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Posts tagged 'Embassy of Brasil in Nairobi'
Lusophone Film Festival Meets Ten Cities Screening Series, Apr. 26 2014 @ Goethe Institut
Date: April 26, 2014
Venue: Goethe Institut
Time: 3-8.30 pm
Entry: Free
This session will be dedicated to the musical mix of the Portuguese-speaking countries, and is organised jointly with Ten Cities.
The films on show will be the following:
Lusophony, the (r)Evolution (Lusofonia, a (r)Evolução), Red Bull Music Academy – Portugal, 2006, 65 min
A Red Bull Music Academy production filmed with the fast-beat of a music video. From Portuguese fado, Angolan kuduro, Cape Verdean morna, Brazilian baile funk, hiphop or rock, this film sheds light on a new movement being born out of the cultural mix of the Portuguese-speaking countries
Passinho Dance Off (A Batalha do Passinho), Emílio Domingos – Brazil, 2012, 73 min
The Passinho dance is the newest trend in Brazilians slums. A new way to dance baile funk but also a lifestyle, the Passinho fever is changing young boys' life around Brazil's outskirts. This documentary portrays this phenomena and discovers how the culture around the funk world has expanded beyond funk dance parties, DJs, and favelas.
I Love Kuduro, Mário Patrocínio – Angola, 2013, 95 min
Kuduro is an urban cultural movement born out of Angolan discos and raves in downtown Luanda through a mixture of house, techno and traditional Angolan rhythms. The movement is at once a style of music, dance, fashion and culture, explored in this documentary through the distinct performances of its greatest stars.
Off the Beaten Track, João Pedro Moreira – Portugal, 2013, 30 min
The beats of Angolan Kuduro started appearing in Lisbon clubs in the late 90s. Four musicians started mixing it with beats from all over the world, creating a unique sound called Progressive Kuduro and a band called Buraka Som Sistema that is taking world dancefloors by storm.
Find more information on the screening on this Facebook event page
Out of Town Screenings: Brazilian Film Festival in Mombasa, Oct. 8-12 2013 @ Alliance Francaise Mombasa
A showcase of Brazilian Films Courtesy of the Embassy of Brazil in Nairobi
Dates: October 8-12, 2013
Venue: Alliance Francaise Mombasa
Time: 7 pm Daily
Entry: Free
For more info visit here
Workshops: Berimbau Making Workshop by Gabriel Limaverde, Nov. 27-29 2012 @ National Theatre
This is part of Tandawazi 2012 festival. The workshops are brought to you by the Embassy of Brasil in Nairobi.


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I'm reminded of a quote from "Dewey: The Small-Town Library Cat" by Vicki Myron:"Everone has a pain thermometer that goes from zero to ten. No one will make a change until they reach ten. Nine won't do it. At nine you are still afraid. Only ten will move you, and when you're there, you'll know. No one can make that decision for you."I think that's very apt in this situation. The OP's friend isn't at 10 yet. And nobody else can tell her she should be - she has to realize it for herself.
That's a good way of putting it. I think the afraid of being alone factor has a lot to do with the bad relationship. People will put up with a lot from another person rather than being alone. I can't speak for dating our 40's, but some women I know in their 20's settled for the bottom of the barrel. These were the women who feared being alone as the worst possible thing...I can see how being at an age where there are fewer available partners can heighten the sense that somebody has to hang on to what they have (or think they have).
Quote from: Fleur on December 18, 2012, 04:32:08 AMI'm in a bit of a bind here. The other day, I asked a friend of mine how her on/off boyfriend was doing. She said she hadn't seen, spoken to or heard from him in six weeks. This person isn't your friend's boyfriend. She is deluding herself if she thinks he is. I would point this out to her, gently, and ask her how she can feel loved and understood by someone who is completely absent from her life. That alone, without touching the "toxic" stuff, is reason for her to move on. What is she thinking?
I'm in a bit of a bind here. The other day, I asked a friend of mine how her on/off boyfriend was doing. She said she hadn't seen, spoken to or heard from him in six weeks.
Ugh, an advice blogger I enjoy (Captain Awkward) calls these types of guys Darth Vader boyfriends. ("There is still good in him! I felt it!") There really isn't a way to say, "Wow, that guy sucks" without making your friend defensive. The best thing to do is 1) don't feed into the drama that makes the relationship so exciting (lots of non-judgmental hmmms and ohs) 2) ask leading questions ("wow, how did that make you feel?") in hopes that she will come to the conclusion that he isn't really that great of a catch on her own. It stinks, but there's not really a way to stop someone from deluding themselves.
POD to those who said you can't tell her anything against him right now because she won't hear you. What you can do is modify your behavior. Here's what I did in a very similar situation with my bff (the situation was bf would break up with his current gf on Thursday to go out with my bff on Fri - Sun, then return to other gf. It ended in almost a huge legal mess but thankfully my bff escaped unscathed and a little wiser):The first four weeks I was supportive and caring and let her cry on my shoulder. After the 4th week of that nonsense, and the drama escalating and her needing more and more support, I couldn't take it any more so when she started talking about it, I would answer, "Ok, you've said that, now what are you going to do about it? That which can not be changed must be endured." and then change the subject. She would of course bring it right back around to him and I would answer the exact same way. After the 12th week of this, I told her she was no longer allowed to mention his name to me or talk to me about it because made, bed, lie. When she stopped getting her emotional needs met by me, she quickly realized that he was really bad for her. It ended soon after and really started her on a road to emotional recovery and discovery. Good luck and polish your shiney spine.
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To the Editor:
Why would the McHenry County Conservation District Board spend any money on history?
Every aspect of life, in this administration, is destroying our history and doing their best to obliterate our history in America.
It is a very sad tale. The majority of young people cannot answer one simple question about America's history. What is worse? They don't care and have no interest in learning. They only want to know where their next given pleasure is waiting for them for free.
Charging an extra dollar? The board would not hesitate to charge $10 if it was for political gain, but for history? They simply do not care.
They would pull their employees for themselves, but not the community.
Essie Hough


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2007-08 Men's Basketball
Rose-Hulman 63, Bluffton 60
Engineers take down Bluffton on Hall of Fame Day, 63-60
By: Brandy Bidlack, sports information assistant
January 26, 2008
BLUFFTON, Ohio - The Bluffton University men's basketball team was defeated by HCAC foe Rose-Hulman, on Saturday, January 26, 2008, by a final score of 63-60 in Founders Hall. Bluffton dropped to 11-7 overall and 5-4 in conference play while the Engineers improved to 8-10 overall and 4-5 in the Heartland Collegiate Athletic Conference.
Josh Eichar (North Baltimore/North Baltimore) picked up a steal and converted on the other end to give Bluffton the first two points of the game. A layup by Justin Rufenacht (Wauseon/Pettisville), thanks to an assist from Aaron Taylor (Antwerp/Antwerp), put the Beavers up, 5-2. Jordan Pothast (Ottawa/Ottawa-Glandorf) added two more points for Bluffton following a dish from Rufenacht.
A jumper by Ben Shindeldecker (Ohio City/Crestview) upped the Beavers' lead to four points with 12:36 left in the first half. A drive by Taylor and an Eichar layin gave Bluffton a six-point lead. Taylor came away with the steal and chipped in two more points to make it a six-point game with less than nine minutes on the clock.
A Bluffton turnover with 14 seconds left in the opening half allowed RHIT to close the gap to one point, 30-29, at the break.
The second half started with a block by Rufenacht and a Josh Eichar jumper. Nate Overmyer (Payne/Wayne Trace) buried a deep triple from the left corner and sophomore Chris Singleton (Ada/Ada) cut the deficit to three points, 42-39, with his jumper at the 13:13 mark.
Overmyer stole the ball and Eichar put the offensive board up and in to knot the score at 45. Shindeldecker tied the game back up at 48 with his trey at the 8:06 mark of the second half. A jumper from Colt Cunningham (Powell/ Worthington Christian) gave the Beavers the lead, 53-52, with 4:13 remaining on the clock.
An old-fashioned three-point play by Taylor gave Bluffton a four-point lead with just over two minutes left in the game, but Rose-Hulman answered with a 7-0 run. Taylor retaliated with another drive, but the Engineers' methodical offense was too much as Rose-Hulman held on for the victory, 63-60.
The Beavers were led by Aaron Taylor with 15 points and three steals. Taylor was a perfect 5-of-5 from the field and 5-for-5 at the stripe. Josh Eichar grabbed a game-high five rebounds, snatched two steals, and had 12 points on 5-of-6 shooting in only 22 minutes of action. Colt Cunningham chipped in with 10 points. Justin Rufenacht and Ben Shindeldecker each added five points. Nick Wilson (Continental/Continental) finished with two blocks and three assists.
Jared Moore led the Engineers with 16 ponits, five assists, four rebounds and one block. Daniel Lowers and Ron George each hit for 13 points, while Lowers added four steals and six boards.
The Beavers hit 18-of-23 (78.3 percent) at the line, while the Engineers made 15-of-26 attempts (57.7 percent). Bluffton went 20-for-39 (51.3 percent) from the field, compared to a 23-for-47 (48.9 percent) shooting night by the Engineers. Each team made only two three-pointers during the contest. The Engineers pulled down two more boards than the Beavers, 28-26. Bluffton coughed it up 22 times, four more miscues than the visitors committed.
The Bluffton University men's basketball team will return to action on Wednesday, January 30, 2008, when the Beavers travel to face HCAC leader Defiance College. Tip time is slated for 7:30 p.m.


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We'd say good morning, except we're not sure what's so good about it. Except the announcements, of course....More →
You know you really, really love the Morning Announcements. ...More →
Good morning and Happy Heart Day, you lovestruck let-downs....More →
Another weekend has come and gone, and you're still here. And so are the Morning Announcements....More →
Happy Friday, butts. Enjoy....More →
What's your favorite part of the morning announcements?...More →
Wanna hear more announcements? Check the rest of 'em out here....More →


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MATHEMATICS TALK Thursday, September 7
Student Colloquium Series Presented by:
Karl Voss Department of Mathematics Bucknell University
Title: "Brownian Motion and Stock Prices"
Abstract: Life and many natural phenomena are full of uncertainties. One might wonder, "How can I model something whose behavior is inherently uncertain?" We will consider an elementary introduction to Brownian motion as one way to predict the future behavior of uncertain phenomena. In particular, we will describe a model of stock prices using Brownian motion and look at the implications for some of the current scandals in the financial markets.
MATHEMATICS TALK Thursday, September 21, 2006
Student Colloquium Series Presented by:
Linda Smolka Department of Mathematics Bucknell University
Title: "Shocks, Waves, Fans and the Method of Characteristics"
Abstract: First order conservation laws can be used to model many complicated processes, such as, the adsorption of nutrients in the digestive tract, the flow of traffic, or the flow of a thin film on a solid substrate. The unknown quantity in such a law depends on space and time, and the conservation law itself is a partial differential equation, that is, an equation containing partial derivatives in space and time of the unknown function. Using concepts from calculus and ordinary differential equations we show how to derive a traveling wave solution to a first order conservation law using the method of characteristics. We'll also discuss other possible solutions such as, shocks and rarefaction fans, and see an example of a conservation law for thin a film flow.
MATHEMATICS TALK Thursday, October, 2006
Student Colloquium Series Presented by:
David Farmer American Institute of Mathematics
Title: "Random numbers"
Abstract: Many phenomena in the real world appear to have an element of randomness. Examples are the distances between cars on a freeway, or the total rainfall in October. Many things in mathematics also appear to be random, even though we know they are not, such as the digits of pi, or the zeros of the Riemann zeta function. I will talk about different types of randomness, and how we use random numbers to study things that are not random.
MATHEMATICS TALK Thursday, October 19, 2006
Student Colloquium Series Presented by:
Lisa Clark Department of Mathematics Susquehanna University
Title: "Groupoids and the Battle for the Universe"
Abstract: A groupoid is a small category in which every morphism is invertible. What does this eloquent definition mean and how does one do battle with it? This talk will be geared toward students who have no preconceived ideas or knowledge about groupoids. With a clean slate, I will explain this lovely definition, give some examples, and discuss the appearance of groupoids in our mathematical universe.
Lisa Clark with Ueli Daepp
MATHEMATICS TALK Thursday, November 2, 2006
Student Colloquium Series Presented by:
John Meier Mathematics Department Lafayette College
Title: "Embeddability: How Plastic Man Got Me Interested in Topology"
Abstract: One of the most impressive things mathematics can do is prove that certain things cannot be done. One example of this is the utlities graph: Draw three utilities (electric, gas and water) and three houses on a piece of paper, add lines connecting each house to each power plant, and at some point you will have to have two of these lines cross. There is no way to avoid it. In this talk we will talk about such things and their higher dimensional analogs, each of which will be introduced by panels from Plastic Man comics (and a few other comics as well).
John Meier
Seminar Talk - Tuesday - November 9 - 4:00 - OLIN 351
Title: "The Lifting Problem for Commuting Subnormals"
Abstract. We construct three different families of commuting pairs of subnormal operators, jointly hyponormal but not admitting commuting normal extensions. Each such family can be used to answer in the negative a 1988 conjecture of Curto, Muhly and Xia. We also obtain a sufficient condition under which joint hyponormality does imply joint subnormality.
Our tools include the use of 2-variable weighted shifts, the Six-point Test for joint hyponormality, disintegration of measures techniques, the theory of multivariable moment problems, and matrix positivity. We obtain new necessary conditions for the existence of a lifting, and generate new pathology associated with bringing together the Berger measures associated to each individual weighted shift.
For subnormal 2-variable weighted shifts, we then find the precise relationship between the Berger measure of the pair and the Berger measures of the shifts associated to horizontal rows and vertical columns of weights. Finally, we consider the (multivariable) spectral theory of these hyponormal pairs, and discover some unexpected new phenomena, not present in the single variable theory.
Seminar Talk - Thursday - November 9 - 4:00 - OLIN 383
Title: "Hyponormality and Subnormality for Toeplitz Operators and Unilateral Weighted Shifts"
Abstract: We discuss the gap between 2-hyponormality and subnormality for Toeplitz operators. In joint work with W.Y. Lee, we have established that every 2-hyponormal Toeplitz operator with either trigonometric symbol or unitarily equivalent to a unilateral weighted shift must be subnormal. On the other hand, in joint work with S.H. Lee and W.Y. Lee we have exploited C. Cowen and J. Long's construction of a nontrivial subnormal Toeplitz operator to provide an example of a nonsubnormal 2-hyponormal Toeplitz operator. We also show that, under a suitable condition on the symbol, a 2-hyponormal Toeplitz operator with nonzero self-commutator must be normal or analytic.
Characterizing subnormality for Toeplitz operators is tied to the search for concrete models for 2-hyponormality. We say that an operator T acting on a Hilbert space H is weakly subnormal if there exists an extension R acting on a bigger Hilbert space K such that T*Tf=TT*f for all f in H; we say that R is a partially normal extension of T. Together with I.B. Jung, W.Y. Lee and S.S. Park we have proved that 2-hyponormal operators are automatically weakly subnormal. More generally, we prove that T is (k+1)-hyponormal if and only if T is weakly subnormal and its minimal partially normal extension is k-hyponormal.
As a direct application, we obtain a matricial representation of the minimal normal extension of a subnormal operator as a block staircase matrix. When this is applied to a weighted shift, we obtain a new, simpler proof of Stampfli's construction of the minimal normal extension of a subnormal weighted shift. Moreover, the above mentioned recursive characterization of k-hyponormality allows us to give a simple proof of C. Gu's description of the gap between k-hyponormality and (k+1)-hyponormality for Toeplitz operators.
MATHEMATICS TALK Thursday, November 16, 2006
Student Colloquium Series Presented by:
Annalisa Crannell Department of Mathematics Franklin and Marshall
Title: "Math and Art: The Good, the Bad, and the Pretty"
Abstract: Dust off those old similar triangles, and get ready to put them to new use in looking at art! We're going to explore the mathematics behind perspective paintings---a mathematics that starts off with simple rules, and yet leads into really lovely, really tricky mathematical puzzles. Why do artists use vanishing points? What's the difference between 1-point and 3-point perspective? What's the difference between a perspective artist and a camera? We'll look at all of these questions, and more.
Annalisa Crannell and Paul McGuire
The following links are virtual breadcrumbs marking the 27 most recent pages you have visited in Bucknell.edu. If you want to remember a specific page forever click the pin in the top right corner and we will be sure not to replace it. Close this message.


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Sorry to sort of derail the thread. Son is being a twit, no doubt about it. We are walking a fine line with him, and he is seeking professional help. He was accepted into an excellent university, so therefore knows everything, enough that since he does not like class Y, he decides he does not have to turn in a certain major paper. Yeah, he tanked his chance at valedictorian with that one. And, he has not been applying for scholarships, because, "money is not important. Besides, I will get a good job when I graduate." He is a National Merit Finalist, but that will only scratch the surface for his tuition. I HATE what he has been doing to himself. But he is 18, and almost fully cooked. He can cook, do laundry, and even basic sewing, and he behaves great in public, I get rave reviews from him at church, and surprisingly, even from the teacher whose class he does not like.Still, his telling me to "calm down" was maddening. bopper nailed it. TEENS.Can't live with them, can't kill them.
Reminds me of the sign "Teens, quick, move out, get a job, your own place and pay your own bills now, while you still think you know everything!"
"Mary" came to the lobby almost in tears because she had a conflict with an instuctor and felt she had been treated unjustly. As always, I tried to be soothing and told her I would find the appropriate person for her to talk to. She continued to stand over my desk and carry on about it, getting herself more tearful and worked up as she spoke. I gently suggested she have a seat and try to calm down a little while we waited for her advisor to come to the lobby to get her. "But I don't want to calm down! I'm angry and I want to be angry! This needs to be dealt with!" and so on.. you get the gist. She was filled with righteous indignation and wanted to keep that head of steam going until she got whatever would satisfy her sense of justice. *Note-I have no idea who was right/wrong here or if the instructor really did do anything wrong or unjust. But that is the student's perception of the situation and that is what matters in the moment.*I can't ask her to leave and come back when the advisor is ready; the last thing we want is for a student to feel they are not being taken seriously and decide to withdraw and go elsewhere. Nor do we want someone tearful and angry carrying on in the lobby where potential students are getting their first impression of the school, either. It's a catch 22. If I could, I would put her in a separate office/room to wait, but space doesn't allow for that.How would you suggest handling this?
And, he has not been applying for scholarships, because, "money is not important. Besides, I will get a good job when I graduate." He is a National Merit Finalist, but that will only scratch the surface for his tuition. ...TEENS.Can't live with them, can't kill them.
Well there is a news article about a girl on the East Coast who is suing her parents for room/board and tuition.Google it.My children are both over 25 and I am very grateful they both survived, but I would never do it again.
Well there is a news article about a girl on the East Coast who is suing her parents for room/board and tuition.
DH and I are happily married, and will contribute what we have been saving for years for DS. We will not go into debt ourselves.DS he applied early decision to a private university, and will have to face his own decisions.
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Old Sturbridge Village in Sturbridge, Massachusetts is just over the Connecticut border, and a chance to step back in time: the years 1790-1840, to be exact.
Visit more than 40 original buildings that have been restored, and learn New England history from the costumed interpreters, who offer a wealth of information.
The restored buildings include homes, meetinghouses, a district school, country store, bank, law office, printing office, carding mill, sawmill, gristmill, pottery, blacksmith shop, shoe shop, and cooper shop.
Don't forget to stop by the Bullard Tavern cafeteria, the Grant Store, and the Village Cafe offer refreshments and hot meals.
For a special Easter event, have brunch at the Oliver Wight Tavern
Date: April 12, 2009, 10:00 am-2:00 pm
$25 for Adults; $5 for Children ages 10 and under
Website: www.osv.org
1 Old Sturbridge Village Road
Sturbridge, MA 01566
Phone: (800) 733-1830
Adults: $20
Seniors (65 and over): $18.00
Youths (3-17): $7.00
Children Under 3: Free
April 4-October 23, 2009: 9:30 am - 5:00 pm


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800, square Victoria, 22e étage,
C.P. 246, tour de la Bourse,
Montréal (Québec),
Making wise investments
AMF offers tools to help Quebecers, young and old alike, become financially aware
A major financial transaction can be unforgettable — for all the wrong reasons.
"Money gives many opportunities to be happy, but can quickly do damage that lasts many years," said Camille Beaudoin, head of outreach and education for Quebec's regulatory agency, the Autorité des marches financiers (AMF). "Buying a car, signing a lease or getting a credit card can be an exciting milestone." But it takes some thought, some planning. Major financial transactions should not be impulse purchases. "Young people need to learn to look forward."
It's tough to get adults to do it, more so for young people, many of whom plan only as far as next weekend, and are a vulnerable group when it comes to financial awareness, as revealed in the AMF Index based on extensive questioning of some 1,500 Quebecers.
The AMF established several profiles based on its research, with young people and the elderly showing little knowledge of financial issues — and little concern for them.
"People aged 17 to 22 are a big concern," Beaudoin said, adding that the AMF's youth website tesaffaires.com has become a valuable tool to educate young Quebecers on financial matters. It has been revamped to better reflect social-media traffic and features new tools, like cost and budget calculators, and a plethora of relevant information.
"People need to ask the right questions," he said. On Tesaffaires.com, you learn about the real costs of car ownership, perils of credit, and even how to budget for the very first time. "Parents can use it to navigate the important conversation of financial literacy in their own household. It's a very interesting tool."
So is the simple budgeting tool, "where you can easily see, with a glance, where your money is going and that helps tremendously."
Targeting real-life situations, the site helps young people negotiate increasingly complex banking and investment options, a great weapon in their arsenal of information — especially when they arrive at CÉGEP or university orientation and are showered with Hacky Sacks, energy drinks and credit-card applications. (A nifty financial glossary helps those who don't know an amortization from a stripped bond.)
The AMF's efficacy lies partly in its strategic partnerships to bring financial literacy and autonomy to even more Quebecers. Programs are in the works that include McGill University clinics on credit, budgeting and savings; working with the Carrefours jeunesse-emploi de Côte-des-Neiges (which works closely with black and English-speaking youth in Montreal), and the University Women's Club of Montreal's financial literacy project called Beginning the Conversation.
The AMF also works with immigrant communities, where language barriers and traditional mistrust of authorities can leave people particularly vulnerable to fraud and exploitation. In order to get its message across most efficiently, the AMF has started working with community-based organizations already active in dealing with immigrant seniors.
Beaudoin laments the fact that Quebec seniors are not accustomed to asking questions or considering alternatives when faced with financial dealers.
"As a group they don't have that habit," he said, adding that, ironically, many are too shy to ask questions or to say no to people who offer them products or services. "They need to ask more questions," he said.
Such questions should, in fact, be asked by the general populace, and might include:
• What is the policy of retrieving assets?
• Are there delays?
• What are all fees or penalties?
• How will you communicate with them?
• How often can you meet?
• Are there other people in the organization to deal with?
These are all questions that can help anyone make the best decisions and avoid tragic pitfalls.
AMF brochures, all available in English online or delivered to you free of charge, contain a wide variety of helpful information. Alternatively, you can make a simple phone call to the Information Centre, which fields close to 90,000 phone calls a year. This unique and valuable gateway features specially trained, fluently bilingual personnel to assist you on the phone, by email or in person. They will not advise on specific products, but will guide you in discussions with your adviser, flesh out insurance details, or help you determine risk quotients.
Among their most popular materials is the brochure Red-Flagging Financial Fraud. Featuring five easy steps to avoid being a victim, it's essential reading for everyone — but especially for young people who commonly exhibit impulsive online behaviour, and have a very different take on privacy and information sharing than their parents.
If a broker or adviser says they are registered with the AMF, Beaudoin cautioned, "check with us. A simple call or a click is all it takes."
Registered advisers contribute to a compensation fund that is available to victims of fraud. "Contacting us should be your first reflex," he said.
AMF (Autorité des marches financiers)


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MESA, Ariz. -- It's tempting to call it just another case of "Manny being Manny" but that has too many negative connotations. This was simply Manny Ramirez Jr. doing what he's done time and time again at high school tournaments and Perfect Game events throughout his prep career.
Doing a terrific impression of his old man back when Manny Ramirez Sr. helped the Boston Red Sox to a pair of World Series Championships in 2004 and 2007, Ramirez Jr. crushed a grand slam and a two-run double to push IMG Academy to a 9-1 win over Desert Ridge High School in the championship game of the Cleats Sports Classic Invitational Thursday night at the Gene Autry Sports Complex.
The championship victory capped quite a tournament turnaround for IMG Academy, which limped into the 12-team playoffs as the No. 11 seed after finishing 1-3 in pool-play. But led by Ramirez Jr., IMG's bats took off and it outscored its four playoffs opponents by a combined 48-16.
"I think we were probably in the toughest pool of the three and really, the way I calculated it, we were three hits away from being 3-1," IMG head coach Jason Elias said after the title game. "All year long these guys have been battling and they've been so stinking close and I knew it was coming -- I just didn't know when. Fortunately the bats just erupted over these last four games."
The championship game pairing was set after IMG Academy beat Williams Field High School (Gilbert, Ariz.), 12-4, and Desert Ridge (Mesa, Ariz.) beat Notre Dame Prep (Scottsdale, Ariz.), 6-3, in Thursday's semifinals.
The Cleats Sports Classic Invitational started on Monday with 15 teams divided into three pools. Eleven of the 15 schools came from within the Phoenix Metropolitan area, and were joined by Tucson (Ariz.) High Magnet School; Bradshaw Mountain High School from Prescott Valley Ariz.; Victor Valley High School from Victorville, Calif.; and IMG Academy, based in Bradenton, Fla.
IMG is a private academy that trains and educates young athletes in seven sports, baseball being one of them. It doesn't contend for Florida high school state championships and instead competes in tournaments across the country. The roster that IMG brought here this week featured players from nine states and Mexico.
"We're hoping to make our mark throughout the country ... and we decided this (tournament) would be a great fit for our guys and for our program," Elias said. "Our guys are prepared for anything; I would argue that maybe they're the best prepared high school baseball team in the country."
Ramirez Jr. is a 6-foot-4, 200-pound outfielder from Plantation, Fla., who is ranked 249th nationally in the 2013 class and is an alumnus of 12 Perfect Game events, including the 2012 PG National Showcase. He has signed to play at nearby Central Arizona Community College.
After going 3-for-3 with six RBI and three runs scored in the championship game, Ramirez Jr. finished the tournament 12-for-23 (.522) with three doubles, two triples, two home runs, 15 RBI and nine runs scored.
"It's just been being confident and just trusting my team and myself," he said. "I feel like we've been working twice as hard as everybody out here and everything we do everyday means something. We just earned this today."
IMG Academy (7-9 overall in 2013) was outscored 26-20 in its four pool-play games and entered the playoffs as the No. 11 seed. Once there, it beat No. 6 Bradshaw Mountain High School (Prescott Valley, Ariz.), 10-5 in the first round and Tucson High Magnet School, 17-6 in the quarterfinals to set up the semifinal against Williams Field.
"I just love this team and we just have great chemistry together," Ramirez said. "We just stuck together and fought through it."
IMG Academy senior third baseman Trevor Courtney from Bradenton, Fla., also enjoyed a terrific tournament. He finished 11-for-21 (.524) with three doubles, two triples, nine RBI and nine runs scored.
"I've been kind of in the hole hitting-wise, so turning it around for me has been great," Courtney said. "This team always plays together and brings everybody together. We're all on each other and this was a great turnaround; we're giving the glory to God ... and we knew if we just played the game of baseball and kept it simple that we would win, we'd have a chance and we'd put ourselves in a good position."
IMG's most effective pitcher over the course of the tournament was senior right-hander Brett Hanewich from Bradenton, who went 2-0 after allowing only one earned run on three hits and striking out 12 in nine innings of work. Hanewich is ranked 105th (class of 2013) and has been to 21 PG events, including the 2011 PG Junior National Showcase and the 2012 PG National Showcase.
It was a somewhat unlikely final four that advanced into the semifinals at the Gene Autry Complex Thursday afternoon. None of the four teams was its pool champion and fifth-seeded Desert Ridge (3-1), No. 7 Williams Field (2-2), No.8 Notre Dame Prep (2-2) and No. 11 IGM Academy (1-3) combined for an 8-8 record during pool-play.
Each of those teams relegated one of the top-four seeds into the consolation round of the tournament with quarterfinal-round wins on Wednesday: Notre Dame Prep bumped top-seeded and national No. 48-ranked Desert Mountain (Scottsdale, Ariz.), 6-4; Williams Field beat No. 2 Saguaro (Scottsdale, Ariz.), 6-3; IMG Academy whacked No. 3 Tucson High Magnet School, 17-6; and Desert Ridge overwhelmed No. 4 Marcos de Niza (Tempe, Ariz.), 17-2.
Desert Mountain went 4-0 in pool-play by outscoring its opponents by a combined 41-5. Seniors Nick Affronti and Devon Deraard combined to go 3-6 with five RBI in Notre Dame Prep's upset of Desert Mountain.
Courtney really raked in IMG Academy's 17-6 win over Tucson High. Courtney, who played some travel ball with Marucci Elite last summer, was 4-for-5 with a double, triple, five RBI and four runs scored to lead IMG's 19-hit attack. Ramirez Jr. was 3-for-4 with two doubles and three RBI, and senior Tyler Biggs and junior Andrew DiLacqua both had two hits and drove in two runs.
"We came out here with a mindset that we were going to go all the way," Courtney said. "We started out slow but we kind of turned it around ... (and decided to) play the game of the baseball like we did when were 12 years old and nothing mattered. We started swinging it, and whenever you start hitting it exciting things can happen."
The tournament was originally scheduled to begin on Saturday, but was rained out that day. The schedule was then condensed into four days and IMG Academy (5-3 at the event) and Desert Ridge (6-2) played eight games between Monday and Thursday. And IMG bashed its way to the championship.
"I knew that we would have a shot to get through pool-play and anytime you're playing a large number of games in a short period of time, if the bats light up you have a shot," Elias said. "That's kind of what happened these last four days and it was fun to watch -- just fun baseball."


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Talk:First Mission (GTA SA)
| This talk page is for discussing the First Mission (GTA SA) article.
This includes commenting on the article, questioning whether it is correct, or adding suggestions for improvements
Questions about GTA games, not about the wiki page itself, should be asked at Community:Questions.Remember to always add your signature to the end of your comments/replies using four tildes:
Input, Anyone?
So, I've been editing on another wiki for quite a while now, and thought I might be able to help lend this one a little more depth. This article shows what I would ideally like to do. Please, anyone respond to let me know what's not feasible, what's not necessary, and what would be left over to be implemented. --GuildKnight 00:19, 31 December 2007 (UTC)
Update: With a little more thought, I've realized this should probably actually be at San Andreas:In The Beginning (mission). Of course, all missions would not need this disambiguation, only the ones like this one and San Andreas:Big Smoke (mission); the ones that would have another page with the same name (i.e[[San Andreas:Big Smoke (person)). --GuildKnight 00:23, 31 December 2007 (UTC)
Pedaling home is not a mission
The mission ends when the player enters the bycicle because the player can buy properties and do vehicle missions and others, so cycling home is not part of it. --DT-boy 06:57, 5 August 2009 (UTC)
I haven't seen one hint that these cutscenes are titled "In The Beginning" in any way. The perception I have is that this portion of the game, like that of GTA3 (which doesn't even have an article), is untitled. - ZS 10:57, 22 August 2009 (UTC)
- I agree on that point. However, nobody is going to search for "Introductory Mission" - whilst it's technically accurate, it's not common phrasing. Howabout something like First Mission (GTA SA)? Then we could have a simple central First Mission page which outlines what the first mission is, and gives a link to the first mission of each game. Gboyers talk 23:21, September 30, 2009 (UTC)
- Some of the opening "missions" aren't missions to begin with (such as in GTA III and GTA LCS), but they are left out in this wiki, cutting out plot points as Give Me Liberty and Home Sweet Home mention nothing about the turn of events in these cutscenes. I've renamed it to something more general. - ZS 05:48, October 1, 2009 (UTC)
The game is programmed to have a save title "In the beginning" when no previous mission is passed, a leftover from Vice City. Players normally don't encounter this "correct" name.--Spaceeinstein 16:23, October 1, 2009 (UTC)
Name of mission
The name of this mission is "In the beginning". Look at
ITBEG) in american.gxt.
Also, you can start the game, get money (eg. by cheat), buy safehouse and save game BEFORE completing first mission. In menu, you see "In the beginning". tomta1 [✉] 18:11, May 27, 2010 (UTC)


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Food & Wine magazine has announced its picks for best new chefs of 2013, and Los Angeles-based Michael Voltaggio of ink. is among the winners.
According to the Food & Wine website, Voltaggio was honored "because his modernist cuisine pushes boundaries — he'll serve octopus over buttered-popcorn puree — but it is still delicious."
PHOTOS: Michael Voltaggio's ink.
Voltaggio isn't exactly new to the food scene in Los Angeles, but to be eligible, chefs must be in charge of a kitchen for five or fewer years.
RESTAURANT REVIEW: Michael Voltaggio's ink.
For the last 25 years, Food & Wine magazine has honored up-and-coming culinary talent with its Best New Chefs Awards. This year's winners will be honored at a dinner at Pranna in New York on Tuesday. The full list of winners:


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An attorney for condemned killer Allen Nicklasson is asking the Missouri Supreme Court for a stay of execution, citing concerns about Missouri's planned use of the anesthetic propofol for the first time as a lethal injection drug.
Attorney Jennifer Herndon filed the motion on Wednesday. It wasn't clear when the court would issue a ruling.
The Missouri Department of Corrections has expressed confidence in propofol as an execution drug, but Herndon raised concerns that it could cause Nicklasson to suffer.
Nicklasson was convicted of the 1994 killing of Excelsior Springs businessman Richard Drummond, who stopped to help when a car used by Nicklasson and two others broke down on Interstate 70. Nicklasson was determined to be the shooter. Another man in the car, Dennis Skillicorn, was executed in 2009. The third, Tim DeGraffenreid of Blue Springs, was a teenage acquaintance they brought along with them. He eventually led authorities to Drummond's body in a Lafayette County field. He received a life sentence.
Also on Wednesday, the Missouri Department of Corrections said that it will return a shipment of propofol, nearly a year after the drug distributer's urgent request for it to be sent back.
The department said in a news release that it still has a supply of propofol, but it didn't clarify whether it had enough of the drug for the scheduled executions of Nicklasson and Joseph Franklin. Phone and email messages left with the agency's spokespeople were not returned.
The announcement came a day after the department released documents to the American Civil Liberties Union, in response to an open records request, that included a Nov. 2 email sent by Dale Kelley, an executive with Louisiana-based pharmaceutical distributor Morris & Dickson Co., to Department of Corrections Director George Lombardi.
The email said a "system failure" led Morris & Dickson to send propofol to the department in violation of the company's agreement with the drug's manufacturer, Germany-based Fresenius Kabi. The email said that because of the mistake, Morris & Dickson was suspended from distributing propofol, which is by far the most popular anesthetic used at U.S. hospitals and clinics.
The drug has never been used in an execution, and Missouri's plan to use it has prompted the anti-death penalty European Union to say it could limit the drug's export. Nearly 90 percent of the U.S. supply comes from Europe.
"Please — Please — Please HELP ... this system failure — a mistake — 1 carton of 20 vials — is going to affect thousands of Americans," Kelley wrote.
Phone messages left with Morris & Dickson were not returned.
The Corrections Department said its remaining supply of propofol was produced by a domestic manufacturer.
The executions would be the first in Missouri since the state dropped its three-drug execution method in favor of propofol in April 2012. The switch was made after the state couldn't obtain its previously used drugs because makers began prohibiting their use in executions.
The change to propofol — the drug used in pop star Michael Jackson's overdose death in 2009 — also spurred a lawsuit filed on behalf of nearly two dozen death-row inmates. The suit argues the drug could result in pain and suffering for the condemned.
The case was scheduled to go to trial this week, but court records show a 30-day delay was granted because of changes the state made on Sept. 24 to its execution protocol, such as changing the amount of propofol that would be placed in syringes. That means the case won't go to trial until after Nicklasson's scheduled execution.


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Q I thought the job market was supposed to be measurably better according to everything I read. It doesn't feel better to me right now. What's the word on the ground from people in the market? — N.B.B.
A "The job market is still like walking through mud, but getting a bit better," is the colorful way Tony Beshara explains today's job search scene.
Beshara, a top-shelf placement and recruitment professional, heads Babich and Associates in Dallas, the oldest job agency in Texas. Beshara writes wonderful job search books and blogs, headlines the daily Job Search Solution radio program and makes instructive webinars and videos on job finding that help many people. He's a busy guy in the thick of the job market.
Speaking about the 7.6 million business establishments in the United States that average 16 employees, Beshara says that because their owners are worried about their profitability potential, they're only replacing departed employees, not boosting payrolls to meet expected demand. They're hiring more out of "fear of loss" than "vision of gain," the job ace explains.
"Hiring authorities are risk averse and they're being extremely careful of whom they hire. A candidate absolutely must interview impeccably well and not let slip "risk factors" that set off alarms," Beshara explains.
When I asked for a few examples of risk factors, Beshara offered the following: "I have enough money so that I really don't have to work"; "I've been unemployed for six months"; "I've had four jobs in the past two years and I really hope this one will be better." Job seekers actually spill these kinds of deal-killers that cause hiring authorities to back off in uncertain times, Beshara says.
"When the job market is expanding, a decision maker's attitude is that it's no big deal if the company hires three new employees and only one works out. But in this cautious market, only one new employee is hired at a time. It's a different mindset."
Q My career has been financially rewarding, but now, at age 33, I'm beginning to feel the need for a mission in life. I'm not interested in becoming a minister, but what have other potential career changers done to make their lives more meaningful? — S.G.
A You're apparently feeling that attainment of material and personal well-being does not by itself lead to a fully mature and healthy lifestyle. It seems that you want to act with a larger purpose in mind than your current career affords.
Some people who've been in your shoes have turned to contemplative books, such as Richard Nelson Bolles' "What Color is Your Parachute?" which is revised yearly, and Rick Warren's "The Purpose Driven Life: What on Earth Am I Here For?" which was revised in 2012.
Others with your longings have identified individuals doing the work they want to do and sought informational interviews with them. Sometimes high-minded potential career changers keep their jobs and find weekend volunteer stints to confirm the realism of their inner yearnings.
Your quandary appears to illustrate your need to include selfless service to others. Some flip-flops between idealistic and materialistic pursuits work the other way. I recall speaking to the head of a major nonprofit organization who seized a chance to move into a highly paid retail position because, at age 41, he realized he had kids to put through college and financial fences to mend.
Ask yourself: Do you see a career as a vocation directed toward special work that encompasses such things as ethics, nobility, compassion, concern for the planet or shared responsibilities for the problems of humanity?
Or do you see a career as a means to employment advancement and financial achievement?
Selecting a softer, gentler career option is admirable and appropriate — for some of us. But a balance between altruistic purpose and materialistic achievement is probably best for most of us.
Email career questions for possible use in this column to Joyce Lain Kennedy at firstname.lastname@example.com; use "Reader Question" for subject line. Or mail her at Box 368, Cardiff, CA 92007.


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Homer Smith used to call it "pushing the top," and I like to refer to it as "blowing the lid off". Both are suitable references to speedy receivers beating defenses vertically, which is something not all receivers can do. One thing we've learned about football is that you can coach technique and discipline, but you can't coach speed. That's the outstanding trait that Oregon State wide receiver Markus Wheaton has.
Believed to be roughly 6' and 180 or so pounds, the senior receiver is one of the fastest rising prospects for the upcoming 2013 draft. He is very explosive and possesses an impressive second gear that enables him to run by defensive backs. The second gear is something that Wheaton's always had, going back to the age of 14 when he won back-to-back national titles on the track. Later, during his studies at Chandler High School, Wheaton set a "personal record 46.80 seconds in the 400 meters, a time that stood as the best in state for most of his senior year at Chandler."
At Oregon State, he's also set records, most notably total receptions, which shows that he means business. Handling business was the main reason he came to OSU, citing in an October interview that "he experienced more of a party atmosphere during recruiting visits to other schools. When he arrived in Corvallis, there was snow on the ground, school wasn't in session and OSU was preparing for the Sun Bowl."Wheaton's on-field business has seen him become one of the most dangerous receivers in all of college football and receive lofty comparisons to Pittsburgh Steelers wide receiver Mike Wallace. Like Wallace, Wheaton's game is based off of winning vertically with sheer speed, which he did very well on numerous occasions, including a 43-yard touchdown versus UCLA.
Lined up just inside the numbers to the right side of the field, Wheaton was assigned to run a go-route against senior corner Sheldon Price. Price was playing off-man coverage, giving a cushion of nearly eight yards and respecting the vertical speed of the OSU receiver.
When Wheaton got off the line of scrimmage, he quickly ate up the cushion and gave a slight jab with his outside foot. Having to respect a potential outside breaking route ran by Wheaton, Price abruptly reacted by coming forward for a split-second and planting his inside foot into the ground. Once he did this, Wheaton squared his shoulders and accelerated vertically, closing the remaining gap between himself and the defender.
Nearly 18 yards down the field, Wheaton and Price were shoulder-to-shoulder. It appeared that Price recovered from the early move from Wheaton and was going to be able to hold up in man coverage. However, that thought quickly went south as Wheaton ran right north and right by Price, proceeding to haul in the pass for a deep touchdown.
This was the immense speed that Wheaton showed so often, posing a plethora of problems for defensive coordinators and leading to comparisons to Mike Wallace. Although he is viewed in the same light as Wallace, he possesses better hands than Wallace does. He's a natural pass catcher, keeping the football away from his body by extending his arms, opposed to trapping the football with his upper body when it comes in. He also shows good concentration and extension when hauling in the football over his shoulder.
Despite having better hands than Wallace, I do have a concern about Wheaton that he shares with the Steelers receiver, which revolves around his agility or lack thereof.
When receivers are asked to run certain routes, such as a deep comeback or dig, they shouldn't have to motor down when breaking off their pattern. In other words, a receiver shouldn't have to take four or five steps to stop and turn to his quarterback. Instead, he should be taking two or three to break off his route and get open. This may seem like a minor issue, but it's not because it limits the route tree for the receiver. A limited route tree can be a difficult issue to overcome for receivers because of the way defenses defend them. Opposed to facing isolated man coverage, the receiver will face more bracket (read: double) coverage, making it more difficult for him to win vertically, meaning he will have to run shorter and more precise routes to get open.
Generally speaking, speedsters tend to have this issue and if one recalls, Steelers head coach Mike Tomlin famously called Wallace a "one-trick pony". This is not to say that Wheaton is a one trick pony at the moment, as it would be unfair to call a collegiate player such, but he will have to expand his route tree when he's drafted into the NFL in April, and I could foresee it being an issue for him.
Overall, every receiver has concerns and Oregon State's Markus Wheaton is no exception. He may lack great agility but he has one great trait that will give him a good chance of succeeding in the NFL: speed. Speed can't be taught and often can't be matched, which is why Wheaton is a very appealing prospect.
He's currently a draft riser that will likely fly up many more boards after February's NFL Combine. There he'll show off his physical traits and potential, which head coach Oregon State head coach Mike Riley thinks his star receiver has plenty of: "we're just looking at a glimpse of what he's capable of."


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Project teams are from the University of Alberta and the Western Transportation Institute at Montana State University, led by Dr. Colleen Cassady St. Clair, in collaboration with Dr. Scott Nielsen and Dr. Tony Clevenger. Over the next four years, research initiatives championed by these teams and supported by experts from Parks Canada and Canadian Pacific, will test the effectiveness of grain aversion, determine potential off-site habitat improvement and better identify the root-causes of grizzly bear mortality along the rail corridor.
Parks Canada's short-term actions benefiting from research grants under the Joint Action Plan include a bear GPS collaring and monitoring program, as well as sight-line and sound-line improvements through vegetation management. In addition, the initiative will establish an off-site test area to evaluate fence and closure alternatives to assess what infrastructure is needed to stop bears from accessing the railway corridor.
All of these initiatives are part of the five-year Joint Action Plan announced by Parks Canada and Canadian Pacific in October 2010.


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This is SWEDEN! Since when has IT been a hotbed for terrorists or drug dealers?
File it under "delusions of grandeur". Our politicos like to think that Sweden is important enough to be considered a terrorist target.
Sweden is "non aligned" and has (officially) maintained a neutral stance
"Officially", yes. Practically, not so much. We (the government, that is) bend over for the guy with the biggest guns, and have done so since World War One.
Perhaps the difference is who they primarily serve? If most requests come from the US or UK, then placing servers within the country reduces Googles exposure to surveillance because the transmissions are domestic not international.They said they can't put their servers in Sweden, but US/UK etc is fine? What is the differance?
They did, noting that the new law would make their already active wiretapping legal.
Such as?
You mean your trust. I, for one, do not trust them anymore than any other government. And in what instance did it serve us well in the past?
For one, there is quite a stir in IT related, and mainstream media about this.
Really? If so, you should have no problem pointing to at least one article in mainstream media in recent months.
The current government suggested this while in opposition a couple of years ago
No, they did not. This comes from the MoD via the MoJ under Thomas BodstrÃm, but his lawyers screamed bloody murder so they canned it until it was revived by Odenberg under suspicious circumstances. Read more about it here: http://rickfalkvinge.se/2008/05/30/fra-forslaget-en-tidslinje/ [rickfalkvinge.se]
The government is supposed to work for us. We have every right to be outraged when they instead turn against us.
That doesn't mean that we're surprised.
encrypt if you don't want it snooped on.
I don't want my private communication snooped on. So, does anyone have experience with what is the easiest and least intrusive way to push email encryption on less technical friends and family? I would prefer something I can install/activate for them which automatically encrypt/decrypt emails to/from me, while still allows them to communicate as usual with others. Preferably an open-standard multi-platform / multi-program solution.
If things really are not this easy, maybe it is time to work hard on develop
From what I've heard the snoops care more about who is talking to who than about what's actually being said. Mapping social networks and all that.
So in addition to encryption, we would all have to run anonymising proxies, such as Tor or Freenet.
The United States has already said that pretty much any private communication it can get hold of is fair game. Does anybody have the feeling that a lot of other countries are responding by taking the view that, "If you read my mail, I"m sure as hell going to read yours."
"If you read my mail, I"m sure as hell going to read yours."
Herein lies the problem. We CAN'T read THEIR mail!.
There is no oversight. We can't watch the watchers.
We are living in an unbalanced surveillance society, where the core system of checks and balances has been thrown out the window.
%DCL-MEM-BAD, bad memory VMS-F-PDGERS, pudding between the ears


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Several Illawarra beaches have been closed as looming wet weather and rough surf conditions deter potential beachgoers.
Beaches in Bellambi, Bulli, Corrimal, Stanwell Park, Windang, Wollongong City and Woonona were all closed around lunchtime as rain and dark clouds threatened overhead.
Austinmer, Thirroul, Coledale, Fairy Meadow and North Wollongong beaches have also been closed due to lightning strikes.
Beaches at Coalcliff, Port Kembla, Sandon Point, Scarborough, and Towradgi remain open but could be closed later in the day.


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Chocolate Bliss Marble Cake Recipe
Popular Videos
- 5 egg whites
- 1/4 cup baking cocoa
- 1/4 cup hot water
- 1 cup sugar, divided
- 1 cup fat-free milk
- 3 tablespoons canola oil
- 1 teaspoon vanilla extract
- 3/4 teaspoon almond extract
- 2-1/2 cups all-purpose flour
- 3 teaspoons baking powder
- 1/2 teaspoon salt
- 1-1/2 cups reduced-fat whipped topping
- 4 ounces semisweet chocolate, chopped
- 1-1/2 cups fresh raspberries
- Let egg whites stand at room temperature for 30 minutes. Dissolve cocoa in water; let stand until cool.
- In a large bowl, beat 3/4 cup sugar, milk, oil and extracts until well blended. Combine the flour, baking powder and salt; gradually beat into sugar mixture until blended.
- In another bowl with clean beaters, beat egg whites on medium speed until soft peaks form. Beat in remaining sugar, 1 tablespoon at a time, on high until stiff peaks form. Gradually fold into batter. Remove 2 cups batter; stir in reserved cocoa mixture.
- Coat a 10-in. fluted tube pan with cooking spray. Alternately spoon the plain and chocolate batters into pan. Cut through batter with a knife to swirl.
- Bake at 350° for 30-35 minutes or until a toothpick inserted in the center comes out clean. Cool for 10 minutes before removing from pan to a wire rack to cool completely.
- For topping, in a microwave, melt whipped topping and chocolate; stir until smooth.
- Place cake on a serving plate. Drizzle with topping. Arrange raspberries in center of cake. Yield: 16 servings.
Reviews forChocolate Bliss Marble Cake
My Review
Average Rating
"cake was very dense and not sweet enough. Icing was a disaster but my fault since I didn't follow the directions:)"
"Have not made yet. I've read all 18 reviews and this is my take. I love cake and need to watch my fat intake. When I get a chance I will try this, paying close attention to the egg whites and use applesauce for the oil. In this house I'm the only one who likes frosting so I'll leave that off . If it seems too thick before adding the whites I'll add more milk, one tablespoon at a time. And Grandma832, if you see this I hope you give it a try adding in my suggestions. Sometimes, like a child, it takes a village."
"Very moist ..... great taste!"
"I read the reviews and saw the ups and downs. So, I made sure the egg whites were at room temp, and everything was exactly like the recipie. It looked too small in the pan, but when it tested done, I took it out. Way too packed.......but I did the frosting anyway. But, then I took a step back, looked at it and couldn't make myself serve it at a dinner. It's deep 6 in the bottom of my trash can!"
"It was very tasty, however it was a litle heavy. But my husband loved it and since we are both watching our sugar and weight I was more than satisfied with it. I didn't top with the chocolate since with only the two of us and we limit ourselves to one piece a day I felt it might get sticky. I just added low fat whipped topping as we ate each piece."
"I didn't have any whipped topping so I just used whipping cream. The cake turned out very nice. Also, it wasn't too sweet."
"Wow, I'm not sure what the negative reviews are about--This cake was devoured by my whole family. I didn't have the Cool Whip so I just used powdered sugar, still very, very good."
"This was easy to make - I just wish I had some fresh raspberries (carefully thawed some frozen ones)."


text: registrar City and Town Clerks Prepare For Same-Sex Marriage By Flo Jonic • Aug 1, 2013 RIPR FILE Same sex marriage becomes the law of the state today Thursday. City and town clerks are well trained in the new law but don't have any idea what kind of volume they'll be dealing with. State registrar Colleen Fontana has been working overtime instructing city and town clerks in the new law guaranteeing marriage rights to same sex couples. The new forms – giving couples the option of calling themselves 'bride,' 'groom,' or 'spouse' are printed. Now it's just a waiting game to see how many people show up to apply today. Fontana said there's just no way of knowing.


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Skip to comments.RS: Bush Like Me - Ten weeks undercover in the grass roots of the Republican Party
Posted on 10/13/2004 11:34:04 AM PDT by weegee
I never felt any longing to go to Orlando, Florida. What I felt, in traveling south to volunteer for the campaign of George W. Bush, was an obligation. Let me explain by first saying something about the critics of our president. A great many of them like to laugh at George Bush for not reading books and for being uninterested in visiting other countries. But a lot of those same people are guilty of the opposite offense. They prefer to read books and travel abroad rather than actually getting to know their own country face to face.
These critics do a terrific job of mocking his mental deficiencies and dismissing his supporters as hapless morons, but they do not do a very good job of explaining the nature of his support. The few dissident commentators who bother trying to explain the Bush phenomenon seldom do more than reach for the nearest Marx-inspired academic cliche. They will tell you, for instance, that Republicans are a vast intellectual underclass cynically manipulated by the rich through a mesmerizing cocktail of yahoo enthusiasms, xenophobic fears and ancient superstitions -- and those same people will insist, if forced to offer an opinion on the subject, that one should feel sorry for most of them.
This is the wrong approach. As a professional misanthrope, I believe that if you are going to hate a person, you ought to do it properly. You should go and live in his shoes for a while and see at the end of it how much you hate yourself.
This was what I was doing down in Florida. The real challenge wasn't just trying to understand these Republicans. It was to become the best Republican I could be.
Republicans are everywhere, but everywhere is not a good place to look for them. For my purposes I wanted to try to catch them in their ideal habitat. That was why I chose Orlando. For me, it is hell on earth, the worst city on the planet, a place that would make me long for Kinshasa or Volokolamsk. But for Republicans, it is ideal: a scorching-hot paved inland archipelago of garish shopping malls and stadium-size steel-and-glass Baptist churches, a place with no nonhuman life apart from the caged animals at the theme parks, and an entire economy organized around monstrous temples to fake experience.
I arrived in early June, moved into a cheap hotel, called the local Republican office and offered to volunteer. They told me to come on by. So I went, arriving early on a Tuesday morning at their small strip-mall office on the east side of town.
My cover story was a travesty, an idiotic tissue of halfhearted lies. I said I was a New York City schoolteacher named Tom Hamill, in Orlando to spend a summer with a girlfriend who was from the area. It was the best thing I could come up with to explain my Northern accent, my lack of local connections and all that free time.
The story's only saving grace was that the truth was so much more unbelievable. Republicans are paranoid enough to expect a mole from the Kerry campaign, but I was far worse than that -- a dissolute, drug-abusing anarchist who reads the battle diaries of Vietnamese generals on rainy days, roots for Russia at the Olympics and once published an article titled "God Can Suck My D**k." I was, in short, the most offensive individual who could conceivably be planted in the campaign of George W. Bush. I was tempted to feel guilty about this. But in the end I figured that it was only fair. Since John Ashcroft has made it easy for FBI agents to infiltrate anti-war groups, it seemed to make sense that an anti-war journalist should infiltrate Ashcroft's party.
Orlando is the crucial city along a stretch of interstate called the I-4 corridor, a swath of central Florida running from Daytona Beach to Tampa. Home to 3.7 million of Florida's 9.3 million registered voters, it has the bulk of the state's undecided voters and is therefore the key to winning Florida's twenty-seven electoral votes. When I got there, I expected a teeming, ultramodern NORAD-style campaign headquarters, where I would have to work my way up a giant totem pole. But in fact what I found was -- nothing at all. For all intents and purposes, there was no campaign for George Bush in Orlando in early June. There was only one paid staffer, a central-Florida field director named Vienna Avelares, and a corner of a table at the local Orange County Republican Executive Committee. If the Republicans were building an electoral Death Star somewhere, it sure as hell wasn't in Florida.
The situation was completely disarming. Vienna, a gregarious Puerto Rican single mother who insisted on introducing herself as "Vienna -- like the sausage," seemed desperate. I had planned on doing a good job anyway, but after meeting her I had a genuine desire to help get things going.
After just a week of coming in every day like this, I became -- along with a young blond Sean Hannity fan named Ben Adrian, who also volunteered at that time -- one of the most important Bush people in all of central Florida. Within a few weeks, we would both be given keys to the office and offered full-time jobs.
Here I want to make a general observation about the social aspect of working for Bush. It's very different than it is working for a Democratic candidate. Corny as this sounds, it is much more egalitarian and brotherly than most Democratic campaigns. Almost every Democratic campaign I've seen has let itself be seduced by the Primary Colors paradigm -- the hip clique full of mildly sexually adventurous twentysomethings who have been working on their memoirs since high school and dream of that chance to wear Versace sport coats and crack jokes on Jimmy Kimmel Live.
If you've ever hung out with the Tricia Enrights and Joe Trippis of the world, you know that the operative vibe of the Democratic insider is wisecracking cool. It is not a reach to say that the ideological vision that mainstream Democratic politics has offered America since Clinton has been the supercool high school, the party of the popular kids. For all the talk about the Democrats being the party of inclusion, it really doesn't feel that way from the inside.
That's not true of all Democrats, of course. I thought it was very different, for instance, in the campaign of Dennis Kucinich. For the most part, these people were motivated by something other than ambition, and just being part of that campaign meant you were in a besieged minority, with the whole world out there laughing at you. Kucinich supporters stuck up for one another, because they had to.
You get that same besieged fraternal feeling in a Republican campaign office. There is no M*A*S*H ensemble-cast repartee. Nobody wears T-shirts that mean something, and nobody looks cool. As I would later find out, most Republicans hate "cool" ("They all think they're so cool and artistic," griped one woman as she watched Fox coverage of Democratic delegates arriving in Boston). Many of the parent volunteers I met were especially bitter because they think that cool is what liberals use to lure their children away. Which they might very well be right about, of course.
In my first month on the campaign, I did not meet many people who came into the office with the serious intention of working hard for the president. I did, however, meet a great many very lonely people who came in because they knew the Bush offices were the one place where they could share certain deeply held ideas without being ridiculed.
Part of my job, I soon came to understand, was to be supportive when people like portly Tampa sheriff's deputy Ben Mills came in to share their very serious utopian ideas -- like the benefits of having a society guarded by a clone army. "We'd save a hell of a lot on benefits and medical expenses," he said. " 'Cause you know if they got wounded..."
"You could just shoot them," I said.
"Exactly -- pow! Just shoot 'em dead, right in the ground."
He went on.
"We'd just have a big breeding farm in Colorado," he said. "Course, it'd be a security problem if they got out, you know, if you had rogue clones running around. You'd have to have a special security force to maintain 'em."
"That's where folks like us would come in," I said.
"Exactly," he said.
Folks like us. I was getting the hang of it.
In my first six weeks on the campaign, I saw only one black person enter our offices. He was a recently released armed robber from Newark, New Jersey, who was the guest of a local female Republican politician. The ex-con was not particularly interested in Republican politics, although he did say something about wanting to hit Christine Todd Whitman in the face with a brick. I urged him to support the president, even though he couldn't vote. He didn't make any promises.
In mid-July a girlfriend came down from New York to visit me. I recruited her to help me with an idea I'd had to at least temporarily diversify my office environment. We decided that she would pose as a reporter for Vibe magazine, call our offices and ask whoever answered the phone if she could interview our "black volunteers."
"Penny" got my officemate Ben Adrian on the phone, and he instituted a frantic search that lasted several days. We thought at first that we might have a black professor from the University of Central Florida (sixteen miles away) on our volunteer list, but he turned out not to be available. Then Rhyan Metzler, the local Republican Party operative, gave us the number of an elderly man in Sarasota named Johnny Hunter.
As the chairman of the Federation of Black Republicans for the Republican Party of the State of Florida, Johnny was used to being called to this sort of duty. On the phone with "Penny," he explained that his job involved traveling around the state to meet people. "Wherever they need me," he said, "that's where I be rolling to." Finally, Ben came through with someone more local. He managed to persuade a thirty-seven-year-old Promise Keeper Christian named Lorin Jones, a phlegmatic fellow who was recovering from two brushes with congestive heart failure, to come in for an interview.
We scheduled it, but "Penny" never showed up. I wanted to be there for what I knew would be an excruciatingly awkward situation; the lone black volunteer, dragged into the office to show off to the media, surrounded by a bunch of nervously small-talking white Republicans waiting for the no-show journalist.
Exactly this situation materialized. The bespectacled Lorin sat surrounded by me, Ben and a few other folks from the campaign, and treated this anxious clock-watching crowd to a lesson in the vagaries of black urban existence: "My dad was a drinker," he said. "He cared about the bottle more than he loved us. But what my mom did was, she worked -- she was there in the afternoon; she wanted to see what we were doing in school.... "
"Gee," mumbled Ben. "I can't imagine the strength.... I'd like to meet her."
"I know what it's like to have a parent who'll put a belt on my butt," Lorin continued.
Nervous silence. Nods.
A few minutes later, "Penny" called to cancel, citing car trouble. Lorin hung in there for a few minutes. Our older volunteer coordinator, Don Madden, came over to chat; the two of them apparently went to neighboring schools in California. Don's school, Don said, was great at basketball, but, he said, winking at Lorin, "You were probably the only guys who could have beaten us."
Lorin laughed uncomfortably. "We were OK," he said. "We were pretty good. Our college was pretty good at basketball."
Then another staffer came over to say hi. He knew Lorin from past campaigns and asked if Lorin was planning on coming in to do phone banking. Lorin answered that he wasn't, that he was busy setting up a school-supplies giveaway charity event in his neighborhood. The staffer laughed.
"Oh, come on," he said jokingly. "I know how you people don't like to work." Lorin, who was halfway out the door, stopped at this. His smile disappeared. For a moment, he was genuinely pissed off. "We don't like to work?" he said. "That's all I do is work to make you white Republicans look good."
The staffer, a jovial guy who I normally liked quite a bit, said nothing and simply slapped Lorin on the back, laughed and helped him out the door.
"Good old Lorin," he said, going back to his office.
Vienna also chimed in after Lorin left. The two of them didn't like each other, having once disagreed at a community meeting.
"I don't like that guy," she said. Then she explained: "After that meeting, we really got into it. We were really shouting. He called me a spic. And so I said to him, 'Hey, I may be a spic, but at least I wasn't brought to this country as a slave. I was born here.' "
"Man," I thought, "We're just one big happy family."
I ended up getting to know Lorin Jones a little. He was an odd, sincere person who interested me largely because he was by far the most dedicated, effective and intellectually honest Republican volunteer the party had in the area, and yet the campaign more or less completely ignored him.
A devout Christian, Lorin supported Bush not only because of the social-religious issues, but because he sincerely believed that state financial aid had had a corrosive effect on the black community and that communities should support themselves through charity. He was the living incarnation of the "thousand points of light" idea. He ought to have been a poster child for Republican values.
"In my neighborhood, you can go up to anybody and ask where the black Republican lives," he said. "And they'll lead you right to my house. But they respect me because of what I've done."
And I saw this. At a function I would later attend in his neighborhood, I met several people who had been converted to Bush by Lorin. He was working round-the-clock for the president, but the campaign was just trying to turn him into another Johnny Hunter. "All they want me to do is start clubs," he said. "Tallahassee keeps calling and bugging me to start black clubs. And I hate that, because I think that puts us all in boxes. I think we should be going out into the community more."
Lorin believed that Republicans could win twenty percent of the black vote -- not the usual ten percent -- if they were smart about it. All they had to do, he said, was visit black churches and hand out fact sheets showing the Republican and Democratic stances on social and religious issues. "You wouldn't even have to campaign," he said. "You'd get an extra ten percent right there."
I must have heard him put forward that plan a half-dozen times, but no one did anything except smile and nod.
Some of the Republicans, however, were willing to help Lorin -- sort of. A smallish contingent of five YRs (Young Republicans) met Lorin in front of an Office Depot in a white suburban area one Saturday to man a booth for soliciting school-supply donations for kids in Lorin's neighborhood. They worked cheerfully throughout the afternoon, giving away hot dogs and helping Lorin get a good amount of stuff.
But when it came time a few days later to actually give away the stuff in Lorin's West Orlando neighborhood, none of the YRs showed up. I was the only white Republican who made it. It was a remarkable event. More than 200 people, mostly single mothers and their children, showed up at a funeral home called Gail and Wynn's to receive the book bags and notebooks Lorin had gathered to give away in one of the reception rooms.
I helped distribute bags to the children. "Vote for Bush," I managed to whisper a few times.
That day Lorin confided to me that this might be his last go-round with the Republicans. "I think this might be it," he said. "I think I might be done with these people."
During my time on the campaign, I noticed an unusual phenomenon. The more involved a person was with the campaign, the more likely he was to be politically moderate. Most of the core group of our office -- Vienna, Rhyan, Ben, Don -- were quietly pro-choice or socially liberal in some other respect. It was the casual volunteers and the people whose only involvement was a bumper sticker who were likely to rant about liberals being traitors and agents of Islamo-Fascism who should be exiled from the country or jailed, etc.
I saw this clearly one weekend at a local gun show, where we were manning a voter-registration booth. I rotated with Rhyan and Vienna that weekend, and all three of us were quietly freaking out at the sight of all these fat weirdos from the sticks buying huge assault rifles and Confederate bumper stickers with messages such as IF I'D KNOWN THIS WOULD HAPPEN, I'D HAVE PICKED MY OWN COTTON.
"Man, I'm glad I'm a socially liberal Republican," whispered Rhyan at one point, laughing.
It was late July, and a new recruit was talking in my ear -- let's call her Susie -- and she was an opinionated, middle-aged fundamentalist-Christian mother of five. Originally from West Virginia, she was working the phones for Bush and sounding off on humanity's declining morals and the agents of the international liberal conspiracy.
"Are you married, Tom?" she asked.
I squinted in apprehension, sensing a Jesus conversation on the way. "Uh, no," I said.
"My oldest," she began, "has a three-year-old and has been with the same girl for six years, and he will not marry her."
"Oh," I said, remembering to sound shocked. "That must really upset you."
"It kills me," she said.
"Does he not go to church?"
"Oh, occasionally," she said, sighing. "He will tell you right off.... He encourages her to go and to take their little daughter, and he tells you he's hopeful that God doesn't come, or nothing happens to him before he rededicates his life. But he's definitely not living a life that either honors God or is even pleasing to himself."
"You should give him those Left Behind books," I said solemnly.
I took a deep breath. Throwing out Left Behind -- that runaway best seller in which God comes to earth and literally yanks the believers to heaven, leaving piles of still-warm clothes and dentures behind with the condemned -- was like being a novice wizard and saying a spell for the first time. I wasn't sure it would actually work. It did.
"He won't read 'em," Susie answered seriously.
"He won't read them?" I cried, shocked.
"He won't read 'em," she repeated. "He doesn't like the way it makes him feel."
We talked for a little while longer, then Susie got up to go.
A half-hour later, the phone in the office rang. It was Susie, inviting me to dinner with her family. It was the act of a good Christian. I must have sounded lonely. "I'm making fettuccine Alfredo," she said.
I told her, "I love fettuccine Alfredo."
One of the great cliches of liberal criticism of the Christian right is the idea that these people are wrongheaded because they profess to know the will of God. H.L. Mencken put that one best, and perhaps first: "It is only the savage, whether of the African bush or the American gospel tent, who pretends to know the will and intent of God exactly and completely."
These criticisms sound like they make sense. But I think they are a little off-base. The problem not only with fundamentalist Christians but with Republicans in general is not that they act on blind faith, without thinking. The problem is that they are incorrigible doubters with an insatiable appetite for Evidence. What they get off on is not Believing, but in having their beliefs tested. That's why their conversations and their media are so completely dominated by implacable bogeymen: marrying gays, liberals, the ACLU, Sean Penn, Europeans and so on. Their faith both in God and in their political convictions is too weak to survive without an unceasing string of real and imaginary confrontations with those people -- and for those confrontations, they are constantly assembling evidence and facts to make their case.
But here's the twist. They are not looking for facts with which to defeat opponents. They are looking for facts that ensure them an ever-expanding roster of opponents. They can be correct facts, incorrect facts, irrelevant facts, it doesn't matter. The point is not to win the argument, the point is to make sure the argument never stops. Permanent war isn't a policy imposed from above; it's an emotional imperative that rises from the bottom. In a way, it actually helps if the fact is dubious or untrue (like the Swift-boat business), because that guarantees an argument. You're arguing the particulars, where you're right, while they're arguing the underlying generalities, where they are.
Once you grasp this fact, you're a long way to understanding what the Hannitys and Limbaughs figured out long ago: These people will swallow anything you feed them, so long as it leaves them with a demon to wrestle with in their dreams.
Which brings me back to Left Behind. Who gets left behind? Nobody, that's who. How could they leave us behind? They couldn't live without us. Even their most intimate family meals would seem lonely if we were missing.
At first, the vacationing New York schoolteacher Tom Hamill didn't say much at the dinner table. Speak when spoken to, help serve the fettuccine, pass the white bread and margarine. Ask politely about her son's senior year at high school, her twelve-year-old daughter's home schooling, the job her husband lost two years ago -- or maybe it was five. Smile in placid agreement as Susie compares Massachusetts Democrats (like Tom's real-life mother) to Al Qaeda. A cozy family dinner in Anytown, U.S.A.
Dinner started at about seven. John Kerry was set to accept the nomination at the FleetCenter in a few hours. Dinner Table wondered if the terrorists would strike. "No, no," Susie said. "The criminals wouldn't attack their own kind."
"Hear, hear," I said.
I concentrated on my food. Grace was easy: Just hang your head. But once they moved into politics and religion, I began to worry that my silence was becoming conspicuous. Susie was shooting me searching looks. I noticed her husband, the wiry gray-haired dad with the slow voice and the henpecked posture, was watching me whenever I chewed. Like he was checking to see if I would swallow. Finally the discussion switched to the high school one of her sons attended; he had a couple of crazy teachers there, a mean lady and a guy with man-boobs....
"We have a transvestite at our school," I whispered, suddenly inspired.
Susie's husband and older son were still talking about the man-boobs teacher. "Whaddya mean, which one?" the younger said to his dad.
"We have a transvestite at our school," I repeated.
Only Susie heard me. "No!" she screamed. "Did you hear what he said? A transvestite works at his school!" She turned to me in horror. "Is he allowed to dress like a woman?"
Now I had everyone's attention.
"Oh, yeah," I said. "Totally normal guy, except that at some point, he started reading all kinds of . . . "
"Books!" Susie guessed.
"It's called possession," her husband said.
"Yeah, books," I said. "It started . . . he was reading Agatha Christie books at first, then he got really into detectives. Next thing you know, he's reading Nietzsche. You know, the German philosopher."
"The weirdo German!" Susie exclaimed.
Everyone was staring at me in shock.
"And he comes up to me one day and says, you know, 'Well, since there's no God, I might as well be gay!' "
"Oh, my God," her husband whispered.
"And he starts talking like this, and his appearance got more and more strange. . . . He started coming into work in drag. . . . "
"Oh, my God," the husband repeated.
"And his boyfriend would come and pick him up at school. . . ." I went on.
"Oh!" Susie shrieked, scrunching her nose, as though smelling rotting cheese.
"The thing is, I'm the one who gets in trouble," I said. "Like, there was this one little girl. I caught her listening to 50 Cent -- you know, the rapper -- and I started telling her about the torments of hell, and how she'd pay in eternity and all of that. And the principal comes up to me, and he's like, 'Stop, you're scaring the children!' "
"Oh, yeah," Susie snorted.
"And I'm like, 'I'm scaring her? Are you crazy? This girl is seven years old. She needs to know about these things!'
"We have kids now, because they know you're a Christian, they go out of their way to make your life miserable," I said. "I know this one guy. They'll take his Bible from his classroom and snort cocaine off it, right in front of him!"
Susie put her hands over her heart.
"They'll get suspended for a week," I said. "But then they're right back in there."
The table fell silent. The kids slowly started to slip away. Soon the only ones left were me, Mom and Dad, and a nearly empty bowl of fettuccine. Forty minutes in, my fork was still scraping the plate.
"Now this is good fettuccine," I said.
Bump for later reading...I don't know why.
You sure it wasn't written by Jason Blair?
He has to be GAY.
Looks to me like the author revealed more about himself, his own prejudices, and the typical Dem-Lib mindset than he was able to reveal about Republicans.
" the operative vibe of the Democratic insider is wisecracking cool"
How blessed is the man who does not walk in the counsel of the wicked, Nor stand in the path of sinners, Nor sit in the seat of scoffers. Psalm 1:1
I hope all liberals, and nobody else, believes that this is what the grassroots of the GOP looks like.
pretty good article until the end when he is invited over for dinner..... The writer must have been pushed to get the story done. The whole feel of the article changes at the end.
Didn't a writer for the NY Times also make up fraudulent stories about a young Republicans' party at the 2000 convention?
He perpetrated fraud by giving a phony name and history. I wonder if any of it is a prosecutable offense.
You mean to tell me that Republicans like fettucine?
Nice find - thank you.
That is part of the interviewing process at RS.
He invited a black man down to the office under the phony pretense of a magazine interview purely for the purpose of humilating him and the other Republicans.
Boy, he sure ran the gamut of republican stereotypes in his piece.
I thought it was a decent article until I got to the race baiting section. Pure fiction from that point on.
oh you are very clever, yeah, someone should check out this guy's story, it could be "Blair"ified fare......
I'd have been more impressed if Rolling Stone had done a concurrent thing with a conservative writer working for the DNC campaign, oh like in Berkeley California, or maybe one of the tony neighbourhoods where the Heinz-Kerrys have a house (bet you got a lot of black volunteers there huh?) and published both articles......
I do find it highly amusing that he is calling the Repubs racist when Kerry was called out for having a very white looking campaign staff and frankly with all the additions of the Clinton thugs, it's still looking pretty whitebread. Lest we forget Reverend Jesse has only recent almost grudgingly come around to support Kerry because Jesse was one of the people dissing Kerry for neglecting his base.
on the other hand, if the story is true about this black supporter that is unfortunate because actually he has an excellent suggestion regarding the black churches......
but it is Rolling Stone, not like a lot of swing voters reading that one, I haven't touched a Rolling Stone since oh I reached the age of majority......and new voters trend more liberal, hell even I was more liberal at that age, life experience changes one's naive world view.......
That's how we know this whole story is fiction. Everyone knows Republicans are all filthy rich and eat nothing but filet mignon and truffles.
Well said.
(Good to see you again, weegee!)
Well this certainly sounds believable. Thank goodness he didn't have to stoop to Southern stereotypes!
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text:
State legislators are working to amend a piece of legislation Jackson County officials say has been draining funds from the county's Justice Court, potentially endangering its operation.
The legislation in question is HB 2712, which went into effect Jan. 1, 2012. The law eliminated surcharges on traffic citations, dollars that originally stayed in the county and helped fund Justice Court operations. Additionally, the legislation increased funds paid to the state to $60 from $45 per violation while reducing the total fine. For example, a Class C traffic violation — the most common — used to be $190, with $45 paid to the state. The county retained the rest. Now the fine is $160, leaving the county with just $100.
"If not changed, justice courts in most counties will go away, since there is no way county governments can afford to deficit-finance justice courts," County Administrator Danny Jordan said in an email. "Municipal courts won't be far behind."
Under the proposed amendments, Rep. Peter Buckley (D-Ashland) said the state-assessed amount could drop back down to $44 or $45.
"Hopefully this is getting back to the structure we had before," Buckley said. "The key difference is the state was taking a larger share up front."
Between that and reduced fine amounts, Judge Joe Charter, who works at Jackson County Justice Court, calls it the squeeze.
"The calendar year 2012 was the worst in revenue, I think, since 2007," Charter said.
He added the changes resulted in a predicted $500,000 drop in revenue for the 2012-13 fiscal year, which the county would have to backfill with general fund dollars.
A court closure would mean the 15,000 or so annual traffic citations once handled by the Justice Court would move to Jackson County Circuit Court.
Richardson said the HB 2712's original intent was to streamline how counties divvied up proceeds generated from traffic citations. If hard data showed the bill's passage gave priority to state programs over county ones, necessary changes could be made.
"We said without at track record, there's no way to know if (the county's) concerns are valid. But if there are unintended consequences, we would do everything in our power to make those corrections," Richardson said.
Jackson County's data shows the law has had the detrimental effect, officials said. Whether or not a new bill would need to be drafted to fix the problem, or if it could be part of the final budget process in June, is not yet known. Either way, legislators say they hope to make the changes sometime in the next few months.
"It doesn't mean just undo everything," Richardson said. "We want to keep our promise not to be favoring the state at the expense of the counties. That will require adjustments to the way 2712 was designed and implemented. We still haven't finalized what they're going to look like."
— Ryan Pfeil
Legislature takes a second look at bill affecting county justice court
State legislators are working to amend a piece of legislation Jackson County officials say has been draining funds from the county's Justice Court, potentially endangering its operation.


text:
Community leaders, some six years ago, saw a need to integrate mental health services into certain Springfield neighborhoods to help improve the social and mental health of children and families.
Now, after providing over 10,000 mental health screenings and intervention for more than 800 children, partners involved with the Children�s MOSAIC Project are preparing to expand the program to serve more children. They also are working to ensure it is sustainable because the main funding grant is set to expire.
�This particular grant doesn�t have a renewable option,� says Cindy Knight, supervisor of student support services for Springfield District 186. �It only continues for another year.�
The Mental Health Centers of Central Illinois, the lead agency representing the Children�s MOSAIC Project, received a $2 million grant in August 2011 from the Illinois Children�s Healthcare Foundation. The grant started an initiative to change the mental health system in Springfield, ensuring all children have access to mental health services.
Because of the program�s success, MOSAIC partners plan to expand and provide support to more children.
�We are scaling up in the larger schools,� Knight says. �We plan to add two new schools next year. Long term, we are trying to figure out how we can do this without the grant funding.�
The program currently serves Matheny Withrow Elementary School, Lawrence Head Start, St. Patrick Elementary, Washington Middle School and Southeast High School.
Melissa Stalets, director of the Children�s MOSAIC Project, believes the program is sustainable without the grant funding.
�The funding has allowed us to work with partners across Springfield to build a sustainable program,� she says. �Through our partners, we believe we will be able to keep this program going.�
However, according to Knight, MOSAIC partners currently are looking for new opportunities to apply for grants.
NYC initiative similar
When community leaders initially came together to discuss ways to improve mental health services for children in District 186, they looked at a New York City program as a model for what the Children�s MOSAIC Project could look like.
�(They) wanted to create something similar to the Harlem Children�s Zone in New York City,� Knight says. Program leaders there tackle poverty and work to improve job and educational opportunities for children in central Harlem.
�We were invited into conversations with MHCCI to help design what that would look like in Springfield,� Knight says. �Nothing happens in a vacuum, so we also asked other potential stakeholders to get involved and lend their input and expertise.�
Other partners include: The Springfield Project, Southern Illinois University School of Medicine, city of Springfield, Community Foundation for the Land of Lincoln, United Way of Central Illinois, the Greater Springfield Chamber of Commerce, Sangamon County Continuum of Learning, Springfield Urban League, Sangamon County Public Health Department, the Hope Institute for Children and Families and Memorial Physician Services.
Every student subject to screening
The MOSAIC Project targets children in three specific settings, including in �high-risk neighborhoods where children live, schools where children learn and primary health-care settings,� according to a MOSAIC release.
�In order to identify kids early, we wanted to be proactive,� Stalets says. �We wanted to reach them before they showed up on our doorsteps.�
To accomplish this, Knight says all students in participating schools are screened for their social and emotional health, unless parents opt not to have their children screened.
MOSAIC provides a universal screening, an assessment, intervention and care coordination when needed.
�We do this around academic skills,� Knight says. �We check in with them throughout the year to see how they�re doing with their grades and if they are keeping up with their classes. We can then assess their development and determine if they are mentally on track. If they need additional support, we�ll work with our partners to make sure they get the help they need.�
While engagement in the program varies by student and parent, most students choose to get involved within a couple of weeks of their screening.
�We�ve been able to get most students engaged within two weeks,� Stalets says. �In traditional outpatient programs, it can take years to get students engaged in the process.�
Goal: serve entire district
MOSAIC leaders believe children in the program are engaged in therapy longer and for more sessions, have lower rates of no-show appointments and fewer crisis events than those in traditional outpatient mental health services.
�What we�re providing to younger kids versus 18-year-olds looks very different,� Stalets says.
�Younger kids are more irritable, throw tantrums and have difficult parent-child relationships. When kids are younger, you do the bulk of the work with the parent.�
With older kids, MOSAIC works directly with kids and their parents, she says.
Leaders hope to continue to expand the program, with or without grant funding.
�We hope to continue adding new schools and primary care sites throughout Springfield,� Stalets says.
�We hope all children can have social and emotional checkups done annually. And we want to be able to provide support to all 27,000 students in the district,� she says. �Children and families have a lot of needs in Springfield, and we want to be there to help.�