over a 30-day period. The postmaster may also cancel the service when the mail is not picked up for 10 consecutive days and the customer does not arrange with the postmaster to hold the mail. A customer may not request restoration of the service for 1 year after its cancellation. Pursuant to 39 USC 3008, an addressee who receives a solicited or unsolicited advertisement offering for sale matter that, in the addressee’s sole discretion, is “erotically arousing or sexually provocative,” may, by completing Form 1500, obtain a prohibitory order directing the mailer of the advertisement to refrain from making further mailings to that addressee. Using this form is not mandatory if the information that the form solicits is in a signed written statement. A person entitled to receive mail addressed to a deceased person is regarded as the addressee of such mail for obtaining a prohibitory order in the name of the deceased. A person authorized to receive mail addressed to a job title (e.g., sales manager) of any business, government agency, or institution, is regarded as the addressee of such mail for obtaining a prohibitory order covering such job title. Any person with apparent authority to act for a business, governmental, or institutional addressee is regarded as the addressee of such organization’s mail for obtaining a prohibitory order in the name of such organization. The application for prohibitory order may be submitted at any Post Office and must be accompanied by the advertisement on which the application is based, and its opened envelope or other cover or wrapper. When applying for a prohibitory order, if the addressee receives mail at more than one address, the addressee should complete an additional Form 1500 for each address. An addressee who is the parent of one or more children less than 19 years of age residing with that parent may request an order on behalf of any or all such children. If the parent of any such child determines that matter offered for sale in an advertisement addressed to the child is “erotically arousing or sexually provocative,” the parent may request issuance of an order prohibiting further mailings to such child. This order is not enforced for mailings received by such person after that person reaches 19 years of age. Such person, however, may ratify the order by giving written notice to the manager of the Prohibitory Order Processing Center (see 608.8.0 for address) that the order is to continue in effect for himself or herself. The prohibitory order forbids the mailer, his or her agents, or assigns from making further mailings to the designated addressees, effective on the 30th calendar day after the mailer’s receipt of the order; directs immediate deletion of such addressees from all mailing lists owned or controlled by the mailer, his or her agents, or assigns; and prohibits any sale, rental, exchange, or other transaction by the mailer, his or her agents, or assigns, involving mailing lists bearing the names of the designated addressees. An addressee protected by a prohibitory order who has a permanent change of mailing address may continue the protection provided by the order by notifying the mailer of his or her change of address and desire to have the order honored for the new address. The notification must be sent by Certified Mail, return receipt requested. To enforce any violation of the order at the new address, a copy of the notification and return receipt must be submitted to the manager of the Prohibitory Order Processing Center (see 608.8.0 for address). Such written notification must modify the order by substituting the new address for the address designated in the original or previously modified order. An order thus modified takes effect in the same manner as the original order. A prohibitory order is not issued when the application is based on any of these: An applicant for a prohibitory order or its enforcement is deemed to have abandoned the application if the applicant fails to comply, within 60 days, with any USPS request to supplement, correct, or complete the application. The USPS does not keep abandoned applications. A prohibitory order is considered void on expiration of 5 years from the date of issuance, except that, when application for enforcing a prohibitory order is made, it is not considered void until expiration of 5 years from the last application for enforcement. USPS files on such void orders may be disposed of, if a record is kept of the disposal of each such file and the reason for the disposal. The fact that a name and address is on the USPS list of persons not wanting to receive sexually oriented advertisements through the mail does not limit or affect the authority of the USPS to issue a prohibitory order protecting such name and address. The issuance of a prohibitory order also does not limit or affect the authority of the USPS to list, under 10.0, the name and address protected by such prohibitory order. If a person protected by a prohibitory order who receives a mailpiece apparently in violation of such order opens the envelope or other outside cover of such piece and writes on it the identifying number of the prohibitory order (if known) and a statement indicating receipt by mail and the date of receipt (for example, “I received this mailpiece on [date].”), followed by the person’s signature. The person submits the piece directly, or through a Post Office, to the Prohibitory Order Processing Center. Such submission constitutes an application for enforcing the order. When the USPS finds, after appropriate administrative proceedings under prohibitory order Standard Operation Procedures (formerly Notice 241) and 39 CFR 963, that enforcement is warranted, it requests the U.S. Department of Justice to seek a court order directing compliance with the prohibitory order. 39 USC 3010(d) defines sexually oriented advertisement as “any advertisement that depicts, in actual or simulated form, or explicitly describes, in a predominantly sexual context, human genitalia, any act of natural or unnatural sexual intercourse, any act of sadism or masochism, or any other erotic subject directly related to the foregoing.” It also provides that “material otherwise within the definition of this subsection shall be deemed not to constitute a sexually oriented advertisement if it constitutes only a small and insignificant part of the whole of a single catalog, book, periodical, or other work the remainder of which is not primarily devoted to sexual matters.” Section 3010 of Title 39 USC provides members of the public with a means to protect themselves and their minor children from receiving unsolicited sexually oriented advertisements through the mail. This section permits any person served by the USPS to file with the USPS a statement that he or she does not want to receive such advertisements through the mail. Any mailer who sends that person an unsolicited sexually oriented advertisement more than 30 days after the date when the USPS adds that person’s name to its reference list of those who want this protection may be subject to civil and criminal sanctions, under 39 USC 3011 and in 18 USC 1735-37. The responsibility for ensuring that no unsolicited sexually oriented advertisement is sent through the mail to any person in violation of section 3010 is placed by that section on the mailer of such advertisements. No USPS regulations may be used to place this responsibility on the USPS. A person who mails sexually oriented advertisements only to persons who request to receive them does not violate the statute or regulations, if otherwise in compliance with the law whether buying and using the USPS list. A person may invoke the protection of section 3010 by completing and filing, with any postmaster or designated USPS representative, Form 1500, available at Post Offices. A person may file in his or her own behalf and in behalf of any of that person’s children under the age of 19 years who reside with that person or are under his or her care, custody, or supervision. An authorized officer, agent, fiduciary, surviving spouse, or other representative, may file in behalf of a corporation, firm, association, estate, or deceased or incompetent addressee. A person’s name and address are kept on the list for 5 years, unless a request for revocation is filed sooner by that person. A person must file a new application at the end of the 5-year period to keep his or her name on the list. The names and addresses of minor children are removed from the list after the 5-year period or when they reach 19 years of age, whichever comes first. A minor must file an original application in his or her own behalf if the minor wants his or her name to remain on the list after reaching 19 years of age. The filing of a single application results in the listing of a single address for the person filing. A person who moves must file a new Form 1500 to receive the protection of section 3010 at his or her new address. Form 3575 may not be used for this purpose. It is not a violation of section 3010 to mail a sexually oriented advertisement to a person at an address other than that which is shown for that person on the list. It is a violation to mail such an advertisement to that person at the address shown for that person even though he or she has moved from that address. A person, at any time, may request the removal of his or her name and address, or that of one or more of his or her minor children, from the list by notifying the manager of the Pricing and Classification Service Center (see 608.8.0 for address). It is not evidence of a violation of section 3010 if a person (or that person’s minor child) receives a sexually oriented advertisement in the mail on or after the date he or she requests the removal of his or her name from the list or his or her minor child’s name. Copies of the list and/or periodic amendments to the list are available to any person paying the annual service fee. The list is provided on a CD-ROM. Information about or requests for the list must be submitted to the manager of the Pricing and Classification Service Center (see 608.8.0 for address). A certified or cashier’s check made payable to the USPS must be received in payment before the list is provided to the buyer. More information on CD-ROM format can be obtained from the manager. The annual service fee is determined by dividing the number of buyers for the previous calendar year into the total cost to the USPS of compiling, processing, printing, and distributing the list. This list may be used by a mailer only to protect persons whose names appear on it from receiving unwanted sexually oriented advertisements through the mail. No person, including a subscriber to the list, may use the list for any other purpose, and no person may sell, lease, rent, lend, exchange, or license another to use this list for any other purpose, including its use by another to remove names from a list of persons to whom sexually oriented advertisements are to be sent. No person may use the list or a copy of the list for preparing mailings or other lists for sale, lease, rent, loan, exchange, or use by another. Violators are subject to criminal prosecution. Section 3010(a) authorizes and directs the USPS to provide a mark or notice that must be placed on the envelope or cover of any sexually oriented advertisement sent through the mail, with the sender’s name and address. The following provisions implement this authority and direction: This is a partial list of conduct that may violate 39 USC 3010 or 18 USC 1735: Anyone who wants to report receipt of an unsolicited sexually oriented advertisement after an addressee’s name and address are on the list for more than 30 days should submit to any postmaster, or directly to the Pricing and Classification Service Center manager, the entire mailpiece, including the envelope or other wrapper. The piece must have been opened by the addressee. When submitting the piece, the addressee must endorse the envelope or other wrapper and also the inside contents in substance as follows: “I received this mailpiece on [date],” and sign the statement. If received by the postmaster, the piece must be forwarded promptly to the Pricing and Classification Service Center (PCSC). The PCSC then forwards the piece to the appropriate Inspection Service Field Division Office. A customer wanting to verify inclusion on the list should write to the Pricing and Classification Service Center (PCSC) (see 608.8.0 for address). |
We’re in the double digits, y'all! (sfx: NYE party horns) In the newest Results May Vary episode, we talk to fish-monger turned award-winning history podcaster, Mike Duncan, about how you can design the past — to engage more people in our shared human history, as well as to gather insights that our useful for us to design our future. His approach to design thinking is as much guided by passion and creativity, as it is intentional and exhaustive. Best known for The History of Rome podcast, Mike’s latest endeavor, Revolutions, is a weekly podcast series examining great political revolutions. His upcoming book, "The Storm Before The Storm" will examine Roman history between 135 B.C. to 80 B.C. with special attention given to the question: "If America was Rome, where are we on the historical timeline?" Today, Mike Duncan offers incredible insights on how to: - Make history accessible to more people through storytelling - Use podcasts to fill in knowledge gaps in education - Supplement your mindful, creative work with paid work that doesn’t drain your brain - Shed light on the current Syrian refugee crisis by examining the past How can you use Mike Duncan’s experience as inspiration to design your own life and increase your creative confidence? You have to listen to RMV 10 to find out! Show Links The History of Rome Mike's 5-year labor of love to cover the history of the Roman Empire from start to finish. Pretty much the gold standard for all other history podcasts. Revolutions Mike's current labor of love, a weekly podcast series examining great political revolutions. Now: The Haitian Revolution. Next: Simon Bolivar and Gran Columbia. The History of Rome Tours History-focused trips to some of most amazing locations in the ancient world, led by Mike himself and a series of knowledgeable guides. The Ancient World Scott Chesworth's history podcast, which takes a broad view of the very early development of human society from the earliest civilizations down through to the Greeks and Romans in THREE epic series: The Ancient World, The Ancient World - Rediscovery, and his current creative pursuit, The Ancient World - Bloodline, tracing the generations from Cleopatra to Zenobia. (full disclosure: Scott is also Tracy's extremely handsome husband and she wrote this sentence, so you know it's true) |
Vols Film Study: Kirkland, Reeves-Maybin, and the Blitz Bob Shoop likes to blitz. The Tennessee Volunteers’ new defensive coordinator comes to Knoxville after spending two years at Penn State, and he brings with him a reputation for putting the heat on opposing quarterbacks. Shoop has consistently produced some of the nation’s best defenses in recent years. In his two years at Penn State, the Nittany Lions finished eighth and ninth in the country in total pass defense. Before going to Happy Valley, Shoop spent the previous three years coordinating the defense for Tennessee’s in-state SEC rival, Vanderbilt. Despite not always having as much talent as their SEC competition, the Commodores were very good under Shoop, never finishing worse than twenty-third in the nation in pass defense. A big part of Shoop’s philosophy revolves around putting pressure on the quarterback. The stats back this up. In 2015, Shoop’s Nittany Lion defense led the nation with 3.54 sacks per game. In his introductory press conference at Tennessee, Shoop said, “We’ll be an in-your-face style of defense that’s built on relentless pursuit and never-ending pressure.” If you go back and watch film of Shoop’s defenses at Penn State or at Vanderbilt, then you will see that he is serious about never-ending pressure. Shoop will send pass rushers early and often. He likes to rush linebackers on early downs to stop the run, while also using creative blitz packages on passing downs to put pressure on the quarterback. Shoop’s primary pass coverage scheme is a conservative form of quarters, but he will use a fire zone blitz as his primary changeup. The fire zone was popularized by Dick LeBeau, then the defensive coordinator of the NFL’s Cincinnati Bengals, in the 1980s. LeBeau learned the concept from Bill Arnsparger, the head coach at LSU, who was experimenting with zone blitz tactics at the college level. Prior to this time, defenses always played man coverage behind blitzes. This was effective at times, but very risky. Quarterbacks and offensive playcallers began getting better about designing plays to get the ball out fast, before the blitz could get home. Defenders were isolated in man coverage, so any slight mistake could result in a big play for the offense. The zone blitz maintained the effectiveness of the pass rush, but the pass coverage scheme was much safer. All six defenders in zone coverage could keep their eyes on the ball, allowing them to rally and make the tackle for little gain even if the quarterback completed a quick pass. While Arnsparger is credited with inventing the concept, LeBeau is the man who made it famous. When he brought it to the NFL, his new tactic confounded quarterbacks and saw incredible success. LeBeau’s favorite type of zone blitz was what he called the fire zone. Three defenders (typically the two cornerbacks and one safety) would each be responsible for a deep third of the field in zone coverage. Three more underneath defenders would be responsible for taking away any short to intermediate passes. The remaining five defenders will rush the quarterback. Which five defenders rushed the quarterback and which six dropped in coverage was at the defensive coordinator’s discretion. He was limited by only his own creativity. Now skip ahead to 2016. Shoop uses the fire zone to compliment his base coverage scheme. Typically, Shoop will rush four and drop seven to play conservative zone coverage. But Shoop wants opposing quarterback’s to feel the heat. He likes to blitz, and the fire zone is the best way to do it. Shoop can send five pass rushers, while maintaining safe zone coverage. Shoop will send pass rushers from any and all directions. He’s not afraid to use linebackers, slot corners, safeties, and even outside corners as blitzers. He is also willing to drop defensive ends, and sometimes even defensive tackles, into coverage while blitzing a second level defender in order to keep the opposing quarterback off guard. Fortunately, when Shoop arrived in Knoxville he inherited two linebackers that fit his blitzing scheme perfectly. Middle linebacker Darrin Kirkland Jr. and weakside linebacker Jalen Reeves-Maybin both return as starters. While neither linebacker weighs more than 230 pounds, they are both known for their speed, quickness, and instincts. That combination makes Kirkland and Reeves-Maybin tenacious pass rushers for the Vols. Reeves-Maybin finished his junior year second on the team with 5.0 sacks, while leading the Vols with 14.0 tackles for loss. Kirkland finished right behind Reeves-Maybin with 3.0 sacks and 6.5 tackles for loss in his true freshman season. From a pure athleticism standpoint, Reeves-Maybin and Kirkland are among the best linebackers Shoop has ever coached. They fit his scheme perfectly, and have the potential to star under his tutelage. In order to help them reach their full potential, Shoop will certainly have to devise even more creative ways to utilize his linebackers in 2016. Consider this pressure package that Shoop has used in the past. It is one of his favorite blitzes, and one that nearly every high school, college and pro team in America runs. The point of the scheme is to overload the offense on one side. In the above example, the blitz is coming off of the (defensive) left side. The left end will stunt to the A gap, in between the center and the guard (this is called a long stick technique), while the middle linebacker will rush through the B gap, in between the tackle and the guard. The strong side linebacker (or nickel back) will blitz off the edge through the C gap. Shoop called this rush against Temple last season. The right tackle saw the blitzing middle linebacker and focused his attention on him. This allowed strongside defensive end Carl Nassib came free for the sack. Now skip ahead to bowl season. Former Vols’ defensive coordinator John Jancek dialed up a very similar blitz when the Vols’ faced off with Northwestern. Here, the right tackle recognized the blitz and tried to block Darrin Kirkland Jr., coming from his middle linebacker spot. He was, however, no match for the more athletic Kirkland, who blew by him for the sack. Now its Reeves-Maybin’s turn. Consider this blitz that Shoop used while at Vanderbilt in 2013. Here, Shoop calls for a linebacker and the strong safety to rush, in an attempt to overload the (defensive) right side. The offense will be overmatched with two defensive linemen plus two blitzers rushing to one side. On this play, middle linebacker Jake Sealand came free up the middle, while the offensive linemen were focused on blocking the defensive linemen. Sealand flushed the quarterback out of the pocket, right into the waiting arms of the other blitzer, strong safety Javon Marshall. Jancek called a similar blitz against Alabama in 2015. This time, running back Derrick Henry blocked the Vols’ blitzing strong safety LaDarrell McNeil, and All-American left tackle Cam Robinson was in position to block Reeves-Maybin, blitzing from his weakside linebacker position. However, Reeves-Maybin used his speed and his quick hands to swim past the bigger offensive lineman, and ended up finishing the play with a big sack. With Reeves-Maybin and Kirkland showing outstanding ability to blitz, they will certainly feel right at home in Coach Shoop’s aggressive scheme. With talented pass rushers like Derek Barnett, Corey Vereen, and Jonathon Kongbo already captivating the attention of opposing offensive linemen, the Vols’ linebackers will surely have plenty of opportunities to put pressure on SEC quarterbacks when Shoop dials up the blitz. Editor’s Note: Seth Price writes Vols Film Study weekly for FOX Sports Knoxville. You can see more of his work at Football Concepts. He is also the author of Fast and Furious: Butch Jones and the Tennessee Volunteer’s Offense, which is available on Amazon.com. |
We can cry because we're happy. We can cry because we're sad. We can cry because we're cutting onions. We can cry just because we need to cry. They're all completely different emotions... but are they different tears? Photographer Rose-Lynn Fisher wanted to find out in her series The Topography of Tears. She put dried tears from all different kinds of situations under the microscope to see what's different between them all. So there are three different types of tears. Psychic tears (happiness, sadness) are caused by extreme emotions. Basal tears are made to keep the cornea lubricated. Reflex tears (onions, tear gas) come out in response to something else. Advertisement Smithsonian says that Fisher found that those three different types of tears contain different molecules. That makes sense! They're three different things! But how do tears of joy and tears of sorrow, which come from the same place, end up looking different? Because of circumstance. Even though they're the same, how you cry and so forth can affect how it looks up close. You can see more tears here. Here's what tears of grief look like: Advertisement And tears from laughing: And tears from onions: |
[click the image above to enlarge it; screenshot reads: TRANSMISANDRY is the hatred of TRANS MEN because they are TRANSITIONING to a MALE] If you wanted to know why I think “transitioning” is transphobic (except when trans people use it to describe their own personal process), this would be the perfect example. (x) Not only is the definition of transmisandry inaccurate (if transmisandry was actually something that exists), the level of transphobia for a blog that is supposedly pro-trans men is astounding. Trans men are already male. Using “transition” to refer to people besides yourself implies that these trans men aren’t men yet & they won’t be men until they “transition to male.” This is cissexist & gross bcos it implies that in order to be men, people must first fit the socially-accepted mold for what it means to be a man. Inb4 “but I’m just speaking ~biologically~!!!” No amount of faux-biological bullshittery will justify misgendering trans men. Male/female terminology is just gender in a doctor’s coat. Trans men are already male. Pre-op or post-op or no op, trans men are male. |
WASHINGTON — As Republicans took control of an unprecedented 69 of 99 statehouse chambers in the midterm elections, they did not rely solely on a bench of older white men. Key races hinged on the strategic recruitment of women and minorities, many of them first-time candidates who are now learning the ropes and joining the pool of prospects for higher office. They include Jill Upson, the first black Republican woman elected to the West Virginia House; Victoria Seaman, the first Latina Republican elected to the Nevada Assembly; Beth Martinez Humenik, whose win gave Republicans a one-seat edge in the Colorado Senate; and Young Kim, a Korean-American woman who was elected to the California Assembly, helping to break the Democratic supermajority in the State Legislature. In Pennsylvania, Harry Lewis Jr., a retired black educator, won in a new House district that was expected to be a Democratic stronghold; he printed his campaign materials in English and Spanish. Of the 12 Latinos who will serve in statewide offices across the nation in 2015, eight are Republican. “This is not just rhetoric — we spent over $6 million to identify new women and new candidates of diversity and bring them in,” said Matt Walter, the executive director of the Republican State Leadership Committee. “Most of these chambers were flipped because there was a woman or a person of diverse ethnicity in a key targeted seat.” |
$\begingroup$ There are reasons that any modern example is likely to resemble the status of Legendre's constant. Most (but not all) interesting numbers admit a polynomial-time algorithm to compute their digits. In fact, there is an interesting semi-review by Borwein and Borwein that shows that most of the usual numbers in calculus (for example, $\exp(\sqrt{2}+\pi)$) have a quasilinear time algorithm on a RAM machine, meaning $\tilde{O}(n) = O(n(\log n)^\alpha)$ time to compute $n$ digits. Once you have $n$ digits, you can use the continued fraction algorithm to find the best rational approximation with at most $n/2-O(1)$ digits in the denominator. The continued fraction algorithm is equivalent to the Euclidean algorithm, which also has a quasilinear time version according to Wikipedia. Euler's constant has been to computed almost 30 billion digits, using a quasilinear time algorithm due to Brent and McMillan. As a result, for any such number it's difficult to be surprised. You would need a mathematical coincidence that the number is rational, but with a denominator that is out of reach for modern computers. (This was Brent and MacMillian's stated motivation in the case of Euler's constant.) I think that it would be fairly newsworthy if it happened. On the other hand, if you can only compute the digits very slowly, then your situation resembles Legendre's. I got e-mail asking for a reference to the paper of Borwein and Borwein. The paper is On the complexity of familiar functions and numbers. To summarize the relevant part of this survey paper, any value or inverse value of an elementary function in the sense of calculus, including also hypergeometric functions as primitives, can be computed in quasilinear time. So can the gamma or zeta function evaluated at a rational number. |
To check your balance In order to check your account balance, just tweet @cointip_jp with the following and wait a moment for a reply: @cointip_jp balance To confirm your deposit address Like above, when you want to know the Bitcoin address used for CoinTip deposits, tweet @cointip_jp the "deposit" command: @cointip_jp deposit You can use all of the following commands via both Twitter's web client and mobile app. FAQ I deposited bitcoin into my account, but I don't see them on my Dashboard. Deposited bitcoin will show up after they have been confirmed within the Bitcoin network. This may take some time, so please wait or the process to complete. I can't tip. If your tweets are protected, you and @contip_jp must be mutual followers. Follow @cointip_jp and it will automatically follow you back (usually within an hour). Does CoinTip charge any fee? We do not charge any fees for deposits and/or tipping. We charge 0.6mBTC as a Bitcoin's miner fee when you withdraw your bitcoins to an external wallet. |
Fresh off the opening of upscale plant-based pizza concept 00 + Co earlier this year, vegan chef Matthew Kenney is preparing to open another restaurant in his home state of Maine named Arata. The new eatery, opening Memorial Day weekend in Belfast, will be a place “to test new ideas, experiment, and continuously innovate within the category,” according to Kenney. The menu will include curated dishes including Smoked King Oyster Buns; Kimchi Pancakes with Bibb Lettuce, Sesame, Chili Sauce, and Pickled Vegetables; and a wine and cocktail program. In addition to 00 + Co in New York City, Kenney is also the founder of his own vegan cooking academy, Plant Food + Wine restaurants in Los Angeles and Miami, and is planning for his first international foray with Plant Cafe opening in Bahrain in 2017. Want more of today’s best plant-based news, recipes, and lifestyle? Get our award-winning magazine! Subscribe |
President Obama speaks at the Richard Rodgers Theatre in New York Monday. (Photo: Susan Walsh, AP) WASHINGTON — Federal agencies will be required to take additional steps to offset the environmental impacts of development under a presidential memorandum signed by President Obama Tuesday. The new policy expands on the federal government's 26-year-old "no net loss" wetlands policy, first established under President George H.W. Bush, which requires that any wetlands that are destroyed by human development be replaced somewhere else. The Obama policy applies that concept to any natural resource — not just wetlands — and also encourages agencies to replace those resources even before they're destroyed. For example, the memorandum would require oil and gas producers, loggers and others who deplete natural resources to pay other companies to restore those resources nearby. The executive action appears to be part of the Obama administration's alternative to listing the greater sage grouse as an endangered species. In September, the Interior Department said it would instead use land use plans to help conserve the bird's habitat, and Tuesday's action give those plans an even broader scope. "We all have a moral obligation to the next generation to leave America's natural resources in better condition than when we inherited them," Obama said in the preamble to the memorandum. "American ingenuity has provided the tools that we need to avoid damage to the most special places in our Nation and to find new ways to restore areas that have been degraded." The directive — which carries the same legal weight as an executive order — instructs federal agencies to adopt new regulations within two years. Rep. Chris Stewart, R-Utah, said the memorandum has the possibility of creating "the most far-reaching environmental regulatory manual" in history. "It’s such a good example of executive arrogance," he said. "The presumption that I'm a Republican and therefore I want dirty air and I want dirty water. The reason I live in Utah is because I love that state. I want to protect the air and water there as much as anyone, but the president doesn’t want to trust me as a working partner." Industry groups also reacted negatively, saying Obama's plan will replace state-level conservation efforts with bureaucratic federal land-use planning. "Setting in stone a no net loss ideal essentially puts wildlife and other natural resource values above human needs," said Kathleen Sgamma of the Western Energy Alliance. "It’s very top-down. It’s not tailored to conditions on the ground. Just like the president has continuously ignored elected officials in Congress, he's now starting to ignore those inconvenient governors who push back on these policies." White House and Interior officials would not answer questions about the order. But Christy Goldfuss, managing director of the White House Council on Environmental Quality, said in a written statement that the order was "a great step forward for conservation, building on a three-decade bipartisan history of presidential leadership that has encouraged innovation in land and water protection efforts." A new Interior Department policy released with the White House action Tuesday "requires any new development in certain areas of grouse habitat to avoid, minimize, and compensate for any impacts from those development activities," Deputy Secretary of the Interior Michael Connor said in a separate statement. Read or Share this story: http://usat.ly/1MwOlxq |
Amsterdam secondary schools are becoming increasingly segregated and children from families with well-educated parents rarely mix with those from more disadvantaged backgrounds, according to a new report by the city council’s research department. Pupils at one in four schools are almost exclusively from highly-educated parents, while in four out of 10 schools, children from low-skilled families make up 80% or more of the school population. For example, twice as many pupils go to schools in the districts of Centrum and Zuid as actually live in the city’s wealthiest districts, the report said. In just eight schools is there a 50/50 split, which accurately reflects the city’s general population, the OIS statistics office said. Two years ago, 11 schools had the ‘ideal’ mix. One reason for the segregation is the rise in single stream schools in the city. In the main, Dutch pupils are divided into pre-university (vwo), pre-college (havo) and vocational training (vmbo) streams at the age of 12 but an increasing number of schools only offer one type of education. ‘This means that children from different social classes rarely come into contact with each other,’ Amsterdam university professor Herman van de Werfhorst told the Parool. The rise of schools which only cater to pre-university or pre-vocational training streams is increasing the divisions, he said. ‘The best children go to the best schools, with the best teachers,’ he said. ‘This inequality is only increasing and no one seems to find it an issue.’ Research also suggests that children with low-skilled parents are more likely to be sent to vocational schools. |
Noah Brown, a 4-star wide receiver out of Sparta, N.J., has verbally committed to Urban Meyer and the Ohio State Buckeyes. Brown had offers from schools such as Michigan State, Missouri, Nebraska, Notre Dame, Penn State, South Carolina and USC, but he ultimately chose the Buckeyes over Rutgers, according to Sam Hellman of Scout.com. Noah Brown announces commitment to Ohio State over Rutgers. — Sam Hellman (@SamHellmanFOX) September 10, 2013 Brown is a 6'2", 212-pound athlete who plays a lot of running back for his high school football team, but he's projecting to move to wide receiver at the collegiate level. Brown was in Columbus for Ohio State's 42-7 victory over San Diego State, and a day after he got home, he felt comfortable enough to pull the trigger, according to Eleven Warriors. I had wanted to make my choice before my season started, and the visit to Ohio State this time just reassured me that Ohio State was the place for me, I feel very comfortable with the choice because I am comfortable with the staff as people. The football program is incredible, the 'Skull Session' just showed how much the fans there feel about Ohio State, and overall it's just such an incredible place. Brown's commitment brings Ohio State's 2014 recruiting class to 18 members. The Buckeyes now have commitments from five players who can line up at wide receiver, as Brown joins 5-star Curtis Samuel and 4-star prospects Parris Campbell, Terry McLaurin and Malik Hooker. According to 247Sports, Ohio State's recruiting class currently ranks No. 2 behind top-ranked Alabama. Brown is a big part of that. The talented athlete dominated during his junior season, rushing for 847 yards and 14 touchdowns to complement 630 receiving yards and six touchdowns. Meyer and the Buckeyes have loaded up on talented skill players over the past two recruiting cycles. Last February, Meyer signed a class that included 4-star wide receivers Jalin Marshall, Corey Smith, Dontre Wilson and James Clark. With Brown now in the fold, Ohio State is assured to have a stocked depth chart in the coming years. Watch highlights from Brown's junior season here: All recruit rankings and stats per 247Sports.com. David Regimbal is the Ohio State Football Lead Writer for Bleacher Report. Follow him on Twitter @davidreg412. |
Thanks to my Patreon Supporter @thenerdcity for supporting my work. If you enjoy this piece feel free to join. Alex Mauer, 34, was a highly known chiptune artist that made countless songs that people enjoyed. While they were originally a male, they chose to change genders and become a female at some point in the second half of 2016. That’s the only time in this piece I will go out of the way to specifically point that out. You know that now. If it comes up again during this story, it’s not in a way that disrupts the flow of writing. What matters here is the person’s actions. Not what gender they are. Now. Onto the story. They had fans. Alex Mauer had admirers. Every word in this particular paragraph is going to link to someone showing appreciation for Mauer’s songs. Please understand. There’s this old interview with Alex that was done over on the Megabeep website back in January 2012. Here’s the gist of it, so you can get a better personal understanding of Mauer. I do love many classic game soundtracks. I want my chip music to sound enough like a classic game that if you heard it, you wouldn’t know it was a new composition. I have no formal music training what-so-ever. I am 80% composer, 19% engineer, and 1% gamer. I was 100% gamer as a kid… and as I got older, I had the chances to use computers and synthesizers here and there. Now, I own computers and synthesizers and my devotion to gaming is at an all time low. I am very particular about what sounds I use when composing (thats the 19% engineer part) but I don’t get too caught up in programming or mastering. I have a few different approaches to composing. There’s the most straight forward, I just imagine the music in my head and then hit the computer and plug it all in. It’s noted that Mauer would be working with Imagos Films as far as back then. For every climbing up in the world, there’s always the chance for a fall. Alex Mauer went off the cliff. Skydived their credibility and name in the gaming industry, straight to rock bottom. What they did to Starr Mazer could have happened to anyone. There was no way of knowing beforehand Alex Mauer was a ticking time-bomb waiting to explode. It’s tragic. When it comes to understanding the Starr Mazer developers, the brand names apparently confused people. “Imagos Softworks is a brand under Imagos Films. Imagos Films LLC is the actual company. All payments and business actions are done through Imagos Films LLC.,” a representative of the company told me. Imagos Softworks launched their Starr Mazer Kickstarter on January 22nd 2015. Starr Mazer and Starr Mazer: DSP are two separate games both in the same sort of series. The former is a point-and-click shoot ’em up adventure that takes place in space. The latter is a rogue-lite horizontal scrolling shooter title set within Star Mazer‘s universe. Got it? Good. The best way to introduce the controversy is by hearing it generally summed up by someone who was close to Alex Mauer in the situation. I have contacted Maximo Lorenzo (former Art Director at Imagos Softworks) directly and have permission to use this post he made on a forum. The timeline for Alex works kinda like this, EXTREMELY abusive childhood ( from her mothers side of the family, her Dad’s is kinda soft but tries to help ) Alex spends her whole life being repressed and just doing whatever people tell Alex to do, Alex doesn’t have 1 mean bone in her body and just takes abuse without ever standing up for herself, her wife, her job, everything is just terrible, but Alex does 1 thing well and thats make music. I was a fan for a few years, we became friends and eventually Alex got to work on a project called Starr Mazer. Alex the repressed introvert is working on the project where the boss wants all this stuff that puts tons of pressure on Alex, interviews, live concerts, daily twitch shows, selling at conventions. All this stuff Alex simply was not made to do, and Alex didn’t know how to say “no” she asked me and I was like “if you dont want to do it tell them to fuck off and dont do it”. But the boss exudes lots of pressure, that’s how he gets stuff done. And I watch in slow motion Alex completely cracks under the pressure of having no money ( he moved to a pricey apartment to be close to the job ), publicity that she cant handle and so on and so forth. The Boss now see’s Alex become completely paranoid, manic, and Alex is starting to have VISUAL DELUSIONS ( I wish I was kidding ). Talking to the boss, I work with him to get Alex into a mental health place where they can chick [sic] her out. And basically after 2 days of effort, she gets some medication and is ok for a little while… Then Alex moves back home to where she came from massively in debt and with medical bills starting to come in. Alex NEVER liked ( himself ) or how ( he ) looked, Alex had really bad problems even looking in the mirror, so after ALL THIS Alex announces they are going to transition from Male to Female, and this makes a lot of sense knowing Alex’s personality and self hatred. Well Alex snaps a few more times and stops medication and starts lashing out at ANYONE, me and her boss included. Alex gets it into her head the boss owes him a lot more money than he actually does because reality is real fucked at this point. I argue really badly with Alex telling Alex going after his boss is NOT WORTH IT, MOVE ON, MAKE MUSIC. But years after being pushed around and bullied and told what to do Alex only wants to fight, FIGHT ANYTHING even if this hurts Alex. I took the time to ask Maximo if Alex’s boss was to blame. According to him, it was quite the contrary. Maximo says Don did what a boss needed to do: push the potential of people to maximize their work ethic. The boss didn’t force Alex to do anything, Mauer just didn’t know how to properly say “no” to them. Maximo says that while everyone played a bit of a role in making Mauer snap, nobody can really be blamed for not knowing about the underlying mental instability of Alex until it was too late. “[The Boss] definitely made mistakes. But I wouldn’t say you could blame him for Alex’s condition,” Maximo told me. Alex Mauer was brought on the Starr Mazer project at the ground floor with their Kickstarter. They were seen as an influential figure that could draw in attention and backers. “The game will feature a collaborative soundtrack by Alex Mauer (VEGAVOX, Serious Sam: Random Encounter), Manami Matsumae (Mega Man), The Protomen, Virt (Shovel Knight) and many more!,” the Kickstarter page said. Imagos often promoted Mauer’s talent when applicable. They had Mauer do a behind the scenes sort of video so people can see how the game development magic happened, and included Alex in streams throughout the Summer of 2015 to show off their music. To be clear, Mauer had primarily worked from home in Pennsylvania. Imagos Softworks had meetings with their remote staff via Google Hangouts on a routine basis, and work was submitted through file-sharing websites. Despite the distance, Imagos managed to get Alex to come out to Seattle for PAX that year. Alongside helping promote Starr Mazer, Mauer was a hit at parties and concerts that went on day and night. It was unbeknownst to Imagos that Mauer hated being on livestreams, keeping those sorts of things to themselves. July 8th 2015. An interview with Mauer over on Synthtopia happens. We get a better idea of what Alex’s responsibilities are behind the scenes. “I am the Music Director and Lead Composer for Starr Mazer. We have around 30 guest musicians contributing tracks to the OST. I’m writing the core songs and establishing the style, then directing the guests to match the style. You can check out the progress on Starr Mazer on our Twitch stream Starr Mazer TV. I host a show called Starr Jamz once every 4 weeks, showing the music progress.” At the time, Alex refers to themselves as co-founder of Imagos Softworks. We learn that Mauer is also the in-house composer at Imagos Films, and did work on commercials for Adult Swim games. Who, by the way, were the publishers originally. But the change in Starr Mazer‘s overall scope and idea direction began migrating things away from the original vision agreed to. “The Boss” referred to earlier by Maximo was someone who was going to balance all of this at once. Let’s meet him. In November 2015 Imagos Softworks Don Thacker would help move Mauer to Seattle. The two had worked together (since 2011) previously on Thacker’s 2013 film Motivational Growth. The intent of this trek was to help Alex focus on their music, as they were going through divorce proceedings at the time. This change in location caused Alex’s coherence and stability to deteriorate within the span of months. The break-up between Playism and Adult Swim happened around February 2016. Don Thacker kept things afloat for the company by raising money on his own. The new publisher, Playism, came on board by June 2016. They were strict about their monthly milestones and allocated budgets. This would definitely come at odds to Mauer’s habits with missing meetings and not responding to people for large chunks of time. This detachment from reality led to efforts by both members of the Imagos team and Mauer’s family to try and hospitalize Alex in late Summer 2016. By this point they were accusing Don and other people on the development team of conspiring to confuse/trick Mauer, with someone somewhere outside apparently working against them through their technology (on one occasion, Alex thought there was a conspiracy to hack Mauer’s Dropbox and send secret messages). This mental health episode resulted in Alex moving back home to Pennsylvania. Alex faced trouble after they had parted ways with Imagos. The change in Mauer’s personality came after they returned to Pennsylvania and began their efforts to change their gender. Multiple people aware of the situation tell me this was a combination of hormones being altered and Alex’s refusal to take their medication for their mental disorders. Mauer had to be detained on at least one occasion for assaulting their father. Alex became irate when they were prohibited to take his vehicle to New York to try and get a lawyer so they could sue someone in the family. On August 13th 2016 Alex Mauer was charged with “Receiving Stolen Property” and “Disorder Conduct Hazardous/Physi Off” according to this criminal docket. Part of the requirement in the 1-year probation they received was they get a mental health evaluation and abide by recommendations. Mauer’s sanity is further cast into doubt when they mention the fact they can’t buy a gun. One of the questions on the forms involved in the purchasing process for a firearm is “Have you ever been adjudicated as a mental defective OR have you ever been committed to a mental institution?,” under section 11f. Alex publicly threatened to stab anyone who’d break in to their house. As seen in this Facebook post, the incident in question involved stealing packages off of doorsteps. Alex Mauer explains their point of view on the story in a series of tweets (after someone tweeted them a link to the docket). Calling their situation “hilarious,” Alex says they stole a package from a doorstep and opened it to discover an exercise DVD. They were allegedly caught while attempting to return it. Mauer tells someone that they plead guilty to the lesser charge of disorderly conduct, which is apparently called that based on these stolen goods involved. But also in the mix is the pending charges that Alex hit a cop, with Mauer claiming that is a lie. In Autumn 2016, Alex Mauer began their arguments that Imagos Softworks owed them some sort of back pay. In October of that year, they offered a “solution” that involved a Kickstarter campaign for some sort of surgery on Alex’s larynx. Why Kickstarter? Mauer believed other crowdfunding websites didn’t feel legitimate enough, despite their desire being a strictly personal thing rather than an actual product. Don agreed to post, support, and even invest in this, so he could support his friend. In January 2017 Starr Mazer had to begin scaling back their team because of not being able to pay them. They’ve got people ready to go, but the project needs investors in order for that to happen. Discussions courting potential investors came to a dead halt once the Alex Mauer incident came to be. While Starr Mazer: DSP is published by Playism, confidence was shaken in them agreeing to invest any further because of the controversy. Starr Mazer: DSP‘s publisher at Playism posted an announcement on February 23rd 2017. The game is currently unavailable due to a copyright infringement claim of assets reported towards Imagos Softworks, the copyright holder / developer of Starr Mazer: DSP. We are confirming the situation with Imagos Softworks, then will update everyone as soon as possible. We sincerely apologize to all the users who had trouble and was worried about the sudden closing of the store page. PLAYISM Alex would end up trying to take the game down on the basis of music, general sound, voiceovers, and other sound elements. One of these takedown requests was because Mauer found sounds in an archive branch of the game’s source code. By March 1st 2017, Mauer had withdrawn completely from the public eye, taking down their website (briefly), Twitter, and Bandcamp. A week later we’d see exactly what happened when this was published on Alex’s website. “never gave me a contract for the project” is a point that can be easily disproven immediately. I have a copy of it. According to Alex Mauer’s contract with Imagos Softworks they started at the beginning of March 2015. They would be paid $40,000 to be their Music Director for the Starr Mazer project, paid $1500 on a bi-weekly basis for 26 payments, with a 27th payment set at $1000. First payment was exactly two weeks from their start date. To be clear – the information redacted with black represents what Imagos Softworks did before giving me the document at all. I have personally elected to redact additional info (although helpful for verification purposes) with a red marker in the above picture out of respect for Mauer’s privacy. March 12th 2017. The public would get some answers as to what was going on. According to Don Thacker (Director at Imagos Softworks), Imagos and Alex had a for-hire contract agreement when it came to Starr Mazer/Starr Mazer: DSP along with other side projects. At an unknown point in 2016 Mauer had medical issues that prevented the completion of their work. Regardless, Imagos honored the agreement and paid for what work was done up to that point, and then some. Midway through 2016 Alex Mauer left Imagos Softworks because of their health issues and wanted to “refocus their life”, says Don. At some point after Alex left, Mauer would contact Don about something to the effect of being owed additional pay of some kind. Imagos Softworks and Don made at least three attempts to come to an agreement with Alex (including shared DSP soundtrack rights, equity share in game revenue) out of human decency and respect towards Mauer’s health situation. Alex shot these down. Agreed to one, but then decided to dissolve it. Alex had issued a DMCA takedown request to Valve for Starr Mazer: DSP, forcing Imagos to take it down while an investigation was done. The counterclaim filed asked Alex to provide proof of a rights chain violation, and couldn’t do so successfully. Starr Mazer: DSP was allieved of suspension after providing proof of correct chain of rights and copyright to Valve. Don notes that Alex’s claims have changed: starting out as not being paid for time put in, to not being paid for the right project, to the assertion there was a conspiracy to defraud Mauer from the get-go. At the time he wrote this statement, Thacker says Alex’s current claims were the work contract not including Starr Mazer: DSP... which would contradict another one of Alex’s earlier claims being that she was not paid in full for their contract when it came to Starr Mazer: DSP. At one point Alex Mauer tried to release an album on Bandcamp with Starr Mazer: DSP songs within it, and attempted to rally their fans for a boycott. It was something they had threatened to both Imagos and Playism if they didn’t give Alex money. Bandcamp removed the album after they recieved proof of copyright and a DMCA claim from Imagos, along with a substantial amount of evidence that disproved the accusations Alex had made. In response to this Mauer just moved their campaign to a personal website instead. Don Thacker didn’t want to have this fight with Alex. He offered Mauer a release of rights in return that they stop making outrageous claims. Alex refused. The company replaced Mauer’s Starr Mazer tracks in the meantime while their new music partner Arcade High works on a replacement. It would take until the end of May 2017 for Starr Mazer: DSP to properly return to Steam. But Mauer was just getting started. Shawnphase has known Alex Mauer for at least a decade, if not longer (Mauer themselves says they were friends with Shawn for 12 years). They played drums with Alex Mauer when they did live performances (“best show I ever played” Alex said to Shawn once), and made two remix albums full of Alex’s songs in the past. Shawn is a friend of Don Thacker at Imagos, and worked with him to find a way to fix the problem here. Shawn’s efforts to talk with Alex Mauer through this current dilemma ended up with a falling out. Of course, Alex would tweet about this. According to Shawn, Alex Mauer had done what was expected of them when it came to soundtrack and sound effects work at Imagos. The hard part was over. Mauer was involved in both Imagos Softworks and Imagos Films. Video game development is certainly no small feat either. Many different intricate parts need to be made and come together into their final form. For Alex it was test of patience apparently. All that was left for Mauer to do was go on some podcasts to help promote the game in the weeks leading up to release. Shawn says Alex was shy when it came to that sort of media exposure, and it easily could’ve added more stress to their transitioning life at the time. When one of the people on Starr Mazer’s development team left, Mauer wasn’t even entirely sure the game was going to see release at all. Alex Mauer had outbursts at Shawn in the past. Like this time in 2014 when they shouted at him over Facebook to take a simple photo down. To fully understand the extent of the damage Mauer has done to the people around them, Shawn explained to me more about how much the Imagos folks went out of their way to help Alex out. When moving to the West Coast, Don Thacker himself flew out to Mauer in Pennsylvania, picked Mauer up and got a rental car, then went on a cross-country trip with them back to Seattle and helped them move. This was in October and November of 2015. Alex sold a lot of their possessions in the meantime, and before they knew it they were in a new city and around new people. Shawn explains to me that it took a lot of convincing early on to get a (rather timid) Mauer to release their work to the public in the first place. After praising Alex’s work and motivating them, Shawn says they got enough momentum going to get into working on video games. When it came to Starr Mazer, Mauer opted for modular gear for the sound effects in order to get the kind of style results that were desired. It’s unclear if Alex or Imagos paid for that. If it was the former, it showed the lust for high quality Mauer wanted out of their product. If it was the latter, it demonstrates the extra mile Imagos was willing to go to accomodate Mauer’s request. Shawn was initially heisistant to trust Don, but he turned out to be a good friend and business partner, in Shawn’s eyes. As we know now, Alex Mauer might not agree with that description. With everything going on in this situation, Shawn says it hits Don harder than most. When it comes to the transgender aspect of all this, Shawn had a lot to say. He says the DMCA/Imagos Softworks controversy is motivated by Alex Mauer’s desire to “get even” with the companies involved, and get enough money to get a sex change operation. This unpredictable mania is likely fueled by Mauer’s hormone intake (they “possibly doubled down” according to Shawn) which created a moody disposition from Alex as a result. He wanted to ask Alex why they were always moody, but elected against it as he felt Mauer was becoming more abrasive. Putting that another way, Shawn tells me the overall combative and instigative demeanor became more visible as this transition process continued. Before the hormones, he points out that Alex Mauer could still have their moments of upset. But generally stayed buttoned-up and taciturn instead of lashing out. Alex was a part of a trans support group for a while. They all met up on a regular basis, and Mauer would go with a friend of theirs. During this period of time, people observed Alex’s self-destructive and outrageous behaviors but didn’t exactly engage with it. Shawn says Mauer wanted to make merchandise for trans-people, but nobody seemed to show interest in these ideas from them. But Shawn tells me that Alex’s trans friends were some of the earliest who were shocked by this Imagos Softworks dispute. It seemed out of the blue to them, and they considered themselves part of the circle of friends who would be more knowledgeable. But this came out of nowhere to them. The DMCA frenzy on YouTubers was intended to “raise awareness” (Shawn points out to me this was Alex’s exact word choice) about the battle with Imagos Softworks. From these lawsuits Mauer hopes it’ll rake in around $40,000. When it comes to the damages that come with the journey from point A to B, the mindset is Alex believes people will just forget about it. Shawn says he assumes Mauer thinks everything will just “go back to normal” after this sex change happens. That this angle of litigation will work not just with Imagos, but later on with potentially Turner Broadcasting down the line. So while Alex Mauer may have always been shy about their presence online and off, they think money for a gender reassignment surgery would assuage their problems. Where would the cash come from? From the companies on the other end of these legal battles Mauer has engaged. The DMCA war they waged was Alex Mauer’s way of forcing some sort of conclusion to this dispute. The YouTube DMCA system is meant for big companies to maintain and regulate the usage of their content within reasonable limits. It’s assumed by Google that nobody would go wild with it and abuse the system for personal vendettas. Alex Mauer’s own interpretation of what DMCA takedowns are used for differs strongly from YouTube’s. “The DMCA is what you use if you own copyrights. The end,” Mauer tweeted. While that’s a decent start. But later on Alex suggests it’s like a game of tag, Mauer DMCA’ed, and if Leonard French thinks Imagos owns the music they should DMCA Alex back. They use it as a form of leverage to entice people into replying back to their emails. Alex Mauer announces their plans to DMCA because it’s a form of getting attention from the public. It was a big part of Mauer’s overall scheme here, as they kept a meticulous record of their targets throughout this period. They called these DMCA takedown attacks “waves” for that reason. People were subjected to the whim of Mauer’s feelings, as they had briefly recanted their 3rd wave of strikes because they thought it would “stop the bullying” apparently. Actually, that was definitely it, because Mauer said as such in an email to Leonard French. Sometimes they were blocked because of counter-claims, but Alex wasn’t afraid to go all the way and do repeats. Starr Mazer‘s YouTube channel was taken down entirely for a brief time because of Alex Mauer. A DMCA is not an attack. It’s a “stop using my music without my permission” – Alex Mauer Things first came to light on June 23rd with SidAlpha’s first video on the topic, A wave of DMCA strikes hits YouTubers. He explains that Starr Mazer DSP (a title by Imagos Softworks) was removed from Steam in order to fix an issue that had arisen with the original music. The soundtrack composer Alex Mauer was contracted by the developer to create songs for the game, but the two parties had a falling out before Mauer’s work was fully completed. Alex refutes that their contract was for Starr Mazer and not Starr Mazer DSP, but the counterargument from Imagos is that the wording stipulates “Starr Mazer and all Starr Mazer related products.” What’s most important about this aspect is the “WORK FOR HIRE” section of the document, which defines that Mauer’s body of work produced in the duration of this agreement was property of Imagos. This is the catalyst for what would eventually unfold. Alex Mauer eventually started going on a DMCA takedown spree on YouTube, targeting any and all Star Mazer content they could find. It would attract the attention of people like TotalBiscuit and Jim Sterling, who had to deal with their own causes of DMCA frauds. SidAlpha approached Mauer and attempted to reason with them in the hopes they’d back off. TemmieNeko was one of the first impacted by Mauer, leading to this conversation. Basically Alex wanted the people complaining about these DMCAs at Mauer directly to shift their focus and go after Imagos Softworks for it. SidAlpha points out Alex’s circumstances put them in a position where taking things to court wasn’t out of the question. Filing false DMCAs as Alex Mauer appeared to be doing is illegal and considered perjury in the US. Sid concludes by directing people’s attention to an email address provided by Imagos, to serve as a point of contact for parties affected by Alex’s actions. They stated the company was willing to provide Mauer’s contract to those who wanted it (to make the DMCA counterclaim process go easier). We’d get more information on the 24th with SidAlpha’s An update on the Alex Mauer DMCA Wave follow-up. The situation had since caught the eye of TotalBiscuit personally, who threw his top hat into the ring when it came to assisting people with sorting out this DMCA mess. The massive audience his channel has at its disposal meant the Alex Mauer situation received a lot more attention to the public eye. At the time of writing this, the video he made, Alex Mauer’s Copyright Claim Abuse, has over 300,000 views. If you listen to TB in this one he sounds reluctant to be even doing it in the first place. From the outset he lays out his intention: abuse of the YouTube DMCA takedown system shouldn’t be normalized under any circumstances, given the difficulty involved for smaller channels to get any sort of remedy in these sorts of scenarios. Bottom line? TB signal boosted SidAlpha’s findings. The difference with his take on the situation was he pointed out Alex Mauer’s actions were intentional. TotalBiscuit made the conscious effort to separate Alex Mauer and Imagos Softworks as different parties, and reiterated the responsibility for frivolous DMCA takedowns fell on the former. Not the latter. Biscuit mentions YouTube’s implementation of the DMCA system is as a guideline, and not entirely forced with the same consequences as the actual law. To him, while it was unclear who was “right” and “wrong” in the battle between Mauer and Imagos Softworks, there was a clear display of unethical behavior when it came to how Alex Mauer issued these DMCAs. At the end of TB’s video, he offered direct assistance to the YouTube channels impacted in this erratic take-down attack. [Let’s jump back to Sid’s video.] Sid goes on to affirm that Mauer does not have any leg to stand on, making mention of copyright lawyer Leonard French’s analysis of the situation confirming this to be the case. This is what Alex had to say in light of how the situation was looking at the time: Mauer was expanding their attack radius, now including Death Road to Canada in their DMCA maelstrom. SidAlpha was mailed a copy of the Cease & Desist letter Mauer sent to Turner Broadcasting (sent via Alex themselves), alleging the broadcasting company also engaged in copyright infringement. Alex was apparently going after “DUCK GAME Live Quacktion Trailer” videos too because they had done work for that as well. Mauer had resorted to selling their music on Bandcamp for the sum of $1000. Alex had also claimed to be forced to work as a lawyer in a statement they gave to a YouTuber named Jupiter Hadley. SidAlpha brings up Leonard French again, revealing he’s licensed in the same state Alex Mauer resides. Given the scope of the damages Mauer was causing with their DMCA kamikazes to a number of YouTubers, Sid suggests a GoFundMe to raise funds on French’s behalf so he could pursue this was definitely possible. SidAlpha says Alex was trying to solicit documentation from other YouTubers in order to get them tossed into the ongoing dispute between them and Imagos. This had evolved into a battle of its own. On the 25th SidAlpha released UPDATE: Alex Mauer list of DMCA strikes. SidAlpha reveals TemmiePlays (a victim of Mauer’s DMCA frenzy) had emailed him. According to Temmie, Alex was forwarding emails that other people were sending Mauer. For some bizarre reason. The most recent one was the topic of interest for SidAlpha’s video. Mauer wrote the following: Let me know if I missed any videos. In this list the X’s are ones that are already down, and the dots are videos I reported but YouTube is giving some kind of strange delay as if it certain Youtubers are being treated better than others by YouTube’s algorithms. Any videos which do not contain my music or sound effects are safe. Like I asked on the discussion, I have no idea why the game is currently offline considering they supposedly removed all of my music and sound effects. I’ve been trying to get in touch with the devs and no one will answer the very basic question: Why is the game still offline? Attached to this email sent, is a PDF listing all of Mauer’s DMCA victims so far. Over 70 strikes had been recorded by this point. (There’s more direct proof of Alex Mauer keeping a list of the channels they targeted, from Mauer themselves on their Twitter account. Why? “I recorded the channel URLs for reference. I will disclose once the goal is achieved,” Mauer says. I have more than one “end game,” they tweeted.) The only words in response SidAlpha could muster were “utter madness” when describing his opinion about how things were unfolding. Sid questioned Mauer’s state of mind and mental health in light of this new development. TotalBiscuit had the means of speeding up the DMCA counterclaim process and was in the middle of doing so by this point. After talking about this, SidAlpha had to also clarify about something going on with Lindsey of Imagos Softworks. After directing people to her email address, Lindsey recieved a steady flow of angry emails from people who got the wrong impression that she was somehow responsible for the DMCAs that were running amuck on YouTube. The 26th is a bit of a break. Jim Sterling would give his two cents on the matter. He ended up making a reupload because there was a harassment issue that arose from a particular segment of footage he used originally. If you wanted to catch up with everything so far, The Know put out a video that not only summarized the DMCA situation pretty well, but the earlier story that Don Thacker talked about too. By the 27th, things were getting dramatic. SidAlpha took to Twitlonger to share some disturbing news: At 6:55 this morning Alex Mauer sent me an email merely containing a screen cap of her phone showing the suicide prevention hotline. I am extremely worried that given her increasingly erratic behavior over the last few days that the worst might happen. If anyone knows her personally, please check in on her. But of course, the show must go on. The videos were going to continue as long as there were new developments to talk about. For the time being. SidAlpha released a lengthier update titled Alex Mauer: more on the DMCA Front Lines. According to him, Mauer was continuing their unusual routine of forwarding emails YouTubers had sent them, onward to other YouTubers. Sid’s concerns about Alex’s mental state had deepened. Sid himself was receiving numerous emails from Mauer. One of these items was a letter from the Hyper RPG Twitch channel. The group was hit with a 24-hour ban for covering the Starr Mazer and Mauer situation back in 2016. The timing of the incident was abysmal, impacting the site’s output during the time of the E3 conferences. Not being able to cover any of that news made a huge dent in Hyper RPG’s overall income for that period of time. Sid got in contact with them directly to brief them about the ordeal, and Hyper RPG’s Zack replied they were working with Twitch and Imagos to sort that strike out. Next, SidAlpha and TotalBiscuit both were forwarded a message from Mauer that shows Alex pleading to ex-Penny Arcade staffer Robert Khoo for assistance. Sid points out that Mauer was trying to paint the situation as if these YouTubers were directly linked to the fight between them and Imagos, rather than a separate conflict. When SidAlpha asked Alex for their reasoning when it came to this seemingly random email forwarding, Mauer replied by stating: You’re supposed to realize that Imagos Softworks isn’t even a registered company, which is not legal in the State of Washington. Neither is not sending 1099 forms to contractors. The emails of people who are owed money by Imagos are there for you to verify the story. I was giving you a chance to break a story, idiot. These documents are supposed to speak for themselves, and you were not smart enough to be the first one to figure it out. I worked with Penny Arcade. Yes, that is really Robert Khoo, and if anything continues as it has been he may not help me. I am willing to lose the business contact in this document leaking war. You assume that I have no idea what I’m talking about when it comes to business. Go ahead and lose your opportunity. Don Thacker is a con artist, and you are helping him. To put it another way – the “logic” by Mauer was they were hoping SidAlpha would come to some sort of epiphany and assist Alex in their supposed plight. After that, SidAlpha received a letter written by Mauer’s lawyer. It’s unsigned because it was unfinished and never gave permission for the draft to be sent. (When someone asked why Alex was using a document dated back from March 2017, they said “It’s not outdated. It is applicable against Leonard French’s current argument that everyone is believing. Imagos has not changed strategy”) Sid spends the next few minutes just speaking his thoughts about Mauer aloud. He had no idea what the game plan was for Alex anymore. If things hadn’t been considered “off the rails” already, they certainly were now. Sid expresses astonishment at how simple it was for him to google Imagos Softworks business license and prove their legitimacy, thus showing how off-kilter Mauer’s statements were. SidAlpha confirms Leonard French was going to represent Imagos Softworks in court against Alex Mauer. On top of that, DMCA counter-claims for this situation were reportedly happening on their own without even needing YouTuber input anymore. Lastly, SidAlpha emphasizes to the public that they shouldn’t harass anyone. He points out that Alex Mauer was openly taking advantage of this angle in an effort to make themselves look like the victim in this controversy. This part of the video gets extended attention as Alex was having a public meltdown on the Steam forums: I reached out to TB and that mother ♥♥♥♥er didn’t give two ♥♥♥♥♥ about me so ♥♥♥♥ you Annabella. I am getting death threats and now Leonard French is representing Imagos. I was trying to hire Leonard and he decided to politically choose a client to further his own cause. The world is a♥♥♥♥♥♥place where you can work insanely hard for your dream and someone can steal it from you. Then when you call them out on it they still win anyway. So ♥♥♥♥ you Annabella. Later statements by Mauer sound furious and disjointed. “If there was a way to DMCA punch you in the face through my computer screen I would,” they commented. Alex believed the DMCA granted them direct control over who can use their music on an individual basis. In another comment, Alex alludes to the Imagos Softworks effort to assist YouTubers by giving them proof of Mauer’s contract. Alex says their agitation (at the moment, anyway) was that what she referred to as a “former client” had circulated their contact info, a *redacted* SSN, and Mauer’s written signature. They speculated internet trolls were going to do that and abuse it for nefarious purposes. Flirting with the idea of buying a gun, Alex says they might as well arm themselves to respond to anyone who shows up at their house. Then came Alex Mauer DMCA Update: Imagos gets litigious on the 27th. SidAlpha explains that a YouTuber named Musical Antihero had crossed paths with Mauer. Reaching out to Alex to get a statement about the current situation, and managed to have a civil conversation. In spite of this, Mauer would end up DMCAing Anti Hero’s video going over this discussion. SidAlpha points out that the entirety of the piece had Anti Hero sitting at a desk and filming himself just talking to the camera, there wasn’t any of Alex Mauer’s music involved whatsoever. When it comes to the conversation between Mauer and Anti Hero, you can read it in full here. SidAlpha managed to get an explanation from Mauer as to their reasoning for doing this: “He used an old photograph from before my gender transition in his video. It’s an EXTREMELY sensitive issue for trans people. I asked him to take it down and he said he would. Over 12 hours later it was still up, so I decided to report it. The photo came from my camera and I technically own the copyright.” Mauer goes on to tell Sid that it differed from the DMCA notifications that they were doleing out for videos using their music, with YouTube defining it as a “strike” because of visual copyrights (this appears to be Alex’s personal conclusion on it, may or may not be true). We come to find out by this point that Mauer has a DMCA list of over 100 videos they targeted. Mauer notes that they believed YouTube’s 3 strike rule was a myth, as they had since targeted channels with reports exceeding that number. Totalbiscuit would respond in the comments section clarifying how YouTube’s system actually worked. Sid backs up this point in his video by showing the DMCA notification Chip Music Chronicle got after Mauer reported five videos on that channel. The second piece of news that came to light was Don Thacker of Imagos Softworks deciding to respond to Mauer via the courts. “We have become represented by Leonard French in this case and I intend to litigate,” he told Sid. “I am seeking absolutely no damages in this action, and am seeking only a court ordered establishment of our clearly defined rights chain and, subsequently, the place in that chain for youtubers who have been affected.” Continued: “This most recent action, however, while absolutely not the first aggressive act from Alex toward myself, Imagos or our properties, has integrated content creators and we cannot abide this.” On the 28th things got dramatic for SidAlpha, as explained in his Alex Mauer issues Death Threat video. Mauer emailed SidAlpha various statements people sent them, that encouraged Alex to commit suicide. I looked into this a bit more, and was able to find some examples of these kinds of messages on Mauer’s Twitter page where they publicly shared them (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7). Then Alex sent this to Sid. There’s little room for interpretation here. We know this because SidAlpha explains while he wasn’t sure Alex wasn’t just forwarding what someone else said or not at first, there was a follow-up message making it clear this was a direct statement. “You are transphobic. Seriously. You think your fucking cis gender world is al [sic] that exists. You think I don’t own a photograph of myself? Then you’re a fucking robot. I want to kill myself but I have to kill youfirst,” Alex Mauer told SidAlpha. On Sid’s subreddit he goes over everything Mauer says as well as stating his intent to protect his family from Mauer’s instability. In a follow-up later that day titled Alex Mauer: An update on the DMCA strikes and everything else, SidAlpha fleshes things out more. Pointing to a Twitlonger by Totalbiscuit, we get confirmation that YouTube gaming escalated all the DMCA counterclaims in this Mauer crisis, essentially meaning the staff themselves looked into it personally to approve. SidAlpha went to the cops over Mauer’s threat, but dismissed the legitimacy of it based on the grounds that Alex lives thousands of miles away from Sid. Basically things got too intense, and SidAlpha encouraged everyone to take a step back. They wanted to make sure nobody died from this situation. That evening, Alex Mauer threatened another round of strikes. This was after they threatened to go after @adultswimgames for a Jazzpunk commercial that Alex Mauer had done music for. On June 29th, a Alex Mauer gets help video would come out on SidAlpha’s channel detailing a sliver of hope to that effect. According to Sid, the clusterfuck of drama that was radiating out of this Alex Mauer dispute would be coming to an abrupt halt. Without going into specifics himself, SidAlpha using the phrase “getting the help she needs” when talking about what was going with Mauer. The damage done in Alex’s wake: over 100 people by this point with DMCAs, the C&D to Turner Broadcasting, and the diverse array of harassment and threats tossed around certainly caused a disruption in people’s routines. Alongside the legal ramifications, Sid expressed a need for consideration on personal reflection for those involved. He reports that the YouTube community was able to raise beyond the baseline asking amount from French’s GoFundMe campaign for legal expenses. We’d get some more answers about what exactly happened to Alex Mauer in a Twitlonger posted by TotalBiscuit. This will hopefully be the last time anyone needs to talk about this, but Leonard French informed everyone that last night, Alex Mauer has been taken into custody for her own safety and the safety of others. She had been utilizing information gathered from counterclaims to her dmcas to email, call and threaten some of the channels involved and had yesterday attempted to issue a claim through Youtubes Legal Support department declaring my video illegal, due to alleged harassment she had received as a result of it. When YouTube replied asking which law the video violated and how, she replied saying that all the proof they needed was on her twitter and that YouTube would be personally responsible for attacks on the transgender community and that she would begin issuing death threats as she chose, because the “police had told her the people threatening her were exercising their first amendment rights”. In the paragraphs that followed, TotalBiscuit assures everyone there was no incitement or call to action, nor was the factor of Alex Mauer being transgender even mentioned. The only point that became involved was after Mauer made repeated mentions of it online as some of defense in response. TotalBiscuit said Mauer’s acts were possibly libelous (at least that’s what he thought personally), but would not pursue a litigatory recourse as it would complicate what he called a “troubled” individual even further. The wrap-up of it has TotalBiscuit expressing sadness towards how the Alex Mauer ordeal was turning out. That he hoped to be wrong when he saw these bizarre and strange posts Mauer was making and diagnosed the source of the problem as mental issues. Jim Sterling made a Jimquisition episode expanding on his thoughts about the Alex Mauer matter. Going for the angle that YouTube itself kept its head buried in the sand, Sterling says for all the noise and chaos that Mauer was unleashing in this DMCA barrage, the folks over at Google were mum on the subject. The “guilty until proven inncoent” system meant that YouTube channels targeted by Alex Mauer were victim to these strikes guaranteed. The power was completely in Alex’s hands, as it was clear that these claims were automatically processed and not reviewed by an actual human being at first. Sterling urged a change. YouTube needed to make a burden of proof necessary on the part of those making DMCA takedowns before following through with them. July 3rd, 2017. SidAlpha comes back with a Alex Mauer Returns video. Sid says he was vague about what happened to Alex Mauer previously out of respect to their privacy and the privacy of Mauer’s family. But now, Sid reveals that Alex’s behavior (sending death threats to people, bizarre emails) resulted in them being placed on a 302 psychiatric hold. Committed against their will. After being evaluated, Alex Mauer was released. They released a statement. To all, I just wanted to let the media know that the video by Leonard French that claims I received “the help that I need” was complete BS. My ex-wife who I have not seen in months filed a 302 against me, and the police forced me out of my house in handcuffs. I explained to them that I already reported the death threats against me to the police and was told it was freedom of speech to make death threats. The cops forced me into a hospitalization against my will. The first thing that happened at the hospital was that they told me I wasn’t a girl, and gave me a wrist band that said I was male. Next, they took away my female clothing and forced me to wear disposable scrubs. The next day they transported me in an ambulance to a different facility where they did a full strip search of me. At this facility, they asked me many evasive questions including how many sexual partners I’ve had and at what age I was when I had my first sexual encounter. The police and crisis workers had completely ignored my story about having been told it’s my freedom of speech to use hate speech. The doctor I saw at the 2nd facility understood the story and said “because there is no furtherance of the threat” it’s fine. I was released as immediately as possible. The entire period of time having been away from my house was 5 days. No one in my family showed me any support what so ever. This incidence has lead to me decided to no longer have any communication with anyone in my family at all, because they sided with my opposition. Keep an eye out for the next big move. It should be coming soon. ~Alex Mauer Mauer later forwarded an email showing how things were going on the Turner Broadcasting front. Generally speaking, SidAlpha seemed unphased by this move. July 4th. Alex Mauer threatens a 2nd wave of DMCA strikes comes out on SidAlpha’s channel. Sid reveals that Alex Mauer was moving forward with another round of DMCA attacks, as foreshadowed by them previously on social media. Back on the 29th of June, Alex made a comment saying they DMCA’ed River City Ransom. However it didn’t go as planned, as Valve gives more scrutiny when it comes to these sorts of claims. Attached is a photo of the response Valve gave Mauer, as well as Alex’s and Sid’s replies. It’s worth pointing that this also led to Mauer threatening a River City Ransom developer of Conatus, Daniel Crenna. Daniel, There is a hiccup in the Valve DMCA process as you can see in these emails. RCRU would already be offline if the system was working correctly. Dawn Dempsey, the Valve representative, does not believe that I am one of the composers and is preventing me from doing something that is my right. I suggest that Conatus take the game down before Dawn does. I will not stop trying to find a way to get this game taken down until it is down. You need to remove my music from the game, NOW! ~Alex Mauer On top of that, Alex Mauer was vying to take down their music from Bandcamp. SidAlpha explains that while Alex Mauer seemed to be doubling down on their attacks, the defense seemed unphased. July 7th, SidAlpha releases Alex Mauer gets served. Mauer was continuing to forward emails about what they were doing to Sid and other YouTubers. They were trying to continue their DMCA bonanza, but YouTube was starting to take notice of this particular situation. Alex was sent this by YouTube. The videos in Mauer’s crosshairs were still up at the time of Sid’s video. Alex was starting to go after River City Ransom Underground videos, and forwarded Sid a letter they sent to Conatus that goes into the thought process behind this. Conatus, I have contacted Daniel Crenna and Rich Vreeland multiple times in the past week explaining that Conatus never secured my signature on any paperwork relating to River City Ransom Underground. Conatus does not have my permission to keep using the soundtrack, and I did compose at least 1/3 of the music. What Conatus needs to do is take the game offline with Steam immediately, and behin the process of removing my contributions to the soundtrack. This will be difficult, because my work appears in nearly every song in the game. Rich and Dino (the other composers) have all of the original files, including versions of some songs from before I contributed to them, and should be able to immediately start producing a version of the soundtrack that does not contain my music. The game must remain offline until the soundtrack is replaced. The failure to respond to my emails will result in further DMCA strikes on RCRU YouTube videos. I need an immediate response to assess what legal actions to take next. ~ Alex Mauer I’m just going to take the time to emphasize. Alex Mauer wanted the developers to take their video game down and redo all of the musical scoring for it (basically from scratch). Alex pressured the developers by threatening to take down YouTube videos via DMCA if they didn’t immediately comply with Mauer’s demands. Leonard French was able to serve Mauer with an initial court summons, and it came to Sid’s attention that Alex was going to be representing themselves in that regard. There was an effort to try and negotiate the matter between each other directly beforehand. Sid notes that at least one YouTube channel was completely decimated as a result of Alex Mauer’s efforts at this point in time. Also on the 7th, Alex Mauer The DMCA Reversal is released by SidAlpha. Sid opens up by expressing some optimism that Alex’s tirade on the YouTube website was coming to an end. “A bunch of successful counter-claims for channels affected by the Starr Mazer DSP thing just went through all at once. For those asking whether or not this is YT intervening, I don’t have a solid answer for you on that. Due to batch nature, it is possible,” Totalbiscuit tweeted in relation to this. We see this email that Mauer sent to Musical Anti Hero. Sid takes the time to note all of the infractions that Mauer has committed against human decency up to this point. including threatening his own Youtube channel because he showed an image of Mauer’s birth certificate on screen. He shows it again just to make sure we’d all be on the same page in understanding what he’s referring to. Sid clarifies that many pieces of identifying information were redacted, and the point behind doing so in the first place was proving what Alex Mauer’s middle name (Thomas) legally was. While revisiting the death threat Mauer made against Sid, we see that Leonard French was also threatened by Alex. (it wasn’t the first time that happened.) SidAlpha spends the second half of the video going over the situation once more. He admits to covering the story too much over the past few weeks, and explains that it hit him personally to see these smaller YouTuber channels hit with DMCA strikes and that they would have had no means of remedy or direction on hand on their own accord. July 11th, SidAlpha comes back with Alex Mauer DMCA strikes continue. This is despite him directly saying in the last video that the DMCA problem seemed to be over. We learn that the reasoning for Alex Mauer’s reversal of DMCA strikes was only so they could be refiled in a way that they’d be counted in YouTube’s system separately. Basically, when Mauer filed originally, they did it in batches. The way YouTube’s system works means all of the DMCAs filed on a particular channel at once, would only qualify as one strike overall. “As far as I understand, the channels which are being targeted for takedown are in check for one more strike on each.” tweeted Alex apathetically. Naturally this caused a heightened sense of fear in the YouTube community. As they were witnessing someone who, that very day, went after DisasterPeace’s Bandcamp account because of the “Ram Son” album which had Alex Mauer’s collaboration work within it. Mauer wasn’t afraid of burning any bridge down. “Some of the 3rd wave DMCAs are being blocked by previous counter-claims. The Sid Alpha DMCA is currently blocked by argument of ‘fair use’,” Mauer said in a tweet. In a follow-up after that Alex said they were making a concentrated effort to “push thru” with one for him. Sid was concerned that Mauer was feeding off the media attention they were generating, and TotalBiscuit agreed. To the extent that they desired Sid not post another video about the subject out of concern it would exacerbate things further. But upon closer inspection, SidAlpha became convinced Mauer was doing this in a state of delusion that they were on “the right side of history,” so to speak. SidAlpha shares a DM convo someone had with Mauer, revealing that they were planning to speak with an actual lawyer at some point in the future. (Mauer would later note this is the 4th lawyer they were going for in regards to this case. Elsewhere on that subject, Alex says their previous lawyers condoned the DMCA manuever, but it “fell apart” after Mauer mentioned the Turner Broadcasting stuff.) All of this in mind, SidAlpha notes that Alex Mauer’s actions were showing the world how out of date DMCA laws were. On the 14th, SidAlpha uploads the Alex Mauer: Restraining Order and more DMCA strikes video. After a five minute self-reflection about the past month, SidAlpha says Alex Mauer finally hired an attorney that does copyright law. There was going to be a hearing about a temporary restraining order but Mauer’s lawyer requested a continuance so he could catch up with events beforehand. The hearing happened on the morning of the 13th, and was granted. It applies to the works of Imagos Softworks and Starr Mazer. Basically Alex Mauer was legally prohibited from issuing DMCA takedowns when it came to Starr Mazer, obligated to pullback on the notices that were already issued, and forbade from making threats against either Imagos Softworks or Leonard French. Mauer took out the rage on their lawyer, Frank. Alex claims that the lawyer kept asking them to lie. In text chats shared by Mauer, they accuse Frank of being responsible for an array of unsolicited emails that came in (somebody signed up to a bunch of websites with Mauer’s information). They ended up firing Frank because they sent Alex a formal letter instead of texting to them electronically. Accusing Frank of misgendering them, Alex demanded their lawyer resign. If you look at the email Alex Mauer sent to Leonard French, you can see this formal letter. Which states Mauer was also emailed in addition to the paper copy. Taking this to a whole ‘nother level, Alex Mauer tweeted the letter they sent the Judge in which they requested their lawyer be fired. I redacted the address and personal information out of this picture. Originally, Mauer did not. River City Ransom Underground related takedowns were not in play by this. The game itself had been taken down on Steam the day before. “We are aware that RCRU is down on Steam. We have contacted Valve’s copyright department, and will let you know when access is restored,” the developers tweeted. They invited people who were hit by this DMCA attack to reach out to the company for advice and help. The Know would put out a follow-up video going over these events. So if your brain is fried from all the information between now and the last video The Know did, you get an easy way to catch-up. By the 15th, SidAlpha got into a heated exchange with Mauer. While normally Alex is the one sharing these sorts of things, it was Sid himself who posted it to Twitter. It’s time to back up a bit and go over Leonard French’s side of the story here. Leonard French announced in the afternoon of June 27th that he was going to represent Imagos Softworks in their litigation with Alex Mauer, along with a GoFundMe to help raise funds for this legal back-n-forth with the help of the community. The full initial announcement can be read here, but as a basic excerpt: We hope that Alex pursues the help and assistance that she needs. Unfortunately, the copyright system in the United States has allowed her to assert rights that she does not actually own. And her assertion of those rights has caused Imagos and Don to lose credibility with many of the people and companies they do business with. This has resulted in Imagos and Don losing developers, financial support, potential and existing film clients, and that has further caused them all a great deal of stress. They have tried to handle the matter quietly so that Alex would have the best chance of improving. Alex has recently become very public about the matter. We have decided to pursue court action solely to adjudicate Imagos’ rights and to clear up any dispute with Alex. This is all in the hopes that the developers, including Don, can continue with their first love, development of the game. It is and always has been my understanding that Imagos owns valid copyrights on all their works for which Alex has issued takedowns. It is also my understanding and position that Alex has no right to issue takedowns for Imagos and related content. Imagos and Don have engaged me to pursue these legal rights as reasonably and appropriately as possible. It is our primary goal to establish Imagos’ rights and the community’s rights to publish Starr Mazer and Starr Mazer: DSP content. The GoFundMe funds go to an Escrow account specifically created for the expenses of this case. This is to cover filing fees, a process server, transcripts for depositions, travel expenses for Don Thacker as necessary, and other miscellaneous variables. Any funds leftover in the remainder afterward get donated to Penny Arcade’s Child’s Play charity. French forecasted anywhere from $10,000 to $25,000 as being the overall required amount for the proceedings. Leonard French made three videos on the subject of Alex Mauer. June 25th, Alex Mauer enforces contract by DMCA extortion: This is nearly two hours in length as it appears French gave his thoughts in a livestream. More off-the-cuff first impressions rather than edited prepared statements. From the get-go Leonard offered his skills to pursue this matter because it fit within his field of lawyer expertise. It was his impression that Mauer lived within the same area as him, making it easy to take action in the court system. While introducing the situation, Leonard makes it clear that Mauer’s use of the DMCA system in order to take down Starr Mazer DSP related videos was an inappropriate use of the system. French says Mauer would have needed an explicit copyright assignment in order to have at least some grounds in that respect, but Alex appeared to not have as such. Despite that, Mauer has asserted that they have the power to take down entire YouTube videos of Starr Mazer solely because of their music part within the game. Leonard says it appears Mauer’s rationale for doing so is hoping the outrage would cause Imagos Softworks to buckle under pressure and comply with whatever Alex is demanding. Going over the contract itself, Leonard points out that it doesn’t matter that it only says “Starr Mazer” on the first page (rather than Starr Mazer: DSP) because the SERVICES section of the contract dictates that Mauer’s work can be used however Imagos sees fit and as required. Highlighting the TERM section as important, it says that Mauer’s employment is not for any guaranteed period and Imagos had the right to discharge Alex at any time. When it comes to the payment obligation in these circumstances, Imagos is only subject to that if Mauer doesn’t breach the obligations. What’s also interesting is the agreement can be immediately suspended as a result of postponement or interference of the produciton as a result of “labor controversy,” as well. The main point of interest is the WORK FOR HIRE section, as it makes a blanket license of copyright be the property of Imagos Softworks and not Alex Mauer. Leonard points out that even if Alex Mauer owned the copyrights to their Starr Mazer music, they’d still not have the grounds to DMCA Let’s Play videos on YouTube. When it comes to the argument that if Imagos violated the contract and that Alex Mauer “must own” the copyright as a result? No. That’s not how it works. Producing something for a media show of some kind does not grant that creator the right to interfere with the show itself. A violation of contract does not automatically void a contract. Even if the potential for voiding a contract is possible, it’d need to be taken to court and offically recognized as such. DMCAs assert an assumed copyright on Alex Mauer’s part and take down YouTube videos, which in turn could impact the livelihood of the uploader depending on the size of the channel targeted. Title 17 Chapter 5 Section 512 of the U.S. Code deals with Limitations on liability relating to material online and comes into play with these sorts of matters. Subsection F details that any person who knowingly and materially misrepresents the material being infringed (or having it removed/disabled by mistake and misidentification) is responsible for the damages and costs accumulated as a result of making the copyright owner having to deal with sorting that out. A case that set precedent for this was the September 2015 Lenz v. Universal Music Corp case that happened in the United States Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals. Stephanie Lenz got a DMCA takedown from Universal Music Corporation because of a video she posted of her kids dancing to “Let’s Go Crazy” by Prince. Lenz claimed fair use and took Universal to court over the DMCA because of misrepresentation, with the ruling ending up being copyright holders must consider good faith of fair use before throwing down the DMCA hammer on people. On the Supreme Court level, there was certiorari denied meaning the case was looked at and did not merit further review. It says the courts see no further reason to look into it further – basically showing things are good the way they are. Lenz’s own attorney appealed this because they felt subjective fair use right wasn’t enough, and they wanted the courts to affirm objective fair use right specifically. What it boils down to is Alex Mauer having to prove to the court they made an effort to determine their genuine belief that their copyright was being violated, and not knowingly and willfully misrepresenting that when pursuing DMCA takedowns. Responding to Totalbiscuit’s statement that YouTube’s DMCA system uses the law only as a guideline and doesn’t actually represent the law itself, French argues it’s still an argument of misrepresentation that YouTube themselves would be liable for at the end of the day. When it comes to the argument that if Imagos violated the contract and that Alex Mauer “must own” the copyright as a result? Producing something for a media show of some kind does not grant that creator the right to interfere with the show itself. A violation of contract does not automatically void a contract. Even if the potential for voiding a contract is possible, it’d need to be taken to court and offically recognized as such. DMCAs assert an assumed copyright on Alex Mauer’s part and take down YouTube videos, which in turn could impact the livelihood of the uploader depending on the size of the channel targeted. Title 17 Chapter 5 Section 512 of the U.S. Code deals with Limitations on liability relating to material online and comes into play with these sorts of matters. Subsection F details that any person who knowingly and materially misrepresents the material being infringed (or having it removed/disabled by mistake and misidentification) is responsible for the damages and costs accumulated as a result of making the copyright owner having to deal with sorting that out. A case that set precedent for this was the September 2015 Lenz v. Universal Music Corp case that happened in the United States Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals. Stephanie Lenz got a DMCA takedown from Universal Music Corporation because of a video she posted of her kids dancing to “Let’s Go Crazy” by Prince. Lenz claimed fair use and took Universal to court over the DMCA because of misrepresentation, with the ruling ending up being copyright holders must consider good faith of fair use before throwing down the DMCA hammer on people. On the Supreme Court level, there was certiorari denied meaning the case was looked at and did not merit further review. It says the courts see no further reason to look into it further – basically showing things are good the way they are. Lenz’s own attorney appealed this because they felt subjective fair use right wasn’t enough, and they wanted the courts to affirm objective fair use right specifically. Responding to Totalbiscuit’s statement that YouTube’s DMCA system uses the law only as a guideline and doesn’t actually represent the law itself, French argues it’s still an argument of misrepresentation that YouTube themselves would be liable for at the end of the day. June 29th, Official: Imagos v. Alex Mauer – Week 1 – The Filing: A stressed out French tells us he took on the task of representing Imagos Softworks, and his expectations about what that work entailed. Alex Mauer began sending a series of “unhinged” messages that eventually evolved into straight up threats. “I was threatened with having my windows broken, my building set on fire… there were some colorful ones in there that I’ll leave out because I don’t want to encourage it,” he said. With that in mind, Leonard French thought it was his ethical duty to find Alex Mauer some help. He thought he had succeeded by the time of uploading this video. On a happier note, the GoFundMe campaign done to help fund French’s legal work was a smashing success. A complaint was going to be filed in the Allentown division of the Eastern district of Pennsylvania, primarily focusing on the DMCA takedowns Alex Mauer had issued and taking the steps to undo that wherever necessary. A court order was going to be pursued that’d stop Alex from doing these things any further. July 9th, Official: Imagos v. Alex Mauer – Week 2 – The Complaint: French tells us that the situation has become a lawsuit. Leonard shows us the amended complaint that was filed on July 7th. It was pretty much the same as the original complaint, with corrections made to the defendents name and also adding verification of Don Thacker as the Plantiff. French goes over a basic timeline of events of how this situation came to be in the first place, similar to what I’ve done in this piece here. When it came to the actual charges against Alex Mauer, there’d be several. The first of which would be Copyright Misrepresentation in regards to the (willful and knowing) illegitimate claims made by Mauer in regards to Starr Mazer and Starr Mazer: DSP, and is ignorant of the work-for-hire agreement that they are responsible for knowing, as well as being responsible for the damages caused by this controversy. The second count is a Breach of Contract. Imagos entered a work-for-hire agreement with Alex Mauer in March 2015, and that arrangement specifically requested Mauer keep confidential information a secret. They violated that and caused damages to the Plantiff that they are liable for as a result of their breach of contract. The third count dealt with Defamation per se. Mauer made public claims of ownership as well as public allegations of misconduct against the Plantiff, causing serious damage. The fourth count is for extortion/blackmail. Establishing that Mauer has publicly stated their actions are the byproduct of the contract dispute with Imagos, it’s further said that the Plantiffs went out of their way to resolve this matter with Alex over the past year. While Imagos doesn’t believe Mauer’s claims are legitimate, they attempted to settle in a show of good faith. Mauer made false claims to the property of the Plantiff, and any consent of obtaining property or rights to property was done so by wrongful use of force or the threat of force. In addition to that, Alex has made threats of serious harm to both the Plantiffs, as well as French. The Prayer for Relief (requests made to the court) includes a Temporary Restraining Order, a Preliminary Injunction in addition to a Permanent Injunction as it applies to the copyright claims made by Alex, an overall Declaratory Judgement establishing the Plantiff as legitimate owners of the copyrights in question, Judgements for the damages done by Alex, and whatever else deemed appropriate by the court. Leonard makes it clear that his approach to this situation was offering Alex Mauer an easy out. Alex Mauer refused. French goes on to state that the GoFundMe campaign goal went from $10,000 to $15,000 because the threats aspect of the situation was unexpected at the outset. He goes on to say if Alex really thought there was an issue here, they should have filed a lawsuit against Imagos when it came to the contract. While the previous section already went over the death threats that Leonard French recieved from Alex Mauer, it’s worth pointing out an additional caveat that unfolded. At one point, French used Mauer’s “dead name” in the court documents. This would later be fixed but not to Alex’s complete liking. It was apparently for that reason that Alex Mauer wanted to get their own lawyer and not have to represent themselves. This is where we are at. Conclusion Alex Mauer’s fall into insanity is one of the most tragic things in recent memory. Not just because of the DMCA attacks they did on the YouTube community, but because of the amount of outrage and disgust their actions have soured themselves in the public eye. Alex Mauer wasn’t a “bad person,” they just pushed themselves too far and lost control of their reality. Share this: Twitter Facebook |
No. 24 There’s a girl named Kiri-chan in Sootpolis city of Hoenn region. I wrote her message. I wrote most of the message that appears when she gives you berries, because that Kiri is a special character for me. Near the end of the game’s development, I asked to include her without letting many people know about it. Because… Kiri is the name of my daughter who was born in September. That’s why I came up with that message, with my hope for her. At that time, Pokemon Ruby and Sapphire was almost complete and we were mostly debugging the game, but there still were decisions to be made. And while I was beside my wife who was giving birth to my daughter, I would get mail on my mobile, such as, ‘The feature for yata-yata is going to be like this, OK?’ In many ways it was a tension-filled experience. The message you want to deliver will not arrive at its destination, and the message you didn’t mean to send ends up being delivered. It’s an interesting phenomenon, isn’t it? PS Time flies and my daughter is now 2 years old. So are Pokemon Ruby and Sapphire. See ya. |
The blockchain technology will be ready for mass implementation only in 3-4 years, Russia's Central Bank deputy chair Olga Skorobogatova believes. According to the official, despite the “exploding interest” to the distributed ledger last year, today “the situation and the rhetoric have changed” since regulators and companies “discovered many imperfections and risk zones,” reports Bankir.ru. “The myth of blockchain, that everything is ready for the transfer and it is already possible to reduce expenses and get rid of banks, has turned out to be but a myth. It is absolutely clear that it will take 3-4 years to work it out,” Skorobogatova said speaking at the international forum “Banks of Russia - XXI century”. Yet, the deputy chair of the Central Bank is certain that in the near future the practice of banking will radically change — account managers and cashiers will be replaced by automated systems, while people retain the intellectual element of work. “And it will probably be present not in banks, but in fintech companies, working alongside the banks. These changes will occur within 3-5 years,” Olga Skorobogatova predicts. “The understanding how banks relate to fintech is already here. Only 4-5 years ago everybody would say that there is no relation at all... Today, 65% of banks recognise fintech as a partner. 45% support cooperation, 43% consider it right to invest in fintech companies.” Skorobogatova noted that the regulator together with banks and the fintech companies discuss the possibility of creating a consortium to promote and develop innovations in the financial sector. “I also like the idea of an innovation hub allowing to examine technologies and evaluate them regarding the ways of regulation,” she added. The creation of the consortium will be discussed, in particular, at the Finopolis-2016 fintech forum to take place in the city of in Kazan on 13-14 October. The event is organised by the Bank of Russia and will focus, among all, on the use and regulation of blockchain. Olga Timirchinskaya |
For last couple of months I have been working on Employee Scheduling application that is fully written in ES2015 and ES2016 with Angular 1.x (if you want to know more about how to write apps with ES2015, Angular 1.x and JSPM check my blog post here) and came to the point where I had to start writing some unit tests. Currently I am running over 900 unit tests and in this post I gonna describe how I got running all these tests with ES2015, Angular 1.x, Karma, JSPM, Istanbul and Jasmine. Writing unit tests with ES2015 is really easy and in some cases you don't depend on angular-mocks at all as you only test vanilla JavaScript code. To give you some example let's have look how we can test authentication service written in ES2015 and Angular 1.x: authentication.js import { Service , Inject } from '../../ng-decorators' ; @ Service ({ serviceName : 'AuthenticationService' }) @ Inject ( 'AuthenticationResource' , 'TokenModel' ) class AuthenticationService { constructor ( AuthenticationResource , TokenModel ) { this . TokenModel = TokenModel ; this . AuthenticationResource = AuthenticationResource ; } logout () { return this . AuthenticationResource . logout (). then (() => { this . TokenModel . remove (); }); } } export default AuthenticationService ; NOTE: I am using ES2016 decorators in my code to avoid boilerplate code. If you want to know more about decorators read my blog post How to use ES2016 decorators to avoid Angular 1.x and ES2015 boilerplate code. In below test I do not need to inject any dependencies with Angular and instead I take advantage of ES2015 modules also I do not use $q promise instead I am using ES2015 promise and then I resolve these promises with tiny library called jasmine-async-sugar (we gonna talk about this library later on in this blog). authentication.spec.js 'use strict' ; import TokenModel from '../models/token.js' ; import AuthenticationResource from '../resources/authentication/authentication.js' ; import AuthenticationService from './authentication.js' ; describe ( 'AuthenticationService' , () => { let authenticationService , authenticationResource , tokenModel ; beforeEach (() => { tokenModel = new TokenModel (); authenticationResource = new AuthenticationResource (); }); itAsync ( 'should logout and remove token' , () => { spyOn ( authenticationResource , 'logout' ). and . returnValue ( Promise . resolve ()); spyOn ( tokenModel , 'remove' ); authenticationService = new AuthenticationService ( authenticationResource , tokenModel ); return authenticationService . logout (). then (() => { expect ( authenticationResource . logout ). toHaveBeenCalled (); expect ( tokenModel . remove ). toHaveBeenCalled (); }); }); }); As I mentioned early I have written over 900 unit tests so if you want to see how to test config , directives , routes , components etc. then have look at Employee Scheduling project. Setting up Karma with JSPM To get running unit tests written in ES2015 we need to install extra libraries so let's install follow packages: npm install --save-dev jasmine-core phantomjs karma karma-jasmine karma-phantomjs-launcher karma-jspm jasmine-async-sugar 1. We start with basic settings where we add frameworks block: 'use strict' ; module . exports = function ( config ) { config . set ({ frameworks : [ 'jspm' , 'jasmine' ], }); }; 2. We use PhantomJS as our headless test browser so we need to add polyfill to fix issue with Function.bind() that is not supported by PhantomJS 1.x. The bind() function is use by SystemJS and it might be use in other libraries so it is good idea to include this polyfill with PhantomJS 1.x. I also like to use tiny jasmine-async-sugar library that enhance testing of async (promise) functionality in Angular 1.X applications. To give you quick taste have look on the follow code: it ( 'tests async functionality in standard way' , ( done ) => { AsyncService . resolveAsync () . then ( function ( response ) { expect ( response ). toBe ( 'response' ); done (); }); $rootScope . $digest (); }); and here is same code with jasmine-async-sugar library where we don't need to use angular $rootScope : itAsync ( 'tests async functionality without "done", manual "$rootScope.$digest" triggering' , () => { return AsyncService . resolveAsync () . then ( function ( response ) { expect ( response ). toBe ( 'response' ); }); }); Add below files block to karma.conf.js file: files : [ 'node_modules/karma-babel-preprocessor/node_modules/babel-core/browser-polyfill.js' , 'node_modules/jasmine-async-sugar/jasmine-async-sugar.js' ] TIP: I stopped using Angular $q promise in my application, test code and instead I am using ES2015 promise. 3. In below lines we configure karma-jspm . The loadFiles configuration tells karma-jspm which files should be dynamically loaded via SystemJS before the tests run. The serveFiles configuration will only load these files when and if the loadFiles files require them. The src/app/app.js is the main file that bootstrap angular app and includes all app sub-modules. jspm : { config : 'jspm.conf.js' , loadFiles : [ 'src/app/app.js' , 'src/app/**/*.spec.js' ], serveFiles : [ 'test/helpers/**/*.js' , 'src/app/**/*.+(js|html|css|json)' ] } TIP: I saw a few times that people try only load test files in loadFiles and then application files in serveFiles and I would not recommend this if you are planning to generate coverage thresholds for your code. If you gonna load only test files in loadFiles then coverage thresholds will be generate only for these files e.g.: you have app files A.js, B.js, C.js and you write test only for file A.spec.js then you get only coverage for file A.js with 100% coverage which is incorrect from application point of view because I would expect coverage under 100% as files B.js and C.js haven't been tested. This can be easily missed in large applications when some developer might forgot to write test. Depends on your application file structure you might see 404 error when you run your test. To fix this error you need to proxy your paths to /base/ prefix e.g.: proxies : { '/test/' : '/base/test/' , '/src/app/' : '/base/src/app/' , '/jspm_packages/' : '/base/jspm_packages/' } NOTE: This is bug in karma-jspm and it might be fix in the future so you will not need to proxy anything. 4. The karma.conf.js file is available here and you should be able to run your ES2015 code with JSPM now. If you want to know how to run coverage for ES2015 code then just continue reading. Setting up coverage for ES2015 code To get running coverage for ES2015 code we need to install extra libraries so let's install follow packages: npm install --save-dev karma-coverage karma-babel-preprocessor isparta The karma-babel-preprocessor is transpiling ES2015 to ES5 code with babel since the coverage reporter throws error on ES6 syntax and the isparta is a instrumenter code coverage tool for ES2015 using babel. preprocessors : { 'src/**/!(*.spec|*.mock|*-mock|*.e2e|*.po|*.test).js' : [ 'babel' , 'coverage' ] }, babelPreprocessor : { options : { stage : 1 , sourceMap : 'inline' } }, coverageReporter : { instrumenters : { isparta : require ( 'isparta' ) }, instrumenter : { 'src/**/*.js' : 'isparta' }, dir : 'test-reports/coverage/' , reporters : [ { type : 'html' }, { type : 'text-summary' } ] } TIP: Make sure you don't forget include sourceMap: 'inline' to babel options otherwise you might see error like this [TypeError: Cannot read property 'text' of undefined] . After you run tests the coverage reports can be found in the test-reports/coverage/ folder. The ES2015 coverage report for Employee Scheduling project is available here. At the time of writing this blog there are a few issues with ES2015 coverage so let's have look on these issues and how to fix them. Issue 1 The current karma-coverage is only showing ES5 code and not ES2015 as you would expect so to fix this problem we need to use a fork version that was created by Douglas Duteil. "karma-coverage": "douglasduteil/karma-coverage#next" My understanding is that Douglas already merged his changes to origin karma-coverage repo and from this comment it should be clear that there is no need for the fork anymore however I tried karma-coverage v0.5.x and I was not able to get ES2015 output. I have opened issue regarding to this problem. Issue 2 When you generate ES2015 coverage reports you might see error like this: ERROR [ coverage]: [ TypeError: Cannot read property 'text' of undefined] TypeError: Cannot read property 'text' of undefined This is an issue with Istanbul and source maps so to fix this problem we need use Istanbul branch that has fix for this issue: "istanbul": "gotwarlost/istanbul.git#source-map", Conclusion |
Let's make charging easier! ZNAPS is a simple yet perfect solution to prevent frayed charging cables, tripping over cable resulting in smashed phones, pointless fiddling to plug in cable in the dark, water damage through charging outlet, and more! This innovative magnetic charging adapter will make your life just a bit more convenient. Znaps is a new Kickstarter project that aims to make connecting a Lightning cable to your iPhone or iPad as simple as connecting a MagSafe charger to your MacBook. Znaps consists of a connector that plugs into the Lightning port on your iOS device, and an adapter for your Lightning cable that lets it connect to the port magnetically.With the Znaps Connector and Adapter, a Lightning cable can snap onto your device using magnets, making it quicker to connect and charge an iPad or iPhone. There's also a version for devices that use Micro-USB.Znaps is small enough that it will work with a wide variety of custom iPhone cases that leave the Lightning port exposed, and as the project's creators point out, it can cut down on the hassle of fumbling to get a Lightning cable plugged into an iPhone or an iPad.Znaps works for both charging and syncing, and a small LED light on the adapter will light up when a device is being charged. The magnetic field it uses is "negligibly small" according to the project's creators, and will not cause damage to the internal components of the iPhone. It also does not enhance or impede charging times.A Znaps Connector and Adapter for Lightning or Micro-USB can be obtained for a pledge of $11 Canadian , or just under $9. There are also several other tiers available at different price points for purchasing multiple Znaps.Znaps are projected to ship in late November of 2015, but as most of us have experienced on Kickstarter, there are projects that miss shipping estimates by months, especially when orders exceed expectations, so prospective purchasers should keep that in mind when backing this project. |
Do You Fear What I Fear? Christmas was one of the best things about being a kid. There is nothing quite like the anticipation leading up to Christmas morning. And even now, having achieved geezerhood, I am still a complete sucker for the big day. Every year a real tree, the lights, sorting through and selecting from the decades and decades of collected ornaments, the gifts, and hopefully a tree skirt free of cat vomit. I put on It’s a Wonderful Life, wife by my side, hopefully at least one of my Bing’s yard was full of tinfoil flowers, brightly colored and spinning in the morning sunlight. The house was a little pink cake of a place, with white trim and nodding lilies. It was a place where a kindly old woman would invite a child in for gingerbread cookies, lock him in a cage, fatten him for weeks, and finally stick him in the oven. It was the House of Sleep. “Everyone lives in two worlds,” Maggie said, speaking in an absent-minded way while she studied her letters. “There’s the real world, with all its annoying facts and rules. In the real world there are things that are true and things that aren’t. Mostly the real world s-s-s-suh-sucks. But everyone also lives in the world inside their own head. An inscape, a world of thought. In a world made of thought—in an inscape--every idea is a fact. Emotions are as real as gravity. Dreams are as powerful as history. Creative people, like writers, and Henry Rollins, spend a lot of their time hanging out in their thoughtworld. S-s-strong creatives, though, can use a knife to cut the stitches between the two worlds, can bring them together. Your bike. My tiles. Those are our knives.” Christmas was one of the best things about being a kid. There is nothing quite like the anticipation leading up to Christmas morning. And even now, having achieved geezerhood, I am still a complete sucker for the big day. Every year a real tree, the lights, sorting through and selecting from the decades and decades of collected ornaments, the gifts, and hopefully a tree skirt free of cat vomit. I put on, wife by my side, hopefully at least one of my now-grown kids at hand, and keep the tissues handy. I find it completely heartwarming. One must wonder, however, how Christmas might have been celebrated in the King household. I suppose it is possible that Dad left his darker impulses by his keyboard. Did they share hot chocolate like the rest of us, or maybe add bits of human flesh instead of marshmallows. Hot toddy made with blood from a guy named Todd? Brownies made with under-age Girl Scouts? Did their whipped cream scream? Well, probably not, but onewonder., the author’s latest tale from the dark side, takes a beloved annual celebration and gives it the special family treatment. If you like your Christmas trees decorated with sparkling abominations, your Santa more by way of an oversized, but underfed mortician, and your Santa’s special elf a rapist psycho-killer, then this is the book you will want to find frightening off the other packages under your tree next Christmas.Joseph Hillstrom King, underJoe Hill, is a man who not only would be King, he already is one. He has been pretty busy the last few years, writing up a storm, 20th Century Ghosts Heart-Shaped Box , and Horns , establishing himself as a respected, successful writer of horror fiction, picking up at least eleven literary awards to date. Although his career has been relatively brief, he has, with, grown up to a level where he can glare, eye-to-eye, with the best of contemporary horror writers, even that guy across the table at Christmas dinner.is a work of impressive creativity, and one that may give you many a sleepless night, so powerful are some of the images he has created. But the core of the book is Victoria McQueen, Vic, The Brat. And how fitting that a King makes his heroine a queen. Applying a familiar horror-tale trope, the young female hero, we are introduced to Vic as an eight-year-old. This kid loves her bike. (like another McQueen, of the Steve variety, in The Great Escape) But then she has good reason to. It takes her where sheto go, whether that happens to be around the block or across a magically bespoke bridge that takes her across geography, wormhole style. It comes in handy when she desperately wants to locate, say, a lost necklace that figures in her parents latest screaming match, opening for her a personalto take her to the proper destination. It takes her home again, of course. But it exacts a toll. And the journey through it can be harrowing.Countering this adorable heroine is Charlie Manx.so adorable. This definitely not so goodtime Charlie abducts children to his special place, Christmasland, taking advantage of their unhappiness to seduce them with a King-family version of Neverland. What if it were Christmas every day? Charlie’s number one supporter is Bing Partridge. Bing’s latest accomplishment was the murder of his parents, but not before engaging in unspeakable behavior of another sort. He may be dreaming of Christmas but it is more likely to be fright than white, and there are fouler things than partridges in the trees he favors. He lives, fittingly on Bloch Lane, named, we suspect, for the author of. Once teamed up with Charlie, he makes use of his access to a particular sort of gas, sevoflurane, to subdue his victims. The stuff smells like gingerbread.You won’t find Christmasland on any map, but it exists. Charley drives a 1938 Rolls Royce Wraith. Not exactly a sleigh, but useful for transporting Charley and his goodies here and there. Actually, it is more a case of him bringing the children to his dubious gifts than it is of the gifts being brought to the children. Charlie has been snatching children for a long time. So we have the goodie and we have the baddies.Vic becomes that most horrifying of nightmares, an adolescent. And in a fit of rage against her divorced parents goes looking for trouble. Before you can say “Feliz Navidead,” the Brat finds herself riding into a Charlie lair, the cutely named “Sleigh House.” A bleak house indeed, as you might guess, and Vic has to resort to some extreme measures to make good her escape. Of course, once she does she earns a permanent place on Charlie’slist. One positive that comes out of this ordeal is that when Vic is fleeing Charlie she is picked up on the highway by a passing biker, the large, leather-clad Lou Carmody. Classic meet-cute and oh, someone is trying to kill me.It turns out that Vic and her nemesis are not the only ones with a certain gift. When Vic crosses her Shorter Way Bridge to the place of business of Maggie Leigh (second possible Psycho reference?) she meets another person with a special talent, one particularly suited to a librarian. It’s not heaven, though. It’s Iowa. Later Vic’s dad joins up and there is some help from beyond the grave as well. Team Charlie has a lot of young recruits, too. One might be forgiven at times for thinking that he might be giving new meaning to the term “cold calls” as he has his maybe-dead minions manning (would that be childing?) the phones to harass our hero.The King family seems to have figured out how to make us care for their heroes, and Hill has done a nice job of that here. Vic is sympathetic, not just for her courage and determination, but for her failings as well. And there is plenty of failing to go around here, but also generous doses of redemption.And there is no shortage of action. It all builds to a very explosive climax. There are occasional bits of fun in here as well. Hill engages in a joke having to do with Checkhov’s gun that is sure to bring a smile. And he takes a cutesy swipe at Henry Rollins, in the quote above. No idea if this is a friendly poke, or a straight up dig.There are some soft spots as well. Charlie is a pretty bad sort. Not enough attention is addressed to looking at how he came to be that way. It might have helped make him more understandable, if not sympathetic, which is always more interesting than the straight up boogie man. Bing is boogie man enough, despite his less than imposing façade, his child-like insecurity. And what is it that gives certain objects their magical properties? Never addressed. Hill takes on the somewhat softball difference in value between happiness and fun, which certainly has relevance to our consumer culture, but is far from novel.Still and all, this is top notch horror, signaling not necessarily that a King is born, but that one has arrived and is ready to ascend to the throne.Happy Horrordays!=============================Hill put up a nice promo vid for the book on his site4/29/13 - The New York Times review by Janet MaslinIn Stephen King's 2013 release, Doctor Sleep , he offers at least two nods to. Thanks Pop.-----11/29/2017 - Saint Nicholas to Santa: The Surprising Origins of Mr. Claus - by Brian Handwerk-----12/13/2017 - Who Is Krampus? Explaining the Horrific Christmas Devil - by Tanya Basu-----12/21/2017 - Vintage Map Shows Santa's Journey Around the World - By Greg Miller – a kitschy 50’s Santa Map-----12/19/2017 - One Town's Fight to Save Their 40-Foot Yule Goat - by Sarah Gibbens – Yes, really, a Christmas goat12/21/2017 - This NY Times video by Matthew Salton is a trip - Santa is a Psychedelic Mushroom |
A Canadian government website claims that global warming is forcing Santa Claus to relocate his toy-making village to the South Pole. The Policy Horizons Canada website said last week that Santa signed an agreement with the “international community” to move his operation to the South Pole because of melting Arctic ice. “Santa’s relocation agreement marks the first time that the international community agrees on a common legal definition of climate change that includes refugees as corporations, as well as individuals,” the website said. "This deal is expected to lead to the deployment of a global climate change refugee visa system that in the near future could help to more easily relocate individuals and corporations facing the impacts of climate change.” The statement comes as part of a series of Christmas-themed blog posts about Canadian policy concerns, including global warming, the Daily Caller reported. Scientists recently warned that global warming could increase the amount of poverty and hardship in the world. Europe would also see a surge in “climate refugees,” according to a study. Experts have long warned that rising temperatures and extreme weather could increase the number of people in poor countries seeking refuge in richer, more temperate nations, but the phenomenon has previously been studied only at a small scale. The Associated Press contributed to this report. |
The following is a re-post from Mint News Blog’s sister site, Coin Update. The U.S. Mint unveiled the reverse designs for the 2018 America the Beautiful quarters on August 1 at the American Numismatics Association’s World’s Fair of Money in Denver. The national sites to be recognized in 2018 are Pictured Rocks National Lakeshore in Michigan, Apostle Islands National Lakeshore in Wisconsin, Voyageurs National Park in Minnesota, Cumberland Island National Seashore in Georgia, and Block Island National Wildlife Refuge in Rhode Island. Each quarter reverse in the series depicts a scenic representation of the park or historic site at the center, framed by a plain, raised, circular border on which the park name (or an abbreviated version of it) appears at the top, the state name and E PLURIBUS UNUM at lower left and lower right, respectively, and the date of issue below. The obverse of the 2018 quarters will continue to feature the 1932 portrait of George Washington by sculptor John Flanagan. Required obverse inscriptions are UNITED STATES OF AMERICA, LIBERTY, IN GOD WE TRUST, and QUARTER DOLLAR. 2018 marks the ninth year of the America the Beautiful Quarters Program, which was authorized by Public Law 110-456, the America’s Beautiful National Parks Quarter Dollar Coin Act of 2008. The act directs the Mint to design, mint, and issue quarter-dollar coins emblematic of a national park or other national sites in each state, the District of Columbia, and the five U.S. territories. In accordance with the act, the Mint issues the new quarters at the rate of five per year through 2020 in the order in which each honored site was first established. The final coin will be released in 2021. ❑ This post incorporates content from a press release courtesy of the U.S. Mint. Like this: Like Loading... |
Facebook…I have a Page…I will post a picture of a “Gay Yoda” I drew, if you go and Like the Legacy Control Facebook Fan Page. So..there must be some evil paramilitary baron dude fucking with me. I have tried and failed twice to download the Hawken Alpha. I am CRAVING this game (I know, and there isn’t even any loot in it). I even got some tech support from Brian (Editor of Control Freaks, and all around badass) and still no go. Seriously…fuck windows. I know I am going to get some hate for this, but having only ever had a mac, the Windows interface is so totally foreign and confusing to me…never mind the fact that my .dll file somehow vanishes during download. I competed in my second ever Magic The Gathering draft tourney today (for Return to Ravnica) and did better than last time. I just missed placing in the top 10. I have learned a lot this time and I am giving the Legacy Control fans this promis…next time…I will place. I was going to write “Happy Monday” but I don’t want to give anyone false hope. Javis |
Taking potshots at Amazon, Flipkart CEO Binny Bansal has said selling churan, hing and memberships do not constitute real sales. “We did not sell ‘churan’, ‘hing’, detergent, products of daily-need and virtual memberships. We sold products that people love to buy during the festival season such as smartphones, LED and apparel,” Bansal told HT. The week-long sale has just concluded and the big three- Flipkart, Amazon and Snapdeal- have claimed to have posted stupendous sales performance over the previous year. Read | Not just churan, we sell a lot of fashion: Amazon hits back at Flipkart Retaining its lead, Flipkart alone sold 13 million goods. As a group, together with fashion e-tailers Myntra and Jabong, it sold 15.5 million products. Amazon was a close number two with 15 million products, which included daily needs, churan and hing, as well as its Prime membership. Snapdeal sold around 11 million units. According to Bangalore-based consultancy firm Red Seers, e-tailers sold $1.2 billion worth of goods so far. Of which, Flipkart sold $451 million, or 37.5%, of the total festival season sales, reports said. Amazon’s numbers were not available. Read | Flipkart-owned Myntra acquires fashion and lifestyle site Jabong In fact, according to Bansal, Flipkart has also sold more smartphones – 2.5 million during the five-day sale – than what is sold in the country in a week. It sold more LEDs during the period than what normally gets sold in the country in 45 days. “We crossed our internal target by 40%.”. The company’s internal calculations also show that 95% of goods sold on Flipkart were above the selling price of Rs 300. Around 100,000 customers shopped for more than Rs 50,000. The e-tailer’s high point was on October 3, when it sold goods worth Rs 1,400 crore, which was more what all organised retailers sell in a day (around R868 crore according to industry estimates). But it wasn’t easy for India’s biggest e-tailer. Amazon was breathing down its neck. The Jeff Bezos-led firm has already pumped in $5 billion into India. Flipkart has invested $3.2 billion since it began operations in 2007. Amazon has more money and a bigger war chest to offer more discounts to consumers. But Bansal says Flipkart used the six-month slowdown period before the festival sales to expand its reach to smaller towns . “We expanded out reach to the remotest towns… We sold mid-to-low value products in smaller towns, something we have never seen before,” he said. More people from smaller towns shopped online than ever before. The festival season, which goes up to Christmas, is far from over, and Bansal has more plans. “You will see more innovations as we penetrate deeper into the country,” he said. Read | Case of cheating against Flipkart for delivering soap instead of Samsung phone First Published: Oct 12, 2016 08:23 IST |
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