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Lately I have been missing my stepfather, Andy White, who keeps excusing himself while he steps out of the room to get something from his study or heads out the back kitchen door, on his way to the barn again. He'll be right back. I can hear the sound of that gray door—the steps there lead down into the fragrant connecting woodshed—as the lift-latch clicks shut. E. B. White died in 1985—twenty years ago, come October—and by "missing" I don't mean yearning for him so much as not being able to keep hold of him for a bit of conversation or even a tone of voice. In my mind, this is at his place in North Brooklin, Maine, and he's almost still around. I see his plaid button-down shirt and tweed jacket, and his good evening moccasins. One hand is holding a cigarette tentatively—he'll smoke it halfway down and then stub it out—and he turns in his chair to put his Martini back on the Swedish side table to his right. It must be about dinnertime. What were we talking about, just now? We were close for almost sixty years, and you'd think that a little back-and-forth—something more than a joke or part of an anecdote—would survive, but no. What's impossible to write down, soon afterward, is a conversation that comes easily.
Here we are, instead, on a frigid December day in 1929, walking up a steep stretch of Pinckney Street, on Beacon Hill, in Boston. The narrow brick sidewalk is snowy in places, and the going is harder for Andy than it is for me, because he's wearing ice skates. He's been complaining—who can blame him—and finally he sits down on somebody's front stoop to pull off the skates, and goes on, snow or no snow, in his socks. We've been here on a family visit from New York to the Newberrys' house at 87 Myrtle Street—my Aunt Rosie (she's one of my mother's sisters) and Uncle John's place—and Andy and I brought our skates along, just in case. Christmas is two or three days away, and on a clear and cold afternoon he and I head down to Charles Street and then over to the frozen lake in the Public Garden. There may be a red-ball sign standing out on the ice, telling us it's safe to skate, but there's no place you can go to buy a ticket, and no shack with a stove inside, where you could keep warm while you lace up your skates. We find a park bench instead. Andy hides our shoes under a bush and we step down an embankment and sail away. Other skaters are here already—some of the men are in overcoats, along with kids in striped scarves and big mittens—but it's as if we had the place to ourselves. There are wintry trees and park lampposts with a different shape than the ones in Central Park, and though the sense of Boston is close at hand, we could almost be in the country. Wind has cleared patches and paths through snow for us to skate on. The ice is rough, with frozen ripples here and there to trip you up, but Andy and I are good skaters, and we laugh when we come to a curved bridge and, bending low, shoot under and out the other side. It's a great afternoon—right up to the moment when we come back to our bush and see that Andy's shoes are gone. I don't recall that we made a fuss or much of a search; this was hard times, the onset of the Depression, and even a poorly fitting pair of shoes was better than a handout or a hot meal for a lot of men just then.
Andy was shy and self-conscious—he was a slight man, never one to bluster his way through things—and I could see him turn his head away in embarrassment as people coming toward us down Beacon Street began to smile when they saw him tiptoeing along on his hockey skates. Sometimes after they'd gone by he stopped and bent half-double, laughing at himself. " 'The Skater,' " he said, shaking his head. It was a relief for me to laugh, too. What came to me later—I was nine but prone to thought—was that this adventure would not have happened with my father. I'd done more skating with him, on rivers and ponds everywhere—he'd started me when I was small—but he'd have taken us home when we found there was no place to check our shoes. Or if he had lost his shoes somehow he'd have found a cab or made a phone call before ever walking a dozen blocks in his skates. Andy was ten years his junior, and younger than my mother, too. He was a grownup, but there was a readiness for play in him that lasted all his life. Luckily, I didn't need another father and that freed us up.
Andy makes light of the lost shoes in a tiny Notes and Comment piece he wrote for The New Yorker afterward, and I've remembered the day for boyish reasons—it was an adventure and it put me alone with someone I loved but didn't see all that much. Actually, the story is right up his alley. In "One Man's Meat," the celebrated collection of his essays published in 1942, he recalls his dreamy seventeen-year-old self at home in Mount Vernon, New York, in 1917, just before he entered Cornell as a freshman. He was thinking of a girl he had skated with the winter before, when "the air grew still and the pond cracked and creaked under our skates," and "the trails of ice led off into the woods, and the little fires burned along the shore. It was enough, that spring, to remember what a girl's hand felt like, suddenly ungloved in winter." The shift from the winter general to the sudden particular of the girl's hand is a White special, as is the self-deprecation. And pegging along on a sidewalk in skates was an embarrassment that he would have made more of in a piece later on and played out with relish, as he did so often in his writings, turning the awkward moment into a charming and then telling paragraph, even as he dwells on his fears. He was the most charming man I've known, and he got that side of himself into his writing, like everything else, without effort.
Another winter scene is coming—this one a half century later—but first it should be explained that E. B. White was a lifelong hypochondriac, perhaps world class, but not a solemn one. Munching a canapé on my porch in Maine one evening, he clapped one hand to his face in horror. We paused, drinks in midair. "Got anything for cheese in the eye?" he cried indignantly. The crisis passed and the moment was affectionately filed away, joining the deadly ant bite at the beach picnic, the bone in his upper spine that was almost surely pushing its way through his windpipe, the passing ulcer or descending thrombus, and the thousand-odd spoonfuls of soup or compote, or forkfuls of salad or soufflé that were suddenly halted and inspected midway to his mouth, with the same "Any clams in this?" A clam had poisoned him once—though I don't think I ever heard the meal or the mollusk named—and the cooks and hostesses of the world, including my mother, were out to lay him low again by the same means. No discussion followed a fresh alert. "Nope, no clams, Andy," someone would murmur, and the meal resumed. If your eye fell on him later, you might notice that he was chewing, as always, with his mouth a quarter or an eighth open, ready to discharge any skulking bivalve that had slipped through the lines. Another quirk of his, almost as familiar as his gray mustache or his easeful walk, was a persistent leftward twist of his head, a little adjustment of neck and spine repeated every minute or so, retesting a structure on the verge of collapse.
I never had the feeling that Andy worked on his worries. He wasn't exactly after attention, though that's what he got at the spectacular upper levels of his discomposure. In the winter of 1980, word came to my wife, Carol, and me in New York that a cherished Maine neighbor of ours, Catherine McCoy, had died. There would be a memorial in Blue Hill, early in January, and after discussion we agreed that Carol would fly up to Bangor while I stayed home with our ten-year-old son, John Henry. My mother had died three years earlier, and Andy was delighted by the unexpected visitor, though it was understood that he would not attend the ceremony. Public gatherings—and most private ones, as well—made him jumpy. For years he had passed up family weddings and graduations, town meetings, dedications and book awards, cocktail bashes and boat gams and garden parties. As his literary reputation widened when he was in his forties and fifties, he did make it to a few select universities to receive honorary degrees, but despite prearranged infusions of sherry or Scotch he found the ceremonials excruciating. "So the old emptiness and dizziness and vapors seized hold of me," he writes to my mother after his honoris causa Ph.D. appearance at Dartmouth in 1948. "Nobody who has never had my peculiar kind of disability can understand the sheer hell of such moments, but there they are." And when the time came for the encomiums and the enrobing, there in the sunshine at Hanover, he went on, his hood—"white, quite big, and shaped like a loose-fitting horse collar"—became entangled with the honoree in the next seat, Ben Ames Williams: Andy's worst dreams come true. "When I got seated the thing was up over my face, as in falconry," he continues. "A fully masked Doctor of Letters, a headless poet." After that, he stayed home, even passing up an invitation in 1963 to go to Washington and receive the Presidential Medal of Freedom from Lyndon Johnson; the deed was consummated instead by a stand-in, Maine's Senator Edmund Muskie, in the office of the president of Colby College. Andy also skipped his wife's private burial in the Brooklin Cemetery, in July, 1977. None of us in the family expected otherwise or held this against him. And when his own memorial came, eight years later, I took the chance to remark, "If Andy White could be with us today he would not be with us today."
There would be no question of his accompanying Carol to Catherine McCoy's farewell at the Blue Hill Congregational Church—except that a considerable snowstorm blew in overnight, converting the two-lane Route 175 to a slithery corridor the next morning. Carol said she'd drive herself over, but he wouldn't hear of it; he'd drive her—he knew these winter roads. And so she found herself and the writhing public E.B.W. seated side by side near the front of the long church—the "Congo," in local parlance—while preliminary organ music fell about them and the rows filled up with stomping, de-muffling mourners. When the music subsided and the footfalls of the minister were heard, Andy leaned toward Carol and whispered, "I'm having a heart attack."
"I'm not leaving," she whispered back, and kept her gaze straight ahead while he rose, excusing himself, and, half-bending but not unobserved, made his way out of the row and back up the aisle and, at last, through a door into the vestibule. The service and the tributes went on lengthily, at least for Carol. Had she done the right thing? She had no idea what she would find after the benediction and the recessional were over—certainly not the sight of Andy stretched on his back on one of the vestibule benches, a Saxon king atop his sarcophagus, as he responded to the anxious questions of each departing neighbor. "A heart attack," he explained. "I had a heart attack." In time, he arose, bundled up, and drove her safely back to North Brooklin for drinks and a nice dinner.
My mother and Andy White got married in 1929, immediately after my parents' divorce, and though my sister and I were only weekend and summertime visitors with them after that, I soon felt as much at home at their place—on East Eighth Street and then East Forty-eighth Street, in New York, and then in Maine—as I was with my father the rest of the time. A fresh household sharpens attention, and one of the things I picked up was that sense of ease and play that Andy brought to his undertakings. Though subject to nerves, he possessed something like that invisible extra beat of time that great athletes show on the field. Dogs and children were easy for him because he approached them as a participant instead of a winner. In a family photograph, he is sitting astride a bench outside the garage door, in Maine, while he stirs up a dish of mash for his bantam hens. Blond John Henry, then about two years old, is standing close by, and they are looking into the dish with equal interest while Andy mixes and talks. When Andy, without his trying and almost without my noticing it, taught me how to sail or how to row or how to lure a flounder with a bit of periwinkle as bait and—in some part—how to write, ease seemed to be the whole trick. He let things emerge, like the time he unexpectedly put his nearly empty bottle of Pabst or Schlitz down on the carpet in front of his big dachshund, Fred, who sniffed about and soon found that by laying one paw on the neck he could tip the last of the beer toward the top of the bottle and lap it out. Then he ate the label.
When the Whites moved to a year-round residency in Maine, in 1938, we kept in touch by letters, as everyone did in those days, but also, I began to realize, through his writings. He'd given up the Comment page he wrote each week for The New Yorker, and the eased deadlines and greater length of his monthly "One Man's Meat" column in Harper's suited the hours and bottomless concerns of a saltwater farmer with a hundred and fifty pullets, a dozen geese, twenty or thirty sheep, an editor wife (my mother had continued her work as a fiction and poetry editor with The New Yorker by long distance, with daily envelopes of galleys and proofs mailed back and forth between New York and Brooklin), a schoolboy son, Joel, and a full-time hired man. What he wrote about, along with the weather and the way to build a double-ended cedar scow for Joe and the way to keep a city rubber plant healthy with doses of "sheep-shit tea" (as it was known in the family, if not in print) and how to hook up a mooring with a chain so the tide will lift it free in the morning, was himself. The arrangement left room for his thoughts about the movies, automobile design, the railroads, taxation, domesticity, poetry, Florida trailer parks, and freedom. In 1937, a year before he began writing "One Man's Meat," Andy formally took a year off ("My Year" as he called it) to try—well, to try to become a serious writer. Nothing came of it, of course, but then the Harper's assignment came along and saved his life. He was self-conscious at first as a countryman—he is abashed as he catches himself crossing the barnyard with a paper napkin in his hand—but the demands of the work and his affinity for it soon dismissed such concerns and somehow put him in place as a writer. The Whites, with their well-staffed household and sophisticated occupations, would always be "from away," in Down East parlance, but no one in Brooklin who knew Andy ever took him for a gentleman farmer. When the war came, he even took on a cow—the first time he leads her out to the pasture, he writes, he feels "the way I did the first time I ever took a girl to the theatre"—and his production goals for 1942 were four thousand dozen eggs, ten pigs, and nine thousand pounds of milk.
I was away much of the time at boarding school and then at Harvard, and then elsewhere as a soldier, but the sense of home and informal but intimate attachment I got from Andy's writings was even more powerful than it was for his other readers. Reading him brought him to me almost in person, as it still does in a 1955 passage about driving on U.S. 1, in Maine:
Like highways everywhere it is a mixed dish: Gulf and Shell, bay and gull, neon and sunset, cold comfort and warm, the fussy façade of a motor court right next door to the pure geometry of an early-nineteenth-century clapboard house with barn attached. You can certainly learn to spell "moccasin" while driving into Maine, and there is often little else to do except steer and avoid death. Woods and fields occur everywhere, creeping to within a few feet of the neon and the court, and the experienced traveler into this land is always conscious that just behind the garish roadside stand, in its thicket of birch and spruce, stands the well-proportioned deer; just beyond the overnight cabin, in the pasture of granite and juniper, trots the perfectly designed fox. . . . The Maine man does not have to penetrate in depth to be excited by his coastal run; its flavor steals into his consciousness with the first ragged glimpse of properly textured woodland, the first whiff of punctually drained cove.
The moccasin joke survives—I think of it every year on the same stretch of highway, where the juniper and the foxes are scarcer now and the deer and the neon more prevalent. Reading the passage as a writer, I am struck by its simplicity and complexity, by that "punctually" and "barn attached" and the quick, sentence-closing "fox" and "cove." What I feel for its author comes not just from my knowledge of him at the table or twitchy behind the wheel but from a sense of trust. He has looked at the roadside grunge and granite with the same eyes I do, and he does not labor for reference or add a chunk of scholarship to give them meaning; he waits for the connection—that extra moment—and delivers it with grace. I am included: this must be my thought, too, elegant as it has become. His editor William Shawn, writing after Andy's death, called him the most companionable of writers, but added that "renowned as his writing was for its simplicity and its clarity, his mind constantly took surprising turns, and his peculiar mixture of seriousness and humor could not have failed to astonish even him."
The other sentence-closer in the passage is "death," and Andy must have ceased in time to be astonished at how often the theme and thought recurred in his writing. It runs all through his sweetly comical piece "Death of a Pig," in which he tries ineffectually to deal with the crisis of a young pig of his who has stopped eating. Castor oil doesn't help, nor does his own sense of "personal deterioration," or the ministrations of Fred, who accompanies him on trips down the woodpath through the orchard to the pigyard, and also makes "many professional calls on his own." The pig dies, nothing can be done about it, and it is the profusion of detail—his feeling the ears of the ailing pig "as you might put your hand on the forehead of a child," and the "beautiful hole, five feet long, three feet wide, three feet deep" that is dug for the pig among alders and young hackmatacks, at the foot of an apple tree—that makes its death unsentimental and hard to bear.
The "d"-word also ends two famous essays of his, "Once More to the Lake" and "Here Is New York," arriving without warning in the first one—a piece about taking his young son to a family summer camp where he himself often used to go as a kid. Everything there is the same, or almost—the middle lane, where the horse used to walk, has vanished from the road through the meadow—with the customarily spectacular afternoon thunderstorm thrown in. When it's over and his boy is putting on his wet bathing suit for another dip, "I watched him, his hard little body, skinny and bare, saw him wince slightly as he pulled up around his vitals the small, soggy, icy garment. As he buckled the swollen belt suddenly my groin felt the chill of death." I was a young man when I first read this, and remember finding the thought self-indulgent and exaggerated, almost a mistake, but this was before I'd begun to feel the brevity and sense of poignant loss that, from the first day, attend our meticulously renewed American vacations.
"Here Is New York," written in 1948, was widely rediscovered in the weeks just after September 11th, because of its piercing vision. Reading the piece now—a revisiting of the pulsing and romantic city he knew and worked in during his late twenties and early thirties—you look for death at the end, since he has just mentioned that a small flight of planes could now bring down the great shining structure in a moment, but he almost appears to have given up on the idea. Has he forgotten the point? It arrives at the tail end of the last sentence, in the famously reversed final phrase: "this city, this mischievous and marvelous monument which not to look upon would be like death." Losing New York is possible, but not holding on to the thought of it—which is all we may have in the end—much worse.
Andy White and my mother wove daily illness and incipient pain into their routines and conversations and their letters as they grew older. Her health was worse than his—she suffered from an exfoliating skin disease, went through a spinal-fusion operation and another dangerous procedure to clear a carotid artery, and endured painful bone deterioration in her old age, as a result of steroid treatments for the dermatosis—but if in the end she won their amazing sick-off, she took no pleasure in it and talked of his symptoms with the same concern and detail as her own. Their conversation became studded with lovingly enunciated medical reference: tachycardia, ileitis, the ethmoid sinuses. My older daughter, Callie, believes that what was most surprising about the Whites' joint hypochondria was its energy; they were falling apart, they felt terrible, but they weren't depressed. The narcissism and intimacy of their exchanged symptoms could be infuriating, since it excluded everyone else, but it was so dopey that you laughed at it and forgave them. When you turned up at their house after an absence, they'd ask you about your kids and your job and your recent doings, and almost in the same breath bring up a lingering migraine or this morning's fresh back spasm. Someone in the family—someone who'd been reading about astronomy lately and remembered the "red shift" phenomenon as a measure of radiation and distance—named this the "White shift," and it stuck.
All this, as I've said, showed itself late in their marriage, but a moment's effort can bring back for me the way things were at home in better days, a couple of decades back—say on a late morning just after the mail has arrived. Their studies face each other across the narrow front hall, with the doors always open. My mother, in soft tweeds and a pale sweater, sits at her cherrywood desk, one leg tucked under her, with a lighted Benson & Hedges in one hand and a brown soft pencil in the other as she works her way down a page of Caslon-type galleys, with her tortoiseshell glasses down on her nose. Her desk is littered with papers and ashes and eraser rubbings. Across the hall, Andy sits up at his pine desk, facing her; a paste pot and a jar of pencils and some newspaper clips are arrayed before him, next to an old "in" basket, and a struggling winter sunlight touches the white organdy curtains by the north window. There are messages to himself taped up on the bookcase behind, near the worn stacks of the Encyclopedia, some bound volumes of The New Yorker, and a trusty Roget's. The wallpaper here, curling a bit in the corners now, is made of connected blue-and-tan Coast and Geodetic Survey maps of Penobscot Bay, from the hills of Rockland in one corner, narrowing to a strip above the fireplace mantel, and all the way around to the waters near Mt. Desert Rock, in the other. Andy reads a passage aloud from today's letter from Frank Sullivan or his brother Stanley or a grain merchant in Ellsworth, and my mother laughs, scarcely lifting her eyes from the page. Soon the noises of her typing out another letter to Harold Ross or Gus Lobrano are joined by the slower clatter of his Underwood: a New England light industry is again in full gear, pouring out its high-market daily product, and the labor force, for the moment, seems content. Soon it will be lunchtime.
To me, the Whites' later concern with their health was a substitute joint effort, more loving than angry, and constituted a fresh form of intimacy as the two grew older. Andy missed the joy and youth that he had known in my mother and the passion that she had brought to her work as an editor, an obsessive gardener, and a non-stop letter-writer; once he told me how he mourned the day when she decided that she'd have to give up her evening Martini or Old-Fashioned. We in the family often speculated that Andy's hypochondria wasn't a way to stay close to her as much as fear of death in another form: if he could intercept each twinge and malaise as it arrived and bring it squirming to the light, then the ultimate event might yet be forestalled. But this is too easy. Rather, I've come to believe that his anxieties were a neurotic remnant of childhood. He was the last child of affectionate but older parents—his father, Samuel White, a piano-company executive, was forty-five when he was born and his mother, Jessie, forty-one. There were two prior brothers and three sisters; the oldest sibling, a sister named Marion, was eighteen years older than he was, and the youngest, Lillian, already a five-year-old. There seems to be no dark family event to seize upon, but one can imagine that a cough or a skinned knee or a passing stomach ache would have brought a rush of attention to young En (as he was called then) amid the daily news and doings of so many vibrant elders.
What is certain is the way that writing about death became a strength for him, and brought a lasting power in his best work. No one who feared death could have written the end of "Stuart Little," in which the hero-mouse goes off in search of the heroine, a bird named Margalo, who has flown away "without saying anything to anybody." But Stuart is also a romantic, like his creator, and interrupts his search for Margalo to invite a young girl he has met, Harriet Ames—she is just his size—to a picnic. He plans it carefully, but nothing goes right. The day is cloudy, Stuart has a headache, and some idle boys smash the souvenir birchbark canoe in which he means to take her for a paddle. He is disconsolate, and, when Harriet can't cheer him up, she leaves.
The first sentence of "Stuart Little," to be sure, is just as surprising as its shadowed endings—the fact that the Littles' second child, on arrival, is a mouse, not a boy. White never explains the anomaly, and simply gets on with the story, but some critics and teacher-parent groups—and Anne Carroll Moore, the retired but still formidable children's librarian at the New York Public Library—were collectively aghast. Harold Ross, who read everything, stuck his head into Andy's office one afternoon and said, "God damn it, White, at least you could have had him adopted." The author and his readers—kids and their read-aloud elders—stayed calm, however, and "Stuart Little" sold a hundred thousand copies in the first fifteen months after publication.
Andy was not mouselike, but in these pages he is ready for love, though rueful about the results. In life, he was intensely, almost manically, domestic but always ready to fall a little in love, without the plans or bother of a full affair. Pretty girls, with brains and laughter, entranced him. One of them, a New Yorker assistant named Maryan Fox, by a later coincidence became a sister-in-law of mine. He also admired Susy Waterman, the wife of a Maine neighbor, Stan Waterman, and felt that she would be the perfect narrator for the Pathways of Sound recording of "Charlotte's Web"—an assignment he took on himself in the end. For a long time, there was a Steinway baby-grand piano tucked in a corner of Andy's study in Maine, and I can still hear him playing and singing the verse of a lilting old song—did he perhaps write and compose it himself?
How often in the greening spring,
'Neath bough and bank reclining
[I can't re-mem-ber this next line]
And gay young girls declining . . .
On another day, he contrived an epochal whine, murmuring to Carol that he always came in third in my mother's heart: first there was The New Yorker, then me (me, Roger), and then, way down the line somewhere, himself. "Are you crazy!" she cried. "How can you say such a thing? You're always first with her—there's nobody else. Then the magazine and then all the rest of us. Everybody knows this."
Death was a more reliable companion. There is not even a concealing metaphor by the time "Charlotte's Web" comes along, in 1952, seven years after "Stuart": a great short novel that begins with "Where's Papa going with that ax?" and ends, or just about, when Charlotte, the spider, describes her coming death to the disbelieving young pig Wilbur, whom she has saved from that axe. Then comes the line—experienced teachers or reading-aloud parents check to make sure that the Kleenex is handy—"No one was with her when she died."
Andy showed class, that pause again, in waiting to write "Charlotte's Web" until he had the country stuff in it down by heart. He knew how geese sounded when they were upset, and on what day in the fall the squashes and pumpkins needed to be brought in and put on the barn floor—which is to say that he'd still be himself in writing about it, and would not put in a word that might patronize his audience. He must have known as the chapters emerged that this would be his masterpiece, but it would not occur to him to feel uneasy that his best book was for children. Money and celebrity were not much on his mind. When his old friend James Thurber died, he wrote that he'd known him "before blindness hit him, before fame hit him." Andy also turned down a Book-of-the-Month Club offer for a later book, "The Second Tree from the Corner," because he did not want to delay its publication until it suited the promotional plans of the B.O.M. He wrote an apology to his publisher, Cass Canfield, for the loss of the promised extra revenue, in which he said, "There are other things in life besides twenty thousand dollars—although not many."
It's my belief—I can't prove it—that there are still readers and writers who feel a debt to E. B. White because of the sparkle and directness they found in a few lines or passages he wrote decades ago. Some of them, to be sure, were third graders who were encouraged by their teachers to write him in North Brooklin, asking whether Stuart ever found Margalo, or what became of Wilbur in the fullness of age: these letters came in by the bagful, and in time Andy had to turn over the task of replying to others. Readers also remember the power of his pieces on freedom and the Constitution—his 1947 "Party of One" letters to the New York Herald Tribune, for instance, which took the paper briskly to task when it supported the blacklisting of the Hollywood Ten and others who refused to answer questions about their loyalty or past political affiliations. The Trib didn't back down, and wrote that members of "the party of one" were "nearly always as destructive as they have been valuable." White's reply, which pointed out that "a difference of opinion became suddenly a mark of infamy," won a fan letter back from Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter.
White's gift to writers is clarity, which he demonstrates so easily in setting down the daily details of his farm chores: the need to pack the sides of his woodshed with sprucebrush against winter; counterweighting the cold-frame windows, for easier operation; the way the wind is ruffling the surface of the hens' water fountain. Clarity is the message of "The Elements of Style," the handbook he based on an early model written by Will Strunk, a professor of his at Cornell, which has helped more than ten million writers—the senior honors candidate, the rewriting lover, the overburdened historian—through the whichy thicket. "Write in a way that comes naturally," it pleads. "Do not explain too much." Write like White, in short, and his readers, finding him again and perhaps absorbing in the process something of that steely modesty, may sense as well the uses of patience in waiting to discover what kind of writer will turn up on their page, and finding contentment with that writer's life.
He was a demanding worker. He rewrote the first page of "Charlotte's Web" eight times, and put the early manuscript away for several months, "to let the body heat out of it." Then he wrote the book again, enlarging the role of the eight-year-old girl, Fern, at the center of its proceedings. He was the first writer I observed at work, back in my early teens. Each Tuesday morning, he disappeared into his study after breakfast to write his weekly Comment page for The New Yorker—a slow process, with many pauses between the brief thrashings of his Underwood. He was silent at lunch and quickly went back to his room to finish the piece before it went off to New York in the afternoon mailbag, left out in the box by the road. "It's no good," he often said morosely afterward. But when the new issue turned up the next week the piece was good—unstrained and joyful, a snap to read. Writing almost killed you, and the hard part was making it look easy.
What's been left out of my account, of course, is most of a life: his son, Joel, and Joel's wife, Allene, three grandchildren—all grown now, with kids and life stories of their own—and the Brooklin Boat Yard, where Joe built a career and earned a reputation as a master boat designer and builder that matched or continued his father's as a writer. The Whites' pasture isn't here, sloping past the woodlot toward the shore, with the shapes of Herriman Point and then Mt. Desert coming clear beyond as the morning fog thins, nor is Fiddler Bayou, on Siesta Key, Florida, where the Whites passed so many winters. My mind, still in Maine, takes in the rubbly shore of Allen Cove, and the redolent boathouse, its surfaces softened with age, where we changed our clothes before swimming, and where Andy took himself, some days, to write or to work on his Newsbreaks selections for the magazine. Andy, getting ready to swim on a morning when the icy incoming tide has been warmed a fraction by its journey over mudflats, wades out until the water reaches his knees, then unfurls his old Abercrombie & Fitch thermometer and flings it out to the end of its twine tether. If the temperature is bearable—I think the red line stands at sixty-four degrees—he shakes his head and commits himself to the shallow deep.
Many in the family, including my children, have their own lasting and complex attachments to Andy and the Whites' place. My daughter Alice, at about ten—an age when she'd read and been read "Charlotte's Web" over and over again—was shocked to learn that a young pig in residence in an enclosure to the southwest of the garage would be converted to ham and bacon shortly after her departure in September. She worked late that evening, crayoning a large replica of Garth Williams's "SOME PIG!" drawing in the book—the miracle web that saves Wilbur—and had me drive her back to the Whites' that night, so she could secretly thumbtack it to the side of the pen. The agrarian Andy was startled but unmoved, and the pig went to his smoked reward on schedule.
Others in or around the Whites' house are missing as well—Henry Allen, Edith Candage, Shirley Cousins, Tink Hutchinson, Howard Pervear. Andy's lobsterman neighbor Charlie Henderson. Harold Ross—yes, Harold Ross, the magazine's founder and editor—who probably never made it to the Whites' place but who, right up until his death, in 1951, was so much a part of their daily thoughts and mealtime conversation that I sometimes almost saw him sitting at the table across from me, with his hunched shoulders and that gap in his teeth. Henry Lawson, Joe and Tooey Wearn, Russell Wiggins, Dottie Hayes. Fifty years of Brooklin friends and neighbors, who all knew or almost knew Andy, and respected his emphatic privacy. (When he was old, Brooklin townspeople would turn away pilgrim tourists who'd come all this distance to visit the shrine. "The E. B. White place? Well, it's hard to say how you'd get there from here. Anyway, I don't think he's around right now.") Sometimes, away for months on end, I felt in danger of falling out of touch, but then another letter from Andy would arrive, like this one from June 24, 1964: "I'm the father of two robins and this has kept me on the go lately. They were in a nest in a vine on the garage and had been deserted by their parents, and without really thinking what I was doing I casually dropped a couple of marinated worms into their throats as I walked by a week ago Monday. This did it. They took me on with open hearts and open mouths, and my schedule became extremely tight. I equipped myself with a 12" yellow bamboo stick, split at one end like a robin's bill, and invented a formula: hamburg, chicken mash, kibbled worm, and orange juice. Worms are hard to come by because of the drought, but I dig early and late and pay my grandchildren a penny a worm. The birds are now fledged and are under the impression that they know how to fly. When I come out of the house at 6 a.m. they come streaming at me from bush and tree, trying for a landing on shoulder or cap, usually overshooting me in the fog and bringing up against a wall. This exhausts them and me." (The stimulating "Letters of E. B. White," out of print for some time, will reappear next year, in a new and updated printing, edited by his granddaughter Martha White.)
My mother died in 1977, and Andy stayed on alone in the house for the rest of his life. Well, not entirely alone. As he grew older, he began to spoil himself a little, and why not. Sometimes when he was having a bad spell with his head he would check himself into the Blue Hill Hospital for two or three days, until he felt better. He liked a meal out now and then, at the Blue Hill Inn, sometimes with company and just as often alone. He took drives in the afternoon with Ethel Howard, the wife of a Sedgwick garageman, whose conversation he enjoyed; and had occasional visits from Corona Machemer, a Harper & Row editor who had worked with him on late collections of his works. He gave up sailing the sturdy twenty-foot sloop Martha, named for the same granddaughter, which Joel had built and rigged for use by a cautious single-hander; he was a morning sailor by now, anyway. Andy worried what might befall him when he was alone, and paid a succession of nurse-companions to be in the next room if he woke up in the night and needed a morsel of talk or a glass of milk. Older women, quite a few of them, set their caps for him, of course, and were disappointed. He told Carol once that he didn't plan to marry again. "I'm afraid I might get a lemon this time," he said.
He was the same, still lithe and only a bit slower, and one evening in August, 1984, when he came for dinner he complained that he'd knocked his head the day before while unloading a canoe from the roof rack of his car, over at Walker Pond; now he was having trouble knowing exactly where he was or what was happening around him. Carol and I smiled at him. "Yes, that happens sometimes, doesn't it?" we assured him.
But he knew better. A couple of months later, after we'd left, he took to his bed and never again knew exactly where he was. It looked like a rapid onset of Alzheimer's, but more likely, the doctors thought, was a senile dementia brought on by the blow to his head that day. He was eighty-five now. Nurses and practical nurses and other local ladies were hired, round the clock, who took extraordinary care of him. My brother managed it all, and somehow managed his own life as well. When I came up for a visit, early in the winter, Joe said that Andy would know me but that our conversation would be interesting. "How do you mean?" I said. "You'll see," he said.
I walked in and found him restless in his bed and amazingly frail. His eyes lit up and he said my name in the old way: "Rog!" He wanted to know how I'd come from New York and I said that Henry Allen had picked me up at the Bangor airport. "Did you fly over Seattle on the way?" he asked. He didn't seem troubled when I said no, and after a moment murmured, "Lost in the clouds."
He died the next October, still at home and able to recognize the people around him. Joe told me that in that long year he'd read aloud to his father often, and discovered that he enjoyed listening to his own writings, though he wasn't always clear about who the author was. Sometimes he'd raise a hand and impatiently wave a passage away: not good enough. Other evenings, he'd listen to the end, almost at rest, and then ask again who'd written these words.
"You did, Dad," Joe said.
There was a pause, and Andy said, "Well, not bad." ♦


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Apartment Standaard
up to 4 guests
3 rooms
2 bedrooms
1 bathroom
Distance to Beach 700 m
Proximity to public transport 20 km
Distance to sea 700 m
Pets allowed
Swimming Pool
Washing machine
Balcony / Terrace
Community garage
Non smoking
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"Standaard", 3-room apartment 58 m2, north facing position. Very practical furnishings: living room with TV. 1 room with 1 x 2 bunk beds. 1 room with 1 french bed. Open kitchen (4 hot plates, microwave, electric coffee machine). Shower, sep. WC. Balcony 3 m2. Terrace furniture, box-room. Facilities: telephone. Garage (extra). Please note: non-smoking house. Maximum 1 pet/ dog allowed.House/Residence
Oostduinkerke 6 km from Nieuwpoort: Comfortable small apartment house "Domein Westhoek". 36 apartments in the residence. In a quiet position, 700 m from the sea, 700 m from the beach. For shared use: park 15 ha, indoor pool. Tennis, boccia, children's playground. Private: terrace, garden furniture. In the complex: reception, restaurant, bar, WiFi, sauna (extra). Whirlpool (extra). Washing machine, tumble dryer (extra), bicycle rental. Breakfast and half board possible (extra). Parking. Tram 600 m, railway station "Station Oostende" 20 km, sandy beach 700 m. Nearby attractions: Natural Parc 1 km, Plopsaland 15 km. Please note: no lift. Baby equipment on request.
Prior to your departure, you will receive the key collection information for your stay, along with your travel documents.
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Location DescriptionGeneral info
Large, historical fishing village, directly by the sea, 50 km from Brugge. All shops, restaurants etc. in the resort.Summer
6 to 10 km of marked footpaths for walking. 3rd weekend in August, 4 days of l'Yser (international hike). Cycle routes from 65 to 150 km. Bike rental at the Koksijde railway station. Volley ball, badminton, tennis, ping-pong, squash, gym, 3 mini-golf courses, horse riding. Open air swimming pool on the beach.
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At first blush, the FBI's recent investigations into Arizona politicians appeared to be limited to just a handful of low-level state lawmakers who have been charged with federal crimes.
But records uncovered this week by TPM show at least one of the probes has been linked to some of the most powerful politicians in the state government as well as a shadowy conservative group known as ALEC, which has drawn national scrutiny for its outsized influence in state capitols across the country.The investigation centers on an Arizona super lobbyist who was hired in 2009 by undercover federal agents. The agents posed as high rollers from what they said was a New York City company called Longford Solutions LLC. They came to town looking to make hefty deals to buy land from local governments and allegedly offered gifts like sports tickets to help grease the wheels.
The probe has already led to the indictment of state Rep. Ben Arredondo (D) on charges of bribery and attempted extortion. He has pleaded not guilty. Federal authorities say the inquiry is still ongoing.
Another lawmaker, Rep. Richard Miranda (D), resigned from office earlier this year and pleaded guilty to swindling thousands of dollars from a charity he ran. The federal investigation that brought him down so far appears to be separate from the Arredondo probe, though Miranda's lawyer has raised questions about whether the two are connected.
Now, records on file with the state show Arredondo wasn't the only lawmaker that lobbyist Mike Williams met with while representing the FBI's front company, Longford Solutions.
On Feb. 16, 2009, Williams spent money on the company's behalf to entertain two of the most powerful Republicans in the House, Majority Leader John McComish and Majority Whip Andy Tobin. The amount he spent was low, just $65.96, and was designated for "food or beverages."
A similar meeting took place about two weeks later on March 3, 2009 with Rep. Cloves Campbell, a low-ranking member of the Democratic minority. Williams spent $24.09, again on food or drink, to entertain the lawmaker on behalf of Longford Solutions.
Three days after that, on March 6, 2009, Williams met with Rep. Jim Weiers, an influential Republican who served three terms as speaker of the House, the most powerful position in the chamber. Records show the lobbyist spent $54.58 on food or drink for the GOP big.
The records don't say what the meetings were about or where they took place.
None of the lawmakers at those meetings has been accused of wrongdoing. When asked on Friday, Manuel Johnson, a spokesman for the FBI's Phoenix office, wouldn't confirm or deny whether any of the men were under investigation.
Reached at his House office on Friday, Weiers told TPM he has had lunch with Williams numerous times over the years and knows him "better than some, not as good as others." But he said he had no recollection of the March 6, 2009 meeting.
"Have I been out to lunch with Mike Williams? Absolutely," Weiers said. "To remember back to '09, I have absolutely no recollection of any land anything. And when it comes to Ben Arredondo, he's been down there for one term. He's just finishing up his second year. I don't think I've spoken 10 words to him."
Weiers said he has not been contacted by the FBI or federal prosecutors, but a private detective working for Arredondo called him about four weeks ago with questions. He said he has not made any effort to retain a lawyer.
The lawmaker said he recently called Williams to find out what was going on after learning his name was connected to the probe. Weiers asked the lobbyist how Longford Solutions came into the picture. "He said, 'They called and asked if I could have them meet people,'" Weiers recalled. He said Williams told him nothing resulted from their meeting.
"I don't do deals," Weiers said. "I'm a little unique. If it's a good idea, it's a good idea. If it's not, it's not."
Likewise, Campbell told TPM he could not recall whether Williams was accompanied by a Longford Solutions executive during their 2009 meeting and could not remember where the meeting took place.
"I don't really recall anything. You know, we would probably meet with five or six different lobbyists over a week's time," Campbell told TPM on Friday. "I couldn't even tell you what we talked about. I don't even remember what it was."
Campbell said he has never been contacted by the FBI and did not recall what Longford Solutions was interested in.
McComish and Tobin did not return messages left Friday at their offices. Contacted previously by TPM, Williams said he knew nothing about the FBI probe and then hung up.
Since the meetings, most of the lawmakers have changed jobs. Tobin is now the powerful House speaker, McComish was elected to the state Senate and Cambell lost his 2010 reelection bid. Weiers still has the same job but is planning to leave after his term ends at the end of the year.
The timing of these meetings matches closely with dates laid out in the recent indictment against Arredondo. Federal prosecutors say he began his alleged lawbreaking on Feb. 18, 2009 while he was still a small time city councilman in Tempe, Ariz.
The indictment said Arredondo started pressuring the undercover agents, posing as Longford executives, to pay for things like tables at charity events that the lawmaker could then use for himself.
The pattern continued, according to the indictment, for weeks after Arredondo got elected to the state House in November 2009. During that time, prosecutors allege, he took thousands of dollars in tickets and other gifts from the undercover agents.
Meanwhile, Williams, the lobbyist, kept working on Longford Solutions' behalf, even traveling to places like Philadelphia and Atlanta to attend swanky conferences where state lawmakers and lobbyists from throughout the nation could meet behind closed doors.
One of those meetings, according to Arizona records, was the 2009 annual gathering of the conservative American Legislative Exchange Council, widely known by its initials ALEC.
Hosted in Atlanta and featuring guests like former U.S. House Speaker Newt Gingrich, the conference was the kind that the organization has come under intense scrutiny for in recent years. Journalists and liberal activists have uncovered evidence showing conferences like this were used as a conduit for lobbyists and big corporations to write their own laws, which were then handed directly to lawmakers for introduction in statehouses all over the nation.
On July 15, 2009, Williams spent $123.10 at the conference on behalf of Longford Solutions, according to the records.
Less than a week later, from July 21 to 23, Williams was at another gathering of lawmakers in Philadelphia. This time it was the National Conference of State Legislatures' annual summit. Speakers like then-U.S. Commerce Secretary Gary Locke headlined the event and it was another chance to mingle with influential state politicians from throughout the nation. There, records show, Williams spent $196.70 on behalf of the phony company.
As with the lawmakers, no one from ALEC or NCSL has been accused of wrongdoing and there is no indication the organizations or their practices are under federal investigation. The trips simply open a window into what exactly went into the investigation that ensnared Arredondo.
Meagan Dorsch, a spokeswoman with NCSL, said she hadn't heard about the investigation before being contacted Friday by TPM and that the organization doesn't generally release rosters of conference attendees. She declined to provide any other comment. A message left with an ALEC spokesperson was not immediately returned.
Federal authorities have made it clear that their investigation is still ongoing. Recently, prosecutors filed documents in U.S. District Court in Arizona asking for evidence in the Arredondo case to be sealed because it could affect other people who have not yet been named.
In his order granting the request, federal Magistrate Judge Lawrence Anderson said the evidence included "materials relating to the investigation of third persons and/or entities" as well as "materials relating to individuals who have agreed to cooperate with the Government in the investigation of other persons or entities." He acknowledged that the release of the information could have an effect on ongoing federal probes.


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My friend Ed told me about Champions Sports Bar a few weeks ago. He had heard some blurb about it on sports radio. My friend Luis was in town from Los Angeles, so my wife Marcela and I decided to take him with us to check the place out. Champions Sports Bar is located inside of the Marriott Hotel right by the Miami International Airport.
We ordered the Champions Sampler Tower ( 2 Dozen Wings, 8 Beef and Cheddar Sliders, Fully Loaded Cheese Fries and Onion Rings).
Luis seemed to like everything but in particular eating all the Cheese and Bacon off the fries, that mother f'er. Marcela liked the Cheese Fries the best as did I. It tasted like there was Parmesan Cheese on the Fries, pretty good addition if you ask me. The Wings and Onion Rings were pretty standard stuff as were the Sliders. The Sliders being average only meant one thing to me, that the regular Burger was either going to be Average or Really Bad. Luis orders the Miami Dog (foot long, half pound Hot Dog with Sauteed Onions, Chili, Mushrooms, Cheddar, Sauerkraut & Yellow Mustard), I order the Blue Cheese and Onions Burger and Marcela decided to quit while she's ahead.
By far, the Miami Dog was way better than the Blue Cheese and Onion Burger. Not the best Dog I've ever tried as the server claimed, he must not get out much. Luis seemed to love the Chili which really irked me because I drove him to Arbetter's to try the chili and he claimed this Chili was better. I really think he was pulling my chain on this one.
The menu says "fresh Angus Burger" but I don't buy it. It certainly did not taste that way, it was an average tasting Burger too. Plus I had spoken too soon, Marcela and Luis decide to order the Brownie Sundae.
I'm not a Brownie fanatic but I can tell when something isn't fresh. It was served room temperature with Hot Fudge and Vanilla Ice Cream. It was an average affair just like everything else which is a shame because the place seemed to have potential.
To Be or Not To Be A:
Champions Sports Bar (located inside the Marriott Hotel)
1201 NW 42 Ave, Miami, FL


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Suo Song village is in close proximity to the Brahmaputra River in the steep cliff, here is the view of Nanjiabawafeng and Brahmaputra Grand Canyon in the best position, The panorama was teken at the edge of a cliff on a block of stone, Upstream could be seen in the Namjagbarwa snow mountain,To Pai town direction can clearly see the Yarlung Zangbo Grand spectacles.
360-degree panorama photography by yunzeng liu and hulin long
Tibet Autonomous Region is situated at the southwest border, southwest of Qinghai-Tibet Plateau, longitude 78 ° 25 'to 99 ° 06 ', latitude 26 ° 44 'to 36 ° 32 ' between. It is bounded by the Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region, Qinghai Province, northeast connecting the east of Sichuan Province, Yunnan Province, south-east and connected; south and west with Myanmar, India, Bhutan, Sikkim and Kashmir and other countries and regions bordering China and the formation of national and Border lines of all or part of a total length of 4,000 kilometers. Tibet, with its magnificent, magical magnificent natural scenery known. Her vast territory, spectacular landscape and abundant resources. Since ancient times, people of this land to create a rich and splendid culture.


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Catmose College is an oversubscribed secondary academy school on Huntsmans Drive in Oakham, Rutland. The majority of students are drawn from the county town of Oakham and surrounding villages, although many are attracted from a wider area including Leicestershire and Melton through parental choice.
The College is one of the highest achieving in Rutland and Leicestershire. Our Ofsted report in February 2012 rated the College 'Outstanding' in all categories. We offer a broad range of experiences beyond the classroom to build independence, resilience and leadership skills that are critical for success in adult life. More details on the College can be found via the menu above or on the DfE.
We believe that great schools are not made by the buildings they occupy, but by the people who work within them. We are proud at Catmose College to have both committed staff and talented, hardworking students whose contributions make our College truly exceptional.
Our primary aim is to encourage each student to become a mature, independently minded individual who has the necessary skills and knowledge to be of value to themselves and society. We know that every student is talented, so our role as educators is to ensure these talents are fully realised. To achieve this, we have high expectations of every student, emphasising the importance of hard work and doing one's best in every circumstance.


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Cowboys welcome Josh Brent on sidelines during game
ARLINGTON, Texas -- On a day the Dallas Cowboys honored the late Jerry Brown with a moment of silence and a No. 53 decal on their helmets, Josh Brent was welcomed on the team's sideline for the game against the Pittsburgh Steelers.
Brent, a third-year defensive tackle, was the driver in the alcohol-related, one-car accident that resulted in Brown's death. Brent is facing intoxication manslaughter charges. According to The Dallas Morning News, Brent registered a blood alcohol level of 0.18 -- more than twice the legal limit -- after the accident last weekend.
The team's decision to allow Brent on the sidelines created a stir on Twitter, including from CBS studio analyst Boomer Esiason.
FUNERAL:Jerry Brown remembered in St. Louis
"Am I the only one that is wondering what in the world the Cowboysare thinking with Josh Brent on the sideline?," Esiason tweeted.
Brown, who was a member of the team's practice squad and Brent's college teammate at Illinois, was buried Saturday in St. Louis.
The Cowboys, who placed Brent on the non-football illness list this week, have pledged to continue to support him as he moves through the legal process. He was at the team's headquarters during the week and has been engaged with the Cowboys' counseling staff.
His presence on the sideline, wearing a sweatshirt and Cowboys ball cap, was another demonstration of the team's support.
At a memorial service Tuesday in Dallas, Brent accompanied Brown's mother, Stacey Jackson, who asked players to forgive Brent as she has for her son's death.


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Strada Square Planter
The Strada Planter is a classic planter available in a circular, square and rectangular shapes in a variety of sizes. Finished in a grey with a smooth finish to further enhance aesthetic appeal. Other concrete colours are available.
Ethical Risk Index
This Radar diagram illustrates the level of ethical risk associated with a specific stone. Ethical risk is plotted against the 10 ten measures of the ERI, with each value drawn from reports produced by independent ethical auditors, engaged by Marshalls to provide non-biased and honest reporting into levels of risk in that supply chain.
Each of the 10 measure is designed to recognise different and discrete sources of ethical risk. This produces a bespoke, fit for purpose framework designed specifically for the requirements of the stone industry. The radar diagram itself also compares the Marshalls supply chain to the wider industry in that stone, giving users a working comparison of Marshalls supply chain to the industry average, in the opinion of the auditor.
- Modern Slavery Act Awareness
- Supply Chain Visibility
- Income and Employment Security
- Health & Safety
- Employment Freely Chosen
- Empowerment
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- Corruption and Bribery


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Taylor Swift - Grammys 2013 Red Carpet
Taylor Swift is wondrous in white on the red carpet at the 2013 Grammy Awards on Sunday (February 10) at the Staples Center in Los Angeles.
Earlier in the evening, the 23-year-old entertainer won a Grammy for Best Song Written For Visual Media Award for "Safe & Sound"!
"WE JUST WON A GRAMMY FOR SAFE AND SOUND!!!!!!!!!!" Taylor tweeted after winning – congratulations!!!!
Taylor is also set to perform at the telecast – be sure to stay tuned to JustJared.com for the latest.
Make sure to tune in to the 2013 Grammy Awards, hosted by LL Cool J, TONIGHT at 8/7c on CBS!
FYI: Taylor is wearing a J Mendel dress with Jimmy Choo shoes, Lorraine Schwartz earrings, an Ofira ring, and a bracelet by Jaimin with Lorraine Schwartz.


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One of my favorite people, who happens to be relatively vanilla, asked me to write a post on the term. Who am I to refuse?
On the most basic level, "vanilla" is just a word the BDSM community uses to designate "people who are not into BDSM", or "sex acts that are not BDSM-related". For me, when I use the term "vanilla", I don't feel like I'm insulting "vanilla people". They're vanilla; I'm not. Some people are gay; I'm not. We're all friends here. … Which makes me feel a little puzzled, when some vanilla people feel bothered by the designation "vanilla".
It gets a little more complicated when we consider the cultural connotations of "vanilla", though. (Not to mention what happens when we start thinking about whether "vanilla vs. non" is a black-and-white thing, or whether there's more of a continuum there.)
Let's start with something most of us agree on: vanilla is delicious! It is a layered, complex and interesting flavor that can be used in many exciting ways. But, while there are lots of awesome things about vanilla, most people also agree that it's not as awesome as richer/more exotic flavors (particularly the perennial favorite: chocolate!). Think about the way we talk about "plain vanilla" … it wouldn't be "plain" if vanilla weren't considered boring, expected, dull. The major cultural connotation of "vanilla" is "not as good as chocolate".
So … if BDSMers refer to non-BDSMers as "vanilla" … does that mean we're looking down on their sexuality? That we're saying it's "not as good"?
I've tried thinking about this from the vantages of other alternative sexualities. For instance, if "straight" weren't such an established term — if it weren't a word that I'd grown up using — I think I might feel slightly miffed that it's the word for non-LGBTQ folks. I mean, I may primarily be interested in having sex with men, but must the word for that be "straight"? Am I "straight"? Is all of my beautiful unique snowflake personality a "straight" one? … How boring!
Obviously "straight" is only a descriptor of my sexual preferences and not my entire personality. But that's not necessarily how it feels when I hear it. And from that perspective, it's somewhat understandable that some vanilla people feel insulted when called "vanilla". No one wants to be "not as good as chocolate"!
I don't think vanilla people would find it insulting when I call them "vanilla", if they perceived the term to be an expression of neutral preferences. Vanilla people who feel insulted by the term must feel insulted, not because they think I'm describing an unimportant difference, but because they feel that I'm saying something about them. Perhaps this points to an issue about how we think about sexual preference: perhaps we consider sexual preference as defining a lot about a given person. We probably shouldn't. I don't think that most people's in-bed preferences actually correlate highly to other specific personality traits.
This also points to some larger issues. Specifically: this highlights the way that non-"alternative" sex — sex that isn't BDSM, queer, multiple partners, etc. — is perceived by some as being boring and limited and "plain" by default. That sucks, because there are lots of fun things you can do with straight, vanilla, one-on-one monogamous sex! Straight, vanilla, one-on-one monogamous sex should not be seen as boring and limited by default!
Part of the problem is that non-alternative sex has not been forced to develop the same kind of self-consciousness, ingenuity, negotiation techniques, etc. that other types of sex require and facilitate. We all know that American culture too often shames its members into being unwilling to discuss or acknowledge their sexual needs. But even the liberal subcultures that teach kids to think that sex is a beautiful thing still don't teach them how to talk to their partner or determine their needs — which means that even kids raised in sex-positive households often find themselves floundering and confused once they actually start having sex.
The only places that provide guidelines for those things are the sexual outlaw subcultures — because we've had to develop them. BDSM, for example, has been forced to invent very specific sexual negotiation tactics because if we don't carefully work out our interactions, we end up violently assaulting our partners. That is, we've developed very careful communication practices because if we fail at sexually communicating, the consequences are arguably more serious than they would be for other sexualities. The BDSM community has an entire vocabulary — words like "kink"* and "squick"**, for instance — developed to help us parse our sexual experiences. Within the BDSM subculture, you can frequently find actual workshops or lectures to teach negotiating sexual preferences. You don't find words or workshops like that in the "normal world".
I've been reading a really great anthology called Pomosexuals; it's a little old by now (1997), but so much of the commentary in there remains smart and important. It includes Pat Califia's essay "Identity Sedition and Pornography", and writing this post brought the following quotation to mind:
Straight people blithely assume it's their prerogative to write about us [queer people]; but we know a lot more about them than they know about us. We came out of them. Most of us made a rather extensive study of heterosexuality before leaving it behind. Even after we come out, we have to be experts in straight presumption, ignorance, and frailty in order to survive.
… We are not the only group of people dealing with a heritage of sexual shame and repression. Heterosexuals really need our help and inspiration, and I wish they'd admit it.
Moral of the story: No one should look down on vanilla people for being vanilla. Nor should anyone think vanilla sex is automatically "plain" or "boring". Conversely, vanilla people would do well to understand that they have a lot to learn from BDSM ideas about sexual communication (and from other sexual subcultures, on other relationship topics).
We're stuck with the word "vanilla" now, along with all its connotations. It would be annoying and probably impossible to invent a different word for "people who aren't into BDSM". But, hey — we've reclaimed so many other terms in this modern era … why not reclaim "vanilla"? Let's make "vanilla" mean "delicious, complex, layered and interesting", rather than "plain"!
As a side note, one interesting thing that my vanilla friend pointed out is this: "I feel like we should have learned by now that all these things occur on a spectrum. Maybe I'm not gay but I am queer. Maybe I'm into handcuffs and blindfolds but nothing else. Maybe there needs to be language to describe that spectrum rather than trying to draw a line in the sand. My sense is that the grey area is vast. Embracing it could be a useful strategy."
There's a term, "french vanilla", that BDSMers sometimes use to indicate people who are "kind of into BDSM, but not heavily into it". It's cute, but I don't ultimately find this term very helpful, and here's why: as soon as you start talking to BDSMers about their BDSM preferences, you quickly find that they are more into some things than others — and that there are many BDSM acts they just aren't interested in.
Usually, I think about this in terms of "sliders". On the most basic level, I envision several BDSM sliders: a Bondage slider, a Dominance slider, a Submission slider, a Sadism slider, and a Masochism slider. Frequently, these sliders overlap — for instance, many people with a high Masochism slider have a high Submission slider. You can get even more complicated and talk about the specific acts that people enjoy or dislike, but I tend to find that those sliders are a good place to start.
So basically, if we're going to complexify the conversation by talking about the BDSM spectrum, then I think we might as well go straight for the sliders, and skip vague terms like "french vanilla".
… I just had a startling thought. Arguably … what we're actually describing, when we talk about "vanilla people" vs. "BDSM people", is more about the way people think about these acts — how formally people articulate these acts — and less about how much, or how heavily, people actually do them. But this post has already gotten quite long, so I'll have to explore that idea another day.
* "Kink" = "a specific sexual preference". For instance, if I like whipping people, then you could say that I have a kink for whipping people.
** "Squick" = "a non-judgmental dislike of a certain sexual act". For instance, if I feel really bothered by the idea of someone whipping someone else, then you could say that I am squicked by whipping.


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Main navigation | Main content
If supermassive stars—55,500 times the mass of our Sun, or solar masses—did exist when the Universe was very young, they could have died in a special kind of supernova. But if the stars were slightly more massive—56,000 solar masses—they would have become supermassive black holes, say astrophysicists at the University of California, Santa Cruz (UCSC) and the University of Minnesota. Their findings were recently published in Astrophysical Journal (ApJ).
The researchers came to this conclusion after running a number of supercomputer simulations at the Department of Energy's National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center (NERSC) and the Minnesota Supercomputing Institute. They relied extensively on CASTRO, a compressible astrophysics code developed at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory's (Berkeley Lab's) Center for Computational Sciences and Engineering (CCSE).
As of now, no one has ever detected such a supermassive star. But, some scientists believe that they could exist because supermassive black holes—millions to billions of solar masses, or bigger—have been observed. In fact, these colossal black holes make up the core of nearly every galaxy in the cosmos. Despite their ubiquity, astrophysicists still do not know how they formed. However, they hope that supercomputer simulations might help solve this long-standing mystery by providing clues about how and where to look for supermassive stars.
"We found that there is a narrow window where supermassive stars could explode completely instead of becoming a supermassive black hole—no one has ever found this mechanism before," says Ke-Jung Chen, a postdoctoral researcher at UCSC and lead author of the ApJ paper. "Without NERSC resources, it would have taken us a lot longer to reach this result. From a user perspective, the facility is run very efficiently and it is an extremely convenient place to do science."
Supermassive Mysteries
There are currently two competing theories about how supermassive black holes form. The small seed theory predicts that a 100 to 1000 solar mass star collapses to form a black hole, which then grows to be supermassive over time by merging with other structures and sucking in surrounding gas and dust. Meanwhile, the big seed theory postulates that an enormous cloud of cosmic gas and dust collapses to form a very unstable supermassive star—millions to billions of solar masses. This star would only burn for a few million years before collapsing under its own weight to become a supermassive black hole.
Because these gigantic black holes have been spotted as far away as 12 billion light years—when the universe was only about one billion years old—many scientists tend to lean toward the big seed theory. These researchers question whether one billion years would really be enough time for the Universe to cool after the Big Bang; for galaxies and stars to form; for stars to ignite nuclear fusion, burn and become black holes; and for those black holes to accrete enough mass to become supermassive.
If supermassive stars did exist in the early Universe, scientists suspect that they probably behaved very differently than nearby stars. After all, the Universe's first stars (Population III) formed in a relatively pristine environment—from clouds made primarily of hydrogen, and maybe a little helium. All other chemical elements were forged later on by future generations of stars. To gain some insights about how these Population III stars would have behaved, researchers rely on supercomputer simulations.
The Simulations: What's Going On?
To model the supermassive star's life, Chen and his colleagues used a one-dimensional stellar evolution code called KEPLER. This code takes into account key processes like nuclear burning and stellar convection, and relevant for massive stars, photo-disintegration of elements, electron-positron pair production, and special relativistic effects. The team also included general relativistic effects, which is important for stars above 1,000 solar masses.
They found that 55,500 solar mass stars live about 1.69 million years before becoming unstable due to general relativistic effects and then start to collapse. As the star collapses, it begins to rapidly produce heavy elements like oxygen, neon, magnesium, and silicon from helium in its core. This process releases more energy than the binding energy of the star, halting the collapse and causing a massive explosion: a supernova.
CASTRO—a multidimensional compressible astrophysics code developed at Berkeley Lab by scientists Ann Almgren and John Bell—was used to model the star's death. These simulations show that once collapse is reversed, Rayleigh-Taylor instabilities mix heavy elements produced in the star's final moments throughout the star itself. The researchers say that this mixing should create a distinct observational signature that could be detected by upcoming near-infrared experiments like the European Space Agency's Euclid and NASA's Wide-Field Infrared Survey Telescope.
According to Chen, this supernova is unique because it is triggered by relativistic instability, not pair-production instability. When the team compared chemical elements produced in each case they found that a supernova triggered by pair instability produces a lot of Nickel-56 and other iron-group elements, while supermassive stars do not.
Depending on the intensity of the supernovae, some supermassive stars could enrich their entire host galaxy and even some nearby galaxies with elements ranging from carbon to silicon when they explode. In some cases, supernova may even trigger a burst of star formation in its host galaxy, which would make it visually distinct from other young galaxies.
"My work involves studying the supernovae of very massive stars with new physical processes beyond hydrodynamics, so I've collaborated with Ann Almgren to adapt CASTRO for many different projects over the years," says Chen. "Before I run my simulations, I typically think about the physics I need to solve a particular problem. I then work with Ann to develop some code and incorporate it into CASTRO. It is a very efficient system."
To visualize his data, Chen used an open source tool called VisIt, which was architected by Hank Childs, formerly a staff scientist at Berkeley Lab. "Most of the time I did my own visualizations, but when there were things that I needed to modify or customize I would shoot Hank an email and that was very helpful."
This research was germinated at the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities. Ken Chen received much support from the School of Physics and Astronomy led by Ron Poling and Joe Kapusta and from the Minnesota Supercomputing Institute led by Tom Jones and Jorge Viñals.


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X Landing is a customizable responsive landing page template which can be adjusted to any need, from a simple informative page to a quick showcase of your products or local business!
Each element can be moved, removed or added as you please and you can easily change colors and patterns, allowing you to create your very unique landing page!
Last update: 31 October 2012
Focus on
1. Landing page
X Landing offers you the elements to build your own landing page: change the colors, the patterns, the elements order and much else to meet your needs.
It will looks great on most devices, tablets and mobiles!
2. Slideshow
With this slider users can explore your products properties with the aid of visual tooltips that show the details of the products or services you offer.
3. Properties
Show your products features or your company ideals using this snippet with strong visual impact. You can create your custom icons with the included psd source files.
4. Gallery
A simple collection of pictures of want to show your visitors. By clicking the images a fancybox popup will show them full-size.
5. Information
If you have much to say with this snippet you can pack up a lot of information for users hungry for information.
You can add any number of tabs without worries, it will adapts by itself.
6. Product offerts
Show what your products can offer to your costumers with a quick table overview showing the differences between them.
7. Map
You own a local business? Make yourself visible throught a customizable map!
8. Contacts
It's always very important to show your contact info on your landing pages. The more visible they are the merrier.
9. Mailing list form
Here you'll get your Leads! One of the core element of every landing page!
10. Testimonials
Show your visitors what your costumers say about your activity! It will help reassuring other customers!
11. Social
Link your landing page to your social pages to make users follow easily your updates!
Template Features
- HTML5 and CSS3, table-less responsive layout
- Responsive template, looks great on personal computers, tablets and most mobile devices
- Customizable colors and patterns
- SEO friendly, code optimized for search engines
- PSD files are included
- Documentation included


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BBC News
- General election 2019: Labour launches 'radical' manifesto
- Alex Salmond accused of sexual assaults on 10 women
- Prince Andrew seen for first time since stepping back from royal duties
- UK to repatriate first citizens from north-eastern Syria
- Shrewsbury and Telford NHS maternity death review families unaware
- Thomas Cook's new owner creates 1,500 new jobs
- Helen McCourt murderer Ian Simms set for parole
- Grace Millane trial: Accused 'eroticised' backpacker's death
- Detectorists stole Viking hoard that 'rewrites history'
- Essex lorry deaths: Money raised for Vietnamese victims' families
- Oxford Union to review practices after blind student removal
- General Election 2019: The untapped influence of the non-voter
- General election poll tracker: How do the parties compare?
- General election 2019: Tories top donation list for first election week
- Nikki Fox on the hurdles and options for disabled voters
- General election 2019: Voting activist wants 'youthquake'
- General election 2019: Has Boris Johnson got National Insurance cut confused?
- Liberal Democrat manifesto 2019: 12 key policies explained
- Jo Swinson: Lib Dem leader pressed on if she'd block a Tory or Labour government
- General election 2019: How to register to vote, when is the deadline and other questions
- Election debate: Five things from Johnson v Corbyn head-to-head
- Election debate: How did it play out online?
- Quiz: How do your morals compare?
- The farmers who started out with student debts and big dreams
- Manchester Museum returns 'stolen' sacred Aboriginal artefacts
- Planning a baby at 16: 'I might be a young mum but I'm a good mum'
- Lewis Hamilton on a tough season, the risks of racing and his future
- Roma Traveller's abuse 'affecting university studies'
- Officer left with PTSD after investigating child abuse
- Chris Martin on Coldplay's 'environmental touring pause'
- Norfolk Lights Express makes Poppy Line debut
- Harry Dunn family: 'Dominic Raab misled us'
- Election 2019: Lib Dems present 'Stop Brexit' manifesto in nightclub
- Ex-KGB media magnate: Russian-UK influence 'fake news'
- Harry Dunn's family 'disgusted' with Dominic Raab over legal costs
- ScotRail misses target to stop dumping sewage on tracks
- Sixteen people found in lorry on ferry to Rosslare
- Patient died after 'transplant surgeon error'
- Bobby Moore's first England captain cap sells for £11,000
Our traditional ANY-Village websites can still be found at their original location:
Below we are listing some of the most popular UK property websites advertising homes for sale in the Peasenhall area:
Nestoria (PEASENHALL Map Search)
Vebra.com (PEASENHALL Map Search)
Rightmove (PEASENHALL Map Search)
Zoopla (Peasenhall Map Search)
Homes for SALE / Flats for SALE in PEASENHALL
Homes for RENT / Flats for RENT in PEASENHALL


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Honoring Life
Honoring a life means acknowledging and showing respect for the individuality of the personality and uniqueness of the life's path of the deceased.
Grief Support
You're never alone.
No matter how you feel at this moment, you have our commitment.
Planning Ahead
Start the online planning process now, or meet with one of our pre-planning advisors.
Our educational, grief support and remembrance events are designed to appeal to a wide age range, enriching lives, educating minds, and easing sorrows.
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Atkins-Lodge Chapel - Lewes
16961 Kings Hwy.
Lewes, DE 19958
Clarksville Chapel - Ocean View
34874 Atlantic Ave.
Ocean View, DE 19970
Dodd-Carey Chapel - Georgetown
307 N. Bedford Street
Georgetown, DE 19947
Hardesty Chapel - Bridgeville
202 Laws Street
Bridgeville, DE 19933


text:
MOUNT VERNON, Ga. - Georgia Southwestern notched a pair of wins over Brewton-Parker in a mid-week, non-conference doubleheader Wednesday afternoon as the Lady Hurricanes extended their current winning streak to four games.
Game 1: GSW 3, BPC 2 (8 innings)
In the first game of the afternoon, GSW rallied from an early deficit to overcome Brewton-Parker in a thrilling 8-inning affair.
BPC (18-7) notched the first runs of the day in the second inning when the Lady Barons punched in a pair of runs to take the early 2-0 advantage over the Lady 'Canes.
GSW's Rachel McElroy led off the fourth inning with a solo blast to left field to put the Lady 'Canes on the board.
Southwestern tied up the contest later in the inning when Avery Purser scored off a Jordan Miller-single to left field.
The contest remained tied until GSW's Chelsea Hodges drove in Hayley Knight in the top of the eigth inning to give GSW the go-ahead run as the Lady 'Canes triumphed, 3-2.
McElroy paced Georgia Southwestern (25-22, 8-10 PBC) as the sophomore accounted for two out of GSW's four hits.
Southwestern's Allison Pastor (12-7) threw a complete game for the Lady 'Canes as the junior allowed two runs off four hits while striking out a career-high ten Lady Barons to earn the win.
Game 2: GSW 4, BPC 1
Riding a wave of momentum from the first contest, the Lady 'Canes didn't need any late-game heroics in the second game of the day as GSW scored four runs off seven hits in order to sweep the twinbill.
GSW's Hayley Knight opened the game in the first inning by driving in Mason Moreland as Southwestern was first to dent the scoreboard.
Jordan Miller helped GSW extend their lead in the fourth inning as the junior went long for the eight time this season off a two-run homer to put the Lady 'Canes up 3-0.
Brewton-Parker (18-8) lit up their side of the scoreboard for the first time when the Lady Barons punched in a run in the bottom of the fourth inning.
GSW added an insurance run in the sixth inning as the Lady 'Canes went on for the 4-1 victory.
Hayley Knight led Southwestern's offensive as the junior went 2-for-3 with an RBI. GSW finished with seven hits on the outing.
Ashley Cavender (9-9) was credited with the win for GSW (26-22, 8-10 PBC) as the sophomore threw a complete game allowing one run off four hits with five strikeouts.
Georgia Southwestern will look to continue their winning way Saturday, April 6, as the Lady 'Canes travel to Young Harris for a doubleheader starting at 1 p.m. It will be the first-ever meeting between the two teams as Peach Belt Conference foes.


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Cisco, Citrix link arms for VDI partner push
Virty desktops are like ERP in the 1990s
Citrix and Cisco are arch enemies in the online meeting racket, with their respective GoTo and WebEx online collaboration services, but they do agree on one thing: virtual desktop infrastructure is such a big market, and such a messy and complex sale, that they must cooperate to realize the potential revenue streams that can come to them both. If they don't mess this opportunity up.
They have both come to the conclusion that they are going to need more robust channel players, too.
Citrix is well known among corporations for server-side application virtualization, and has emerged as the dominant supplier of VDI back-ends with its XenDesktop Swiss army knife, which does many different kinds of virtualization related to PCs, including streaming apps or whole desktop images from servers in the data center to running PC images on bare-metal hypervisors on PCs that are based on Intel's vPro iron.
Cisco is the dominant switch maker in the data center, and is also a big player in the office with its unified communications gear and software. Significantly for its VDI effort, Cisco has designed its "California" Unified Computing System blade servers specifically to host heavily virtualized apps like hundreds or thousands of concurrent PC images.
Cisco and Citrix have been working together at the products level for more than two years, getting XenDesktop certified on Cisco iron and moving on to a more formal "Virtual Experience Infrastructure" or VXI partnership back in October 2011, mixing up Cisco thin clients, switches, servers, and WAN optimization software with Citrix VDI wares to provide a better "virtual workspace" for end users.
In February of this year, Cisco inked a reseller agreement with Citrix, giving Citrix and its vast channel partners the ability to peddle a complete VDI stack – provided they are certified on the whole stack, of course. (The deal was not exclusive, with Cisco being a very strong partner with EMC with its Vblock virty server stacks and with virtualization minion VMware with its ESXi hypervisor and View VDI tools as well.)
Now Cisco and Citrix want to go one step further with something they call the Partner Accelerator, which is a bunch of tools and a pile of cash to get a crack team of partners rushing into data centers to catch the Windows 7 desktop wave and virtualize it to the benefit of both companies while mashing up virty PCs, voice, and rich media so it can be streamed down to myriad devices.
Cynthia Gallant, vice president of worldwide channel strategy and market development at Citrix, tells El Reg that over 10 million seats in the public and private sectors worldwide have been converted from traditional PCs to virty ones, and cites statistics from Gartner that suggest that between 2012 and 2014 (inclusive) another 56 million corporate desktops will go virty.
The challenge – and the opportunity – is clear: with workforces going more mobile and end users working from an average of three different devices each day, CIOs are being hard-pressed to control access to applications and data in a consistent way while at the same time supporting PCs, smartphones, and tablets all at the same time.
"Right now, end users are taking things in their own hands," says Gallant. "There's lots of opportunity for partners, because in many cases these are greenfield VXI installations." But the long-term nature of the deals, which usually start out with a proof-of-concept with dozens to hundreds of seats and lots of babysitting on the part of the partners, makes it hard for the channel to take down the deals.
El Reg suggested to Gallant that the opportunity was much like the ERP wave back in the 1990s, when it suddenly became desirable to bring all of the applications to run a factory, a warehouse, and a back-end office with all of its myriad functions under the control of one master program.
The ERP effort was expensive, and you needed to calculate return on investment very thoroughly to make a sale, but you could convince CEOs and CIOs to do it because it freed them from having to write their own applications, and allowed them to duck the Y2K bugs lurking in their code. But the ROI calculations – however faulty they might have been – sealed the deals.
Partner Accelerator is about helping partners do a better job and hitting the numbers rather than exaggerating them. Cisco has a staggering 280,000 channel partners globally, and Citrix has 10,000 of its own, and there is a bit of overlap, of course. But even still, says Gallant, this is not even about trying to pump up several thousand partners, but rather to create several hundred suppliers that can take down big deals, do them right, and get VXI wares moving into data centers and onto desktops faster.
"This is to create a select group," says Gallant. "And we are putting in lots of money. This is not just another channel play."
How much money Cisco and Citrix are kicking in, neither company would say, but Brian Allison, director of worldwide channels at Cisco tells El Reg that this Partner Accelerator effort is one of the biggest channel investments either company is making. The idea, says Allison, is to build VXI practices at partners, give them the tools they need to compress the sales cycle, and give them the marketing, assessment, and proof-of-concept funding so they can find deals and get them into full virty desktop production faster.
The Partner Accelerator program for VXI includes what Cisco and Citrix call "learning maps," which is just another way of saying becoming familiar with all of the technology that goes into a VXI stack and then proving through certification that you know your stuff. Once you complete your courses, you are in line for sales leads that Cisco and Citrix have gathered up.
The vast majority of the coursework is available online, and the two companies will host quarterly "best practices" webinars with partners added to the program to keep them on the leading edge of VXI. Partners will be shown how to beef up their services offerings, since about 30 per cent of the total butcher's bill for a VXI installation is for services of one kind or another, according to the companies.
The companies have also created a crack team of Cisco and Citrix techies that are familiar with the hardware and software from both companies as it relates to VXI, and they are now working as a helpdesk for the VXI channel partners to help them plan, design, and implement VXI.
"We are going to put these partners up on a pedestal," says Allison, allowing them to use special "Unified Workspace Solutions" reseller branding and given them access to ROI tools as well as cash to fund assessment work and to help them cover the costs of proofs of concept for VXI before the big desktop orders coming in. ®


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An engaging recent New Yorker article* describes the constructed language Ithkuil, which aims to be "maximally precise" by "eliminating the ambiguity, vagueness, illogic, redundancy, polysemy (multiple meanings) and overall arbitrariness that [are] seemingly ubiquitous in natural human language."
Our first response was that the creator of this constructed language had likely not seen our recent blog post about connotation vs. denotation in brand names. The post notes that connotation is often more important than denotation in brand names. An example is gazelle. For the many who have never actually seen one of these animals, the literal meaning may be a bit blurry, yet to them the gazelle is still likely to connote swiftness and grace.
Our second reaction to Ithkuil was to ask why, as its creator noted, overall arbitrariness is so widespread in human language. The answer's pretty easy if we picture what occurs in ordinary conversation: as communicators, we incline more toward verbal artistry than toward explicit programming. We launch plans as if they were rockets, face problems as if they were adversaries, and target opportunities as if–well, no need to flog a metaphorical horse.
Consider what language would be like without metaphor. Rather than launching plans, we'd simply make them, or start them. Metaphor is so intrinsic to the way we use words, it's even difficult to find literal verbs to substitute for face in "face problems" or target in "target opportunities." It's much easier to find other metaphors: attack problems, meet problems head on, embrace change, aim for opportunities…
That gives good reason to suppose that even if a precise language–be it Ithkuil or C++–should ever be spoken, it wouldn't take a day for a ninja band of metaphors to start creeping in.
No wonder, then, that metaphor should be a staple of brand names. Metaphor helps us to see something new in everyday objects. It enables brands like Tide, BlackBerry, and Volt to stand out from the competition by endowing them with a unique, attractive message.
Metaphors do lose their force over time. Our verb reveal goes back to a Latin verb meaning 'pull back the veil,' yet that image no longer pops up when we encounter the word. Metaphor weakening explains how we get unwitting blends of metaphor like:
Over all, many experts conclude, advanced climate research in the United States is fragmented among an alphabet soup of agencies, strained by inadequate computing power and starved for the basic measurements of real-world conditions that are needed to improve simulations.
New York Times, June 11, 2001
The images in brand names subside over time as well. While the newcomer Volt immediately brings to mind an electric charge, the BlackBerry, introduced in 1999, now offers models–the Porsche and the Pearl–in colors other than black. Tide, introduced in 1946, hardly conjures the image of waves in the sea anymore.
But in branding, that's OK, because a brand name's heaviest lifting happens up front, when the name is new. A colorful name attracts attention, ties a unique message to a product, and is more likely to spread virally (if you'll pardon the metaphor) when it's first introduced.
Therefore, for those – like the inventor of Ithkuil – that wish to make language more efficient, we recommend metaphor, which in a single word can turn a caterpillar into a butterfly.
— Will Leben, Chair of Linguistics
* Joshua Foer, "Utopian for Beginners: An Amateur Linguist Loses Control of the Language He Invented." The New Yorker, December 24 & 31, 2012.


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Cuts threaten House seats
BELLEVILLE, Ill. — Rep. Bill Enyart might be a Democrat and Rep. Rodney Davis a Republican, but the two rookie lawmakers in Southern Illinois share one fear.
Sequestration could cost them their seats.
Story Continued Below
Enyart and Davis are three months into their new jobs — representing next-door districts — and constituents already are blaming them for not doing enough to stop the automatic spending cuts.
( Also on POLITICO: DOD to begin sending furlough notices Thursday)
This week, 4,500 civilian workers at nearby Scott Air Force Base will receive furlough notices — a troubling reminder for Davis, who won his seat last fall by just 1,002 votes.
Enyart's no better off: He pledged to protect Scott during his 2012 campaign, but at last weekend's St. Patrick's Day parade in his hometown of Belleville, several people shouted, "Stop the sequester!" as he walked by tossing green beads to children.
"Certainly, in my district, we're in crisis stage," Enyart told POLITICO after marching in the parade.
This tale of two districts is a reminder for some in Washington who still think about sequester as an abstract political fight. On the ground, the cuts are real — and so are the political consequences.
( PHOTOS: How sequestration could affect you)
Davis, who holds a part of Abraham Lincoln's old district and the state capital of Springfield — is considered one of the best pickup opportunities in 2014 for Democrats. After all, he had the narrowest margin of victory last cycle for any successful Republican.
To Democrats, the thinking is that Davis's constituents in rural Illinois and the college towns of Champaign, Normal and Springfield will be so upset with Republican leadership over the spending cuts that they will send him packing next November.
The two congressmen said during interviews Saturday back in their home state that they're on the case since they're willing to work across the aisle to cut a deal. But that spirit of bipartisanship hasn't stopped their national parties from launching attack ads that pin the blame for sequester on the other guy.
For Republicans, their strategy is to go directly after Enyart, a former leader of the Illinois National Guard who anchored his 2012 campaign around the message that he could protect the region's largest employer, Scott Air Force Base.
( Also on POLITICO: The delicate matter of base closures)
"He came in saying he had instant credibility," said Jon McLean, the GOP chairman for St. Clair County. "I think he's got a lot riding on it. He's put himself out there."