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An arbitrator has overturned for the fifth time the refiring of a reinstated Metropolitan Police Department officer, lending support to persistent accusations by rank-and-file officers that Chief Cathy L. Lanier has systematically abused their due process rights and undermined MPD’s disciplinary system. The ruling is among the many “inefficiency cases” - so-named for the rationale used by MPD to refire 18 of the 27 officers who had been reinstated - that have been overturned by arbitrators, with back pay, raising further questions about the chief’s judgment in handling personnel matters. It also underscores what police union officials and their representatives have argued for years: Chief Lanier, in response to negative media attention, implemented a flawed legal opinion by the D.C. Office of the Attorney General (OAG) in refiring the 18 officers, who had been fired and then reinstated on appeal. Four inefficiency cases remain to be decided. Nine other officers kept their jobs in spite of Chief Lanier’s attempts to refire them. According to the July 8 arbitrator’s ruling, the MPD charged former officer Edwin Santiago in 2004 with moonlighting without approval and lying to investigators. After a police trial board sustained the charges, Mr. Santiago was fired in September 2004, the ruling states. The MPD reinstated him with back pay and benefits in 2007 when the D.C. Public Employee Relations Board found the department had violated his right to a timely hearing, according to the ruling, and he continued to work without incident. “That should have been the end of the matter,” arbitrator Andrew M. Strongin wrote of Mr. Santiago’s reinstatement. But in May 2008, after “local news outlets” disclosed MPD’s willingness to reinstate police officers who had violated the law, Chief Lanier moved to refire Mr. Santiago and 17 others “for reasons that appear to be a response to negative publicity,” Mr. Strongin wrote. First, she solicited an “evaluation” from the attorney general’s office that cause existed to terminate the officers for inefficiency, according to the ruling. On May 23, 2008, Attorney General Peter J. Nickles told Chief Lanier in a letter that reinstatement of the officers, including Mr. Santiago, posed a “profound public safety issue.” He wrote that when an officer has engaged in misconduct that calls the officer’s credibility into question, “that officer has irreparably impaired his or her ability to serve the criminal justice system.” ‘Credibility can’t be trusted’ Armed with the Nickles letter, Chief Lanier issued a news release that same day claiming that several of the officers were reinstated “due to administrative error.” “We can’t have officers testifying in court when their credibility can’t be trusted,” she said. She then asked the OAG to review the 27 reinstatements to determine “whether or not these individuals could be reasonably retained as MPD officers,” according to an Aug. 1, 2008, letter that Mr. Nickles sent to Chief Lanier. Of the 27, Mr. Nickles said his office would not rely on or call as witnesses 18 of them. “We also believe that the conduct is serious enough - and the supporting documentation is compelling enough - to support any decision that MPD would make about these officers, including termination,” he wrote. Chief Lanier had solicited similar advice from U.S. Attorney Jeffrey A. Taylor, who told her that his office had a duty to disclose wrongful conduct if an officer was called to testify. It would be “difficult to effectively utilize” such an officer who had been found guilty of misconduct, he wrote in a July 30, 2008, letter. Mr. Taylor reiterated that advice in an Aug. 27, 2008, letter. He declined to comment for this article. Based on the letters from the OAG and the U.S. attorney, Mr. Santiago was charged Sept. 23, 2008, with “repeated and well-founded complaints concerning the performance of police duty,” resulting in a violation of general orders for “inefficiency.” The notice also cited the July 30, 2008, letter from Mr. Taylor saying Mr. Santiago’s court testimony “would not be sponsored” by the U.S. attorney - an assertion nowhere to be found in that letter, a copy of which was obtained by The Washington Times. The arbitrator identified other flaws in Chief Lanier’s handling of the matter. According to Mr. Strongin’s ruling, both the OAG and the U.S. attorney maintain lists that include the names of officers with records of convictions, ongoing investigations or misconduct. But, he noted, “Inclusion on the list means that an officer’s prior conduct is subject to disclosure, not that the officer is barred from testifying.” In addition, Assistant U.S. Attorney Roy McCleese, appellate division chief, testified at the Santiago trial board that his office’s advice “does not explicitly request any kind of discipline.” He declined to comment for this article. Similarly, according to the arbitrator’s ruling, Robert Hildum of the OAG was prepared to testify that his office’s advice “was not in the nature of a complaint, but more of a notification going forward with respect to the situation as related to [Mr. Santiago].” He also declined to comment. Fired again Nevertheless, the trial board found Mr. Santiago guilty of inefficiency and the MPD fired him on Sept. 17, 2008. During the course of Mr. Santiago’s appeal, Sgt. Robert Merrick of the Internal Affairs Division said MPD officials had assigned him to investigate the Santiago matter and dictated the format of the charges he was expected to file, including the questions he was to ask of Mr. Santiago, the arbitrator’s ruling states. Stopping short of endorsing what Mr. Santiago’s attorneys claimed was a “sham investigation,” Mr. Strongin said Chief Lanier “directed Agent Merrick to conduct an investigation while simultaneously directing him to charge [Mr. Santiago] with inefficiency regardless of his findings.” Mr. Strongin also said the chief’s solicitation of legal advice convinced him that “MPD was not simply motivated by receipt of new evidence, but rather actively engaged in a process of creating a new charge based on old facts.” “There is scant if any evidence to support MPD’s assertion that [Mr. Santiago‘s] ability to testify free of [credibility-related] concerns in fact is an essential element of [his] job,” he wrote. Asked for comment on the ruling, Chief Lanier said in a Friday email, “While I am disappointed in the arbitrators’ decisions we have received to date, I will not back away from my effort to rid the department of members who have engaged in misconduct that has irreparably undermined their credibility.” The OAG and the U.S. attorney’s office declined to comment. Mr. Nickles, now in private practice, said MPD makes the decision on whom to fire, but if “uncontested violations of law” by an officer were so egregious that, based on a review by independent lawyers, the officer could not be called as a witness, then “the officer cannot do his or her job efficiently. “The fact that an arbitrator doesn’t agree doesn’t affect my confidence in the analysis or actions of the lawyers in my office,” he said. Mr. Santiago’s attorney, James Pressler, the general counsel for the Fraternal Order of Police, said Mr. Nickles “was completely wrong on the law, and there was no legal basis for taking action against these officers. “They knew it, or should have known it, at the time they refired 18 of them,” he said. Copyright © 2019 The Washington Times, LLC. Click here for reprint permission. |
Plot Edit Draenor, the homeworld of the orcs, is being torn apart by a mysterious force known as fel magic. Gul'dan, a powerful orc warlock, unites the orc clans and forms the Horde, and creates a portal to the world of Azeroth. The orcs begin to use fel magic to drain the life out of captive draenei in order to sustain the portal. Once it is operational, Gul'dan leads a small warband to capture prisoners on Azeroth and sacrifice them to bring the rest of the Horde through the portal. Durotan, the chieftain of the Frostwolf Clan, his pregnant mate Draka, and his friend Orgrim Doomhammer join this initial warband. While crossing through the portal, Draka goes into labor. When the orcs arrive on Azeroth, Gul'dan assists Draka with giving birth, but while the baby is born alive, it is in neonatal distress, struggling to breathe, and is near death. Gul'dan then drains the life out of a nearby deer to revive and infuse fel magic into the baby, which Durotan later names Go'el. The orcs raid several settlements throughout Azeroth. Anduin Lothar, the military commander of the human forces in the Stormwind Kingdom, looks over some of the men that were killed, and finds a trespassing mage named Khadgar, who explains that he was investigating the dead bodies because they contained traces of fel magic. Khadgar persuades Stormwind's king, Llane Wrynn, to consult Medivh, the renowned Guardian of Tirisfal, and Llane sends Anduin and Khadgar to Medivh's stronghold, Karazhan, to inform him of the fel magic's presence on Azeroth. In the Karazhan library, a ghostly shadow leads Khadgar to a mysterious book, which he takes. Anduin, Khadgar, and Medivh join a scouting team following traces of fel magic but are ambushed by orcs. Medivh uses a spell to kill the fel-corrupted orcs, leaving the Horde's warchief, Blackhand, to flee along with Durotan and Orgrim. Khadgar restrains a half-orc slave, Garona, and the soldiers take her prisoner. King Llane frees Garona in exchange for loyalty to Stormwind, and she leads the humans to spy on the orc camp, where they learn of Gul'dan's plan to bring the Horde to Azeroth. Meanwhile, Durotan realizes that the fel magic is responsible for the destruction of Draenor, and if Gul'dan is not thwarted, Azeroth will suffer the same fate. Despite Orgrim's objections, Durotan invites Llane to a secret meeting so that the Frostwolf Clan and the humans can unite to defeat Gul'dan. While studying the book that he took from Karazhan, Khadgar learns that Gul'dan could not have opened the portal on his own; he had help from someone on Azeroth. He is confronted by Medivh, who burns Khadgar's research when Khadgar offers to help him with his work. The Frostwolf Clan meets with the humans to negotiate an alliance, but the group is ambushed by Blackhand. As the humans retreat, Medivh forms a magical barrier to protect them, but Lothar's son Callan is separated from the rest of the group and killed by Blackhand. Medivh is severely weakened, and Garona and Khadgar take him back to Karazhan to recover. After noticing Medivh's eyes shine green, showing that he is infected by fel magic, Khadgar returns to his former home, Dalaran, to seek help from the Kirin Tor, the authority of human and high elven mages. The Kirin Tor facilitate a meeting with Alodi, revealed to be the shadow who led Khadgar to the book; she confirms that Medivh has indeed been corrupted by fel magic and turned into a demon. At the orc camp, Blackhand purges the Frostwolf Clan. Orgrim helps Draka to escape, and she sends Go'el down a river in a basket, but is then found and killed by another orc. Durotan challenges Gul'dan to Mak'gora, a traditional orcish duel to the death for leadership of a clan – in this case, all of the orcs. During the fight, Gul'dan violates the honorable combat rules by draining the life out of Durotan with his magic, killing him and earning the disapproval of the orcs watching, and he empowers Blackhand with the same magic. Medivh, now in a half-demonic state, starts to open the portal to Draenor, and Gul'dan begins sacrificing the captured human villagers to allow the rest of the Horde to enter Azeroth. Llane leads the human army in an assault on the orc camp, while Anduin and Khadgar fight Medivh and destroy the demon that had begun to manifest on the outside. Medivh is left mortally wounded, and uses the last of his strength to close the portal to Draenor and instead open a portal to Stormwind, allowing Llane to evacuate most of the freed prisoners. When Medivh eventually dies, the portal closes, leaving Llane, Garona and a small number of human soldiers to fight the orcs. Llane secretly orders Garona to kill him, bringing her honor among the orcs and putting her in a position of power to bring peace between the two races. Garona reluctantly does so and is welcomed into the Horde by Gul'dan. As the orcs celebrate, Lothar arrives to retrieve King Llane's body and discovers Garona's knife still in Llane's neck, realizing that it was she who had killed their king. Blackhand challenges Lothar to Mak'gora, and Lothar quickly disposes of him. Against Gul'dan's demands, the orcs, bound by tradition, allow Lothar to depart with Llane's body. At Llane's funeral in Stormwind, the leaders of the other human nations, along with the high elves and dwarves, proclaim an alliance against the orcs and rally behind Lothar as the leader of the Alliance forces. Elsewhere, Orgrim takes one of Durotan's tusks to one day give to Go'el, and the basket containing Go'el is found by a human. Cast Edit Production Edit Release Edit Reception Edit Possible sequel Edit With the film's storyline leaving Warcraft open to possible sequels, Jones has expressed interest in a sequel to the film, likely to be adapted from Warcraft II: Tides of Darkness, the second video game in the Warcraft franchise.[87][88][89] On June 18, 2018, Jones tweeted that the chances of Warcraft getting a sequel "doesn't look good."[90] See also Edit |
GEARY BUS RAPID TRANSIT (BRT) The more than 52,000 daily riders on the 38 need more efficient and reliable transit service. Bus Rapid Transit (BRT) on Geary will provide those service improvements. There are many different elements that make up a BRT system. One of the main features is dedicated bus lanes, which get buses out of congested traffic and reduce delays. New boarding platforms are another part of a BRT system and make it safer and easier to get on and off the bus. Other features that keep the buses moving, like stop changes and traffic signal adjustments, will save riders even more time. By combining all these elements, we expect bus travel times to be reduced as much as 24% when the Geary BRT project is complete. Although Geary BRT has been decades in the making, we’re also looking to the future of transportation on the corridor. The project’s design allows for the addition of rail service in the future. The city is currently evaluating longer-term plans for the city’s rail network, including the Geary corridor. That means rail could be installed if funding becomes available. This flexibility makes Geary BRT a good investment both for the near-term and the future. STATUS AND NEXT STEPS The San Francisco County Transportation Authority Board—comprised of members of the San Francisco Board of Supervisors—unanimously approved the Geary Bus Rapid Transit Project design and certified the Final Environmental Impact Report (EIR) at their meeting on Thursday, January 5, 2017. The Final Environmental Impact Report (EIR) was released on December 9, 2016. It includes a response to all the comments submitted during the public comment period following the release of the Draft EIR in October 2015. In addition, the Federal Transit Administration issued its Final Environmental Impact Statement and Record of Decision on the project, concluding the federal environmental review process. Next steps include detailed design work, more community outreach and then construction. PHASES OF IMPLEMENTATION Geary BRT would be implemented in two phases. Phase 1, the Geary Rapid Project, includes all improvements between Market and Stanyan streets. Phase 2, the Geary Boulevard Improvement Project, includes the remaining improvements in the Richmond District. This phased construction approach streamlines project delivery, minimizes the effects of construction and allows people travelling on the corridor to feel the benefits of Geary BRT as soon as possible. Phase 1 Implementation is beginning with the painting of the bus-only lanes and stop changes between Market and Stanyan streets. Other upgrades like the installation of new traffic signal infrastructure and new pedestrian and bus bulbs will follow. Phase 2 Next steps for Phase 2 including conceptual engineering, final design, approvals and construction. Following additional design work the team will be able to develop a more detailed construction schedule. SAFETY ELEMENTS Geary BRT means a safer corridor for everyone. The package of improvements planned for Geary go beyond bus-only lanes and rapid transit service. On a street with one of the highest collisions rates in the city, and a notoriously unfriendly walking environment, the Geary Bus Rapid Transit Project would improve safety conditions along the entire corridor, whether you are walking, biking, riding transit, or driving. When crossing Geary, a pedestrian is eight times more likely to be hit by a car than the citywide average. (Statewide Integrated Traffic Records System, 2010-2015). Geary is part of the 12 percent of the city streets where 70 percent of severe injuries and traffic deaths occur. To make the Geary corridor safer and bring the city closer to its Vision Zero goal of zero traffic deaths by 2024, the Geary BRT project is proposing safety improvements at almost every intersection on Geary and O’Farrell streets and Geary Boulevard. Safety improvements includes: More than 100 sidewalk extensions, a combination of pedestrian and bus bulbs Accessible curb ramps, bus bulbs and boarding islands New bike signals, guidelines and other bicycle facilities at intersections with bike routes along the corridor Leading pedestrian intervals, which are signals that give people walking a head start and more time to cross Protected left turns, giving people driving a dedicated left turn signal Consistently providing two traffic lanes in each direction to reducing speeding Example of new bike treatments proposed at some intersection with crossing bike routes. This package of safety improvements reflects a reimagining of how the Geary corridor functions. The current design of the Geary corridor reflects a different era, when streets were designed to support fast-moving car traffic. The safety elements that are part of the Geary BRT project better suit the needs of everyone who uses the corridor. CONSTRUCTION The City understands construction is sometimes loud and disruptive, with the potential to affect many users of the Geary corridor. Geary is one of the longest commercial corridors in the City, is lined with many small businesses, and is vital to the City’s economy. The San Francisco County Transportation Authority and San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency are partnering with the Office of Economic and Workforce Development on five key construction strategies: Pre-construction survey Business and community advisory committees Accessibility, way-finding and advertisement Notifications and project resources Business technical assistance and support COST AND FUNDING The cost of the project is $300 million. That figure includes both the proposed transit improvements and additional streetscape elements. Phase 1 is now fully funded with Transit Performance Initiative funds and various local funds, including about $2 million in Prop K sales tax and $2.4 million in Prop AA Vehicle Registration fee. Planned funding of Phase 2 includes about $49 million from the Prop K sales tax, $2 million in Prop AA Vehicle Registration fee, and $100 million from the FTA Small Starts program. The Mayor’s Transportation 2030 Task Force identified Geary BRT as one of the few named projects in its investment plan, with a $27 million investment, and also deemed Geary BRT eligible for a portion of the $58 million identified for the Transit Performance Initiative in its investment plan. These represent two of the multiple options being explored to help fill the project’s funding gap. |
Given their arrogance, pomposity and habitual absurdities, it is hard not to feel a certain satisfaction with the comeuppance that Brexit has delivered to the unaccountable European Union bureaucrats in Brussels. Nonetheless, we would do well to refrain from condescension. Unity is not easy. What began in 1951 as a six-member European Coal and Steel Community was grounded in a larger conception of a united Europe born from the ashes of World War II. Seven decades into the postwar era, Britain wants out and the EU is facing an existential crisis. Yet where were we Americans seven decades into our great experiment in continental confederation, our “more perfect union” contracted under the Constitution of 1787? At Fort Sumter. The failure of our federal idea gave us civil war and 600,000 dead. And we had the advantage of a common language, common heritage and common memory of heroic revolutionary struggle against a common (British) foe. Europe had none of this. The European project tries to forge the union of dozens of disparate peoples, ethnicities, languages and cultures, amid the searing memories of the two most destructive wars in history fought among and against each other. The result is the EU, a great idea badly executed. The founding motive was obvious and noble: to reconcile the combatants of World War II, most especially France and Germany, and create conditions that would ensure there could be no repetition. Onto that was appended the more utopian vision of a continental superstate that would once and for all transcend parochial nationalism. That vision blew up with Brexit on June 23. But we mustn’t underestimate the significance, and improbability, of the project’s more narrow, but still singular, achievement – peace. It has given Europe the most extended period of internal tranquility since the Roman Empire. (In conjunction, of course, with NATO, which provided Europe with its American umbrella against external threat.) Not only is there no armed conflict among European states. The very idea is inconceivable. This on a continent where war had been the norm for a millennium. Give the EU its due. It has championed and advanced a transnational idea that has helped curb the nationalist excesses that culminated in two world wars. Advanced not quite enough, however. Certainly not enough to support its often dismissive treatment of residual nationalisms and their democratic expressions. Despite numerous objections by referendum and parliament, which it routinely either ignored or circumvented, the EU continued its relentless drive for more centralization, more regulation and thus more power for its unelected self. Such high-handed overriding of popular sentiment could go on only so long. Until June 23, 2016, to be precise. To be sure, popular sentiment was rather narrowly divided. The most prominent disparity in the British vote was generational. The young, having grown up in the new Europe, are more comfortable with its cosmopolitanism and have come to expect open borders, open commerce and open movement of people. They voted overwhelmingly – by 3 to 1 – to remain. Leave was mainly the position of an older generation no longer willing to tolerate European assaults on British autonomy and sovereignty. Understandably so. Here is Britain, inventor of the liberal idea and home to the mother of parliaments, being instructed by a bunch of Brussels bureaucrats on everything from the proper size of pomegranates to the human rights of terrorists. Widely mentioned, and resented, was the immigration directive to admit other EU citizens near automatically. But what pushed the leave side over the top was less policy than primacy. Who runs Britain? Amazingly, about half the laws and regulations that govern British life today come not from Westminster but from Brussels. Brexit was an assertion of national sovereignty and an attempt, in one fell swoop, to recover it. There is much to admire in that impulse. But among its casualties may be not just the European project (other exit referendums are already being proposed) but possibly the United Kingdom itself. The Scots are already talking about another vote for independence. And Northern Ireland, which voted to remain in the EU, might well seek to unite with the Republic. Talk about a great idea executed badly. In seeking a newly sovereign United Kingdom, the Brits might well find themselves having produced a little England. Charles Krauthammer is a columnist for The Washington Post. He can be contacted at: [email protected] Share filed under: |
Simple! Because Americans are bigoted racists. In the past, they used to bar black people from entering stores and other places. Now, in the 21st century, they are doing it to Iranians!! What's interesting is that these big American companies sell the latest technologies to the mullahs and the Islamic dictatorship in Iran to help them spy on innocent Iranian citizens! That is, Iranians are trying whatever they can to overthrow the mullahs, while Apple and other U.S. companies are doing whatever they can to help the Islamic regime to hold on to power. It is interesting that Arabs killed 3000 Americans in 9 11 but Americans love and worship arabs so much! These Americans in the past have helped Saddam Hossein to kill thousands of Iranians. They also helped arabs to take over Iranian Islands such as Bahrain. And now they are helping Arabs rename the Persian Gulf to the a*****n gulf and take over the rest of the Iranian islands. Anyone would expect that IRANIANS would be the ones hating Americans but most Iranians have nothing against Americans and it's actually the other way around!! Tracy · 7 years ago 0 Thumbs up 1 Thumbs down Report Abuse |
Drones have been the subject of nearly relentless media speculation over the past year (or more). But while it’s easy to make bold predictions about the possibilities of widespread drone use, we wanted to highlight a few ways that these unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) are actually being used right now. One of most obvious benefits of drones is their ability to easily go where humans can’t. This could have far-reaching implications for service companies, which often need to inspect difficult to reach buildings and assets. Here are three organizations that recently started testing and employing drone inspectors. Allstate Last week Allstate received approval from the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) to continue their ongoing drone trials. Allstate has been conducting research with the Property Drone Consortium to evaluate the potential of drones to be used as remote insurance inspectors. The hope is that drones will easily be able to inspect damaged roofs, collapsed buildings, and other difficult-to-reach places. This could prove especially valuable after severe storms, when technicians are often unable to assess damaged structures or evaluate claims. In a statement last year (when Allstate first announced the proposed study), they explained “Drones used in the claims process could provide faster payments to customers, especially in an area where widespread damage occurs quickly.” Allstate’s FAA approval comes on the heals of a number of other insurance companies, such as AIG and USSA, that have sought commercial exemptions for drone use. With this approval, Allstate will now be able to fly drones over private property as long as they have a licensed pilot and the permission of the property owner. The Royal Navy The U.K.’s Royal Navy recently begun using drones to complete faster surveys of its ships. By using drones to carry out the inspections, the Royal Navy won’t have to turn around the vessels (which can be time consuming with a 500 ft long destroyer) and can conduct maintenance checks while at sea. In many ways, the Navy is borrowing from the private sector with this new program. Lt Steve Lovatt, who initiated the trial, told Forces TV, “This is normal business in the oil and gas industries when they’re inspecting rig. It’s quick, cheap, you could do it wherever the ship is, the results are with you in minutes.” The drones being used can reportedly withstand wind gusts of up to 40mph. Testing of the drone inspections is scheduled to continue (and be expanded) over the next 16 months. Consumers Energy Consumers Energy is the fourth energy company in the US to receive approval from the FAA to begin drone operations, and the first utility in Michigan to begin doing so. After receiving approval, they launched their first drone on Monday, June 22nd. Consumers Energy has traditionally used a helicopter to inspect power lines, but according a statement from their vice president of energy delivery, “Using a UAV in place of a helicopter could tremendously reduce fuel use and emissions, and our neighbors would experience a noise reduction in their environment.” According to the terms of their exemption, they must keep drones within 400ft of the ground, and not exceed a flight speed of 100mph. Drones for Small Business? While the above organizations have copious resources (and in one case, government funding), drone inspections may not be out of reach for small businesses. In additional to the FAA’s recent exemptions for insurance and energy companies, they also approved the start-up Fly4Me to begin operating its “Uber for Drones” program. The platform helps local drone pilots connect with companies or individuals that need a temporary drone for mapping, private events, or – you guessed it – inspections. Has your company explored the idea of using drones to improve efficiency? Let us know about it in the comments! _____ photo credit: Quadrocopter via photopin (license) |
In written testimony submitted Friday to a U.S. Senate subcommittee, FIRE asked congressional appropriators to deny requests to increase the Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights’ (OCR) budget until it “stops infringing on the First Amendment and rolling back due process protections” on campus. On March 17, 2016, 22 Senators sent a joint letter to the Senate Committee on Appropriations’ Subcommittee on Labor, Health and Human Service, and Education, and Related Agencies urging it to increase OCR’s funding from its fiscal year 2016 budget of approximately $102 million to a whopping $137.7 million for the upcoming fiscal year. As FIRE explained to the subcommittee in our written testimony, approving this request would be a mistake: While FIRE supports OCR’s goal of effectively addressing sexual assault and sexual harassment on college campuses, we have serious concerns about the manner in which the agency is pursuing that mission. In pursuit of this objective, OCR has unlawfully ordered institutions of higher education to reduce the due process protections afforded to individuals accused of sexual misconduct and has redefined sexual harassment to include speech protected by the First Amendment under precedent from the Supreme Court of the United States. Until OCR stops infringing on the First Amendment and rolling back due process protections, the agency should not receive budget increases. FIRE’s criticisms of OCR have been well catalogued, and our concerns about the agency’s overreach have been shared by both Senators Lamar Alexander and James Lankford. Accordingly, we told the subcommittee: FIRE is eager to work with Congress and OCR to effectively address campus sexual assault and sexual harassment. But until Congress holds OCR accountable for its unlawful abuse of power and its blatant disregard for campus civil liberties, the agency will continue to both exceed its authority and take an inappropriately one-sided approach to addressing these issues. In the upcoming appropriations process, Congress has an opportunity to send a clear signal to OCR that it will not allow the agency to continue to simply make up the law as it goes along. We hope the subcommittee heeds our call, and that OCR rolls back its unlawful mandates. If it does not, FIRE is currently seeking students and institutions who may be interested in filing suit to challenge the legality of OCR’s mandates. |
(Newser) – Now that's abstinence. Delaware Tea Party Senate candidate Christine O'Donnell is opposed to masturbation because the Bible says "lusting in your heart" is the same as committing adultery and, as O'Donnell so correctly pointed out in a past MTV interview, "you can't masturbate without lust." During a 2007 debate on sexuality on Fox News, when former Surgeon General Jocelyn Elders complained that "we have a sexually unhealthy society," O'Donnell snapped: "That's wonderful. It's called modesty." Jezebel calls O'Donnell a "wackjob," but also points out that dark horse Tea Party candidates can turn out to be stunningly powerful as witnessed in Alaska Senator Lisa Murkowski's defeat by Tea Party challenger Joe Miller this week. Now nervous Delaware Republicans are viciously attacking O'Donnell, with state party chairman Tom Ross claiming she "couldn't be elected dog catcher." Dems, convinced they could easily beat O'Donnell, are rooting for her to trounce GOP challenger Rep. Mike Castle in the Senate primary this month. (Read more Christine O'Donnell stories.) |
The whole world is invited to our vision of the future. You know the one with decentralized services, open standards and customized media hosting? In preparation for the whole world, also known as our imminent public instance, we asked for more contributors, and boy did we get them! We also managed to further our internal vision a bit by making great strides on our migration and storage plans. This may have been our most exciting month yet, especially if you go by the lengthy list of thank yous! uchoMay ogressPray! Transifex is fully set up to handle translations and MediaGoblin has already been translated into 14 languages.* (If you can help us by translating another, we’d be very grateful!) We’ve started conducting user experience testing — many thanks to all the folks who responded to our call for testing! Caleb Davis is graciously hosting and running MediaGoblin’s user experience testing server. We’ll be collecting new data each month here. Got opinions? We’d absolutely love to hear them. Please ping us if you want in on the UX testing party. There are a few new goodies for the users this time around, including the ability to delete media, and some smaller things (like now if you submitted an image wider than 640 pixels, clicking on the scaled down image brings you to the original size). We’re also supporting media attachments as an optional (but not enabled-by-default for security reasons) feature. Assuming you’re on a site that supports it, you can now attach source files to your works, etc. The internal roadmap also got some nurturing in the form of media-processing changes, a new site export/import tool as well as docs and wiki improvements. On the literally visual front, we made some progress on our logo and there’s a new favicon. You can also take a look at our new tidied up homepage: Loads of storage stuff! We’re now compatible with OpenStack’s “swift” file storage system, (so you can use Rackspace CloudFiles, for example, or connect to some other instance of the software) and we worked on an experimental “MountStorage” system for mounting multiple storage systems at once. (Sorry, there are no pictures of the storage systems.) You can however take a look at our improved 404 (not found) and 500 (internal server error) pages when you want something we haven’t stored where you thought we did or something breaks: We wouldn’t have been able to glimpse the future without all of our contributors, so a hearty thanks goes out to: Will Kahn-Greene, Deb Nicholson, Joar Wandborg, Christopher Allan Webber, Jef van Schendel, Osama Khalid, Elrond of Samba TNG, Alejandro Villanueva, Caleb Davis, Karen Rustad, Alex Camelio, Thorsten Wilms, Jarred de Beer, Sam Kleinman, Jim Campbell, Aleksej Serdjukov, Mark Holmquist, Jacobo Nájera Valdez, Vinzenz Vietzke, Benjamin Lebsanft, Odin Hørthe Omdal, Jure Repinc, Jan-Christoph Borchardt, Shawn Khan, Justin Mantell, Jordyn Bonds, Larisa Hoffenbecker, Avery Morrow, and Transifex usernames: lasconic, osc, harryhow, Arder, gap and aleksejrs.** Stay tuned, because next month we’ll be living this month’s future… and it looks very bright indeed! And if you want us to help make these dreams a reality, please join us! (*Pig Latin is not one of them.) (**Transifex doesn’t currently let us easily view translation history. If we didn’t mention you, we’re sorry and we still really, really appreciate your help! Drop in IRC and we’ll fix the error.) |
There are now two cities that will be home to two NFL franchises. New York City (or East Rutherford, New Jersey if you want to get technical) hosts the Giants and the Jets at MetLife Stadium, and now the City of Los Angeles will play host to the Rams and Chargers. The Rams will continue playing their home games at the Los Angeles Coliseum for two more years, and the Chargers will play its home games at the much smaller StubHub Center (MLS facility) in Carson for two seasons. Both teams will then migrate to Kroenke’s mecca in Inglewood upon its completion, the Chargers as a tenant seeing that Kroenke will own the stadium. This will make Los Angeles the only city in the U.S. to have two sports franchises from the same sport to play at the same venue…in two different sports (the Los Angeles Lakers and Los Angeles Clippers have played at Staples Center for years). The aforementioned MetLife Stadium is the only other venue to house two franchises from the same sport. So what will happen? Will adding two NFL franchises to Los Angeles cause the sports bubble to burst? People always mutter how football can’t survive in L.A. because there is just too much to do. Wrong. Here is the correct statement: “BAD football can’t survive in L.A. because there is just too much to do.” The Browns can be bad in Cleveland because, let’s face it, what else is there to do in Cleveland? No offense to anyone living in Cleveland, a great American and hard-working city. There is the common belief in Los Angeles that it is, and always will be, a Lakers Town. Why do you think this is? Let me tell you why. Because the Lakers have won 16 NBA Championships and 31 Conference Championships. It’s Hollywood baby, if the show and the product are good, the seats, tickets and TV deals will get sold. What is going to happen in L.A. over the next few years is going to be, in my opinion, an extremely exciting time period in the history of the NFL. A modern day arms race if you will. A Cold War in The City of Angeles. But, instead of weapon upgrades and nuclear enhancement, it will be player acquisitions and draft prowess. It will be gridiron success with a touch of Hollywood flair. If you are a Ram’s fan you should be ecstatic that the Chargers moved up the 5-freeway. And if you a true Chargers fan (especially one that lives in L.A.) then you should feel blessed that the Chargers left San Diego. When teams enter training camp it is always their goal to win the Super Bowl. To win their division, then win their conference, and then win the Super Bowl. If that’s not their goal then they have no reason being in the league. But not many teams have to compete with a team that they won’t even be playing! Let me put it this way. The Rams have a history in L.A., and they came back to the city a year before the Chargers, but that won’t do jack for them if they don’t win. Unless you’re over the age of 35, you don’t have a history with the Los Angeles Rams. They are a new team that won 4 games in 2016. If they have two more seasons of mediocrity or no playoff appearances, those “new fans” will abandon ship quick. The Chargers come in with a veteran quarterback and an overall better roster than the Rams. They just loved losing games in the final two minutes. What if that changes? What if Anthony Lynn can catapult the Chargers into the playoffs. What if the Chargers win a playoff game, or two over the next few seasons? If this happens, I can all but guarantee the Chargers will be the more popular Los Angeles team when the two join up in the new stadium in Inglewood. And that is why this is going to be such an entertaining arms race. That is why the Rams hired Sean McVay, the youngest coach in NFL history. The “boringness” of the Fisher regime must by stamped out by the excitement of a new McVay leadership. That is why the Chargers hired Anthony Lynn to replace Mike McCoy. A fresh face for a fresh move that will steer the Chargers in a new direction. There is a lot of money to be had in the confines of Los Angeles County. The 2nd largest media market. The 2nd largest Metropolitan area. A fan base that is hungry for a championship. A fan base, that largely, does not have an allegiance to a specific team. And so it begins. The Battle of the San Gabriels. The Battle for Griffith Park. The Battle for the Beaches. The Battle for Los Angeles. May the best team win. Like this: Like Loading... |
ALBUQUERQUE (KRQE) - Many kids are saying goodbye to summer and heading back to school Thursday. If you're like most parents, you've probably spent both time and money on making sure your student was ready, from clothes to supplies. Yet, many teachers still don't have everything they need for the big day and they're asking the public for help. On most school supply lists, parents are required to buy supplies, not only for their child but also for their child's class, which includes everything from tissues and paper towels to hand sanitizer. Yet, some teachers are still turning to the community for basic supplies. KRQE News 13 spoke to Albuquerque Public School's new superintendent to learn why. Spiral notebooks, math games, three-ring binders, more than 50 Albuquerque area teachers posted their pleas on a crowd-funding website. They're asking for money so they can buy supplies for their classrooms, everything from a basic white board to an Apple TV. What's more, many of them teach in low-income areas. Albuquerque Public School's new superintendent Dr. Luis Valentino says crowd-sourcing just to get classroom supplies raises a question. "How do we best support schools and classrooms?" asked Valentino. Already, parents are required to fork over cash for community school supplies something the new superintendent didn't see in the California district where he previously worked. "You know, it's interesting how I discovered that is as my wife was enrolling my child in kindergarten, he too got that list," said Valentino. KRQE News 13 found those community supplies cost parents somewhere between $10 and $25. That's in addition to the basic supplies for their individual child. Valentino says he understands it can be a burden for many metro area families and agrees the lists need another look. "One way of supporting the families and students better in that regard is for us in central office to look at way of being more strategic in ways of how we use our own resource, how we fund things, so we can better support schools," explained Valentino. Valentino tells KRQE News 13, one way he might address that financial burden is by re-evaluating how the district uses their resources to support schools and classrooms. "Are there areas where we can say, we don't need to continue to support that, we don't need to expand that because it would be better to re-align our finances to better support this? So that parents don't necessarily need to buy all of the pencil or all of the crayons," Valentino explained. While he says he has no clear cut answers now, Valentino says he plans to have a discussion about classroom supplies so parents don't have to spend so much and teachers don't have to turn to crowd-sourcing for markers and binders. Valentino says one thing APS is doing this year is asking teachers who are not in the classroom, some of their administrators, to become classroom teachers until they've been able to hire more. He says some of those will likely come from their central office. Valentino adds academic achievement will be his greatest challenge this first year as superintendent. |
Three weekends of ABC coverage at the Indianapolis Motor Speedway, including the network’s 50th consecutive telecast of the Indianapolis 500 Mile Race on May 25, is part of the 2014 TV schedule announced by INDYCAR and broadcast partners ABC and NBC Sports Network. ABC will televise five races, including the inaugural Grand Prix of Indianapolis on May 10, plus Indianapolis 500 qualifications on May 17-18. NBCSN will televise 13 races, including the final 11 of the 18-race schedule. “With the debut of the Grand Prix of Indianapolis, the intensity of qualifications for the Indianapolis 500 and the ‘Greatest Spectacle in Racing,’ ABC is the destination to tune in for our three big weekends of competition in May,” said Mark Miles, CEO of Hulman & Co., the parent company of INDYCAR. ABC’s schedule also includes the season-opening Firestone Grand Prix of St. Petersburg on Sunday, March 30, and the Chevrolet Detroit Belle Isle Grand Prix doubleheader on Saturday, May 31, and Sunday, June 1. The telecasts for all three races will begin at 3:30 p.m. ET. The network also broadcast both Detroit races in 2013. “The Indianapolis 500 has been an important property for our company for many years and the milestone of the 50th consecutive race on ABC is one that we plan to celebrate,” said Julie Sobieski, ESPN vice president, league sports programming. “It’s only fitting that our celebration also will include the new race on the Indianapolis road course and the drama of qualifications. “At the same time, we’re also very happy to again be able to air the season opener from St. Petersburg as well as the doubleheader from Detroit. We look forward to an exciting season with the IndyCar Series and the Month of May at Indianapolis.” NBCSN will pick up the schedule with the Firestone 600 on Saturday, June 7, and carry it through to the season finale Saturday, Aug. 30, at Auto Club Speedway. The NBCSN portion of the schedule continues the IndyCar Series emphasis on consistency in start times. With the exception of night races, many of the NBCSN telecasts will begin at 3 p.m. ET. Miles added: “We’re grateful to our television partners for working with us on a schedule that gives our fans the best of both networks. Fans will know that NBC Sports Network is our home for the final 11 races of the season, including two doubleheaders, as we build up to another exciting championship.” “We’re pleased to again present a record 13 races to IndyCar’s passionate fan base on NBCSN, including Long Beach, Barber, two doubleheaders and the final 11 races of the season,” said Jon Miller, president, programming, NBCSN. NBCSN also will televise two of the season’s first three races – the 40th Toyota Grand Prix of Long Beach on Sunday, April 13, beginning at 4 p.m. ET, and the Honda Indy Grand Prix of Alabama on Sunday, April 27, beginning at 2:30 p.m. ET as well as live coverage of final preparations for the 98th Indianapolis 500 on “Carburetion Day,” May 23. Download the 2014 IndyCar Series Schedule |
Not all medical professionals support vaccination. Some nurses are bold enough to publicly question their safety for some time now. This is bad for Big Pharma’s image. Masters of the game, the pharmaceutical industry has pushed for vaccine mandates on all hospital workers, nurses included and they have been lobbying for laws like these under an all too familiar guise, for the betterment of all, for the “greater good.” Vaccine mandates nearly guarantee that those who are skeptical of vaccines don’t pursue a career in medicine. Many nurses have lost their jobs for speaking out against vaccines, which has backed them into a corner and made many of them feel like they have nothing left to lose. Most nurses choose to criticize vaccines under the guise of anonymity. As long as their identity is protected and reprisals are all but impossible. Freedom of speech is how these nurses are fighting to restore our medical freedoms. In the information age, censorship is more difficult for Big Pharma than it ever has been before. The world is waking up. From all walks of life, here are the stories from those brave enough to speak out. Hear from the nurses against vaccines. Patriot Nurse In the time I was at my educational institution there was very little discussion, true discussion, and even less true debate, on the subject of vaccination, on the true science of vaccination and on real risks and possible perceived benefits of vaccination. So I had to search out the information, the studies, the data for myself and in an effort to find the truth, I have come to the conclusion that I am against vaccination, especially for children and infants under the age of 2. I have three main areas of objection. We could spend hours talking about this …my areas of objection are the additives that are present in the vaccines, the vaccination schedule for children, especially under the age of one, and the sufficiency of breast milk for conferred immunity. Guerilla RN As an E.R. nurse, I have seen the cover up. Where do you think kids go when they have a vaccine reaction? They go to the E.R. They come to me. …The cases almost always present similarly, and often no one else connected it. The child comes in with either a fever approaching 105, or seizures, or lethargy/can’t wake up, or sudden overwhelming sickness, screaming that won’t stop, spasms, GI inclusion, etc. And one of the first questions I would ask, as triage nurse, was are they current on their vaccinations? It’s a safe question that nobody sees coming, and nobody understands the true impact of. Parents (and co-workers) usually just think I’m trying to rule out the vaccine-preventable diseases, when in fact, I am looking to see how recently they were vaccinated to determine if this is a vaccine reaction. Too often I heard a parent say something akin to “Yes they are current, the pediatrician caught up their vaccines this morning during their check-up, and the pediatrician said they were in perfect health!” If I had a dollar for every time I’d heard that I could fly to Europe for free. But here’s the more disturbing part. Mind you, I have served in multiple hospitals across multiple states, alongside probably well over a hundred doctors and probably 300-400+ nurses. …I have even made a point of sitting in the most prominent spot at the nurse’s station filling out a VAERS report to make sure as many people saw me doing it as possible to generate the expected “What are you doing?” responses to get that dialog going with people. And in every case, if a nurse approached me, their response was “I’ve never done that!” or “I didn’t know we could do that,” or, worse “What is VAERS?” which was actually the most common response. The response from doctors? Silence. Absolute total refusal to engage in discussion or to even acknowledge what I was doing or what VAERS was. The big take away from that? The number one place parents bring their kids in the event of a vaccine reaction is the E.R., and as an E.R. staffer, I have NEVER met anyone who filed one, in spite of seeing hundreds of cases of obvious vaccine-associated harm come through. What does that say about reported numbers? The CDC/HHS admits that VAERS is under-reported …In an industry that is rocked on a monthly basis by horrible medication scandals, if you didn’t question everything they told you, I would look at you funny. And it’s my job to give these medications to people. Just to note, on a recent scandal, I have been warning people about Zofran use in pregnancy for 5 years. The information was right there in the insert. It was right there on the manufacturing website. It was right there in the PDR. As well as on every downloadable app and printed IV drug book. The information is there. It is the medical professionals that are failing the general public. …Everything I’m saying is public domain knowledge. It’s stuff we SHOULD be telling you.I am sorry we are not. I try to take a stand where I can, but at the end of the day, I’m only one nurse. Matt Smith, RN After being on the vaccine team for one day and seeing children get sick after receiving their vaccine, I came home exhausted and turned on TV and I happened to catch the Larry King Show and he had a story and it aired. I think it was November 2nd, 2009 where he did a story about 19 deaths caused by the vaccine, and it was a vaccine that I was giving out that day. In response, I sent out an email to all my co-workers saying, “Hey, watch this report,” because I felt it was my responsibility to inform that what’s going on and they might be giving a shot that could kill somebody. …Basically, they said, “Shut up, you’re fired. Stop using email,” and they sent me a confidentiality agreement threatening federal prosecution and that pretty much scared me. Michelle Rowton, MSN, RNC-NIC, C-NPT, NNP-BP Well, I had mentioned that they go ahead and vaccinate premature infants on time, meaning that once they are two months old, they are ready for their two month vaccines regardless of the fact they are supposed to have been inside their mothers’ stomachs and not even born yet, and some of the things we’re seeing and that are being said is like a neonatologist calling from the step down unit to the level three, to the more intensive unit, saying, “Hey, I’m going to give these four babies their two month vaccines this weekend so I just wanted to make sure you had four beds ready cause I know they’re all going to have issues and need increased care. I had mentioned before that I had sat in the call room before with a bunch of providers saying, “Hey we have this 25-weeker that was so strong and now, they never required intubation with a breathing tube to actually go on the vent, had a less invasive type respiratory support and you come in and they’re like, “Oh how embarrassing. We gave that baby his two-month immunizations and now he’s intubated and on the vent for the first time. Oops.” And it’s just kind of blown off. Really low birth weight infants are 28 weeks of gestation or less and under 1000 grams, approximately 2.2lbs or less at birth. You had a group of physicians and a practitioner that went into a database of a large neonatology corporation with almost 14,000 infants looked at. What the results said that they were looking at the pre-immunization period versus the post-immunization period and their sepsis workups went up 3.7 times in the post-immunization period. What sepsis means is a blood infection and so there were multiple labs drawn, blood cultures, urine cultures, they go ahead and start those babies on antibiotics right away while they wait for results so it’s not a benign thing. It’s life threatening. And if it ends up not being an infection, they’ve still had pain, they’ve still had invasive procedures, and they’ve had antibiotics given, which is not a benign thing for these babies with their very sensitive intestines. So it’s a big deal. We had increased respiratory support, two times higher in the post-immunization period and then intubation, actually getting intubated with a breathing tube and going on the vent at about 1.7 – 1.8 times higher and what really shocked me, I had to read it about three times, when I got down to the conclusion, they said based on this, there was no difference in reaction between single shots and combo shots and so you could just go ahead and keep giving the combo vaccines. Whistle Blower Nurse Since the Affordable Care Act came out, we are now as nurses required to ask every single patient who comes into the hospital if you’ve had your flu vaccine or your pneumococcal vaccine. If you say no to either one of those, in the computer an order will generate that says we need to give you this vaccine. We don’t need to speak to a doctor; it’s hospital policy. It’s now health department policy that we now have to give you the vaccine. Even if you came to the hospital with a stubbed toe, you will be offered both vaccines if you meet requirements, which just about everybody meets requirements for flu vaccine and most people over the age of 65 will meet the pneumococcal vaccine. Even if you come to the hospital with a stubbed toe, you are going to be given this vaccine. You have the right to say no. If you say no, they just check off as “refused”. This was never like this years ago. This was a new thing. When you go into a hospital, if you need surgery, you need a knee replacement surgery, first they’re going to ask you if you’ve had the vaccines, and you’re going to say no. Then they’re going to say, “Well you need to sign this consent. If you’re going to have surgery, you need to sign this consent.” In the consent is a word called “biogenics” [and/or bioligics]. If you sign the consent saying I consent for you to give me biogenics [or biologics] basically it means they can give you anything deemed necessary, including vaccines. So if you say you didn’t get a flu shot and its flu season and you sign the consent to say they can give you biogenic[biologics], they will give you a flu vaccine even when you’re under anesthesia because you already signed the consent. Unless you go and get your medical records, you will not know you got a flu vaccine. They may tell you at the end “Oh, by the way, you’re now covered. You got the flu vaccine,” or “You got the pneumococcal vaccine,” but two people now have reported to me last week, saying they got the vaccine, that they did not want the vaccine, and that they did not know. … You can, when you sign consent for surgery, you can specifically say no vaccines. I don’t want this. You can write and initial after you say what you do not want and they have to honor that. And if they don’t honor it, they can be sued. The word biogenics [biologics] is now being used. In the past, there used to be a consent that basically said we could give you blood products if we feel you need it, we could give you other medications if we feel you need it, but now with the word biogenics [biologics] it’s now including vaccines. Brenda Ikemeyer, FNP I’m a family nurse practitioner practicing emergency medicine. My story with immunization is basically I bullied a dad to get a chicken-pox vaccine for his two-year-old daughter when the chicken-pox vaccine first came out. She then developed shingles and went blind in her left eye at the age of three all because of immunizations. I had to take a flu shot because of mandatory vaccination for my job. I developed Guillain–Barré and I could not walk for a month and a half. …It was a new vaccine and they didn’t want to get it. Nothing had come out about MMR at that time. There was no controversy with immunizations at that time. That was in ’99, ’98. I blame myself. Probably in 2002 when I had my Guillain–Barré reaction myself. I do emergency medicine. I got out of primary care so I didn’t have to be part of the problem anymore. Now, I get to educate about why are we immunizing and when their children come in, I can actually make the VAERS report because their children come to the Emergency Department when they are vaccine injured. #vaxxed review from a nurse practitioner Posted by Tia Severino on Saturday, May 14, 2016 Anonymous Nurses Speaking Out Against Vaccines (Their names have been changed to aliases in order to protect their careers) Mel RN I became aware of the dangers….well, I had to get my DTaP updated about four years ago to enter into my FNP program. My arm swelled up huge, like a football player’s and was red, hot, and swollen. This lasted a couple of weeks. I could not even work for a week or more. To be honest, I have been sick ever since. I have something autoimmune going on. I am not sure what it is, but I feel my body go through “flare ups.” …I am not 100% if it is related to this, but it is a definite possibility. Then, I have just awakened to more and more situations via Facebook and my own research. I am in functional medicine as an R.N. and plan to specialize in this as an FNP as well. Jana RN There is a huge emphasis on informed consent of the risks/benefits of procedures/meds. Vaccines are not singled out in this portion of the education. I get a strong feeling from comments made by the instructors that in the real world we won’t have time for proper informed consent often. Lila RN A year or so after I graduated and had my first child, I noticed that a high school friend posted on FB that she didn’t vaccinate her child. This led me to look into them enough to realize that they weren’t made of saline solution. I saw that Jenny McCarthy had started a “Green the Vaccines” campaign. Unfortunately, I didn’t really dig much further than that until the CDC Whistleblower story came out in the summer on 2014. I posted about it on FB, and thought it was going to become an international story and immediately affect the U.S. vaccine program. When I realized that it was a media blackout instead, I really started researching vaccines. Liz RN If nurses knew more about the dangers of vaccines I think more of them would feel ethically conflicted about administering them. I think now everyone is fooled into thinking that neuro-developmental problems are genetic. I NOW know that genetics are involved in the extent of injury, but I believe all vaccines are injurious. …Based on my experience it doesn’t matter what is presented in school because the science isn’t being done. “You give a vaccine, you make antibodies, you are protected” – that’s all there is to it. There is so much more to it than that but it has been hard to find, especially when organizations such as the CDC fraudulently withhold data, there’s poor access to the VAERS data, the VAERS data is completely voluntary so it’s almost meaningless anyway, there’s no transparent access to the vaccine safety data. All the lack of transparency, the deliberate Google misdirections, [and] the very system of research funding all goes against vaccine safety research and sharing of information. An Anonymous Nurse From The FB Page Informed Consent I was asked to discuss a cover up I witnessed. …The ambulance report was a male child who had just received vaccinations a few hours ago, who was progressively deteriorating in mentation and finally experienced sudden onset seizing. It was what we call status epilepticus, where the seizure starts, and it doesn’t stop. It just keeps going. I wrote in large letters across the bottom of the paramedic report “JUST RECEIVED VACCINATIONS, NOW SEIZING”. Often I didn’t get a chance to convey relevant or important material to the doctors because we were too busy. That medic radio report was stuck on top of the chart when it went to the doc, and they were supposed to look at it first before anything else. It also was supposed to be part of their record for the visit as it was the only record of prehospital interventions we often received and functioned as the first director of interventions. On EMS arrival to the scene, kiddo was still in active seizure. They had administered drugs to stop the seizure, but were not convinced it was not still ongoing at some subacute level because there was no responsiveness and they were seeing clenched hands, and tight arms, and minimal spontaneous breathing, but it was apparently there, and pulseox was getting a reading over 90%. Mind you, I’m just getting what the very scared sounding paramedic was quickly spitting into the radio. It always makes you clench up when the paramedics sound scared. Anyway, I acknowledge their radio report and looked for an open room. There was a couple literally walking out, just discharged. We had bare minutes until their arrival. I couldn’t find the nurse assigned to the room, so I just ran in and hammered out a quick clean down so we could use the room when the medics got there. Right as I finished cleaning the room, they roll in. Charge nurse is finally back, but has no idea what’s going on. I grab the papers and get them into the room yelling back at charge nurse “pediatric status epilepticus” so he knew to get people heading my way to help. I started getting bedside report as we are transferring the kiddo over to our gurney. Mom is with them, near breakdown, freaked out. Additional help arrives as we are padding the bed rails and working on vitals, and the nurse assigned to the room finally arrives. At this point, I’m supposed to turn the case over. But this is kind of heavy to drop, so I pause and give the nurse a quickie run down emphasizing the pediatrician office visit and vaccinations immediately prior to onset of symptoms with mom nodding yes while crying in the corner and the paramedic nodding yes. Here, I then get out of the way, and I step out of the room, telling the nurse I’ll get the rest of the history and enter it for her to save her time so she can work on interventions. At this point the doctor is finally getting to the room, chart in hand, with the paramedic report and my large block writing visible on it. The medic is talking to me telling the rest of the story for their report. The doctor interrupts us and asks what happened. This is typical. Poor medics usually have to tell their story three times before they get back out the door unless all the staff meet them at the same time in the room. The paramedic starts relaying the story from call out, what they found on scene, interventions. The doctor asks if there is a seizure history. Medic says no. I add in that the child vaccinated only hours ago, and symptoms onset was after vaccination. The doctor does a dismissive “humph” and turns away from me and looks at the medic and asks, “Is that right?” The medic says, “Yes.” Then the doctor looked at the room and the mom standing about ten feet from us, kind of glares at us, turned on both of us and walks into the room. I finish getting the medic report. And the doctor has started some orders, and the doctor is now talking to the mom who I hear talking about how he was perfectly healthy earlier, how the pediatrician was saying he looked in perfect health, how he got his vaccines. I figured my part was done. … A couple hours go by before I finally catch a break to go check in. We dosed the heck out of the kid with benzo’s, and he was sawing logs and mom was calmer. I caught the nurse and asked if he came out of it at all, and she said he had some semi-lucid speech at one point and it looked like seizures were done, but that he had been gorked out with the drugs and had been sleeping for a while. She said the labs and imaging had been coming back, and that the doc was in contact with a peds neuro trying to decide what to do with the case. I went into the room to check vitals and re-document. I was honestly helping the nurse who was busy where I finally had a break, but it also gave me an excuse to get back involved and stay involved in the case. I talked with the mom while she was in the room. I asked what she had been told. Not much. She told me the doctor did not believe the vaccine had anything to do with it. I asked her when the doc had told her this, and she said right away, when they first got there and met her. I asked if she had shared what the labs and imaging showed, and she said all she was told was that there was some kind of swelling in his brain and they were getting transferred to another hospital, and the doctor didn’t know what caused it. (Encephalitis, or swelling of the brain is a common adverse reaction to vaccines, and it is frequently listed in vaccine warning inserts). I went out to look at labs and imaging report from the perspective of patient education with the intention of filling the mom in more with what was going on. I also dug through to the doctors notes to see what the doctor had written up. Since they were being discharged, I could help the primary nurse by printing off our chart copies to make a transfer packet. The paperwork is what kills in the ER. The primary nurse was more than grateful to get the help, and I was more than willing to help. Plus it let me get a look at what was going on. I quickly noted that there was absolutely nothing documented in the physicians notes about the vaccination or the pediatrician appointment, in spite of its obvious necessity for mention as it was the “last known normal” time and correlated with an exam by a medical doctor who declared him in perfect health. If for no other reason, that should have been in there to establish time frames for onset of illness. But it also, because of this, did not include any mention of vaccination, in spite of the mom saying it, the medic saying it, and the triage RN saying it. It appeared to be a new onset illness, out of the blue, that occurred with no outside interventions or changes in routine, if you were to simply read her physician pass-off notes (which is all the receiving medical doctor is going to do. They don’t read nurses notes). So this information was not being relayed. Most disturbing, in the face of this absence of inclusion of potential etiology, the disposition line that my doctor included under diagnostic impression was “encephalitis of unknown etiology”. Okay, well, yeah, I can’t argue with that statement, but, there was a potential source, a change in daily routine and exposure, that was temporally associated! It should have been mentioned, or at least discussed as a possibility. Not willing to leave it alone, I approached the doctor and politely tried to broach the subject. I said that I noticed when I was putting together the packet, there was no mention of the pediatrician office and the vaccinations in her pass off report and ER summary, and did she want to amend this before I finalized the transfer packet. I thought it was a polite way of nudging to try to get her to include it. I got “the glare” and a stern voice dismissal that was something to the effect of “they’re not related”. That’s it. I said something like Don’t you want to at least include it for the neurologist to consider? And I got the glare again and was told no, and to just finish the packet. So I went about piecing and copying the packet together. I included a larger text line with more emphasis about the vaccinations in my triage notes, hoping that at least someone over there might notice that. And then I tried to find the paramedic report to copy it. There is the paramedic radio report that I fill in while I’m talking to them on the radio and they are inbound. Then there is their official run report, which is their paperwork, which they make a copy of for our records. Both were missing from the chart. In fact, every mention of the vaccines was sterilized from the chart. The primary nurse had not written in anything about it either. …The doctor, of course, did not report to VAERS. In spite of the fact that there were lab findings, radiology findings, and symptoms which all warranted a VAERS report, and the child was not just brought in to the ER, but was hospitalized, and assigned neurological follow up care. … I went and filed a VAERS report nice and publicly sitting at a prominent terminal as close to the doctors as I could get. I made sure to say it loud enough to be overheard that I was filing a VAERS report on the kid we just transferred when a colleague questioned what I was doing. I know the doctor overheard. She ignored me.Top of FormBottom of Form Conclusion Medical freedom is quickly becoming endangered. Sadly, some things must get worse before they get better, and this is what we are experiencing now. When persuasion to vaccinate fails, we are seeing mandates, coercion, and deception used instead. Although this may seem like things are getting worse (and in some ways they are), in the end, these kinds of heavy-handed tactics will only make us stronger. Mandating vaccines for nurses is ultimately what inspired so many nurses to speak out against vaccines. The biggest difference between the nurses who are against vaccines or for them is that those nurses who are against vaccines actually know something more about vaccines than simply how to administer them. Knowledge has a way of changing minds, the same way it has changed the minds of these nurses. They took the time to research vaccines, as they were not taught about the dangers of vaccination in school, they had to take the time to teach themselves. Knowledge is power. When we live in ignorance, we are slaves to the propaganda of others. It is knowledge of the truth that will set us all free and restore our medical freedoms. Related Reading: Sources: |
In the past decade, African-American women applied for gun permits at higher rates than all white gun owners combined. According to a recent study from the Crime Prevention Research Center, this changing face of gun ownership is reflected in Texas and across the United States. In Texas, where the Department of Public Safety tracks race and gender data for registered handgun owners, permits have increased the most for black residents, particularly among women. White residents still represent the majority of owners, but since 2000, African-American women have grown from 1 percent of total permit holders to 11 percent. Growing up in Chicago, Dee Bond-Hodrick, who now lives in Houston, says she never thought she wanted to be around guns. But now she worries about the safety of her family, and has become one of the more than one million registered gun owners in this state. Continue Reading “It’s a scary thought not being able to defend your family if someone comes into your home,” she says. Philip Smith, founder and president of the National African American Gun Association, based in Atlanta, calls it part of a maturation process of the African-American community. “More and more people are no longer taking the quote-unquote standard perspective: ‘Black folks shouldn't have guns; they’re dangerous, blah blah blah.’ “It’s okay to have a gun. It’s okay to protect your family. There's nothing anti-American about that.” Smith’s organization has benefited from the shifting mind-set of African Americans in regards to guns. In 2013, a Pew Research Center Study survey found that 29 percent of blacks viewed gun ownership as a good thing. Two years later, that number rose to more than half. Since 2015, when Smith founded NAAGA, the organization has attracted more than 20,000 members, with 42 chapters across the country, including here in Houston. Women, in general, have shifted gun ownership demographics in recent years. Data provided by the National Rifle Association showed that 86 percent of participants who signed up for the NRA's most popular instruction course – basic pistol – were women. With NAAGA, 60 percent of its members are female. “If you’re a single black woman going to work at night, coming home late at night, you want to have a gun in your purse,” Smith said. “If you get home late at night and someone breaks in your window, you want to protect yourself and your kids.” Bond-Hodrick grew up in Chicago with a “healthy fear” of guns. Her mother kept a gun in the house, but anecdotes from her community and the news made Bond-Hodrick weary of firearms. During high school, a classmate died after shooting himself playing Russian roulette, and she constantly heard stories about accidental shootings when a kid picked up a gun in his house. But when she moved to Texas in 2000 and met her husband, Andre, who owned multiple guns, she started to accept the idea. Andre co-founded the Ibon Eko Gun Club in Houston this past February as a chapter of NAAGA, and insisted Bond-Hodrick join. “I’m still a little uncomfortable, still a little fearful, but I’m getting over it,” she said. Members of the Ibon Eko Gun Club at a range in Houston. Photo courtesy of Thomas McLemore The desire for safety drew most members to Ibon Eko, explained Thomas McLemore, the president of the club, although that logic does ignore existing evidence that possessing a gun can do more harm than good. Gun ownership is linked to higher chances of victimization, including homicides and suicides, according to multiple studies. A 2014 analysis of state data from the Boston University School of Public Health found that a 1 percent increase in gun ownership led to a 1 percent increase in gun homicides. The Crime Prevention study, authored by John Lott, a prominent pro-gun academic, doesn’t offer reasons for the rise in popularity among minorities, but Houston Press interviews with black gun owners indicated news coverage of violence, as well as personal brushes with crime, led people to seek more information on guns and safety. Regulatory changes could also be a factor. The largest spike in black owners in Texas came in 2012 when the state reduced the minimum training hours for permits from ten to four. And as more clubs form – and as the registration fee for handguns plummets from $140 to $40 in September – minority rates will likely continue to grow. “I don’t think the gun clubs have necessarily caused people to own more guns,” Bond-Hodrick said. “I think society has caused more people to own guns.” |
It’s a little eerie dropping in on other boxes. Same stacks of bumper plates. A congregation of chalky kettlebells. Bands people forgot to put away dangling from the pull-up rig. Sweat angels on the mats. A trash can of PVC pipes. You pull one out and start your pass-throughs. But there are differences–is one of their kettlebells shaped like a skull? And, of course, the fear hovers over you: Everyone can see you’re not a real CrossFitter. You can’t do a pull-up, for crying out loud. Even at your own box, you feel like a fraud sometimes. And when people outside the gym see your sweatshirt–“Oh, you do CrossFit?”–you flex in caricature and reply, “Ha ha, yeah, can’t you tell by how totally jacked I am?” This box you’re visiting is 700 square feet in a strip mall. The people couldn’t be nicer. They tell you the 400-meter mark is the second blue fire hydrant. You’re afraid you’ll miss it, but then you remember you’re the slowest runner in the world, so you just watch where the real CrossFitters turn around. Now you’re at a box at the coast. The people couldn’t be nicer. You’re told sometimes the metcon is to throw a ball as far as you can into the ocean and then swim out to fetch it, 5 rounds for time. Not today, though, which is a good thing because you didn’t wear your suit. And also, even if you did, cellulite. And also too, jeez-o-flip, you’d die. If the infarct didn’t take you down, then the riptide would do it. You imagine being supine on the beach, coughing water into the lifeguard’s face. “Do you know where you are?” he says. “Time!” you reply. Oooh, this one’s 4,000 square feet in a string of converted old warehouses. It’s shmancy. The people couldn’t be nicer. You watch a pint-sized woman, 100% sinew, in teeny shorts and a bra made of less fabric than your sock, do heavy thrusters and burpees. She takes a 3-minute breather and then starts to butterfly-kip one million pull-ups. Somebody calls her name. You look at the wall and notice a placard with that name. On the side it says Reebok CrossFit Games. Whoa, a real live CrossFitter, in her habitat. You try not to ogle. At all of them, when you walk in, the coach asks, “Have you done CrossFit before?” It’s a liability issue–CYA–but you always assume they’re incredulous. You hear, “Have you done CrossFit before?” and paint one of their eyebrows into an arc with your mind. Then the warm-up starts. You know these movements–you’ve done them a million times. You snatch the kettlebell. Someone says, “Wow, you’re really good at that.” At one box, the coach has you do handstands and cartwheels. Ha! You can do handstands and cartwheels! At another one, you look on the board after the WOD. You out-lifted all the other women there. And you stop. And you wonder, how long will this go on? At what point are you a CrossFitter, without qualifications or disclaimers? When you can do a pull-up? Or is it when you can do a muscle-up? Maybe when you’ve got a sub-5-minute Fran? And it comes to you. You dry-heave a little because it sounds cheesy, even in your own mind, but there it is: Whenever you say. <hork> For real though, whenever you say. <hork> (Sorry, still… <hork>) But seriously, there are people who consider themselves CrossFitters on Day 1 of boot camp, and others who stomp around three years later wondering when it will happen, like there’s a magical threshold to cross somewhere [raises hand]. In reality, the only difference between the girl who calls herself a CrossFitter and the girl who doesn’t is one calls herself a CrossFitter and one doesn’t. Nobody’s gonna come by with a PVC pipe one day and dub thee Legit. You are a real CrossFitter. Whenever you say. Might as well be today. (One last <hork>.) ********** Like me on Facebook here. Follow me on Twitter here. |
It’s time for Mr. Money Mustache to attack another one of America’s most sacred traditions. Marriage. Well, not marriage specifically, but those fantastic and fancy parties we call weddings. Now, in case you hadn’t figured it out, from an American perspective, I might as well be from another planet. I grew up in a small town in Canada, in a frugal and somewhat bizarre family where love, rather than manufactured products, was the chief currency. We also missed out on any concept of tradition, religion, and even most of polite society’s Social Norms. We are generally a clan of nerds, reading many books and practicing as Spock-like engineers and armchair scientists, but not often seen on Celeb magazine covers in the grocery store. So when I came into adult life, I got to learn quite a few new things just like Starman or The Terminator did when they first came to Earth. I learned (or am still learning) that people love to be made to feel special on their birthday, a tradition I heartily accept. I also learned about some very bizarre traditions, like those practiced by the world’s various competing religions, and most significantly for this article, what people do when they get married. What I learned is that it is entirely common for you humans to spend months preparing for a wedding, including renting special buildings, hiring various contractors to provide exotic services, buying clothes that will only be used once, inviting guests that are not people you speak with every day or even every month, and even trying to create “appropriate” appearances to various branches of the extended family. Fellow aliens might read that paragraph, and say, “Well, yeah, you’re talking about the wedding ceremonies of the very rich, right? Like the Royal Wedding that happened in England this summer? Don’t try to understand Old Money, they have their own crazy Power Dynasty thing going.” But no, it’s more interesting than that. Royal weddings started out in the domain of kings and queens, but they have trickled down into the realm of the middle class, such that it is now common for ordinary nonmillionaires to spend an average of $24,000 on their weddings. As some icing on that wedding cake, I also learned the social norm is for a Man to spend “two months’ salary” for the engagement ring ($10,000 or so!?), and then immediately after the wedding, take off for an international honeymoon at an all-inclusive resort. Some of these brides and grooms are the same people who have borrowed to pay for their cars, put less than 20% down on their houses, and claim to Mr. Money Mustache that retirement before 65 is impossible. Like the first person to burp after a serious speech, it’s time for Mr. Money Mustache to be the first to say it: It’s Okay to break this tradition. These Ultraweddings are so ingrained (surely in part by the efforts of the profitable wedding industry itself) that people think they are having a “low-key” wedding if they only have 100 guests or only spend $5,000. I’ll tell you how to have a wedding. When my wife and I decided we were adult enough to get married (just before age 30, after 10 years of togetherness), we put on our best sandals and walked downtown. We went to the county clerk’s office, where they record important events like property transactions, births, deaths, and marriages, and we said we wanted to get married. “Congratulations!” said the nice lady there, and gave us a pretty diploma-like document to fill out, with a golden seal in the corner. A marriage license. We filled it out and submitted it. The total cost was $10. One of the paragraphs you have to initial says something like “I hereby agree to have a ceremony to declare this marriage effective”. So we hiked to the top of a mountain at the edge of Boulder, Colorado and under a towering arch of rock, declared, “We are married!” Later we invited all the local friends over for drinks and nicely made food at our house. And the following summer, we repeated the party in Canada for friends and family who happen to live there. The whole experience shines on as a golden memory, just like the marriage itself. Nobody had any less fun, or got any less married, despite the fact that we spent at least 98% less than the average. Even though we could have technically afforded to pay for even a rather fancy wedding without borrowing at that point in our lives. In fact, not spending excessive money on a wedding provides a life-changing boost to a new couple’s financial situation. Quite a large portion of divorces are caused by financial problems. So it could be reasonably stated that it is far more romantic to have a low-cost wedding. So here’s my prescription for marital bliss: Plan your wedding party just like you would plan any other phenomenal bash you would host at your house. That’s right, it will be at your house, or your parents’ house, or at a local mountain, forest, or other natural area. Don’t allow your friends to bring gifts – just as your friends should not ask for gifts from you when they get married. The photographer will be whichever of your friends has the nicest camera. The caterer will be your parents, or a large take-out order from your favorite local restaurant if you can afford it. You can buy beer and wine for everyone, and your heaviest-drinking friend or family member can be the unofficial bartender. Make sure everyone has a great time, and spend your energy talking and laughing with the people most dear to you rather than rehearsing elaborate walking patterns and selecting floral arrangements. As you say your vows, Mr. Money Mustache himself will be blessing your union. Further Entertainment: This amazing video on YouTube summarizes these points with much more style than my article ever could: Amusing Updates: |
“It’s probably the biggest loss you’re gonna see them take for the next 5 years” –Poll Results: Would EVE be better without killboards?, Do you have confidence in CCP’s 3 year plan? –EVE News: The Battle of B-R and analysis of the consequences, Nulli falls back, PL withdraws from the war, Return of the titan drive by, The end of Bombers Bar? We hope not. –Contract Wrap Up: Lowsec Incursions for Fun and Profit, Atlar/Illamur POCO hits –This Week In Mercs: Gevlon Goblin seeks highsec mercs for anti-Goon crusade with hilarious results –CSM Corner: Ali gives a review of the recently held Winter Summit, Alek grills her on what CCP’s perspective is on the next two expansions, Rubicon 1.1 released with needed but still derpy ESS fixes -Turtle is not pleased about seeing the Tutorial constantly post 1.1 –Noir. History: “Failscading since 2008” (All the reasons Noir. sucks) -Turtle is not pleased about the DX11 bug post 1.1 -If you’re still interested in joining Noir. after listening to that segment, NMG. is actively seeking large PVP corps XD Ending track courtesy of J-Kraken http://soundcloud.com/jkrakenmusic |
This talk was delivered as keynote for the Art History of Games conference, that took place during DiGRA 2013. While the infamous Can Games Be Art? question is now being carefully avoided like an inappropriate text you sent while drunk, some references and questions may still be valuable to the world beyond the small group of scholars that gathered in that hotel basement in Atlanta. It’s a minimally edited transcript/note dump, please forgive the informal tone. In the last few years, if your filter bubbles include gaming circles you probably have witnessed the many collective cheers, the vuvuzelas, the stadium waves, raising upon every glorious step of the videogame medium toward high-culture acceptance. Legally art, proof of art, the Supreme Court… Thislanguage of legal validation is quite alien to the usual art discourse. Artists are not typically looking for proofs and evidences that demonstrate that what they do is actually art. They just… make art. And if the general or specialized public is perplexed or hostile that could even be a good sign, a sign that they are breaking new grounds. All these articles, and there are many more, usually start with a reference to film critic Roger Ebert and the claims he made from 2005 onward. This essentialist and structural argument is so flawed that, as scientists would say, “it’s not even wrong” so I won’t spend any time discussing it. Now, across the pond in Europe, we’ve never heard of Roger Ebert so our reaction was like “whatever old cinema dude on the Internet”. But here, I found out, Ebert is not just an authority in his field: he is a kind of Americana icon like Twinkies or colorful license plates. And because he was so loved, he suddenly became the villain. It was as if a mutated Mr. Rogers suddenly started to use racial slurs. Americans just… could not ignore that. What really matters is that: something new happened. These statements forced a generation of North American game developers, game critics and players to confront the mysterious Art Thing. Possibly for the first time in their lives. Their honor, their reputation and their favorite pastime was being attacked by a prominent tastemaker. In the following years, a movement of amateur art criticism emerged within the game industry. Programmers started to Google terms like “aesthetics”, game journalists filled their counter-articles with pictures of Duchamp’s Fountain. Because if everything can be art, why not games? Every strange, intimate, weird looking game was measured for its potential to defuse Ebert’s argument. Even hardcore gamers started to cry while playing (and blogged about it) demonstrating they also had feelings. Those little sprites and polygons really mattered to them. In any case, from that cycle of shame and pride emerged a new sensibility. On one side the gaming community matured and developed higher cultural ambitions. On the other, the masses of non-gamers and the mainstream press became more and more sympathetic to the game form. This coincided with a series of events that have been framed as “victories” by the industry, like the move by the National Endowement for the Art to accept games as possible recipients for grants. Although, as few have pointed out, in the past the NEA funded videogame projects through individual artist grants. So it wasn’t really a big deal. Another landmark was last year’s exhibition “The Art of Videogames” at the Smithsonian Museum. Game people were too busy celebrating this recognition to wonder whether or not this was a just populist publicity stunt to refresh the museum’s image and the industry’s. The show was in fact “generously” supported by Entertainment Software Association. The curatorial process was also populist and designed for buzz. It involved an online poll asking people to vote for the games to be included in the exhibition. Of course fans love to argue about lists and top tens. But it didn’t make a big difference anyway, because only 5 among the 80 chosen titles were actually playable in the exhibition. The ultimate institutional validation was the inclusion of 14 games in the MoMa’s permanent collection. Here too we were so busy celebrating that I haven’t heard many commentators reflecting on the fact that the acquisitions were part of the Architecture and Design collection, and not the art. What does it mean to put Asteroids right next to swanky furniture and unrealized architectural proposals? Is the hip and yuppie field of interaction design imperialistically claiming videogames? Are games furniture? Can architecture make you cry? (like videogames) For example I’d like, one day, to see the art game Passage exhibited next to Felix Gonzalez-Torres’ “Perfect lovers”. If you don’t know Gonzalez-Torres’ piece, it’s super simple: two identical clocks are set in unison but over time they will inevitably fall out of sync with one another. Both works explore themes or time and eternal love; they are tragic and romantic; they are biographical (Gonzales-Torres made this after his partner was diagnosed with AIDS. Passage has a similar background story). And now they are both part of the MoMa collection. Except that Passage is in the design department. Will these worlds ever collide? But the most important thing that was missing from this long Games as Art debate was the acknowledgment that artists have been working with videogames for almost 20 years now. Videogames have been a constant fixture in digital art festivals and exhibitions around the world. There have been a multitude of specifically game-themed exhibitions in the last 10 years. And the reason why this trend remained under the radar of the game community and of the mainstream press is because it could not be summarized with a simple “Whaaat? Pac-man in a museum?” headline. Because the lines of engagement between art videogames are rich and complex. I want to give a brief overview of these different approaches. This is not meant to be a taxonomy made of neat boxes, but more like a glitched up collection of intersecting planes. (Disclaimer: I will not mention my own stuff, I’m not that kind of person) So when we talk about games and art we should think of many things: Art mods One of the earliest strategies was the art mod. I’m referring to artist that use or appropriate game technologies to create interactive screen-based pieces. For example to create twisted virtual museums spaces within real museums. Or removing elements to create new meanings and experiences. This is a mod of Mario Bros from 2000 with all the enemies removed. This work is where Cory Arcangel got the inspiration for his famous “clouds”. Or the radical interventions on first person shooters by Jodi. Changing the texture of Wolfenstein 3D and turning it into a kind of constructivist painting. This is actually playable and it’s quite enjoyable. Or the early work by Brody Condon. Amplifying the violence of a FPS when everybody was freaking out about game violence and Columbine. Or the early work by Julian Oliver: turning Quake into a performance environment or into a generative audio visual artwork performed by bots. I want to show you a couple of videos from my favorite artist working with art mods. Joan Leandre, aka RetroYou, is a Catalan artist. All of his work is visually and sonically exquisite. It’s a bit of an acquired taste, early Glitch aesthetic. It’s a luddite attack to the polished surface of 3d games. These artists are almost saying: it took centuries of visual art, and the invention of photography, to finally be able to appreciate abstraction. And yet videogames are going the opposite way, getting more and more realistic. And boring. Fuck that. I like to think about it as a Gordon Matta Clark type of intervention: a cut though the surface of an engineered artifact that reveals its inner workings, the digital matter, the guts and the flesh of a game. The invisible bounding boxes, the hidden variables. It’s not just a fuck design/fuck architecture statement but rather: “let try to see trough these boxes, literally, let’s imagine new affordances”. Games made by artists There is this tautological definition of art that reads: “art is what artists do”. Which is not completely useless. It implies that art can’t quite emerge by accident. There is an artist intention, there is identification with a certain role in society. In case of trained artists, there is a degree of literacy at the very basis of artistic practice. Well known examples include Natalie Bookchin’s The Intruder. A mash up between poetry and classic arcade games. Or the Night Journey conceived by Bill Viola. Everything made by Bill Viola must be art right? In fact it is so fine art that you may never get to play it, unless you go to a fancy gallery in a fancy city. This crosspollination happens in the commercial world as well. Toshio Iwai, the maker of Electroplancton is a Japanese interactive media and installation artist. Fumito Ueda graduated in art, tried to make a living as a painter, failed and then switched to the game industry. But his background shines through his work in the AAA game industry. His creation process is very visual, he conceptualized Ico and Shadow of the Colossus through an computer animation instead of a game prototype. Visual and sensory experience first. Keita Takahashi studied sculpture, and his object-based sensibility is so evident in both Katamari and Noby Noby Boy. Games about art This is another approach or subgenre: games that specifically reference art or are themed after artworks. This is the most straightforward way to frame your work as art. It’s a classic post-modern trick: hi-brow meets low brow. But it’s a trick that works because the artworld is not that different from any other geek subculture: we have our own culture, our inside jokes, and we love things that makes us feel like we belong to a community. Of course there is a problem of accessibility. It is hard to understand Pippin Barr’s the Artist is present without being at least aware of Marina Abramovic’s performance of the same name. The game is a simulation of the absurd experience of being there, waiting in line in order to have a staring context with the art star. Games about art select their audience. I’m personally wary of taking a popular form and “elevate” it to an high culture status, even when it’s through self-conscious humor or parody. But we have to keep in mind that contemporary artists are always in dialog with artists of the past and are always drawing from other cultural fields. There’s a lot of art about art and sometimes it’s more than inside jokes, it’s a sign that art and the art system, much like the scientific consensus, is in constant revision (feminist remakes, institutional critique etc.). And I think there is a great potential in games that are community and culture specific, as opposed to designed to reach the widest audience possible. Art Game by Pippin Barr goes a step beyond the art reference and “simulates” the artistic process as a game within a game. Satirizing the plight of the self-absorbed artist, the arbitrariness of value in contemporary art and its abstruse language is quite easy, but the game also draws some interesting parallels. If games are art, what about the detritus of the gameplay? The piles of tetris blocks, the trajectories of space shooters… Maybe the artworks that are not games by themselves are simply the outcomes of playful acts. Games redefining play Games redefining play may be an awkward wording but I want to make sure I’m not referring to experimental games – as in games-with-novel-gameplays. With the rise of independent development, innovation is becoming the norm. The game language is evolving faster now than ten-fifteen years ago, when only the technological advancement seemed to dictate the game forms, but being original is not the unique prerogative of artists. Here I’m talking about works that are presented as games but are intentionally pushing the boundaries of gaming. This is the case of the so called NotGames by Tale of Tales, among the others. These are works that use game technology and game conventions but intentionally deter a goal-oriented mode of play. The synesthetic exploration game Proteus gives the player a very limited agency, an agency that has nothing to do with the control over the environment. Rather, it lets you modulate the experience of its rich hyper-natural soundscape. Aside of goals, this kind of work can challenge other aspects we tend to consider core properties of games. For example the safety of the cybernetic magic circle is violated by Lose/Lose a game that deletes a file from your computer every time you defeat an enemy. Or challenging the idea that winning a game is a matter of skill or chance. This game, referencing John Cage has almost no visuals, only a loading bar. It’s an online game that you play by simply running the file and doing nothing. The goal is to be the only person in the world who plays it for 4 minutes and 33 seconds. If somebody else in the world runs it, you lose. Vesper 5 is another game that literally stretches the experience of play to the extreme. The goal is to explore the area and reach a point in the map, but you can only take one step per day (real life day). The act of playing becomes a ritual that requires a unusual type of commitment and patience. Game Art This is the most “conservative” line of engagement between art and games. By game art I mean artworks that do not employ a game medium but incorporate motifs or themes that belong to game culture. One of the earliest examples I could find is this series of imaginary game screenshots from the early ’90. They look like contemporary weird indie games but they are just digital images made by a visual artist. Some game art follows the tradition of pop art. Referencing commercial culture and giving it a fine art treatment. Sometimes these works are indistinguishable from glorified examples of fan culture. But some game art can produce powerful images or objects that can give us insights on our medium and community. Is the Modern Fossils series a commentary on planned obsolescence in gaming? This series of long exposure screenshots by Rosemarie Fiore are striking portraits of gameplay patterns. Distellamap is a series of infographics that unpack the source code behind classic Atari games along with their execution flow. Or this project from the player perspective. It’s a tab, like a guitar notation, that contains a perfect playthrough of Super Mario. It makes you wonder if there is a space for creative play in that kind of game. Is the act of playing just an exercise in muscle memory? And yes, these works are not games, but ignoring them on the basis of the artistic medium, puts us out of touch with contemporary artistic practice. Contemporary art has been steadily moving away from a medium-based approach toward a post-media practice. Artists don’t want to be confined into ghettos like video art, installation art, new media art. They want to be able to adopt different media according to their needs. Art with games There are practices that tackle games from a performative angle. Dead in Iraq is a digital performance and a memorial to the fallen soldier in Iraq that takes place inside American Army’s servers. The artists logs in the well known recruiting game and every time his avatar dies he types name, rank, and date of death of an actual soldier, short-circuiting the reality of war with the propagandistic depiction of the first person shooter. Machinima can also fit in this genre. People tend to associate machinima with fan-culture or with that lousy comedy series set in Halo, but artist have been doing great machinima even before that term was coined. For example this is a systematic study on game deaths by Brody Condon. This approach doesn’t really relate to the question: can games (as objects) be art but rather: can games be played or misplayed artfully? Can players be artists? Of course we have a lot of games like Minecraft or Little Big Planet that enable players to be creative, which is an euphemism for generating content for free. But it’s a Lego set kind of creativity, that smells like STEM informal learning. Art performances within games are typically antagonistic to the products they use. They are exploits, conceptual hacks that expose certain technical or ideological limits of commercial games. But I wonder if antagonism a requisite for meaningful intervention. Is it even possible to create game artifacts that embrace and encourage this kind of expressive, critical and subversive play? Artgames The artgame genre or movement emerged mostly within and around the game industry. Artgames don’t try to break all the rules of gaming. They don’t try to challenge our idea of game. Rather, they put a strong emphasis on craft and on the procedural aspect of videogames. It’s art as in “art rock”, as Jason Rohrer once put it. The gameplay, the formal system of rules, is the primary vector of expression. And the narrative component is tightly coupled with it. Themes too, tend to be different than the ones found in traditional videogames (so far at least). Games for grown-ups This takes me to another plane that intersects most of the others: games for grown-ups. They are a reaction to an industry dominated by teenage fantasies. The issue of content comes up frequently in the discourse around art and games (please enjoy yet another fanboy headline). You have titles like Bioshock that kinda give you the impression of dealing with important themes while you are shooting and blowing things up. Or works that aim to solicit a range of emotions that are not typically associated with games and competition. In this idea of games (and gamers) growing up there is a hierarchy of emotions. Some feelings seem to be more adult and noble than others: empathy, melancholia, nostalgia. A work that moves you is for some reason more highly regarded than a work that makes you laugh or freaks you out. There is a well known trope in videogame culture: Can video games make you cry? It originated from this Electronic Arts ad from 1983. It’s a really nicely written manifesto – and a cool rockstar photoshoot. It’s so hard to believe that it was the origin of what is now one of the most conservative game companies in the world. A cautionary tale for all young indies. The trope of noble emotions re-emerged in the mid ’90s when Myst came out and was saluted as the first example of artistic game. Almost 20 years later this opening paragraph can be applied to a bunch of recent titles I mentioned before: Dear Esther, Bientot L’ete, Proteus, the Witness… Let’s be clear, I’m glad to see games exploring and soliciting different responses. But I also think it’s time to abandon this hierarchy of emotions in relation to the artistic merit of a game. Most contemporary artist couldn’t care less about making people cry, that’s the job of cheesy Hollywood movies or drama TV shows. And many artists working with games and game culture are actually very much into violence. A sculpture connected to a Counterstrike Server that spills a drop of fake blood every time somebody dies online. Or the isometric screenshots I showed before. Or the work by Eddo Stern which I’ll show in a second. That’s because these artist’s interest is in games as a techno-cultural phenomenon. They are trying to explore how these games are products of a specific society, in a specific moment in time. When digital artists, decide to adopt a game form it is often because they are interested in investigating the nature of medium itself, and not just use it as a device to express or manipulate emotions. Installation games Some games are specifically designed for art spaces and art audiences. Painstation is a good early example one. It’s a Pong clone that introduces real pain in the competition: your hands get electric shocks, burns, and lashes every time you miss the ball. You lose when you can’t stand the pain anymore. It’s a very intense experience. Eddo Stern’s Tekken Torture Tournament (from the same year) is also connecting virtual pain with physical pain, and is presented as a fight-club like event. I find fascinating that both these work and several others in this genre satirize the macho posturing of many mainstream games. They over-identify with them and make violence appear even more over the top. Some artists (perhaps not coincidentally women) took the opposite approach when transforming game interfaces for art spaces. In Sweetpads you play a Quake deathmatch by gently touching a sphere. If you are too rough the game doesn’t respond. This is also an intense experience. Imagine seeing your rocket launcher-wielding enemy slowly turning toward you. You can’t panic or twitch react, only softly caressing the controller hoping to have enough time and focus to evade. By simply enlarging the controller, Mary Flanagan turned single player Atari games into collaborative experiences, since moving and firing requires the collaboration of multiple people. In Massage Me a wearable game controller converts button mashing and combos in Tekken into a massage for the benefit of a non player. The gamepad/corset is cleverly designed to allow both meaningful controls and pleasurable massage patterns. Installation games bring up the issue of art spaces. Art is not only what artists do but also whatever lives (or dies) in a museum or a gallery. Like it or not, the job of most artist boils down to fill some empty space, to take advantage of, and justify the existence of the art infrastructure: These white clean rooms, where civil and educated people hang out. I’m personally not interested in creating work for these institutions, because I’m not interested in entertaining the mainly privileged people who hang out in these spaces. And I believe the most interesting art now happens outside of the white cube: net art, social practice, creative activism, performance. These practices are rarely mentioned in the Art vs Games discourse because we are obsessed by museums, and yet they have a lot of things in common with games and play. But I also believe these traditional art spaces are interesting and important because they have unique affordances: they allow you to have a complete control of the environment and the players. You can do illegal stuff, you can do very unpractical stuff, you can do grandiose and insane stuff without fretting about game systems or distribution platforms. This is very different from the museification process that got gamers and industry so excited. When I look at this artsy MoMafication of Pac-Man: grey, dry, walltexted, with headphones, I start to think that maybe Pac-Man doesn’t need to be there in that space. Maybe the importance of Pac-Man is self evident. And maybe the role of the art system is not to validate already successful commercial works but to enable the existence of works that could not exist anywhere else. Another question worth asking is: should games with artistic ambitions be more exhibition friendly? Should they be short, easy to learn, arcadey to deal with the short attention span of art consumers? Games may need to disrupt the exhibitions space. Like performances and time-based art had to before them. In the early nineties black boxes were created to accommodate video art, for example. Festivals and events can be the best ways to bring together performance or socially engaged artists. We may need to bring some couches, snacks and drinks in the museum. Because you just can’t play Cart Life in 5 minutes while standing. In conclusion, here’s the problem: all these approaches and questions I just posed did not matter in the games vs art debate. Because that exciting, pedantic, fractal, never-ending dispute we call “art” was never the point of this debate. The point was to Upgrade the cultural status of videogames as a whole: as a medium and as an industry. For gamers it was a retroactive validation of the countless hours spent moving pixels around. For the game industry it was a chance to snort some of that fancy art dust without accepting the responsibilities that come along with working in that special area of culture. And critics, game makers, and scholars like us, people in this room who know about art and know about games, failed to propose a different narrative, a narrative that highlights the richness and the variety I just outlined. I don’t have a note for this keynote, but I do have a proposal, a desperate plea: Let’s stop identifying with the game industry. Let’s stop being academic/fans and glorify consumer products that were never meant to be more than consumer products. Instead of being advocates for the medium as a whole we can be advocates for good games and good art. Because we cannot have an art history of games without an art criticism of games. |
Syfy recently announced plans to rebrand itself, shifting away from the D-movie “Sharknado” schlock-fests, reality shows and pro wrestling and refocusing on quality original programming and along those lines, it’s unveiling its promising new series ‘The Magicians’ on December 16 at 10pm. To mark the special event, the pilot episode will air commercial-free! The show will return for its regular run in late January. Based on Lev Grossman’s hit fantasy novel series, ‘The Magicians’ follows an edgy group of students, attending a school for magic wielders. But don’t expect Hogwarts! This series promises to be a bit edgier and with an older cast, a lot sexier. Syfy will be airing its highly anticipated miniseries ‘Childhood’s End’ on consecutive nights, December 14-16 from 8-10pm. It will be using ‘Childhood’s End’ to help showcase not just ‘The Magicians’ but its other anticipated new drama ‘The Expanse’ starring Thomas Jane. The first two episodes of ‘The Expanse’ will air after the first two episodes on Monday and Tuesday, with ‘The Magicians’ appearing on Wednesday at 10pm. Here is a quick preview of ‘The Magicians’: Adapted from Lev Grossman’s New York Times best-selling fantasy trilogy, THE MAGICIANS centers on Quentin Coldwater, a brilliant grad student chosen to attend Brakebills University for Magical Pedagogy, a secret upstate New York university specializing in magic. He and his 20-something friends soon discover that the magical fantasy world they read about as children is all too real – and poses grave danger to humanity. ‘The Magicians’ stars Jade Tailor, Jason Ralph, Olivia Taylor Dudley, Hale Appleman, Stella Maeve, Arjun Gupta, Summer Bashil and Edwin Perez. Its regular premier will be on January 25th. Source: The Hollywood Reporter |
Rep. Jared Polis has called on Attorney General Eric Holder to look into whether the Drug Enforcement Administration acted inappropriately and in defiance of federal government policy by raiding and arresting a small medical marijuana grower in Colorado. Polis, a freshman Democrat who represents the state, told HuffPost that he also met with Drug Czar Gil Kerlikowske and pressed him on the issue. "I was very impressed with him," said Polis. Now he's working on Holder. In February, Holder said that the Justice Department would not arrest or prosecute people for drug law violations if they are following state medical marijuana laws. The department issued a memo to that effect in October. The DEA raid and subsequent comments from top special agent Jeffrey Sweetin that the drug warriors would "arrest everybody" created a climate of "widespread panic" in Colorado, Polis wrote to Holder in a letter this week. He asked the AG to clarify in writing whether the department's policy was still in effect. The man captured in the raid has been charged by the U.S. Attorney for intent to distribute drugs. "It seems like there is a disconnect between the field and the White House policy," Polis told HuffPost. "You have rogue agents like the one in Colorado, like Jeff Sweetin, that are going around, that are making statements that are scaring people, and that are disrupting a doctor-patient relationship that is sanctioned by the people of Colorado." Medical marijuana is legal as part of Colorado's constitution. "I think clearly the Attorney General and Washington need to have more clear guidelines and they need to enforce those guidelines nationally so that no other agents step out of line and scare people who are following state laws," said Polis. The DEA was alerted to the defendant's pot-growing operation because he gave an interview to a local TV station. "Sometimes there's a subculture within law enforcement that seeks enforcement for the sake of enforcement. And serious law enforcement professionals need to put a stop to that," said Polis. "The voters overwhelmingly passed a medical marijuana law, and regardless of what Coloradoans feel about medical marijuana, they overwhelmingly agree that the federal government should not intervene with what we believe to be a state and local decision," he said. Polis compared the situation to alcohol enforcement -- even if the grower broke state law, as the DEA insists, that is an issue that should be left to the state. "Until recently, Colorado had blue laws so we weren't allowed to have liquor stores open on Sunday," said Polis. "I didn't see any federal agents raid liquor stores on Sunday. That was a state issue and so is this." |
Swansea striker Michu to be given a first Spain call-up Michu: First Spain cap on the way for Swansea striker The Swansea striker has made a massive impact in his first season in England, and his 13th league goal of the season against Manchester United on Sunday put him on top of the scoring charts at Christmas. Michu cost Swansea only just over £2m and has proved to be a real bargain buy, his form helping the Swans into a comfortable mid-table position. Spain face Uruguay in a friendly in Doha on 6 February and their coach Vicente del Bosque said: "Michu and Iago Aspas will appear." Celta Vigo striker Aspas has also been linked with a move to Swansea in the press, although an asking price of more than £8m could prove to be a stumbling block. Aspas has been with Celta since his early days in their youth set-up and was instrumental in getting them promoted to La Liga last season with 23 goals - he has added six more in 12 top-flight outings in 2012-13. |
Pride of Detroit is counting down the top 10 Lions players of 2012, as voted on by readers of the site. More than 400 ballots were submitted, and up first is a look at the No. 10 player on the list. No. 10 - RB Jahvid Best - 747 points The votes are in, and after 10 or so hours of going through all of the ballots and counting up the results, the top 10 Lions of 2012 has been established. 457 ballots were ultimately accepted (nearly 500 were submitted, but many were dropped for a variety of reasons). With the rankings set, we will reveal the full top 10 over the course of the next couple weeks and also take a more in-depth look at the numbers. First up on the top 10 Lions of 2012 is running back Jahvid Best. He appeared on 186 of the ballots and ended up with a total of 747 points. He had two votes for second place on the list, but the majority of the votes for Best were for somewhere in the last half of the top 10. His 747 points were just three less than the ninth-place finisher and were 42 more than the player who came in 11th on the list. The theme of Best's career with the Lions so far, unfortunately, has been injuries. Turf toe issues clouded his rookie season in 2010, although Best still managed to rush for 555 yards and four touchdowns and pick up 487 yards and two touchdowns as a pass-catcher. This past season, Best only played in six games due to a concussion ending his season early. It was his second in the span of a couple months, and it ultimately cut short a season that got off to a very promising start. (He had 390 rushing yards and two touchdowns and 287 receiving yards and one touchdown in only six games.) The Lions' offense really took a few steps backward after Best went down. His absence was not the only reason for their mid-season struggles by any means, but losing him certainly didn't help. He brings a lot to the offense both as a running back and a receiver, and the Lions lost a big weapon with him going down for the year. In 2012, Best is hoping to return from his latest concussion and put all injury issues in the rear-view mirror. He is expecting to be cleared for contact before training camp begins, and if he can stay healthy, he should be the Lions' starting running back. The theme of the entire running back position is staying healthy, and given his concussion issues in the past, for Best staying healthy could be the difference between having a breakout season and potentially having his career come to an abrupt end. Injury concerns aside, Best will be a big part of the offense going forward if he is on the field. His speed gives the Lions another dimension offensively, and although they certainly aren't lacking playmakers, Best is one of the biggest playmakers on the team. It's no surprise he landed on the top 10 Lions of 2012, and if he is able to make it through next season without any injuries, he should be a candidate to rise up the 2013 version of this list. Reminder: You can follow Pride of Detroit on Twitter and like us on Facebook. |
A Russian Mil Mi-8 helicopter crashed in the Democratic Republic of Congo and the fate of the crew is unknown, a source in Russia’s law-enforcement agencies said on Sunday. MOSCOW, March 10 (RIA Novosti) – A Russian Mil Mi-8 helicopter crashed in the Democratic Republic of Congo and the fate of the crew is unknown, a source in Russia’s law-enforcement agencies said on Sunday. The helicopter, which belonged to Russian airline UTair, worked in the central African country under a UN contract. “According to preliminary information, a Russian Mi-8 helicopter crashed in the mountainous terrain at an altitude of 2,700 meters, some 20 km [12 miles] south-west of the town of Bukavu,” the source said. There were four crew members, all of them Russian nationals, aboard the helicopter. UTair has earlier reported a Mi-8AMT helicopter was performing a Shabunda-Bukavu flight on Saturday in complex weather conditions. Communication with the helicopter interrupted some 10 miles from the Bukavu airport. The helicopter was detected in hard-to-access terrain on Sunday at an altitude of 2,700 meters. |
NewsFamily OTTAWA, March 7, 2014 (LifeSiteNews.com) – Apparently even Canada’s porn channels are scrutinized for their Canadian content. The Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC) has ruled that three pornography channels “may have failed to comply with its conditions of licence.” All three channels are owned by the Toronto-based company, Channel Zero. In addition to failing to provide at least 35 percent Canadian content, they also failed to provide at least 90 percent closed-captioning for the hearing impaired. Channel Zero describes itself as “an independent Canadian media company,” and owns a number of specialty channels, as well as CHCH in Hamilton. It is jointly owned by four individuals, two of whom are its president, Carl Millar, and its CEO, Romen Podzyhun. Click "like" if you say NO to porn! The ruling has met with ridicule throughout the country, as people of every ideological stripe attempt to imagine how it is possible to conceive of pornography as fitting into the paradigm of cultural development and preservation which the CRTC’s ‘Canadian content’ rules are meant to serve. In their attempt to capitalize on the humorous dimension of this story, most news sources have missed that the pornography broadcaster is also under scrutiny for two other problems associated with its original application. The CRTC noticed a discrepancy in the ownership of the company and the holder of the broadcasting licence. The Commission also noted that the company “may have also failed to comply with its condition of licence relating to its nature of [the] service definition.” These matters will be discussed at a hearing at CRTC headquarters in Gatineau, Quebec, on April 28. At stake is the renewal of the company’s broadcasting rights. Public feedback is being accepted in relation to the licencing renewal, which can be given via its website until April 4. Submissions can also be made by that deadline by mail or by fax: Secretary General of the Commission, CRTC, Ottawa, Ontario K1A 0N2 Fax: 819-994-0218 |
Female-majority city council in Texas left fuming after male consultant described experience with women during presentation for municipal staff They ask lots of questions that can require patience, they tend to tune out financial arguments and with Hillary Clinton running for president, more are probably on the way. That was how a male consultant invited by Austin city managers described his experience with elected women during a presentation for municipal staff, which left the female-majority city council fuming and officials backtracking in Texas’s most liberal city on Wednesday. City officials say they organized the workshop titled “Changing Dynamics in Government” because women now control the 11-member Austin city council for the first time. At a news conference on Wednesday, Austin’s seven city councilwomen rebuked the seminar as outdated and appalling. “Women don’t read agenda information? We don’t want to deal with numbers? Come on,” Councilwoman Leslie Pool said. The workshop took place in March, but councilwomen say they were unaware of it until a story published this week in the Austin American-Statesman. Jonathan K Allen, a former small-town Florida city manager, led the seminar and told participants that he expects more women to follow Clinton’s example and run for elected office. Allen told Austin city employees that they would be making “a serious error” if they dealt with a female-dominated council in the same way as one controlled by men. Selling women on a costly project, he said, might require talking more about local impact than dollars and cents, even when the numbers alone should make a convincing case. “It may make good financial sense, but if I want to get it through and get the necessary votes, I have to present it a totally different way,” Allen said. He also suggested that women are less likely to read agenda packets that hold the answers to question they’re asking. Allen said listening to his daughter once inundate with him questions taught him how to be more patient and communicate better with people, “even when they know the answer”. A phone message left for Allen was not immediately returned on Wednesday. Two weeks after speaking in Austin, Allen was fired as city manager in Lauderdale Lakes, where he answered to an all-female board of city commissioners. Lauderdale Lakes vice-mayor Beverly Williams said on Wednesday that conflicting goals had emerged between Allen and the commission. She said Allen never talked down to her. She also emphasized that she does her due diligence on the job. “I read everything. I am concerned about our financial statements. I do ask a lot of questions and expect a lot of answers,” Williams said. Austin city manager Marc Ott apologized for the training session, which his office organized, saying it should have been better vetted. Councilwomen questioned why anyone thought such a workshop was needed in the first place. “All of these women can do math. All of these women understand how to make financial decisions,” Councilwoman Ellen Troxclair said. |
Zaitokukai, also known as the Citizens Against Special Privilege of Zainichi, is a far-right anti-foreigner group devoted to “eliminating the privilege” of Zainichi Koreans in Japan, although their activities more often characterised as acts of racism and hate speech. Zaitokukai’s frequent demonstrations are at the forefront of the discriminatory movements against Zainichi throughout Japan. On June 16, the group made news when several prominent members of the group were arrested on charges of assault after one of their usual protests got out of hand. Although the media seems to be wary of explicitly naming the opposing group that showed up to counter-protest Zaitokukai’s demonstration, many believe it was the Shitback Crew, an anti-Racist group that has since posted video footage of the incident online. Although some might find the footage of counter-protestors shouting “Racists go home!” at the Zaitokukai protesters inspiring, the netouyo have unsurprisingly come out in full force in support of the Zaitokukai members. Many commenters are taking issue with the media coverage of the incident, saying that the article is biased for releasing the name of the leader of Zaitokukai but not the counter-protesters. What do you think? Is the media unfairly influencing the way this story is spread, or are they merely showing legitimate concern for the safety of an already marginalized minority? From Yahoo! Japan: Eight Zaitokukai Chairmen Arrested, Suspected of Assault at Shinjuku Anti-Foreign Demonstration – Tokyo Police After a hate speech demonstration in the Shin-Okubo area of Tokyo calling for the expulsion of Koreans living in Japan resulted in conflict between demonstrators and an opposing group on June 16, Shinjuku police arrested leader Takada Makoto (alias Sakurai Makoto, 41, of the Hirai district of Edogawa ward in Tokyo) of the Citizens Against Special Privilege of Zainichi (also known as Zaitokukai) on suspicion of assault. In total, eight men and women were caught red-handed by Tokyo Metropolitan Police. According to Shinjuku police, at around 3 pm on June 16 a demonstration called “The Shinokubo Sakurada Festival” was scheduled to take place around Shinjuku’s Ookubo station, but before it could start, there was a conflict with members of an opposing group near the station around 2 pm. Four people from the demonstrating group, including Takada, and four people from the opposing group, including photographer Okubo Kenji (48, of the Miyasaka district in Setagaya ward), were arrested. No one involved in the demonstration was injured. Takeda was arrested on the charge that he allegedly grabbed the collar of the self-styled manager of the opposing group (male, 46) and spat on him on Shinjuku street a little after 2. Takada has denied the charge. Comments from Yahoo! Japan: へのへのもへ（run…）さん: They’re releasing the name of the Zaitokukai leader and treating him as a suspect, but they’re not releasing the name of the person from the Shitback Crew who was also arrested for fighting. It’s completely clear that they’re intentionally hiding them. You can totally tell from the name Sei Yoshiaki anyone can completely tell that he’s Zainichi, so they’re not releasing it because they’re concerned. I understand how unfair the mass media’s reporting is. It’s cowardice to be concerned about even those who have been arrested. The mass media can’t help being called traitors, because it’s true. あゆみネコです！（k10…）さん: Shin-Okubo is not Korean territory! Go back to your country right now. 水瀬大魔神（miz…）さん: The Japanese government should abolish Zainichi privileges and ban legal aliases ASAP. helpfuljoy（wor…）さん: This article seems to be biased towards an online community for Korean current affairs. To the last, Zaitokukai’s purpose is to forbid the special privileges of Zainichi, and they don’t have anti-foreign or hate speech goals. 水瀬大魔神（miz…）さん: From the bottom of my heart, I hate Koreans!! (´･Д･)（fxx…）さん: They’ve intentionally made it hard to understand, but there where four people from Zaitokukai arrested, and four people from the opposing Zainichi left-wing group, right? The title obscures this and makes it look like eight members of Zaitokukai were arrested. eig*tta**s（eig…）さん: We can’t allow the oppression of freedom of expression. I think Zaitokukai’s assertions are extremely correct. licensacc（wit…）さん: It’s a biased article, isn’t it? Typical shit news. It can’t be helped that they try to make Zaitokukai look bad, Korean garbage media. 月島 花（wor…）さん: The Shitback Crew, a group of South Korean naturalized citizens, came to interfere in their army of Mercedes-Benzes, but why couldn’t they be arrested? It was probably an attempted murder. Is not being arrested even after attempting murder becoming a Zainichi special privilege? 侍日本魂（sam…）さん: Calm down. They can’t do anything more than arrest him for something like this. Let’s enforce justice without using violence. In the name of proving that Japanese history isn’t wrong, too. ほうじ（myo…）さん: Both sides were arrested, and both parties in the fight will be punished together, but the biased article’s headline strongly indicates that “Zaitokukai” is bad. nao（nao…）さん: It seems like the Zainichi think this is the downfall of the Zaitokukai, but it’s no joke. Whenever there’s an unfair arrest, our unity becomes stronger, and moreover the anger towards the Zainichi just increases. Even so, Sakurai is a pen name so they gave out his real name, but the Zainichi who were arrested were probably using common names, so why don’t they give out their Korean names? It’s weird! 卍丸（man…）さん: We absolutely can’t allow hate speech by Koreans toward the Japanese. Comfort women? Lies! Invasion? Morons who don’t feel gratitude for being “merged” and “modernized” during the colonial period can shut the hell up! We can’t forgive the Koreans who extort money and insult our ancestors’ dreams of peace in Asia. シュルツ司令とガンツの顔射衛生法（tak…）さん: Even if you get pissed off, please stop the behaving just like the Koreans. (＊◇＊)（joi…）さん: Have you thought about why only the Koreans are the targets of demonstrations, even though Japan has a lot of foreigners? Zainichi & Netouyo? シラっとした民意（man…）さん: That street lined with Hangul signs is somehow really creepy. バンドろっくす（jjj…）さん: It’s the media’s fault that anti-Korean people like this are increasing! Korea is waging a negative campaign around the world against Japan, but on TV you just see news biased towards Korea, so they’re raising their voices. It’s what the Turkish people are fighting for now. kanamehaorenoyome（wgh…）さん: They get a perfect score for shadiness for not giving the name of the opposing group. w The mass media’s approach to reporting is incredible. w Give the names of the bastards on the opposing side, too! w They’re probably common names, but ww Well, Zaitokukai is inconsequential, but the mass media’s garbage is really coming out, huh? ww t9t*ash（t9t…）さん: The sense of balance of the correspondent writing this article is dubious. He didn’t give out the names of eight people arrested from “Zaitokukai.” The internet community doesn’t encourage biased reporting, so you should quit it already. That’s also a reason to collect an unbiased evaluation of Zaitokukai’s activities in a place like this. sleep_aig（sle…）さん: |
After playing Dr. Manhattan in the Warner Bros. film “Watchmen,” Billy Crudup is now looking to reunite with the studio on one of their highly anticipated comic book movies. Sources tell Variety Crudup is in talks to play the father of Barry Allen (aka the Flash) in the upcoming Warner Bros. and DC Entertainment film, which stars Ezra Miller as the title character. Warner Bros. had no comment. Kiersey Clemons is also on board as Iris West with “Dope” helmer Rick Famuyiwa. Seth Grahame-Smith penned the script which is based on a treatment by Chris Miller and Phil Lord. Production is expected to start this year with the pic set to open on March 16, 2018. Plot details are being kept under wraps but Miller has already made a cameo as the character in “Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice” and will also appear as the superhero in “Justice League” which opens next year. Crudup has roles in the Oscar winning “Spotlight”, the Sundance darling “The Stanford Prison Experiment,” the upcoming biopic “Jackie” and “20th Century Women” starring Annette Bening. Crudup most recently wrapped production on “Alien: Covenant.” He is repped by CAA and Lighthouse Management. |
Moeen Ali has been banned from wearing “Save Gaza” and “Free Palestine” wristbands in the remainder of the third Test against India in Southampton by David Boon, the former Australia batsman who is the International Cricket Council’s match referee. England had cleared Moeen to wear the bands, arguing that he was making a humanitarian statement and not a political one, and perhaps sensitive to accusations of inconsistency as the whole team will wear the logo of the Help for Heroes charity on their shirts on Tuesday to commemorate the 100th anniversary of the outbreak of the first world war. But the ICC issued the following statement on Tuesday morning: “The ICC equipment and clothing regulations do not permit the display of messages that relate to political, religious or racial activities or causes during an international match. Moeen Ali was told by the match referee that while he is free to express his views on such causes away from the cricket field, he is not permitted to wear the wristbands on the field of play and warned not to wear the bands again during an international match.” |
The 2016 Autodesk University event kicked off in Las Vegas yesterday, and the design software company wasted no time in making some big announcements for the VR industry. For those that don’t know, Autodesk creates software for various industries, allowing designers to make 3D models and environments for professional use. Its services already support VR viewing, but now the company is going one step further. Forge, the company’s cloud-based developer platform, is now coming to the HTC Vive via the Viveport platform. The service will let designers and creators build products in VR, show them with others. Autodesk CTO Jeff Kowalski spoke of the importance of VR to the company’s work during his keynote speech at Autodesk University. “When you’re in VR, you’re more connected to your data,” he said. “It’s more detailed, it’s more emotional and meaning full.” He talked about interacting with data at “human scale”, designing chairs or even buildings at their correct scales. “Of course, the ultimate step is actually designing in VR,” Kowalski continued. “And we’re working on new tools that let you model and simulate in a VR environment from the start.” An example of what’s possible with Forge in VR is being shown at the event this week. With Forge, HTC and Autodesk are looking to build the dominant platform for VR product design, architecture and more. A release date for Forge on Viveport hasn’t been announced, though its pricing model is likely to follow the one already established: $500 a month with a free 12 month trial period with limit cloud data storage. We’re not sure if Forge integration is exclusive to Vive or could coming to the Oculus Rift and Touch later down the line, though we’ve reached out to the company to find out. IT’s not the only VR announcement made at this week’s event, with IrisVR also launching its own VR products. Tagged with: autodesk, design, Vive |
A Jet Airways flight from Mumbai to London was recently shadowed by fighter aircraft from the German Air Force when it fell silent over the European country's airspace after communication got snapped with the German Air Traffic Control (ATC). Jet Airways, in a statement, said that the flight managed to land safely in London after contact was restored and that the matter has been reported to the Directorate General of Civil Aviation (DGCA). Also read: Jet Airways flight to London loses contact briefly with ATC while flying over Germany What happened? According to an official statement from Jet Airways: "Contact between Jet Airways flight 9W 118, from Mumbai to London Heathrow, of February 16, 2017, and the local ATC, was briefly lost while flying over German airspace. Communication was safely restored within a few minutes." The carrier added: "As a precaution, the German Air Force deployed its aircraft to ensure the safety of the flight and its guests. The flight with 330 guests and 15 crew members subsequently landed at London without an incident. Jet Airways has duly reported the matter to the concerned authorities including the DGCA. As part of the standard process, the flight crew of 9W 118 has been de-rostered pending investigation." Was there a terror scare? While there is no official word yet on what the German authorities suspect, parallels can be drawn with the September 11, 2001, terror attacks in the United States – also known as the 9/11 terror attacks – in which planes were crashed into the twin towers of the World Trade Centre and the Pentagon. In all four cases of the aircraft hijacks at that time – a fourth aircraft crash-landed in a field – the hijackers had ensured that radio silence was maintained by the pilots as the planes were steered towards their intended targets. The German authorities may have suspected something similar when they were met with radio silence from Jet Airways flight 9W 118. What's more, the Islamic State group – also known as Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) or Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) – has been posturing with its terror threats against European nations for quite some time, and has even perpetrated a few. That would have been playing on the minds of the officials manning the ATC in Germany. Whatever the case, the incident showed the preparedness of Germany in case of a 9/11-style attack on its soil. Human error? A new possibility that has arisen is that of human error, and something the DGCA has to probe. Aviation Herald, which broke the news, later reported that the temporary radio silence – alternatively loss of communication – could have been due to the crew member in charge of communication goofing up on some numbers. The Aviation Herald report said the aircraft stopped transmitting when it was being handed over from the Bratislava ATC to the one at Prague Centre. The radio frequency of Prague communication centre is 132.890 MHz, while the crew may have tuned in to 132.980 MHz, and the swapping of the digits resulted in Prague not receiving any communication from them. |
From the beginning, boosters of Dogecoin have said the meme-themed cryptocurrency was different from all the others. Many of the other major currencies, like Bitcoin and Litecoin, have a hard cap on the number of coins that can be created; when Bitcoin hits 21 million coins in 2140, no more new units of the currency will even come onto the market. Dogecoin, on the other hand, will go on creating new coins forever—making it more akin to currencies issued central banks. It’s a decision that was written into the system’s original code and, after months of intense debate, recently reaffirmed by a post on collaborate development web-hosting platform Github by Dogecoin creator Jackson Palmer. There are a couple reasons behind the decision. The first is that Palmer was hoping to ensure the health of the Dogecoin network itself. All cryptocurrencies use a public ledger in which all transactions as a way to ensure that someone doesn’t get away with attempting to spend a single coin multiple times. Since there’s no central financial institution through which transactions flow, that ledger is maintained by computers around the world running software that logs all new transactions. New coins enter the market through a process called mining. Using an elaborate guessing game of solving incredibly complex mathematical equations, one group of miners somewhere on the system is rewarded with a block of freshly minted currency every so often. For cryptocurrencies with a limited supply, the rate at which new coins are generated gradually slows over time until it hits zero. In an email to the Daily Dot, Palmer explained that placing a cap on the final number coins has the potential to make the rewards for mining Dogecoins so small (or non-existent) that there won’t be enough miners to keep the system running. ?The sad reality is that a lot of the hash rate on alt-coin networks comes from multi-poolers who are mining coins then instantly cashing out—they just go after whatever is most profitable,” Palmer wrote. ?As block rewards get lower and lower over time, these guys disappear and move on to a newer, more profitable alt-coin. This is the fate of most coins coming on the market (and why you see them popping up and dying every day). By keeping the reward there, the hope is that a number of miners will remain and keep the network running into the future.” ?If it costs more U.S. dollars to mine a Bitcoin than I’m being rewarded for solving a block, where’s the incentive for *anyone* to do so?” Palmer continued. ?I’d like to hope there are some kind hearts out there who’ll continue to point their hashing power at the network just because they believe in the currency, but I think we can all recognize that the bulk of miners are into cryptocurrency for the profit in U.S. dollars they can make.” There’s also another benefit to reaffirming that dogecoins will be mined for perpetuity, one that’s elemental to the very nature of the culture surrounding Dogecoin. To understand that, it’s important to step back for a moment and look at what it means to have a cap. Currencies with a hard limit on the number of coins that will enter circulation are labeled “deflationary” because they’re designed to increase in value over time as adoption picks up and new coins entering the ecosystem can’t keep pace. Over the past six months, the price of Bitcoin has quadrupled—from $200 to $800 USD—because demand for the currency far outpaced the supply of new bitcoins coming onto the market, which is currently happening at only half the rate it was when the currency was first launched in 2009. Imagine how much the price would have swung up if there were no new bitcoins coming onto the market. Deflationary currencies are great for early adopters who want to use a cryptocurrency as an investment vehicle, because there’s a reasonable expectation that its value will increase over time. But a constant, expected increase in value also has a downside—hoarding. If someone is holding currency they know is going to increase in value, they have an incentive to hold onto it. This strategy works well for assets like stocks, but no one is trying to build a global payments network exclusively using shares of Exxon Mobil. The deflation issue has already hampered some business attempting to deal in Bitcoin. In an interview with Wired, Michal Handerhan, the co-founder BitcoinShop.us, a Bitcoin-only online retail portal attempting to become the ?Amazon.com of Bitcoin,” explained how he saw a 20 percent dip in sales right in the heart of Bitcoin’s most dramatic price spike. “People are holding their bitcoins and won’t let go,” Handerhan complained. While hoarding-related volatility is a minor roadblock in the way of Bitcoin’s widespread adoption, it could be disastrous for Dogecoin. Dogecoin is known primarily for two things: One, being named after one of the few 2013 memes that wasn’t annoying, and two, having an incredibly high transaction volume. Dogecoins move from person to person at a rate far higher than any other cryptocurrency. The value of all the Dogecoins in existence is currently just under $50 million USD, but users sent each other over $300 million USD worth of the currency in just the past 24 hours. The majority of this transaction activity comes in the form of users donating Dogecoins to each other, either by giving to charity or tipping each other with the help of automated bots on social media sites like Twitter and Reddit. Much of this free flow of Dogecoin can be attributed to a single coin only being worth a fraction of a penny, making the act of tipping someone for making a clever comment on Reddit only a tiny bit more consequential than hitting the ?upvote” button. However, a lot of it also has to do with the good-natured, communal culture that’s arisen surrounding the currency. Adding more units to the money supply (a.k.a. monetary inflation) doesn’t necessarily mean each unit of currency will be worth less (a.k.a. price inflation). While the two don’t often go hand-in-hand, price inflation typically follows monetary inflation if money is being pumped into the system without a concurrent expansion in economic activity. Basically, the amount of money in an economy should ideally grow at at about the same rate as the economy itself. A little bit of price inflation, however, is often seen as healthy for an economy. Since people know that the unit of currency sitting in their pocket is slowly becoming less valuable the longer they keep it there, they have an incentive to spend it—an act that makes an economy grow. That doesn’t mean there aren’t risks to picking the inflationary model. The next logical step in Dogecoin’s evolution is turning it into a commercial platform over which products can be bought and sold. Currently, only a small handful of merchants accept Dogecoin, but there are efforts to expand that base. If the value of a dogecoin drops to a level far lower than what it is now, it’s unlikely to make that jump from a cute novelty to a currency real people actually use to do things like order pizza or buy shampoo. The key is for the currency to hit that inflationary sweet spot. “As long as it’s at a steady and predictable rate, you would want that inflation rate to more or less match the growth of the global economy,” James Angel, a finance professor at Georgetown University, told Ars Technica. “In order for a currency to survive, it’s got to be useful. One of the problems we learned with gold standard was that it’s too inflexible—it takes too long for gold miners to dig it up out of the ground. Having a nice, steady, predictable money supply is actually a good thing.” One positive sign for Dogecoin to keep inflation at a healthy rate, despite a constant projected expansion of the overall number of coins, is that, while virtual currencies technically last forever, a significant number of them simply become lost. The most famous example of lost bitcoins is the sad tale of James Howells, who accidentally threw $7.5 million worth of bitcoins in the trash when he disposed of an old hard drive containing 7,500 units of the currency that purchased for a mere $6 a few months after Bitcoin first debuted. Palmer insists that, even though there’s been some griping from Dogecoin holders about inflation, the community has been largely supportive. ?Overall, the response has been positive because we followed what the community were saying—they want Dogecoin to continue,” he noted. ?A coin that nobody mines is a dead coin, so by keeping the incentive there (be it with fairly low rewards) past the target cap, we hope that Dogecoin can continue into the future rather than just dying like the majority of other alt-coins. We’re having way too much fun as a community for this to just die off.” Photo by Aaron Sankin/NoodlyTime |
I have not spoken to you since you successfully blocked our film, Don’s Plum, from being seen by the audience for whom it was intended. You might be the only actor in the history of American cinema who has publically and unapologetically shamed his director and then went on to destroy his work. And we just might be the only living filmmakers in America to have their film banned in the USA and Canada. This letter is about so much more than just a movie. It’s about bullying, censorship, and abuse of power. You and Tobey Maguire spat in the face of independent film and the community that helped get you where you are today. You are not bigger than art, Leo. You are not bigger than the films in which you act. In a single night in 1996, you made a series of hasty and wildly irrational decisions that hurt a lot of people. By abruptly cutting off all communication with me and RD Robb, you cut off your access to the truth. Had you just taken time to listen to reason, you would have found that Tobey Maguire was using you for his own mysterious purposes. Had you actually taken the time to look at the facts, and not just listened to Tobey, you would have continued to support Don’s Plum. But instead you allowed yourself to get swept up in a witch hunt that destroyed art and careers. After 18 years, I can no longer remain silent. I can no longer allow the defamation and lies that you perpetrated against Don’s Plum to scar the great work of the artists who created it. I’m not afraid of you or your lawyers anymore. I have endured enough. I’m going to speak with the freedom that our Constitution affords me. I’m going to stand up for our film and for every one of the people who helped make it. I’m writing you this open letter because I want nothing lost in translation. I’m going to set the record straight, and an open letter is the closest I could come to saying it face to face. I don’t know you anymore, Leo, but I hope that you’ve learned a little bit about film preservation and your responsibility to protect and contribute to the ongoing experiment of filmmaking. You said some very inspired things about independent film in your interviews with Charlie Rose. Watching you speak as if you never blocked a film, or a filmmaker’s first chance, was distressing and appalling. You’re going to have to make some difficult decisions after this letter. My hope is that you will recognize this as an opportunity to do things differently - to do them right. While I’m on the topic of interviews, you did one in Detour Magazine back in November of 1996. Printed just a few weeks after the infamous night at Kevin Connolly’s, it was the perfect snapshot of your issues surrounding Don’s Plum. I’m going to address your statements, and support some of the things I have to say using Tobey’s sworn testimony from his deposition in Stutman v. DiCaprio. I’m sure you can get a copy of the deposition if you would like to verify that what I am writing is accurate and in proper context. Printed in DETOUR MAGAZINE, November 1996 DENNIS COOPER: It’s amazing to me, what with all the rumours about you, that you trust people at all. DICAPRIO: I don’t, really. Like I had a friend who I did a short film with recently who slandered me. I was trying to do a favor for him. His name is R.D.Robb. It’s scandalous. It was originally a short film, and then he tried to make it into a feature. I worked one night on it. He tried to make it into a feature. And I heard all this stuff about how he was going to pit the press against me if I didn’t go along with him and do the feature. I just did it as a favor, you know? And then all this stuff happens and you ask why. Why be nice if that’s going to happen? OK… Let’s break this down. “I had a friend who I did a short film with recently who slandered me. I was trying to do a favor for him. His name is R.D. Robb. It’s scandalous.” You did Don’s Plum as a favor for all your friends, not RD alone. It seems to me that the only reason you would isolate RD with this fallacy is to maximize the amount of damage you could do to his name. And it worked. RD has never “slandered” you in his life. You won’t find a quote anywhere. Not before or after you slandered him in this article. Show Business has always been RD’s life. You knew what making a statement like this could do to his career and reputation. What’s even more troubling is that you were reacting to accusations by Tobey against me and Jerry Meadors, not RD. Yet, you deliberately set out to defame him publically. That, my friend, is scandalous. I hope you never know what it’s like to have a person with your power and influence attack your character. You have millions of fans and an almost ubiquitous influence in the business. I don’t think I have ever witnessed such an egregious misuse of fame. I hope one day you take responsibility for what you did to this talented man’s life. “It was originally a short film, and then he tried to make it into a feature.” Don’s Plum was never a short film, nor did anyone try and make it into a feature. That misunderstanding began when you chose The Saturday Night Club over Last Respects at your house in Los Feliz. Last Respects was a sub-30 page, short film script that you turned down because the script wasn’t strong enough. I remember your words clearly, “we can make Last Respects, but no one will ever see it.” Obviously no one wants to make a film that can’t be seen - that doesn’t make any sense - so Stutman pitched his Saturday Night Club concept. Saturday Night Club did not have a script. It was almost entirely improvisational in nature, which is why you all wanted make the film in the first place. Here is what Tobey had to say about it: Q: Do you recall any reaction that you had to Mr. Stutman’s explanation of what the Saturday Night Club project was at Mr. DiCaprio’s - the meeting at Mr. DiCaprio’s house? TOBEY: I was definitely more hopeful about that idea compared to Last Respects. And I was interested to see what that - what our further discussions would be or where it would go. Q: Okay. Why were you more hopeful about the Saturday Night Club project than Last Respects? TOBEY: Why? I remember that I wasn’t - I wasn’t super comfortable with the script of Last Respects, and the idea of improv sounded like it could be fun and could be more of a group collaboration and contributing to it, which is sort of my idea of what we were supposed to be doing together and having fun and contributing rather than like the script and a director. Without a script it is simply impossible to know or impose any length or running time until you actually get the footage in the can. Just think about it for a minute and you’ll realize this is true. That’s why, after the very first day of shooting, both RD and I told everyone else (you had left for NY by that point) that we thought we had enough footage to consider a feature. Here is Tobey’s memory about that point: Q: Do you recall during the three-day shoot of Don’s Plum in July of ‘95 any discussion at all that you heard or were a part of where Don’s Plum was discussed as a feature? TOBEY: I did hear along with the feet of film that there was enough footage to cut something longer than a short, not - I don’t know, you know, what time they were talking about, but you know, we have enough to, you know, cut something longer than a - I don’t know. They could have said something beyond that, but maybe they said we have enough to cut something over 70 minutes, or - I don’t remember - 80 minutes, or I don’t remember, but something like that. There is no such thing as a “longer than a short” film. It’s either a short, or a feature. Tobey knew the difference between the two. He was in an Academy Award nominated short in 1996. We called it by its only known name, a feature film, on the second day of shooting. Which makes Tobey’s very next response in his deposition a deliberate lie. Q: Do you recall hearing anyone saying… that they wanted Don’s Plum to be a feature film? TOBEY: No. We were transparent from the start. You gave us your blessing just days after wrapping the first shoot when we assured you we would make a cool little film or nothing at all. That is why, eight months after the initial shoot in ‘95, all of your close friends returned to shoot additional footage. Q: When you showed up to shoot the second shoot in March of ‘96, did you have the understanding that Don’s Plum was going to be a feature film? TOBEY: Yeah. I don’t - I don’t know what - what “going to be” means. I was aware that they were cutting a version of the film that was longer than a short film. Q: Okay. When you showed up to shoot the scenes for the second shoot of Don’s Plum, were you aware that they, R.D., Dale, were cutting a version of the film that was of feature length? TOBEY: I don’t really - I wasn’t aware of how long exactly, and I’m not sure what exactly determines when a film is feature length, so I don’t know how to answer that, really. But I knew it was much longer than a short. These answers demonstrate how ridiculous your accusations are. You and everyone else knew we were making a feature film. We hung out, along with all of our friends, numerous times over the eight months between shoots and while we were editing. Not only were we constantly talking about the film, but we were planning the next shoot. All that aside, if any one of the guys, including Tobey, hadn’t come back for the second shoot, we could not have completed Don’s Plum. The project would have died. We talked openly about how we hoped Don’s Plum would be good enough to go on to festivals and, eventually, arthouse theatres throughout the US and Canada. In fact, Tobey would talk about his financial interests in Don’s Plum with some regularity. Q: Did you ever tell Dale that you were going to screw Stutman out of all of his [profit] points on the film? Do you recall saying that to anybody? TOBEY: No. Although I do recall, you know, talking with somebody, maybe a combination of RD and Dale about profit points. When, I couldn’t tell you. And for me, it was in a kind of a joking tone, I would always ask them what were - not always, but you know, a couple of times or whatever, would ask them what their profit points were, and they were always trying kind of, “Oh, I don’t know what we have, and I don’t know what’s out there.” And I was, “Ah, come on, come on.” “Oh around 5, 7. I don’t know.” They’d always give me these answers. And then I’d say, “Well, you know? What’s up with that? Why do you guys have all these points?” I tried to avoid these uncomfortable discussions because my deal with David Stutman (who owned the film) was none of his business. But Tobey would not leave it alone, as usual, and so I finally told him my number to shut him up. He’s insinuating shady behavior where there was none. We were not responsible for negotiating Tobey’s deals. I had committed to work on Don’s Plum for a minimum of one year and those points were my only compensation. TOBEY: So those are the things that I remember about a discussion of profit points. And I would say - you know, talk about, you know, well, if this thing were to ever happen, you know, I would want tons and tons of stuff, you know? But it was always - it was not in like a serious manner to me because when those things were talked about seriously, my agent at least or my lawyer is talking about them. It was more a friend joking around. Tobey Maguire, always the kidder. I hope it’s becoming clear to you that it is absolute nonsense to characterize us as a bunch of evil filmmakers who fiendishly tried to turn a short piece of art into a longer piece of art. The film certainly evolved and we all evolved along with it. Q: What did you mean by “If this thing were to ever happen?” And what did you mean by “tons and tons of stuff”? TOBEY: Well, first of all it was in a joking context. And if this thing were to ever happen, if you know - if Leonardo ever agreed for it to be released or - or any which way, you know? I was joking, even if it was cut as a short or a feature and there was any kind of sale, either as a short to Showtime or if there was some kind of thing as a feature after Leo agreed, then you know, I would want tons and tons of stuff, meaning, you know, I was going to - I was going to have my people, you know, get me whatever they could points-wise and especially comparable to Dale and RD, you know? And you know, as far as what I was saying, it was mostly in a joking context, although I was curious as to what their points were, and all that kind of stuff. The issue of money was always on Tobey’s mind whenever we were together. I remember we were driving around in his old red toyota truck, just after seeing The City of Lost Children. He was nagging me about how much I would earn if Don’s Plum made 20 million dollars. I laughed it off, not believing for a second that our little film could fetch anywhere close to that kind of money. But Tobey knew better. He knew that, with you behind the film, my points could have been worth a tidy sum. His jaw nearly hit the floor when I told him I would earn 1.4 million. Sadly, I believe he would be pleased to know that my entire compensation for Don’s Plum was a little over $180. I worked for thousands of hours on that film and thousands more trying to defend it from the both of you. It took six years from the first day of shooting before Don’s Plum finally premiered at The Berlin Film Festival. Don’s Plum was never about money for me, it was just the beginning of what I hoped would be a long journey in filmmaking. “I worked one night on it.” Yeah, well, you’re amazing. And I’m serious about that. I don’t think there is a living actor today that could have done what you did in Don’s Plum in a single night. You and the entire cast were sensational and you should be proud of the work. It was truly a magical night for everyone, both on and off camera. Mike D’Angelo is a film critic whose written for Esquire magazine and thedissolve.com. He was also the Chief Film Critic for Time Out New York in 2001, when he called Don’s Plum the best film he saw at the Berlin Film Festival that year. Here are some lovely excerpts. “This is the movie that Kids wanted so desperately to be… every moment feels utterly true… Robb cited Mike Leigh in the post-film Q&A, but his film is a lot closer to teenage Cassavetes… Superb ensemble work – DiCaprio hasn’t been this strong since This Boy’s Life, and his is among the least effective performances here” - Mike D’Angelo for Time Out New York What Mr. D’Angelo didn’t know is that it was you who elevated every single one of us on that set. I loved you for what you did in Don’s Plum, but I hate what you did to it. You may have worked one night, but the rest of the artists and craftspeople worked thousands of nights combined to produce this little piece of art. What a terrible waste. “And I heard all this stuff about how he was going to pit the press against me if I didn’t go along with him and do the feature.” This is the fallacy that destroyed everything. You heard all of this pitting the press “stuff” from one person: Tobey Maguire. And you foolishly believed him. You never heard my account of what happened with him the night before we all met at Kevin Connolly’s house, when I endured a 15 hour ordeal with Tobey. By the time I arrived at Connelly’s, I hadn’t slept for more than 30 hours trying desperately to save our film. It all started when Tobey came over to RD’s place, at around 5 or 6pm, the night before Connolly’s, saying he wanted to make us something to eat and talk about Don’s Plum. He showed up with some macaroni and cheese and tofu wieners which was, in retrospect, an amazing statement in and of itself. He told us he had some concerns. “OK, fine,” we said, “let’s have a talk.” TOBEY: I said, “There’s a lot of questions that I feel need to be answered. I feel like you guys have been like really cryptic and - and I just don’t know. I feel like there’s things going on that I don’t know about it. It just feels like you guys are really manipulative and cryptic constantly, and I just want to know what the hell is going on, and what’s up with this Variety article? You know, and maybe there’s some mumblings around some things going on, you know, nothing really solid at that point, but I just, I feel really uncomfortable, and I would like you guys to come clean and just let me in on what’s going on.” His words, “nothing really solid at that point,” are quite revealing. He came to RD’s that night looking for trouble. After a couple of hours of listening to these vague insinuations and accusations, RD started to get agitated. It was understandable. Tobey was sitting in his house, feeding him Kraft Dinner and fake wieners, and rambling on in this accusatory tone. Everything he was saying always came back to that insignificant Variety article. It all became too much and finally RD barked, “What the f. do you want, Tobey!? Why are you here?” I have never seen anyone lose his mind so suddenly. “I WANT DON’S PLUM TO BURN!!!” He screamed it over and over again until the veins popped out of his neck like thick cords, “I WANT DON’S PLUM TO BURN!!!.” My stomach immediately started wrenching. The palms of my hands broke out in a nervous sweat. Up until that moment, I was just kind of dealing with him as his normal menacing self whose always trying to take control of everything - but this was something else. My head was spinning. This guy really wanted to destroy our movie and I knew he had a lot of influence over you. At that point in time, things were going brilliantly for Don’s Plum. The screening we did for you at MGM went extremely well, despite the tension surrounding the announcement in Variety. The most satisfying moment of that night happened after the screening, at the after party at the HMS Bounty on Wilshire. Kevin Connolly and Nikki Cox arrived with a bouquet of flowers, a card, and two giant smiles. They came straight to our table to give RD their gift. The card read, “Congratulations, you did it!” Four perfect words. It was very emotional for all of us. Then, Kevin told us that the two of you spoke. He said that you had done a “180 degree turn” on Don’s Plum. He said that you absolutely liked the film - he might have said “loved”. Of course it had its flaws, but the movie was undoubtedly a success. Then, days after the screening, your agents at CAA told us to bring in a distribution deal. We flew to NY to screen the film for Miramax, among others, and they told us they were going to make an offer! And this was before you were a star, Leo. There was no Romeo and Juliet, or Titanic. In fact, when this dispute over Don’s Plum began, you had only been “the star” of two movies that did a combined box office of about $2.8 million. Those films were Total Eclipse, and Basketball Diaries. Of course, you were an extremely important actor in the business, but most of the world hadn’t met you yet. Don’s Plum was selling on its own merits as an independent film. Miramax made us an offer of 1 million. Tri-Mark offered 1.5 million and we had interest from scores more, both domestic and international. RD signed with your agency, CAA, as a director. Sundance was calling. And Jersey Films wanted to talk about a multi-picture deal. It was an auspicious debut. And Tobey wanted to put a stop to it all because of “mumblings” and “uncomfortable” feelings. RD and I spent the entire night trying to calm Tobey down. It was an emotional rollercoaster filled with hours of defending ourselves against a senseless attack. RD finally went to bed, completely drained. I stayed awake, literally trembling inside. I thought that if we spent more time together, Tobey would realize he was tripping out over nothing and he would start to feel better. We eventually went over to his place where we continued to talk until around 7am. I said a lot of things to him about our plans and dreams. I talked about how much gratitude I felt toward you and everyone who worked on the film. I told him about how great Don’s Plum was going to be for all of our careers. I told him about some of the offers that were coming in for the film. I remember telling him that Harvey Weinstein called Don’s Plum “smart” filmmaking, hoping that dropping his name would give us a little credibility. It didn’t work. Q: During that discussion with Mr. Wheatley that occurred after Mr. Robb went to bed and before you went to the AA meeting… do you recall discussing with Mr. Wheatley any potential distributors of Don’s Plum? TOBEY: I do feel like we did talk about that, actually, that they were talking to distributors. Or actually, that was part of what he [Dale] was saying was part of pitting the press, is he said, “Oh, people - “ that’s right. He said, “People know about this film. And people have already seen this film. People also meaning distributors or people who work in that kind of area know about this film, and it’s not going to look good, you know, if Leo doesn’t let it happen.” He was saying that was part of the angle of pitting the press against Leo. So in that sense, distributors were brought up. Suggesting distributors can be used as an “angle” for pitting the press against an actor that is in the movie that they’re buying is delusional. Of course we let buyers have a look at the movie. That’s how you determine if there is any interest for the film in the marketplace. I wonder if Tobey told you any of the wonderful things I had to say about Don’s Plum that night. I got emotional at one point describing this daydream I had, where I’m standing at a newsstand. You’re on the cover of a magazine with your friends, Tobey, Kev, RD and Bloom. The story is about how you guys came together to make Don’s Plum - about how you’re surrounded by incredibly talented friends, and how lucky you are to be in a position to introduce them to the world. That’s what Don’s Plum was all about. That’s why you did this favor for your friends in the first place. But Tobey just stared back at me with a condescending look on his face, completely unaffected. Once my dreamy soliloquies were done, he went right back to pressing and grinding, and demanding, “I want to know the worst thing that ever happened with Don’s Plum!” And with everything on the line… my relationships, my film, my dreams… all hanging on the edge of Tobey’s madness, he claims I said this: TOBEY: Oh something I didn’t mention about the one - the meeting before, which also came up in this one (meeting at Kevin Connolly’s house) was about the Variety article. It being - what Dale told me is that it was a specific warning to Leo from Jerry Meadors that Jerry Meadors has a voice in the press, and that it wouldn’t look good for Leo to not allow this film to go out as a feature. Tobey went on to describe the next night at Connolly’s house with a terribly inconsistent story. At first, I’m backing off of what I had “confessed” to him in private, and in the next moment, I’m committing career suicide with wild confessions of duplicity. TOBEY: “It wouldn't - it wouldn't look good for Leo, you know, along with showing all the distributors, and they know that the film is in existence and now - now the industry knows because of the Variety article, along with all the tapes they were sending out and the screening. And - and - but he was still - he was saying about the stuff about pitting the press, he was like, you know - he was just kind of backing off of that, although he was still kind of saying the same thing, he was much more reluctant ‘cause with me, he just put it out on the table, and now he was kind of going, “Well, you know, that’s not how I meant it, and it was all Jerry Meadors and - “ or he said, “That was Jerry Meadors’ idea, although we knew about it.” And I said, “Yeah, but didn’t you tell me last night that that was Jerry Meadors - you know, the Variety article was Jerry Meadors saying, “Look, I have a voice in the press.” And he said “Yes. Yes, that was a warning, you know. Yes, there were some meetings talking about pitting the press against Leo.” As you know, Kevin Connelly taped the entire night. I don’t believe for a second that the tape was stolen, although I do understand why you would want it to disappear. I would love to hear the sound bite of me confessing, in front of all of you, that we had meetings about pitting the press against you, and I’d like to hear the rest of the tape while we’re at it - that night was filled with senseless and vicious attacks on me and RD. We were led into that house to be put to shame, not to resolve any issues with our friends. We were there to be destroyed. Q: You said things got pretty heated. Can you describe what you mean by that? TOBEY: Well, I got very emotional. I - with the feelings of betrayal and anger, you know, I felt really hurt and I felt really angry, and, you know, there was definitely like raising of voices and arguments, and, you know, I couldn’t tell you exactly what, but there was arguments between me and Dale and me and RD. And - and you know, I remember Leo was having a response to the pitting the press thing, and, you know, he was saying stuff about - in response to pitting the press, like you know, “Do you think I’m just going to stand back for that? You think I’m just going to let you guys bull me over and bully me around and manipulate and coerce? And it’s - you know, I’m not - do you think I’m just going to sit there for that? It’s like I feel so betrayed. You know, I feel so betrayed, and - and, you know, I’m not just going to sit - “ it was just emotional. It got emotional, you know. It wasn’t emotional, Leo, it was cannibalistic. I remember Tobey screaming, inches from RD’s face, calling him a “whore” and a “success monger.” It was as if he was an expert in coercion and interrogation tactics. He had broken us down for hours until we were emotionally battered and sleep deprived. Then he started offering us a way out - all we had to do was confess. TOBEY: I felt really betrayed, so - so most of my memory is with RD, I think. And I just remember him basically being really general and kept repeating throughout the evening about reaching for the stars and stepping on people’s toes, and I was just getting so frustrated. I was just like, “What does that mean, you know? That’s - what is that stuff? It’s just you know, tell us. Tell these guys what you guys were telling me. Be as honest as you were last night. This is like - you know, we’re all friends here, and this - this all can end, you know? Put a stop to this. Put a stop to this stuff. Just - just cop to it. Just take responsibility for your actions, you know? And maybe we can like, you know, figure out a way to like, you know, help you out of your mess or whatever, but you got to take responsibility. You overreacted to a premature announcement in Variety. That’s why you fell for all of this madness. The offending article was a tiny, benign blurb of maybe 30 words that reported the completion of the film. Nothing more. I have scoured the internet and it’s the only article that I can’t find anywhere–because it’s meaningless. RD and I didn’t even know about the damn thing until it was too late to pull it. Proper friends would have easily worked through such a minor problem. For over two years, we tried to reach out to you and get this thing sorted out properly but you refused to speak with us. Instead, you continued your campaign to destroy the film and those of us who made it. Finally, left with no other choice, David Stutman filed suit. It was all so ridiculous. I understand why the Variety article pissed you off - it was a mistake. Tobey pounced on that mistake and drove you into a fit. And that’s why you defamed RD in Detour Magazine and began this horrible act against the film. Q: Do you recall Mr. DiCaprio saying anything [at Kevin Connolly’s house] about Braveheart? TOBEY: I do - I do remember a mention of Braveheart. Q: What do you recall about that? TOBEY: I don’t remember exactly what he said, but it was in the same thing I was telling you about, like, you know, in response to pitting the press, he was saying like, you know, “You think I’m going to sit back like that? There’s just no way. You know, you guys aren’t going to bully me around and put articles in the press, you know. I’m not just going to stand for that, or I mean do you think I’m just going to like be bullied into releasing the film? And you know, I’m going to - “ Something, you know, along - in this context of like, you know, “ I’m not just going to be beat down, you know? I’m like Braveheart, “ or “I’m Braveheart,” or “I’m like Braveheart. I’m not just going to, you know, get screwed.” Instead of overreacting to his accusations, all you had to do was pump the brakes a little bit. We were all young and excited, and vulnerable to errors. I personally would have loved for you to become more involved with the movie at that stage. What you did instead was absolutely unthinkable. How do you take the work of others into your own hands and defile it? Imagine your performance as Billy being crushed because Jack Nicholson got into a quip with Martin Scorsese. It’s impossible. But that’s what happened to Kevin Connelly. He was amazing in Don’s Plum. And I truly believe Scott Bloom’s performance would have established him as leading man material had Don’s Plum been released in the US. Jenny Lewis’ performance was as strong as any other female lead you’ve worked with in your career - it was a discovery. Meadow Sisto, Amber Benson, Byron Thames, Stephanie Cambria–they were all fantastic. It was you who introduced us to Toledo Diamond and his incredible show. How could you destroy all of that work, all of that opportunity for so many people, in a single evening? Why wouldn’t you take the time to qualify Tobey’s accusations before you acted? If you had talked to anyone about Jerry Meadors, Tobey’s claims would have been completely discredited. You would have learned that Jerry was an ally of yours very early in your career when he was a VP of Marketing at Paramount. Not only did he work alongside Cheryl Boone Isaacs to successfully lobby for your Oscar nomination for Gilbert Grape, but it was his suggestion to campaign the Academy in the first place. Jerry Meadors changed your life. You changed his too, when you sued him for making an independent film. Jerry is a kind, honest, and very wise man. I’m really lucky to call him a friend, and we were lucky to have him as a producer. Had you gotten to know him, none of this would have happened. You would have known that it’s not possible for that garbage, those threats, to come out of his mouth. Tobey certainly didn’t feel very threatened or betrayed by Meadors. Even after ending our friendships over his “threats” to you, he and Jerry had lunch together. And I guess things were pretty relaxed too, because Tobey started “joking” around with him about having RD murdered. Q: Did you ever tell Jerry Meadors that you were so upset with RD Robb that if you had connections to the mafia that you would have RD Killed? TOBEY: I don’t recall saying that. Q: OK. Is it your testimony that you did not say that? TOBEY: I don’t think - I don’t think I said exactly that. Q: Okay. You just used “exactly” in that answer. Could you tell me if you recall saying anything that in sum and substance was similar to that? TOBEY: First of all, are you talking about at any time to Jerry Meadors? Q: Yes. TOBEY: I couldn’t - I couldn’t tell you any - anything specifically, though I may have been–I may have been joking with Jerry and said something similar about like, you know, “Oh, sometimes I wished I had connections to the mob, or some joke like that.” Like I said, always the kidder. Clearly I must have said something to Tobey that helped him construct such an elaborate indictment against us. And I did. It was probably six in the morning at that point. I kept telling him that nothing bad happened with the movie, but he wouldn’t relent. He challenged my denial in a contrarian manner, saying something like, “Come on–don’t tell me nothing bad was ever said about Don’s Plum, or about Leo.” I thought maybe I could appease him, so I told him this: “The worst thing that ever happened, was that I said, if Leo is going to trample all over a perfectly good independent film, he won’t look good doing it.” Those were close to my exact words. And I believed them. But it was just my opinion, not a threat. And I was referring to the industry, not the press. There was no mention of Jerry, no secret meetings, no voices in the press. Of course we worried about whether or not you would support the film. RD would agonize over the idea that you might not get behind Don’s Plum even if it was good, and that was what I said to make him feel better. I told Tobey that, too. But he took my statement and the Variety article (and the fact that it was Meadors who placed it) and some “mumblings” and went to work constructing his story right before my eyes. I’ve never seen anything like it before or since. In my attempt to pacify him, I had created a monster. My words, distorted and used to threaten you, destroyed the work of dozens of artists and craftspeople and broke friendships that were years in the making. This is my hardship. TOBEY: I remember - I think it was the night before the meeting at Kevin Connolly’s that I remember, and I went over to his apartment…” “…I don’t know what the - if there was a purpose going over there. I don’t know if it was set up some way, but we - I started asking questions. I started asking Dale and RD questions regarding Don’s Plum. I started asking - I - I told them that I felt - that I felt uncomfortable with them for the past however long it had been, a year or so since we were - since we first shot it or, you know, I don’t know exactly, but I told them I felt uncomfortable because I felt like they were - they were like producers. They were like producers more than friends. They were constantly like telling me how good I was in this movie and how like, you know, women really liked me in this movie, and I told them that I felt like kind of icky, and it felt manipulative on their part. Tobey distorted my genuine compliments into an “icky manipulation” just as he distorted my words to RD into a threat against you. Now, after 18 long and very difficult years, not a single disparaging remark about you was ever uttered by me, Jerry, or RD in any press throughout the world. That evidence should speak for itself. “I just did it as a favor, you know? And then all this stuff happens and you ask why. Why be nice if that’s going to happen?” Appearing in Don’s Plum was the most generous favor you could have done for your friends. After all this time, despite being fraught with pain, for which I hold you partly responsible, I remain extremely grateful to you for that gift. I truly believe that Don’s Plum is a gem among low budget independent films, and it wouldn’t have happened without you. It is such a shame that your American and Canadian fans have been deprived of your wonderful work in the film. This problem, and this letter, exists because of Tobey. He played you like a pawn. He pitted you against your own friends, and then hid behind you while you trampled all over a perfectly good independent film. Q: Why did you do the reshoots? TOBEY: Well, what’s it on me? You know, I’m totally in the bounds of what I - what my agreement is. It’s just to show up and have fun, and, you know, Leo has veto rights with you guys, and I completely respect that, and as soon as he vetoes it, I give him no shit about it. You know what I’m saying? Doing your friends a favor wasn’t the mistake you made. I hope you realize that now. It’s not too late. #FreeDonsPlum Yours Truly, Dale Wheatley |
Georgia McCafferty , CNN Written by Contributors Stella Ko, CNN A photograph taken inside an historic covered reservoir in Finsbury Park, London has won an international award for best architectural photograph of 2016. "It was the painterly quality of this picture that made it stand out. The calm, quiet quality, coupled with a compelling sense of intrigue and scale," one of the judges of the award, Emily Booth, told CNN. "We considered factors such as composition, light, scale, atmosphere, sense of place, as well as the narrative. It is about communicating a story of space." "Photography has long been the means of communicating architecture," added Lynn Bryant, one of the founders of Arcaid Images. "The earliest known photograph by French scientist Joseph Nicéphore Niépce, taken with a camera obscura in the late 1820s, was architectural. The medium may have changed...(but) a good image leaves a lasting impression beyond the confines of the architectural fraternity." Communicating architecture From a spiraled skyscraper in Shanghai, to a warming hut in Winnipeg, the twenty professional photographs that were shortlisted for the award gave the buildings they captured a sense of soul and provided a glimpse into the life they contain within. Covering a wide range of old and new structures in both mundane and exotic locations around the world, each shortlisted image was assessed by a group of six judges on its composition, sense of place, atmosphere and use of scale. Although over a thousand professional architectural images were submitted for consideration, Emmett's underground photograph received the most points across each of the four categories. It was also the first time the award was given to a photograph of an historic location -- the East London Water Works Company reservoir shot by Emmett was built in 1868. Noting that "the award is for photography and not for architecture," Booth, who is editor at The Architectural Review and The Architects' Journal, said good architectural photographers needed a sense of curiosity, sensitivity, and humanity. |
The future of homes is upon us and it isn’t a smart home. It’s a prefab home. Short for prefabricated, these homes come as livable units ready to be assembled and then lived in… like IKEA meets Architecture. The prefab homes became all the rage in 2015 when Muji debuted three ultra-small prefab hut designs for people looking to live the minimalist life away from the city’s hustle and bustle. Their latest hut design is ready for production and costs roughly $27,000. They also sit on a cemented foundation, making them permanent. The KODA prefab home by Estonian design collective Kodasema however proposes something more head-turning. This fully equipped, quaint hut with a 25 square-meter living space and a mezzanine bedroom can be completely disassembled, and reassembled at another location within a day! The idea is that KODA is a state of mind. It should give you a space to live in wherever you find tranquility, be it in the woods, or a lakeside, or even your backyard. Its design can allow it to become your retreat, or even your personal office space, or a studio or classroom. The house is constructed with factory-made components, and can be assembled on-site without any need for foundations. The terrace comes equipped with solar-panels, allowing KODA to generate and conserve its own electricity. The KODA is literally the perfect home away from home! Watch the video below and be amazed! Designer: Kodasema |
Here is what I gave out as an extra credit assignment to students who were interested in how to get more out of their textbook. Students mostly got the last problem correct, so the results were that the people who did this voluntarily really got something out of it. The handout was 5 pages long. The last problem was as follows: I copy-pasted the activity below although it is out of a google document instead of being properly TeX'd, so you probably won't be able to use it as is (for example, the integral signs didn't make it, nor the exponents or fractions). Still, it's here if you're interested. The purpose of this exercise is to help you think about how to read a math book. Reading a math book is much different from reading other books! Step 1: Open your book to section 4.5. Begin reading the “Pattern Recognition” part. Read page 292 -- everything before the first example. Don’t worry too much about the details of the “theorem” for now, but then answer the following question: Each differentiation rule has an integration rule that tells you how to go backwards. Which differentiation rule goes with “integration by substitution?” Step 2: Read Example 1. Then complete this question: Find the derivative of 13(x2 + 1)3 + C. Why is this answer relevant to example 1? Step 3. Read Example 2. Then complete this question: Find the derivative of sin 5x + C. Why is this answer relevant to example 2? Step 4. Look at the “Exploration” box at the bottom of the page, after Examples 1 and 2. 4. Complete questions a through e on this page. a. b. c. d. (multiply by ½ and also by 2, as your first step). e. (multiply by __ and also by _ as your first step). Step 5. Read Example 3. What does this have to do with the things you did in parts d and e on the previous page? There is a sentence after Example 3 that says “After all, if it were legitimate to move variable quantities outside the integral sign, you could move the entire integrand out and simplify the whole process. But the result would be incorrect.” Use this wrong method (factor everything out of the integral) to find x2 dx. What is the actual correct answer for x2 dx? Step 6. Read the paragraph and formula under the heading “Change of Variables.” It says in here that if u = g(x), then du = g’(x) dx. That last equation looks weird. What happens if you divide both sides of it by dx? Does that make more sense? If u = x2, what is du? Step 7. Read Example 4. Check their answer to see if it is right (how do we even do that?) Step 8. Read Example 5. Check their answer to see if it is right (how do we even do that?) Following the examples, solve x3x - 1 dx. Check your answer to see if it is right (how do we even do that)? Step 9. Read Example 6. It is getting crazy now. Remember that sin2 x means (sin x)2, and sin3 x means (sin x)3. Check their answer by taking the derivative. Step 10. How to read a math book. 11a. How many pages of the book have we made it through? How many pages of our own math writing did it take to make it this far? When you have to read a math book in the future, what is an important tool you will absolutely need in order to do so successfully? |
By Jan Carabeo PHILADELPHIA (CBS) — As a school community grieves the death of a first grader, parents aren’t just pleading for change anymore, they are demanding it. Demanding more money for Philadelphia schools and demanding schools don’t open in September if there isn’t a full-time nurse in each and every building. Heartbroken Andrew Jackson Elementary School parents stood united Thursday in front of a school that’s now dealing with the loss of one of its youngest students. Sal Genestra says, “My heart goes out to the family. It’s terrible.” A first grader, just seven-years-old, who lived at a homeless shelter with his family in West Philadelphia, suffered a medical emergency yesterday afternoon. District Spokesperson Fernando Gallard says, “We were blessed to have certified personnel on site and also that the emergency personnel came here in less than five minutes.” But there was no full-time nurse at the school. Officials say a retired nurse just happened to be at school and two other staff members were certified in CPR too. Jackson only has a part-time nurse on Thursdays and every-other Friday. Learning that the boy later died at the hospital, parents are left wondering what if. Shawn Watts comments he’s, “Scared and sad.” Khadija Nicholas asks, “A child died, what could be more serious than that?” An autopsy is now complete, but not yet public. While officials aren’t sure if a nurse would have made a difference, these parents say they shouldn’t have to take that chance. President of Friends of Jackson Melissa Wilde says, “We have a right as parents and our children have a right as students to a school nurse at all times.” Meanwhile, the West Philadelphia Families Forward Philadelphia Shelter, where this family was staying, issued this statement: “Our heartfelt sympathy goes out to the child’s family, and we will do all we can to assist the family through their time of sorrow. We are cooperating fully with the authorities in their investigation…” The district spokesperson tells CBS3 that only some schools here in Philadelphia have a full-time nurse because of budget cuts. Superintendent William Hite issued a statement regarding the passing of the student: “Yesterday, the Andrew Jackson Elementary School community experienced a tragic loss. A student became ill at the school and later passed away at the hospital. On behalf of the School District of Philadelphia and the School Reform Commission, I want to express our most sincere condolences to the family, friends and members of the Jackson Elementary community. At the time of the incident, the student was surrounded by loving and caring people, including a school counselor, teacher, support staff and community volunteer. Working with emergency personnel, they did their best to provide comfort and medical assistance to the student. We are tremendously grateful for their service. This incident, however, illustrates the serious needs and challenges that our students, teachers, staff and principals face every day. During times of tragedy, our community should not have to question whether an extra staff member or program would have made a difference. We should all feel confident that our schools have everything they need. This school year has been tremendously challenging on several fronts. Our pleas for sustainable funding are based on obvious needs. We urge our funders to provide the School District with the $440 million needed to adequately serve our schools. We cannot afford one more year of inadequately funded schools.” |
An anonymous source has contacted JWsurvey with details of three new songs to be released at Watchtower’s 2014 Annual Meeting, which is expected to be held this coming weekend. Entitled “The Kingdom Is in Place – Let It Come!,” “Grant Us Boldness” and “Jehovah Is Your Name,” the songs underscore the need for Witnesses to be obedient, and to stand firm in the face of opposition. Also leaked is a personnel list of the six Governing Body committees, including the names of all Governing Body helpers. Helpers are essentially an elite class of bethelite who assist the Governing Body and are thus most likely to become Governing Body members themselves some day (provided they profess to be of the anointed). The leaked new songs are as follows… Song A The Kingdom Is in Place – Let It Come (Revelation 11:15) Jehovah, you always have been And always you will be. You’ve given the throne to your Son; He rules by your decree. The Kingdom has been brought to birth; His rulership will fill the earth. CHORUS For now have come to pass Salvation and kingdom and might. The Kingdom is in place. We pray: “Let it come, Let it come!” The time for the Devil is short; We know what this will mean. Though living in times of distress, We see the things unseen. The Kingdom has been brought to birth; His rulership will fill the earth. (Repeat chorus) (See also Dan. 2:34, 35; 2 Cor. 4:18.) Song B Grant Us Boldness (Act 4:29) As we tell about the Kingdom, As we witness for your name, There are many who oppose us, And who try to bring us shame. But instead of fearing men, It’s really you we must obey. So we beg you now for your spirit, O Jehovah, hear what we pray. CHORUS Grant us boldness as we witness; Help us overcome our fear. Give us confidence and courage, So that all the world may hear. Armageddon draws ever near, But until that great day is here, Grant us boldness as we witness. This is our prayer. Even though we may be fearful, You remember we are dust. Your assurance to support us, Is a promise we can trust. Give attention to the threats Of those who persecute and blame. May you help us all to continue As we boldly speak in your name. (Repeat chorus) (See also 1 Thess. 2:2; Heb. 10:35.) Song C Jehovah Is Your Name (Psalm 83:18) The living and true God The God of all creation In every generation Jehovah is your name. We’re honored and we’re proud To be your congregation. In every tribe and nation, Your glory we proclaim. CHORUS Jehovah, Jehovah, there is no God like you. There’s no other in the heavens, or on the earth below. You alone are God Almighty, And this all men must know. Jehovah, Jehovah, We have no other God but you. You cause us to become Whatever you desire, To do as you require Jehovah is your name. And witnesses for you Is what you’ve kindly named us. We’re honored you have claimed us, A people for your name. (Repeat chorus) (See also 2 Chron. 6:14; Ps. 72:19; Isa. 42:8.) Noteworthy in Song A is the nod towards Revelation 12:12, where it describes Satan being hurled to the earth in 1914 for a “short period of time” before kingdom rule is established. That 100 years can be considered a short period of time by any stretch of the imagination is one of the most obvious failings of Watchtower’s increasingly embarrassing teaching surrounding 1914, which it continues to cling to in its most recent publications. Song B seems to be a rallying call against those who “oppose” the organization, and urges obedience in the face of their “threats” (along similar lines to the recent “close ranks” rhetoric). Expect this song to accompany future talks and Watchtower studies that focus on apostates, as Watchtower continues to spread fear and paranoia regarding “those who persecute and blame.” Song C seems intended to be sung as an anthem invoking pride among Jehovah’s Witnesses in their commission as divine representatives. An intriguing lyric boasts that “in every tribe and nation, your glory we proclaim.” Citizens of Somalia, North Korea and Afghanistan, where there are NO Jehovah’s Witnesses (at least as of 2007), will be curious as to the meaning of this verse. Governing Body committee information leaked As previously mentioned, a highly classified document has also been leaked listing by name ALL of the personnel on the Governing Body committees. I can reveal the contents of the document below, together with quotes to explain the role of each of the committees from page 131 of the latest 2014 “God’s Kingdom Rules!” book… Coordinators’ Committee “The brothers serving on this committee oversee legal matters as well as the use of the media when it is necessary to convey an accurate picture of our beliefs. They also respond to disasters, outbreaks of persecution, and other emergencies affecting our brotherhood anywhere in the world.” Stephen Lett Anthony Morris Mark Sanderson John Ekrann Robert Wallen Personnel Committee “This committee is entrusted with the oversight of arrangements for the physical and spiritual welfare and assistance of members of Bethel families earth wide. It oversees the selecting and inviting of new members of Bethel families and handles questions regarding their Bethel service.” Gerrit Lösch Geoffrey Jackson David Splane Gerald Grizzle Patrick LaFranca Daniel Molchan Ralph Walls Publishing Committee “Those serving on this committee supervise the printing and shipping of Bible literature worldwide. They oversee printeries and properties owned and operated by the various corporations used by Jehovah’s Witnesses, as well as all construction worldwide, including the work of building Kingdom Halls. They arrange for the best use of funds donated for the Kingdom work.” Samuel Herd Stephen Lett David Splane Don Adams Robert Butler Harold Corkern Donald Gordon Robert Luccioni Alex Reinmueller David Sinclair Service Committee “The brothers who make up this committee oversee all areas of the evangelizing work and matters affecting congregations, publishers, pioneers, elders, traveling overseers and missionaries. They supervise, among numerous other things, the activities of Hospital Liaison Committees. They also oversee the preparation of Our Kingdom Ministry.” Samuel Herd Gerrit Lösch Anthony Morris Mark Sanderson Gary Breaux Joel Dellinger Seth Hyatt Christopher Mavor Baltasar Perla William Turner, Jr. Robert Wallen Leon Weaver, Jr. Teaching Committee “This committee oversees the instruction provided at assemblies, conventions, and congregation meetings. It also has oversight of Gilead School, the School for Kingdom Evangelizers, the Pioneer Service School, and the Theocratic Ministry School, as well as other schools. In addition, this committee oversees the development of audio and video programs.” Geoffrey Jackson Stephen Lett Anthony Morris Ken Flodin William Malenfant Mark Noumair David Schafer Writing Committee “The brothers serving on this committee supervise the preparation of spiritual food in written and electronic form for fellow believers and the general public. It also cares for the organization’s Web site and oversees the translation work done throughout the earth. Additionally, this committee responds to questions about the meaning of certain scriptures and points presented in the publications.” Samuel Herd Geoffrey Jackson Mark Sanderson David Splane Robert Ciranko James Mantz Izak Marais Gene Smalley John Wischuk (This list is up-to-date as of September 2014. I intend to update this article in the near future with photos of some of the helpers.) In all, 36 individuals serve across the six committees, including the 7 Governing Body members. It is interesting to note that only one of the Governing Body members, Gerrit Lösch, doesn’t serve on three committees. The fact that he only serves on two is probably due to his advanced years more than anything. It is also seems that there might have been some kind of shake-up of the Governing Body committees since 2009, or else the “Bearing Witness” book (published in that year) is in error. It says on page 110 that the Coordinators’ Committee “consists of the coordinators of each of the other committees and a secretary who is also a member of the Governing Body.” This does not seem to be the case according to this leaked information. Though there is nothing too explosive in this latest series of leaks, it has gone some way to shedding light on the people in the higher echelons of the organization, directly beneath the Governing Body. The fact that this information has surfaced is also an encouraging indication that the Governing Body does not enjoy the unanimous loyalty of all those working in and around the headquarters. |
About What's It All About Then? Read The First Chapter (Rough Draft) The Webyssey follows the story of a man (whose name is not Brian) trying to find his way out of The Web with his companions: Spambot, Strawman and Edgar the Lol-Cat. His adventures will take him from discussion forums to abandoned geocities sites, into MMORPGs, through the great Library of Wikipedia, into contact with Twitter birds, Facebookers and on the run from Grammar Nazis, Trolls and other internet denizens. The book will be between 180-200 black-and-white pages, with colour inserts at the beginning each chapter. The first 50 backers will also receive one of the few extant copies of my very first publishing effort, Cap Gun Cavalcade. Who Are You? I've been drawing comics for roughly five years and publishing them intermittently on my website DirtPony (it's not nearly as sexual as it sounds.) Here are some other favourites: • Superheroes • House • Pokemon • Astrology • It's been more or less a hobby for me, but now I'd like to do something more substantial. ========================================== What's In It For Me? Everyone who backs this project will get their name up in a special thank you section on my site. Every donation over $10 will get your name printed in the book, you could appear as a character in the book, design an alternate cover, and many other fabulous things detailed in the sidebar. Oh, and also you might get a copy of the book when all's said and done. What's The Money For? Besides the printing of the books and the rewards, backers' funding will go towards promotion of the book, setting up and travelling to booths at conventions, upgrading my computer hardware to a functional level, and other miscellaneous costs (well, there's always something, isn't there?) Just How Bad Is This Famous Laptop? It has a 30GB hard drive (of which only 4GB remains free) and 256MB of RAM. In other words, it's less powerful than an iPhone. ========================================== ========================================== Anything Else? Just one little thing - if your donations come from outside the United States, it would be great if you could kick in a couple of extra dollars to help pay for the shipping. I've put some guideline amounts in the donation boxes. Cheers! Thank you so much for checking out my Kickstarter page. With some luck, and your help, I look forward to bringing The Webyssey very soon to you and the rest of the teeming masses! Please don't disappoint Mister Astley. |
Head Coach Anthony Lynn vowed to make changes entering the second quarter of the season. That apparently included making a switch at kicker, bringing back Nick Novak while waiving Younghoe Koo. A 10-year veteran who previously spent four seasons as the Bolts’ kicker from 2011-14, Novak has connected on 173 of 209 field goal attempts (82.8-percent) with a career-long of 53-yards. He’s appeared in 111 career games for the Chargers, Redskins, Cardinals, Chiefs and Texans. The 36-year old Novak ranks as the second most accurate kicker in Chargers history, making 101 of 117 kicks during his four-year stint. His 86.3-percent conversion clip ranks just behind Nate Kaeding’s franchise-leading 87.0 field goal percentage. Novak currently ranks fourth in team history with 101 made field goals, and seventh in total points scored (889). His best season with the Bolts came in 2013, when he tied a franchise record with 34 field goals while setting a new record for single-season field goal percentage (91.9-percent). |
How often does a unit of already-unionized workers actually decide to formally say goodbye to their union—and is it happening more often now than in the past? Actually, it is happening less often. The (National Labor Relations Board) reported 228 decert elections in 2012—the lowest total since we started tracking NLRB election data in the mid-1980s. Unions typically faced more than 400 decert elections a decade ago. Even as recently as 2007, 331 decert attempts made it to the election phase. But that doesn’t necessarily mean that unions are doing a better job of hanging on to their members nowadays. Of those 228 elections last year, unions won only 87 — by far the lowest total on record — earning a 38.2 percent win rate that itself marks a five-year low. In terms of living, breathing members, the 2012 figures were similarly bleak for unions. Of the 14,051 workers in bargaining units threatened with decertification, only about half — 7,326 — remained unionized after the votes were counted, marking the lowest retention total on record. Among individual unions, one organization accounted for more than one-fifth of all decert elections in 2012. The Teamsters were besieged with 51 decerts, far below its yearly average but far above the total for any other union. The union was shown the door in 38 of those elections, for a 25.5 percent win rate. The Teamsters were able to hang on to only 743 of the 2,256 workers eligible to vote in the elections. |
The personal lives of Chinese leaders are such closely guarded secrets that few in China even know the birth dates of their leaders. So when Prime Minister Narendra Modi early today posted a message on China's social media platform Sina Weibo - a Twitter equivalent where he has 1.7 lakh followers - wishing Chinese President Xi Jinping on his birthday, it came as 'news' and remarkably as quite a surprise to Chinese internet users. PM Narendra Modi post, in Mandarin, read, "On the occasion of President Xi Jinping's birthday, I congratulate him, and wish he lives till one hundred years and has a healthy life." PM Modi added, "A few days ago, I met with President Xi Jinping during the Shanghai Cooperation Organization summit in Astana, and we had a fruitful discussion to further promote the development of India China relations." PM Narendra Modi's tweet was liked by 750 people and forwarded and commented on by more than 200. The numbers suggest Sina Weibo is screening comments as it usually does when China's leader is involved. NOT A QUESTION OF PRIVACY In China's heavily censored internet, news about the personal lives of Chinese leaders - from their birthdays to their families - is strictly off limits. The "Great Firewall" of restrictions doesn't tolerate discussions on personal lives of leaders, only usually allowing news reports that are sanctioned and discuss their work. One reason why showcasing personal lives is a strict no-no, beyond the Communist Party's abiding objective of controlling public opinion and the public image of its leaders, is a historical post-Mao aversion to personality cults of any sort. XI JINPING TREADING WITH CAUTION Xi Jinping is perhaps the only leader after Mao and Deng Xiaoping who has allowed some elements of a public persona to emerge, unlike his cautious predecessor Hu Jintao. Xi's visit to a local steamed bun shop in Beijing, for instance, was allowed to receive wide coverage, in part because it presented him as a populist leader. Still, his birthday and other personal details are off limits and sharing such details could land internet users in China in trouble - unless, of course, it is the Prime Minister of India who is sharing them on China's social media. ALSO READ | Can China really encircle India with its String of Pearls? The great game of Asia ALSO WATCH | China, Pakistan hold joint military drills in Arabian Sea |
With the final rosters announced for the 2013 World Baseball Classic, it is interesting to take a look at how Rockies players, both present and past, fared in the first two editions of the tournament at the MLB seasons that followed. 2006 World Baseball Classic: 2006 Rockies participants: RHP Byung-hyun Kim (South Korea), RHP Sunny Kim (South Korea), LHP Jeff Francis (Canada), RHP David Cortes (Mexico), C Miguel Ojeda (Mexico), LHP Brian Fuentes (United States), OF Matt Holliday (United States), RHP Manuel Corpas (Panama) 2013 Rockies participants: LHP Jeff Francis (Canada), LHP Jorge de la Rosa (Mexico),Coach Marcel Lachemann (United States), C Ramon Hernandez (Venezuela), RHP Rafael Betancourt (Venezuela) Other notable Rockies participants: Coach Larry Walker (Canada), RHP Rodrigo Lopez (Mexico), 3B Vinny Castilla (Mexico), LHP Huston Street (United States), IF Ronnie Belliard (Dominican Republic), RHP Julian Tavarez (Dominican Republic), OF Willy Taveras (Dominican Republic), IF Marco Scutaro (Venezuela), The 2006 Rockies sent eight players to the World Baseball Classic, six of them pitchers. Among the most notable was Jeff Francis with Canada. Francis started Canada's final game of the WBC against Mexico, allowing six earned runs in just 1 1/3 innings of work in a game the Canadians lost, 9-1. However, Francis went on to have a breakout season for the Rockies in '06, going 13-11 with a career-best 4.16 ERA while logging 199 innings. Pitchers Byung-hyun Kim and Sunny Kim represented the Rockies on a South Korean squad that lost in the semifinals to Japan. Byung-hyun Kim pitched 4 2/3 innings in four relief appearances, three of them scoreless, and struck out 7. He went on to compile a 5.57 ERA in 27 starts with the Rockies in 2006. Sunny Kim started South Korea's 3-2 win over Japan in Pool A play, but pitched just seven innings for Colorado the following season. The only starting position player the Rockies sent to the 2006 WBC was left fielder Matt Holliday. Holliday got only six at bats for the USA, going hitless. He then went on to make his first all-star appearance in 2006, hitting .326/.387/.586 with 34 home runs and 114 runs batted in. Other notable Rockies-related performances in the 2006 WBC included Jorge de la Rosa and Rafael Betancourt combining to pitch five scoreless innings and a 38-year-old Vinny Castilla going 7-for-24 for Mexico before making his final appearances as a Rockie toward the end of the 2006 season. 2009 World Baseball Classic: 2009 Rockies participants: LHP Adam Bright* (Australia), RHP Jason Grilli (Italy), C Chris Iannetta (United States), RHP Ubaldo Jimenez (Dominican Republic), RHP Manuel Corpas (Panama) * Played for AA Tulsa in 2009 2013 Rockies participants: RHP Adam Ottavino (Italy), Coach Marcel Lachemann (United States), C Ramon Hernandez (Venezuela), RHP Manuel Corpas (Panama) Other notable Rockies participants: Manager Vinny Castilla (Mexico), RHP Rodrigo Lopez (Mexico), Coach Larry Walker (Canada), RHP Jeremy Guthrie (United States), RHP LaTroy Hawkins (United States), RHP Matt Lindstrom (United States), Coach Andres Galarraga (Venezuela), C Henry Blanco (Venezuela), IF Melvin Mora (Venezuela), IF Marco Scutaro (Venezuela), RHP Julian Tavarez (Dominican Republic), OF Willy Taveras (Dominican Republic), The Rockies had much less of a presence at the World Baseball Classic in 2009, sending just four active major leaguers and one minor leaguer to the tournament. The most prominent of the Rockies representatives at the 2009 WBC was pitcher Ubaldo Jimenez. Jimenez started the Dominican Republic's elimination game against the Netherlands, striking out 10 in four scoreless innings. However, the Dominicans lost the game, 2-1, in 11 innings. Jimenez went on to post a 15-12 record for the Rockies in 2009 with a 3.47 ERA striking out 198 in 218 innings. He also started Games 1 and 4 of the 2009 NLDS against the Phillies. The Rockies also sent a catcher to the WBC for the second time. Chris Iannetta had a great tournament for the United States, going 6-for-13 with four walks, a home run and six runs batted in. He played 93 games for the Rockies in 2006, hitting 15 home runs and posting an .804 OPS. Perhaps the club's most significant contribution to the '09 World Baseball Classic came in the dugout, with three former Blake Street Bombers in coaching roles. Vinny Castilla managed the Mexican team to a 2-4 record, while Larry Walker and Andres Galarraga serving as hitting coaches for Canada and Venezuela, respectively. 2013 World Baseball Classic: 2013 Rockies participants: RHP David Kandilas* (Australia), RHP Jhoulys Chacin (Venezuela), C Ramon Hernandez (Venezuela), OF Carlos Gonzalez (Venezuela), Coach Marcel Lachemann (United States) * Played for Low-A Asheville in 2012 Other notable Rockies participants: RHP Rodrigo Lopez (Mexico), RHP Jason Grilli (Italy), LHP Jeremy Affeldt (United States), IF Marco Scutaro (Venezuela), Coach Larry Walker (Canada), Coach Andres Galarraga (Venezuela) The Rockies will only be represented by major league players with Venezuela for the third edition of the World Baseball Classic. Three current or former Rockies will be participating in their third straight WBC, catcher Ramon Hernandez, first base coach Marcel Lachemann and former outfielder Larry Walker, who has been Canada's hitting coach in all three Classics to date. Meanwhile, Carlos Gonzalez and Jhoulys Chacin each will make their first WBC appearance for a likely potent Venezuelan team that shares Pool C with the Dominican Republic, Puerto Rico and Spain. David Kandilas will also be the second straight Rockies minor leaguer to represent Australia. It is perhaps notable that several Rockies, particularly Francis, Holliday and Jimenez, had breakout seasons after participating in the World Baseball Classic. Can Chacin follow in their footsteps? Can Gonzalez repeat Iannetta's standout performance in '09? We'll all find out in March. Kandilas' Australian team opens its tournament at 9:30 p.m. Mountain time next Friday against Chinese Taipei, and Venezuela starts Pool C play at 4:30 p.m. MT on March 7 against the Dominican Republic. |
The Associated Press MONTREAL -- The first scheduled Montreal show of contentious French comic Dieudonne was cancelled Wednesday after he was prevented from entering the country and from performing through video conference. Dieudonne M'bala M'bala, known as Dieudonne, landed in Montreal from France on Tuesday in advance of a series of sold-out shows. He was never let through customs and returned to Europe. Dieudonne has been convicted of hate speech multiple times in Europe, most recently in France just a few hours before he touched down at Montreal's Pierre Elliott Trudeau International Airport. He had announced on his Facebook book page he would still perform his Wednesday evening show through video conference, telling his fans the venue would change from an art gallery to a hotel in the city's downtown. Hours later, however, the comic's tour promoter, Gino Ste-Marie, told The Canadian Press the video conference event had also been cancelled after Mayor Denis Coderre put pressure on the venue. Coderre has been an outspoken critic of the comic and blasted him on Twitter days before his scheduled arrival. The hotel confirmed the event was cancelled but didn't give details. The mayor's office denied Coderre intervened. Ste-Marie promised there would be another performance in the future "and it will be even better." Quebec Immigration Minister Kathleen Weil said she was relieved Dieudonne was not allowed to stay in Canada. "I know people who have attended his shows, just to see, just to experience it, and it was very bothersome for them," she said. "So, for social peace, it's a very good thing he wasn't able to enter. I am relieved." |
A man and a woman lie in bed at night in the short hour between kid sleep and parent sleep, turning down page corners as they read. She is leafing through a fashion magazine, he through a cookbook. Why they read these things mystifies even the readers. The closet and the cupboard are both about as full as they’re going to get, and though we can credit the fashion reader with at least wanting to know what is in fashion when she sees it, what can the recipe reader possibly be reading for? The shelf of cookbooks long ago overflowed, so that the sad relations and failed hopes (“Monet’s Table,” “A Drizzle of Honey: The Lives and Recipes of Spain’s Secret Jews”) now are stacked horizontally, high up. The things he knows how to make that are actually in demand are as fixed as any cocktail pianist’s set list, and for a clientele of children every bit as conservative as the barflies around that piano: make Parmesan-crusted chicken—the “Feelings” of food—every night and they would be delighted. Yet the new cookbooks show up in bed, and the corners still go down. Vicarious pleasure? More like deferred frustration. Anyone who cooks knows that it is in following recipes that one first learns the anticlimax of the actual, the perpetual disappointment of the thing achieved. I learned it as I learned to bake. When I was in my early teens, the sick yearning for sweets that adolescents suffer drove me, in afternoons taken off from school, to bake, which, miraculously, meant just doing what the books said and hoping to get what they promised to yield. I followed the recipes as closely as I could: dense Boston cream pie, Rigó Jancsi slices, Sacher Torte with apricot jam between the layers.* The potential miracle of the cookbook was immediately apparent: you start with a feeling of greed, find a list of rules, assemble a bunch of ingredients, and then you have something to be greedy about. You begin with the ache and end with the object, where in most of the life of appetites—courtship, marriage—you start with the object and end with the ache. Yet, if the first thing a cadet cook learns is that words can become tastes, the second is that a space exists between what the rules promise and what the cook gets. It is partly that the steps between—the melted chocolate’s gleam, the chastened, improved look of the egg yolks mixed with sugar—are often more satisfying than the finished cake. But the trouble also lies in the same good words that got you going. How do you know when a thing “just begins to boil”? How can you be sure that the milk has scorched but not burned? Or touch something too hot to touch, or tell firm peaks from stiff peaks? How do you define “chopped”? At the same time as I was illicitly baking in the afternoons, I was learning non-recipe main-course cooking at night from my mother, a scientist by day, who had long been off-book, as they say in the theatre, and she would show, not tell: how you softened the onions, made them golden, browned them. This practice got you deeper than the words ever could. Handed-down wisdom and worked-up information remain the double piers of a cook’s life. The recipe book always contains two things: news of how something is made, and assurance that there’s a way to make it, with the implicit belief that if I know how it is done I can show you how to do it. The premise of the recipe book is that these two things are naturally balanced; the secret of the recipe book is that they’re not. The space between learning the facts about how something is done and learning how to do it always turns out to be large, at times immense. What kids make depends on what moms know: skills, implicit knowledge, inherited craft, buried assumptions, finger know-how that no recipe can sum up. The recipe is a blueprint but also a red herring, a way to do something and a false summing up of a living process that can be handed on only by experience, a knack posing as a knowledge. We say “What’s the recipe?” when we mean “How do you do it?” And though we want the answer to be “Like this!” the honest answer is “Be me!” “What’s the recipe?” you ask the weary pro chef, and he gives you a weary-pro-chef look, since the recipe is the totality of the activity, the real work. The recipe is to spend your life cooking. Yet the cookbooks keep coming, and we continue to turn down their pages: “The Asian Grandmothers Cookbook,” “The Adaptable Feast,” the ones with disingenuously plain names—“How to Roast a Lamb: New Greek Classic Cooking” (a good one, in fact)—and the ones with elaborately nostalgic premises, like “Dining on the B. & O.: Recipes and Sidelights from a Bygone Age.” Once-familiar things depart from their pages silently, like Minerva’s owls. “Yield,” for instance, a word that appeared at the top of every recipe in every cookbook that my mother owned—“Yield: six portions,” or twelve, or twenty—is gone. Maybe it seemed too cold, too technical. In any case, the recipe no longer yields; it merely serves. “Makes six servings” or “Serves four to six as part of an appetizer” is all you get. Other good things go. Clarified butter (melted butter with the milk solids skimmed and strained) has vanished—Graham Kerr, the Galloping Gourmet, once used it like holy water—while emulsified butter (melted butter with a little water whisked in), thanks to Thomas Keller’s sponsorship, plays an ever-larger role. The cult of the cooking vessel—the wok, the tagine, the Dutch oven, the smoker, the hibachi, the Tibetan kiln or the Inuit ice oven or whatever—seems to be over. Paula Wolfert has a new book devoted to clay-pot cooking, but it feels too ambitious in advance; we have tried too many other modish pots, and know that, like Elvis’s and Michael Jackson’s chimps, after their hour is done they will live out their years forgotten and alone, on the floor of the closet, alongside the fondue forks and the spice grinder and the George Foreman grill. Even the imagery of cooking has changed. Sometime in the past decade or so, the actual eating line was breached. Now the cooking magazines and the cookbooks are filled with half-devoured dishes and cut-open vegetables. Michael Psilakis’s fine Greek cookbook devotes an entire page to a downbeat still-life of torn-off artichoke leaves lying in a pile; the point is not to entice the eater but to ennoble the effort. With their torn leaves and unyielding pages, cookbooks have two overt passions right now: one is simplicity, the other is salt. The chef’s cookbook from the fancy place has been superseded by the chef’s cookbook from the fancy place without the fancy-place food. David Waltuck, of the ever to be mourned Chanterelle, started this trend with his “Staff Meals,” and now we have Thomas Keller’s “Ad Hoc at Home,” and, from Mark Peel, of the Los Angeles hot spot Campanile, “New Classic Family Dinners.” (“Every single recipe was tested in Peel’s own home kitchen—where he has only one strainer, just like the rest of us, and no kitchen staff to clean up after him.”) The simplicity is in part a reaction to the cult of complexity of Spain’s Ferran Adrià school of molecular cooks, with their cucumber foam and powdered octopus. Reformations make counterreformations as surely as right makes left; every time someone whitewashes a church in Germany, someone else paints angels on a ceiling in Rome. But simplicity remains the most complicated of all concepts. I have in one month stumbled over six simple recipes for making ragù or Bolognese—plain spaghetti sauce, as it used to be known, when there was only one kind—with chicken livers or without, diced chuck roast or hamburger, white wine or red. Yet all movements in cooking believe themselves to be movements toward greater simplicity. (Even the molecular gastronomes believe that they are truly elemental, breaking things down to the atomic level.) Curnonsky, the greatest of the interwar gourmands, was famous for preferring the cooking of the provinces and of grandmothers to the cuisine of restaurant chefs, and the result was such monuments of simplicity as Tournedos Curnonsky: filet of beef with grilled tomatoes, poached bone marrow, and cognac-port-and-black-truffle sauce. Simplicity is the style, but salt the ornamental element—the idea of tasting flights of salt being a self-satirizing notion that Swift couldn’t have come up with. The insistence on the many kinds of salt—not merely sea salt and table salt but hand-harvested fleur de sel, Himalayan red salt, and Hawaiian pink salt—is everywhere, and touching, because, honestly, it all tastes like salt. And now everyone brines. Brining, the habit of dunking meat in salty water for a bath of a day or so, seems to have first reappeared out of the koshering past, in Cook’s Illustrated, sometime in the early nineties, as a way of dealing with the dry flesh of the modern turkey, and then spread like, well, ocean water in a tsunami, until now both Keller and Peel are happy to brine everything: pork roasts, chicken breasts, shrimp, duck. Although brining is defended with elaborate claims about tenderness, what it really does is make food taste salty, and all primates like the taste of salt. That’s a feature, not a bug; we’re doing what our peasant ancestors did, making meat into ham. Salted food demands a salty sweet, and we read that in Spain recently one connoisseur had “a chocolate ganache coated in bread floating in a small pool of olive oil with fleur de sel sprinkled on it,” while we can now make pecan-and-salt caramel-cheesecake chocolate mousse with olive oil and flaky-salt sticky-peanut cookie bars for ourselves. The salt fetish has, I think, another and a deeper cause: we want to bond with the pro cooks. Most of what pro cooks have that home cooks don’t is what plantation owners used to have: high heat and lots of willing slaves. (The slaves seem happy, anyway, until they escape and write that testimonial, or start that cooking blog.) But the pro cooks also salt a lot more than feels right to an amateur home cook; both the late Bernard Loiseau and the Boston cook Barbara Lynch have confessed that hyper-seasoning, and, in particular, high salting, is a big part of what makes pro cooks’ food taste like pro cooks’ food. But the poor home cook, without hope of an eight-hundred-degree brick oven, and lucky if he can press-gang a ten-year-old into peeling carrots, can still salt hard, and so salt, its varieties and use, becomes a luxury replacement, a sign of seriousness even when you don’t have the real tools of seriousness at hand. The urge to meld identities with the pros is tied to a desire to get something out of a cookbook besides another recipe. For beneath those conscious enthusiasms and trends lies a new and deeper uncertainty in the relation between the recipe book and its reader. In this the Great Age of Disaggregation, all the old forms are being smashed apart and their contents spilled out like piñatas at a birthday party. The cookbook isn’t spared. The Internet has broken what once seemed a natural tie, between the recipe and the cookbook, as it has broken the tie between the news story and the newspaper. You can find pretty much any recipe you want online now. If you need a recipe for mustard-shallot sauce or boeuf à la mode, you enter a few search terms, and there it is. So the old question “What’s the recipe for?” gives way to “What’s the cookbook for?,” which turns it, like everything else these days, toward the memoir, the confessional, the recipe as self-revelation. Barbara Lynch begins her book “Stir” with a preface that sounds like the opening passages of “GoodFellas”: “We were poor, fiercely Irish, and extremely loyal. The older boys I knew grew up to be policemen, politicians and criminals (often a mix of the three.) . . . If I ever had thoughts at all as to what I might be when I grew up, they were modest ones. I might have pictured myself running a bar (in Southie) or opening a sub shop (in Southie). But having a restaurant of my own on Beacon Hill? No way. In fact, if a fortune teller had told me at fourteen what good things were in store for me, I would have laughed in her face and told her where she could shove such bullshit. . . . I marvel that any of us made it out of there without winding up in jail or the morgue.” Michael Psilakis, in “How to Roast a Lamb,” includes his own childhood traumas: “As I sat on top of the lamb, watching it struggle to free itself, as if in slow motion my father came up behind me, reached down over my right shoulder with a hunting knife, grabbed the lamb’s head and ears, and, in one swift motion, slit the lamb’s throat. . . . Blood shot out of the lamb like water from a high-pressure hose.” You never had a moment like that with Julia Child or Joseph Wechsberg. [#unhandled_cartoon] Another answer to the question “What good is the cookbook?” lies in what might be called the grammatical turn: the idea that what the cookbook should supply is the rules, the deep structure—a fixed, underlying grammar that enables you to use all the recipes you find. This grammatical turn is available in the popular “Best Recipe” series in Cook’s Illustrated, and in the “Cook’s Bible” of its editor, Christopher Kimball, in which recipes begin with a long disquisition on various approaches, ending with the best (and so brining was born); in Michael Ruhlman’s “The Elements of Cooking,” with its allusion to Strunk & White’s usage guide; and, most of all, in Mark Bittman’s indispensable new classic “How to Cook Everything,” which, though claiming “minimalism” of style, is maximalist in purpose—not a collection of recipes for all occasions but a set of techniques for all time. You see a progression if you compare the classics of the past century: Escoffier’s culinary dictionary, Julia Child’s “Mastering the Art of French Cooking,” Julee Rosso and Sheila Lukins’s “The New Basics,” and Bittman’s recently revised “Everything.” The standard kitchen bible, the book you turn to most often, has evolved from dictionary to encyclopedia, and to anthology and then grammar. Escoffier’s book was pure dictionary: quick reminders to clarify a point or make a variation eloquent. Escoffier lists every recipe for tournedos and all its variations. His recipes are summaries, aide-mémoires for cooks who know how to make it already but need to be reminded what’s in it. (Is a béarnaise sauce tarragon leaves and stems, or just leaves?) This was the way all cooks cooked once. (In the B. & O. cookbook, one finds this recipe for short ribs: “Put short ribs in a saucepan with one quart of nice stock, with one onion cut fine, steam until nice and tender. Place in roasting pan and put in oven until they are nice and brown.” That’s it. Everything else is commentary.) In “Mastering the Art of French Cooking,” as in Waverley Root’s “The Food of France,” which came out at around the same time, the turn is encyclopedic: here’s all you can find on a particular kind of cooking, which you will master by reading this book. Things are explained, but, as in an encyclopedia, what is assumed is the need for more and deeper information about material already taken to be essential. You get a list not of everything there is but of everything that matters. Julia gives you only the tournedos recipes that count. You didn’t want to master the art of French cooking unless you believed that it was an art uniquely worth mastering. When people did master it, they realized that it wasn’t—that no one style of cooking really was adequate to our appetites. So the cookbook as anthology arrived, open to many sources, from American Thanksgiving and Jewish brisket through Italian pasta and French Stroganoff—most successfully in “The New Basics” cookbook, which was the standard for the past generation. The anthology cookbooks assumed curiosity about styles and certainty about methods. In “The New Basics,” the tone is chatty, informal, taking for granted that the readers—women, mostly—know the old basics: what should be in the kitchen, what kinds of machines to use, how to handle a knife. The cookbooks of the grammatical turn assume that you don’t know how to do the simple things, but that the simple things, mastered, will enable you to do it all. Bittman assumes that you have no idea how to chop an onion, or boil a potato, much less how chopping differs from slicing or from dicing. Each basic step is tenderly detailed. How to Boil Water: “Put water in a pot (usually to about two-thirds full), and turn the heat to high.” How to Slice with a Knife: “You still press down, just with a little more precision, and cut into thick or thin slices of fairly uniform size.” To sauté: “Put a large skillet on the stove and add the butter or oil. Turn the heat to medium-high. When the butter bubbles or the oil shimmers, add the food you want to sauté.” Measuring dry ingredients, you are told to “scoop them up or use a spoon to put them in the cup.” And, “Much of cooking is about heat.” This all feels masculine in tone—no pretty side drawings, a systematic progression from recipe to recipe—and seems written mainly for male readers who are either starting to cook for friends or just married and learning that if you don’t cook she’s not about to. The old “New Basics,” one recalls nostalgically, was exclamatory and feminine. “The celebration continues,” reads the blurb, and inside the authors “indulge” and “savor” and “delight”; a warm chicken salad is “perfection when dressed in even more lemon,” another chicken salad is “lush and abundant.” The authors’ perpetual “we” (“We like all our holidays accompanied with a bit of the bubbly”), though meant, in part, to suggest a merry partnership, was generous and inclusive, a “we” that honest-to-God extended to all of their readers. Bittman never gushes but always gathers up: he has seven ways to vary a chicken kebab; eighteen ideas for pizza toppings; and, the best, an “infinite number of ways to customize” mashed potatoes. He is cautious, and even, post-Pollan, skeptical; while Rosso and Lukins “love” and “crave” their filet of beef, to all of animal flesh Bittman allows no more than “Meat is filling and requires little work to prepare. It’s relatively inexpensive and an excellent source of many nutrients. And most people like it.” Most people like it! Rosso and Lukins would have tossed out any recipe, much less an entire food group, of which no more than that could be said. Lamb is a thing they “fall in love with again every season of the year,” and of pork they know that it is “divinely succulent.” Bittman thinks that most people like it. His tone is that of Ed Harris in “Apollo 13”: Let’s work the problem, people. Want to thicken a sauce? Well, try Plan A: cook it down. Copy that, Houston. Plan A inadequate? Try Plan B: add roux. And so on, ever upward, until you get to the old one, which they knew on the B. & O.: add a little cornstarch. The progressive pattern appeals to men. The implication, slightly illusory, is that there’s a neat set of steps from each point to the next, as in a Bill Walsh pass pattern: each pattern on the tree proceeds logically and the quarterback just has to look a little farther upfield. Grammars teach foreign tongues, and the advantage of Bittman’s approach is that it can teach you how to cook. But is learning how to cook from a grammar book—item by item, and by rote—really learning how to cook? Doesn’t it miss the social context—the dialogue of generations, the commonality of the family recipe—that makes cooking something more than just assembling calories and nutrients? It’s as if someone had written a book called “How to Play Catch.” (“Open your glove so that it faces the person throwing you the ball. As the ball arrives, squeeze the glove shut.”) What it would tell you is not that we have figured out how to play catch but that we must now live in a culture without dads. In a world denuded of living examples, we end up with the guy who insists on making Malaysian Shrimp one night and Penne all’Amatriciana the next; it isn’t about anything except having learned how it’s done. Your grandmother’s pound cake may have been like concrete, but it was about a whole history and view of life; it got that tough for a reason. The metaphor of the cookbook was long the pet metaphor of the conservative political philosopher Michael Oakeshott in his assault on the futility of thinking that something learned by rote was as good as what was learned by ritual. Oakeshott’s much repeated point was that one could no more learn how to make good government from a set of rules than one could learn how to bake a cake by reading recipe books. The cookbook, like the constitution, was only the residue of a practice. Even the most grammatical of cookbooks dies without living cooks to illuminate its principles. The history of post-independence African republics exists to prove the first point; that Chocolate Nemesis cake that always fails but your friends keep serving anyway exists to prove the second. Unsupported by your mom, the cookbook is the model of empty knowledge. All this is true, and yet the real surprise of the cookbook, as of the constitution, is that it sometimes makes something better in the space between what’s promised and what’s made. You can follow the recipe for the exotic thing—green curry or paella—and though what you end up with would shock the natives, it may be just as good as or even better than the thing intended. Before I learned that green curries were soupy, I made them creamy, which actually is nicer. In politics, too, where the unwritten British constitution has been turned into a recipe—as in the constitutions of Canada and Australia—the condensation of practices into rules can make for a rain of better practices; the Canadian constitution, for instance, wanting to keep the bicameral vibe of a House of Lords without having a landed gentry, turned it into a Senate of distinguished citizens by appointment, an idea that can rebound back as a model for the new House of Lords. Between the rule and the meal falls the ritual, and the real ritual of the recipe is like the ritual of the law; the reason the judge sits high up, in a robe, is not that it makes a difference to the case but that it makes a difference to the clients. The recipe is, in this way, our richest instance of the force and the power of abstract rules. All messages change as they’re re-sent; but messages not sent never get received. Life is like green curry. |
Please enable Javascript to watch this video STROUD TOWNSHIP -- A former Stroudsburg Area youth wrestling coach is now facing a list of child sex abuse charges. Authorities say Ron Gorman, who once lived in Stroud Township, sexually assaulted two of his former wrestling students. "The charges that have been lodged against Mr. Gorman speak for themselves. He is just not safe for the community," said Monroe County Assistant District Attorney Julieane Fry. Gorman moved to Georgia in 2009. He was arrested there earlier this month for similar misconduct but never charged. The former coach was brought back to Pennsylvania after two victims from his program in the Poconos came forward a few weeks ago -- a now 20-year-old man from Stroudsburg and a now 20-year-old man from East Stroudsburg. Both were 10 years old when the alleged abuse began. According to court paperwork, the alleged abuse of both victims happened in a number of different places, including Gorman's home in Monroe County, various hotels throughout the Poconos, even out of state. Gorman's attorney says his client is maintaining his innocence. He says the charges are straining on the entire family, including Gorman's wife, who was at his arraignment. "The indications are that this is a gentleman who was nothing but a fantastic role model for the vast majority of children for the last 30-plus years and the amount of digging that had to be done by the commonwealth to find two people to say something not of that nature or character is significant," said defense attorney Brett Riegel. Officials in Monroe County believe there might be more victims out there. "We would hope that they would come forward, but we understand and respect their privacy," said Fry. According to the judge, because Gorman is a potential flight risk and because of the charges against him, bail was set at $1 million. Gorman is currently locked up at the Monroe County Correctional Facility. A preliminary hearing is scheduled for Friday, March 31. |
SANTA CLARA, Calif. -- For former San Francisco 49ers wide receiver Dwight Clark, there's something about ringing in the new year that brings good fortune. On Sunday, Clark celebrated his 60th birthday. On Monday night, he was in Tampa to see Clemson, his alma mater, win the college football national championship in thrilling fashion. On Tuesday, he celebrated the 35th anniversary of "The Catch," the game-tying 6-yard touchdown he caught from Joe Montana in the 1982 NFC Championship Game that set up the game-winning extra point to send the Niners to the Super Bowl. And as if all of that wasn't enough, the play call that ended with Clemson quarterback Deshaun Watson hitting wide receiver Hunter Renfrow for the game-winning 2-yard touchdown against Alabama on Monday looked awfully familiar. In the Eastern time zone, Renfrow scored his touchdown on Jan. 10, exactly 35 years after Clark made "The Catch." Dwight Clark's catch beat the Cowboys and remains one of the iconic moments in NFL history. Rob Lindquist/Getty Images The play that afforded Watson the chance to throw or run for the score and sprung Renfrow with the pick/rub play had a striking resemblance to the play in which Montana found Clark. That play, called simply "sprint right option," differed from the Clemson touchdown only in how it finished, but not in how it was designed. In the Niners' version, Montana's first read was supposed to be receiver Freddie Solomon, who was supposed to shake loose via pick, just as Renfrow did. Earlier in that game, Solomon had scored on a similar play. "There’s all kinds of versions of how we had practiced it, where we practiced it, when -- everybody remembers it a little bit different," Clark told the 49ers website in 2013. "The way I remember it is, we had practiced it during practice maybe once, and then Bill [Walsh] kept Joe and I after practice during training camp, and he said, "This is what we’re going to do; we’re going to try to pick the defender that’s covering Freddie, hit him, touchdown. If that doesn’t work, then keep rolling, you can run in if it's open. The third option would be to roll to the right and throw it high enough where it goes out of bounds or Dwight can jump up and catch it. But don't throw it low, don't throw an interception. We won't call this on fourth down. Give us another down to make a play." But Solomon slipped the second time, which threw off the timing and forced Clark to run his route in the back of the end zone, faking left and then tiptoeing along the back right corner of the end zone. Montana was flushed from the pocket, and as he faded backward and was hit, he lofted a high pass to Clark in hopes he could come down with it. Clark's leap and fingertip grab remains one of the most famous plays in NFL history for not only its degree of difficulty, but also for how clutch it was in a big moment. It also set in motion a series of events that established the Niners as one of the NFL's dominant franchises for the better part of the two decades that followed. "What I love about it the most is that it's connected me with 49ers fans for the rest of time," Clark said in 2013. "I didn't realize at the time that people would keep talking about it. But they not only talk about it, they pass it down through the generations. I'll be at an autograph thing, there'll be a 10-year old kid saying, "You're The Catch." On Monday night, after watching Renfrow haul in the national-title-winning catch while playing the role of Solomon, Clark told CSN Bay Area that the player in his position never had a chance -- much like Solomon didn't -- in 1982 because the player running his route "got pushed to the ground." Although it didn't play out exactly how "The Catch" did, it was just another sweet victory in early January for Clark. |
Hong Kong Investors Rush to Enter the Bitcoin Markets With bitcoin again dominating headlines, a flood of new money has recently entered the cryptocurrency markets – including from emerging crypto markets such as Hong Kong. Local media outlets are reporting, however, that many new investors may be ill-prepared for the risks associated with cryptocurrency. Also Read: Japanese Investors Increasingly Switching From Traditional FX Trading to Bitcoin Bob Laberge, a Canadian in His 50s Living in Hong Kong, Recently Invested in Bitcoin for the First Time Speaking to South China Morning Post, Mr. Laberge stated that he first invested on November 15th, purchasing $500 USD worth of bitcoin when the price was at approximately $6,600 – despite knowing very little about cryptocurrency at the time. After a fortnight, Mr. Laberge chose to invest “tens of thousands more” into bitcoin, however, and was left in a high state of anxiety due to his chosen bitcoin exchange failing to credit his account for four days. “The way I dealt with the banks was exactly the mindset when I was getting into bitcoin. For most exchanges it’s very difficult to get in touch with them. The only way to contact people, unlike a bank where you call their number and someone answers in a couple of minutes, is through a support ticket. And if they don’t answer the support ticket you are left hanging and it’s stressful when you’ve got a huge amount of money sitting there.” Mr. Laberge stated that he will not invest any further capital into bitcoin, despite his investment increasing in value by 70%. “My wife saw that it was going up and she said we should invest more but I said ‘No, let’s not lose our heads.” The President of the Hong Kong Bitcoin Association, Leo Weese, Has Commented on the Rush of New Investors Entering the Crypto Markets “There is certainly a big influx of new [bitcoin] users; the price increases give people an incentive to get in as fast as they can,” Mr. Weese stated. “The problem is that people are not making good decisions and they’re not thinking about exactly what it is that they’re investing in and what the risks are.” Mr. Weese stated that he expects to see the collapse of several “poorly run” Asian cryptocurrency exchanges in future, warning that many investors are inadequately accounting for counterparty risk. “People confuse bitcoin always being around with bitcoin exchanges always being around, but that’s not the case.” Rapid Growth Poses Challenges to Regulators Charles Mok, a representative of the IT sector to Hong Kong’s legislative council, has described the booming cryptocurrency sector as posing a number of challenges to regulators. “It puts us in a very uncomfortable situation,” Mr. Mok stated. “On the one hand we want to see an industry developing around cryptocurrency. But on the other hand, I don’t think these kinds of speculative activities … are really conducive to the long-term development of crypto-technology and cryptocurrencies.” Mr. Mok expressed concerns that should local bitcoin exchanges collapse, that Hong Kong’s Securities and Futures Commission (SFC) would seek to regulate the cryptocurrency industry. He states that the SFC would likely lack the experience and knowledge required to develop an effective regulatory apparatus for crypto, and could potentially resort to enacting prohibitive policies. Despite Mr. Mok’s concerns, Hong Kong’s financial regulator has not expressed the intention to develop a specialized legislative framework for cryptocurrencies. On December 11th, the SFC published a document articulating that companies seeking to offer “bitcoin futures contracts and cryptocurrency-related investment products” in Hong Kong are required to adhere to existing regulations defined in the territory’s “Securities and Futures Ordinance.” What risk management strategies do you employ in the management of your crypto holdings? Share your tips in the comments section below! Images courtesy of Shutterstock, Wikipedia At news.Bitcoin.com all comments containing links are automatically held up for moderation in the Disqus system. That means an editor has to take a look at the comment to approve it. This is due to the many, repetitive, spam and scam links people post under our articles. We do not censor any comment content based on politics or personal opinions. So, please be patient. Your comment will be published. |
The group of teams in contention for College Football Playoff spots toward the end of the season is going to look a lot like the top part of the various rankings being released in advance of the upcoming season. Most people agree those squads are good, and their performance should bear that out over the next couple of months. But there are always a handful of teams that exceed preseason expectations. These are the outfits that, for whatever reason, weren’t given much of a shot at winning many games or competing for a prestigious bowl. The only (totally arbitrary) criterion for SI.com’s list of sleepers is that the chosen teams fall outside of the top 20 of our preseason Top 25. The five squads below probably won’t be in the conversation for a CFP berth come Selection Sunday, but we feel poll voters and media outlets are undervaluing them. North Carolina State The Wolfpack wouldn’t be flying this far under the national radar had they won one of two close games last season. The first was a 24–17 overtime loss at eventual national champion Clemson in October in which NC State kicker Kyle Bambard missed a 33-yard field goal at the end of regulation. The second was a four-point home defeat to Florida State in November wherein the Wolfpack led deep into the fourth quarter, only for Seminoles quarterback Deondre Francois to hit NFL-bound wideout Travis Rudolph for a 19-yard touchdown with just over three minutes remaining one play after nearly throwing a potentially game-sealing interception. NC State takes just one of those close decisions, and it heads into this season as the clearest threat to shake up the ACC’s duopoly. Instead, the Wolfpack have been reduced to scrapping for “Others receiving votes” love, and Dave Doeren is showing up on coaching hot seat lists. Doeren needs to offer evidence of progress in 2017; the Wolfpack have posted a 25–26 record during his four years in Raleigh, and they haven’t notched anything that remotely qualifies as a signature win. That drought ought to end this year, as NC State hosts both Clemson and Louisville, our No. 7 and No. 14 teams, respectively. But looking beyond their potential to wreak havoc in the upper reaches of the division standings, the Wolfpack should be able to handle business against the ACC’s middle class without much fuss. Their defensive line is big and ferocious, and it’ll stop opposing running games in their tracks while stud end Bradley Chubb causes problems off the edge. NC State is experienced on the other side of the the trenches, where second-team all-conference guard Tony Adams returns, and offensive coordinator Eliah Drinkwitz will have two fun playmakers (Jaylen Samuels and Nyheim Hines) and a returning starter at quarterback (Ryan Finley) to work with. If NC State can turn even one of 2016’s close losses into a W and avoid a head-scratching toe stub on the order of its 21–14 home loss to Boston College, it’s hard to imagine 2017 not being Doeren’s most fruitful campaign in Raleigh to date. Notre Dame The jokes began hours after the season-opening loss to Texas, multiplied after a 12-point defeat to Michigan State two weeks later and crescendoed into a sort of schadenfreude that felt harsh even by the standards of the long tradition of poking fun at every Notre Dame misstep after a late-September loss to Duke. The Fighting Irish never righted the ship in 2016, dropping five of their last seven games, but their record of 4–8—college football’s version of the “Warriors blew a 3–1 lead” meme—shrouds how close they came to a much better final win-loss mark. Let’s review: A 50–47 loss to the Longhorns in double overtime, an eight-point loss to Michigan State, a three-point loss to the Blue Devils, a seven-point loss to the Wolfpack in a rainstorm, a seven-point loss to Stanford a week later, a one-point loss to Navy, a three-point loss to Virginia Tech. The close Ls papered over how well the Fighting Irish were actually playing: According to Football Study Hall, Notre Dame recorded 7.2 second-order wins, a statistic that seeks to render the number of victories one would expect based on performance. As much joy as most fans derived from Notre Dame’s misfortune last season, if a couple of those tight games break the other way in 2017, the Fighting Irish will be as insufferably successful as ever. Last year’s starting quarterback, DeShone Kizer, is a Cleveland Brown now, but replacement Brandon Wimbush has drawn rave reviews going back to his time as a Penn State verbal commitment. Junior Equanimeous St. Brown gives Wimbush a big-time target outside, former blue-chip tight end Alizé Mack is back in the fold after being ruled ineligible for the 2016 season because of academics and junior tailbacks Josh Adams and Dexter Williams should get plenty of touches in new offensive coordinator Chip Long’s uptempo system. First-year defensive coordinator Mike Elko has bigger issues to address on his side of the ball, but he comes well-regarded from his stint at Wake Forest. The linebacking corps is battle-tested, though things could get shaky in the back end, particularly if Navy safety transfer Alohi Gilman isn’t granted immediate eligibility. Brian Kelly’s mandate to win, and win big, is clear, but there’s cause to believe he’ll deliver. Oregon The case for an Oregon revival seems dubious based on the competitive landscape it faces and its schedule. The Ducks are looking up at three of our top 25 teams (No. 9 Washington, No. 15 Stanford and No. 22 Washington State) in their division, they meet two of them on the road (the Huskies and the Cardinal) and they face a pair of non-conference tests before the start of Pac-12 play (at home against Nebraska on Sept. 9 and at Wyoming on Sept. 16). Throw in the year of transition time first-year coaches often need, and the likelihood that Oregon falls flat for a second consecutive season seems pretty high. There’s also the fact that first-year coach Willie Taggart went 2–10 in his maiden campaigns at his two previous stops (Western Kentucky and South Florida). We’re hopping on the Ducks’ bandwagon despite all of that, primarily because of two things. First, their offense has the capacity to char every defense on the schedule, including the Stanford unit SB Nation’s Bill Connelly projects to rank in the top-10 nationally. Quarterback Justin Herbert is ready to take a big step forward after getting thrown to the fire as a true freshman last season, and dangerous playmaker Charles Nelson can prop up a green pass-catching corps that saw leading receiver Darren Carrington get dismissed last month following a DUI arrest. If Herbert doesn’t become the pinpoint distributor new co-offensive coordinator/quarterbacks coach Marcus Arroyo is counting on to field the sort of efficient, pace-pushing attack the Ducks need to overcome their deficiencies on the other side of the ball, they should be fine feeding bellcow back Royce Freeman and burner Tony Brooks-James. The second thing involves those defensive deficiencies mentioned above. They definitely exist, but new coordinator Jim Leavitt should do a whole lot better managing them than Brady Hoke did in 2016. Oregon is going to end up playing a lot of games in the 40s, but teams will run out of gas trying to keep up, even if the Ducks have a hard time stanching the bleeding when they don’t have the ball. Jeffrey Vest/Icon Sportswire TCU Watching TCU hemorrhage points while failing to crack the Football Outsiders S&P + defensive top 50 in consecutive years has been disorienting. The Horned Frogs’ work on that side of the ball turned them into a Mountain West power last decade and put them in position to claim the Big 12’s first playoff spot in 2014. Patterson should be able to shore up that unit if a couple of disruptive presences emerge up front to replace the Horned Frogs’ two sack leaders (Josh Carraway, Aaron Curry) and their co-leader in tackles for loss (Carraway). Senior cornerback Ranthony Texada is a candidate for All-Big 12 honors, and senior linebacker Travin Howard is a tackling machine ready for a killer final season after increasing his total from 105 to 130 a year ago. The Kenny Hill experiment mostly flopped in 2016, but drops and receiver health were major culprits. Both of those issues can turn around this season, putting Hill in position to play more like the Heisman Trophy candidate he was early in his college career than the guy who tossed only four more touchdowns (17) than interceptions (13) and posted the third worst QB rating among qualifying Big 12 signal-callers last season. Co-offensive coordinator Doug Meachem left this offseason to run Kansas’s offense, but TCU did tab former Cal coach and Air Raid disciple Sonny Dykes as an offensive consultant/analyst. If Hill can get into a groove after a rough first go in Fort Worth, this offense should be able to trade blows with every Big 12 unit save Oklahoma’s and Oklahoma State’s. The defensive slide is worrisome, but given Patterson’s track record, this feels more like a temporary blip than the start of a prolonged downward spiral. The Horned Frogs return more production than every other Power 5 conference team this season, according to Connelly. That production may not have gotten them very far in 2016, but it does set the table for a major upturn. And though the conference schedule isn’t favorable (road games against Oklahoma State, Kansas State and Oklahoma), TCU has a credible argument as the Big 12’s No. 3 squad behind the Sooners and Cowboys. Virginia Tech Year One of the Justin Fuente era worked about as well as Virginia Tech could have hoped. The Hokies overcame a turnover-dotted loss to Tennessee at Bristol Motor Speedway in September to rip off a 6–2 mark in the ACC before pushing Clemson in a seven-point loss in the conference title game. It’s not unreasonable to think the Hokies can get back there in 2017. The second, third and fourth-place finishers in the ACC Coastal are all replacing their starting quarterbacks: North Carolina’s Mitch Trubisky was the first quarterback taken in this year’s draft, Miami’s Brad Kaaya was a sixth-round selection and Pitt’s Nathan Peterman was picked one round earlier. Yes, Virginia Tech will have to make do with a new face under center, too, after Juco transfer Jerod Evans surprisingly announced he was headed to the NFL (and wasn’t chosen in the draft). But Fuente’s history of grooming quarterbacks, from Andy Dalton at TCU to Paxton Lynch at Memphis to Evans last season, suggests he’ll be able to mold Virginia Tech’s next starter into, at the very least, a serviceable distributor for his spread attack. Fuente hasn’t settled on a No. 1 guy yet; redshirt freshman Josh Jackson is still trying to beat out two other inexperienced options (Juco transfer A.J. Bush and true freshman Hendon Hooker). Whoever gets the nod, having arguably the league’s top receiver, senior Cam Phillips, is a luxury that should ease any early turbulence. Junior linebacker Tremaine Edmunds and veteran defensive backs Greg Stroman and Terrell Edmunds will set the tone for what should be another top-20 (if not top-10) defense under longtime coordinator Bud Foster, and look for former big-time recruit (and current 335-pound redshirt sophomore) Tim Settle to add some punch to a front that loses first-team all-conference honoree Woody Baron. The Hurricanes stack up as the Hokies’ primary challenger in the Coastal, but Virginia Tech’s ACC slate is manageable outside of a visit to Hard Rock Stadium in early November. In a division with a lot of unknowns, you can feel good about buying into a team with a suffocating defense and an elite coach with a well-earned reputation as an ace quarterback developer. |
Lamont’s letters were his sly supplements to the pieces that were appearing in the Islander Beacon. The published articles were quite popular, written in Lamont’s breezy style, but still peppered with the usual references to relentlessly cheery cockneys, courageous fire wardens and “the inimitable bulldog resistance of the British.” His letters to his parents were less reverent and sometimes more harrowing. Tel always shared them, and Marion was touched by the almost wondering pride with which he’d read them out loud. After Laurette and Marion had finished washing the dishes, they joined Tel and Felicia in the living room. Tel was obviously impatient to start, sitting in his chair and holding the pages from Lamont’s letter. He glanced around at everyone to make sure he had their attention, and began. Dear Mama and Papa, First, I must thank you for the bottle of All Is Lost. So far it’s rendered edible everything from stale eggs to ancient meat to vegetables boiled to a mush. In remembrance of what I learned at Mama’s knee about sharing, I offered some to an English friend, who, after one bite, coughed, wiped away a few tears and politely declined a second taste. A homesick soldier from Texas, however, went mad for it, and has offered me money for more. If I had a case of the stuff and were a less honest and patriotic American, I might become a rich man selling it to GIs. No doubt you have already heard that since D-Day, the Germans have stepped up their attacks. I’m told it’s not quite like what Londoners endured back in 40 and 41, but the Boche always have new and exciting methods of murder. The latest is a horrible new weapon called, with typical English understatment, “doodlebugs.” The only warning is a sort of purring buzz overhead followed by a moment of silence, followed inevitably by something blowing up, maybe a block away, maybe next door or down the street, maybe you. I don’t believe there is any way to truly convey the terror to someone who’s not experienced it. You are going about your business when you realize what you are hearing overhead. And then there’s that moment when it stops, that vacuum, where you know the thing is falling and you wonder if you’ll even survive long enough to hear the blast when it lands. You have just enough time in that silence to cower, or to roll out of bed and dash downstairs, or to run inside the nearest building, or to crawl under something, or to just embrace your child, your spouse, your friend, and pray it lands somewhere else — Which in the city means you are praying for somebody else to die. Yesterday afternoon I was on the way back to my room from the office when I heard it, and there was nothing for it but to dash for the nearest public shelter. I was sitting there trying to catch my breath and stop shaking when a kid, a boy who couldn’t be more than fourteen, left his family and came over and sat down next to me. I must have looked pretty bad, because he said in what can only be described as fatherly tones, “You’re alright here. Know what they call me? Lucky. Lucky Nobes, that’s me. The houses on either side of ours came down while I was home, and see? Not a scratch. Stick with us and you’ll be fine.” I gave him what was probably a pretty weak smile and thanked him. He looked at me more closely and asked, “Hey, where are you from?” I’ve learned there is no point in saying “Touperdu Island” because nobody knows where that is, so I just said I was from America, doing my best to sound like Humphrey Bogart. By this time Lucky’s little sister had wandered over and was staring at me, open-mouthed. She pointed at my hands. “Why are you that color, mister?” she asked, causing several other faces to turn sharply in my direction. I removed my hat so they could get a good look at my hair. “It was an aaaccident, kiddo,” I said, making my ayes as flat as possible. “An accident?” “Back home in Kansas, I worked in a pie factory…” I said. I had her at the word “pie.” She sat down on my other side, her eyes boring into mine. “…and my job was to use a great big ladle to stir a giant kettle of molasses as big as a swimming pool.” “What’s molasses?” “He means treacle, Maud,” her brother said. “One day, I was minding my own business stirring the molasses, getting it just right for Shoo-Fly Pie, when I slipped and fell right into the vat! Fortunately, it was a union shop and they had a lifeguard on duty specially trained to swim in molasses, and he hopped in and pulled me out, but it was too late! I was coated from head to toe. And ever since then I’ve been this color.” I heard a faint mumur from the rest of the adults. Her brother rolled his eyes and stood up. “Does it hurt?” she asked, looking a little worried. “Not one bit! But I do get a little crusty when it’s cold, and I can’t sit down on hot days or I’ll stick to the chair.” That was perhaps going too far because she pursed her lips and drew back, but all my other listeners laughed and decided I was okay. The Camels I always carry cinched the deal. American tobacco is an amazing ice-breaker over here. We all sang a few songs. I even taught them that great Kansas favorite, “The Light on the Cove.” By the time the all-clear sounded I’d passed out the rest of my cigarettes and every child had an apple I’d magically removed from an ear or a mouth or a pocket. Lucky tells me I can hang around in the shelter with him and his sister any time. Hugs to you, Mama, Papa, and everyone else, and a brotherly kiss on the cheek to the lovely Marion. Yes, I am staying as safe as possible, yes, I am taking every precaution a Duday of talent and ability can take, which isn’t everything but does give me a better chance than many. Send me more news of home when you can, and I will write back when I can. Your loving and vigilant son, Lamont Papa Duday folded the letter carefully, still smiling. This was as happy as Marion ever saw him these days. She knew without anyone saying so that each letter was being tenderly stored someplace safe. It was late. Laurette rose and said it was time she got back to Pond House. Papa Duday said he would walk with her. Felicia was yawning, ready for bed. She always slept more soundly after one of Lamont’s letters. Papa Duday, Marion knew, was not sleeping well. When he got back from taking Laurette home, he would probably go into his workroom. When Marion asked what he did there, he just shrugged and said, “I study chemistry.” One evening, when she’d felt restless, she’d paused in front of the closed doorway to his workroom and listened. She’d heard pages turning, but the light under the door had flickered in a way that bothered her. She’d hurried back to her room and read instead of going down to the kitchen as she’d planned. This time of evening, when the house had grown silent and dark, made her deeply uneasy. Her days were crowded with activities. Committee meetings, visits, sewing, volunteering… And during the day even this big house had footsteps and voices. But at night, when doors were closed and lights were out, she could not shake off the sense that there was something hidden. Something wrong. Something was hiding from her. She had at first told herself she was being foolish. What did she know about families other than her own? What did she know, really, about what was normal? But there was that thing, that monster in the courtyard two years ago. Her imagination, Papa Duday and Felicia had said, but she knew what she’d seen. Maybe it was gone. Maybe not. She hadn’t seen it since, but there remained echoes, shadows. There remained things that simply made no sense, didn’t fit into reality as Marion understood it or worse, fit into the reality she thought she’d left behind when she married Leon. Maisie, for instance. Invisible Maisie, Marion called her. Unseen Maisie, that servant Tel had mentioned who came in sometimes in the morning. They said she was gone now, working like so many former servants in some factory, but sometimes when Marion came home, she found signs that Maisie had been there, something about the way things had been tucked into place, dust eradicated, sheets tucked in. Certain convictions instilled in childhood could not be shrugged off. She was convinced there were dangers that the Dudays could not comprehend. Unbelievers, her father used to say, were blind to some realities, and as much as she loved the Dudays, everything she felt in this house after dark proved the truth of it. Every night, before going to bed, she stopped, she listened and she knew the invisible world was present here. And because only she could sense the danger, since her new parents were oblivious, it would be up to Marion to protect them. At least she could do that, even if she could not change Leon being lost and Lamont being in harm’s way. Funny, soft, feckless Lamont. Stay safe, Lamont, she thought, as she walked to her room. Leave the heroics to my husband, wherever he may be. And then she said a quick, guilty prayer for Leon’s safety. Advertisements |
Advertisement When most people think of the old DOS command prompt window – that archaic, lingering vestige of computer days gone by – they think of those simple commands that nearly everyone learned if they had to use a computer during those early days. Folks learned how to see a directory content with DIR or how to navigate from one directory to the next with CD. Not all commands were very intuitive, and of course before long we had that wonderful graphical user interface of Windows 3.1 (still my all-time favorite) and beyond. One would thing that with the advent of the graphical user interface, there would be no need for using any sort of command-line activities – yet the CMD tool lingers on from one generation of Windows to the next. The commands haven’t always stayed the same, in fact some have been trashed while other newer commands came along, even with Windows 7 in fact. So, why would anyone want to bother clicking the start button and typing “CMD” into the Run field? Let me show you why. The Magic of the Windows Command Prompt Windows is without a doubt filled with lots of features and tools for you to do all sorts of things like run disk drive diagnostics, search through thousands of files across multiple directories, and copy/paste everything from pictures and documents to files and directories. Yes, the interaction of Window and Mouse have come a long way, but do you always remember where to find what you need to do? Do you always recall, quickly, where you need to click? Let’s take a look at several very simple but extremely useful CMD commands that you can use in Windows 7. The following are 13 commands that will save you the time and headache of having to click, click and click. Instead, click Run, “CMD” and then type your command. Done. Before we get started, find cmd.exe in C:/windows/system32/, create a shortcut and place it on your desktop. Then right click it and select properties. Click on the shortcut tab, click on the “Advanced” button, and select “Run as administrator”. For the commands I’m going to share, double click this shortcut to enter the command prompt, so that you can be sure you have admin rights. 1. ASSOC – Associate File Types So, you went to open up a text document and Windows kindly asked you what program you want to use. Just this once, you’re testing a new text editor, so you click on that selection and forget to uncheck the box that makes this your default selection. Now, every time you go to open a text file, it uses that new text editor instead of notepad. Do you remember how to set it back? Not many people do. Instead, open up a command prompt and type the “ASSOC” command. This will show you all file associations related to all of the registered file extensions on your system. This is a pretty extensive list, but it gives you everything in a single shot, which is really convenient. To see the same thing in the Windows GUI, you have to go to Control Panel, click on “Default Program” and the link to associate file types. You can use the ASSOC command to associate any file extension with whatever registered file types you have on your system. However, I don’t commonly use it for this – my thing is to quickly free up a file extension that I accidentally associated with some other program. To do this you just type in the file association assignment and leave the right side of the command blank. “ASSOC .txt=” tells Windows that the next time I double click on any .txt file, to ask me what program I want to use to open the file. This gives me the opportunity to reassign the file association if I like. 2. CIPHER – Encryption Command Yes, you have the ability to encrypt and decrypt files and entire directories from the command prompt, but keep in mind that Cipher (EFS) is not supported (fully) on Windows 7 Starter, Home Basic or Home Premium. If you have any other version, you can run the CIPHER command to enable a directory as an encrypted directory. Any new files you add to that directory will also be encrypted. As you can see, my system doesn’t support encryption, but if it did you would see the result at the bottom stating that the 1 directory was encrypted. If you’d like to play around with this command on your machine, make sure to check out Microsoft’s explanation of how EFS works. 3 & 4. MORE and CLIP – Making Command Output Useful The next few commands are very simple, but I feel compelled to review them because they come in handy so often, and not everyone knows about them. While you’re going through your various commands and you get huge lists of output – such as a directory listing – it can be really nice to record that output. You can record the results of a command right to the clipboard using the CLIP command. Just type “| clip” after the command. Now, in the example above, I can go into any other application like Excel, Word or Notepad, and just paste that output. It is one of the fastest and easiest ways to obtain the complete listing of files in a directory, driver or hardware details about your computer, or any other information that you can pull from your system using any Windows command. If you instead follow a command by “| MORE”, it will just keep the output on the screen, but instead of scrolling like mad up the screen faster than you can read it, it’ll stop when the screen is full and wait for you to press a keyboard key before scrolling again. 5. COLOR – Have Some Fun Okay, so we’re not all work and no play here. If you want to stand out, play around with the color scheme of your Windows 7 command window by typing in the color command followed by a two digit number. The first hex digit is the background, and the second is the foreground. Just type “color /?” if you can’t remember the codes. Just black and white can get boring, so mix it up a little! If your friends ask you how you did that, just tell them that you’re a world class hacker. 6. DRIVERQUERY – Get Your Driver Information Working in IT, there is nothing more frustrating than working on communicating with a device, only to learn that the device driver is wrong, or the version is out of date. That headache can be avoided by running the DRIVEQUERY command to get a full list of installed drivers on your system. Just output it to the clipboard with the CLIP command, or output it to a file with something like, “DRIVERQUERY >> mydrivers.txt” The “>>” operator is actually an “append to file” command and it will create the text file and add the details. If the file exists, it’ll append the info at the end. Use “>” if you want it to wipe any old data and create a new file. 7. FC – File Compare Another really useful command – especially if you’re a writer or a programmer and often find yourself trying to find out what changes took place to a file – is the FC command. In my example below, I had two self-written biographies and wasn’t sure which was the most recent, so I type “FC /L ryanbio.txt ryanbio2.txt”. This does an ASCII comparison and actually outputs the sections of text in each file that are different. This isn’t the sort of useful feature many people associate with Windows command prompt command – but there it is. I’m not saying it’s a very new or exciting command, but it is a command that can make using the Windows command prompt a much faster and more effective way to get a job done than trying to figure out how to do it in some application. 8 & 9. DEFRAG and CHKDSK – Useful Maintenance Tools Some people swear that a regular defrag of your hard drive will keep it healthy and will make everything run more smoothly. Other people say the efficiency difference is negligible. I say, if it’s important to you, then run the command. In fact, just set up a weekly or monthly scheduled task Schedule Daily Tasks With Tasks Till Dawn [Mac] Schedule Daily Tasks With Tasks Till Dawn [Mac] Let's say you just want to schedule a few little daily or weekly tasks on your Mac and you don't feel like hauling out Automator or figuring out a script in AppleScript. Well, a small... Read More to get the job done and you’ll never even have to think about it again. As you can see from the example below, I use “DEFRAG C: /U /V”. The /U switch prints the progress of the defrag to the screen, and /V makes that output verbose. Obviously if you’re running a scheduled task in the background, you wouldn’t bother with that. Another important maintenance command I run regularly is CHKDSK to monitor the health of my hard disk. I run “CHKDSK c: /F /R”, which will check the C: drive for any problems. If if finds errors it will fix them thanks to /F, and it’ll try to recover readable information from bad sectors thanks to /R. 10 & 11. HOSTNAME and IPCONFIG – Network Troubleshooting Tools So you’re on the phone with IT and they need the hostname of your computer, what do you do? Yes, you could open up File Explorer, right click on the My Computer and check the Properties, or you can visit “System” in the Control Panel. If you want to be super-fast though, just open up your command prompt and type in one word – “HOSTNAME”. Done. I’m sure lots of IT folks are rolling their eyes out there with the mention of IPCONFIG. Why? Well, because it’s one of the first commands that IT techs cut their teeth on. It’s the fastest way to check the IP address and MAC address of a machine, as well as the current state of the network adapter. It is also a real life-saver in some situations. I can’t count how many times I’ve had friends struggling with Internet connection issues, and doing a quick “IPCONFIG /RELEASE” followed by “IPCONFIG /RENEW” wipes the slate clean (obtains a new IP and therefore a “fresh” Internet connection from the ISP) and solves all their problems. 12. Function Keys Are Your Friend Another well protected secret about your command prompt is that Function Keys also have a purpose in Windows 7. While you’re typing one command after another, you can quickly navigate through commands with the following function keys: F3 – Shows you the last executed command F4 – Deletes any text you’ve just entered F7 – Displays the entire list of recent commands you’ve used F9 – Lets you select one of the commands from the F7 list to paste to the command line It would have been really nice to have those function key features in the earliest days of DOS, when we had to type and retype commands if there were typos or mistakes. These days, you can whip out commands much faster than you could ever hope to navigate through various windows with point-and-click. 13. TREE – The Powerful Directory Visualizer I think the coolest command that I stumbled upon is the “TREE” command. This simple and fast command will output an entire visual map of the directory structure, starting at the path location you define. This is definitely one that you want to output to a text file. In the example below, I used the command “TREE /a >> treeresults.txt”. Since I was already sitting in “C:/Owner/” when I typed the command, it started drilling down through all of the directories in the “Owner” folder, and output the entire structure in an ASCII graphic (thanks the the /a switch). So, there you have it – 13 simple yet powerful commands that can make your computing experience a lot more efficient. And if you want to get a little creative, you could try your hand at writing batch files that incorporate several of them together! Did I convince you to try out the Windows command prompt for the first time? Were there any commands listed here that were new to you? Share your thoughts and your own CMD tips in the comments section below. Image Credit: Command Prompt via Shutterstock |
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