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Saudi Foreign Minister Adel Jubeir and Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov discussed the situation in Syria in light of Russian forces pullout in a phone call earlier on Wednesday. MOSCOW (Sputnik) — Saudi Foreign Minister Adel Jubeir on Wednesday praised Russia's decision to withdraw the bulk of its forces from Syria as an important step toward the political settlement of the Syrian conflict, the Russian Foreign Ministry said. Jubeir and Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov discussed the situation in Syria in light of Russian forces pullout in a phone call earlier on Wednesday. "The sides focused on the development of the situation in Syria in light of new possibilities opened after President Putin's decision to withdraw the bulk of the Russian air group from Syria," the ministry said in a statement. According to the statement, Lavrov and Jubeir stressed the importance of a sustainable political process in the country involving the Syrian government officials and the entire spectrum of opposition forces on the basis of principles approved by the UN Security Council and the International Syria Support Group. |
The Massachusetts State GOP released its first attack ad against consumer advocate and U.S. Senate candidate Elizabeth Warren Wednesday. The Web ad comically attempts to use selective quoting and distorting camera effects to make Warren look anti-business, or violent, or like an inarticulate speaker, or… something. They are clearly trying to make her seem like a very scary class warrior. Republicans don’t like the fact that she has pointed out that wealthy businesspeople did not make it on their own, and that the entire society played a role in their success by building roads and educating workers and paying cops and firefighters they rely on. These points seem pretty obvious to me, but to Scott Brown and the Republican Party this is frightening, violent rhetoric. This video makes a few other things clear. Brown and the Republicans are obviously going to try to tie Warren to Harvard at every chance, even though polling suggests voters couldn’t care less about where Warren teaches. And other than sexism and empty and tired claims of “class warfare,” Brown really doesn’t have much to work with in his fight for reelection. Having done some polling on the class warfare stuff, and knowing it doesn’t work for the Republicans, my guess is that this ad isn’t really aimed at voters at all, but at their corporate donors. The campaign clearly wants to scare the wealthy corporate special interests that support Brown, so they will drop even more money in his lap. Check the ad out, and contrast it with the actual remarks in full Warren made on this topic: EDITOR'S NOTE: Warren still looks awesome even in an attack ad against her. |
November doesn't need to be a nightmare for Democrats By David Plouffe Sunday, January 24, 2010; A17 The Democratic Party got a resounding wake-up call from the voters of Massachusetts on Tuesday. But it's long been clear that 2010 would be a challenging election year for our party. With few exceptions, the first off-year election in a new president's term has led to big gains for the minority party -- this was true for Harry Truman, Dwight Eisenhower, Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton. After two election cycles in which Democrats won most of the close races and almost all of the big ones, Democrats have much more fragile turf to defend this year than usual. Add to that a historic economic crisis, stubborn unemployment and the pain that both have inflicted on millions of Americans, and you have a recipe for a white-knuckled ride for many of our candidates. But not if Democrats do what the American people sent them to Washington to do. In 2006 and 2008, voters sent an unmistakable message: We want decisive change. This was not just a change of political parties. Instead of a government that works for the entitled and special interests, a government that looks out for Wall Street, they wanted a government that works better for them, a government that plays the role it should to help foster the security of the middle class. Many of last year's accomplishments are down payments on those principles. We still have much to do before November, and time is running short. Every race has unique characteristics, but there are a few general things that Democrats can do to strengthen our hand. -- Pass a meaningful health insurance reform package without delay. Americans' health and our nation's long-term fiscal health depend on it. I know that the short-term politics are bad. It's a good plan that's become a demonized caricature. But politically speaking, if we do not pass it, the GOP will continue attacking the plan as if we did anyway, and voters will have no ability to measure its upside. If we do pass it, dozens of protections and benefits take effect this year. Parents won't have to worry their children will be denied coverage just because they have a preexisting condition. Workers won't have to worry that their coverage will be dropped because they get sick. Seniors will feel relief from prescription costs. Only if the plan becomes law will the American people see that all the scary things Sarah Palin and others have predicted -- such as the so-called death panels -- were baseless. We own the bill and the health-care votes. We need to get some of the upside. (P.S.: Health care is a jobs creator.) -- We need to show that we not just are focused on jobs but also create them. Even without a difficult fiscal situation, the government can have only so much direct impact on job creation, on top of the millions of jobs created by the president's early efforts to restart the economy. There are some terrific ideas that we can implement, from tax credits for small businesses to more incentives for green jobs, but full recovery will happen only when the private sector begins hiring in earnest. That's why Democrats must create a strong foundation for long-term growth by addressing health care, energy and education reform. We must also show real leadership by passing some politically difficult measures to help stabilize the economy in the short term. Voters are always smarter than they are given credit for. We need to make our case on the economy and jobs -- and yes, we can remind voters where Republican policies led us -- and if we do, without apology and with force, it will have impact. -- Make sure voters understand what the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act did for the economy. Rarely does a congressional vote or issue lend itself to this kind of powerful localization. If GOP challengers want to run ads criticizing the recovery act as wasteful, Democratic candidates should lift up the police officers, teachers and construction workers in their state or district, those who are protecting our communities, teaching our children and repairing our roads thanks to the Democrats' leadership. Highlight the small-business owners who have kept their doors open through projects funded by the act. The recovery act has been stigmatized. We need to paint the real picture, in human terms, of what it meant in 2010. In future elections, it will be clear to all that instead of another Great Depression, Democrats broke the back of the recession with not a single Republican vote in the House. In the long run, this will haunt Republicans, especially since they made the mess. -- Don't accept any lectures on spending. The GOP took us from a $236 billion surplus when President Bush took office to a $1.3 trillion deficit, with unpaid-for tax cuts for the wealthy, two wars and the Medicare prescription drug program. Republicans' fiscal irresponsibility has never been matched in our country's history. We have potent talking points on health care, honest budgeting and cuts in previously sacrosanct programs. Republicans will try to win disingenuously by running as outsiders. We must make them own their record of disastrous economic policies, exploding deficits, and a failure to even attempt to solve our health care and energy challenges. During the campaign, who will be whispering in Republican ears? Watching GOP leaders talking about health care the past few days, it was easy to imagine lobbyists and big health insurance executives leaning over their shoulders, urging death to health insurance reform. When it comes to cracking down on the banks and passing tough financial regulatory reform, GOP leaders will be dancing to the tune of Wall Street lobbyists and opposing tougher oversight, as if the financial crisis never happened. We need to lay it out plainly: If you put the GOP back in charge, lobbyists and huge corporate special interests will be back in the driver's seat. Workers and families will get run over, just like they did in the past decade. -- "Change" is not just about policies. In 2006, Democrats promised to drain the swamp and won back Congress largely because the American people soured on corrupt Republican leadership. Many ethics reforms were put in place by the Democrats. But a recent Gallup poll showed that a record 55 percent of Americans think members of Congress have low ethics, up from only 21 percent in 2000. In particular, we have to make sure the freshman and sophomore members of the House who won in part on transparency and reform issues can show they are delivering. The Republicans will suggest they have changed their spots, but the GOP cannot hold a candle to us on reform issues. Let's make sure we own this space. -- Run great campaigns. Many Democrats won congressional and statewide races in 2006 and 2008 with ideal conditions. Some races could have been won with mediocre campaigns. Not this year. Our campaigns can leave no stone unturned, from believing in the power of grass-roots volunteers and voter registration, to using technology and data innovatively, to raising money -- especially with big corporate interests now freed up to dump hundreds of millions of dollars to elect those who will do their bidding. Democratic candidates must do everything well. Each one must make sure that the first-time voters from 2008 living in your state or district -- more than 15 million nationwide -- are in their sights. Build a relationship with those voters, organize them and educate them. On Nov. 3, many races are sure to be decided by just a few thousand if not a few hundred votes. These voters can make the difference. We have to show them that their 2008 votes mattered, and passing health insurance reform is one way to start. -- No bed-wetting. This will be a tough election for our party and for many Republican incumbents as well. Instead of fearing what may happen, let's prove that we have more than just the brains to govern -- that we have the guts to govern. Let's fight like hell, not because we want to preserve our status, but because we sincerely believe too many everyday Americans will continue to lose if Republicans and special interests win. This country is at a crossroads. We are trying to boost the economy in the short term while also doing the long-term work on health care, energy, education and financial reform that will lay a strong foundation for decades to come. Let's remember why we won in 2008 and deliver on what we promised. If Democrats will show the country we can lead when it's hard, we may not have perfect election results, but November will be nothing like the nightmare that talking heads have forecast. David Plouffe, campaign manager of Obama for America and Obama-Biden 2008, is the author of "Audacity to Win." © 2010 The Washington Post Company |
Something real strange happened in the eighties. No, I’m not referring to Boy George. Or the proliferation of fluorescent clothing and polished cotton disco pants. Or the popularity of applying eye-liner before a night out on the town – among heterosexual males. Nor am I referring to the beyond-boofy hairdos of the era that sported fringes so large they gave more shade than a Stratco verandah. Nope, I couldn’t care less about any of those fads, because their lifespans were relatively short. But something else arose in the eighties whose global impact was to be far more severe and far longer lasting. That something was low-fat mania. Due to the stunning realization by health authorities and certain authors that carbohydrates yielded around 4 calories per gram, while fats supplied around 9 calories per gram (something actually known to scientists for decades prior), these busy-body authorities decided – during what must have been a very drunken brainstorming session – to start urging the world to eat less fat in order to prevent obesity. This overly simplistic and, quite frankly, patently stupid strategy was based on the premise that human beings –not exactly known for their temperance and moderate behaviour – would obediently lower their fat intake, and make no attempt whatsoever to compensate for the decreased caloric intake and decreased satiety by consuming greater amounts of alternative macronutrients. But they did. And how. To make up for the lack of taste and satiety imparted from the now departed dietary fat, they not only began adding more sugar to their cereal and squeezing more syrup onto their pancakes, they began consuming a far higher quantity of carbohydrates overall. In fact, they just couldn’t get enough of those sweet, delectable carbohydrates, so to squelch their between-meal carb-cravings, they began guzzling down ever-greater amounts of sugar-laden juices and soft drinks. And that was the folks who actually lowered their fat intake. Many did not, but consumed extra carbohydrate anyhow, convinced by all the “fat-makes-you-fat” hysteria that extra carbohydrate calories were somehow inconsequential. Amidst this burping, flatulent orgy of carb-binging, food manufacturers quickly realized a golden opportunity was staring them in the face. They began pumping out low-fat, carbohydrate- and sugar-rich foods en masse, and a multi-squillion dollar industry was born. All around the world, people were gorging themselves on the kind of caloric and carbohydrate intakes that would do many professional athletes proud. There was just one wee problem: Most of these people weren’t professional athletes. In fact, most didn’t even exercise, let alone compete in triathlons. The 1980s, in effect, was the era in which normal-weight sedentary people all around the world began doing what anyone commencing regular strenuous training in a glycogen-dependent sport should do: increase their caloric and carbohydrate intake to cover the increased energy demands imposed by their new training regimen. They just left out the training regimen. Sedentary housewives and businessmen were eating more carbs and calories, but they remained sedentary housewives and businessmen. The result: Planet Earth promptly became home to the fattest and most diabetic population this world has ever known. The moral of the story? Excess calories are real and have consequences, whether they come from protein, fat, or carbohydrates. If you are going to emulate the dietary macronutrient composition of a pro athlete, then you better damn well train like one. The eighties: Bad clothes, bad hair and male pop stars kitted up like ugly sheilas. Almost as silly as low-fat mania. Stupid Is as Stupid Does The story doesn’t end there folks. Oh nooooo, not by a long shot. Because in the late 90s, something else really strange happened. No, I’m not talking about the cigar-based antics of a certain ex-President and his chubby intern, the screwballs who blamed Columbine on Marilyn Manson albums, or the share price of Pets.com. No, I’m referring to the rise of a creature every bit as deluded and simple-minded as the authorities who convinced the world to go low-fat. The name of this Do-Do-like creature? The low-carb guru. The low-carb guru was typically a cardiologist or family physician who realized far greater fame and fortune was to be had in becoming a “diet doctor” than prescribing warfarin and treating coughing, wheezing, carbuncled Medicare recipients. The low-carb guru usually looked like he himself could sorely use some good fat loss advice, but this hardly mattered to a population beleaguered with obesity and diabetes and desperate for the next novel-sounding quick-fix. If it was a novel magic bullet the population wanted, then the low-carb gurus were more than happy to give it to them. So in response to the myopic and simple-minded war on fat, they presented their revolutionary solution: A myopic and simple-minded war on carbohydrate. Bloody brilliant! Well, not really. Truth be told, it was bloody moronic. Some people lost weight on the low-carb diets by unwittingly lowering their caloric intake, just as some folks lost weight on the low-fat diet when they were able to refrain from consuming extra carbohydrates. But, just like many folks in the low-fat era believed carbohydrate calories were without consequence, many of the newly-converted low-carb devotees became convinced that fat and protein calories were inconsequential. Only carbohydrates needed to be restricted, they were told, because carbohydrates caused insulin release, which by some magic voodoo process caused fat gain. I say “voodoo” because real science showed that in real life humans, isocaloric high- and low-fat diets cause no meaningful difference in metabolic rate (when there is a slight increase in metabolic rate, it is almost invariably seen with high-carb meals and diets) and no meaningful difference in de novo lipogensis (creation of new fat). Tightly controlled metabolic ward studies in which the likelihood of non-compliance was greatly reduced, and in some instances made virtually impossible, repeatedly showed no difference in fat-derived weight loss between isocaloric low- and high-carb diets. This of course, mattered little to the low-carb gurus and their gullible followers. The gurus simply ignored the tightly controlled human dietary research and instead cited ad nauseum very short-term studies in which intravenous insulin infusions, or administration of insulin to adipose cells in petri dishes, caused suppression of lipolysis and stimulation of lipogenesis. From these largely irrelevant studies they built a virtual religion whose fundamental tenet was “Carbs raise insulin, insulin makes you fat”. To give the impression that these unnatural experiments actually had relevance in humans, they cited the half of free-living studies comparing low- and high-carb diets that showed greater weight loss in the former. The remaining half that found no difference were simply ignored, as of course were the multitude of metabolic ward studies that completely failed to show any difference. Bah, impartiality and conflicting evidence…who needs it? The poor schmucks who soaked up this bullshit, that’s who. The nineties: When serious athletes started taking nutrition advice from blokes who looked like this. Thanks to their belief in the nonsensical metabolic advantage spewed forth by the high priests of low-carb, millions of low-carb devotees endured constipation, bad breath, lethargy, and a socially awkward diet in the hope of weight loss that never materialized. They slashed their carb intake even further, pissed on their Ketostix even more fervently (“turn purple, you bastard! PURPLE dammit!!”), but still no weight loss aside from the 2 or 3 kilos of electrolyte-flushing water loss they experienced at the start of their low-carb misadventure. Low-carbing turned out to be a big disappointment. Nary a dent was made in obesity rates, and as Generation Quick-Fix waddled off in search of the next overhyped load of bollocks, the lucrative low-carb empire collapsed. Atkins Nutritionals went bust, the follow-up to the best-seller Protein Power bombed, and unwanted copies of Dr Atkins New Diet Revolution, The South Beach Diet, and Protein Power started appearing on shelves of charity shops faster than you could say “Low-carb pasta tastes like soggy sawdust – only worse”. “Good riddance!” exclaimed a disillusioned and fat-as-ever population. However, they spoke too soon, for not all the low-carb demons had been exorcised. Along with the rise of the low-carb gurus beginning in the late 90s, something else really bizarre happened. It was this: swayed by the low-carb hypebole, many highly active strength and endurance athletes started eating low-carb diets, despite the fact that a literal mountain of research has shown that high-carbohydrate diets were the far superior choice for glycolytic activities. Intelligently applied non-ketogenic low-carb diets (in other words, not the kind recommended by the low-carb gurus) were actually a viable short-term choice for diabetic and totally sedentary folks (however, the negative effects of keto and non-keto low-carb diets on T3 levels makes them a questionable long-term option). But for athletic folks, they were a terrible choice, period. So while in the eighties sedentary folks started eating diets with macronutrient and caloric profiles more akin to those of serious athletes, the opposite was now occurring: Many serious athletes were consuming diets with a carbohydrate content suitable only for diabetics and inactive people. And they were suffering for it. Don’t Run a High-Octane Machine on Low-Octane Fuel Activities like boxing, cycling, mixed martial arts, running and even high volume weight training are dependent on a steady supply of carbohydrate to replace the muscle glycogen that would otherwise be exhausted during these glucose-dependent activities. As research has repeatedly shown, low-carbohydrate diets are simply incapable of maintaining optimal glycogen levels and vastly inferior to high-carb diets when it comes to improving performance. While those pursuing weight loss were hoodwinked with the “carbohydrate-insulin” hypothesis, athletically-inclined folks were reeled in with an equally unscientific theory known as the “fat adaptation” theory. According to this hypothesis, your performance and mood may suffer during the first week or so of a low-carbohydrate diet (this much is actually true), but after this adaptation phase, your body will become wonderfully adept at running on fat and performance in your chosen sport will skyrocket. You won’t have to worry about glycogen depletion or “hitting the wall”, because your newly fat-adapted body will just keep drawing on body fat to power your workout into the next millennium. This theory is utter rubbish. Before I detail the science showing exactly why, let’s take a look at some real life examples of what happens when endurance athletes are suckered by the fat adaptation hogwash. Here’s an email I received from Kevin, an avid marathon runner who attempted an ultra-endurance event after months of low-carbing. He recounts what happened, and it wasn’t a very happy experience: Hi Anthony, I've followed you for years going back to the Active Low Carb website, which has banned me. I have The Great Cholesterol Con and The Fat Loss Bible. Preface: The lowcarb approach to diet is insidious. That the initial weight loss is all water doesn't make much difference to most, including me. But I have a story that explains why I finally quit the lowcarb bull: I'm a marathon and ultramarathon runner. A couple years ago I ran the Antelope Island 50 mile race. Antelope Island is the largest island in the Great Salt Lake of Utah. Months of diligent lowcarb eating had caused me to lose 20 pounds by race day. Initially I felt I was running slower than my norm but attributed it to the cold. The race was in March and in Utah it tends still be winter-like in March. As the day warmed I tried to increase my pace but still lagged below my normal pace. The island is a bit over 25 miles long. Runners start at one end, run to the other end then turn around and come back. The island has a small mountain dead-center. The course requires running to the top each way. When I was climbing it for the second time, my energy level was so poor I was unable to run and instead was trying to race-walk. By the time I got back down to level ground I was having leg cramps and shivering from the cold. Runners passing me were wearing shorts and t-shirts so it wasn't that cold. This was around mile-40. By mile-45 the cramps had progressed to my ass, lumbar back, shoulders, triceps and neck. I ultimately finished, dead last among the 200 runners. But the story doesn't end there. I had put up a tent near the start-finish line the night before the race. I slept in the tent and was first on the course on race day. I'd planned to sleep in the tent after the race rather than make the 6 hour drive home. Crawling into the tent I was shivering from the cold. The shivering aggravated the cramping. I lay in the sleeping bag trying to get warm enough to stop the intense shivering and horrific cramping. Around midnight I couldn't take the it anymore. I crawled out of the tent and crawled to my car. It took several minutes to unlock the door and get myself seated in the passenger seat. Then I turned the heater on full-force. I sipped gatorade all night and the cramping didn't stop til dawn. The entire night was a wide-awake nightmare. So I learned the hard way. Low carb proponents want to lose weight without controlling their diet. Some, like me, try to get around it with intense exercise. But as the body becomes more efficient it loses less weight through exercise. That's the closest thing to a true metabolic advantage. And it was an advantage during famines, I imagine. Thanks for continuing the fight, although you won't convince anyone unless they've gone through an ordeal similar to mine. Kevin Kevin’s experience is being played out by misguided exercisers the world over. Serious strength and endurance athletes, suffering from an irrational fear of carbohydrate, go to great lengths to avoid the very macronutrient they actually need the most. When their performance inevitably dives, they first attempt to rationalize it away, figuring they’re “having a bad day”, or that it “must be the headwind slowing me down”. After several months of persistent bad days, even when the weather is fine and a nice strong tailwind is blowing, reality starts to sink in. A deeply unsettling feeling that something’s just not right begins dominating their thoughts every waking moment. That something is a lack of carbohydrate, which causes glycogen depletion, which in turn leaves muscles unable to get the glucose they need to produce ATP, the ultimate cellular fuel source. I’m intimately familiar with this whole scenario, because I’ve been through it myself. In what now seems like a lifetime ago, when I was far less wiser than what I am now, I figured I’d prove to the world that ketogenic diets could indeed adequately fuel glycolytic activities. I ‘d been following a low-carb diet for several years, and a ketogenic intake for around a year, so the usual objections trotted out in response to clinical studies about lack of fat adaptation did not apply. During the final 18 months or so of finishing my book The Great Cholesterol Con, I had been doing very little bike riding and had been maintaining my strength and fitness on a “skeleton” regimen comprised of weight training and a couple of hours of MMA training on the weekends. After escaping from a suffocating marriage, then finally finishing the book, I decided to reward myself with a brand new Scott CR1, a game-changing machine that at the time was setting new benchmarks in carbon fiber bicycle frame technology. I bought my new bike and began eagerly hitting the hills. At first, I was able to zip up the hills with little problem. "Ha!", I thought, "who says low-carb ketogenic diets can't power high level physical activity?" It wasn't long before reality came knocking. Hard. My energy and performance started tanking. My times got slower. And slower. My rides progressively felt harder and harder. It felt like someone was slipping an invisible and increasingly heavier weight vest over my shoulders with each and every ride. Off the bike, my legs started feeling heavy and tired - classic signs of glycogen depletion. My arms and torso felt fine, indicating that the cycling was tapping into my leg muscles' glycogen stores much faster than what my low-carb diet could replace them. The problem wasn't insufficient calories or fat, as I was eating plenty of both and maintaining my weight. The final straw came one day as I was riding up a route well known to Melbourne road cyclists as "The Wall". When I was passed by a cyclist with thighs not much bigger than my forearms, I immediately sought to rectify the situation by catching up, slipstreaming, then passing him. But no matter how hard I tried, I simply couldn't catch the guy - it was like someone had ripped out the muscles from my legs and replaced them with lead. There I was, with my speed-skater-like thighs and world-class super-light road bike, being left in the dust by someone with the physical presence of a starvation victim and riding an old Giant. It was at this point that a rising sense of anger and disgust finally overpowered my stubborn denial. I had to face the facts: despite my enthusiasm for ketogenic dieting, it was killing my cycling performance. The rest, as they say, is history. I began increasing my carbohydrate intake and my performance immediately improved. Nowadays, I average around 400-500 grams of carbohydrate per day, and my ride times have improved to the point where I can power up to Mount Lofty on a heavy-ass steel-framed single-speed significantly faster than what I used to do on the feather-light Scott. My old low-carbing days are now just a distant bad memory, but the sad reality is many active people out there are still plugging along in a mire of substandard performance, waiting for a magical fat-derived performance boost that will simply never arrive. The moral of the story? If you want to train, perform and look like a serious athlete, you better damn well eat like one. People who perform vigorous exercise have no business eating a diet best suited to diabetics and sedentary soccer mums. In Part 2, I’ll delve into the sports nutrition research that conclusively shows low-carb diets to be a complete dud when it comes to fuelling high level exercise. We’ll also take a closer look at some athletes who supposedly achieved athletic success following a low-carb diet. Until then, keep eating your berries and sweet potatoes, Anthony. Click here to read Part 2 — Anthony Colpo is an independent researcher, physical conditioning specialist, and author of the groundbreaking books The Fat Loss Bible and The Great Cholesterol Con. For more information, visit TheFatLossBible.net or TheGreatCholesterolCon.com Copyright © Anthony Colpo. Disclaimer: All content on this web site is provided for information and education purposes only. Individuals wishing to make changes to their dietary, lifestyle, exercise or medication regimens should do so in conjunction with a competent, knowledgeable and empathetic medical professional. Anyone who chooses to apply the information on this web site does so of their own volition and their own risk. The owner and contributors to this site accept no responsibility or liability whatsoever for any harm, real or imagined, from the use or dissemination of information contained on this site. If these conditions are not agreeable to the reader, he/she is advised to leave this site immediately. |
The Goldarmor raising his Shield was a last second addition, right after I played through this bit again to get more references for the overall composition. The font of the HUD is basically as MMX-ish as can be without just being the MMX font itself. Fun fact: This is probably my first time working with tiles to make a floor. Shovel Knight © Yacht Club Games Sprites by Invisishades since you can't really kill them.The Goldarmor raising his Shield was a last second addition, right after I played through this bit again to get more references for the overall composition. The font of the HUD is basically as MMX-ish as can be without just being the MMX font itself.Fun fact: This is probably my first time working with tiles to make a floor.Shovel Knight © Yacht Club GamesSprites by In other news: More Shovel Knight stuff!What can I say? I just love this game, so I decided to do a SNES looking mock-up, albeit at the aspect ratio of the original game.The blue mist probably took the longest overall, I just couldn't get it to look right for days and did a lot of other sprites before finally settling on this. A lot of fun was had working on all the enemies, I just had to include the Propeller Rats, and felt obliged to add the |
It has been an exciting couple months for ID@Xbox. We created this program to make it easy for independent developers to bring their innovative ideas to Xbox One, and the response from the community continues to be amazing! In December, we gave you a first look at developers worldwide who joined the program. Without further ado, below are some more ID@Xbox developers hard at work on their games. Remember, this list is by no mean exhaustive – more than 200 developers are already creating games using dev kits provided by ID@Xbox right now – it’s just a sample of the many independent developers who will be bringing their games to Xbox One. Honestly when I look at this list, all I can say is “wow.” It’s incredibly humbling to see so many fantastic studios there supporting Xbox One, from XBLIG and XBLA alumni like Ska Studios and Humble Hearts, to new studios like Glass Bottom Games and Heart Machine, and veterans including Robomodo, Zoë Mode and Playdead. We could not be more excited! ID@Xbox is a global program and we’re committed to bringing the best from around the world to Xbox One. The first ID@Xbox games are in certification now and, as always, we continue to look for ways to improve the creation process for our ID@Xbox partners with new processes and tools. Stay tuned for updates on both soon! |
The Miami Dolphins begin organized team practice activity on Tuesday at the team’s practice facility in Davie. While no live contact is permitted, 7-on-7, 9-on-7 and 11-on-11 drills are permitted. Miami’s OTA dates are May 23-25, May 30-June 1 and June 5-June 8. The Dolphins will also have a mandatory minicamp from June 13-15. So with no contact, what exactly can coaches and players get out of these practices? • The Dolphins can gauge the physical conditioning of older veterans • The Dolphins can see which second-year players seem ready to make a quantum leap • The Dolphins can begin to assess the readiness of rookies to contribute early in the season Here’s a look at 5 position groups we’ll be watching (OTAs are not open to the public but some sessions are open to the media) in the coming weeks: Quarterback — We haven’t seen Ryan Tannehill operating Miami’s huddle since December 11, when a knee injury against at home against Arizona ended his season. According to offensive coordinator Clyde Christensen, “I don’t see (Tannehill) favoring it at all. He looks like the same guy.” Coach Adam Gase has said many times he does not expect Tannehill’s mobility to be limited, despite the plan to wear a knee brace. “He moves around fine,” Gase said. “He’s got a good edge that I like to him right now.” Gase said that Tannehill is pushing himself. It should be fascinating to see just how well Tannehill is really moving around and how comfortable he seems in Year 2 in Miami’s offense. A possible battle for third-string quarterback between Brandon Doughty and David Fales could be interesting to watch develop. Linebacker — The Dolphins plan to cross-train players like Kiko Alonso, Lawrence Timmons and rookie Raekwon McMillan at multiple positions. It would seem Timmons would take most of the early reps at inside linebacker with McMillan taking some, as it should be his eventual position. Miami already knows Alonso can play inside linebacker if needed. How does Koa Misi look in his return from a serious neck injury? How fast does Timmons look, at the age of 30? How fast does McMillan pick up what he has described as a defense more complex than the one he played in at Ohio State? How does McMillan look in pass coverage? Miami’s linebacking corps was a weakness last season. Could it become a strength? Wide receiver — Does Jarvis Landry show any signs of annoyance if a contract negotiation drags on? Probably not. Landry is emotional but has to believe after seeing teammates get paid that he will, too. Will Kenny Stills bring the same intense focus and commitment to preparation after getting paid? No reason to believe he won’t. Will Leonte Carroo take a step forward to show why he was a third-round draft choice last season. This is a key moment in Carroo’s fledgling career. Will Jakeem Grant take a step forward in ball security? We know he’s explosive. And perhaps most importantly, does DeVante Parker show real proof that he is ready to emerge as a healthy, dynamic, consistent star? Parker believes he’s one of the best receivers in the league. Perhaps this offseason he shows he’s really ready to fulfill that prophecy. Cornerback — All eyes will be on starting cornerback Xavien Howard, who missed two stints of his rookie season with a knee injury. Is Howard ready to become an upper-echelon starter? Could Howard see some reps at slot corner in case rookie Cordrea Tankersley is too good to keep out of the lineup? Will Bobby McCain or Tony Lippett struggle to the extent that their roster spot becomes jeopardized? Will Byron Maxwell show that he can provide tighter overall coverage than he did last season? Especially on crossing routes, Maxwell and Lippett must show they can stick closer to opposing wide receivers. Miami wants corners to play physical and tough, and in general there must be tighter coverage this season. Running back — What a great chance to see if Jay Ajayi really is a much better receiver, as advertised by Christensen. What a great chance to see if Kenyan Drake is ready to become one of the best change-of-pace backs in the NFL. He needs more touches in 2017 and should see them. Will undrafted rookie De’Veon Smith make a gigantic impression this offseason and perhaps push for a roster spot? Without hitting in these OTAs, it’s really hard to judge trench play. But it will be interesting to look at the guard/center combinations Miami uses. With Mike Pouncey presumably out of OTAs, one would think Kraig Urbik and Anthony Steen will get long looks there over the next month. 10 Miami Dolphins under pressure this offseason First impressions of Miami Dolphins defense straight from rookie mouths Miami Dolphins’ Charles Harris not worried about practicing without contract 7 Miami Dolphins with extremely enormous upside Follow Joe Schad on Twitter Get Dolphins stories right to your Facebook by liking this page |
WINDSOR, Ont. – A young woman accusing 2012 New Jersey Devils draft pick Ben Johnson of raping her in a washroom stall three years ago has launched a $3.95-million civil lawsuit against the NHL hopeful. The 20-year-old woman, whose identity is protected in a separate criminal proceeding against Johnson, has also named Mynt nightclub in her lawsuit. She claims the now-defunct downtown bar, its owners and employees allowed underaged people like herself to become drunk and vulnerable, then failed to protect them. She claims the bar knew or ought to have known that Johnson, who was also underage, “could pose a danger to others because of his impairment by alcohol,” the lawsuit states. The contents of the statement of claim have yet to be proven in court. Johnson, 22, is currently before the criminal courts, charged with sexually assaulting the same young woman. Johnson, who played for the Windsor Spitfires OHL team at the time, is accused of forcing the then-16-year-old girl to perform oral sex before having intercourse with her in the women’s washroom of the bar. Johnson says the oral sex was consensual. He says he never had vaginal intercourse with the girl. The Superior Court judge who heard the case has reserved his decision. Johnson was served with the civil suit at the Windsor courthouse during his criminal trial. The lawsuit was filed in London in March, but not served on Johnson until this month. While Johnson’s father, Kevin, accused the young woman of waiting until after she had testified in the trial to serve his son with the lawsuit, her lawyer said the timing was not strategic. “We were having trouble serving him in Calumet,” said Paul Ledroit, referring to the village in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula from which Johnson hails. Ledroit said his only concern about the timing of the lawsuit was with rules that dictate civil cases must be filed within two years of a person turning 18. The lawsuit was commenced five days before the young woman’s 20th birthday. Along with the statement of claim, the young woman has filed notice that she wants her case heard by a jury. Johnson’s criminal lawyer, Patrick Ducharme, said Wednesday he had not seen the civil lawsuit and had no knowledge of Johnson being served with it. Ducharme did not raise the multimillion-dollar lawsuit during his cross-examination of the young woman during the criminal trial. In her civil suit, the young woman claims she suffered both physical and emotional pain because of the alleged sexual assault. The 18-page statement of claim says her education and employment have been impaired and she now has an inability to “engage in normal human relations.” “She has suffered terribly,” Ledroit said, explaining the girl had to seek therapy after the alleged assault. “This is tremendously traumatic to a young woman.” Neither Johnson nor the other parties in the lawsuit have filed statements of defence with the court. Johnson’s criminal trial heard the girl was at Mynt to celebrate St. Patrick’s Day in March 2013. Members of the Windsor Spitfires, who had just played their last game of the season earlier that day, were also there. Surveillance video showed the girl and Johnson talking near the dance floor before they separately went upstairs to where the washrooms were located in the bar. Johnson testified the girl told him to meet her upstairs. Once there, she pulled him into a stall in the women’s washroom where she performed oral sex on him, he said. The prosecution says the girl was too intoxicated to consent to any sexual activity, much less vaginal intercourse that left her bloodied and bruised. The young woman testified in the criminal case she had been a virgin until her encounter with Johnson. The statement of claim in her civil suit does not include this detail. |
Baggage handler fired after refusing to load emaciated and abused dog on flight A Reno-area woman says she was fired as a baggage handler at Reno-Tahoe International Airport last month after she refused to load an emaciated hunting dog on a plane. Lynn Jones of Lockwood said her supervisor told her to load the dog lying in a pet carrier because the animal's paperwork was in order and its condition wasn't her concern. But Jones, an employee of contractor Airport Terminal Services at the time, told the Reno Gazette-Journal that she couldn't put the dog on the plane for shipment to Texas because its paws were bloody and its body was covered with sores. Fired: The former airport handler, Lynn Jones, sits with her three dogs a month after refusing to load an ailing dog onto a plane at Reno-Tahoe International Airport She said: 'Everybody who saw it, the TSA people, the airport police officers, the girls at the ticket counter, was concerned. 'The dog was so weak and torn up. It didn't look like it could survive the flight. I was crying. I kept saying that dog could not be put on a plane.' 'Everybody who saw it, the TSA people, the airport police officers, the girls at the ticket counter, was concerned. The dog was so weak and torn up. It didn't look like it could survive the flight. I was crying. I kept saying that dog could not be put on a plane' She said airport police phoned Washoe County Regional Animal Services, which took custody of the dog. The animal is owned by a hunter who has it shipped to places he hunts, according to authorities. It was taken back to Texas after being nursed back to health. Jones said she was fired on the spot on November 15, adding: '[My supervisor] kept yelling, "That's it, you're done, you are out of here, go home".' Officials at St Louis-based Airport Terminal Services, didn't return phone calls. Secrets in abuse: County animal services officials say a new state law keeps details of animal abuse cases secret but the airport later determined the dog had been abused Krys Bart, CEO of the Reno-Tahoe Airport Authority, said she was proud of how airport police intervened. 'In all my years here, this is the first time I'm thoroughly disgusted over what I understand to be the situation this animal was put in. 'They (officers) had an affirmative responsibility to deal with this, and that's what they did,' Ms Bart said. Ms Bart said she was out of town when the incident occurred, but determined later that the dog had been abused prior to arriving at the airport. County animal services officials declined to comment on the incident, citing a new state law that keeps details of animal abuse cases secret. Jones said her job loss has been a hardship, but she has no regrets. She held the job for more than five years. |
My ancestors happened to fight on the losing side of the Civil War, or as some called it in the South, The War of Northern Aggression. My people were simple farmers, many of whom are now buried in the Counts family cemetery in Cabot, Arkansas. I'm certain more than one of them raised a bayonet against a Union solider during America's bloody conflict. Still, I cringed when I saw that the Confederates of Michigan held a rally Sunday along a freeway south of Jackson, the birthplace of the Republican Party, which put an end to slavery and the Confederacy. I'm also not sure if the group was aware they had their gathering at a park named for Gov. Austin Blair, Michigan's governor during the war and a staunch abolitionist who helped start the party of Lincoln. Confederate flags fly over US 127 at anniversary rally wash in both cheers of support and jeers of distain, members of the Confederates of Michigan proudly waived their Confederate battle flags at passing cars during their one year anniversary rally Sunday, May 22. The 20 or so people waving Confederate flags for the benefit of cars cruising along U.S. 127 said they were merely celebrating their Southern heritage. "We may be holding Confederate flags, but (that) does not mean we are hateful," the group's leader, Steve Panther, told MLive. "We wave it for our heritage and for families of veterans of the confederacy who were just defending their land." There are a lot of wonderful things about the South. The food. The music. Its grand literary tradition. Institutional slavery and the Confederate States of America that arose to defend it are not among those, however. The flag is a symbol for the defense of slavery, once a prime component of the South's economy. There were other reasons for secession -- as organizations like the Confederates of Michigan will point out -- but there's no doubt slavery was at the heart of the affair. My Southern forbearers probably didn't own slaves either. Perhaps they were also just defending their farms. It doesn't matter. In the ensuing years, the flag has become a symbol of hate and seeing it unfurled and waved with anything resembling pride is deeply unsettling. And in 21st Century America, when you stand on the side of the road waving it, you should know this. It's not just extremely disrespectful to African Americans, it presents Michigan as a place where white people don't understand the pain it causes their black neighbors. Empathizing with and understanding people of all different races and ethnicities is vital to creating a better society. Do the Confederates of Michigan have a right to wave the flag? Absolutely. Our freedom of speech guarantees it. Do I think the Confederates of Michigan truly care about their Southern heritage, as they claim? I think Sunday's gesture was more about shock and provocation, much like the open carry groups who get a certain kick out of taking guns into schools. The thinking goes that it's healthy to exercise our Constitutional rights whenever we can. But just because you have the right to say something doesn't mean it's good for our republic to say it. With our rights comes a responsibility to try and say something beneficial and enriching for our society, not just to provoke. The Civil War may have ended this same month 151 years ago, but the legacy of slavery still remains with America's volatile race relations. Look no farther to southeastern Michigan. We can't escape the past. We live with it every day. "The past is never dead," the great Southern novelist William Faulkner wrote. "It's not even past." We can only try and do better in the future, a future where it would be better if the Confederate flag was displayed where it belongs: in a museum. This is an opinion column by John Counts, a writer on MLive's Impact Team. Contact him at johncounts@mlive.com. |
HOEGAARDEN Province : Vlaams-Brabant Additions : 1977 Meldert, Outgaarden Official blazon (1819) Van lazuur beladen met een uitgestrekten regter arm omhangen met een flenon en houdende een bisschopsstaf alles van goud. (1838) D'azur à un dextrochère, mouvant du flanc senestre, tenant une crosse d'évêque, le bras revêtu d'un fanon, le tout d'or. (1985) In lazuur een geklede rechtervoorarm met manipel, houdende een bisschopsstaf, het geheel van goud. Origin/meaning The arms were granted on September 15, 1819, May 29, 1838, and again on september 2, 1985. The arms are based on the historical seals of the town. All seals known since 1289 show the arm holding a crosier. The symbol itself is likely derived from the fact that the village was in Medieval times a possession of the Prince-Bishops of Liège. In 1288 it was mentioned that the local council had no seal, but the Prince-Bishop granted a seal in 1289. The new symbol on the seal symbolised the power of the bishops over the village. Literature : Servais, 1955 |
16 have been arrested so far in connection with the Manchester Arena attack, but it is thought the 22-year-old operated on his own Police now believe the Manchester bomber acted largely alone in the run-up to his suicide attack at Ariana Grande’s concert. Soon after Salman Abedi blew himself up at Manchester Arena eight days ago police said they were investigating a potential terror “network”. But now detectives say the 22-year-old shopped alone for most of the components he used to make the bomb, which killed himself and 22 concertgoers on 22 May and injured 116 more. “Our inquiries show Abedi himself made most of the purchases of the core components and what is becoming apparent is that many of his movements and actions have been carried out alone during the four days from him landing in the country and committing this awful attack,” said Det Ch Supt Russ Jackson, head of the north-west counter-terrorism unit. Abedi was born in Manchester to Libyan parents, who moved back to Tripoli in recent years, along with his younger siblings. He is believed to have visited Libya just four days before the attack, arriving back in the UK on 18 May. His father and younger brother, Hashem, have been taken into custody by Libyan authorities. Police are not ruling out that Abedi may have had accomplices. “It is vital that we make sure that he is not part of a wider network and we cannot rule this out yet. There remain a number of things that concern us about his behaviour prior to the attack and those of his associates which we need to get to the bottom of,” said Jackson. Police have arrested 16 people so far in connection with the investigation. Three men were released without charge on Tuesday: two men aged 20 and 24 from the Fallowfield area of south Manchester, believed to be Abedi’s cousins, and a 37-year-old man from Blackley in north Manchester. A 16-year-old boy from Withington and a 34-year-old woman from Blackley were released last week shortly after their arrests. Police have examined Abedi’s phone records, along with CCTV footage, to begin to piece together his movements in the run-up to the attack. The investigation has 3,000 lines of inquiry within the counter-terrorism control room, with officers examining almost 300 pieces of digital equipment, including phones. “Much of the investigation has been painstakingly working through Salman Abedi’s last movements. We have done this by examining his movements on CCTV and other interactions he has had whether it be with people or the phone calls he has made,” said Jackson. “With specialist support we have also have a good understanding of the likely component parts of the bomb and where these came from.” On Monday night police released a CCTV image showing Abedi wheeling a large blue suitcase and appealed for anyone who may have seen him with it on Wilmslow Road, known locally as the Curry Mile because of its abundance of south-Asian restaurants. “We are especially keen to find out why he kept going back to the Wilmslow Road area and we need to find the blue suitcase which he used during these trips,” said Jackson. For the last few days officers have been searching a landfill site in Pilsworth, Bury, reportedly looking for the case. Eleven men remain in custody, mostly in their late teens or early twenties. Suspects can be held without charge for up to 14 days if arrested under the Terrorism Act. “We still have a number of people in custody and we will be seeking to extend the custody of some of them as we work to understand what has gone on and whether Abedi was helped,” said Jackson. “The release of some people can be expected in investigations of this nature as we corroborate accounts that have been provided.” Anyone with information should call the anti-terrorist hotline in confidence on 0800 789321. |
The 'Mad Men' star will become the first actor to be turned into a lifelike 3D rendition for virtual and augmented reality at the festival. Call it the Invasion of the Holohamm. Jon Hamm will become the first actor to be turned into a lifelike 3D hologram for virtual and augmented reality at the Sundance Film Festival. The Mad Men star, who plays a hologram named Walter Prime in the Sundance movie Marjorie Prime, is getting the anthropomorphizing treatment from 8i, a New Zealand- and Los Angeles-based tech company and hologram pioneer. The Hamm hologram will make its first appearance at the Passage Pictures film's premiere afterparty on Jan. 23. The photo-realistic rendition, which was created by 8i and directed by Rogue Rubin, offers volume and depth, making it look and feel as if talking with the actor. To make matters more confusing, Hamm will be on hand at the party, creating a futuristic conundrum for the age-old set-up: Which one is real, and which one is the imposter? Revelers will be able to interact with the Hamm hologram in a volumetric VR experience and in mixed reality on a mobile device. The high-tech creation marks a natural extension for the Michael Almeryeda-helmed film, which centers on 86-year-old Marjorie (Lois Smith), who spends her final ailing days with a computerized version of her deceased husband (Hamm). "It is amazing to experience the future in the here and now," said Marjorie Prime producer Uri Singer. "When we first started working on the movie, the script dictated that the holograms would be portrayed as a futuristic reality. Making an actual hologram, not only on film but one that can be experienced with VR/AR, attests to how present the future has become." The unveiling arrives at a time when Sundance is flexing its VR and AR muscles. This year's festival lineup features such projects as Zero Days VR, which takes participants inside the U.S./Israel-hatched Stuxnet virus as it sabotages an underground Iranian nuclear facility, and the evolution depiction Life of Us from artists Chris Milk and Aaron Koblin, with music from Pharrell Williams and collaborators Megan Ellison, McKenzie Stubbert and Jona Dinges. Marjorie Prime and its spinoff Hamm creation echo the philosophical issues being raised as the reality of artificial intelligence looms. It also begs the question that will surely be asked by all the single women in Park City: Will the Holohamm be making the rounds? |
luchschen/Shutterstock In early August, the Environmental Protection Agency is set to decide on a petition to change the source of fluoride in U.S. drinking water. Currently, the source of fluoride in most public water supplies is fluorosilicic acid, according to government records. The petition calls for the EPA to instead require the use of pharmaceutical-grade sodium fluoride in water fluoridation, which is the addition of fluoride to drinking water for the purpose of preventing cavities. Fluorosilicic acid is often contaminated with arsenic, and recent research has linked the arsenic from fluorosilicic acid in drinking water to as many as 1,800 extra cases of cancer yearly in the United States, said William Hirzy, a chemistry researcher at American University in Washington, D.C. Hirzy, who worked at the EPA for 27 years, submitted the petition. The study and petition grew out of what researchers believe is a lack of regulation and understanding of chemicals used in fluoridation, Hirzy said. Fluorosilicic acid has been shown to contain the carcinogens arsenic and lead, and to leach lead from water pipes, he said. Billions in cancer costs In the study, published in February in the journal Environmental Science and Policy, Hirzy and co-authors estimated that putting pharmaceutical-grade sodium fluoride into the water supply would reduce the amount of arsenic in drinking water by 99 percent. The arsenic at issue is the inorganic variety, a known human carcinogen, meaning it causes cancer. [Why Is Arsenic Bad for You?] The switch would cost $100 million, but would save billions in reduced cancer costs, Hirzy said. "We found that the United States as a society is spending, conservatively speaking, $1 billion to $6 billion treating the excess bladder and lung cancers caused by arsenic in the most commonly used fluoridation chemical, fluorosilicic acid," Hirzy said. The EPA limits levels of arsenic in drinking water to 10 parts per billion. Hirzy said that the researchers, in calculating the number of U.S. cancer cases yearly linked with arsenic in fluorosilicic acid, used the EPA's own risk assessment data. Experts not involved with Hirzy's study agreed with its findings. "I think this is a reasonable study, and that they haven't inflated anything," said Kathleen Thiessen, a senior scientist at SENES Oak Ridge Inc., a health and environmental risk assessment company. An EPA scientist, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because he wasn't authorized to speak to the press, said the study is the first to perform a risk assessment on this arsenic source, which "should have been done" already. He said he "didn't dispute anything" in the paper, and said the cost estimates were reasonable. While the EPA performs risk assessments for most contaminants in public water supplies, it doesn't oversee the addition of chemicals used in fluoridation, according to the agency — a policy that Hirzy said doesn't make sense. Under the Toxic Substances Control Act, the EPA has the authority to regulate or ban almost any substance — including fluorosilicic acid — that poses an "unreasonable risk" to public health, he said. Fluorosilicic acid During the production of phosphate fertilizer, phosphate ore is reacted with sulfuric acid to produce toxic gases. These are taken out of the air after being sprayed with water, which produces fluorosilicic acid, said Michael Miller, a minerals commodity specialist for the U.S. Geological Survey. The solution is sold to water systems nation-wide, where it is diluted and put into drinking water, Miller said. Occasionally, it is treated to create sodium fluorosilicate. Together, these compounds (called silicofluorides) provide fluoride to 90 percent of U.S. drinking water systems that are fluoridated, serving about 150 million people, Miller said. Fluoridation was introduced in 1945, and the early tests of its effects were done with sodium fluoride, largely derived from the aluminum smelting industry, Hirzy said. Fluorosilicic acid wasn't used to fluoridate water supplies until after 1951, when water fluoridation became a goal of the U.S. Public Health Service. The health effects of fluorosilicicacid haven't been widely tested, according to a 2006 report on fluoride by the National Research Council. Mosaic, one of the companies that sells fluorosilicic acid to water utilities around the country, Miller said, lists the substance as hightly corrosive. The undiluted acid can eat through glass. Carcinogen Any increase in exposure to arsenic leads to an increase in the risk and incidence of cancers, Hirzy said. On average, diluted fluorosilic acid adds about 0.08 ppb to drinking water. The purity of fluoridation chemicals is regulated by NSF International, and the American National Standards Institute, according to the study. Under a regulation called the NSF/ANSI Standard 60, fluoridation chemicals are not permitted to create arsenic levels above 1 ppb in drinking water, the study noted. However, there's reason to believe this standard isn't being enforced, Hirzy said. For example, arsenic levels in Wellington, Fla., recently exceeded this limit, and nothing was done in response to the violation, according to the study. "Nobody is watching the store," Hirzy said. Email Douglas Main or follow him on Twitter or Google+. Follow us @livescience, Facebook or Google+. Article originally on LiveScience.com. |
Orange County coroner's officials remove a body from the scene in Orange, Calif., Tuesday, Feb. 19, 2013. Police say a chaotic 25-minute shooting spree through Orange County left a trail of dead and injured victims before the shooter killed himself. Orange County sheriff's spokesman Jim Amormino say there are at least six crime scenes with three people, including the suspected gunman, dead and several others wounded. Tustin police Supervisor Dave Kanoti said the shootings started with an apparent carjacking just after 5 a.m. Tuesday in an unincorporated Ladera Ranch area of Orange County. (AP Photo/Jae C. Hong) TUSTIN, Calif. (AP) — The violence stretched across 25 miles in Orange County and was as brutal as it was fast-moving. In less than an hour, a man in his 20s shot and killed a woman in her home and two commuters during carjackings early Tuesday, shot up vehicles on a Southern California freeway and committed suicide as police closed in on him, authorities said. One driver was forced from his BMW at a red light, marched to a curb and killed as witnesses watched in horror. "He was basically executed," Santa Ana police Cpl. Anthony Bertagna said. "There were at least six witnesses." It was unclear if the victims knew each other or the shooter, Orange County sheriff's spokesman Jim Amormino said. "It might have been a random thing," he said. "We just don't know." The violence began at 4:45 a.m., when deputies responded to a call in Ladera Ranch, a sleepy inland town about 55 miles southeast of Los Angeles. They found a woman shot multiple times. Jason Glass, who lives across the street, said he couldn't sleep and was watching TV in his garage with the door partly open when he heard what sounded like gun shots. Then he heard a commotion and the sound of a car speeding away. Hours later, his neighborhood was flooded with police, and crime scene tape sectioned off the street. Glass said a man and three young children had been escorted from the home where the shooting occurred. "I just happened to be in here when this happened," Glass said about his garage. "To think he could have rolled under my door or needed a car or needed to hide is crazy. It's freaking me out." From Ladera Ranch, police said the gunman headed north and within 30 minutes carjacked a Dodge pickup truck in Tustin, about 20 miles away. The driver was uninjured, but a bystander was hit by gunfire and taken to a hospital. The suspect then began firing at vehicles in the area where Interstate 5 and State Route 55 connect. Three people reported being targeted, including one who suffered a minor injury, Tustin police Lt. Paul Garaven said. Two cars were damaged. When the truck got low on gas, the gunman stopped at State Route 55 and McFadden Avenue in Santa Ana, stole the BMW and killed the driver, Bertagna said. The shooter then drove to a Tustin business called Micro Center and carjacked another small truck, killing one person and wounding another, Garaven said. Officers trailed the gunman to Orange, a city about five miles away. As they closed in, the man got out of the vehicle at a busy intersection and shot himself, police said. A shotgun was recovered at the scene. _____ Associated Press Writer Sue Manning in Los Angeles contributed to this report. With the suspect dead, authorities working six crime scenes tried to explain the connection — if any — between the man, his first female victim and the other dead and injured. |
The June 2013 summary of performance measures for Firefox for Android. Few significant changes this month. Some improvement in “time to throbber start”. Talos This section tracks Perfomatic graphs from graphs.mozilla.org for mozilla-central builds of Native Fennec (Android 2.2 opt). The test names shown are those used on tbpl. See https://wiki.mozilla.org/Buildbot/Talos for background on Talos. tcheckerboard Simple measure of “checkerboarding”. Lower values are better. 0.0 (start of month) – 0.0 (end of month). tcheck2 Measure of “checkerboarding” during simulation of real user interaction with page. Lower values are better. 4.0 (start of month) – 3.8 (end of month). trobopan Panning performance test. Value is square of frame delays (ms greater than 25 ms) encountered while panning. Lower values are better. 12000 (start of month) – 12000 (end of month). There was a regression in this test during the month (June 12 – 24) — see bug 882120. tprovider Performance of history and bookmarks’ provider. Reports time (ms) to perform a group of database operations. Lower values are better. 375 (start of month) – 375 (end of month). tsvg_nochrome Page load test for svg. Lower values are better. 3800 (start of month) – 4000 (end of month). This was caused by a change to the test infrastructure — see bug 883894. tp4m_nochrome Generic page load test. Lower values are better. 680 (start of month) – 590 (end of month). Slight improvement on June 19 (bug 883894 again?). tp4m_main_rss_nochrome 125000000 (start of month) – 128000000 (end of month). Expected regression here, on June 26 — see bug 878674. tp4m_shutdown_nochrome 25000000 (start of month) – 25000000 (end of month). ts Startup performance test. Lower values are better. 3800 (start of month) – 3800 (end of month). ts_shutdown Shutdown performance test. Lower values are better. 25000000 (start of month) – 25000000 (end of month). Throbber Start / Throbber Stop These graphs are taken from http://phonedash.mozilla.org. Browser startup performance is measured on real phones (a variety of popular devices). “Time to throbber start” measures the time from process launch to the start of the throbber animation. Smaller values are better. Note the recent improvement. “Time to throbber stop” measures the time from process launch to the end of the throbber animation. Smaller values are better. See Bug 879357 – Regression in “time to throbber stop” on May 31 — Nexus One and Droid Pro only Eideticker These graphs are taken from http://eideticker.mozilla.org. Eideticker is a performance harness that measures user perceived performance of web browsers by video capturing them in action and subsequently running image analysis on the raw result. More info at: https://wiki.mozilla.org/Project_Eideticker awsy See https://www.areweslimyet.com/mobile/ for content and background information. It seems we are not slim yet! Advertisements |
Posted on December 15, 2011 Giuliani On Romney: "I Have Never Seen A Guy Change His Positions So Many Times" Former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani slams Mitt Romney on MSNBC's "Morning Joe." "I have never seen a guy -- and I've run a lot of elections, supported a lot of people -- I've never seen a guy change his positions on so many things, so fast, on a dime. Everything." Joe Scarborough argues that "Newt has switched pretty quickly on issues as well." "Nothing, absolutely nothing like what Mitt Romney did from governor of Massachusetts to candidate for president," Giuliani responds. "Pro-choice, pro-life. Pro-choice because somebody, a close friend died, and he became pro-choice because this woman died of an abortion. Then he figures out there are embryos, and he changes. He was pro-gun control. Fine. Then he becomes a lifetime member of the NRA. He was pro cap-and-trade. Now he's against cap-and-trade. He was pro-mandate for the whole country, then he becomes anti-mandate and he takes that page out of his book and republishes the book. I could go on and on." |
Get our daily newsletter Upgrade your inbox and get our Daily Dispatch and Editor's Picks. OPENING a new training centre in forensic science (pictured above) at the University of Glamorgan in South Wales recently, Bernard Knight, formerly one of Britain's chief pathologists, said that because of television crime dramas, jurors today expect more categorical proof than forensic science is capable of delivering. And when it comes to the gulf between reality and fiction, Dr Knight knows what he is talking about: besides 43 years' experience of attending crime scenes, he has also written dozens of crime novels. The upshot of this is that a new phrase has entered the criminological lexicon: the “CSI effect” after shows such as “CSI: Crime Scene Investigation”. In 2008 Monica Robbers, an American criminologist, defined it as “the phenomenon in which jurors hold unrealistic expectations of forensic evidence and investigation techniques, and have an increased interest in the discipline of forensic science.” Now another American researcher has demonstrated that the “CSI effect” is indeed real. Evan Durnal of the University of Central Missouri's Criminal Justice Department has collected evidence from a number of studies to show that exposure to television drama series that focus on forensic science has altered the American legal system in complex and far-reaching ways. His conclusions have just been published in Forensic Science International. The most obvious symptom of the CSI effect is that jurors think they have a thorough understanding of science they have seen presented on television, when they do not. Mr Durnal cites one case of jurors in a murder trial who, having noticed that a bloody coat introduced as evidence had not been tested for DNA, brought this fact to the judge's attention. Since the defendant had admitted being present at the murder scene, such tests would have thrown no light on the identity of the true culprit. The judge observed that, thanks to television, jurors knew what DNA tests could do, but not when it was appropriate to use them. The task of keeping jurors' feet on the ground falls to lawyers and judges. In one study, carried out by Dr Robbers in 2008, 62% of defence lawyers and 69% of judges agreed that jurors had unrealistic expectations of forensic evidence. Around half of respondents in each category also felt that jury selection was taking longer than it used to, because they had to be sure that prospective jurors were not judging scientific evidence by television standards. According to Mr Durnal, prosecutors in the United States are now spending much more time explaining to juries why certain kinds of evidence are not relevant. Prosecutors have even introduced a new kind of witness—a “negative evidence” witness—to explain that investigators often fail to find evidence at a crime scene. Defence lawyers, too, are finding that their lives have become more complicated. On the positive side, they can benefit from jurors' misguided notion that science solves crimes, and hence that the absence of crime-solving scientific evidence constitutes a reasonable doubt and grounds for acquittal. On the other hand they also find themselves at pains to explain that one of television's fictional devices—an unequivocal match between a trace of a substance found at a crime scene and an exemplar stored in a database, whether it be fingerprints, DNA or some other kind of evidence—is indeed generally just fiction. In reality, scientists do not deal in certainty but in probabilities, and the way they calculate these probabilities is complex. For example, when testifying in court, a fingerprint expert may say that there is a 90% chance of obtaining a match if the defendant left the mark, and a one in several billion chance of a match if someone else left it. In general DNA provides information of a higher quality or “individualising potential” than other kinds of evidence, so that experts may be more confident of linking it to a specific individual. But DNA experts still deal in probabilities and not certainties. As a result of all this reality checking, trials are getting longer and more cases that might previously have resulted in quick convictions are now ending in acquittals. Criminals watch television too, and there is evidence they are also changing their behaviour. Most of the techniques used in crime shows are, after all, at least grounded in truth. Bleach, which destroys DNA, is now more likely to be used by murderers to cover their tracks. The wearing of gloves is more common, as is the taping shut—rather than the DNA-laden licking—of envelopes. Investigators comb crime scenes ever more finely for new kinds of evidence, which is creating problems with the tracking and storage of evidence, so that even as the criminals leave fewer traces of themselves behind, a backlog of cold-case evidence is building up. The CSI effect can also be positive, however. In one case in Virginia jurors asked the judge if a cigarette butt had been tested for possible DNA matches to the defendant in a murder trial. It had, but the defence lawyers had failed to introduce the DNA test results as evidence. When they did, those results exonerated the defendant, who was acquitted. Mr Durnal does not blame the makers of the television shows for the phenomenon, because they have never claimed their shows are completely accurate. (Forensic scientists do not usually wield guns or arrest people, for one thing, and tests that take minutes on television may take weeks to process in real life.) He argues that the CSI effect is born of a longing to believe that desirable, clever and morally unimpeachable individuals are fighting to clear the names of the innocent and put the bad guys behind bars. In that respect, unfortunately, life does not always imitate art. |
Producers, I’ll continue to complain about the email deliveries on the show rather than in an email that people won’t get anyway! The MailChimp people are looking into this, but some spam experts say that it may actually be large organizations other than Google responsible. Long story. In a nutshell all I can say is please help support the show by I’ll continue to complain about the email deliveries on the show rather than in an email that people won’t get anyway! The MailChimp people are looking into this, but somesay that it may actually be large organizations other than Google responsible. Long story. In a nutshell all I can say is please help support the show by clicking here , especially if you have never contributed before. rockets flying in and out of Gaza. This conflict never ends and the reporting on the situation is poor. Luckily, we have some boots on the ground, but this scene is so laden with pro and con propaganda that it is hard to tell what’s what. Count on your No Agenda Show to get to the bottom of it. Thesis: There is too much going on to ignore within and out of Gaza. This conflict never ends and the reporting on the situation is poor. Luckily, we have some boots on the ground, but this scene is so laden with pro and con propaganda that it is hard to tell what’s what. Count on your No Agenda Show to get to the bottom of it. Thesis: Oil rights are involved. The Sunday Show will have the final discussion regarding the World Cup. It’s good that this event is only once in four years. In other news, does anyone besides me find it disturbing that our most secure labs are mishandling deadly pathogens including bird flu and anthrax to the point where the places need to be shuttered? Then someone finds some old Small Pox virus in storage at the NIH? Cripes. new iPhone coming out soon! Just a reminder that we do need your continued support. Please visit the support page today. Thanks, Your co-host PS Here is the promised picture of Adam and Micky after they went on a boat with Sir Gene, Hey, but there’s acoming out soon!Thanks,Your co-hostPS Here is the promised picture of Adam and Micky after they went on a boat with Sir Gene, Baron de Marriott, Sheriff of Texa x on Sir Gene's boat. Next thing you know this happened. If any Dutch gossip sheets want a higher resolution file. It's for sale. Well, Micky always looks photogenic, so that's a plus. Click on image if you want more pics like this in the future. |
One of the easiest ways to hang frames flush against the wall is using keyhole slots. They are easy to make with a keyhole router bit. The tricky part is making all your keyholes the same distance from the top of the frame so your picture will be level. You can make a simple keyhole router bit jig that will not only help guide your router, but also make consistent keyholes every time. Watch the 2-minute video or read on! Click here to SUBSCRIBE to my YouTube channel for more DIY videos! Materials All you need are basic tools and materials to make this keyhole router jig Figure out the dimensions I started by measuring the size of my router’s base. My RIDGID trim router‘s base was 3-1/2 by 3-1/2. I decided to make my jig 3-1/2 x 4-1/2 so I would have a 1-inch span to slide the router back and forth when cutting my keyhole slots. I bought some 1-1/2 poplar to use for the frame and figured out I would need the following cuts: (2) @ 3-1/2 (top and bottom piece) (3) @ 7-1/2 (both sides and an extra which will serve as a stop piece) Assemble the frame Make pilot holes. Really, this is important. I first tried making this without pilot holes and I split my wood. I marked by boards and used a 1/8″ drill bit on the drill press to make the pilot holes. I also used a countersink bit so my screw heads would be flush. I used eight 2-inch flat head wood screws to assemble the 4 corners. Attach a stop The last step is to add a stop at the back. I again drilled countersunk pilot holes and applied some glue. I clamped the stop flush with the top of the frame and screwed it in using 1-1/4 flat head wood screws. How to use the Keyhole Jig This jig is truly so simple but makes keyholes so easy! Not only does it help guide your router, but more importantly it allows you to make multiple keyholes at the exact same distance from the top of your work piece, which means your frames will hang level every time. You don’t need a plunge router with this jig. Simply press the router base against the bottom edge of the jig and push the router straight down into the work piece until your base sits flush on the surface. Then slide the router all the way up and back down again before pulling out the bit. Perfect keyholes every time. |
When the Omega Speedmaster watch was introduced in 1957, no one imagined that it would later accompany a parade of space pioneers to the moon. The astronauts aboard Mercury spacecraft wore their own personal wristwatches. Some of these were Omega Speedmasters. America’s first manned space missions began with Project Mercury, established on Oct. 7, 1958. In his address to Congress on May 25, 1961, President Kennedy urged the country to land a man on the moon and return him safely to Earth before the end of the decade. In pursuit of this goal, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) announced a plan in December of that year to extend Project Mercury to develop a two-man spacecraft. This new program was named Gemini. Astronaut Walter Schirra was wearing his own Speedmaster when he and his Sigma 7 Mercury spacecraft orbited the Earth six times on Oct. 3, 1962, a flight lasting 9 hours and 15 minutes. NASA decided to make astronauts’ wristwatches part of their equipment for Project Gemini and for the subsequent Apollo program, and thus for the moon landing. The agency commissioned James H. Ragan, a NASA aerospace engineer and flight hardware expert, to write a list of specs, test potential watches and purchase the winning models. The watch would have to be a chronograph, and an official call for candidates was issued. In addition to Omega, other entrants were Longines, Wittnauer and Rolex. All models were tested under zero gravity, extreme pressure variations, bone-jarring vibrations, and temperatures ranging from -18 to +93 degrees Celsius. The watches were also tested by astronauts aboard a Gemini space flight. The first Speedmaster (1957), which had a broad-arrow hand and steel bezel The Speedmaster outperformed all the other watches in both test series. The watch was officially designated as “flight-qualified by NASA for all manned space missions” on March 1, 1965. NASA bought an initial group of 15 to 20 Speedmaster watches from Omega. Unlike almost all other Apollo equipment, the watch was not manufactured for use specifically by NASA or for use in space but was available in retail outlets in the U.S. The first Speedmaster models flew into space three weeks later on the wrists of astronauts Virgil “Gus” Grissom and John Young as official equipment aboard Gemini 3. This was the first official trip for the chronograph although it had already flown in space twice on Project Mercury missions. This was the first Speedmaster in space. Walter Schirra wore this second version of the Speedmaster, which debuted in 1959, when he orbited the Earth in 1962. The real test for the Speedmaster came on June 3, 1965, during the Gemini 4 mission, when astronaut Edward H. White wore the chronograph over the sleeve of his spacesuit for a spacewalk. The environment in outer space is as harsh as any a watch will encounter anywhere. Near-vacuum conditions and extreme temperatures prevail. The temperature on the side of the ship exposed to the sun climbs to about 100 C and plummets on the other side to approximately –100 C. In anticipation of these rigors, Omega developed prototypes with red anodized aluminum cases for protection from extreme temperature variations and dials coated with zinc oxide to provide the highest resistance to solar radiation. But these prototypes turned out to be unnecessary because the Speedmaster withstood the extreme temperatures without any modifications. To read the rest of this story, plus more about the Omega Moonwatch, order the WatchTime E-Special: Omega Speedmaster. This article was originally published in 2012 and has been updated. |
Purdue University What if getting a flu vaccine no longer involved getting a shot? Researchers at Georgia State University have spent the past few years working on a microneedle patch that dissolves into the skin for patients to easily and painlessly self-administer vaccines. Now, they've developed a flu vaccine using the system that, when tested on mice, proved to be 100 percent effective more than a year after the mice were vaccinated. As they report in the September 2013 issue of the journal Clinical and Vaccine Immunology, the influenza vaccine uses dry virus-like particles (VLP) instead of a liquid with the dead or attenuated virus. The VLPs coat the micronneedle patch alongside a stabilizing agent, so that the patches won't necessarily need to be refrigerated. At just seven-tenths of a millimeter in length, the microneedles do away with the pain some experience when getting vaccines via hypodermic needles. What's more, the precise delivery method afforded by such tiny needles requires a smaller dose, which in turn further reduces the already low risk of side effects. The researchers previously tested the VLP-coated microneedles to measure short-term protection, and found that the approach actually offers greater protection than conventional intramuscular immunization. Now they confirm that 14 months after immunization, the mice were 100 percent protected. You just don't get better numbers than that. Sang-Moo Kang, a researcher at George State, said he envisions patients some day being able to self-administer the vaccine easily and painlessly and with fewer side effects. Perhaps then the seasonal flu vaccination rate would rise above the 43 percent reported in the 2010-2011 season. |
In 1928, the American magazine Liberty published what was to become one of PG Wodehouse's best-loved stories: "Lord Emsworth and the Girl Friend". All the usual Wodehousean suspects are here – the fierce aunt, the overbearing gardener, the uncomfortably stiff collar – and the plot hangs on a characteristically slight thread. Even so, this tale of friendship between a tremulous peer and a 12-year-old East Ender named Gladys has tremendous power. Emsworth is a character known for his benign indifference. Absent-minded, cowed by those around him, he lives for his prize pig in a world of his own. But when Gladys has a bad afternoon at the Castle, we see a whole different side to the oft-oppressed peer. "Something happened, and the whole aspect of the situation changed." "It was, in itself, quite a trivial thing, but it had an astoundingly stimulating effect on Lord Emsworth's morale. What happened was that Gladys, seeking further protection, slipped at this moment a small hot hand into his." Contained but viscerally alive, there is a poignant reserve about this "mute vote of confidence" – the pace and rhythm of the sentences are as subtle as the emotions they convey. It is, Kipling argued, "one of the most perfect short stories ever written". Countless readers of Wodehouse have testified to the way his novels have their own "stimulating effect" on morale, providing not just comic, but almost medicinal effects: the exiled Kaiser Wilhelm, after his defeat in the first world war, consoled himself by reading Wodehouse to his "mystified" staff; the late Queen Mother allegedly read "The Master" on a nightly basis, to set aside the "strains of the day"; more recently, news reports tell of the imprisoned Burmese comedian Zargana finding comfort in Wodehouse during solitary confinement. "Books are my best friends", he confided. "I liked the PG Wodehouse best. Joy in the Morning – Jeeves, Wooster and the fearsome Aunt Agatha. It's difficult to understand, but I've read it three times at least. And I used it as a pillow too." Wodehouse was born in 1881, and his early years were, in many ways, highly conventional. His father, Ernest, was "as normal as rice pudding" and determined to give his sons a childhood to match. The only thing conspicuously – but critically – missing was Wodehouse's parents. Ernest had a post as a magistrate in Hong Kong, so the children were billeted with nannies and various relatives in England. Pelham Grenville had almost no parental contact for the first 16 years of his life. "Looking back," Wodehouse wrote in his autobiography, "I can see that I was just passed from hand to hand. It was an odd life … but I have always accepted everything that happens to me in a philosophical spirit; and I can't remember ever having been unhappy in those days. My feeling now is that it was very decent of those aunts to put up three small boys for all those years. We can't have added much entertainment to their lives. The only thing you could say for us is that we never gave any trouble." Things in Wodehouse's world are always "odd" rather than "terrible". But sadness seeps through. The Wodehouse children sound like so much unwanted luggage. Perhaps most significant is the thin comfort blanket of amnesia: "I can't remember ever having been unhappy." Even by Victorian standards, this absence was a long one. The separation was to create a coolness between Wodehouse and his mother. "We looked upon her," Wodehouse recalls, "more like an aunt." The fact that there are no extant letters between Wodehouse and his parents, either from his childhood or from his later life, may indicate something about these relationships. Wodehouse was in many ways his father's son. Despite living through extraordinary circumstances – a self-made man, he married a sometime chorus-girl, spent time with Hollywood movie stars, endured Nazi internment and journalistic accusations of treason – he still kept up the appearance of imperturbable "normality". This was why, perhaps, he was never the most transparent of correspondents. It was Dr Johnson, one of Wodehouse's earliest literary loves, who wrote that a man's soul, "lies naked" in his letters. But Wodehouse's attitude to nudity was a wary one. "You know my views on nudes," he once wrote to a friend, "I want no piece of them." Wodehouse's correspondence is often clad in the epistolary equivalent of Bertie's heliotrope pyjamas, carefully buttoned up to disguise true feeling. The "cladding", for Wodehouse, has always been his written style. While difficult to analyse (a critic in Punch compared the act to "taking a spade to a soufflé"), there are a variety of figures of speech that recur throughout his fiction, and his letters. One is the way in which he deflects emotion away from the self. When disaster occurs in the shape of income-tax demands or illness, it is the "home" that he metonymically laments. When he expresses admiration for his wife, her outfits – rather than her body – garner the praise. Such manoeuvres are perfected in his fiction, with his use of the transferred epithet – a technique that casts the state of mind of the protagonist onto a nearby, often unlikely inanimate object. We have, for example, "I balanced a thoughtful lump of sugar on my teaspoon"; "he uncovered the fragrant eggs and b and I pronged a moody forkful"; or the memorable ablutions in Jeeves and the Feudal Spirit: "As I sat in the bathtub, soaping a meditative foot and singing, if I remember correctly, 'Pale Hands I Loved Beside the Shalimar', it would be deceiving my public to say that I was feeling boomps-a-daisy." The shifting of affect, from mind to limb, is not only absurdly incongruous, it has the effect of holding the emotion in question at arm's (or leg's) length. The pace of this sentence is also ingenious. It suspends its meaning, clause after clause, building up our expectations, till it sinks, like a punctured rubber duck, on "boomps-a-daisy". It is a phrase as unexpected – after the precision of "if I remember", the mystique of "Shalimar" and the rhetorical nod to "my public" – as it is daft. But Bertie isn't even feeling "boomps-a-daisy"; it is part of his charm that his low mood is described not only tangentially, captured in the shape of his "meditative" foot, but through negative inference and euphemism. Discretion also governs another feature of the typically Wodehousean syntax – abbreviation. Found in both his fiction and his letters, terms such as "posish", "eggs and b", and "f i h s" ("fiend in human shape") create a clubby feeling of intimacy between writer and reader. But there is also something subtly self-deprecating about this shorthand code – as if he is creating a voice that is necessarily compacted, determined not to draw too much attention to itself. As the comic writer Basil Boothroyd pointed out, both Wodehouse's heroes and Wodehouse himself "are vulnerable at heart". But Wodehouse's pre-eminent stylistic flourish is his use of metaphor and simile: "Ice formed on the butler's upper slopes"; a man "wilts" like "a salted snail" – and one finds the same in his letters. "Things," he tells a friend, "are beginning to stir faintly, like the blood beginning to circulate in a frozen Alpine traveller who has met a St Bernard dog and been given a shot from the brandy flask"; returning to New York, he reflects, "was like meeting an old sweetheart and finding she has put on a lot of weight". Wodehouse's letters, often written at speed, allow us to see him without his craft in place. Moments of great emotion break through: his excited optimism at the prospect of winning a scholarship to Oxford; his disappointment when he learned that a varsity life was not to be his lot after all; his stoicism in the face of romantic disappointment; his devastation at the death of his step-daughter; his outrage and sorrow at the public response to his wartime broadcasts. Some of Wodehouse's earliest letters are his most revealing. Recently discovered notes to an Oxford undergraduate, Eric George, aka "Jeames", show him testing, and parodying, the language of love. Wodehouse was still at school, and in a playful allusion to their separation, he shows himself a master of literary drag, impersonating an "hilliterit' female admirer": "My only Jeames," he writes, "life is werry hollow without you." Snatches of contemporary love poetry are offered – "A sigh sent wrong, / A kiss that went astray" – only to be manfully dismissed: "Isn't it rot?" Wodehouse's dreams of joining Jeames at Oxford were crushed. "[J]ust as scholarship time was approaching," he writes, "it seemed to my father that two sons at the university would be a son more than the privy purse could handle." Wodehouse was sent to work in a London bank and became lost in the maze of early Edwardian bureaucracy. Determined to succeed as an author, he "chucked in" his job, and gained a post with the Globe newspaper. The next years were spent at a frenetic pace, writing lyrics for musical comedies and news parodies. In 1904, Wodehouse fulfilled a long-held dream to travel to America, bunking up in a cut-price cabin. New York was, he wrote, "like being in heaven without having to go to all the bother and expense of dying". He returned in 1909 and landed some lucrative publishing deals. Letters written on paper swiped from the luxurious Waldorf Astoria show him as a newly confident figure. But beneath the surface, one senses that Wodehouse was often lonely, and dismayed by his short-lived romantic forays. He was apparently sanguine when he failed to win the affections of the actress Alice Dovey, but later letters suggest real heartbreak. "I shall never forget how wonderful she was, with her charm, and her sense of comedy, and her beautiful voice. All the heroines in my books are more or less drawn from her." There are mentions of other attachments. A relationship with a London widow is intriguingly filtered through a correspondence with her 11-year-old daughter; a dinner engagement with another widow – the well-known music-hall artiste, Daisy Wood – and a day-trip with a lady journalist apparently came to nothing. In a surprisingly candid moment, he complains to a friend of life's "infernal" monotony. There is some comedy in watching this least confessional of writers negotiate an increasingly confessional age. Wodehouse himself was briefly an "agony uncle" for the journal Tit-Bits, and he took delight in the psychology of the public letter writer, teasing those who flaunted their bleeding hearts in print. Wodehouse's own romantic life was sealed by a 1914 meeting with a twice-widowed actress and dancer, Ethel Wayman. A brief courtship was followed by a surprise wedding. "Excuse delay in answering letter," he wrote to a friend, "been busy getting married…!" Ethel was an astute and clever woman. Described as a "mixture of Mistress Quickly and Florence Nightingale with a touch of Lady Macbeth thrown in", she was handsome, long-legged, and intensely sociable. Though Wodehouse's opposite in many ways, she understood him well, and the union was to prove immensely successful. "Married life really is the greatest institution that ever was," he wrote. "When I look back and think of the rotten time I have been having all my life, compared with this, it makes me sick." In marrying Ethel, Wodehouse not only gained a wife. He also "inherited" her 11-year-old daughter Leonora. Wodehouse adored being a stepfather. Indeed, his 1914 satire on the fashion for eugenic family planning (The White Hope) was oddly prescient. Family, for Wodehouse, was forged through love, not genetics. Leonora – or "Snorky" – as she soon became, was far more precious to Wodehouse than any of his biological relations. Wodehouse and Ethel had little money when they married, but the letters record them being all the happier for their makeshift existence together. This was an intensely productive time for Wodehouse. In 1915, his serial "Something Fresh" was bought by the top "slick" paper, the Saturday Evening Post. A collaboration on a series of hit musical comedies followed. Apart from a touch of writer's block, and difficulties over complex income tax liabilities, these were golden years for him. Leonora, his "confidential secretary and adviser", proves to be his most important correspondent during these years as he relates the difficulties of getting a small glass of whiskey during prohibition, reports the "low down on the Riviera", and provides the inside story about the theatrical impresario Florenz Ziegfeld. After a brief spell screenwriting in Hollywood ("this place is loathsome", he confides in a letter), Wodehouse settled in northern France. There, surrounded by a brood of animals, he was to produce some of his greatest comic novels. Throughout the upheavals of the 1930s, Wodehouse, unlike his contemporaries George Orwell and Stephen Spender, kept world events at a remove. Some letters seem to show a weakness of political sense. "A feeling is gradually stealing over me," he writes, "that the world has never been farther from a war than it is at present … I think if Hitler really thought there was any chance of a war, he would have nervous prostration." The year was 1939. Letters from Wodehouse and Ethel give details of the moment when their tranquil Le Touquet life was shattered as invading Germans surrounded their house. When the Nazis decreed that all enemy males under 60 were to be taken into internment, the 58-year-old Wodehouse found himself caught unawares. "He only had 10 minutes to pack a suitcase," Ethel recalled. "I was nearly insane, couldn't find the keys of the room for the suitcase, and Plum went off with a copy of Shakespeare, a pair of pajamas [sic], and a mutton chop." The correspondence offers a dramatic progression from Wodehouse's stoical postcards in internment camp, bluntly pencilled in slanted capitals, to his 1941 telegram sent from Berlin to the movie star Maureen O'Sullivan (Jane to Weissmuller's Tarzan) and her husband John Farrow, letting them know that he was about to broadcast to America on German radio: "LOVE TO YOU BOTH LISTEN IN TONIGHT". Seventy years on, Wodehouse's actions in Germany are still repeatedly placed under the journalistic microscope. These letters, together with a complete examination of the MI5 files, show, once and for all, that he was no collaborator. Broadcasting on German radio was, he admitted in a 1946 interview, a "ghastly blunder" – the texts he delivered, written in internment to entertain his comrades, had been intended to boost, not damage, British morale. "It never occurred to me," Wodehouse reflected, "that there could be anything harmful about such statements as that … the commandant at Huy Citadel had short legs and did not like walking uphill, that men who had no tobacco smoked tea, and that there was an unpleasant smell in my cell at Loos prison." What the writer failed to realise was the relationship between the medium and message. He had little sense that a war was taking place on the airwaves, as well as on the ground and in the air. In June 1941, fresh out of an internment camp, Wodehouse had few people to advise him and, without advice, made the worst possible choices. He even accepted a small fee for his broadcasts without, as he later admitted, "realising the implications". Though channelled through the German treasury, the other sums that Wodehouse received in Berlin were his own personal literary earnings – most of them royalty payments on the sales of his novels in European countries. There are moments when it seems as if the Reich put Wodehouse under pressure, hoping that he would change allegiance. One letter shows him mysteriously asking his agent to transfer a sum of money from his account to that of Edward Delaney (ED Ward), who willingly broadcast for the Nazis. Elsewhere, he gives an account of a telephone call from the ministry of propaganda. He begins with a tone of chirpily morbid curiosity, noting that the ministry called to ask "if I would join a party of writers who were being taken … to look at the corpses of those unfortunate Polish soldiers who were murdered by the Bolsheviks in 1940". "I had to refuse," he notes, "because of what would have been said in England, but I was very regretful that I couldn't go, as it would have been a great experience." The coda, however, is more wary. "When I heard the offer, I said to myself, 'Ah, they're starting to ask me to do things', but I believe it was just a detached thing and does not mean anything." Wodehouse's assumption seems to have been correct: there is no sequel to this episode, and we hear no more of the ominous "they" and their propaganda demands. The Nazis, Wodehouse admitted, gave him "the pips", and he was desperately relieved to gain permission to leave wartime Berlin for the relative safety of occupied Paris. Throughout the war years, Wodehouse's letters record his daily routine of morning exercises, dog-walking beneath looming flak towers, and pacing hotel corridors to work out plots. But there were still some other surprising encounters. His small circle of acquaintances included Hitler's interpreter Paul Schmidt, as well as a sinister-looking, monocled spy called Johann Jebsen. When news of the Schmidt-Wodehouse friendship reached British ears, MI5 asked Jebsen, who was one of the famous "Double Cross" agents, to investigate further. The subsequent report assured the British that the association had no traitorous bent. Ethel, he reported, was "very pro-British", while Wodehouse was "entirely childlike and pacifist". Wodehouse's most revealing wartime letters are the series that he wrote to Anga von Bodenhausen, an aristocratic widow who took him in as a house-guest and helped extricate him from his broadcasting agreement. In their exchanges, we see Wodehouse writing his way through Berlin's air-raids, fretting about his reputation, and perturbed by the increasing shortage of food. Other letters give us glimpses of Ethel, tracing her time from desultory exile on a trout farm in Lille while Wodehouse was interned, to her life as a resident alien, meeting with film directors to drum up work for her husband, and holding parties for "decorative" British officers. In the months after August 1944, the French épuration ensued – the punishment of those known, or suspected, to have assisted the enemy. Once again, Ethel and Wodehouse found themselves in danger, as the Comité Parisien de Libération considered whether Wodehouse was, given the broadcasts in Germany, a threat to national security. One night, Ethel reports that she "suddenly woke up and saw a sinister man leaning over my bed with his hat on and his coat collar turned up exactly like a movie. I produced my British passport. Useless. I was told if I didn't dress at once I would be taken in my night gown!" Wodehouse wrote a terrified letter to his friend Malcolm Muggeridge: "We have not tasted food all day. I believe the bearer of this is going to get us some, if he can, but what can he get and where? Can you supply anything. We are absolutely fainting with hunger, & Ethel is on the verge of collapse …" Muggeridge came to the rescue and Ethel was soon released. Wodehouse, however, was kept under surveillance for a number of weeks before the French realised that he was innocent, and posed no threat. These were dark days, but the wartime correspondence takes its blackest turn when the couple learn of the sudden and unexpected death of Leonora, after a routine operation. "We are quite crushed by the dreadful news," Wodehouse wrote. "I really feel that nothing matters much now." Wodehouse rarely mentions Leonora again. Her loss is felt throughout the remaining letters – but to articulate it, he later confessed, would have been too painful. Wodehouse may have parodied the modernist poets, but he has more in common with TS Eliot than he might have admitted. For him, as for Eliot, the aim of the written text was not to express, but to "escape" from emotion. It is, as he told a friend, "hopeless to try and put down on paper what one is feeling". The idea of internal psychology, in what he referred to as "the Henry James style", is parodied and resisted. Generous, loyal, and sometimes astute, Wodehouse nonetheless admitted that he felt himself to be "a case of infantilism. I haven't developed mentally at all since my last year at school." So we see the life in these letters unfold as if preserved in the emotional equivalent of aspic, the juvenile tones emerging at the most unlikely moments. Reflecting on the war, Wodehouse asks: "Doesn't all this alliance-forming remind you of the form matches at school?" adding, "I can't realise that all this is affecting millions of men. I think of Hitler and Mussolini as two halves, and Stalin as a useful wing forward." Faced with a changing political landscape, Wodehouse does what he knows best – he restyles it. But in a reversal of his fictional technique, this time his similes domesticate rather than distance – it brings the horrors of war home, but leaves the pain behind. There is something telling about the absence of sentiment in Wodehouse's postwar letters. While forever saddened by his "blunder", he refuses to pay lip service to the all too readily summoned brand of postwar existential shame – what Primo Levi calls "the vaster shame, the shame of the world", finds no place in Wodehouse's articulated emotional repertoire. This is not to say that it wasn't felt. But complex emotion, for Wodehouse, was best played down. Shame, especially, was to be worked out according to the best codes of public-school etiquette, in the privacy of one's mental dormitory. The postwar period also shows Wodehouse recognising that the tenor of his fictional universe rode uneasily with the contemporary moment, with its "welter of sex" and "demand for gloom and tragedy". While his novels preserve their Edenic calm, his letters sometimes seem bewildered or angry. His chief pleasure, he noted, was "writing stinkers to people who attack me in the press". The letters of his final years are calmer, offering a view into the endearing routine of his domestic life – the round of dog-walking, cocktails and daily soap operas. Ultimately, writing, and his beloved Ethel, were his greatest loves, with the rest of the world kept at bay. In an open letter to some admirers, he admits that his fiction was never intended to fit the criteria of "relevance": "The world I write about, always a small one – one of the smallest I ever met, as Bertie Wooster would say – is now not even small, it is nonexistent. It has gone with the wind and is one with Nineveh and Tyre. In a word, it has had it. But I have not altogether lost hope of a revival." The beauty of this sentence is that it enacts what it says. In a superlative run of clichés – "gone with the wind", "one with Nineveh", "in a word" – Wodehouse revels in, and revives, the contained sphere of an exhausted language (a "small world" of its own) and makes it a little larger. So it is with the worlds of his fiction. Almost lyric in their perfection, sometimes escapist, but never small-minded, they offer what Adorno called "the dream of a world where things could be otherwise". Right until the end, Wodehouse wrote to preserve the world of innocence he never quite grew out of – and to resist a world he never quite grew into – a ghost of Gladys by his side. • PG Wodehouse: A Life in Letters, edited by Sophie Ratcliffe, is published this week by Hutchinson • This article was amended on 7 November 2011 because the original referred to John Farrell, when it should have said John Farrow. This has been corrected. |
SOMEWHERE IN MONTANA — This was the most amazing thing about the two hours I spent with 39-year-old Tom Brady on Sunday afternoon in a cabin (well, it’s called a cabin, but the getaway area for the Brady clan is pretty darned well-appointed) in the shadow of one of the most beautiful mountains in the world: “I have zero pain,” Brady said, almost one week to the hour after he took the field for Super Bowl 51. “I feel great. I feel 100 percent.” Brady had a zen look to him on a brilliant afternoon in Big Sky country. Clear eyes, zero bloodshot. Placid. No limping, no wincing, which took me by surprise after Atlanta’s five sacks and nine significant hits of Brady in the game. And there’s this: Brady has played 261 NFL games, and never has he taken as many (99) snaps as he did against Atlanta. But when we talked, he looked like he’d been relaxing for a month—not just having arrived here Saturday from a hectic post-Super Bowl week in Boston. He went skiing Sunday on a pristine trail with fresh powder. (He asked that I not name the exact location for privacy’s sake.) Brady does a good job handling being Brady. But who can take being in the eye of the public storm all the time? When I first saw him Sunday afternoon, Brady had a wide grin. That grin was repeated six or eight times on the afternoon, including when he was urging his wife, supermodel Gisele Bündchen, to play photographer for The MMQB with the shot you see below this paragraph. It’s break time, and other than some solemn, emotional minutes talking about his mother, Brady is determined to get away for a while, after the strangest yet most rewarding year of his professional life. Gisele Bündchen for The MMQB After the game, I’d asked Brady for some time to dissect the key plays in one of the great pieces of football theater the NFL has ever put on, New England’s comeback from a 28-3 deficit to the 34-28 victory. We did this after his last Super Bowl victory two years ago, on the phone. This time he invited me here. One thing led to another, and we put 90 minutes on tape—much about the game, but much, too, about his future, his family, his season, and the way he lives. So I’ll divide my time with him thusly: Today I’ll put the great comeback under his microscope; Wednesday, I’ll write Part II about all other things Brady—including how long he plans to play. And in conjunction with The MMQB’s podcast partner, DGital media, I’ll put the conversation in a Brady-centric two-part podcast: Tuesday morning and Thursday morning. You’ll have a seat with us for the entire conversation. And for those who’ve had their fill of perhaps the greatest quarterback of all time, we’ll have plenty more to interest you this week at The MMQB. Brady disagreed with my first premise of the afternoon, about this Super Bowl being one of the great games of his life. “I don’t really think that is necessarily the case,” he said, relaxing in ski pants and sneakers. “I think it was one of the greatest games I have ever played in, but when I think of an interception return for a touchdown, some other missed opportunities in the first 37, 38 minutes of the game, I don’t really consider playing a good quarter-and-a-half plus overtime as one of the ‘best games ever.’ But it was certainly one of the most thrilling for me, just because so much was on the line, and it ended up being an incredible game. There are so many things that played into that game—a high-scoring offense, a top-ranked defense, the long Super Bowl, four-and-a-half-hour game, the way that the game unfolded in the first half versus what happened in the second half … so it was just a great game.” Well, I’ll quibble with him on that one. I get the angst over the crappy interception that Atlanta cornerback Robert Alford returned for a touchdown, and a few other bad throws. But any quarterback who, on his team’s five biggest drives of the season, goes touchdown-field-goal-touchdown-touchdown-touchdown, and brings his team back from 25 down to win the Super Bowl … that constitutes one of the great games of one’s life. We’ll start with 8:31 left in the third quarter. Atlanta had just gone up 28-3. “That’s a good place [to start],” Brady said. • THE PATRIOTS’ PLACE IN HISTORY: Peter King evaluates how the Brady/Belichick era stacks up against other NFL dynasties * * * * * * Atlanta 28, New England 3 (third quarter, 8:31 left) Missed opportunities in the first half left the Patriots feeling like they still had a chance at halftime. Patrick Smith/Getty Images NFL Films captured Brady going up and down the sideline, exhorting his teammates: “Let’s go! Let’s show some fight! Let’s play harder! Harder! Tougher! Everything!” “It was similar to what I had felt at halftime,” Brady said. “We came out of halftime saying, ‘Look, we’ve had 20 minutes time of possession, we’ve run 45 or 46 plays, we’ve done a good job moving the ball up and down the field, we just have nothing to show for it because of a missed third-and-one, a fumble in their territory, an interception return for a touchdown in their territory, because of poor execution in the red area … We had over 200 yards passing in the first half [actually 184], so it wasn’t like we were in there at halftime saying, ‘Hey, how are we going to move the ball?’ “So we come out for the second half, defense does a great job getting a stop, which was exactly what we needed, we’re down 21-3. And we come out there on offense and throw an incompletion on the first pass of the second half, which was close to being caught but we didn’t come up with it, then a third down to Julian [Edelman], I hit him running across the middle and who knows if we would have gotten the first down, but we didn’t come up with it and it was just more of the same. … So we come off again, and I’m like, ‘Guys, at some point we all gotta just start making the plays.’ [Atlanta] went down the field and scored to put us down 28-3. And at that point, you can say a lot of things, but ultimately it comes down to what we do.” Offensive coordinator Josh McDaniels said after the game that Atlanta played more man coverage than he expected. That meant the Patriots didn’t have as many easy short throws as usual. Combined with the fact that Atlanta’s run defense throttled the Patriots’ ground game in the first half (14 carries, 35 yards), the Patriots had to fight for things that often were easy in their previous 18 games. On this drive, Brady converted a fourth-and-three from his 46 on a quick out to Danny Amendola for 17, victimizing Falcons corner Brian Poole. James White took a Brady flip five yards for the touchdown that gave New England’s sidelines some hope, even if Stephen Gostkowski missed the extra point. “We just needed to execute one drive, and after that drive we’ll come to the sidelines and we’ll talk about the next drive,” Brady said. “We had an entire quarter left,” McDaniels said a week ago. “We knew we’d get three possessions at least.” That was all they’d get. • BURNING QUESTIONS, POST-SUPER BOWL: Albert Breer on what’s next for the Patriots and Falcons Atlanta 28, New England 9 (fourth quarter, 14:51 left) When the Patriots needed first downs, they frequently found rookie wideout Malcolm Mitchell. Patrick Smith/Getty Images Great stat from the Elias Sports Bureau that I shocked Brady with on Sunday: In the Patriots’ first six Super Bowls in the Brady/Belichick era, New England never completed a pass to a rookie. In this game, rookie fourth-round pick Malcolm Mitchell was huge—six catches, 70 yards, in big spots—and especially big on this drive. He had catches of 15, seven and 18 yards, and Brady said the reason McDaniels had him in the game, and Brady picked him on routes with multiple options, came down to one word: trust. “I think he had earned that trust of everybody,” Brady said. “If it was Julian, Julian was going to get it. If it was Malcolm, Malcolm was going to get it. Malcolm happened to be in those spots. And everybody had confidence to have Malcolm in those spots if he got it. He proved everybody right because he came up with the plays.” Two big Grady Jarrett sacks forced the Patriots to kick a field goal. With 9:48 left, it was a two-score game. When Fox came back from its break, Brady and McDaniels were deep into play-diagrams for the next series. “There were still a lot of calls on the call sheet that we liked, based on the style that they were playing,” Brady said. “The Super Bowl is a strange game. I’ve been in a lot of them, and it may go one way and then it may go the other way, and I know at the end of all those games that I’ve played in the Super Bowls, the defenses have a hard time stopping the offense at the end, in every game.” Here, Brady said, “I felt like, man, we’re back in the game.” • FOR BRADY’S FAMILY, ‘REDEMPTION’: Tom Sr. on why this win meant more to his son than just a fifth Super Bowl ring Atlanta 28, New England 12 (fourth quarter, 8:24 left) The Patriots caught Falcons cornerback Jalen Collins out of position on Danny Amendola’s fourth-quarter touchdown catch. Ronald Martinez/Getty Images The break New England needed, the sack/fumble of Matt Ryan by Dont’a Hightower, set up two of the most interesting plays of the Super Bowl for the Patriots. One: the six-yard touchdown pass to Danny Amendola. Watch closely the Fox replay. Brady’s in the shotgun with 31 seconds left on the play clock, with his receivers fanning out and Amendola settling in the left slot. Cornerback Jalen Collins starts on Amendola’s outside shoulder. But then Collins walks, almost aimlessly, to the inside shoulder and stares a hole through Brady. With about 21 seconds left on the play clock, Brady changes the play. He gives Amendola a sort of stop sign, and Amendola moves out a couple of steps. Collins does nothing. Now, Brady can hear a coach talk to him until the 15-second point of the play clock, but he doesn’t recall exactly what McDaniels told him on this one. “I think he said, ‘Don’t forget about Danny,’ or ‘Danny has a great shot on this.’ Something like that,” Brady said. “I wanted to give Danny a better chance to get open. So I pushed him out because I knew at that point I had changed the route and I wanted to make sure Danny would get the leverage or put him in a better position to get the leverage based on the route that he had. I wanted to move him out because I didn’t want him to get stuck inside of Jalen … [Collins] being inside told me it was probably man coverage, a perimeter corner on the inside of the field … When I pushed Danny out, Jalen didn’t really adjust, so I was really looking outside after that to see if the corner was going to try to get involved and maybe trapping that to the flat. But once I saw the corner go with the outside receiver, or it might have been James White, I just threw it to Danny.” But, one of the benefits of running a tempo offense is you’ve got a trusted voice in your ear. Brady said he likes McDaniels’ reminders because they’re not oppressive or unrelenting; they’re notes based on what McDaniels is seeing from the sideline. “No question part of the advantage of going fast is the coach-to-quarterback communication,” Brady said. If you’re set at the line with 31 seconds left, there are two advantages: You limit defensive substitutions, and a second set of eyes can help you. Two: the two-point conversion fakery, the successful run by White. As I wrote last Monday, McDaniels said the Patriots “took it out of mothballs.” It’s the same play they used in the Super Bowl 13 years ago against Carolina, with Kevin Faulk getting the ball and burrowing in for two points. But the difference here was what happened at practice on Friday. On the play, White lines up next to Brady as a snug sidecar. The center, David Andrews, has to vary his shotgun snap slightly, sending it a hair to the left, and Brady has to fake like he’s getting it, and then White has to burst forward and try to make a hole where they may not be one. Andrews is normally good at the snap. But on Friday … “He snapped it over, it was kind of at my head, so James couldn’t get his hand up there to get it,” Brady said. “So the ball is laying on the ground, rolling around on a two-point play, on a direct snap when it is supposed to be right in James’ breadbasket. We come to the sideline and it was like the last play of the whole week of practice. You always want to finish practice on a high note, and then to finish … I don’t know how a lot of teams practice, but at the end of the week we do what we call, ‘Move the field,’ and you’ll start at one end and work your way down, first down, second down, third down, and you’ll move your way down the field. Then you’ll score a touchdown and you say, okay, let’s go for two, and you run your first so-called two-point play. And that was it. We moved the field, we scored the touchdown, it was the last play of the whole day, and we ran the two-point conversion and we had a mistake, so who knows? I don’t think Josh lost confidence in that play, and certainly not losing confidence in David, because Dave has been a great player for us, and he has done it a hundred times right.” I told Brady it reminds me of the Friday practice in 2007 when David Tyree dropped four of Eli Manning’s passes—only to redeem himself with the Velcro catch. “Oh, don’t tell me that,” Brady said. The one other point about White’s play: He gave nothing away—didn’t act jumpy or anticipatory. “It is a lot of concentration,” Brady said. “Don’t give it away, catch a snap when you really don’t know it’s coming, so you have to react to it. Then after you catch the snap, read the blocks and get in at the most critical point in your career. I’d say that is a pretty incredible play.” • SUPER BOWL 51 FILM NOTES: Andy Benoit breaks down the plays, schemes and matchups that defined the Patriots’ comeback The Julio Jones catch interlude Brady: “I saw Matt [Ryan] step up; it was right on our sideline … I kind of looked through a bunch of bodies and I saw him make the catch, and I saw both refs run in and signal catch and I said, ‘There’s no way!’ I looked up on those screens, and then they showed it once or twice, and I was like, ‘He frickin’ caught it!’ When you actually see the replay, I didn’t realize how close [Patriots cornerback] Eric Rowe was. Then I saw a picture in Sports Illustrated of the catch, in the early pages. It was insane. The height that he had to jump and the concentration to get two feet down … Fingertips. Sideline. Toe touch.” Atlanta 28, New England 20 (fourth quarter, 3:30 left) James White’s 1-yard plunge brought the Patriots within two in the final minute of the fourth quarter. Jamie Squire/Getty Images Everyone (and rightfully so) obsesses about the Edelman catch, which was sort of a reverse Tyree. I’m going to respectfully skip that, because it’s been so well covered, including by our Jenny Vrentas last week. But the play before that, and the aborted play after, were huge. The play before: Three times in the last 19 minutes the Patriots ran the exact same formation—a three-by-one set (three receivers to the right, one to the left). Three times they threw it to the “one” receiver. Twice that was Malcolm Mitchell, the most inexperienced receiver (by leaps and bounds) on the team. And with 2:34 left in the fourth quarter, with New England 75 yards away from the end zone, McDaniels called it again. The Patriots liked the man-to-man matchups against Collins. Why? Because he is, in the vernacular, “long,” and New England’s scouting theory entering the game was that “long” corners (Collins is 6'1") are slightly slower at stopping and starting. On this play, Mitchell sprinted out 12 yards and then slipped and fell to one knee. The bad part of this? Brady’s pass was already in the air. If Collins had been in a better position with Mitchell, there’s a good chance he could have darted in front of Mitchell for the game-ensuring 35-yard pick-six. And wouldn’t the story lines today be a lot different. Instead of Brady the hero, the stories would be about Brady the pick-six king. But somehow, Mitchell got up and snagged a throw that was on top of him in an instant. When I mentioned this to Brady, about the pick-six part, he zinged me. Brady: “It's actually a route Malcolm runs really well … He really sells that go route really hard, he gets the DB running. Every corner is different in the game because there's a scoreboard behind him. In practice you can be pretty brave with jumping routes because nobody cares if you get beat for a touchdown. In the game it's different. They always have to be fearful of you throwing the ball behind the defense … I thought I saw Malcolm start to slip. Then he went behind the left tackle or left guard so I really couldn't see the completion. I just heard the crowd go ohhhhhhh (dejected voice), then OHHHHHHHH (happy voice).” The play after: During the game, I wondered—why are the Patriots rushing to the line with 2:03 and the ball at the Falcons’ 41 and two timeouts left? Why leave Atlanta with enough time to go down and win the game with a field goal? Two reasons: The Patriots called twin double-moves on corners who hadn’t seen many double-moves all day. And the Patriots, as McDaniels explained post-game, wanted to be in position to get another possession if they didn’t covert the two-point play after scoring a touchdown on this drive. “What are the chances of making two two-point conversions?” Brady said. “Josh was obviously thinking that.” The fact that Brady didn’t chance a throw for a touchdown here isn’t the point; it’s that New England was playing chess here—thinking two and three moves ahead. At 2:03, Brady hit Amendola crossing to the right for 20 yards, to the Falcons’ 21. White made the last 21 yards himself, catching two quick passes and then scoring on a one-yard dive over right guard. Atlanta, 28-26. The Patriots had three two-point plays on the play sheet for this game. The first one was the Andrews-to-White snap and run fakery. The second one depended on two receivers turning into snowplows at the goal line for Amendola. Edelman and Chris Hogan plowed two Atlanta defenders just far enough away that Amendola burrowed ahead, and the ball pierced the goal line. Barely. • SUPER BOWL 51 AT THE MMQB: All of our coverage of one of the most memorable championship games ever Overtime: Atlanta 28, New England 28 Chris Hogan helped set the table in overtime for the Patriots’ winning touchdown. Tony Gutierrez/AP Matthew Slater called heads. The coin flip came up heads. Patriots ball. Ballgame. The Falcons were gassed. The Patriots were energized. But when Brady looks back at this Super Bowl, he’ll think of more than the game. He’ll think of 111 practices. The anticipation throws he made in this game were, collectively, his finest achievements and the biggest difference in winning and losing. The chemistry between Brady and his receivers is as good as it possibly can be. Third play of the opening, and only, drive of OT: Hogan was singled left on Collins. (Poor Collins. He’s got to be having nightmares about this offense.) Follow this. Brady, standing on his 37-yard line, sees Hogan and Collins running stride for stride, almost Siamese twins, at the Atlanta 45. Brady throws to a spot about 23 yards downfield, on the left. Hogan digs his foot into the ground at the Atlanta 37 and boomerangs back, expecting the ball. Collins is a step behind him. The ball hits Hogan in the hands at the 40, and he efforts ahead to the 37. Just a beautiful play. This is the kind of unsung play that wins huge games, and it went a long way, Brady throwing those 11- and 15- and 23-yard comebacks to drive Atlanta crazy. “It's such a Peyton Manning-type throw,” Brady said. “I watched him for so many years make those throws. I used to be in amazement. Marvin [Harrison] and Reggie [Wayne], they'd cut their route off, turn around, ball was in the air, in stride, 15-, 18-yard gain. How the heck did they do that? There's so much trust from the quarterback to the receiver. The DB can't get to the ball faster than the receiver can. You got to believe your receiver is going to get to the ball faster than their guy. That's what that play came down to.” “But,” I said, “if you throw it 25 yards in the air, it could be an interception or incompletion.” “And that's a lot of throws,” Brady said. “That's a lot of throws. That's 111 practices that we had. That's however many games. Films, meetings. It's got to be like clockwork. You're throwing it to a spot, he's turning, those are the ones the DBs have been covering all year too. It ended up being a really tight play. But it took great execution.” The end: James White, who made so many plays in this game, took a pitch from Brady and willed his way into the end zone. Replay confirmed it. Remember the two two-point conversions, and the Patriots having a third one on their call sheet? Well, this White run was that third one. New England went three-for-three on two-point plays in the game, and the net result was 10 points—and a Super Bowl championship. * * * No quarterback has played in or won more Super Bowls than Tom Brady. Jim Davis/The Boston Globe via Getty Images The Patriots trailed by 10 entering the fourth quarter in Super Bowl 49 against Seattle, and down by 19 entering the fourth against Atlanta. Brady’s performance, collectively, in the final 34 minutes of those two games—the fourth quarter against Seattle, and the fourth plus the four minutes of overtime against Atlanta: Comp.-Att. Pct. Yards TD-INT Rating 34-42 .810 370 3-0 127.2 Brady searched for a reason, but he has no idea what it is. And maybe it is a coincidence. But if so, it’s a great time of your professional life to have some coincidental luck. “I always feel like I'm the same. Sometimes the stats don't show that, but that's how I feel … I felt the same in both of those games. I felt like I just go out there and do my job.” Playing that level at that age at that time—and after playing the most snaps of his professional life, in a high-pressure game. In his last game in his 30s, Brady played seven more snaps than he ever had. And it looked like he could have played 20 more. Or 30. How, exactly? “That,” Brady said, “is for a whole other podcast.” We have all week. On Wednesday, Brady will tell us. • THE SUPER BOWL, VEGAS STYLE: Robert Klemko spent Super Sunday trailing the head of the biggest sports book in Sin City * * * The Story That Will Not Die Terrell Owens tweeted ‘HOF is a total joke’ after falling short in his first year of eligibility. Elsa/Getty Images Terrell Owens didn’t make the Hall of Fame, which you know. You also know that the fault in him not making the Hall this year seems to be that he was often a disruptive teammate. The man who presented T.O.’s case in front of the Hall’s 47 other selectors, Paul Domowitch of the Philadelphia Daily News, was befuddled (as was I) at the overwhelming importance apparently placed on his behavior versus his performance. Owens is second all-time in receiving yardage in NFL history, and third in receiving touchdowns. I wanted to give the story a few days to die down before talking to the widely respected veteran football writer. This was Domowitch about Owens on Saturday: “I understand people’s reservations about his disruptive behavior. Totally understand. No one disputes he had his disruptive moments. But being second all-time in receiving yards and third in receiving touchdowns—those are Ruthian numbers. We’re keeping him out of the Hall of Fame because of some disruptive incidents with teammates? Most of the people keeping him out of the Hall didn’t cover him. I did. What he did most often was hardly the work of a person who doesn’t care. I don’t think you play the Super Bowl with a broken bone in your leg, and you catch nine balls for over 100 yards … I mean, that’s not something you do if you don’t care. Now what concerns me is how entrenched some people seem.” That concerns me too. But the next 49 weeks will have a way of calming some troubled waters. I still don’t think it’ll be enough to get Owens in next year in a starry class, but I hope I’m wrong. • DAN FOUTS GETS HIS VOTE: The Hall of Fame quarterback on T.O., the Canton balloting process and much more * * * As for Game One, 2017 … On Sept. 7 in Foxboro, the Patriots will host the first game of the season. (I’m assuming it will be Roger Goodell’s re-debut in the middle of these six friendly states.) Thoughts on the Patriots’ opening-night foe, with odds: Foe Odds Thoughts KC 2-1 Easiest choice. Andy Reid’s team is always competitive HOU 4-1 Playoff rematch—with a better passer, Tom Savage or Tony Romo ATL 9-2 Can’t see NFL wasting Super Bowl rematch second year in a row CAR 6-1 The NFL heard Ron Rivera’s anger over ’16 opener at champ Denver MIA 10-1 Outside shot, but two one-sided games in ’16 hurt this one LAC 20-1 Philip Rivers and a decent pass rush. Meh BUF 50-1 Not happening NYJ 75-1 Really not happening * * * Quotes of the Week Julio Jones’ sideline catch late in the fourth quarter was overshadowed by the Patriots’ 25-point comeback. Robert Beck for Sports Illustrated I “You a baaaaaad man!” —Atlanta wide receiver Mohamed Sanu to Julio Jones, in the Atlanta huddle after Jones made the greatest catch of his life in the Super Bowl, via an NFL Films wiring of Sanu. II “I love playing the game, love everything about it, but at some point your body tells you when to stop. The season ended. I just went into [general manager] Steve Keim and to coach [Bruce] Arians and asked them if I could take a month and make sure my body was going to get back to 100 percent—make sure my body was going to bounce back and give me another shot at it. I took the month and the body’s recovered well. I feel great.” —Arizona quarterback Carson Palmer, describing why he will return for a 14th season in 2017. He turns 38 in December. III “I know that this will anger some people and inspire others, But please know I did this not for you, but to be in accord with my own values and my own conscience. Like 1968 Olympian John Carlos always says, ‘There is no partial commitment to justice. You are either in or you’re out.’ Well, I’m in.” —Seattle defensive end Michael Bennett, who announced that he would forego a goodwill trip with NFL players to Israel because he discovered the trip would be used by the Israeli government for what he understood to favor Israel over Palestine. IV “I'm speaking to you, Jerry. Mr. Garrett, make it happen. Dak Prescott leads our team right now. I need you to take Tony Romo, take a couple picks, and give them to Cleveland so you can pick me up. Please, I'd love to play in Dallas, just make it happen.” —Texas A&M pass-rusher Myles Garrett, in contention to be the top pick in the 2017 NFL Draft, in a video posted by ESPN. “Jerry” is Cowboys owner Jerry Jones, “Mr. Garrett” is coach Jason Garrett. Two thoughts: The Cleveland complex continues … and I sincerely doubt Tony Romo, who will be 37 opening day, holds much value to the Browns, who need a quarterback for the future, not for 2017. V “I caught it! Swear to God!” —New England wide receiver Julian Edelman, captured by an NFL Films wire, telling Falcons corner Brian Poole that he made that impossible catch in the fourth quarter of the Super Bowl. VI “Without you, there is no me. People want to put someone on a pedestal—just one person. But they leave a lot of people out when they do that, and I don’t believe that should happen. So yes, you have a piece of this bust, man.” —Hall of Famer Terrell Davis, the Denver running back, in a touching interview with a former road-grading teammate, guard Mark Schlereth, on the radio show “Schlereth and Evans” on station 104.3 The Fan. A legitimately touching tribute by Davis. That was good radio. • 2017 DRAFT DEFINED BY DEPTH: Albert Breer examines several central themes emerging with the new prospects * * * Stats of the Week Carson Palmer is returning for his 15th season in 2017, his fifth with the Cardinals. Norm Hall/Getty Images I For those who rolled their eyes at the return of Carson Palmer and think the Cardinals should have moved on from the 37-year-old passer: Palmer has thrown for 655 more yards than Aaron Rodgers over the past two seasons. II I am eight days late here, but holy crap, this stat line on New England left tackle Nate Solder versus Atlanta in Super Bowl 51 is stunning: Sacks allowed: 1 QB hits allowed: 1 QB pressures allowed: 11 * * * Factoids That May Interest Only Me I The first of Bill Belichick’s 227 NFL coaching victories came against the Patriots. Belichick’s second game as Cleveland coach was a 20-0 victory Sept. 8, 1991. The New England coach that day in Foxboro: Dick MacPherson. The New England quarterback that day: Tom Hodson. II The first of Bill Belichick’s 26 NFL postseason victories came against the Patriots, 20-13, on New Year’s Day 1995. The New England coach that day at Municipal Stadium: Bill Parcells. The New England quarterback that day: Drew Bledsoe. III The last game of Belichick’s rookie coaching season in 1991, a dreadful affair at Three Rivers Stadium, was Chuck Noll’s last game as a pro football coach. Steelers 17, Browns 10. I was in the stadium that day, Dec. 22, 1991, expecting to see or hear Noll’s announcement—would he retire or return? No dice. I do remember a picture of Noll and wife Marianne appearing on the scoreboard in the fourth quarter with the words HAPPY HOLIDAYS FROM CHUCK AND MARIANNE NOLL. The crowd gave that visage a standing ovation. IV Belichick (263) is eight wins from passing Tom Landry (270) on the all-time coaching victories list. * * * Non-Super Bowl Factoid Larry Fitzgerald greeted Sidney Crosby and Shane Dolan before dropping the puck Saturday night. Christian Petersen/Getty Images Per PR maestro Mark Dalton of the Arizona Cardinals: Saturday was Larry Fitzgerald Bobblehead Night at the Arizona Coyotes game. The Coyotes defeated the defending Stanley Cup champion Penguins in overtime. On the night the Coyotes feted Arizona's most noted number 11, Martin Hanzal put the Coyotes up 2-1 in the second period. Hanzal wears number 11, it was his 11th goal of the season and it came with exactly 11:00 left in the period. * * * Mr. Starwood Preferred Travel Note People in Montana are so nice. I got off a plane in Bozeman on Sunday and the gate agent said, “Welcome to Bozeman!” I walked out to my rental car and a Bozeman police officer said, “Welcome to Bozeman! How ya doin’?” Late in the afternoon, I stopped at a burger place and got a bison burger. Terrific. When I went to the men’s room, I saw a poster for avalanche classes. I asked my waiter about it, and he said lots of people who ski go to these classes to avoid getting buried on the mountains. It’s a big country. * * * Tweets of the Week I "I will NOT be going to the White House. I don't feel welcome in that house. I'll leave it at that." -@LG_Blount — Rich Eisen Show (@RichEisenShow) February 9, 2017 II I ordered coffee. She asked me for my name. I said: "Wolf." She said: "OK. I'll howl when it's ready." We both laughed. pic.twitter.com/m2LcHlfZO7 — Wolf Blitzer (@wolfblitzer) February 11, 2017 III The most stunning stat of the Super Bowl: Teams leading by 25+ points are 2545-4-2 (regular season) in those games. — Sam Farmer (@LATimesfarmer) February 10, 2017 IV As the father of twins, George Clooney is so screwed. — Richard Deitsch (@richarddeitsch) February 11, 2017 * * * Pod People From “The MMQB Podcast With Peter King,” available where you download podcasts. Love the pod this week—New England offensive coordinator Josh McDaniels on the game (much of it covered at the top of this column) and San Francisco GM John Lynch. I chose a couple of the Lynch bites, because they give you a view into the person. • Lynch on how the story of him being a GM was such a shock to so many people: “Early on, the story broke that I was doing the silence part to test [CEO] Jed York, and that’s true, but that was probably third on the list. I have four kids. My wife, when I went to her, she said, 'John, listen. It is hard for me to wrap my arms around something until you have an offer. So, develop this thing if you wish, but I don’t want to tell the kids at this point, because kids get anxiety about that.’ That spoke to me. I have a son who is going to be a junior right now. He checks Pro Football Talk, he checks The MMQB on a constant basis. I didn’t want him learning— and that’s the way this world works now. [My family members] were the top priority. But also because I had read the stories that there were a lot of leaks out of that San Francisco building. I said, ‘Jed, it’s very important to me. Actually, it’s a non-starter. If this gets out, my name’s out of the hat.’ To his credit, it worked, and it stayed quiet. One person had the story, and he is a good man because he never leaked it. He’s a father, and I told him, as a father, I'm asking you to hold on to it, and he did.” • Lynch on his baseball history—especially starting the first game in the history of the Florida Marlins organization: “Unfortunately what I remember is that the first seven pitches that day were balls. A four-pitch walk, and then I got to 3-0, and then I came back and I got it going, but oh wow, what an experience … It was so short to right field in the park, Erie, Pennsylvania. Mr. [Wayne] Huizenga brought up all the dignitaries, and I throw the first pitch and they run out and take my hat, take my jersey, they give me another one, they stop the game. Every pitch they were taking something for the Hall of Fame, so the fact that some of that stuff still resides at the Baseball Hall of Fame is pretty fun. I think I would have been a good pitcher. I had great sink, heavy sink. And I think it would have worked, but now just thinking about it, it's the same reason I took this job. I learned right there, my dad wanted me to play baseball. What are you doing? Look at the career—no injuries! A lot of people thought I was crazy to leave the Marlins where I was the second pick ever, I threw the first pitch, and had a fast track to the major leagues. What I did is I followed my heart … I realized that I loved baseball but I had to have football. That same line of thinking is what allowed me to pursue this opportunity without fear. I'm going to give it my best shot. I don't fail at many things that I try in life. I am going to have some failures but I'll overcome those.” * * * Ten Things I Think I Think In 2017, Jimmy Garoppolo will be on the final year of his rookie contract, which expires after the season. Maddie Meyer/Getty Images 1. I think these are my quick notes of analysis from the first week of the off-season: a. Last one out of the Falcons’ coaches’ offices, turn off the lights. b. All I know about the Terrell Owens Hall of Fame story is this: Lots of anti-Owens people have been in hiding for the past nine days. c. It’s amazing to me that those who think Owens doesn’t belong in the Hall of Fame are all hiding under rocks this morning. d. Not a big fan of NFL coaches wearing T-shirts slapping the NFL commissioner in the face. It’s just not a good look. e. The owners/GMs who interview an exceedingly intelligent and mature man and excellent coach, Matt Patricia, for head-coaching jobs in the future (and that will happen, just the way it did this year) are going to wonder: Do we have to worry about the leader of our team pulling a Delta Chi frat prank? f. Kyle Shanahan wasn’t kidding, knowing him, when he said four days after the game: “I remember every single play, and I will go over those for the rest of my life.” g. This Raiders’ thing in Las Vegas will not end well, because no high rollers there want to mess with the jilted casino magnate Sheldon Adelson. h. I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again, a hundred times: Mark Davis needs a partner with money, period. 2. I think Jimmy Garoppolo will not be traded by New England this off-season. 3. I think it’s pretty obvious why everyone thinks he will be: Tom Brady just finished a season with 35 touchdowns and five interceptions. He’ll next take a snap when he’s 40, but when he looks this good at 39, no one expects him to fall off a cliff. Got it. So go get a first-round pick for Garoppolo and develop Jacoby Brissett. But there are two problems with this logic, as I see it. And understand, I have not spoken with Belichick about this; it is a simple reading of the tea leaves knowing the way Belichick could be looking at it. One: In the 17 seasons since the Patriots drafted Brady, Garoppolo has to be the first man Belichick looks at and thinks can be the Patriots’ quarterback for the next decade. He’s smart, makes good decisions, has shown (admittedly in a very brief window last September) that he can beat quality opponents. Two: The Patriots do the most with lesser prospects of any team in recent league history. If you’ve got a starting quarterback about to turn 40, regardless of his incredible good health and fitness, whatever Brady gives the Patriots now is a bonus. If I’m Belichick, I’m thinking: I’d rather have a quarterback on my roster who I know can win January games in 2017 than go without him and have a first-round pick instead. I can’t tell you how he’s thinking; I can only tell you that based on Belichickian logic, I think that’s most likely how he is thinking heading into the off-season. Oh, and as the Patriots drove for the tying touchdown in the fourth quarter of the Super Bowl eight days ago, these were the skill players who touched the ball, and the linemen who blocked for them, and the draft round and year for their entry into the NFL: Tom Brady: sixth round, 2000. James White: fourth round, 2014 Chris Hogan: undrafted, 2012 Julian Edelman: seventh round, 2009 Malcolm Mitchell: fourth round, 2016 Danny Amendola: undrafted, 2008 Nate Solder: first round, 2011 Joe Thuney: third round, 2016 David Andrews: undrafted, 2015 Shaq Mason: fourth round, 2015 Marcus Cannon: fifth round, 2011 Notice a trend? One of the 11 (Solder) was a top-75 draft choice in the NFL. It isn’t that the Patriots don’t want high draft choices; of course they do. But they win with players drafted down the line, or not drafted at all, or by stealing the fourth receiver on the Bills (Chris Hogan) in free agency. 4. I think I liked the officiating crew in the Super Bowl altogether. But I especially liked the decisiveness of line judge Jeff Seeman. The one thing you want out of your officiating crew is decisiveness. And when Edelman got entangled with three Falcons on that ridiculous cover-of-Sports-Illustrated catch in the fourth quarter, and it was unclear whether Edelman caught the ball but it sure looked like he didn’t, Seeman sprinted in from the sideline with absolute certainty that it was a catch. He pumped his arms over and over in the officiating sign for a good reception. And, of course, it turned out Seeman was right. Great call, great conviction. That’s got to go on every Dean Blandino teaching tape this off-season. 5. I think the Raiders deserve credit for the Jack Del Rio contract extension. Lots of credit. When I met with Derek Carr in December, he couldn’t have been more enthusiastic about Del Rio’s steadying influence. Right time, right place, right coach. 6. I think I wouldn’t be concerned about the mass exodus of Atlanta coaches, except for two: Kyle Shanahan and Bobby Turner. Shanahan made Matt Ryan better. He made the offense better because it was so diverse and so unpredictable. Turner’s the unsung loss. He’s the veteran running backs coach who, back in Denver, made a slew of low-drafted backs (Terrell Davis most notably) play great, and he was vital in the development of Devonta Freeman and Tevin Coleman in Atlanta. But I applaud the Falcons. They could have played hardball and kept Turner. But Turner wanted to go with Shanahan—Turner obviously was close with Mike Shanahan—and he becomes a very influential senior adviser (he is 67) to Kyle Shanahan. 7. I think it doesn’t hurt that the 49ers have rewarded Turner by making him one of the highest-paid (if not the highest-paid) running backs coaches in the NFL, with a salary of at least $625,000. 8. I think I’ve got five Atlanta points left over from the Super Bowl, in the wake of watching the tape back twice, along with the coaches tape, courtesy of NFL Game Pass, which is one of the great sportswriter tools ever invented: • On Dan Quinn, and blame. Quinn four seasons ago was coaching at the University of Florida. He’s in his second year at any level of being a head coach, and he just guided his team to the Super Bowl. I can’t line up a firing squad because, with the play clock running, he didn’t overrule Kyle Shanahan and order him to run on second-and-11 with 3:56 left in the game. I don’t know how many times all season, if ever, Quinn has overruled Shanahan. But Shanahan ran the eighth-highest-scoring offense in NFL history this season. He helped Matt Ryan play 10 to 15 percent better than he ever had. That, I believe, buys Shanahan the trust of the head coach when he makes a questionable call in a vital situation down the stretch. Atlanta could have kneeled down twice and Matt Bryant would have been in position to kick the insurance field goal from about 42 yards away, with about 3:35 left. This, I believe, is on Shanahan. He should have thought ahead, and he didn’t do it. The buck does stop with Quinn. It’s a bitter pill for him, and for his team. But it’s more on the man who calls the offensive plays. It was an incredible gaffe by Shanahan. • On fatigue. So much being made of the Falcons’ defenders on the field so much. Not a fan of this excuse—at all. The Patriots’ offensive players had to play those same amount of snaps, 95 in all. (Add in the four plays negated due to defensive penalty, and there’s your 99 plays.) The Atlanta defense is far younger than New England’s offense. So spare me Atlanta being tired while the Patriots road-graded them in the second half and overtime. If I’m Quinn, I’m thinking about my team’s conditioning, and perhaps changing practice to mirror what the Patriots did late in the season—practice once a week in pads. • Alex Mack playing with the cracked fibula was noble, but he was a big part of this loss late too. New England’s Trey Flowers burst past the limited Mack for the crucial 12-yard sack on the killer Atlanta drive; Mack wasn’t competitive on the play. When Jake Matthews got the holding call on the next play, that killed the Falcons. A terrible selection of plays—from Shanahan calling a pass, Mack giving up the sack, Matt Ryan incredibly not throwing the ball away (cardinal quarterback rule in this case, at this spot on the field), and then Matthews stupidly wrestling Chris Long to the ground. • The Patriots three times in the last 11 minutes of the game ran the exact same play—a trips-right formation (three receivers right, one left), and the Falcons didn’t pick up on it. Every time, Brady threw to the single receiver—Mitchell twice, Hogan once. Is there no one on the Atlanta sideline or upstairs that sees this happening over and over again, no one to say, If this happens again, let’s change up the coverage? Evidently not. • Devonta Freeman knows this already, and he has been flayed from coast to coach for eight days for missing the block on Dont’a Hightower. But it’s got to be said: If Freeman makes the block and Atlanta converts that third-and-one, the Falcons could well have had the ball long enough there with a 16-point lead to make sure that if New England got two more possessions, it would be with long distances to go for touchdowns, not one of the possessions starting at the Atlanta 25. Lazy play by Freeman. 9. I think I like Seattle inking Blair Walsh. There’s no such thing as psyche insurance, and so you don’t know if he’s ever going to be a great kicker again after having the yips in 2016. But he’s only 27. In 2012 he made 10 field goals of 50 yards or longer in 10 tries. The question is not why you would give Walsh a shot, but rather why you wouldn’t. 10. I think these are my non-football thoughts of the week: a. Story of the Week, and maybe of the year, by Hailey Branson-Potts of the Los Angeles Times, about a foster father in Los Angeles who takes in only terminally ill children. Well written and crafted. b. Do not read the story if you do not want to cry. c. Read the story. d. Football-Related Story (but just barely) of the Week: Steve Young, private equity czar, by Alex Sherman of Bloomberg Businessweek. A terrific story about a person who refuses to get locked into what people think he should be—an ex-football player. e. Interesting how in the story how much Young distances himself from football, and remembers the words of another Hall of Fame quarterback in so doing. “Roger Staubach once told me, and I’ll never forget it, “When you retire, run. Don’t look back,’” Young said. f. Good luck to colleague Bob Costas as he transitions into whatever he’s going to transition to—and whatever it is, he’ll be great, because that’s what he is at everything. I’ve been lucky enough to work with Costas for the past 15 years at HBO and NBC. He won’t do anything unless he can be great at it. g. And good luck to Mike Tirico, one of the great team players and broadcasters in TV sports, as he takes over Costas’s Olympic host duties. Tirico is good at so many things, two most notably—explaining nuances of games simply but vividly, and making people on his team feel valued. h. Step away from Twitter, Mr. President. Be presidential. i. You messed with the wrong guy, James Dolan—and I don’t even know who’s right in the Charles Oakley/Dolan fiasco. You messed with the wrong guy because Oakley played his guts out for the Knicks, and you can’t win a fight with a legend like that. j. Owners who lose all the time don’t seem to get that fans hate them because the team’s not winning. Antagonizing a former player you hate but the fans love is the opposite of good business. k. Coffeenerdness: The Starbucks smoked butterscotch latte is a very good drink when made consistently. Unfortunately, that happens about half the time. l. Beernerdness: Live Oak Hefeweizen (Live Oak Brewing Company, Austin, Texas) was the hidden gem of Super Bowl week. I was fortunate to have two mugs of it Thursday night at the Hay Merchant in Houston, and I will just say it will be on my very short list of beers to pursue when I next travel to Texas. m. I’m no chess person, but I do love Garry Kasparov. n. Geno Auriemma and the UConn Huskies play for their 100th straight win tonight, against South Carolina. Let’s put that in perspective, with the full acknowledgement that there are no East Carolinas or South Floridas on a pro football schedule: o. In its last 99 games, the best women’s basketball team in America, UConn, is 99-0. p. In its last 99 games (including playoffs), the best pro football team in America, New England, is 77-22. q. I should have linked to this photo from the Super Bowl press box last week. The NFL was good enough to leave an empty front-row press-box seat, with a commemoration, for the late Edwin Pope of the Miami Herald. His good friend and colleague Armando Salguero was pleased to sit next to the Pope seat, and to tell Pope stories to anyone who was interested. A nice tribute. * * * The Adieu Haiku Montana. Lovely! If I were Tom Brady I’d escape life here too. • Question or comment? Email us at talkback@themmqb.com |
6320 Electronics An interactive course on electronics, starting at the absolute beginning. This course is mostly intended for hobbyists who want to start building their own circuits, but the content will be useful to anyone who wants to learn more about how electronics work. Students are not expected to have any prior knowledge of electricity or electronics. Lectures no lectures added Prerequisites Familiarity with the SI system and prefixes Understanding of scientific notation. Basic algebra: multiplication, fractions, logarithms, exponents, etc. Knowledge of introductory calculus (integrals and derivatives) may be helpful but is definitely not required. Syllabus Classes will be hosted as a series of posts on Reddit at http://www.reddit.com/r/breadboard The classes have already started but the course is not paced. Students can go through the lessons as slowly or as quickly as they want. The content of the first volume is divided into ten units: I - Basics of DC II - Instrumentation III - DC Analysis IV - Batteries and Power Sources V - Physics of Conductors VI - Capacitance VII - Magnetism VIII - Inductance IX - Finding and reading datasheets X - RC/LR Circuits This is only a rough outline and the direction of the course may be shifted to accommodate the content or the interests of the students. Additional information This is a very hands-on course and as such it's highly recommended to spend about $100 on the parts listed here It may be possible to follow the lessons using only circuit simulation software, but if you want to build your own electronic widgets, all of these supplies will be very useful anyway. Teacher qualifications |
Listen On Spotify: bit.ly/1uUZ68G Beyond moving bodies and stirring emotion, music can also be a powerful vehicle for social change. Every90Minutes, in conjunction with Gravitas Recordings, has curated a unique compilation of electronic music for an important cause. "Beat ALS" spans 17 tracks across a number of genres with 100% of the proceeds directly benefiting Every90Minutes, a 501(c)3 nonprofit organization dedicated to funding ALS research through music and events. The release features a truly memorable cast of international talent including Bassnectar, BT, Tritonal, Dub FX, John Acquaviva, ill.gates, Matthew Dear, Machinedrum and many more. Track vibes ranging from dubstep to techno meet downtempo and cinematic sections with class, weaving a sense of poetic diversity throughout the album.Jay Smith, the Founder of music tech company Livid Instruments, started Every90Minutes after his own diagnosis with ALS earlier this year. The Foundation is dedicated to funding the most promising research and treatment for ALS, and provides an inspirational beacon for others affected by his disease. Apart from the "Beat ALS" compilation, Every90Minutes is working on a number of multifaceted initiatives to raise both funds and awareness for ALS. Support of each project directly furthers research to end this debilitating and ultimately fatal disease. Learn more at Every90Minutes.org |
California Chief Justice Tani Cantil-Sakauye wrote the letter Thursday to Attorney General Jeff Sessions and Department of Homeland Security Secretary John F. Kelly. (Robert Galbraith/Reuters) California’s top judge criticized federal immigration agents for using courthouses as “bait” — a place for “stalking” immigrants who “pose no risk to public safety.” Chief Justice Tani Cantil-Sakauye wrote a letter Thursday to Attorney General Jeff Sessions and Department of Homeland Security Secretary John F. Kelly amid reports of federal agents going to courthouses and scouting for immigrants who are not in the country legally. Such incidents have been reported in California, Texas, Oregon, Colorado and Arizona. In the letter, Cantil-Sakauye requested that Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents stop arresting immigrants at courthouses. “I am deeply concerned about reports from some of our trial courts that immigration agents appear to be stalking undocumented immigrants in our courthouses to make arrests,” she wrote. “… Courthouses should not be used as bait in the necessary enforcement of our country’s immigration laws.” ICE spokeswoman Virginia Kice said immigration officers make arrests at courthouses only after exhausting other options. [Thousands of ICE detainees claim they were forced into labor, a violation of anti-slavery laws] “It’s important to note that many of the arrest targets ICE has sought out at or near courthouses are foreign nationals who have prior criminal convictions in the U.S.,” Kice said in a statement. “In years past, most of these individuals would have been turned over to ICE by local authorities upon their release from jail based on ICE detainers. … In such instances where deportation officers seek to conduct an arrest at a courthouse, every effort is made to take the person into custody in a secure area, out of public view, but this is not always possible.” Kice said making an arrest at a courthouse eliminates the safety risks of detaining someone on the street. “These individuals, who often have significant criminal histories, are released onto the street, presenting a potential public safety threat,” she said. “When ICE Fugitive Operations officers have to go out into the community to proactively locate these criminal aliens, regardless of the precautions they take, it needlessly puts our personnel and potentially innocent bystanders in harm’s way. … Because courthouse visitors are typically screened upon entry to search for weapons and other contraband, the safety risks for the arresting officers and for the arrestee are substantially diminished.” Tracking down fugitives, Kice said, requires significant resources because many of them use aliases and don’t have viable addresses or places of employment. “A courthouse may afford the most likely opportunity to locate a target and take him or her into custody,” Kice said. A Department of Justice spokesman declined to comment, beyond noting that the agency will review the letter. [Federal agents conduct immigration enforcement raids in at least six states] Cantil-Sakauye’s letter echoes concerns raised across the country by some local and state officials who fear that ICE’s increased presence at courthouses may deter immigrants from coming to court for legal matters, such as testifying or seeking protective orders from alleged abusers. San Francisco District Attorney George Gascon called the approach “very shortsighted” and said it has a “chilling impact” on the community, according to the Los Angeles Times. In El Paso, county officials said federal agents made false or misleading claims when they arrested a transgender woman who had just obtained a protective order against her live-in partner, local media reported. Federal officials said in an affidavit that they detained Irvin Gonzalez on the street, but surveillance videos showed men in casual clothing detaining Gonzalez just outside the courtroom. “I knew what the truth was when every witness — the lawyers and the judge — said that ICE was there,” El Paso County Judge Veronica Escobar said last month, the El Paso Times reported. “Then the video left absolutely no room for doubt. You see his hand on her arm. She was not free to go. She was in his custody.” El Paso County Attorney Jo Anne Bernal said Gonzalez’s detention was alarming and could wind up keeping other domestic violence victims from coming forward. “Our clients come to us at the lowest point of their lives,” Bernal said, according to the El Paso newspaper. “Many of them are so frightened of coming to us because of possible immigration concerns.” After the incident in Texas, officials in Oregon’s Multnomah County asked for the public’s help in reporting ICE raids at courthouses. “The possible increase in these incidents across the country is concerning,” county officials said in a statement last month. “Abusers often use threats of deportation to prevent their victims from seeking help. Courthouses should be safe locations for people to access justice, particularly people who are fleeing violent relationships.” [‘This is really unprecedented’: ICE detains woman seeking domestic abuse protection at Texas courthouse] In Denver, ICE agents in plain clothes were seen outside a courtroom waiting to pick up a Mexican national who was in court for a sentencing hearing for stealing tools in 2015, according to NBC affiliate KUSA. In Portland, Ore., three ICE agents, also in plain clothes, watched a Mexican national inside the Multnomah County courthouse for several minutes before one of the man’s attorneys told the agents he would cooperate. Ivan Rodriguez Resendiz told the Oregonian that he went to court because he’d violated his probation by driving under the influence. Rodriguez Resendiz was not arrested that day, but the agents followed him and his attorney to the lawyer’s office, the Oregonian reported. “It was disturbing to say the least,” Rodriguez Resendiz’s attorney, Jennifer List, told the Oregonian. “They didn’t go up and say, ‘We’re ICE. And by the way, we’re interested in talking to your client.’ They don’t say anything. They aren’t upfront. They aren’t wearing a badge.” In her letter, Cantil-Sakauye, the first Filipino American and the second woman to lead the California Supreme Court, said the majority of undocumented immigrants who show up in court “pose no risk to public safety.” Stalking courthouses to arrest them, she wrote, is “neither safe nor fair.” “They not only compromise our core values of fairness but they undermine the judiciary’s ability to provide equal access to justice,” she wrote. [After weeks of waiting in ICE detention, asylum seeker with brain tumor released on bond] Here’s Cantil-Sakauye’s full letter: Dear Attorney General Sessions and Secretary Kelly: As Chief Justice of California responsible for the safe and fair delivery of justice in our state, I am deeply concerned about reports from some of our trial courts that immigration agents appear to be stalking undocumented immigrants in our courthouses to make arrests. Our courthouses serve as a vital forum for ensuring access to justice and protecting public safety. Courthouses should not be used as bait in the necessary enforcement of our country’s immigration laws. Our courts are the main point of contact for millions of the most vulnerable Californians in times of anxiety, stress, and crises in their lives. Crime victims, victims of sexual abuse and domestic violence, witnesses to crimes who are aiding law enforcement, limited-English speakers, unrepresented litigants, and children and families all come to our courts seeking justice and due process of law. As finders of fact, trial courts strive to mitigate fear to ensure fairness and protect legal rights. Our work is critical for ensuring public safety and the efficient administration of justice. Most Americans have more daily contact with their state and local governments than with the federal government, and I am concerned about the impact on public trust and confidence in our state court system if the public feels that our state institutions are being used to facilitate other goals and objectives, no matter how expedient they may be. Each layer of government — federal, state, and local — provides a portion of the fabric of our society that preserves law and order and protects the rights and freedoms of the people. The separation of powers and checks and balances at the various levels and branches of government ensure the harmonious existence of the rule of law. The federal and state governments share power in countless ways, and our roles and responsibilities are balanced for the public good. As officers of the court, we judges uphold the constitutions of both the United States and California, and the executive branch does the same by ensuring that our laws are fairly and safely enforced. But enforcement policies that include stalking courthouses and arresting undocumented immigrants, the vast majority of whom pose no risk to public safety, are neither safe nor fair. They not only compromise our core value of fairness but they undermine the judiciary’s ability to provide equal access to justice. I respectfully request that you refrain from this sort of enforcement in California’s courthouses. — Chief Justice Tani G. Cantil-Sakauye Read more: ICE nabs young ‘dreamer’ applicant after she speaks out at a news conference Advocates warn ‘dreamers’ to lie low as Trump ramps up deportation plans Immigration agents illegally detain Obama program ‘dreamer,’ lawsuit says |
Amid coral reef damage, wildfires in Canada and drought in India, "we have no option but to accelerate" action * Government experts meeting in Bonn May 16 to 26 * Starting process to flesh out details of climate deal * NASA says April seventh straight month to break record By Alister Doyle OSLO, May 16 (Reuters) - Governments began work on Monday on a rule book to implement the 2015 Paris Agreement to limit global warming, with the United Nations urging stronger action after a string of record-smashing monthly temperatures. NASA said at the weekend that last month was the warmest April in statistics dating back to the 19th century, the seventh month in a row to break temperature records. The meeting of government experts is the first since 195 nations reached a deal in Paris in December to limit climate change by shifting from fossil fuels to green energies by 2100. It will begin to work out the detail of the plan. "The Paris Agreement represents the foundations ... Now we have to raise the walls, the roof of a common home," French Environment Minister Segolene Royal told a news conference. The agreement sets targets for shifting the world to green energies by 2100 but is vague, for instance, about how governments will report and monitor their national plans to curb greenhouse gas emissions. Many government delegates at the start of the May 16-26 U.N. talks, in Bonn, Germany, expressed concern about rising temperatures and extremes events such as damage to tropical coral reefs, wildfires in Canada or drought in India. "We have no other option but to accelerate" action to limit warming, Christiana Figueres, the U.N. climate chief, told a news conference, asked about the NASA data. She said record temperatures were partly caused by a natural warming effect of an El Nino weather event in the Pacific Ocean, magnified by the build-up of man-made greenhouse gas emissions. She said national promises for curbing greenhouse gases put the world on track for a rise in temperatures of between 2.5 and 3 degrees Celsius (4.5 to 5.4 Fahrenheit), well above an agreed ceiling in the Paris text of "well below" 2C (3.6F) with a target of 1.5C (2.7F). "Certainly we are not yet on the path" for the Paris temperature targets, she said. Last month, the Paris Agreement was signed by 175 governments at a New York ceremony, the most ever for an opening day of a U.N. deal, and including top emitters China and the United States. The agreement will enter into force once 55 nations representing 55 percent of world emissions have formally ratified. Royal said she would submit a bill on Tuesday to the French National Assembly seeking ratification. (Reporting by Alister Doyle; Editing by Alison Williams) Our Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles. |
KESWICK, Ontario, April 30 (UPI) -- A small Canadian town in southern Ontario is divided over charges against an Asian immigrant youth who responded to a bully's punch with one of his own. The confrontation occurred April 21 in Keswick, 40 miles north of Toronto, between two 15-year-old boys during a game in the high school gymnasium. Neither boy can be identified, The Globe and Mail said. One student who immigrated to Canada from South Korea in 2004 told police a white student shoved him, called him an "(expletive) Chinese" and hit him in the mouth. The Korean youth had been trained in martial arts by his father, a former member of South Korea's national martial arts team. The youth told police he had been trained to only hit back with his left hand and, with one punch, broke the other youth's nose, the Globe reported. The boy was charged with assault causing bodily harm, suspended from school and may face expulsion. However, police reopened the case as a possible hate-crime after 400 mostly white students walked out of the high school Monday in protest of how the Korean youth was treated, The Globe and Mail said. York Regional Police said further charges against others were possible. |
After a slip-up on the PlayStation Network Store just over a week ago which allowed countless PlayStation Vita owners across Europe to purchase and download the indie shooter Gunslugs early, an official release date has now been set for the game. Abstraction Games’ shooter will be hitting the PlayStation Store on 18th February in North America and the day after on 19th February across Europe. Tj’ièn Twijnstra from Abstraction Games said “I’m very proud to announce that multi-ward winning, rogue-like run’n gunner Gunslugs is making its way to PlayStation Vita.” Twijnstra continued, “Originally developed by legendary super developer Pascal Bestebroer under the Orange Pixel label and now adapted (and published) for the PS Vita by Abstraction Games, mostly known for the extremely well received Hotline Miami for PlayStation platforms. Gunslugs has almost everything you ever wanted in a good game, a big cast of unlockable characters, screen filling end bosses, nice variation of weapons, drivable tanks, jetpacks, hidden worlds, princesses, armor shop, white wizards, nerds with handhelds, rain, snow, hell, hellworms, sandworms, train rides, chip-tunes by Gavin Harrison, and now finally with BUTTONS!” The PS Vita version naturally comes with Trophies, Leaderboards and Cloud saving. And… on release the game will have a 20% discount for PSPlus members the first week after it’s released.” Like this: Like Loading... Related |
Toronto mayoral candidates Doug Ford, Olivia Chow (L) and John Tory (R) take part in a municipal debate for the upcoming city election in Toronto, September 23, 2014. Current Toronto Mayor Rob Ford, in his first public remarks since doctors revealed he has cancer, has asked residents of Canada's largest city to vote for his brother Doug, who has replaced him on the ballot in next month's mayoral election. REUTERS/Mark Blinch (CANADA - Tags: POLITICS ELECTIONS) The epic and everlasting Toronto mayoral campaign is cycling through its final month and, with little more than two weeks to go before the city chooses a replacement for outgoing mayor Rob Ford, tension appears to have hit a peak rarely seen before. As candidates spar to get their message out to voters, the process by which that message is shared has come under fire, with public debates cancelled, appearances scrubbed and orders leveled on how debates should be held, and with whom. The debate about debates has led to a bizarre form of categorization, where “major candidates” are not the same as “legitimate candidates,” which aren’t necessarily the same as “front running candidates,” as another tier of “fringe candidates” watch from the sidelines – which, by the way, is not the same thing as “longshot candidates”. The latest Forum Research poll found that John Tory held 39 per cent of the vote, Doug Ford held 37 per cent and Olivia Chow held 22 per cent. The remaining two per cent said they intended to vote for one of more than five dozen other candidates. Does that mean any remaining debates should focus on those three candidates, or should they extend further than that, giving more people a chance to have their voices heard? There are officially 65 people running for the position of Mayor of Toronto – a list that includes everything from lawyers and former public servants to high school students and marijuana advocates. Also on the list there is a noted white supremacist, a satirist who refers to himself as “supreme majesty” and candidate once identified by a national newspaper as a former hash dealer. Having them all participate in a single debate is a mind boggling concept that defies common sense. But recently, the format of mayoral debates has become a debate issue itself, with “major” candidates demanding others be barred from participating, and others declining to share the stage with the field of also-rans. Earlier this week, the group Women in Toronto Politics was forced to cancel a debate over how many candidates had been invited to participate. According to a press release, city-funded groups like theirs are required to issue debate invitations to all mayoral candidates. The group had believed this meant they needed to invite all “front-running candidates,” the way independent groups are free to invite any candidates they choose. When they realized their mistake, organizers issued invitations to the entire field of candidates, both front-running and fringe alike. This had two results: the group was inundated by lesser-known candidates who had been chomping at the bit for their chance at a public debate, and the major candidates said they weren’t willing to participate in a debate with that many moving parts. You can’t really blame them – a two-hour debate with double-digit participants gives each candidate enough time to introduce themselves and little more. “The size of the list does make it a real challenge,” Peter Graefe , an associate professor of political science at McMaster University, told Yahoo Canada News on Friday. “If you have 20 candidates even and you give them three minutes to give an opening statement you have gone through an hour and everybody is asleep. You can’t really have a debate back and forth when you need to go through 20 people. “It is one of those situations where you could make a case for the democratic principle that more people who are running should have a voice in the debate. But that comes at the price of the debates serving their purpose of allowing people to actually hear people put forward their platform, answer questions and exchanges differences of opinion.” The issue of debate formats reached a point of satire late Thursday night when organizers of the Inner City Union debate informed the Toronto Star that Doug Ford had threatened to boycott the event if Ari Goldkind – more a longshot candidate than fringe – was allowed to participate. What followed was a bizarre series of events in which organizers, fearing they would lose a high-profile candidate, contacted Goldkind and revoked their invitation – which had been issued long before Doug Ford had joined the race. This prompted John Tory to pull out of the debate in protest, stating that Ford can’t dictate the circumstances of a public debate, which led Ford to accuse Tory of being afraid to debate him. Story continues |
Chapter Four Part One De Fumo in Flammam (Out of the smoke, and into the fire) I had escaped to the roof at every available moment, relishing in the small freedom and releasing the pressures of being a tribute, if only for a few hours. Every night I would awaken through its midst, finding myself staring out into the darkness of my room, recounting the day's events over and over, until, finally, I would leave for the elevator, giving in to the temptation of the wide, open space. It didn't take Quincy very long to figure out where I had been going in the small hours of the morning. I heard the spurs on his boots approaching on the night before the third and final day of training, and his rough voice followed soon after. "Can't sleep?" "No," I say. "Haven't really slept in a while." He nods slowly and genially, staring out into the brilliant evening lights of the city that dwarfed our own humble, wooden town. It was strange, how bright and illuminated the Capitol was, even at this hour. The moon seemed to be almost outshone by the yellow, incandescent glow of the sleek buildings. Back home in 10, electricity was a luxury only granted to the wealthiest folks, like Weston's family; my father and I spent nearly all of our time outside during the day, soaking up every last drop of the golden sun until the sky is bruised purple and black and we retreat back into our home, alone in the darkness until the blazing western sun is hot and high once more. "You know," Quincy starts. "I really think you got a hell of a chance gettin' out of that arena. And I ain't just sayin' that 'cause I'm your mentor." His words are meant to comfort me, to reassure and console me, words to remember when I cannot find sleep because nightmares of my death at the hands of another tribute haunt me, or, perhaps, words to remember when that time actually comes. Instead, they have the opposite effect; a dreaded, harrowing feeling creeps up and settles in my chest. The only thing that I can think about is how my victory would inevitably mean the death of twenty-three innocent children, would be directly linked with twenty-three families fractured beyond repair like mine had been nine years before. Why did I deserve to win? Why did I deserve to return home with a healthy, beating heart when that means twenty-three white coffins return to twenty-three shattered homes? When that meant that I would never forget the faces of those who had died so I can see District 10 once more – the tiny girl from 11 with dark skin and frightened eyes; the small boy from 4 with wild hair that rivals my own; the girl from 12, leaving behind a mourning sister, broken beyond comprehension like I had been nearly a decade ago; even the arrogant boy from 2, Cato, whose entire life revolved around the Games. Neither one deserved a bloody death more than the other. So why me? Why should I be the one granted with a pass out of the arena? And then, suddenly and unsettlingly, a chilling thought strikes me. No one does. I study the man standing next to me, my refuted mentor, who has a pained expression over his scarred, rugged face. Quincy is classic District 10, with deep, somber brown eyes and sun-lightened hair peppered with gold. Although he is easily not much older than twenty-five, his unshaven, worn physiognomy is aged beyond his years, and reveals he is much more than a lowly farmer. And all I can think about it why he's wide-awake in the middle of the night with a distressed look, unable to sleep and standing here next to me, even though he's not the one going into the arena to face his death in less than a week. No one leaves. All I can think about is Finnick Odair's face when he saw me as Cass Whitlock's sister, a ghost of his gruesome past, how broken he had seemed when I stared his green eyes down. How I had heard Bonnie's screams in the middle of the night from the room over, tossing and turning, running away from imaginary demons. What would cause someone so bright and mirthful like Bonnie to produce such a blood-curdling, awful sound; I would never want to know. All I can think about is how bent Quincy is on making sure I'm the one who exits that arena with my life intact, making sure that more blood isn't on his hands, and the way the parents of the tributes look at their mentors, the way they look at their last glimpse of hope with pleading eyes. A victor of the games never leaves the arena, never sleeps a full night without survivor's guilt, never is allowed a day off from the crooked Games. It hadn't mattered whether you are from 2 or 12, it hadn't mattered whether you had been trained your entire life with a full belly, prepared, or simply lived day to day scraping up enough food, you enter and exit the arena armed with more than simply a victory – the Capitol will make sure of that. No one wins. "It's not fair," I think aloud, quietly and under my breath. For a moment, I had forgotten my mentor had ever been standing next to me until I hear him speak up. "Life ain't fair," Quincy's voice is hardly audible at first. After a while, he starts again, this time louder and more sure. "Some cattle grow strong, while others are picked off by wolves. Some people are born rich enough and dumb enough to enjoy their lives. Ain't nothin' fair. Life ain't fair." He stops once more, blinks a few times and looks down at his boots, kicking the edge of the roof, before adding in his final words. "You and I know that better than anyone." By the time the last day of training with the other tributes had rolled around, I am completely exhausted; beat down by my lack of sleep and hours of obstacle courses, weaponry, and avoiding confrontations with the Careers. They haven't been exactly fond of me since the stunt I had pulled with my lasso and the boy from 2, Cato. From the look they're giving Weston and me as we line up for the last course before lunch, I can tell they'll enjoy gutting us like fish in the arena. I bet they're already claiming who kills whom. "Don't let them see you fall," Weston leans down and whispers in my ear, slapping his hand on my back softly as the trainer beckons for me to begin my run-through. I nod at him, thankful for the forward outlook of my district partner to keep me motivated. I step towards the obstacle course and glance around; it never fails to surprise me how much effort the Gamemakers go to train us for the Games, building giant, complicated courses like this to guarantee a good show. The trainer there, a woman, is explaining what I need to do. Essentially, it's jumping, running, climbing, and trying not to fall. She wishes me luck, a kind smile grazing her lips. "Here goes nothing," I say under my breath, and throw a quick wink to my district partner before beginning to run into the first obstacle. Feeling the eyes of the other tributes as I push my way through, I keep Weston's words in mind. I won't let them see me struggle, won't let them pinpoint me as a weakling. The course is more difficult than I had imagined; halfway through, I'm huffing and puffing. I scale the final hill, resisting to the urge to simply roll down it, before I'm met with a giant net, and my heart drops at the sight. Don't let them see you fall. My first grasp on the ropes is tight, and I grit my teeth with exertion as I force my weight up. I manage to clamber through most of it without so much as a stumble, until the net begins to dip from its previously vertical state, and is now nearly completely horizontal. All of a sudden, the knots flip, and I'm entirely upside down, sweat dripping off of me. I feel the burning of the ropes digging into my calloused, worn palms, my hands much too small to fully grip the net for so long, too weak to hold the entirety of my body mass. And then, before I can even grasp what is happening, my hands slip, and I'm plummeting to the ground. The wind is knocked out of me fully as my back collides with the hard mat; I feel my shoulder pop and I wince audibly, squeezing my eyes shut in pain. My head is ringing as I try to pick myself up. I fail miserably at steadying myself enough to rise, and a trainer runs over to help me, but I push her aside and attempt it again. This time, I am successful; although my walk is wavering, I'm standing, and find my place back in line with the other tributes with my head held high. A few of them, mostly the Careers, have amused smirks on their faces from the sight of a weak contender, but most give me pitiful looks. Weston shoots me an apologetic glance before starting his turn. I walk to the end of the line, where the boy from 2 had just finished his run, and watch as my district partner glides along the obstacles "I see you're going to follow in the footsteps of your sister, huh?" Cato's numbingly cold voice chills me to the bone. I'm nearly positive I shudder. Gasps from all the other districts, including the other Careers, surround me. Even they're surprised at the boy's blatant cruelty. "Excuse me?" I say, angry, but my voice is faltering, the effect of his words seeping in. "Who do you think you are?" A mirthless smile tugs at his thin lips. "I've ever been less intimidated in my life," he says, and, deciding he's finished picking on the mediocre tribute from 10, he starts to walk away from me and towards the weaponry. Then, blind rage consumes me to no end as it feeds the stupidity numbing my common sense, and I throw everything I've been told about confrontations with the other tributes out the window as I shove him, pushing on his back as hard as I can. He stumbles forward from the unexpected act of aggression, and more gasps from the others proceed. Almost immediately, he turns around, completely livid, breathing much too heavy for someone so well trained. His hands ball up into fists, and his frigid, icy eyes bore into me, trying to decide whether or not to ring me like a towel for all to see. I'm not done, though. He's awoken something inside of me; I can feel it stirring fiercely as it ignites in the pit of my stomach, burning and blazing like the western sun. "You as slow as you look, friend?" I push him one more time, my small hands meet his hard muscle, but this time, he's expecting it, and hardly moves an inch. "Come on! I ain't got all day!" Cato has had enough. I can tell the only thing he's thinking about right now is how lovely I would look torn apart and strewn in pieces on the ground. It's blatant that he's wondering which would be the most satisfying way to kill me as his nettled eyes fix onto mine. I haven't, in my entire seventeen years of living, seen anyone look this thoroughly infuriated. Fear begins to replace the insistent resent burning in my gut as he raises a hard fist and I shut my eyes tightly, bracing myself for the impact. It never comes. The head trainer, a hardened-middle aged man with graying hair but a ripped physique, is standing in between the two indignant tributes. He looks like he's about to murder us both before any of the others can even lay a hand on us in the arena. Hotly and assertively pointing to the direction of the exit doors, he speaks in a deadly voice that reminds me of the warning hiss of a desert rattler. "You two. Now." After a long, painful lecture from the head trainer about fighting with tributes before the Games that leaves my ears ringing, Cato and I are left alone in the cafeteria to have our lunch in silence. The others have already eaten and begun their last hours of training. I can't tell whether we're more resentful at each other, the fact we wasted some of our precious training time, or that we had to sit through someone yelling at us for about half an hour like we were some small children who had drank more than their fair share of water, instead of warriors sent to fight to our deaths. He's stabbing the food so indignantly, I'm nearly positive Cato is imagining the piece of steak is my face. Nervously, I glance at the clock above. We have another five minutes alone in the cold cafeteria before we're reunited with the others in the training room. I never thought I would miss Weston's warm company as much as I do now. Sighing loudly, I decide I might as well make some conversation with the boy who is going to be bent on ending my life in the next few days. "So," I say, tapping my finger anxiously against the metal tray. He doesn't even glance up at me, and continues to shove food in his mouth. I clear my throat, and try again. "So, you're from 2?" Oh, God... He looks up from his plate and to me, his rigid face incredulous as to how I could be so blatantly stupid. A giant, bright red two is stitched onto his shirt. The boy doesn't bother to reply, and instead, picks up his glass of water. I realize that I have absolutely nothing in common with the brute who sits in front of me; I realize that I do not understand the Careers in the slightest. They dedicate theirs lives in an academy, wasting away fighting and training, and for what? Nothing can prepare them for actually taking the life of a fellow youth. Those who prevail in the Games don't fully leave, forever tied to the bleak life of a victor, and those who perish in the arena, die having never really lived. I ponder what possesses them to voluntarily lead such a double-crossed life, until I find the strength to ask the boy another question. "Why did you volunteer?" Cato sets his cup down loudly, the sound echoing against the empty walls, some of the liquid sloshing and spilling over the sides onto the table with the force. "Don't ask stupid questions," he barks at me. "Come on," I say. "Was it for honor, fame, money? All three?" He sits still for what seems to be forever, staring at the puddle of water next to his plate as if it might hold the answer to my question. For a moment, I wonder whether or not the Careers are as smart and strong as the facade they put on as Cato can't think of a single reason why he voluntarily offered himself up for the Games. Perhaps, he really is that foolishly confident that he will be the one to leave the arena; my suspicions are confirmed as he speaks. "Because I was ready. Because I'll win." "But why?" "You wouldn't understand." "Try me." Something flashes in eyes as he tries to decide whether or not to tell me, but it dissapears in a fleeting moment. I think it is something of lament, but before I can speak, he picks up his tray in a huff, and chucks it at the trash can before stomping out, his boots pounding against the floor so hard I'm surprised the earth beneath him hasn't split. His coarse voice is the last thing I hear as the door slams shut. "I said don't ask stupid questions." Contrary to popular belief, bulls aren't angered by the bright red hue of the sheets the cowboys wave teasingly in front of the creatures. It's the sudden movement and the sheer fact that the stupid rodeo clown would even dare tease such an aggressive animal. I remember going to a rodeo once, held in celebration in honor of Quincy's victory, where I shuddered in fear at the huffing beast with such burning anger in his eyes that was unmatched by anything I had ever seen in my life. Until now. Quincy had been screaming at me, shaking his fist, throwing things, and threatening me with violence for what seems like hours, until Bonnie, who had been watching silently from the sofa this entire time, finally rests her hand on his shoulder. He is breathing hard through his nose, still impossibly outraged and boiling inside, reminding me of the bulls I had feared so much back home. Quincy is infuriated, and with good reason; I had ruined my chances of making it home, probably for both West and me. I was going to be another white coffin sent home, another death on Quincy's conscience. I'm sure he saw me as a second chance to get it right with Cass, a second chance at getting her home safe and sound. And I had thrown it all out with one stupid, rash decision. "You and Weston should go ahead and get washed up," Bonnie tells me, a painfully disappointed look on her face. "Your private training session with the Gamemakers starts soon." Nodding, grateful for her interference, Weston and I rise from our spot on the couches, and make our way to our rooms. "I'm sorry," I hear Weston say. Sorry for what? Sorry that I'm much too impulsive, sorry that I won't make it home alive, following in the footsteps of my sister, just like what Cato had said that drove me over the edge? "I don't blame you for attacking him. I should have stepped in when he said that, I should have been there." "You were on the course, West," I remind him. "You didn't even know." "Yeah, but still," he shrugs. "We should have been in it together. Us underdogs gotta stick together." He says the last part with a sheepish smile, and I would have snorted at the ridiculousness of the statement in any other situation. Weston Hughes, who probably lives in a room bigger than my entire ranch, who never had to feel the burning itch of a thirsty throat when the water supply got thing, who never had to watch the scalding sun burn your father's skin as he worked to the point of collapse to ensure you wouldn't have to risk your life with the tesserae, an underdog? But right now, in the crooked world of the Capitol's game, he was. He was just as untrained and unfit as I am, just as unprepared to enter the arena in two days. Weston admits it so easily and so freely in an attempt to comfort me that I almost hate myself for judging him before. "Yeah, I guess we do." I grin widely at him as we stand outside our bedrooms, wondering how I got so lucky with such an incredible district partner. As I reach my palm out to him, an old saying from the ancient days of District 10 comes to mind; an old saying from when my home was simply the wild west, where cowboys roamed the prairies with nothing but a revolver and a trusted steed, where the laws were as much as a rarity as cold water in those parched lands, where the morals of the men were so crooked they could swallow nails and spit out corkscrews. My father had told me the adventures of the outlaws on the western frontier so many times, they are engraved in my mind; they are stories I was sure to pass on to my own children, stories from when man was as free as the wind that blew through the dry, amber grass of the desert. "Outlaws to the end?" I ask him, quietly but surely. He smiles at me, and takes my hand. "Outlaws to the end." The waiting room is cold and biting, the chill of the metal bench sending goosebumps through my skin. I so much hated this artificially frosty air, and I find myself sitting back against the wall and shutting my eyes, trying to remember what the sweet heat of 10 felt like. I'm aching to be home again, aching to be within the safe perimeter of my ranch, aching for when I was simply a child growing up in 10, not some gladiator sent to fight my ancestor's battles. I wonder what Cass had felt like, going in to the private training session; all I knew was that I felt like I was willingly going into one of the bear caves we have around the steep, rocky hills of 10. Suddenly, an old memory of my sister rises out of some dusty part of my brain, and I find myself replaying it in my head. I couldn't have been older than seven; Cass was probably around sixteen, the year before she was Reaped. She picked me up from school one day with a picnic basket, hauled me up on August, and we trotted along for a while. I remember resting my head against he back, holding her tightly, endlessly comforted by her presence. I remember being an irritating little girl with an infinite supply of curious questions, but Cass answered each one through the duration of the long ride with kind patience. "Do you believe in God?" I had asked her softly. "No," she replied quickly and surely. "I don't. Faith is a luxury I'm afraid I can't afford, sweetheart." "Oh," I said. "Well, neither do I. I don't understand how he can be such a nice man and all if he lets bad things happen. Why do people believe in Him, Cass?" She let out a long sigh before she answered my question. "Well, Willa," she began slowly. "All folks have to look for answers somewhere. Some in big ol' books, others in big ol' bottles of whiskey." "Whiskey?" I asked her. "Like what Mr. Hudspeth drinks?" I remember she stiffened slightly at the sound of the 62nd Hunger Games victor's name. When I was small, my father would sometimes take me into town with him to pick up feed for our cows, and I would often see Quincy, our beloved champion that District 10 held with such great pride, intoxicated in a saloon, drinking away his life at only nineteen, the strong liquor he favored the same color as his soft eyes. "Well, yes, I suppose," she said briskly. "So it would seem." Cass continued to answer my pestering inquiries, until, finally, we reached our destination. It is a beautiful spot that we visited annually; it is a small lake, on the edge of the perimeter of 10, much farther than we're supposed to go, but it is so wonderful and so different than the rest of the dry district, that we were willing to risk it. "Cass," I had said. "Why do we go out here every year?" "It's your momma's birthday, little girl," she replied, laying out a thin blanket in the shade of a lonesome tree, right in front of the shallow water. The sky had been colored in breathtaking hues at this time of day, streaks of orange and red throughout, the bright sun shook like a fist as it had began its descent, and tweeting birds flirted with the whistling, warm breeze. "Oh," I said quietly. "How come Pa isn't with us?" Cass's eyes hardened. "Some people like to celebrate in different ways, Will," she said soberly. "Pa just likes to be alone 'round this time." I nodded, pretending like I understood. We probably sat there for hours, chattering away, sipping on wet glasses of sweet tea, chewing on salted pork and warm bread, until our laughter is interrupted by a low, uneasy whinny from August. Cass stands up slowly, and steps in front of me instinctively. And then we heard it. A low, roaring, groaning, growl. The sound of an anxious bear. I remember nearly shaking with fear as I saw the brown fur approaching closer and closer, getting larger and larger, until it stood fifteen feet from us. I remember my eyes widening as I see two cubs rolling around in a dry bush behind their mother. Cass stood her ground in front of my trembling body. She speaks up, slowly. "I see you, too, have a family, friend," Cass began with a steady, low tone, her voice like warm milk. "And so that we both may see our families again, I suggest we part ways amicably." The bear stood still, unwavering, breathing heavily. I was sure it was going to charge at any minute and eat us both up. "Now," Cass started again. "I'd hate to spoil such a beautiful evening on such beautiful land with further unpleasantries." I felt the creature gaze directly into my eyes for a long time, who was sitting behind Cass this entire time, trembling with fear and peeking through her legs carefully. Slowly, the bear had glanced back up at Cass, boring its brown eyes at her. My sister had stood strong and still, hands at her sides calmly. I swear, to this day, I saw the bear had nod at Cass, before it turned around, and walked away, back from where it came. We packed up quickly once it was out of our sight, hopping on August in a jiffy, and speeding away at full speed. "If you ever find yourself in a hole, Willa," she told me on the way back. "First thing you gotta do is quit diggin'." I had sighed once more, then, wishing I could understand what on earth she had been talking about. "You do so love to talk in riddles, Cass," I said quietly, pressing my tired face against her back. "I wish I could be as smart and brave and old as you." Cass laughed bitterly. "Don't be so eager to grow up, little girl," she said. "It ain't as much fun as it looks." Suddenly, I'm out of District 10 and back in a frigid, metal room as a warm hand shakes my shoulder, and I let out a heavy breath. "We're almost up," West tells me. After a little while, he speaks up again. "Are you nervous?" Now, I understand the meaning of Cass's words. If you're met with a bear, don't go on attacking it or provoking it or even running away. Stand still for a little while, quit diggin'. Right now, this bear is the group of Gamemakers awaiting a wonderful performance. "Don't worry, West," I say, patting his hand softly. "You'll do fine. Just throw everything you can." He glances over at me, and I can tell my words don't do much to comfort him. Instead, he looks worse than before I had spoken up. I hear a robotic voice call my name. "Willa Whitlock." I suck in my breath, and I feel my district partner's hand on my shoulder once more. He nods his head; his eyes hard and impermissible, much like Quincy's are most of the time, daring me to do above my best. Unspoken words are exchanged between the two District 10 tributes, before my name is called once more, and I find myself walking through those heavy double doors, not entirely sure I'll make it out in one piece. The Gamemakers are bored now, I can tell the minute I walk in; they're watching this from their little glass stage for about the twentieth time now. Weapons and various items such as rope and kindle are strung around the room, available for my usage. There's a line of dummies about thirty feet away. "Willa Whitlock," I speak as softly as Cass, voice like warm milk. "District 10." I snatch up a long piece of rope and tie a lasso; with steady hands, I swing it above me, and then, resisting the urge to shut my eyes, I throw it, and it lands around the neck of middle dummy with near perfect precision. I stand back for a split second, pleased with the results, before I tighten the slack and the dummy's neck snaps. A small, relieved smile spreads across my face as I continue to throw the lasso another time, and it lands with the same perfection around a blade similar to the one Cato used resting in the weaponry case, clamoring on the ground. Rope, however, isn't enough to earn me a solid number. I look around until my eyes fall upon the knives, and I grab a few, standing back to throw them. Each at least hits the dummy somewhere it would hurt; most hit them in the chest or the neck. I'm giddy with pleasant surprise with how masterfully I am propelling these knives at the desired targets. I glance up at the Gamemakers. They haven't dismissed me yet. Instead, they continue to watch me, eager for more from the girl whose sister had perished in the Games nine years before. I grit my teeth angrily, and walk over for the axes that lay on a metal table, reaching my last resort. I had failed miserably the first time I picked these bastards up, why do I think this will be any different? Throwing caution to the wind, I release the hatchet. It makes a satisfying sound as it slices through the faux flesh of the dummy, straight through the shoulder. I let out a shaky breath. "Thank you, Miss Whitlock," I hear the head Gamemaker, Seneca Crane, dismiss me. "You may leave." I nod my head towards the group before making my exit, but I'm stopped by Seneca Crane's sharp voice once more. "Just one question," he says. "Do you think you're going to be able to take down that boy from 2 in the arena?" I rack my brain, searching for a clever answer, a mean answer, something. This wasn't supposed to happen. I was just supposed to go and show them what I can do and leave. They must want to know what is going on in the mind of a girl my stature who attacks a boy of Cato's size. And then, I remember what Quincy and Bonnie are painting me as – a careless cowgirl who lives without doubts. "Well, sir," I begin. "As it turns out, it's either me or him." I manage to spread a slow, wicked as I utter my finishing statement. "And, hell, way I see it, might as well be him." I awaken to Bonnie hitting my shoulder hard, and Quincy yelling at me to wake up in the back. A groan escapes from my mouth as I come to, realizing I'm on the leather sofa in the television room of our floor. My head hurts and my mouth feels dry. I now remember I had crashed on the couch in pure exhaustion after the private training session. "Wake up, idiot," Quincy says, plopping down next to me, rubbing the hair on my head. "You've been nappin' for hours. They're broadcastin' the scores already, kid." Turning to the television, I see Claudius and Caesar sitting behind a table and in front of a black screen that shows the face of the boy from 1, Marvel, and almost immediately after, a nine appears next to him. His district partner, Glimmer earns an eight, and Cato and his district partner each a ten. As the commentators rattle off the rest of the numbers, fear sinks in. If someone like the strong boy from 5 only earned a six, what will I get? A five? Maybe even a four? I had left the training room with such elation, sure that I have done an excellent job. Now, that joy is as fleeting as the tributes left until Weston and myself. We sit in anticipation, waiting for our turn. I hadn't gotten the chance to discuss what I had done and said in the training room in front of the Gamemakers with Quincy or Bonnie, and now I'm worried that I made an utter fool of myself. I should have replied with something deadly and biting, maybe even just scoff and walk out. Quincy frowns at me as he notices my hands trembling. Finally, after the girl from 9 gets a seven, it's our turn. Weston's face is as white as a sheet as they show his picture. "Weston Hughes, from District 10, received an eight." Bonnie lets out a gleeful yelp, and smacks Weston on the back, congratulating him. Quincy smiles at the boy and tells him he did good. "Willa Whitlock, from District 10, received a ten." The room is silent for a moment, and then, joyous laughter erupts. Quincy lets out a whoop of joy, picks me up and spins me around, hugging me tightly. When he sets me down, he plants a huge kiss on the top of my head, grinning from ear to ear. Hope is back in his brown eyes, sparkling as brightly as the Capitol lights. There's a chance I might make it home now. Weston and I did it; we made it through. Sponsors will roll in much easier for Bonnie and Quincy. "What the hell did you two do in there?" Quincy exclaims. "No, wait, I don't care! Hot damn, Willa, you and West are the finest tributes Bonnie and I have yet to come across." I look to my district partner, and see he has the same gleeful expression as the rest of the group. "Well, look at you," Bonnie says with a proud smile on her face. "You two are grinnin' like a possum eating a sweet potato. Let's celebrate! 'Cause right now I'm as sober as a preacher on a Sunday mornin'!" Once more, I find that sleep eludes me in the middle of the night, and I'm up on the cold rooftop again. This time, however, I am not awake because of ill feelings that creep up and settle quietly and uncomfortably in my gut, but instead, it is the leftover giddiness of our small after-party. I find that I'm still smiling, even as I clamber into the elevator and ascend to the roof. Quincy is already there, sitting on the solid edge, staring out into oblivion. There's a distant look in his eyes, as if he's straining or hoping to see something in the blackness of the night sky, perhaps an answer to a prayer of some sort, and an empty, desolate expression crosses him. I'm confused; he had been whooping with joy nearly a few hours ago. "What's wrong?" I say, trying to lighten the mood. "Did Bonnie drink all the liquor?" The cowboy grins at me, his morose state broken, and pats the spot next to him. "I knew you would come up here sooner or later," he tells me. "Just can't get enough of me, huh?" "Whatever you say," I roll my eyes. "You're the mentor, aren't you?" Quincy chuckles, and we sit in silence for a long while, admiring the quietude of the Capitol at nighttime. The reticence is broken by my voice. "I'm turning into Cass," I say with a light laugh. "She used to sneak around in the middle of the night, only come home before my Pa wakes up." Quincy stiffens visibly. "Do you know what she was doin'?" he asks me wearily. "Nah," I reply. "I bet she was with some boy, though. They loved her to bits back home. She was so tall and beautiful." "Yeah," Quincy says. I notice his eyes are shut, as if he's trying to imagine something. "I bet they did." There's a long pause where neither of us say anything, until Quincy breaks it. "You know you gotta do good tomorrow in the interview, right?" he says in a strained voice. "You gotta do good so you can get sponsors. And go home." "Yeah, I know," I reply. Then, I remember my high score, and grin. "I wish I could have seen Cass's face when I got that number. I think I beat her!" He's quiet for a while; the only sound is my heel as it taps the stone edge. Then, he speaks. "She got a nine that year," Quincy's voice is as cold as the wind that blows across the top of the building. "A nine." We are sitting still for what seems like forever, the light mood dampened by the mention of my late sister. Quincy's voice is hardly audible, shaking and pained, and I'm nearly positive I wasn't supposed to hear when he thinks aloud. "I was so damn sure she would make it home with me," he says. "So damn sure." The next morning, after a quick shower and breakfast, I'm sitting in a cushioned room with Marcy Millington, alone with her. She doesn't seem to be aware of the awkward silence from my part as she trills on and on about this and that. Marcy is supposed to be training me for my interview, making sure I make a good impression; right now, though, I'm nearly dozing off, falling asleep as she continues to speak about the importance of manners and grace. She gets up suddenly, and thrusts forward a pair of shoes with tall heels, similar to the ones she had on. "Lord," I say with a sly grin. "I can use these as a weapon tomorrow. You sure I ain't allowed to keep these?" Marcy rolls her eyes at me, not in the mood for my games. "Up, up, up! Put them on! We don't have all day!" She pulls me to stand after I slip on the wretched things, and nearly tumble when she does so. "How on earth do you walk on these?" I ask her incredulously, steadying myself with a hand on the couch. I tip back each time I release my grip. "Keep your legs straight," Marcy advises as I totter my way through the room. "Step with your heels first, then shift your weight forward. Good! Keep your legs close together!" After an hour in the blistering shoes, I'm finally released from Marcy and now spending an hour with Bonnie, my mentor, as she tells me who I'm supposed to pretend be to best gain the Capitol's attention, and in turn, sponsors that might end up saving my life over the next three weeks. She waltzes in, the door slamming shut behind her, and stands in front of me with her hands at her hips. For the first time, I appreciate how beautiful Bonnie really is, despite her pained, pale blue eyes. Her short blonde hair is pulled back in a perky ponytail, and her blue blouse is tight around her torso. A playful smiles tugs at her lips as she glances down at my torn feet. "Looks like I got here just in time, huh?" Bonnie winks at me. "Marcy almost killed your feet, there. Sit on down! We got work to do." I comply, and find a seat on the plush sofa, Bonnie sitting across from me. "I think you already know what we're doin' with you," she tells me. "Where we're goin'. You're a rough and tough cowgirl from 10 who just wants to get this over with 'cause you sure as hell gonna be the victor. You're mean and brutal. But you look so damn adorable the Capitol and their rich-ass sponsors won't be able to help themselves!" Bonnie is so enthusiastic about all of this that I even find myself smiling as she lists all of the things I must do, say, and feel to gain the affections of the "rich-ass sponsors". "All right, now, let's give it a go," she says as she grabs my hand, fluttering her eyelashes at me, a sickeningly sweet smile spreading across her face. "Pretend I'm Caesar." I nearly choke holding back laughter. "So, Willa, dear," she says in a deep voice. "What did you feel when you came up on stage here?" "Well, Caesar," I say. "To be honest, I was thinkin' that you're starting to look more and more like a woman everyday." Bonnie rolls her eyes and swats my shoulder, but I hear a light chuckle rising from her throat. "You're just like your damn sister, Willa. Quincy was right about you." My eyebrows furrow at the sudden, out of place mention of Quincy, but I ignore it as Bonnie speaks once more. "Looks like we ain't gonna have no trouble with you." Eventually, after Bonnie nearly has my throat raw from both ridiculous laughter and practicing speaking, I'm escorted to the prepping room where my stylist, Tertia, awaits me with open arms. "I heard how well you did with the Gamemakers!" Tertia wraps her thin, pale arms around me, careful not to bump me with her long, red fingernails. "Now, eat quickly so we can knock them dead out there, too." I stare longingly at the array of food on display at the coffee table in between two leather loveseats. Eagerly grabbing at a plate of meat, throwing the hours of lessons about table manners with Marcy this morning out the window, I chow down while Tertia is shuffling through racks, looking for something. "Ah! Here it is!" Her voice is as excited as Bonnie's had been a few hours ago, and I can't help but grin as she pulls out a long piece of fabric. It really is stunning and Tertia really is talented; it is a long, sleeveless jumpsuit, flowing and loose, but tightened around the waist with a deep, provocative cut in the front and back. The suit is a darker shade of what my dress from the Ceremonies had been, the color of dusk in the west, and is a sheer, soft material. "I know what you're thinking," Tertia says, handing it to me to try on before they make alterations. "It's not a dress. But you are a strong, fearless cowgirl who has no time for such things. All you need is your boots and your horse." At the mention of my boots, I visibly lighten up. My stylist smiles at my perking up brightly, and pulls out a pair of riding boots, complete with spurs, made of supple leather and encrusted with expensive studs. Eagerly, I finish putting on the jumpsuit with the help of Tertia, and try on the boots. She stands back proudly, looking me over. "You look so much like your sister," she says quietly. "I remember having her my first year as a stylist. You're her spitting image. Poor Quincy must be driving himself insane." I frown at her mention of Quincy, not fully understanding what she had meant. She breaks me out of my wonder, though, and points to my feet. "Your suit is drops over your shoes anyway," she tells me. "But they're going to hear your spurs." "Just like at the Reaping?" Tertia nods her head eagerly. "Just like at the Reaping." Weston and I sit in a white room with all of the other nervous, apprehensive tributes, waiting once more, but this time, it is for the interviews to begin. District 1, Glimmer, dressed in a thin, nearly transparent gown, is up first. She shoots me a deadly look before climbing up the stairs in impossibly high heels and even more impossible grace after she had been called up, ready to be interviewed. The roar of the crowd is deafening on the large television screen in front of us, but I ignore it, not eager to watch her incredulously sweet performance. I glance around at the other teens, admiring their outfits, each one more flattering then the rest. My eyes fall on Cato, and he sees me looking. Once more, we are in a silent tussle, not tearing our gazes from one another. He is the one to look away from my eyes first, though, and instead, his stare travels down to my costume. My face reddens immediately, realizing how deep the front cut of the jumpsuit is and how much it reveals; I instantly scoot in closer to West, hiding behind him. Weston is confused by my sudden actions for a moment, pulling back slightly, and then he sees Cato staring me down. My district partner narrows his eyes at the boy from 2, who scoffs and looks away, deeming us unworthy of his attentions any longer. "You all right?" Weston asks me. "Should I get Quincy?" I look over at Quincy and Bonnie who are conversing loudly with some of the other mentors; I think one is from 12, and the other from 11. Lower districts stick together, I assume. Finnick Odair makes a sudden appearance, walking through the metal elevator doors, and I hold my breath as he walks by and towards the other mentors. Quincy, almost instantaneously, stiffens at the sight of the victor from the fishing district. I frown. Hadn't it been him who defended the man who killed my sister in the Games nine years ago? I ponder the strange reaction until I hear my name being called from the stage. "Please welcome, the rough and tough cowgirl from District 10, Willa Whitlock!" Caesar's voice is booming through the microphone as I make my way up the stairs, breath hitched in my throat, trying to remember what Bonnie had told me before the cameras find me. Walk tall, walk smooth, walk with swagger. Each time my heel hits the colored floors of the stage, my spurs rattle. Somehow, they overpower the cacophonous, ear-splitting crowd. I manage to walk carelessly down the stage and to the seats, where Caesar takes my hand just as Bonnie had earlier today, and I bit my lip to hide my amused laughter. "Well," Caesar begins as we both sit down. "You look simply remarkable. Unforgettable! You surely stand out." "Thank you," I lean back in my seat, kicking back, and crossing my boots at the ankles. "I really tried." The crowd laughs eagerly, eating up my fake confidence. Caesar laughs whole-heartedly. "Now, dear, tell me. How did you feel when you heard your name being called at the Reaping?" I lick my lips and pretend to ponder deeply for a moment, before starting to reply. "To be honest, Caesar," I tell him, playing up my western accent as Bonnie had told me to. "I'm a semi-literate farmer. I ain't really in the power game." More laughter at my humorous, humble honesty. "But, I must say," I continue, a cocky grin spreading across my face. "After seeing some of the kids from the other districts..." I shake my head playfully. "I don't think I've been less showed up in my entire life!" The crowd applauds, waves of ringing laughter echoing through the building. "So," Caesar grins at me. "Are you saying the other tributes are less than adequate?" "Well, Caesar, stupid is the word we use back home," I retort. It takes a while for the audience to calm down, howling in amusement. Even Ceasar is practically guffawing at my blunt insult. I grin brightly at the cameras, hoping that I'm making Bonnie and Quincy proud. "Are you, Willa, a worthwhile competitor? Are you going to win?" Caesar asks me, leaning in slightly. "I'll tell you one thing," I say, pointing to a litter of scars across my chest and legs from ranch work, breaking in wild horses, and simply being a rowdy child. "It ain't no secret I didn't get these scars fallin' over in church. I won't go down without a fight, that's for sure." I wink at him, and the crowd goes absolutely wild. The rush from so many adoring shrieks and laughs is absolutely exhilarating. My nerves are nearly completely gone along with the quiet, restless girl from a rickety ranch; in her place stands a tough, tall, confident goddess of a tribute named Willa Whitlock. "I must ask you, Willa, before you leave, about your sister," Caesar's voice is sober and quiet now, and I stiffen at the mention of Cass. I feel like the goddess is withering away, and slowly, I'm back to the being the meek sister of a fallen tribute. "She had been in the Games nine years ago. Is there anything you would like to say for her?" I swallow heavily, my breath starting to become shallower as hysteria seeps in. I try to remember something, anything Bonnie had told me, but my mind is blank. Shakily, I start to speak. "I think the only thing I can do for her, now, Caesar," I say. "Is win." Caesar nods at my answer, content, and starts to clap along with the crowd. "Ladies and gentlemen, the headstrong Willa Whitlock from District 10!" Adrenaline is still coursing through my veins as I make my way backstage once more. Before I process what is going on, I feel Quincy pull me in for a tight hug. "You did fantastic, Willa," he tells me, kissing the top of my head. "No one's going to forget you for a long time." "Damn," Bonnie says with a wide smile. "You had me in stitches!" We step back now, Quincy and Bonnie to the mentors, and I to the tributes, to watch Weston's interview on the television. He is dashingly handsome, in a clean white shirt, unbuttoned slightly, his hair ruffled and roused. I glance at the girls in the Capitol crowd, and some are literally swooning as West's deep voice rumbles through the speakers. "Atta boy, West," I hear Quincy say. "Knock 'em dead." "Literally," Bonnie coughs under her breath. She's trying to be quiet, but I can hear her from fifteen feet away, and the entire group of mentors laughs at her bluntess. I chuckle lightly at my bumbling mentor; my fleeting moment of mirth, however, is completely wiped clean once I notice I'm standing close to the boy from 2, Cato. "Nice job out there," he says with monotone sarcasm. "I was trembling with fear. You were about as tough as a chewed up piece of meat." "Well, well, well," I say, rolling my eyes. "You're not much of an image of bravery, either, then. Because something reeks of coward back here." All I hear is a heavy, angry huff of breath, and then he pushes me back against a wall. He closes in on me, sandwiching me tight. "Listen, Willa," he spits out my name with enough venom that rivals the rattlesnakes back home. "I don't know what the hell you did in that room to earn that number, but you're not fooling anyone with that act." So that's what this is about; he's furious that some small girl from a lowly district earned the same number as him. I bite my lip to try to keep from the last quip from slipping out, but I fail, and Cass's words come to mind. If you ever find yourself in a hole, the first thing to do is quit diggin'. Looks like I'm not ready to put my shovel down just yet. "I think the school is a few blocks down from here," I say back in a deadly voice. "There must be some children you can go and frighten down there." His face twists in anger, and he's about to bite back, when I hear a low, purring voice. "How about you take a few steps back, kid." Cato and I both glance up and see a gloriously handsome man with brassy hair and green eyes, nearly shining with perfection as he glowers above us. Finnick Odair. Protecting me. It's nearly laughable, really. "I'm fine just where I am," Cato barks back, and leans his warm body into mine even closer, glaring at Finnick daringly, as if to say, "come and make me". "I wasn't asking, boy," Finnick's voice is now clean of any low seduction; it is deadly and biting. The blonde boy from 2 eyes me up and down once more before silently storming off, scoffing arrogantly. "I didn't need saving, you know," I tell him quietly, straightening out my jumpsuit. "I know," Finnick says quietly. "You don't seem like the type that does." He walks away from me, and I am alone once more. Weston and I had been walking to our rooms in silence in the midst of the last night before the Games, unsure of what to say before such a harrowing event. Right before I'm about to tell him a quick goodnight as we stand outside of our rooms, not eager to draw out the difficult farewall any longer, he speaks up. "I've never ridden a horse," he says suddenly and bluntly. I'm taken aback. "How?" I ask, truly puzzled. "You live in District 10!" "Promise not to tell anyone," he says in a low voice. "But I'm kind of afraid of them." Although I'm confused as to why he had decided to share this detail with me, I'm grateful at the lightened mood. "My, my. Weston Hughes is afraid a little pony?" I can't help but let a small giggle slip out. "You're mean," West rolls his eyes, but soon joins into my snorting laughter. I'm eager to admit something as well, now. "I've never been inside of the cafeteria at school," I tell him. His eyes widen. "Why? Are you afraid of the lunch ladies?" He retorts. "Oh, yes. It's those hairnets," I grin. "But, no, that's not why. I've just... never been really comfortable with that many people in such a small room. I eat outside with my friend every day." "Lorelai Bailey?" he asks. I nod, surprised he knows the name of my best friend. "I've never gotten a detention before," he admits. I let out a small laugh as I imagine Weston Hughes, number one in his class, a teacher's pet. "I've never been kissed," I say, and immediately regret it the second I do. We stared at each other for a long while after what I had said. The light mood from a few seconds ago is completely gone. My face reddened; I just now realized what it sounded like I was asking for. A kiss from Weston Hughes. What had meant to be a fearful confession, that I might die with uncharted lips, turned into this. Weston's brown eyes are unreadable and hard. Finally, he takes a step forward and reaches for me, both hands on either side of my face, holding me steady. West looks into my eyes for a few seconds, and leans towards me. I hold my breath and shut my eyes, waiting. Instead, I feel warm lips resting against my forehead, and broad arms pulling me in. Weston holds me there for god knows how long and I think I might be crying as he speaks once more. "You're gonna get that kiss, Willa Whitlock," his voice is constricted and feels pained. "You're gonna get that kiss someday. You're gonna go back home to 10 and find yourself a handsome cowboy to give you that kiss." It had taken me a while to fully comprehend what he had meant with those solemn words. I clutch at his shirt tightly, digging into his embrace, not eager to let go of this poor rich boy. I know the second we part, the second we climb back into our rooms, alone, that we are no longer two teenagers holding each other in a moment of raw emotion; we will become tributes, out for each other's necks. Puppets of the Capitol. "How did we end up so much on the bad side of things?" I ask quietly. "Our side wasn't chosen, Willa," he replies soberly. "It was given." Right after I clean myself up, washing my face and ridding it of dried tears, I change into sleeping clothes and exit out my bedroom door. I need to speak with Quincy before tomorrow morning comes, and this is my last chance. I need to not spend the last night before my impending death alone. I need to tell him everything I haven't done, everything I'm afraid of, everything I want to know. I need to tell him I don't want to die without falling in love first. The daily outings on the roof had comforted me to no end, and I long for one more conversation. I dash out quickly, and walk down the hallway until I reach his door. Rapping on it lightly, I'm surprised when he answers the door. I had been expecting no reply, and was getting ready to go back onto the roof. "What do you want?" he says gruffly, but his eyes soften when he realizes it's me. "Oh. Come on in." He opens the door, and I walk in briskly. "So," he says, standing back and leaning against a wall, holding an empty glass in his hands. "What do you want?" "Have you ever been in love, Quincy?" I ask him, a certain sense of urgency evident in my voice. "Do you have anyone back home?" "Look, darlin', if this is your way of comin' on to me-" "Shut up, Quincy," I say. "I'm serious." He sighs deeply and sits down on the bed, running his hands through his hair. "Yes, once, a long time ago," he says. "When you were just a little squirt." "Who was she?" Quincy's expression hardens at my question. "It don't matter," he says, looking away. "All that matters is I ain't got her anymore." He adds, under his breath, "Damn Capitol took her away." I stand back now, thinking, trying to ponder what he had meant with that quiet statement so full of remorse and regret he nearly smothered the glass of liquor in his hands. And then, suddenly and abruptly, without warning, everything falls into place and I nearly stumble back as realization slaps me across the face coldly. What Bonnie had said, what Tertia had said, even what Quincy had said about Cass coming home with him; why he had stiffened at the mention of her, why he had stiffened when Finnick Odair made his way over to him; why Cass had been sneaking around in the middle of the night, not bringing home her boyfriend for us to see, and the way she had sobered when I mentioned him on our ride out to the lake. Everything made sense, now. Quincy fell in love with Cass. I don't know when, how, why, but he did. It's clear as day when he's glaring into the wall downing a glass of burning liquor. He fell in love with her. And he had failed to save her. He's been chasing down bottoms of whiskey bottles, searching for the answers he will never find. "It was Cass, wasn't it," I say, not really asking. "It was you and Cass." Quincy glances up at me in surprise and shock, unsure of what to say next, and looks back down, with something of lament in his eyes, holding his head in his hands. I think he might have opened his mouth to say something, maybe some sort of rebuttal or contradiction, but he snaps it shut once he sees the look on my face. "You were nineteen when she entered the Games," I say, connecting the dots. "And you were her mentor. She was Reaped, and you couldn't do a thing." He is silent, confirming my thoughts without a single word. "And now, you're bent on making sure I make it home. As what, some form of.. of.. restitution?" I realize I'm yelling now, not really sure why I'm angry or who I'm angry at. More than anything, I'm furious I've been kept in the dark for so long. "So it would seem," Quincy's voice is strained and constricted, sounding like he needs a glass of water instead of the alcohol he holds shakily in his large hand. "So it would seem." "Why the hell did no one tell me? Why didn't you tell me? We've been here almost a week, and you didn't even think of sharing the fact that you had my sister's heart for nearly a year? That you had loved her?" Quincy stands abruptly, throwing the glass against the wall in sudden anger. "Do you think I like relivin' it, Willa? Do you think I like remindin' myself there's a gapin' hole in my chest that ain't nothin' can fix? Do you think I wanted you to know that I blame myself for every damn thing that went down in that arena, so you could blame me too? I drown myself in whiskey 'cause there ain't nothin' else that can be done." We're both quiet. I'm taken aback by his sudden outburst. And then he speaks again. "Do you think I don't know it was my fault? I watched her die and couldn't do a thing. I watched the only thing I got slip outta my hands like dust." I open my mouth to say something, but nothing comes out. So I let him talk. "Why do you think I'm wide awake right now? There ain't no difference from night and day to me, Willa. Just darkness," he says. "I wanna see the sunshine again, but my only sunshine has been gone for a while now." He sniffles as though he's crying, but his eyes are dry. "It's just darkness now." Chapter Four Part Two Alea Iacta Est (The game is afoot) I am stirred awake by a solemn, sober Bonnie, bright and early in the morning, who doesn't say a word other than a quick good morning. She hovers by the door for a few moments, staring at me with somber eyes, until she says something about breakfast and shuts the door briskly. Sitting in bed for another few minutes, I realize I don't even remember going to sleep. I'm nearly positive I had dozed off on Quincy's bed as he told me warm stories about him and Cass; I hadn't been eager to spend my last night before the Games alone. He must have carried me back into my room and tucked me in. I had understood that night that Quincy really and truly loved my sister, loved her wholly and in bits and pieces, loved her honestly and rigidly. Every single thing that puzzled me about the enigma of a mentor clicked into place. I remember one of the stories Quincy had told me last night, the story of when he had first laid eyes on her. "She sat down next to me in some dusty saloon in the middle of town, and ordered a glass of dry whiskey," Quincy smiled at the memory, fiddling with his own glass of liquor. "She called me Mr. Hudspeth the entire time." "What were her first words to you?" I asked him. "Do my eyes deceive me? A devil walks among us," Quincy says in a deep drawl, mimicking Cass's. He laughs longingly. "I think she was the only damn person in that dive that wasn't afraid to look at me, let alone speak to me. She was really somethin'. I recall that I told her that was quite a strong drink for a lady, and she laughed and reckoned she could say the same to me." We both had sat silent for that moment before warm smiles broke out from remembrance of the girl that was Cass Whitlock. "She was really somethin'," he repeated, this time an acrid edge to his voice. The dreamy moment of rememberance is fleeting as I'm pulled back into reality by Marcy's incessant knocking. I'm back to being a tribute now. "Hurry up! It's almost time for breakfast!" Reluctantly, I throw the covers back and rise from my bed, stretching my aching back. I shower briskly, and braid my hair back neatly, before dressing in some cotton shirt and cardigan. Tertia will be supplying me with the clothes for the arena later anyway; there was no point in choosing my clothes carefully, and I would like to spend less time thinking about it either way. Maybe it will seem less real if I ignore it for a while. I make my way to the quiet breakfast table, and notice Quincy is the only one not to look up and greet me. Sitting down next to Weston, I pack my plate full of food, just in case this may be my last meal. The bloodbath at the Cornucopia is brutal; countless lives have been claimed in the first few minutes of the Games. "Listen, kids," Quincy says. "When you first get off of your platforms, run for it. Don't even stop to pick something up if it's along the way." Both West and I nod, but Bonnie interrupts Quincy. "Well, if it's on the way," she says. "Then just grab it. Quickly, and then be on your way again. Don't linger." "No," Quincy says. He doesn't want to take chances, especially with me. "Run." Bonnie bores her blue eyes at the side of Quincy's head before huffing and continuing to eat her breakfast in silence. "Ain't gonna be my fault when they end up in the middle of a goddamn forest with nothing but their lonely souls in possession." The elevator ride to the rooftop where a hovercraft awaits us is quiet and still. Bonnie and Marcy had stayed back in the apartment, parting with West and I right then and there. Bonnie's pale eyes filled with tears before she looked away, whisking us with her hand. "Leave already," she said with a troubled smile. "Leave before I make a damn fool of myself." Sunlight fills my entire line of vision when the doors slide open, and the loud humming of the craft drums through my ears. Weston and I are supposed to leave Quincy now, depart from our doting mentor. My district partner tries to give ol' Quince a hand shake, but he pulls him in for a tight, oxygen-depriving hug. "Make us proud, kid," he says, swatting at his bottom playfully as Weston heads for the craft, leaving Quincy and I alone for a moment. We stand there, staring at each other; I, at the man who was unquestioningly devoted to my late sister, and he, at the only sibling of said sister, about to be sent off to war. Some feeling runs through me that I cannot pinpoint, but I do know that I'm glad our paths have crossed as Quincy stares at me with a hard expression. Whether or not the bright sun had been playing tricks or those had been real tears pooling in Quincy's eyes, I would never know, but he pulls me in tightly, and kisses the top of my head one last time. "Go on, Willa" he said, letting me go from his warm embrace. "They've taken enough. Go and win. For all of us." I nod gravely, and lean in one more time against his chest before he tells me it's time. Wearily, and holding back a sob, I begin my death march, my walk to the hovercraft. Before I'm halfway there, however, I notice someone running towards me – Finnick Odair. I try to decide whether or not I would make it in time to escape him if I sprinted to the hovercraft, but he ends up standing beside me with a stringent expression on his beautiful face. "I'll be watching for you, Willa," he says, bringing two of his fingers up to his forehead in a mock salute, a sad smile tugging at his perfect lips. Before I can reply, not even sure I was going to, a Peacekeeper grabs hold of me, the last tribute to board yet again, and escorts me inside of the hovercraft. There's a strange, foreboding blue glow about the innards of the craft, and I find my seat next to Weston, praying that I won't pass out from sheer terror before we reach the launch station. Thankfully, it seems as though I'm in a delirious state, dazed before the commencement of the Games. A woman in a white medical coat is walking around and inserting a thick needle into each of the tributes arms. I hear her tell the girl from 12 that it's a tracker, and a scowl forms over my face. It is a cruel device, an invasion of privacy. It's not until the woman's steady hand takes my own that I realize I'm shaking uncontrollably. Weston grips my knee tightly with his hand, and I'm not sure which one of us he's trying to calm down as the craft parts from the ground and lifts away. By the time Weston and I part ways to our private launch rooms, I am nearly completely paralyzed in terror. Tertia, waiting for me in the cold room, sees me struggling to simply walk through the door, and runs over to help. "Come on, dear," she says. "Let's get you dressed." She pulls a green, weather-proof coat over my clothes, fussing over the zipper for a long time before I notice her eyes are puffy and she's sniffling. "I'll be alright, Tertia," I say, trying to console her. "I'll be fine. I'm a Whitlock, you know." Tertia smiles at me kindly, a sad laugh erupting for a moment between the two of us. We stand in silence, not sure of what to say to comfort the other. Then, a cold, robotic voice exits from the speakers. "Twenty seconds." She seems to have remembered something, and pulls out a crude necklace, the silver blackened by time. Tertia places the small token in my hand, and at closer look it's tiny a horseshoe on a thin chain, with the word 'TEXAS' engraved onto it. I nearly drop it as it places itself amongst the memories in my mind. It is Cass's old necklace, the one she had worn every day for as long as I have known this earth. The word on the horseshoe feels foreign on my tongue, but I remember her telling me it's what District 10 used to be called before Panem. I glance up at Tertia questioningly. "Quincy gave it to me to hand to you before you leave," she explained, dabbing a tissue at her white skin damp with tears. "Why hadn't he just given it to me himself?" "Men are complicated creatures, Willa," she says with an uneasy laugh. "Ten seconds." I could have probably counted on my right hand how many times fear has struck me real and deep in my entire life before my name had been read on the day of the Reaping. I could have probably lived the rest of my years without knowing what if feels like to hold back tears of sheer terror as it penetrates you as you stand, helpless, shaking uncontrollably. Now, I would need a long sheet of paper to tally it all. After the Reaping, the Ceremonies, the first day of training, the interview, and the private training session, this feels like a culmination of the terrible, shattering events it all in one horrible, raw emotion as it rocks through me. Tertia bids her farewell to me as I make my way over to the circular launch pad. The clear glass cylinder engulfs me, and as I rise up to the white light, I think, this is it. This is it. From the second we rise to the arena, wide-eyed and dazed, trying to adjust to the bright light, we have exactly one minute to prepare before the bloodbath at the Cornucopia, only one minute to gain a sense of our surroundings. The foreign smell of trees and wet dirt are drifting throughout the entirety of the Cornucopia; a thick forest of green and brown surrounds us. My heart immediately drops. I knew close to nothing about such climates; I can't help but say I was praying for lands similar to 10. The tributes from 7, the lumber district, visibly brighten at the sight of glorious, tall trees, and I'm undeniably jealous. 50, 49, 48, 47, 46, 45... The countdown is drumming through my ears, drumming through my mind, drumming through my core. I gulp down my fear and try to squint and make out what supplies are strewn around the metal mouth of the Cornucopia, and then I remember Quincy's words. Run. But all I see is a backpack in the corner of the Cornucopia near the forest's edge, full of rope, a few knives sticking out of the side pocket. A hatchet lies nearby. Maybe if I run hard enough, pull through... 20, 19, 18, 17, 16, 15... My heart aches suddenly when the faces of my father, Lorelai, Quincy and Bonnie flash in my mind; I think of them all watching me on the edge of their seats, their stomachs churning, hoping for me to pull through at least for the next ten minutes, hoping that I won't get tangled up in the bloody battleground that is the Cornucopia. I try to steady my breathing and remind myself that I am not just another tribute – I am Cass Whitlock's sister. I look over at Weston in the last few seconds; he's dead center in the middle of the tributes, farthest away from the forest. He's going to need to run, and fast. Cato is standing next to him; he is leaning forward, ready to pounce when the numbers roll back to zero. He catches my gaze, and winks. The simple act chills me to the bone when I realize how unaffected he is by the situation. 5, 4, 3, 2, 1. Zero. The last thing I remember is the wind whistling behind me as I sprint with every muscle and every ounce of energy I have in my body towards the dense thicket of trees. I reach the Cornucopia before anybody else, but I remember Quincy's words and continue to run, further and faster than I had thought my legs to be capable of. I falter, though, near the backpack, and in a split-second of impulse, I snatch it up along with the hatchet, and run. I halt at the edge of the arena, noticing the cease of footsteps behind me, and scan the war that is occuring behind me. The rest of the tributes are a good thirty feet from me, not even noticing that I had gotten away so quickly. Nobody notices the small girl from 10 as they fight. The thick scent of blood slowly starts to waft its way through the arena. Gingerly, I put up the backpack and the hatchet, and turn around, ready to run back into the forest, before I hear Weston's scream as it pierces the air. Nothing had prepared me for this moment. I had forgetten, so worried about my own safety, that my district partner is as vulnerable as I am. I had left him there. Everything is moving slowly, the foreign colors of green and brown swirling on either side of me as I turn around, just to watch the girl from 2 throw one of her knives into the side of his abdomen. Blood immediately rises, rushing and raging, red and rapid. He wavers for a moment, and then Weston, sweet, sweet, Weston falls forward to his death. In a moment of impulse, anger, and pure, pure rage as is pulses through me like an electric shock, I pick up my axe, and throw it with an almost inhuman screech; I throw it with so much fervor I'm nearly positive I hear my shoulder pop. The sickening sound of metal meeting flesh as it slices through the back of the small brunette from 2 makes me almost double over. For all else tributes, the sound falls on deaf ears as they fight their way through the Cornucopia. For me, it echoes in my eardrums, sure to haunt my dreams. Nobody even notices, too busy protecting their own lives, as she falls forward to an unnatural death, thick, gushing blood pooling around her like a halo. Her back is mangled and reddened. I want so badly to shriek, to scream, to cry out in anguish, but I pick up the pack and run away from it all. Blood, blood, blood. I run and I run and I run for what seems to be miles through the never-ending green of the forest, the colors mixing beside me as I sprint at full speed. Something is coursing through my veins as I dash along the tall trees, but I don't dare stop to feel it, don't dare and stop to make the events that had just proceeded before my eyes any more real than they are. I run and I run and I run; I run in and out of consciousness as I step on packets of sunlight strewn through the damp floor of the forest, wondering whether or not this could be just another nightmare. No, I think. I had just watched Weston Hughes die. I run and I run and I run because I don't know what else to do. Maybe if I run far enough, fast enough, death won't be able to catch up; maybe if I reach the edge, I think in a state of deliriousness, I will be able to escape these wicked Games. Something beneath me stumbles my legs, weakened by the miles of running, and I tumble forward, rolling and rolling and rolling my limp body until I hit a rock at the bottom, darkness as thick as the blood that gushed out of the murdered body of the tiny brunette filling my vision. And then, nothing. I know I am asleep as I dream what I dream. I am aware of my unconscious state, but I cannot bear to bring myself out of it. I dream I am back in District 10. A parched, dusty trail cracks through the barren, empty landscape, twisting around in strange tendrils, weaving between dry trees and boulders as I wearily walk along it. I walk along it carefully and cautiously, as though the crack might deepen at any moment and swallow me whole. I furrow my brows as the amber grass of the desert slowly begins to thicken and deepen into a lush emerald hue. The plants in 10 were hardly ever green; it was only a golden yellow and brown watching over the land steadily through all four seasons. I realize I'm no longer in the deserts of my home. I'm barefoot as the cold grass tickles my toes, gliding through the rich vegetation. And then, I see her. I see the girl from 2, plunging her knife through Weston as he falls into the forest floor, disintegrating into it, never to come back. Seething with anger once more, I throw my axe again. I am reliving the harrowing scene. It slices through her, but this time, before she falls, she turns around to stare at me. I gasp so loudly and fully, the sudden intake of breath dizzying me. It's no longer the girl from 2. It is my sister. Cass Whitlock. Her blonde hair swaying in the wind, her blue eyes watery with tears as she touches the blood that begins to rush forward. Looking down, I realize the grass is gone and replaced by damp sand. The distant sound of crashing waves. I am still barefoot, but my feet are no longer mine; they are large and boyish. I see my reflection in a lonely puddle in front of me. I'm reminded, soberly, of what my sister had said once when I yelped out in the middle of the night, afraid of the monsters underneath my rickety bed. I had asked her why she could sleep so soundly and without fear; she answered me soberly. "You stop being afraid of the monsters under your bed when you realize the monsters are inside you." I am Finnick Odair. I am Finnick Odair in the 65th Hunger Games. I am Finnick Odair as he kills my sister. Cass stumbles forward a little, clutching at the spear inside of her. She stares into me, a stare so deep and so motionless, so real and harrowing, and all she does is stare, stare, stare. I found myself withering under her gaze, falling to my knees, holding up my hands, trying to shield away the judgment of that cold, sober stare that bore into my very soul, which penetrated me so deeply, understood me so fully and improbably that it caused my sister's voice to ring in my ears, pounding and pounding like a the thudding, angry ocean waves, but louder and more urgent and demanding; it recalled every moment, every raw emotion, every promise in sisterhood between us. I give in to sobs that rack my body violently, clenching my stomach and holding me captive under its painful grasp. Something real and deep is cutting into my chest, something that hurts more than anything I've ever experienced. I howl in pure anguish, begging and begging for someone to stop. But no one is there. I am alone. So I scream and I scream and I scream until my throat is raw and bleeding, bleeding with the rest of me, praying that the ground might open up and swallow me. Finally, I am pulled away from my wrecked slumber, stirred awake. My head is sore and my throat dry, but I try and sit up against the rock. I think it is something of a miracle that no one has killed me in the time I had been out, but I realize it must have been no more than an hour. The sky is darkening now. I could only imagine the mess Quincy must have been as he watched me, helpless as I had been, laying vulnerable and out cold. I stand up now, and the sudden movement causes me to throw up in ugly, shuddering heaves, puking out the contents of my stomach. Leaning back against a tree to steady myself, I realize I'm covered in scratches and there's dried blood on my forehead. I must have gotten cut up by branches during my sprint through the forest and the rock must have hurt my forehead pretty bad. Water. Picking up the backpack that lays a few feet away, I realize I need water. After stumbling around the forest, impossibly on edge, I find a gurgling creek nearby, and fill up the water bottle that lays in my backpack. All of the arena is so new and unfamiliar, so green and lush, I cautiously snatch up a patch of soft grass to wash the wound on my forehead. It stings, but I clean it up. Then, I glance at my hands. They are entirely intact and unhurt, just as they had been a few hours ago on the hovercraft. They are still white and soft, clear of blood or scratches. But I know they're not; now, they are the hand of a murderer. I start to tremble as I dip my hand in the cold stream, rubbing away at nothing. I rub my hands raw, scrubbing and scrubbing, trying to rid my hands of the invisible sin. Silent, eerie tears spill over as I realize the sin is here to stay, no matter how long they're dipped in the icy creek. Sin spills from my hands, spreading to the rest of me, swallowing me whole. I don't dare start a fire as the sky begins to darken quickly. Instead, I pull myself together and march on until I find a wide, hollowed out tree and climb in, wide-awake and on edge as I flinch at every moving creature in the rustling forest. Hunger is surprisingly absent from my stomach, so when I glance into the contents of the backpack, I don't bother opening up the bag of dried meat or packet of crackers. Eating them now would be a reckless decision. I sit in silence for a long time, trying to put my mind off the death that surrounded me this afternoon, trying to form some sort of game plan for the rest of my time here. My mind is empty though, jumbled up, only flashes of today's events coming up in fuzzy, non-chronological fragments. The sound of the anthem stirs me suddenly. The faces of the fallen tributes start to flash in the darkened sky, and I wince, gripping the boulder, preparing myself to see Weston's face right after they show the girl from 9; instead, it closes with her, and then the only light is the glowing moon. Weston is alive? I throw common sense to the wind as I begin sprinting to the Cornucopia. The Careers must have cleared out already, and Weston couldn't have gone far. I run as hard as I can through the dark thickness of the forest at nighttime, but it's not much; I am weakened by the marathon I had pulled earlier and my tumble into the rock, but I push and I push and I push, and soon, I break through the thick trees and into the clear, dark space of the Cornucopia. "Weston?" I hiss quietly as I walk around, straining to see in the blackness. Then, a trail of blood. Leading to him, leaning against a tree near the metal structure, clutching at the open wound, covered in an impossible amount of the red that sustained his body. I run to him, crying out his name, forgetting that we are in a game to the death. The only thing I can think about is him, laying there, pale from the blood loss, so close to his death. Sitting down and leaning against the tree as well, I pull his upper body into my lap, cradling him. He lets out a moan of pain and holds his abdomen tighter. "Willa," he says. He's improbably ashen, as white as the moon above us. He's struggling to say something, and it comes out in a low, pained whisper. I try to console him, tell him it's all right as run my hands through his matted hair, clutching at his soaken shirt, silent, hot, burning tears rolling down my cheeks, but it comes out even thinner than his words, my throat still recovering from my dry heaves from before. And then I hear it. His voice is raspy and light and hardly audible, but I hear it. "Oh, bury me out on the lone prairie." Weston is singing; he is singing an ancient song from when District 10 was the name on the horseshoe, when cowboys gathered around fires with a trilling banjo to sing songs such as this. I remember my father once had sung it around a roaring flame in the dead of night, strumming his guitar. It had been light music, then, words about a dying man's last wish behind the beat of a thudding instrument. I am chilled, though, as Weston sings the tune in a pained, hoarse, cracked voice, seeping through in severe tones, and it strikes me harshly how fitting it really is, how acrid and sober the song tastes with only the cold forest breeze as a backdrop. I hold back a dry sob to push out the words, singing along with him: Oh, bury me out on the lone prairie Where the coyotes wail and the wind blows free And when I die, oh, bury me Beneath the western sky on the lone prairie Oh, bury me out on the lone prairie These words came soft and painfully From the pallid lips of a youth who lay On his dying bed at the break of day I feel it then, the life go out of him. For a moment, he is impossibly light in my hands, and then, infinitely heavier as he slumps down. Tears are angry hot resentful burning searing smoldering scorching and I nearly flinch as they roll down my cheeks bitterly;I try to push the rest of the song out of a clenching, constricted throat. So we buried him there on the lone prairie Where the rattlesnakes hiss and the wind blows free In a shallow grave, no one to grieve Beneath the western sky on the lone prairie Oh, bury me out on the lone prairie These words came soft and painfully From the pallid lips of a youth who lay On his dying bed at the break of day I must have sat there for an hour, screaming into his chest, sobs as real as the ones in my dreams racking my body as I shook uncontrollably. I clutch at him so tightly, praying that maybe if I hold him tight enough he won't slip through my fingers. The sky is dark and enveloping, and I'm grateful he had perished in the cloak of the night so I can mourn him properly. Harshly, I realize he must have been in pain for hours until I had reached him. My head is so pounding and my throat is so dry. I forget for a dazed moment where I am, and I remember soberly; I am a tribute. I am to fight to the death. Quincy's words echo in my mind as I stand from Weston's lifeless body, my heart torn and bursting at the seams, the grip around my knife so tight and clenching as I walk through the thickness with weary eyes. I am so tired of the death and the blood and the sickness. "Go on, Willa. They've taken enough." Hope you enjoyed this beast of a chapter. It was supposed to be three separate chapters. There must be mistakes littered throughout, so feel free to leave constructive criticism! Thanks, fortes fortuna iuvat |
TRG-AMR North America today announced the launch and schedule for the Aston Martin GT4 Challenge Series of North America. In addition, it announced Pirelli as the official tire partner of the new series. TRG-AMR, the exclusive partner with Aston Martin Racing in North America, made the announcement at Road Atlanta where it will begin the 2014 season for the new Challenge Series. Road Atlanta is hosting Petit Le Mans this weekend, the finale for the American Le Mans Series presented by Tequila Patron. “This series will without a doubt capture the heart, dreams and passion of our Aston Martin racing drivers,” said TRG-AMR CEO Kevin Buckler. “It will reflect the sophistication and performance of the brand and provide memories of a lifetime in a competition that will be fun, but challenging. “We have been working for months to put all the details in place and we are all set. The schedule is simply amazing and it was a personal dream of our entire team to race at some of the finest venues across North America and turn our race weekends into fantastic and complete lifestyle events.” The GT4 Challenge Series of North America will race at some of the finest road courses in North America, beginning April 11-13 at the Braselton, GA track. A month later, the series travels to historic Watkins Glen International Raceway (NY), May 16-18. Virginia International Raceway hosts the drivers’ series June 6-8, while in July the GT4 Challenge is scheduled to join the “Summer Classic” July 25-27 at one of Canada’s most scenic race venues, Circuit Mont Tremblant, outside Montreal. The summer schedule concludes with the Aston Martins traveling to a California track famous for the “Corkscrew” section of its track, Mazda Raceway Laguna Seca on the Monterey Peninsula for Labor Day weekend (August 29-31). The season continues in the fall with stops at Road America (Oct. 10-12) in Elkhart Lake, WI and Sebring International Raceway in Sebring, FL (Nov. 21-23). One additional race will be added to the schedule soon. Four of the races – Road Atlanta, Watkins Glen, VIR and Sebring – will be run in concert with NARRA (North American Road Racing Association). The July event at Mount-Tremblant will be part of the “Summer Classic” and the October event at Road America is shared with MVP Track Time. The GT4 Challenge will feature sportsman drivers racing the Aston Martin Vantage GT4, which is the most popular GT4 car in the world. More than 100 of these cars have been built and are competing in multiple race series around the globe. Aston Martin GT4 Challenge Series of North America 2014 Schedule April 11-13 – Road Atlanta May 16-18 – Watkins Glen June 6-8 – Virginia International Raceway July 25-27 – Circuit Mont Tremblant August 29-31 – Mazda Raceway Laguna Seca Oct. 10-12 – Road America Nov. 21-23 – Sebring International Raceway *one race TBD |
Bostonians can party against the patriarchy today. The city has declared 9 April to be Riot Grrrl Day, in honour of Kathleen Hanna. The former Bikini Kill singer, who now fronts the Julie Ruin, is being honoured on the occasion of her visit to Boston to speak at the city’s Wilbur theatre on “art, music, writing, trends, women and more”. The proclamation of Riot Grrrl Day states, among other things: “Because: Our young women can’t be what they can’t see. Girls need to see other girls picking up drumsticks, basses and microphones. They need to see other girls picking up paintbrushes and pens, and telling their stories loudly. Because: the next Kathleen Hanna may be a young girl in a Boston bedroom creating feminist art by herself, fearful that she has no community to belong to.” It added that the day should “inspire grrrls everywhere to shake up the status quo and create”. The proclamation was signed by the mayor of Boston, Marty Walsh, and was guided into being by the city’s chief of policy, Joyce Linehan. “Kathleen was all about the collective, and it was a real team effort putting this together. There are a lot of riot grrrls in the building [at city hall],” Linehan told the AV Club. Linehan is arguably the most rock’n’roll-friendly policy wonk in the world right now. She led the campaign – inspired by a Guardian article – to have Roadrunner by the Modern Lovers enshrined as the official rock song of Massachusetts, urging Walsh – who was then a state representative – to introduce a bill to that effect. That effort failed earlier this year, when bill H.3573 fell. |
Michael Brown, the former FEMA head who was widely blamed for the Bush administration’s slow response to Hurricane Katrina, sees some familiar patterns in the aftermath of Hurricane Maria in Puerto Rico. The same breakdown in coordination between different levels of government that exacerbated the disaster of Katrina also contributed to struggles to respond adequately to Maria, Brown told TIME this week. Brown, who resigned as FEMA director under President George W. Bush amid criticism of his handling of Katrina, praised the Trump administration’s overall response to Maria. But he said that the unified command center in Puerto Rico was ineffective at coordinating and managing resources, as some local officials would not or could not make it there because they were isolated by the storm’s damage to the island’s infrastructure. In the immediate aftermath of Katrina, New Orleans lacked a federal command center on the scene altogether, according to a government report commissioned to assess the event. “I think presidents and certainly FEMA have learned that you got to have a unified command structure to respond to any disaster,” Brown said. “In Puerto Rico, we see that there are many people who haven’t learned that.” David Paulison, who succeeded Brown as FEMA leader under Bush, offered a similar assessment. “What we had in Katrina was a disconnect between the federal, state and local level,” he said. “In Puerto Rico I see that same breakdown.” Those assessments were challenged by a senior FEMA official in Puerto Rico. “I know both Mike and Dave and I have a lot of high regard for them, but that’s just not the case on the ground here,” Mike Byrne, the federal coordinating officer for Puerto Rico, said in a phone interview from San Juan. Byrne said he meets daily with Puerto Rico’s governor at the command center established early on in San Juan and several times a day with his staff, and has an inter-governmental coordinator in each of the island’s 78 municipalities. “I not only have ground troops at the most minute level, I also have constant access to the highest levels,” he said. Byrne, who took over for another FEMA official a week ago, acknowledged that Puerto Rico’s physical isolation and the comprehensive damage of the storm — which knocked out power and cell phones, and many roads — slowed the initial response. But with 77 helicopters and 19,000 troops on the island three weeks after the storm, the relief effort was “robust,” Byrne said, delivering one million liters of water on Oct. 17, and 600,000 meals. “So there’s always slow ramp up time, but once you get the pump primed, things get moving. And it took longer to get this pump primed, because it’s 1,000 miles from the mainland.” Despite these efforts, Puerto Rico remains in dire straits, with much of the island without electricity or access to clean drinking water nearly a month since the storm struck the U.S. territory, leaving at least 48 people dead. Still, many natural disaster experts agree with Byrne that delays in response have been due to the island’s location and lack of infrastructure, rather than issues with the federal government’s response. Brown said the Trump administration’s response in Puerto Rico was “pretty much textbook.” James Lee Witt, who served as FEMA director for the entirety of the Clinton presidency, told the Washington Post he would give the Trump administration an “A-plus” for its handling of the storm — something Trump picked up on in remarks this week. “I was very honored,” Trump said Monday. “He’s the FEMA director of the Clinton administration. Gave us an A-plus for how we responded to the hurricane aftermath.” Perceptions of the response have also been affected by President Trump’s social media habits. While Trump put resources at FEMA’s disposal, he distracted from recovery efforts at times with tone-deaf comments and online feuds with some local officials, including San Juan Mayor Carmen Yulín Cruz. Last week, Trump threatened to pull FEMA and the Department of Defense from the island. Trump’s advisers would prefer not to focus on the President’s Twitter feed. “Judge us by the actions,” Mick Mulvaeny, Trump’s director of the Office of Management and Budget, told CNN earlier this month. “Judge us by what’s happening on the island.” -With reporting by Karl Vick Write to Justin Worland at justin.worland@time.com. |
Nowadays, even Google is questioning Google's rose-colored portrait of its ever-expanding search advertising monopoly. The way senior vp Jonathan Rosenberg tells it, Google will gradually tweak its AdWords ad platform until it displays almost no ads. Ad "coverage" on the world's largest search engine has certainly shrunk over the past several months, and when the subject was mooted during July's quarterly earnings call, Rosenberg attributed this steady shrinkage to Google's "continued focus on quality" advertising. "[Google co-founder] Larry [Page] says we'd be better off showing just one ad [per page] - the perfect ad," Rosenberg cooed, indicating that coverage would shrink even further. But then, in a rare moment of Google candor, the other co-founder told listening reporters and financial analysts that Rosenberg's "perfect ad" nonsense was indeed nonsense. "There is some evidence that we've been a little bit more aggressive in decreasing coverage than we ought to have been," was the word from Sergey Brin. "We've been reexamining some of that." His candor was fleeting. But with the company's second quarter profits dipping below Wall Street expectations, it looked an awful lot like Brin and company were on the verge of cranking the dial on their AdWords money machine and cooking up added profits for quarters three and four - and beyond. Remember: More coverage means more clicks, and more clicks means more money. Well, little more than a month later, Google has announced significant changes to its ad platform. Most notably, the company is killing AdWords' much-discussed "minimum bid," a means of discouraging what Google considers "low quality" ads. The changes have yet to reach the web at large. Google is testing the waters with "a very small segment of advertisers." But search engine marketers - and Wall Street analysts - can't help but wonder if this is Google's play for more coverage. And more revenue. "No more minimum bids?" says Adam Audette, founder of AudetteMedia, a boutique search marketing shop out of Bend, Oregon. "It certainly looks like they'll have more leeway to make more money." Meanwhile, as Jonathan "Perfect Ad" Rosenberg himself let slip during that shockingly-newsworthy earnings call, Google continues to expand a coverage-happy AdWords beta known as "Automatic Matching." Believe it or not, Auto Match spends your excess ad budget on keyword searches you aren't actually bidding on, and judging from initial tests, it empties your wallet just as pointlessly as expected. Sergey Brin Testing Auto Match with a seasoned Google advertiser, the Dallas, Texas-based search marketing outfit KeyRelevance saw spending increase 600 per cent on a single ad campaign, and most of that extra dough was spent on keyword searches that had little or nothing to do with the advertiser's products. "Auto Match decided the account needed help spending money," says Jim Gilbert, the KeyRelevance ad guru who ran the tests. "So it started spending money." Google insists it's only interested in serving up relevant ads, satisfying both advertisers and web surfers. But this commitment to quality goes only so far. Google is also interested in making lots of money, and as the economy continues to soften, it's worth remembering Mountain View has the power to juice profits whenever it likes. With AdWords controlling 70 per cent of the search advertising market, even the slightest turn of the dial can mean millions. |
The Canadian dollar continued its rise above 76 cents US on Tuesday after oil prices surged by more than five per cent. The loonie was up a third of a cent at 76.72 at the close of trading. West Texas Intermediate crude, the main North American contract, was ahead 5.2 per cent or $2.44 at $48.70 US a barrel. That's it's highest level since the end of August. Brent, the international oil contract, was ahead 5.6 per cent or $2.75 to $52 a barrel. Those are the highest prices in a month for crude, which lost momentum in September because of prospects of a slowdown in China that would depress demand for oil. A worldwide glut of oil has pulled down the price of WTI from above $100 last year to around the $45 level. Crude glut is easing But today, the U.S. Energy Information Agency issued a new short-term forecast that said the surplus of crude is easing. Total world supply is expected to rise to 95.98 million barrels a day in 2016, less than expected because non-OPEC supply has stalled. At the same time global oil demand will grow the most in six years, rising by 270,000 barrels a day to 95.2 million barrels a day. That prediction finally balances supply and demand around the world. Oil prices were also buoyed by reports on Monday that Russia, Saudi Arabia and other big producers would hold talks to support the market. Russia has suffered economically as oil prices fell and sanctions ate into the economy. Toronto traders have also been buoyed by the prospect of the TransPacific Partnership lowering tariffs on Canadian goods and opening markets for Canadian raw materials. That helped the energy and resources stocks advance on Tuesday and improved prospects for the loonie as well. Suncor's takeover bid for Canadian Oil Sands seemed to boost shares of other energy players amid speculation of further takeover action in the oilpatch now energy prices are so low. The TSX rose 95 points to 13,790 in Tuesday trading. |
Key 3D printing patent expired yesterday Yesterday marked the expiry of US Patent 5597589, "Apparatus for producing parts by selective sintering." This is one of the core patents in the 3D printing world -- the patent that allows 3D printer companies to charge more for fine nylon powder than Michelin-starred restaurants charge for filet mignon. The high cost of consumables in 3D printing has been a major barrier to innovation in the field -- selective laser sintering produces a fine finish that the patent-free fused deposition modeling technique used in Reprap-style printers can't match -- and now the brakes are coming off. However, there are still lots of patents (including some genuinely terrible ones) in the 3D printing world, so the expiry of 5597589 doesn't necessarily mean that we'll see a flood of cheap printers and cheaper feedstock -- given the murkiness of the overlapping patent claims and the expense of litigating each one of them, radical new entrants into the field are still facing a lot of risk that has nothing to do with making great products at a fair price. In a good piece on 3D Print, Eddie Krassenstein speculates about the scary supplementary laser-sintering patents lurking in the wings, pointing out that Stratasys (the major competitor of 3D Systems, who owned 5597589) didn't design their entry-lever printers to use SLS, even though they knew that the patent would be expiring in early 2014. Krassenstein suggests that this means that Stratasys knows about some other gnarly and deadly patent that would torpedo them if they went SLS. But I'm a lot less convinced than Krassenstein is about the potential of a competitor taking the risky step of making a SLS printer that sticks to the claims in 5597589. Virtually every technical idea is covered by a stupid, overbroad patent, and yet people start businesses every day that open them to legal liability from a troll or an entrenched incumbent. If the potential for a patent suit was, in itself, a sufficient deterrent to raising capital and starting a business, we wouldn't see any startups. And a company that sticks to the claims in 5597589 has a powerful weapon in any patent suit: the USPTO granted 5597589 20 years ago, and so if they granted overlapping patents since, they were manifestly in error, a matter that is relatively (in patent terms, anyway) easy to prove. The main thing people expect to happen, with the expiration of this patent, including many experts in the field, is a significant increase in the production of SLS 3D printers, follow by a large decrease in the price. Some are led to believe that Chinese manufacturing firms will quickly be spitting out cheaply made SLS printers at a small fraction of the cost of current printers. However, others argue that there are still too many barriers for entry. The expiring patent is an old one, and while it is probably the most important in selective laser sintering printing, it isn’t the only one. There are literally dozen of other patents that are still valid that center around SLS. This means that any company that wishes to enter into the selective laser sintering market, must make sure that they are not breaking any of the more modern patents. This can be shaky ground, that many entrepreneurs and corporation wish to avoid. With the possibility of a lawsuit, if a firm believes that their patents have been infringed upon, will certainly scare off a lot of possible competitors. At the same time though, most of the large 3D printing companies have known for years now, that this patent would be coming to an end today. Certainly they have already taken liberty to investigate all of the other laser sintering patents out there, to prepare themselves for the moment this occurred. It is unlikely that many Chinese companies that are used to making cheap merchandise will venture into possible patent wars. However companies like Stratasys, and their subsidiary Makerbot will surely try and find a way around the newer, still active patents. Laser Sintering 3D Printing May Now Take Off with a Very Important Patent Expiring Today [Eddie Krassenstein/3D Print] (via O'Reilly Radar) |
PM says Australians have been ‘played for mugs’ by ‘bad people’ and signals sweeping policy shift aimed at bolstering national security Tony Abbott has said Australians have been “played for mugs” by “bad people” and the government would no longer give “the benefit of doubt” when it comes to immigration, residency, welfare and citizenship. The prime minister linked the Martin Place siege at the Lindt cafe, which killed two people, to what appears to be a new national security policy of “remedial action”. He outlined a harder stance through a statement and YouTube presentation but has provided little detail and promised further information when he makes a statement on national security on Monday week. “It’s clear to me, that for too long, we have given those who might be a threat to our country the benefit of the doubt,” he said. “There’s been the benefit of the doubt at our borders, the benefit of the doubt for residency, the benefit of the doubt for citizenship and the benefit of the doubt at Centrelink. “And in the courts, there has been bail, when clearly there should have been jail. “We are a free and fair nation. But that doesn’t mean we should let bad people play us for mugs, and all too often they have: Well, that’s going to stop.” Abbott said Australia was working to degrade “the Islamist death cult” and “as a country, we won’t let evil people exploit our freedom”. “The rise of the Islamist death cult in the Middle East has seen the emergence of new threats where any extremist can grab a knife, a flag, a camera phone and a victim and carry out a terror attack.” Abbott said the government would shortly release the joint state-commonwealth review of the Martin Place siege, which killed Tori Johnson and Katrina Dawson. “We are both determined to learn the lessons of this attack and will promptly take any necessary remedial action,” he said. The prime minister’s statement comes days after two men were arrested in Sydney, charged with planning to carry out a terrorist attack. It was also released as two people were shot dead in Copenhagen following an attack on a free speech forum, which featured a Swedish cartoonist, who has caused controversy with his depictions of the Islamic prophet Muhammad. Abbott condemned the attack and said Australia’s national terrorism alert remained on “high”, which means a terrorist attack is likely. “Denmark is a partner in the international coalition that is working to disrupt, degrade and ultimately defeat the Islamist death cult in Iraq and Syria,” Abbott said. “Recent attacks such as those in Copenhagen and Paris will only strengthen our resolve to combat Isil, or Daesh, and the evil it represents.” The government has been seeking to move the debate on to national security ahead of a parliamentary debate on data retention laws and Abbott’s statement makes clear that he will use the report to also tighten measures around border security. Associate professor Anne Aly, of Curtin University’s countering online violent extremism research program said the Abbott government continued to treat the symptoms of terrorism without addressing the reasons which cause young men to join terrorist movements. “Is this the new Tony Abbott?” Aly said. “He continues to frame this as a national security problem, hacking away at the branches without attacking the roots. “This tactic that he is taking that is solely focused on hard side of national security and is at odds with approaches of many other western governments that are implementing programs which give people different strategies when they encounter extremism.” Aly said 99% of young Muslim men and the population generally had come into contact with extremist ideology through the rise of Isis and such programs could help people find a way to turn away from extremist approaches. She said Abbott’s statement and the government’s narrative on national security was making her work harder because it alienated young Muslims who feel under pressure from the language of the national security debate. “It is making my work much harder because my work is focused on positive aspects but increasingly more work is required countering the government narrative as well as countering the extremist narrative,” she said. Aly said it Abbott’s national security statement was “interesting timing”, given that Barack Obama was holding a summit in Washington this week to bring together experts to discuss the importance of countering violent extremism within communities. “The United States, for example, has has given strong recognition to the fact that it can’t just be dealt with at national security issue and it is the same in Europe and the United Kingdom. Yet here in Australia we have no soft programs to balance hard national security laws.” Aly said while the Abbott government had announced $13.4m for programs to counter violent extremism last year out of a $630m package to strengthen government police and intelligence agencies, only $1m had been announced so far and that round had not yet closed, so no funding in the area had yet been released. Aly said even those grants, which provide a maximum of $50,000, could only provide help to community organisations to “improve their ability to deliver an intervention service” rather than fund the service itself. “We are still waiting and while we’re still waiting the prime minister continues to hammer home how he is increasing national security and we are still waiting to do anything that is going to address that at its roots,” said Aly. |
Sixty species new to science, including a chocolate-coloured frog and a tiny dung beetle less than 3mm long, have been discovered by scientists in Suriname. An expedition of scientists spent three weeks in 2012 exploring an area of rivers, mountains and rainforest in the south-eastern region of Suriname that has "virtually no human influence". The Conservation International team found 11 new species of fish, one new snake, six new frogs and a host of new insects in the South American country. Dr Trond Larsen, one of the field biologists, said they were particularly surprised by the number of frogs. "With many frog species rapidly disappearing around the globe, we were surprised and uplifted to discover so many frogs potentially new to science, including a stunningly sleek 'cocoa' tree frog," he said. The tiny 'lilliputian beetle' ( Canthidium cf. minimum) probably represents a new species to science. Photograph: Trond Larsen/Conservation International The cocoa frog (Hypsiboas sp) was named after its chocolate colouring, and described as an "especially heartening" find by Larsen. It lives on trees, using the round discs on its fingers and toes to climb. Among the other new finds were a ruby-coloured lilliputian beetle (Canthidium cf minimum), named after its tiny dimensions that make it possibly the second smallest dung beetle known in south American. The remote nature of the area saw the team travel first by plane, then helicopter and then by boat and on foot, with help from 30 men from indigenous communities. At one point "relentless" rain saw the team forced to move after their campsite was flooded. In total, they found 1,378 different species, and their report concluded "there are very few places left on Earth that are as pristine and untouched as this region." But despite the relatively pristine environment, it was not entirely free of human fingerprints – water samples showed mercury above levels safe for human consumption even though there is no upstream mining. The scientists concluded that the mercury was blown in on the wind. "This demonstrates that even the most isolated and pristine parts of the world are not entirely sheltered from human impacts — all systems are interconnected," said Larsen. |
A new study led by scientists at the Sanford Burnham Prebys Medical Discovery Institute (SBP) describes a technology that could lead to new therapeutics for traumatic brain injuries. The discovery, published in Nature Communications, provides a means of homing drugs or nanoparticles to injured areas of the brain. "We have found a peptide sequence of four amino acids, cysteine, alanine, glutamine, and lysine (CAQK), that recognizes injured brain tissue," said Erkki Ruoslahti, M.D., Ph.D., distinguished professor in SBP's NCI-Designated Cancer Center and senior author of the study. "This peptide could be used to deliver treatments that limit the extent of damage." About 2.5 million people in the US sustain traumatic brain injuries each year, usually resulting from car crashes, falls, and violence. While the initial injury cannot be repaired, the damaging effects of breaking open brain cells and blood vessels that ensue over the following hours and days can be minimized. "Current interventions for acute brain injury are aimed at stabilizing the patient by reducing intracranial pressure and maintaining blood flow, but there are no approved drugs to stop the cascade of events that cause secondary injury," said Aman Mann, Ph.D., postdoctoral researcher in Ruoslahti's lab and the study's co-first author, together with Pablo Scodeller, Ph.D. More than one hundred compounds are currently in preclinical tests to lessen brain damage following injury. These candidate drugs block the events that cause secondary damage, including inflammation, high levels of free radicals, over-excitation of neurons, and signaling that leads to cell death. "Our goal was to find an alternative to directly injecting therapeutics into the brain, which is invasive and can add complications," explained Ruoslahti. "Using this peptide to deliver drugs means they could be administered intravenously, but still reach the site of injury in sufficient quantities to have an effect." The CAQK peptide binds to components of the meshwork surrounding brain cells called chondroitin sulfate proteoglycans. Amounts of these large, sugar-decorated proteins increase following brain injury. "Not only did we show that CAQK carries drug-sized molecules and nanoparticles to damaged areas in mouse models of acute brain injury, we also tested peptide binding to injured human brain samples and found the same selectivity," added Mann. "This peptide could also be used to create tools to identify brain injuries, particularly mild ones, by attaching the peptide to materials that can be detected by medical imaging devices," Ruoslahti commented. "And, because the peptide can deliver nanoparticles that can be loaded with large molecules, it could enable enzyme or gene-silencing therapies." This platform technology has been licensed by a startup company, AivoCode, which was recently awarded a Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) grant from the National Science Foundation for further development and commercialization. Ruoslahti's team and their collaborators are currently testing the applications of these findings using animal models of other central nervous system (CNS) injuries such as spinal cord injury and multiple sclerosis. |
HONOLULU — It was just before 7 a.m. and the streets of Waikiki were filled with tourists, surfers, early morning joggers — and Ronnie Cruz, a 34-year-old homeless man getting a ticket from a Honolulu police officer for pushing a shopping cart piled high with his belongings along the sidewalk. “Happens all the time,” Mr. Cruz said after he made his way to the other side of Kalakaua Avenue. “They won’t let you stand over there.” “I’ve got four of them,” he said, reaching into a billfold as he displayed the tattered tickets. This tourist mecca has had a surge in its homeless population, which is up 32 percent over the past five years. The explosion has prompted one of the toughest police crackdowns in the nation, sounded alarms among civic leaders that aggressive panhandlers are scaring off tourists, and set off an anguished debate on how to deal with the destitute in a state that prides itself on its friendly and easygoing ways. Honolulu officials say they are confiscating up to 10 tons of property left on the sidewalk by homeless people every week. |
Image caption Contactless payments are being increasingly used by consumers Cashless payments have overtaken the use of notes and coins for the first time, according to the industry body. The Payments Council said the use of cash by consumers, businesses and financial organisations fell to 48% of payments last year. The remaining 52% was made up of electronic transactions, ranging from high-value transfers to debit card payments, as well as cheques. Cash volumes are expected to fall by 30% over the next 10 years. The Payments Council, which oversees the system of transactions, said that moves towards debit card, contactless and mobile payments would drive the move away from cash. Digital overtakes cash 48% of payments made by consumers, businesses and financial firms were in cash 34% of consumer payments are expected to be in cash by 2024 4.4% of adults “rarely” use cash at all £67 is the average ATM withdrawal 1% of consumer payments were made by cheque in 2014 Pub money Despite the growth of digital money, cash remained the most common specific payment method among shoppers and businesses in 2014. Some 18 billion cash payments were made in the UK in 2014, worth about £250bn. Debit cards accounted for 24% of payments, followed by direct debits which accounted for 10% of payments. Cash was used in more than eight out of 10 purchases in pubs, clubs, and newsagents last year, but in fewer than three out of 10 in petrol stations. Ten years ago, numerous payments of under £1 were made in telephone boxes and parking meters but those have dropped sharply. The Payments Council is predicting that among consumers alone, the majority of transactions will be cashless in 2016, partly because younger consumers say they are less reliant on cash. However, cash will see a significant overhaul in the coming years, with a new 12-sided £1 coin entering circulation in 2017 and plastic £5 and £10 notes being introduced by the Bank of England in 2016 and 2017. Bank of England chief cashier Victoria Cleland, whose signature is on new banknotes, said that cash had a long future. "Since I started the job I am seeing a growing demand. I am seeing a 46% increase of notes in circulation. I think the proportion of cash transactions is coming down, but I'm still seeing a fairly stable value of cash transactions," she told the BBC. Proportion of cash payments by sector in 2014 Petrol station: 24.5% Electrical goods: 33.8% Supermarkets: 43.8% Bookshops: 45.5% Travel and transport: 59% Charity: 65.9% Discount stores: 68% Convenience stores: 78.5% Pubs and clubs: 83.9% Newsagents: 84.8% Source: Payments Council |
Description Paul Krugman, Laureate of the Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel 2008 at a press conference ... Paul Krugman has a personal dilemma. That's because President Barack Obama's most recent proposal for a fiscal cliff deal includes extending unemployment benefits and boosting spending, as well as a stingier inflation measure for Social Security benefits, which Krugman describes as a "a cruel, stupid policy" in his blog post. "Am I dead set against? No, I'm still agonizing. Very uncomfortable times," the Nobel Prize-winning economist wrote Tuesday of Obama's plan on his New York Times blog. Many economists have warned of the negative economic impact of going over the fiscal cliff, but Krugman argued in an interview with WNYC in November that going over the fiscal cliff -- or letting the scheduled tax hikes and spending cuts take place -- could be preferable to cutting a deal now. |
Officers on the frontline and in control rooms recall the 'living hell' of tackling riots in London, Liverpool, Salford and the West Midlands, and reflect on how it could have been even worse Two police carriers packed with officers sped through Tottenham's suburban streets. In the front passenger seat of the lead vehicle was a 29-year-old constable, sweating and using an iPhone to navigate the way to the riots. By their own admission police had been slow to call for reinforcements, but around midnight teams of officers from across London were pouring into Tottenham. "I knew that police officers had been hurt and things were on fire and it had all got crazy," the constable said. "And I had to get our guys there." As the two vans got closer, the police radio relayed a steady stream of bad news. "It's one guy after the next guy after the next guy … 'Officer down, officer injured, we need a medic, officer down, we can't find so-and-so, does anyone know where he is?'" The vans travelled 20 miles from Sutton, south-west London, inadvertently into the very centre of the riot on Tottenham High Road. "Suddenly bricks and bottles and scaffolding started being thrown at us. And we were like, jeez, OK, it's actually happening now. It's so loud in the van when those things hit the side, it echoes around a sort of big tin chamber." They carried on driving, past burnt-out police cars and a flaming double-decker bus. "Just endless smashed windows and bricks, and I thought: this is not real, this is like a movie set." The constable – one of 130 police officers of all ranks interviewed for the Guardian and London School of Economics study into the English riots – was heading for an experience likely to stay with him for the rest of his life. "I just thought: how much longer will this go on? This is almost a living hell," said a 52-year-old inspector who was knocked unconscious shortly after arriving in Tottenham. "If some of my officers start going down now, we'll get overrun. They will kill us." 1am Sunday 7 August Tottenham had been rioting for four hours. A protest outside the police station over the police shooting two days earlier of a local man, Mark Duggan, had turned violent. Looting was beginning to take place two miles west, in Wood Green. Still using his iPhone, the constable guided the two vans through brown smoke, past blazing buildings and along streets carpeted with debris. The vehicles were forced to stop when they came across an obstacle in the road next to an Aldi supermarket. "All of the shopping trolleys from the Aldi had been pulled out in one big chain, flipped on their side, and just used as a barricade," he said. "You can't drive over the shopping trolleys. So we stopped there. Everyone had a quick note to check their helmets were on, and they had all the kit they needed." When the van door slid open, he was struck by the noise. "Chanting, shouting, things smashing, bricks, bottles, sirens in the distance." He and his colleagues joined a line of about a dozen police who were battling 300 rioters. "It's difficult to breathe with the smoke. The helmet steamed up immediately, so I could just about see where I was going." In the distance, the constable saw the rioters had access to a building site. "You could see a hole in the fence. And that was just this infinite source of brick and scaffolding and everything that you want to throw." The trolleys formed a natural dividing line over which a nonstop barrage of missiles came flying through the air. The police repeatedly tried to get over the trolleys. "That was like a bridge too far," the constable said. When he and a handful of officers finally made it across, they found themselves isolated and under attack from the mob. Making a hasty retreat, the officers managed to scramble back over the trolleys – except him. "I couldn't quite get off [the trolley]," he said. "Next thing I knew, all I could feel were hands clawing down the back of my overalls, trying to grab me and pull me back. There was a moment where I thought: if I get dragged back, there's so many people here, it's so dark and it's so chaotic, that might just be it. I might just be gone. Just disappeared." 6am Sunday The incident occurred 500 metres from where PC Keith Blakelock had been stabbed to death by a mob during the Broadwater Farm riots 26 years earlier. Blakelock had 40 cuts and wounds, several fingers missing and, according to a pathologist, a facial wound indicating a blow "almost as if to sever his head". For the bronze commander on the ground, the Tottenham riots prompted memories of 1985 when, as a wide-eyed 20-year-old constable, he had served alongside Blakelock. Now in his 40s and a chief inspector, he said: "I did have concern that someone was going to die that night [in 1985]. And I would put the first night [of last year's riots] on a parity with that. "I only had about 50, 60 officers in my command the whole night. So a lot of my decision log was: I am aware that these people are spent, I'm aware these people are tired, I have no option but to keep using them." As dawn broke, the chief inspector returned to the station. There were police lying asleep on the floor; in the canteen, vending machines had been smashed open by officers desperate for food and drink. After a debrief, he went to bed at 10am. He awoke four hours later, as crowds began to gather for the second night of riots, in Enfield and Lambeth. 9pm Sunday Although the start of the English riots was notable for intense violence against police, the second night consisted mainly of roaming gangs who targeted shops and warehouses. Some of the most frenzied looting was in Brixton. When a 25-year-old female constable arrived in a bus full of officers, she saw people sprinting along the roads carrying TVs and laptops. The police parked next to a branch of Currys. "The inspector just said: 'It's being looted, we need to surround it to stop them getting out.'" The constable and two officers stood guard by one exit, watching the nervous movements of looters inside and shouting: "Stay back, you are surrounded, don't come out." But as the looters poured out, one pointed a fire extinguisher into her face and fired foam. "I had my visor down, but [it went] right in my face, and it went all up to the inside as well … I don't know what it was – it didn't taste nice." She struggled blindly, waving her baton and "snatching at anything", until the foam cleared enough for her to see a colleague grappling with a suspect on the ground. "Then, all of a sudden, I presume it was my inspector just shouted: 'Everyone, get out of here now.'" A large crowd was descending on the police, switching the balance of power. The constable scrambled into her van. Inside were two other police officers and three prisoners, including a woman who was "screaming her head off". The driver tried to find a way through the crowd, driving forwards, then backwards. "We weren't moving anywhere," said the constable. "I was just super-scared of that side door coming open and being dragged out." As the officers tried to bolt the door, a brick was hurled inside. "My colleague at the back suddenly starts shouting: 'The window's broken, the window's broken!' [My other] colleague was still trying to keep the door shut – I don't think he'd got the bolt on properly, so he had his hand on the door," she said. "Obviously there was a big hole in the window now, and then suddenly this machete knife came through and started, like, hacking at his hand. Thank God he had his gloves on which protected him." 5pm Monday In Hackney, east London, a 25-year-old part-time actor had just begun his first day of work as a Met special constable, a volunteer role with the same powers as paid officers. London was set for its third, most intense night of rioting. Police, by their own admission, were unprepared as unrest spread to 22 of the capital's 32 boroughs. Called to the assistance of officers being attacked by gangs of youths in Mare Street, the special constable stepped out of his vehicle with no helmet, shield or riot training, and no sense of what would happen next. "I remember somebody said to me: 'You need to keep with your driver.' And I was like: 'I've lost her already.' Another officer drew his baton and I was like: 'Oh yeah, my baton.' That kind of epiphany moment: oh shit, I might need this." Rioters in front of him were breaking paving stones to use as missiles. Others had attached utility knives to poles and spades. "Bloody hell! What do you do? I remember just thinking: God, I really want a shield right now." The special constable found his driver, cowered behind her shield and watched a brick fly through the air, strike the ground and split in two. "It bounced up at such an odd angle," he said. "It just went boof, straight into my face." He was knocked over but got back to his feet. In his words, adrenaline, stupidity and a desire not to miss out on the action led him to decline treatment for his injured eye and instead plunge back into the chaos. Nearby, a 33-year-old inspector had just received a call over the radio, saying an 80-year-old woman had been struck by a brick on nearby Clarence Road. He assembled a convoy of three carriers for the rescue. "There were just youths on all sides … smoking barricades and fires," he said. "As we were making our way, I started to think to myself: oh my goodness, we are literally just going to drive straight into the eye of the storm." He shouted at his driver: "Whatever you do, don't stop. Because I was literally thinking: in this road, if we came up to a barricade and we were forced to stop … I honestly believe they would have turned [the van] over. They would have managed to get the door out and, I honestly believe, got us out, one by one, and – I'm not exaggerating – I think they might have killed us." Around that time, the special constable on his first day in uniform was taking a petrol can off a man and pouring the fuel down the drain. He got a phone call from his girlfriend. She was in tears, watching the disorder live on television. "Just don't die, please don't die," she told him. Soon he found himself stationed alone outside a looted branch of JD Sports. A crowd gathered round, goading him and taking photos of his eye. Unsure how to respond, he wrapped his arm around one of his tormenters and posed for photographs. "You think: I'm going to use any tactic I know to try and win these people over. I was stood there, quite naive in a sense, just thinking: if these people decide to go at me, they could kill me." By now, tens of thousands of people were out on English streets to riot and loot – most of them in London. Police deployed in the capital that night would use words like "outnumbered", "frustrated", "scared" and "overwhelmed" to describe what happened. 10pm Monday Around the time rioters were taking over parts of London, others were having less success in Liverpool. Despite repeated attempts over 48 hours, they never got into the city centre. Police put that down to disciplined lines that contained gangs of rioters in areas around Toxteth. But the violence towards police was just as intense. "The instruction came to put your visors down, and everyone's shields come up then," said a 35-year-old sergeant. "It was like a scene from [the film] Zulu – you know that scene when they all come over the hill? Three hundred people literally came round the corner into the side street and started attacking us … Because I had my visor down, it was like watching a TV screen." He added: "They started pushing a burning car towards us and we were told to stand fast by the inspector. Some of my officers were saying: 'Sarge, they're pushing a car towards us here.' And I said: 'Yeah, I'm aware of that.' Luckily it fell short and hit the curb and just caught fire – and then they all ran off." How did it feel? "Truthfully? Excitement! There was not one point [where I felt] scared or anything. My adrenaline was pumping." Police were attacked with golf clubs and petrol bombs. A female mounted officer saw rioters pull estate agent signs out of the ground and use the sharpened posts as a stake to attack horses. Another constable said he was horrified when a rioter approached the line of police and began masturbating. Many described a visceral anti-police sentiment. "They hate us, with a vengeance," said another Liverpool officer, adding that the rioters were not dissimilar to the officer's son, who had "fallen by the wayside" ... "He's grown up in a hard area, you know. [He wears] the black trackies, the black trainers, the hoodies. The way that they are, if one person hates [the police], they all club together. There is a gang element; it's like a wolf pack." 11pm Monday While police in Liverpool fought to keep rioters out of the city centre, in Birmingham officers accepted the battle was already lost. Not only had large parts of the city centre been attacked by looters, a police station in Handsworth had been broken into, ransacked and set on fire. A 31-year-old sergeant from a specialist riot unit was ordered to secure the police station and escort firefighters. "All you could see in front of you were cars overturned on fire. The petrol tanks and the tyres were obviously burning to the point of exploding." The burning debris in the road forced their convoy of vans down a single, narrow route. "They funnelled us into a small gap where we were ambushed," he said. "They bricked all of our windows as we were driving through – there wasn't one van window that was kept intact, including the driver's, who had to drive with his head out of the window." He added: "[They] tried to lure us into alleyways and then set fire to the alleyway. They set fire to vehicles in front of us, trying to lure us into them, so when the fuel tank exploded the vehicle exploded." The battles would last almost until daybreak. "They were aiming shotguns at us from a distance and waving them in the air, which meant we had to slow our progress." The firearms were not just a threat: the following night close friends of the sergeant were lured into another ambush, outside a pub that had been set on fire. Twelve bullets were fired at police who attended the scene, peppering a wall just above their heads. 11.45pm Monday In London, more and more people were exploiting the chaos. A convoy of three police vans drafted in from Surrey snaked past a retail park in Lewisham that had been overrun by 300 looters. A 41-year-old constable inside a van was struck by how relaxed and calm the crowd looked. "The people were trying on shoes and hats and T-shirts, and passing stuff around to each other; it was really surreal. There didn't seem to be any concern," he said. There were too many looters and too few police to make any arrests, but they got out of the van and tried to disperse the crowd. "There was one fella I remember who was really upset because he'd got the one shoe that he wanted, but didn't have the other one. He kept waving his shoe at us, saying: 'You know I need to get back in there and get my other shoe.'" The constable was in a group of four who crawled under the roller shutter of a nearby casino that had been broken into. "It was like a movie – there was slot machines on the ground and they were still playing their music and the lights were flashing … sort of hundreds of pound coins lying all over the floor. Smoke and lights and noise and shouting and all kinds of stuff and it was just … phew, mind-blowing." Midnight Monday In the control room in Lambeth, a bank of screens relayed CCTV footage to the chief superintendent in charge of the Met's tactics. Adrian Roberts, silver commander, had decided early on to divide the capital into five areas, allocating a borough commander to each, in the hope of bolstering resources. There was a constant feed of reports of disorder. Rioters were in Hackney, Enfield, Catford, Queensway, Notting Hill, Kilburn, Barnet, Woolwich, Barking, Balham, Southwark and Camden. Two people, in Croydon and Ealing, had been killed. Commanders were calling Roberts on his mobile phone, pleading for help. "But you get to the point [when] there is nothing left in the pot. It was extremely frustrating. We didn't have enough people, we ran out of people very quickly … We were overwhelmed – no one has ever denied that." Lynne Owens, then an assistant commissioner at the Met, was in the same command room. She said: "You can come up with different theories – and yes, there's an issue with engagement, an issue with social media – but the bottom line is: there were lots of criminals on the streets of London over the four nights and, certainly on the first night, we just didn't have enough officers to stop it happening." The Met blames a failure of intelligence for its delay in getting larger numbers of officers on to the streets. By the third night, there were 6,000 deployed. Twenty-four hours later, 16,000 police were on London's streets – an immense show of force that many police believe helped bring the disorder to an end. In the meantime, Roberts, 46, was having "soul-destroying" radio conversations with officers on the ground, the most difficult of which was with a commander in Croydon. "I can remember … talking to him on the radio, watching what he's having to deal with – the fire's breaking out and watching the cops being completely outnumbered, and I said to him: 'I know you're feeling really vulnerable right now, but I think there could be people trapped in that building. You've just got to go forwards.'" Roberts added: "It's where I was brought up: I'm a Croydon lad, I was married in Croydon. To watch that happening, knowing I'm not there, and knowing I'm that borough commander, was really, really hard." He had a similar conversation with the fire brigade commander standing next to him in the control room. "They have a policy where [firefighters] have to be escorted, and quite rightly so, because they were under attack, but it got to a point where I had to say: 'I haven't got anyone left.'" 11am Tuesday The most intense riots in modern English history had engulfed London, Birmingham and Liverpool, with further outbreaks of disorder in Leicester, Bristol, Leeds, Milton Keynes, Reading, Huddersfield and parts of Kent. England felt on the brink of social collapse. "I rang my dad and said: 'I don't want to go today, I think something terrible is going to happen,'" said a woman police sergeant. "And he picked me up and said: 'This is what you're supposed to be doing.'" The sergeant, in her 30s, was deployed to West Bromwich, where police were not expecting disorder. Her team, comprising another sergeant, two constables and two police community support officers (PCSOs), were told to deliver a very specific message to residents: business as usual. "Those are the three words that will stick with me, because there was nothing [further] from the truth," she said. By late morning it was clear something was brewing. A crowd appeared, having learned via social networks there would be riots in the high street at 2pm. "I could sense the fear in everybody and I thought: OK, this isn't business as usual, and I'm not happy to deliver that message. I really didn't scaremonger, but what I said was: if you feel uncomfortable, then please close down your business." Eighty young people sitting on empty market stalls began putting on masks and balaclavas. The sergeant realised her role was to "keep up the ridiculous pretence" that she and five untrained officers could stop any disorder. She walked into the group of masked youths and tried talking to them. "[Then] this mass of people I had just been talking to became a mob, and they just started to smash all the shops. They were smashing the amusement arcade, and I could see inside the shop – I've never been so shocked in all my life that they were doing this in front of us." When the crowd grew to more than 200 and a car was overturned and set on fire, the sergeant felt "in charge [but] completely alone and isolated". She screamed down the radio for assistance, asked one PCSO to direct the traffic, and ordered the remaining five to take out their batons and form a line to seal off the high street to would-be looters. Then a group of bare-chested men came up to the line and one stepped forward to attack her. "I really growled, and I didn't get into a debate with him about who was the biggest," she said. "I was like [the cartoon heroine] She-Ra. I was going: 'Raaaa!' And everybody was going: 'Get back!' We made ourselves so much bigger than we were." 5pm Tuesday By the time police regained control of West Bromwich, disorder was returning to Birmingham, where three people would be killed. There would also be a second night of disorder in Liverpool, Gloucester and Nottingham. In Manchester, most police saw riots on their patch as inevitable. "As a police officer, you develop this sixth sense," said a 39-year-old constable. "Everybody knew something was going to happen." The challenge was working out where the disorder would begin. Initially, most resources were deployed in Manchester city centre. The level of unrest in Salford was underestimated. The constable was in a group of 25 officers who were first on the scene. "Five-, six-hundred people stood around this roundabout, vehicles parked everywhere … people piling up ammunition at the sides of the road, helicopters up. Some [people] were laughing, you could see the anger in the faces, and you're thinking: it's only a matter of time." There was silence in the van. "It was very, very quiet – almost eerie, like when you jump into a swimming pool and you can't hear anything." Then the crowd began hurling blocks of concrete at the vans. "We were shouting at each other: 'Get your shields up – the window's gonna go in!'" They fled, took stock, and returned on foot to disperse the crowds. The Greater Manchester police Twitter account announced: "Reports of 'stand off' between gangs and police in Salford exaggerated. 20 or so youths dispersed by police – one brick thrown, no injuries." On the ground, the constable saw things differently. "You could see this crowd of about 1,200-1,300 people stood there shouting, some with balaclavas on, some with bandanas covering their faces, people dressed in shorts and T-shirts, some dressed in all black; different ages, men, women, kids, launching things at us," he said. "The sky just went black due to the sheer number of missiles up in the air." One of the missiles – a breezeblock – struck him on the head. "I've dropped to the floor, my shield is on the floor. For that period of, like, five to 10 seconds, I just took blows all over the body … After I'd been hit in the head and [got] back up on my feet, somebody was shouting: 'Kill the fucking pigs!' That's when I almost felt a shiver through my spine." The bronze commander who issued the order to withdraw from Salford – "van up and get out!" – was a 45-year-old superintendant. He likened what happened in Salford to the movie Black Hawk Down, the 2001 war film about disastrous operation by US armed forces in Somalia. His officers had become the focal point of violence, were seriously outnumbered and were "just making it worse", he said. The superintendent clambered on to one of the departing vans. Sat in the same vehicle was a 35-year-old constable, who described his boss as looking dishevelled. "He had no shield," he said. "We just got absolutely annihilated and battered." 11 months on At the height of the chaos, the riots may have felt like defeat to the police. But after months of reflection, the widespread view among officers appears rather different. They admit there were times they lost control, but ultimately, officers point out, they regained order – with fewer injuries and deaths than might have been expected. Many police believe they averted civil unrest on a grander scale: the disorder in 2011 was, at times, more intense than the riots of the 1980s, but it lasted four days rather than several months. Others say the criminal investigations into the riots, which relied heavily on CCTV evidence, have been a big success, with more than 4,000 people arrested in London alone. Despite the public criticism, there remains a deep sense of pride among police deployed during the riots, who feel they fulfilled their duty to protect the public and helped bring the country back from the brink. As a Met chief inspector deployed on the first night put it: "Those officers that were with me on the night did everything that they possibly could. They pushed the boundaries in terms of safety in order to make sure that we saved lives … There wasn't a single officer that said: 'No, we're not going any further.'" But what of the impact on those officers who went beyond the call of duty? For most who participated in this study, the interviews represented a rare opportunity to take stock and reflect. Several said the memories seemed so unreal that it felt as though the riots had never actually happened. For a few, the psychological imprint is only now beginning to appear. The constable with the iPhone, who was almost dragged off a shopping trolley in Tottenham into a mob of rioters, only realised the full impact of that night when he went to see a counsellor. Asked to fill out an "anxiety indicator" questionnaire, he was told: "You know, we start to get concerned when people score about 20 or more. You've scored 86." The constable wrote out his experiences on a piece of paper, and reflected: "I genuinely thought there was a chance I was going to die when I got stuck on those trolleys." He added: "I've dealt with all sorts of horrendous things at work and you're fine – you have a laugh with your colleagues, get it all out, feel fine. So the idea that [the incident on the trolley] had bothered me that much never really occurred to me. But yeah: that little incident will stay with me forever." |
I’ve spent rather more than half a lifetime looking for the perfect ski resort. Last winter, to my intense surprise, I found it – in, of all places – the Spanish Pyrenees. Baqueira Beret, still almost unknown to British skiers, is fit for a king. Indeed, King Juan Carlos has a sumptuous holiday home here. He no longer skis himself, but members of the Spanish royal family make use of it on high-season dates and most weekends. The journey to reach this revelation about Baqueira has taken me to more than 500 resorts in 20 countries. Inevitably, I’m frequently asked which is the best. My stock answer is that on any particular day it can be anywhere you happen to find yourself. But “best” begs the questions “best for what?”, along with “best for whom?” Best depends not only on your standard of skiing, but also on what you are personally looking for in a holiday. Baqueira – I’ve been there several times since it opened in 1964 – now has just about everything any of us could ever want from a ski resort. The Spanish complain that prices in their answer to the swanky resorts of Megève in France and Gstaad in Switzerland are far higher than in any other of their resorts, such as Formigal, La Molina or Sierra Nevada. But they’re still less than half what you will find in one of France’s top destinations such as Val d’Isère , or its Swiss equivalent, Verbier . How about a main course in a smart tablecloth restaurant for £9 and a bottle of delicious local red wine for less than a fiver? The resort is in the Pyrenees, but make no comparison with kiss-me-quick Andorra. Sophisticated Baqueira lies on the high Bonaigua Pass in the Val d’Aran, a remote cleft in the north of the mountain range. It acts as a mountainous back door into Spain from France – the nearest airport, two hours away, is Toulouse. In the Second World War the French Resistance smuggled 20,000 Jews along vertiginous goat tracks to safety here. It’s a proud component of would-be-autonomous Catalonia. Here in this Pyrenean Eldorado they firstly speak Aranese followed by Catalan, Spanish, and a smidgen of French, if you insist. The first requirement of the perfect ski resort is, of course, the snow and the actual skiing. In recent winters Baqueira has enjoyed some of the best cover in Europe. In 2012-13 it recorded a mighty base of 400cm when the lifts closed at the end of the season. Last season was almost as fabulous. The original resort is at 1,500m, with lower and higher satellites, and the top lift rises to a respectable 2,516m. The piste map records a modest but respectable 146km of groomed runs, 26km of them new for this winter and served by an extra chairlift. The beauty of the terrain here lies not only in the long runs of all standards, but in the mainly simple, but nevertheless exciting, off-piste variations from almost every marked run. True, most of the skiing is intermediate, but some steep couloirs such as Escornacrabes (Where Goats Tumble) provide plenty of challenges for experts. From the top, Goats induces a frisson of pure fear. However, when you pluck up the courage to point your skis over the lip, the experience is pleasantly more benign. What is the world's best ski resort? A huge plus point here is the relatively low-cost heli-skiing with Pyrenees Heliski (0 34 655 012 393; pyreneesheliski.com), based eight miles away in the ancient valley town of Vielha. A day with five drops costs €790 (£625), but prices start at just €290 (£230) for two drops when booked through the local British BB ski school (01903 233323; bbskischool.co.uk). Incidentally, having a first-class British ski school in my perfect resort is an important extra bonus. The terrain is in three areas linked across six main peaks, with main access from Baqueira itself by a gondola from the village centre. The hamlet of Beret is little more than a lift station and a terrain park at 1,800m that can be reached on skis or by car from Baqueira. It’s the starting point for some easy blue runs as well as a few much more demanding ones on the Tuc deth Dossau, the highest point of the ski area. Now, the resort itself. No, it’s not the prettiest. Like Tignes, the main base at 1,500m dates from the Sixties ski boom when architectural beauty played second fiddle to bed numbers. The latest development of four and five-star hotels is housed in a mall at the bottom of the lift system in Val de Ruda. Purpose-built, these owe more to North American notions of convenience than to our European ideal. But Tanau at 1,700m, where the Spanish royal family resides, is unquestionably cool. This collection of traditional mountain homes, including the five-star Hotel Pleta, blends with the beauty of its surroundings. What attracts me to Baqueira is the location in more general terms. You don’t have to base yourself in the resort, but alternatively in Vielha eight miles away, or in one of the half-dozen medieval hillside villages such as Arties below Baqueira. My favourites are Arties, Salardu and Tredòs. All offer a variety of accommodation and fine restaurants tucked away down cobbled alleyways. A government-subsidised bus service links the villages between Vielha and Baqueira. But unless staying in the resort itself, a car is essential. Parking is not a problem. Baqueira Beret is set at 1,500m in the Spanish Pyrenees For anyone used to skiing in the Alps, a visit here requires considerable mental and temporal adjustment to the daily routine. On my first visit, after a delayed flight to Toulouse, I arrived in the main street at 2am to find it crowded with night owls who I assumed were leaving Tiffany’s, the main nightclub, at closing time. Wrong. They were leaving restaurants after dinner and going to the club. At 9am, when the front de neige in Val d’Isère is awash with ski classes, the gondola base in Baqueira is all but deserted. No respectable Spaniard clicks into his bindings before 10 or 11am. He skis furiously until 3pm, then has a serious lunch. After the final run home it’s time for tapas and Tempranillo until 6pm when the bars empty – it’s siesta time. At 9pm the whole family re-emerges for drinks and tapas before dinner at 10pm. Of course, you don’t have to switch to the exhausting Iberian clock. You can dine in an otherwise empty restaurant at 8pm, but not earlier. In springtime you need to keep an eye out for brown bears. They’ve been reintroduced to the wild here from a breeding programme based in Arties. Curiously, they tend to head for the French frontier. I can’t imagine why. Ski Miquel (01457 821200; skimiquelholidays.co.uk) offers seven nights at Chalet-Hotel Salana at Baqueira Beret from £559 per person, on a chalet-board basis; or from £627 at four-star Hotel Montarto, on a half-board basis. Both holidays include transfers and flights from London Gatwick or Manchester (£30 supplement) |
Well, our first Armada article! Even though we still don’t have our hands on this game, I thought it was as good a time as any to talk a little about some list theory. So Fantasy Flight gave us a look at both Star Destroyer expansions the other day, and being the Imperial nut I am I digested every piece of info in the article and started churning out list ideas. Disclaimer: I have not gotten to play yet, so any of this could turn sour when we actually get our hands on the game to try it. As a first observation, I’m starting to wonder if certain dice represent certain weapon types to some extent. Missiles seem to only show up on ships that have Black dice, and the Victory-II’s blue dice coincide with it gaining an Ion upgrade (and it loses the missile upgrade as it loses it’s black dice). We’ll have to wait and see if this holds through when everything comes out, but it’s something to note at least. Along the lines of Missiles, let’s take another look at this card that got hidden away behind a sneaky little link: Reminder: Armada’s tournament points total is 300 points. so in terms of how much of your list this is taking up, compare it to a 4-point card for X-Wing. Now the article suggests using this card on a Gladiator: This would give the Gladiator four black dice and two red in it’s forward arc. Respectable, and giving it comparable forward firepower to a Victory-I, with stronger (albeit shorter-range) batteries to it’s sides. Tempting, but I see a better option. Look at the Victory-I: Throwing Expanded Lanuchers on this guy gives a massive forward firing arc, capitalizing on one of the Victory’s strengths. “But what if the target slips past your forward arc?” The Victory’s forward arc is wide enough it should be somewhat easy to catch most opponents, and if you even get one round of fire at close range (where you can use all 5 black attack dice), you’ve got a chance at chewing straight through your target, assuming their defense tokens don’t clear too much of your damage (try using another ship to exhaust them first). Black Attack dice have multiple sides with more than one hit or crit, so rolling 5 can give you 10 hits, plus whatever you land with your red dice (enough to one-shot another Victory). Ontop of that, throw on this title and watch your opponent’s jaw drop at the number of dice you’re rolling: Combined with the Accuracy results you can pull from blue dice, this helps deal with enemy Defense tokens when you’re attacking (and by this point, these dice are honestly better off rolling Accuracy than Damage), and even if they don’t come up on Accuracy, blue dice have no blank sides, so they’re damn reliable to throw on extra firepower. So what’s the weakness of this build? Close Range is really tricky to stay in. Keep in mind, in Armada, you shoot before moving, and there’s no Pilot Skill to determine when ships move, so a keen enemy admiral will do whatever he or she can to avoid having one of their ships in close range when your giant gun is ready to fire. The best way to get around this is to activate this ship last and move it into close range of one or more enemy ships (that have already activated), so that during your next turn you’ll be guaranteed to have a target to blast. So what else do we have? There’s plenty to digest, but the coolest things in my opinion are the two new admirals, Motti (Victory Expansion), and Screed (Gladiator Expansion): I honestly have no idea which of these guys I like better. Motti turns your Victorys into massive tanks capable of taking incredible amounts of fire (a huge asset in a game where slugging it out seems to be the norm), but Screed works fantastically with a lot of upgrade cards, many of which trigger upon landing a Crit. The article suggests XX-9 Turbolasers, but there’s also the earlier noted Assault Concussion Missiles to keep in mind: Both of these upgrades can cause mass amounts of damage, but throwing the latter (Assault Concussion Missiles) onto several Gladiators, led by Motti, has a lot of potential to shred a ship’s defenses fast, until you’re throwing 3 damage at a target for each crit after quickly stripping it’s shields with multiple attacks. The biggest issue continues to be the problem of hanging on to close range, but with multiple Gladiators on the field it’s entirely possible to simply overwhelm a target and then move to the next one, blocking it off so it can’t escape. Until Armada releases, we won’t know how these ideas will work out, but until then I’ll keep crafting more theories to try once we get our hands on this awesome game. Until next time, play more games! Advertisements |
Clive Stafford-Smith, Reprieve's legal director, told Al Jazeera: "These things are being done as far away from the public view as possible, and those prisoners are far worse off than my clients in Guantanamo Bay." "The British government has probably been assured by the Americans that they're not up to anything there, but those assurances, I'm afraid, are worth nothing" Clive Stafford-Smith, Reprieve In a dossier sent to the UK parliament's foreign affairs committee that will invest, Reprieve says boats moored off Diego Garcia may also have been used as floating prisons. "There have been repeated, credible and concurrent claims that Diego Garcia has played a major role in the US system of renditions and secret detention," documents submitted to the committee said. But Britain's foreign office said in a statement that the US has given repeated assurances "no detainees, prisoners of war or any other persons" have been held on Diego Garcia, or have transited through the island. British officials insist they must be notified by Washington if any civilians are held on the base. Stafford-Smith said: "The British government has probably been assured by the Americans that they're not up to anything there, but those assurances, I'm afraid, are worth nothing and we have evidence that contradicts it." The entire population of the Chagos archipelago, of which Diego Garcia is a part, 2,000 people according to the islanders, 1,000 according to the British government - was relocated between 1967 and 1973. The islanders were removed after the UK agreed to lease the island to the US for use as an airbase. 'Great tragedy' Sheikh Mohammed is suspected of planning the September 11 attacks. Zubaydah, accused of being a link between Osama bin Laden and many al Qaeda cells; Hambali, a suspected link between bin Laden and regional terror group Jemaah Islamiyah. In June, a report by Dick Marty, a Swiss senator investigating the issue for Council of Europe, a human rights watchdog, raised the possibility that the island-territory was used as a processing centre for detainees. "One of the great tragedies with this whole experiment with abuse over the last five years, is that I think now, my clients, the suspected terrorists, many of whom are innocent, are found more credible that the United States' president," Stafford-Smith said. |
The pink pigeon is the lone survivor of all the columbids – pigeons and doves – native to Mauritius. In 1990 the species was down to just nine individuals, but thanks to the work of the Mauritian Wildlife Foundation, there were some 400 individuals flying the skies of the island by 2013. In the year 2000, the IUCN downgraded the species from “critically endangered” to “endangered.” They’re not out of the woods yet, but their recovery remains an impressive and rare example of good news in conservation. Still, pink pigeons have yet to recolonize certain parts of the island and nobody is quite sure why. Some researchers have considered disease, inbreeding, and habitat loss to explain it, all important factors to be sure, but Manchester Metropolitan University researcher Andrew Wolfenden thinks that no explanation can be complete without considering the role of the Madagascan turtle dove, a sister species to the pink pigeon (they’re both members of the same taxonomic genus). It’s thought that the Madagascan turtle dove was first introduced from Mauritius from its native Madagascar around 1770 following the extinction of a small dove species native to Mauritius. Despite the fact that the two species – pink pigeons and Madagascan turtle doves – are not similar either in appearance or in ecology, their calls are nearly indistinguishable, at least to human ears. The researchers hypothesized that similarities in the calls (called “coos”) of the two species may be confusing to the pink pigeons and could explain, at least in part, the puzzle. To find out, the researchers conducted a playback experiment to see whether wild pink pigeons would respond to the coos of the Madagascan turtle doves. In all, they tested 42 pink pigeons. Wolfenden and his colleagues found that the pink pigeons responded to the coos of Madagascan turtle doves, but not to the coos of a more distantly related species, the spotted dove, native to India and Southeast Asia. In addition, the pink pigeons’ responses to the sounds of Madagascan turtle doves were indistinguishable from their responses to the coos of their own species. At minimum, this means that pink pigeons perceive the calls of the turtle doves as relevant. It’s possible that they perceive them as the sounds of their own species. The two species’ calls aren’t only similar to human listeners, but also to the pink pigeons themselves. What’s interesting is that the two species are not competitors. The natives forage in tree canopies and the invasives forage on the ground. “After 20 years of intensive observations of nearly all [pink pigeon] individuals in the population, there is little evidence for direct physical contact between the two species,” writes Wolfenden. Instead, he thinks that the two species compete through signal jamming. Signal jamming is when two calls are so similar that an individual mistakes the call of an unrelated species for that of a conspecific. Other research has shown that signal jamming can impact mate finding, territory defense, courtship behaviors, and even egg fertility. Even in sexually incompatible species – as in this case – the costs of signal jamming can therefore be quite high. For example, male pink pigeons who respond both to their own species and to the turtle doves will use up more time and more energy on territory defense, to the possible detriment of their own breeding success. And since Madagascan turtle doves are far more abundant on Mauritius, a pink pigeon looking to establish a territory may think that a new area is already packed with possible competitors, even if there’s not a pink pigeon to be found. If Wolfenden is right, then that could explain the pink pigeons’ confusing pattern of recolonization on the island. The researchers conclude that conservation plans for pink pigeons will have to be reformulated to account for the signal jammers. – Jason G. Goldman | 19 December 2014 Source: Andrew Wolfenden, Carl G. Jones, Vikash Tatayah, Nicolas Züel & Selvino R. de Kort (2015). Endangered pink pigeons treat calls of the ubiquitous Madagascan turtle dove as conspecific, Animal Behaviour, 99 83-88. DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.anbehav.2014.10.023 Header image: Left, pink pigeon via Dick Daniels/CarolinaBirds.org/Wikimedia Commons; right Madagascan turtle dove via Roland zh/Wikimedia Commons |
Many were upset with the new music that replaced Crazy Taxi‘s original soundtrack. This guide explains how to swap songs in the Steam version of Crazy Taxi. Why Would Someone Want to Swap Songs in the Steam Version of Crazy Taxi? The Offspring and Bad Religion might not be everyone’s cup of tea normally. However, their songs blasting out of your speakers while you rushed your fares to their destination was an integral part of the Crazy Taxi experience. The original arcade’s soundtrack was faithfully brought to the Sega Dreamcast. When it came time for a later ports, though, the decision was made not to license the same music. This disappointed many fans who wanted the same experience they remembered years ago. Luckily, we can fix that fairly easily on the PC! What do I Need to do This? You need to download this ZIP file that I’ve prepared that includes a program called ADX Frontend. It’s freeware, but not fun to track down. I’ve scanned it’s contents with the latest Avira today before submitting this article. It’s clean. ADX Frontend is a Windows program that will convert WAV files into ADX format, which is what Crazy Taxi uses. Next, you will need your music files in WAV format. However you obtain your music, people will usually find they are in MP3 or some other format. If this is where you find yourself, I can recommend download the free program Audacity. I will give brief instructions on how to convert your music with it below. Oh, and I suppose you need the Steam port of Crazy Taxi as well. Converting MP3 to WAV with Audacity Open Audacity, click on File, then Open. Select your MP3 file. You’ll see something like the screen below. Now select the File menu again and choose Export Audio. Choose the default file type of WAV to save as and click Save. If you get a screen about Meta data like the one below, you can just click Ok. It doesn’t really matter. Now you have your WAV file. Pretty easy, right? Encoding WAVs to ADX This is super simple. First, make sure your WAV file name has no spaces in it. ADX Frontend doesn’t like spaces. Then simply launch ADX Frontend, click Open, select your WAV file, and click Encode. The program will automatically convert your original WAV file to ADX and put the new file in the same directory as your original WAV file. You now have a song that will play in Crazy Taxi! Hopefully it’s not Celine Dion, but I can’t tell what you’re going to do since I’m in the past and you’re in the future. Hopefully, a future without new Celine Dion music. Okay, So Where Do I Put This? First off, backup your C:\Program Files\Steam\steamapps\common\crazy taxi\SoundData\music_adx folder just in case you make an odd mistake or want to restore the original music. You will be placing your ADX files in this directory with the original soundtrack’s file names. While I use conventional naming below in the next section, make sure you are using the exact same file names such as “black_radio.adx” for it to be used in the game. What Songs Do I Swap for the Original Music? When swapping songs, be sure you use the original file names! That is what the game looks for when sourcing audio. Swap “Name Loop” is “Change the World” by The Offspring and used in the game select screen. “The Chase” for “Hear It” by Bad Religion. It is used on the character select screen before you select Gina every time. Note that you only want to use the first 20 seconds of any song. Using something longer will likely cause the game to crash. So trim it down if you are replacing this track. “Flinch” used to be Bad Religion’s “Inner Logic,” played during the end credits you almost never saw because you aren’t that good at this game after all. “Radiator” was originally The Offspring’s “All I Want” and plays during the 1st demo. “Orange Wednesday” was “Ten in 2010” by Bad Religion and is the song that plays in the 2nd demo. “Black Radio” for “All I Want” by The Offspring, the definitive Crazy Taxi song. “Escape Artist” for Bad Religion’s “Ten in 2010.” Or use a different song since we’ve passed that year. Maybe Bad Religion’s “Against the Grain?” “Get Out” gets swapped for “Them and Us” by Bad Religion. “Radical Sabbatical” used to be The Offspring’s “Way Down the Line.” Stop fucking up like your parents did! You Should Be Good Now As long as everything was done correctly, your swapped music should now play in the game! Don’t worry, if you made a mistake, you always have that backup you made and can overwrite your mistakes. Special Thanks –Jesse for writing ADX Frontend. It makes converting the music very simple! –Frugal for his original guide on how to do this. |
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