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Looking for Something to Do in Cape May New Jersey? Spend a day at the beach, or go Parasailing, take a Jet Boat Ride or Rent a Jet Ski. Why not spend a summer afternoon Whale and Dolphin Watching. Check out the lighthouse and sunken ship at Cape May State Park. Cape May offers beach lovers Victorian architecture, fine dining, bird watching, boating, water sports and fishing in addition to world class resort and vacation accommodations. Cape May Resort.com, Your Cape May Local Travel Resource
Thursday, November 1, 2012
The Department of Environmental ProtectionAdvises Residents To Conserve Water
DEP Advises Residents To Conserve Water
By Press Release
TRENTON – The Department of Environmental Protection is strongly advising residents statewide to conserve water in the wake of Hurricane Sandy because widespread power outages have forced many public and private water utilities to use emergency generators to treat and pump water.
"Power companies are working hard to restore electricity to water utilities, but right now it's impossible to say how long these facilities will have to be operated on backup generators," Commissioner Martin said. "Everyone must pitch in immediately and take steps to reduce water consumption. Without conservation now, homes and businesses could find themselves without water in the near future if backup generation fails. We need full and immediate cooperation."
The DEP is currently assessing the extent to which water utilities are currently using backup power, however it currently appears that most of the major water utilities in the state are currently using some degree of backup generation. The DEP is in contact with water purveyors across New Jersey.
New Jersey American Water Co., the state's largest private water company, has issued a statement urging all of its customers statewide to conserve water indefinitely as many of the company's facilities are operating on emergency generators.
"We are working with the power companies to have power fully restored at all of our pumping stations and water treatment plants, and ask that our customers discontinue non-essential water use until further notice," said Stephen P. Schmitt, vice president of operations for New Jersey American Water. "Voluntary water conservation reduces the demand on the water system while it operates on backup power. We thank our customers in advance for their cooperation in conserving water while power is being restored to their homes and to our facilities."
In the aftermath of the storm, water service for New Jersey American Water customers has not been interrupted.
The DEP advises residents to adhere to the following:
• Do not use water for any nonessential uses, such as watering of lawns and washing of cars.
• Take showers instead of baths. Keep showers as short as possible.
• Limit flushing of toilets, dishwashing and washing clothes.
• Turn off the faucet when shaving and brushing teeth.
• For those who have electrical service, run dishwashers and laundry washing machines only when they are full. If you have a water-saver cycle, use it.
• Check your toilet, faucets, and pipes for leaks and make repairs or shut off water valves to any faucets or toilets that are leaking.
• Use a broom or rake to clean up storm debris, including leaves or pine needles, rather than a hose.
• Keep a supply of drinking water on hand sufficient to last several days.
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subset: commoncrawl


text:
L'Osservatore Romano has made some images available from the Pope's recent private visit to the Birmingham Oratory, which can be viewed at:
3 Oratorians were ordered to "spend time in prayer" at 3 separate monasteries hundreds of miles apart and indefinitely. Of the 3, Fr. Dermot Fenlon (described by the Oratory's own spokesman as "entireley guiltless of any wrong doing whatsoever") remains silenced and in exile. This blog is an archive of publications about the scandal at Newman's Oratory. It aims to bring out the facts, of the great injustice suffered by the 3, particularly the cruel treatment of Fr. Dermot Fenlon.
|Photo by James Bradley - IMG_1782


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Naming Rights, Retail Ad Space and Other Ideas
Twenty years ago, when professional sporting teams started selling naming rights to their stadiums and arenas, many purists called it a low point in the commercialization of sports. But today, the number of arenas and ballparks not named after a corporate sponsor is small. For revenue-seeking team owners, it is just too hard to pass up the money that comes with selling your stadiums' name. Strategy, business development and marketing all play huge factors in naming-rights deals, with top prices for these deals reaching about half a billion dollars, according to Sports Business Journal.


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I have a program that ready a file, and displays the fewuency of a length of a word, however, do to this i have used an array which specifies the max length as seen here:
this makes it so that the max word possibly read is 12....int frequency [] = new int[12];
however i need this to be whatever the maximum length of a word is?
i have the following code, this kind of works, as in it displays the lengths without me telling it hte number, however it goes all the way to 115 (with length as 0 since there are no wordsth is long.
int t = Integer.MAX_VALUE; int frequency [] = new int['t'];
How can i fix this so that it is the max length is determind?
my idea is that i might need a for loop?
sorry, im new to Java there possibly a simple answer


text:
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On April 30, 2011, after secretly giving the go-ahead to the Navy SEAL operation that would take out Osama bin Laden, President Obama killed at the White House Correspondents' Dinner.
The primary target captured in his comedic sights: Donald Trump.
Obama poked fun at Trump's "Birther" campaign – and mocked his hiring and firing of D-listers on "Celebrity Apprentice."
"These are the kinds of decisions that keep me up at night. Well handled, sir, well handled," Obama chided.
Trump, in the audience, smiled as he squirmed. Obama had portrayed him as the thing he hated the most: a loser.
Maybe he decided to run for president that night. Or maybe he'd long harbored the idea. It's impossible, of course, to get into Trump's head, but far easier as Obama – and eventually Hillary Clinton – found, to get under his orange-tinted skin.
Trump enjoyed the last laugh early Wednesday as he celebrated a once-unfathomable victory – denying Clinton's shot at history and making some of his own by going from reality show punch line to commander-in-chief.
But the 70-year-old Republican also got the job he's been running for all his public life: celebrity-in-chief. Now Donald Trump is the host of biggest reality show of them all – one with far, far more serious ramifications than fallout over sacking Gary Busey.
Perhaps that's a commentary less on Trump than on times where a familiar loud voice offering simplistic quick fixes to complex problems can rouse enough voters to beat a seasoned, if polarizing, political figure.
Trump's black-and-white, hired-or-fired showman's theatrics couldn't obscure the demagogic scapegoating at the root of his appeal to many – or his dubious record as a businessman and alleged serial accoster of woman.
The blustery developer won, in part, by framing the endless campaign as a fight for attention, by any means necessary – including pandering to base xenophobic, racist and misogynist instincts and reflexively insulting critics as if he were feuding with Rosie O'Donnell.
Slurs extended not only to opponents ("Little Marco"), but to the likes of Sen. John McCain, a former P.O.W., and Gold Star parents. Trump, meanwhile, lauded Russian strongman Vladimir Putin, a stance once unthinkable to both parties.
Then again, we've never had a U.S. presidential candidate who defended his hand size and publicly bragged about his, um, manhood.
Trump's tough-guy, easy-answers spiel didn't employ facts and details as much as cast blame for the country's woes on some of its most vulnerable residents and outside boogeymen. The trash-talking New Yorker got plenty of coverage by giving the news media unfettered access – until he blamed the press for helping "rig" the election he'd eventually win.
The handsome John Kennedy may have been the first telegenic president. Former movie hunk and California governor Ronald Reagan may have been the Great Communicator. Obama may have spent more time on entertainment television than any other sitting president.
But Trump, more than any of them, instinctively grasped how to use the media, in its various, morphing forms. He expertly commanded a spotlight driven by a voracious 24-7 Internet and a Kardashian-influenced television landscaped littered with symbiotic pseudo-celebrity "news" and Reality TV.
Trump also knows how to work a crowd, even if on the campaign trail he regularly contradicted his own past statements. He became a tweeting machine, pumping out put-downs, innuendo, hyperbolic boasts and outright falsehoods at all hours.
He turned candidate debates into ratings-friendly rules-free spectacles to the point where he wanted CNN to pony up $10 million for charity to secure his participation in the GOP verbal slugfests.
Both Trump and Clinton tapped into the very real concerns of opposite and overlapping constituencies. But their different approaches reflected their worldviews, their personalities and, crucially in this election like no other, their images.
In his first speech as president-elect shortly before 3 a.m. Wednesday, a relatively subdued Trump peppered his talk with some of his favorites superlatives – among them "tremendous," "unbelievable" and, of course, "great." Among the crowd that joined him on stage: former "Apprentice" contestant Omarosa Manigault.
Still, Trump offered rare kind words for Clinton, praising her as a worthy adversary.
Whatever you think of Clinton, there's little doubt the Democratic standard bearer arrived to her three debates with Trump better prepared than him – armed not only with facts, but equipped to battle an unpredictable opponent.
She tweaked his considerable ego, goading him into bizarrely insulting O'Donnell and former Miss Universe Alicia Machado. He took her bait and even griped about a past Emmys loss.
That shouldn't have been surprising from a candidate who later would note – erroneously – that both he and Clinton made Barbara Walters' "10 Most Fascinating People" list twice. The opponent he slammed as a "nasty woman" notched the Walters honor four times.
Clinton also trounced him in celebrity supporter ranks, gaining the backing of Beyoncé, Bruce Springsteen and most of Hollywood. Trump's "Celebrity Apprentice"-like GOP convention lineup included Scott Baio, "Duck Dynasty" star Willie Robertson and Antonio Sabato, Jr.
But in the end, no matter how considerable her fame after traveling over a quarter-century from first lady to U.S. senator to secretary of state to the first woman major-party presidential nominee, Clinton couldn't shake her baggage and the animus she inspired in a significant portion of the populous.
She also couldn't compete with Trump in putting on a show – especially a cynical, manipulative exhibition that resonated with enough of a jaded electorate to put self-declared billionaire everyman over the top.
To detractors, Trump's unlikely presidential bid started as a comedy routine that morphed into a horror show. To his supporters, reluctant and otherwise, the Trump act appeal ranged from the lesser of evils to a heroic quest to return the country to its yuuuuge past glory.
Trump's "Make America Great Again" slogan effectively tapped into an amorphous notion of a time that never actually existed in the U.S. – but evoked the innocuous 1950s TV shows he likely watched as a boy in Queens while the fight for racial equality roiled the country.
That's part of the illusion the self-proclaimed master of the deal peddled, in dog-whistling speeches, as he sold his greatest and most flawed product: himself.
Trump, whose strength and weakness rests in waging a fearless and sometimes reckless improvisation through public life, played the media however it suited him at any given time. He variously wooed, savaged and barred the press. He hosted "Saturday Night Live" last year – and last month tweeted his displeasure at Alec Baldwin's withering impression of him.
For all the reportage chronicling his business missteps and accusations of sexual harassment and worse, little stuck until the public heard him utter those course words bragging of his carte blanche to accost women.
Yet even lording his supposed sexual privilege over half the population wasn't enough to keep Trump from winning. The man with the outsider persona succeeded in building a near-impenetrable wall – around himself.
Trump supporters – and Hillary haters – heard only what they wanted to hear from a great exaggerator, whose most accurate grandiose claim may be, "I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody and I wouldn't lose voters."
Now he's going from New York and Fifth Avenue, where he lived, worked and filmed his TV show in a gleaming tower, to Washington and Pennsylvania Avenue – a different world, with a very different kind of deal-making structure. In January, the one-time smarmy courter of gossip columnists and Howard Stern will arrive in the nation's capital to be sworn in as the country's 45th president and the planet's most powerful human.
Perhaps Trump already is working on his standup routine for next year's White House Correspondents' Dinner, eager to settle plenty of scores with some zingers of his own. But the script of the ultimate reality show has yet to be written.
Meanwhile, the worldwide audience Donald Trump has always craved will be watching.
Jere Hester is Director of News Products and Projects at the City University of New York Graduate School of Journalism. He is also the author of "Raising a Beatle Baby: How John, Paul, George and Ringo Helped us Come Together as a Family." Follow him on Twitter.


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Chronos PrintLife 3.03 MacOSX
Chronos PrintLife 3.03 MacOSX | 328 MB
PrintLife is the fastest, easiest way to create print projects including greeting cards, invitations, photo collages, posters, labels, fax covers, inovices, and more. Throw away the cheesy clip art and clumsy design software of yesteryear. Toss aside those corny templates that were too embarrassing to actually use. Welcome to PrintLife, the modern app for designing & printing almost anything: labels, greeting cards, certificates, envelopes, fax covers, invitations, collages, business cards, flyers, posters, photo pages, and more.
Projects: PrintLife has a project for every occassion.
Life is full of surprises and you never know when you'll need a last minute get well card or a flyer for your lost dog. Rest assured, PrintLife has got you covered!
* Greeting Cards * Certificates * Flyers * Invitations
* Collages * Photo Pages * Posters *Labels
* CD Labels * Jewel Cases * Envelopes *Letterhead
* Raffle Tickets * File Folder Tabs * Name Badges * Gift Tags
* Fax Covers * Invoices * Contact Lists * Contact Summaries
* Activity Lists * Activity Summaries
Artwork: An amazing collection of artwork is included for free.
In order to create stunning projects, you need stunning artwork. PrintLife won't let you down. Here's why:
A $554 Value. The artwork was created by artists from all over the world and is it not the "cheesey" variety of clipart normally included with software products. The artwork is valued at $554 if purchased directly from the iScrapbook Store where it mostly comes from.
7.6+ GB in Size. The artwork collection is over 7.6 GB in size (enough to fill 2 DVDs) which is why it's available as a separate download.
5,100+ Graphics. The collection includes 145 kits (called "iScrapKits") containing over 5,100 graphics.
High-Resolution. All of the artwork has a resolution of 300 dpi which is ideal for printing.
Templates: Start with a template or create your own design.
PrintLife comes with 640+ print project templates, 150+ business card templates, and 300+ label templates to help you can get incredible results almost instantly. Feel free to explore your inner artist and customize however you wish!
Mac OS X 10.9 or later Mavericks compatible
Home Page - http://www.chronosnet.com/Products/printlife/index.html
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The Court quiets title in favor of the plaintiff and against Diversified U.S. Holdings of Washington, LLC, Diversified Financial, Inc. and Northwest Commercial Bank […]
Based upon the findings and conclusions , Plaintiff is granted a net JUDGMENT for $110, 923, plus interest thereonof judgment at the rate of the loan documents of 18.9%. from the date
[ipaper docId=43059595 access_key=key-26nipxiv758aqevmtyra height=600 width=600 /]© 2010-19 FORECLOSURE FRAUD | by DinSFLA. All rights reserved.


text:
South London Club Card holders receive 10% off. Forest is an independent indoor plant shop in Deptford, South East London.
South London Club Discount: 10% off food Located at the end of Creekside and on the borders of Greenwich and Deptford, The Birds Nest is a hub of artists and musicians.
South London Club Discount: 10% off sexy toast menu and lunchtime specials As one of the go-to local eateries in the area, Arlo & Moe have been serving the lively community of coffee lovers and foodies in Crofton Park since 2012.


text:
get better in the next 3 weeks than you have in the last 6 months
Let me ask you...
- Are you practicing the drums every day, feeling overwhelmed by all the information out there?
- Do you worry you're not practicing the right things to get better?
I want to help. Just click the button below and enter your name and email address on the next page and I'll send you 3 videos to improve your playing in 3 weeks.
Want to know more? Check out the 80/20 Drummer Road Map Intro
Are you a good drummer already? If you're like many of my clients you're busy playing gigs, and you're probably teaching your own students. Or maybe you're auditioning for, or already enrolled in a music school.
But you still want to get better. And your time is valuable.
I've heard it over-and-over - "I just wish someone could tell me exactly what to focus on, then take me through it, step-by-step."
What if I could tell you-
- The things to practice that will have the highest impact on your improvement.
- In what order to practice them, and how to spend your time, even if it's limited.
- A few simple exercises to tease out and micro-target your weaknesses, the results of which will affect your playing as a whole.


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Network Administration
Product Overview
Network administration products from Cisco provide a broad range of management tools that can improve productivity, user satisfaction, and time savings.
The Cisco network administration portfolio offers a broad range of technologies to fulfill a variety of needs. Cisco network administration products can help you:
- Increase business and network resources
- Save network administration time
- Improve business productivity
- Increase user satisfaction
Unified Communications Management
Networks that deliver data, voice, video, and multimedia applications require unified, system-level network administration. The wide range of products in the Cisco Unified Communications portfolio provides flexibility for applications, collaboration, call control and messaging, and IP communications.
TelePresence Network Management
Cisco TelePresence integrates advanced audio, high-definition video, and interactive elements with the power of the underlying network to deliver an immersive, face-to-face collaboration experience. TelePresence network administration is essential to the TelePresence experience.
Performance Assurance
With Cisco network administration products, network administration personnel can effectively manage network resources, plan for changes in resource usage, and resolve problems before they affect users. Quick access to configuration menus and easy-to-read reports on data, voice, and video traffic allow network operators to monitor trends, plan capacity, and optimize performance.
Routing and Switching Management
Cisco network administration products support more than 400 types of Cisco devices through detailed reporting, monitoring, and configuration. These products can save network administration time and effort, offering improved inventory and configuration management, rapid software deployment, and simplified troubleshooting.
Identity Management
Security breaches and uncontrolled user access are a primary concern for businesses. Cisco network administration products provide identity management features to protect systems and information through internal trust and identity policies, access control, and compliance features. Using these network administration products, companies can enhance security and protect profits and assets.
Small and Medium Business Network Management
These network administration products are designed to overcome the challenges small and medium-sized businesses face. They can help maximize existing resources, maintain efficiency in the face of competitive pressure, gain a return on investment, and manage rapid growth and changes.
Video, Cable, and Content Delivery Management
Designed to be ready for advanced applications, Cisco network administration products help ensure high performance and availability, leading to greater subscriber satisfaction. With Cisco network administration products, subscribers can access next-generation services such as IP telephony, video on demand, and interactive gaming.
For more information please visit: Network Management


text:
An Introduction to ABTC17 Jan
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A little bit different
Christian leadership is a bit different than secular leadership. What business leadership seminar would ever describe leadership as the path towards crucifixion? But Jesus says if we are not willing to pick up our cross, we are not even able to follow Him.
An accepting ministry part 2
The difference between Jesus and the Pharisees is not in the fact that the Pharisees took sin seriously and Jesus didn't. The difference between Jesus and the Pharisees is found rather in the way that they related to people they knew to have sinned – the way they treated sinners. I don't want to take […]
An accepting ministry part 1
In Jesus' day people had a caricature of what it meant to be holy. They thought it meant not ever hanging out with anyone who might be considered a sinner. In our day, people have a caricature of what it means to be accepting. They think it means never ever directly confronting sin. There are […]
In Ephesians 4:25 Paul says 'put away falsehood.' In other words, don't lie. But what exactly does he mean by that? What does it mean to lie? Here are some examples I came up with: 1. I am speaking falsehood when I contradict the truth. I am talking about the times when someone is saying […]
It is all too rare a thing to find a man who consistently speaks the truth. I want to be one. Here are ten reasons why you should want to be a truth teller as well: 1. Speaking the truth is a characteristic of a godly man. 2. God pleads with us to speak the […]
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Improved Transition Snapping & Auto Direction!
Geschrieben vonam .
Geschrieben vonam .
For a limited-time only, we are offering a unique OpenShot t-shirt design! Not only do you get an awesome t-shirt which helps us to continue funding development of OpenShot, but you also get a special...Weiterlesen
I am proud to announce the immediate release of OpenShot 2.4.4, the absolute best version yet! This is going to be a long post, but here is a quick summary for those who are short on time. This releas...Weiterlesen


text:
Of all the amazing things the mind does, the most amazing may be that it can take sound and turn it into music, and then take music and turn it into meaning. The rest of the double leaps the mind makes look almost easy by comparison: we like pictures of babies at picnics in sunlight because, after all, in the world we like sunny days and chubby babies. The stories we tell in literature are like the lies we tell in life. But music is simply a set of physical vibrations that reach our eardrums; from those vibrations we make the emotional map of our lives.
Yet, as generations pass, the style and manner of those maps change. Not long ago, I realized that one of the great changes in my lifetime involves the way we listen to music. As a teen-ager, I was a fanatic record collector, hungry for old albums. My own teen-age kids, as obsessed with music as I was, have an entirely different way of listening. They ignore the glowing-tube amp and classy articulate speakers in our living room; they bounce instead to tinny earbuds, and often spend hours listening to Taylor Swift or Radiohead on the still more tinny speakers of their computers. Sound quality seems secondary to some other thing they take from music. Though both are far better musicians than I ever was, singing and playing guitar and piano, they have a more limited conception of larger forms, of the record's two sides, of the symphony's three or four parts, of the swell and structure of a cantata. It isn't a question of classical tastes against pop; it's a question of small forms heard in motion against large forms heard with solemn intent. "Sgt. Pepper" baffles them as much as Beethoven's Ninth. They snatch at music as we snatched at movies, filling our heads with plural images. A friend with whom I was brooding over the way recorded sound supplies a soundtrack for modern life said that I ought to seek out Edgar Choueiri, a rocket scientist—really, a rocket scientist!—who has spent a good part of his life worrying about such things. Choueiri, my friend said, had broken the code of something fundamental about the reproduction of sound, and so I went to Princeton, where he has two laboratories, to seek him out.
Those of us who have no laboratory at all might regard what Choueiri modestly calls his "other" laboratory as the only laboratory that anyone would ever need. It is the size of a small airplane hangar, and it is filled with plasma rocket engines that run on electricity: instead of a wasteful explosion of liquid fuel, a judicious leak of ions pushes the craft forward through a vacuum. If we ever start commuting to Mars, it will likely be a Choueiri-style engine that gets us there and back.
The president of the Electric Rocket Propulsion Society, Choueiri is also the president of the Lebanese Academy of Sciences, and is very much, in spirit and appearance, a man of the old Levant. There's the elegant classical nose, the high, anxious brows, and the worried expression. In his smaller laboratory, adjacent to the rocket lab, he works on his musical projects, trying to force three-dimensional sound from ordinary stereo speakers. By three-dimensional sound he does not mean wraparound sound, the kind produced by speakers posted strategically around the room. (Elvis had fifty-two speakers installed in his private jet, the Lisa Marie, trying for that effect.) In Choueiri's system, when you listen to choral music by his hero, Bach—from any pair of speakers, even the cheap ones on your computer—you will hear it coming not from speakers but as if from performers in the room itself.
Many of us dream of the moment when a glint-eyed scientist with a tiny box will do something amazing—turn off all the lights in the city, or send us back in time, or make us glow emerald and fly. Choueiri is that man, and his box is that box. Outside his smaller lab is an office whose shelves are filled with those strange white dummy heads which sound scientists love (though they look as impersonal as crash dummies, each one, I learned, was modelled on a specific head and given a nickname: Carl, Philipp, Emanuel). Choueiri plugged in his box, which runs what he calls his BACCH filter—the acronym also stands for "Band-Assembled Crosstalk Cancellation Hierarchy"—and Bluetoothed it to my iPhone. I chose the Stones' "Beast of Burden," more or less at random, and there they were. I do not mean that the soundscape was widened—I mean that Keith Richards was limping over to my left, licking at chords, and Ronnie Wood to the right, absent-mindedly stabbing away, as he does, and Jagger in the middle and Charlie Watts and Bill Wyman impassive to their rear. And what made this more amazing is that no one, as the track was recorded in layers, over three months in 1977, had had any intention of re-creating the dimensional layout of the studio.
Choueiri belongs to a distinctly modern type: the engineer-aesthete. In his Princeton house and in an apartment he has in Manhattan, on the Upper East Side, he discreetly displays collections of Cubist design, ceramic pipes, and nonfigurative Greek vases of the Periclean period. He was brought up in Lebanon in the nineteen-sixties, among the Antiochian Orthodox—much the most ancient of Christians, the Antiochians look upon the Catholics rather the way Boston Episcopalians look upon Appalachian snake handlers—and he writes poetry in at least two of his many languages. Teased about being an aesthete in the guise of an engineer, he might nod cryptically and, later that day, send a poem he wrote, several years ago, in French, a rueful personal testament called, simply, "L'Esthète." He is also an adept in the art of Zajal, an ancient Arabic form of freestyle rap in which two speakers debate a subject in improvised song, chanting back and forth in strict strophic verse. (Many of his Zajal debates can be found on YouTube, posted by hard-core Zajal fans.) Yet his passion for those forms is mixed with a faith that beautiful things and sounds can be fully understood, and even mechanized, like the plasma propulsion that makes a rocket move forward. His primary passion is music—Bach's Mass in B Minor is for him the "most beautiful thing ever engineered"—and his dream is to try to reproduce its minute subtleties and thereby make sense of its mysteries.
Crosstalk is the core problem in creating three-dimensional illusions. Essentially, we hear stereophonically and see in depth because we have two ears and two eyes. Information from your eyes or your ears arrives slightly separated by the width of your nose or the space of your head, and the brain, using a variety of cues, computes the distance between the signals and re-creates the three-dimensional space the signals come from. (The Cyclops could not watch a 3-D adventure movie about Odysseus and the Cyclops.) There are three kinds of cues that your ears and brain use to locate sound in space, Choueiri says. There's I.T.D., or "inter-aural time difference," which means how long it takes for the sound to arrive at one ear rather than the other. I.L.D., or "inter-aural level difference," means the tiny differences in volume; the sound of a left speaker is very slightly softer for the right ear than it is for the left ear. And, finally, though not least important, there are the differences in sound coloration—the tonality of the sound that you hear, depending, in part, on the shape of your pinnae, the curly outer ears.
But the creation of three-dimensional sound depends on each ear's hearing only what it's supposed to hear. When you listen to your stereo speakers, the right ear hears sound not just from the right channel, the sound intended for it, but also from the left channel, the sound intended for the left ear. The same thing happens when you look at a flat representation of a three-dimensional space: the right eye sees what the left eye is looking at. Cancelling the "crosstalk" is the key to creating an illusion of depth. It's easy to do with your eyes. "You just put a physical barrier between the two eyes, show each one a slightly different image, and, presto, you see in three dimensions," Choueiri explains.
The same principle holds for sound, and the same solutions are in some ways possible. "To get binaural sound is not that hard," Choueiri says. "You can do crosstalk cancellation with a mattress! Really! Just place a mattress between your two speakers, press your nose against one end so that each ear has a different channel, and you get a very robust three-dimensional effect." There are drawbacks. "It's clumsy, awkward, and ugly," Choueiri goes on, "and it has the important psychological difficulty, of course, of working only until your wife comes home." You'd think headphones would do the trick, neatly dividing the aural feeds. But, Choueiri explains, in the real world, when you move your head, the sound signals change a little, and the brain knows where the sounds are coming from. That doesn't happen with headphones, so the mind decides that the sound source can't be "out there." Instead, as Choueiri says, "the sound image collapses into your head."
Thinking about water waves helps to elucidate the solution. Suppose, Choueiri says, you dropped two pebbles in a pond. Their wave patterns, as they spread, would intersect. In theory, if you dropped a third pebble where one of the two pebbles originally dropped, and timed its impact perfectly, you could create waves that would arrive at the left ear of some water nymph just in time to cancel out the waves from the right pebble. The crests of one would coincide with the troughs of the other, creating a little zone of silence. Then you'd do the same for the other pebble's waves and the other ear. There wouldn't be any crosstalk.
The catch with previous attempts at that kind of crosstalk cancellation, or "XTC," as it's known in the field, is that the sound coloration, the timbre of any particular instrument, is extremely sensitive to small changes in position. If you move your head even slightly, the wave interferences get out of synch. As a result, the sound coloration distorts, in a sort of acoustic moiré. Pianos sound as tinny as xylophones. Engineers have long known that the way to fix this is to feed "error" into the design of the XTC wave. But that, it was feared, would tend to destroy the 3-D effect. It's as if the guy dropping the pebbles had to drop bigger pebbles in; the troughs created by the bigger pebbles would at some point become wildly out of proportion to the crests of the original pebble.
Choueiri has discovered a way to feed more error into the designs of the XTC than anyone had previously imagined possible, so that the signal will never discolor, whatever the shape of your pinnae and however you swivel your head. And yet the three-dimensional illusion remains stable. "The human ear-brain system is good at discerning changes in sound level," Choueiri explains, "but subtle changes in the relative timing between the wave components of a sound are too subliminal for humans to detect. The BACCH filter, essentially, shifts the XTC action from the more palpable level domain—called the amplitude domain—to the more subliminal temporal domain, called the phase domain." Since our brains are hypersensitive to color and signal but rather dumb when it comes to tiny time changes the illusion is convincing, but the differences that produce it are too subtle to notice.
Choueiri, as an amateur closeup card magician, sees a likeness between what he has done and a theory of magic called Too Perfect Theory. Basically, Too Perfect Theory says that error can reinforce illusion. Any trick suggesting only one logical path, no matter how skillfully done, will be discomfiting to a spectator, while the tricks that please do so because the magician has, so to speak, opened many different doors for the bemused watcher to explore. Pass a cigarette through a quarter, and every spectator will deduce a hinged hole in the coin. Pass a cigarette through a coin, and then lead the viewer to wonder whether it might be the cigarette that contains the gimmick—anything that broadens or coarsens the path enriches the effect. Choueiri: "Both techniques—the magician's and that behind the BACCH filter—rely on using imperfection to shift the attention from the palpable to the subliminal."
Choueiri's system can produce remarkable effects from ordinary speakers: the sound of a fly buzzing in a circle around your head; the sensation of someone walking toward you and then whispering in your ear. But its real value to the music lover, he believes, is that it eliminates the strain and tension of listening to two-dimensional music. Listen to a Mozart divertimento through the BACCH filter, and—apart from the uncanny experience of depth—a happy sense of release, of calm serenity, like that of being in a concert hall on a good afternoon, runs through your body.
The added bonus is that the sound of all stereo-era recordings, those of the past sixty or so years, can easily become three-dimensional, because they were all recorded with at least two microphones—they have sufficient information encoded within them to switch over to 3-D. "It's exactly as if every movie since the nineteen-fifties had, for some reason, been filmed with two cameras, even when it wasn't meant for 3-D projection," Choueiri says. "You would have this entire signal latent in the film, even if it hadn't been employed for the effect."
Several catches remain. The "sweet spot" of the 3-D effect—the space in which a single listener perceives it in full—is small, with room enough for just the single listener. Choueiri has a solution for this problem, but it is of Rube Goldberg-like complexity. "We have a motion-capture camera placed above the filter, and all you have to do is to signal it," he says, demonstrating by waving in the air, but only once, like a taciturn drowning man. "And it takes your picture—captures your unique skeletal structure. Then, as you wander around the room, it tracks you, and sends the information on your location to the filter, so that it automatically adjusts the sweet spot." This means having a motion-capture camera in your living room to track the musical husband as he roams in tune with the music, and the prospects of household resistance, as Choueiri is the first to admit, cannot be dismissed.
Yet more than wave forms and pinnae are at play when we listen to music. We hear music with our minds. Reproduction isn't transparent. One of Choueiri's favorite cautionary tales is of an experiment conducted during the First World War, in which a tinny Victrola recording and an operatic soprano were cloaked in darkness at Carnegie Hall; the auditors were unable to tell one from the other. The audience's will to hear perfect sound mattered as much as the perfection of the sound heard. And it's alarmingly easy to mistake the apprehended sound for the actual signal. Consider the story of Hugo Riemann, a great nineteenth-century German musicologist, who insisted that he had discovered "undertones," sympathetic vibrations that could be heard beneath a single note, just as "overtones" are known to resonate above it. For a while, Riemann's "undertones" were a mainstay of music theory, until modern acoustic analysis made it plain that no undertones exist, and that Riemann had somehow wished them into existence, and then into his ears and those of his students. Listening and wanting are intricately entangled, in ways that may evade any measure. Talking to Choueiri, I had learned a lot about how we listen to music but was still struggling with the other question: why we listen to it. Who could teach me something about that deeper level, not just where sound becomes music but where music becomes meaning?
I discovered that perhaps the densest concentration of sound scholars in the world could be found in my home town of Montreal, at McGill University, where I, along with five brothers and sisters, went to school. (And where my parents taught for many decades.) One reason for this was the presence of the psychologist Albert Bregman, a former professor of mine, who spent almost fifty years at McGill studying the psychology of sound, and whose masterwork, the eight-hundred-page "Auditory Scene Analysis: The Perceptual Organization of Sound," remains a basic text in the field.
Bregman was a mentor to many of the significant figures in the growth of what has come to be called "cognitive science," that new discipline in which psychology, philosophy, computer science, and, sometimes, sociology and evolutionary biology all meet. At a less exalted level, he also gave me some of the best advice I've ever received. Trying to decide whether to major in psychology or art history, I had gone to his office to see what he thought. He squinted and lowered his head. "Is this a hard choice for you?" he demanded. Yes! I cried. "Oh," he said, springing back up cheerfully. "In that case, it doesn't matter. If it's a hard decision, then there's always lots to be said on both sides, so either choice is likely to be good in its way. Hard choices are always unimportant."
Montreal has changed in the twenty-five-plus years since I left, and mostly for the better—for one thing, there is more good food in the city than there ever was before, most of it genuinely rooted in the culture of Quebec, where the fancy food used to be touched by a colonial cringe toward France. But the places I had known and the people I had grown up with in the old Anglophone quarters were largely gone. I walked down St. Catherine Street, the main drag of Montreal, now drabber than it once was, and past the site of a long-vanished sheet-music store, International Music, where upstairs, in a kind of keyboard bordello, you used to be able to rent one of a chipped set of rickety, out-of-tune pianos for half an hour at a time. I would spend happy afternoons away from school dallying with the Jerome Kern and P. G. Wodehouse song "Bill," with its sharp edge of the dominant-seventh chords and its pretty major-seventh cadence. How the chords had amazed me by their instant assertion of emotion: the poignant, wistful C-major seventh (making its resigned move to F-major seventh) had got me through teen-age heartbreak. In those days, even buying records was almost as exciting, and usually as frustrating, as chasing girls. I could still recall finding a copy of the long-out-of-print "Ella Sings Gershwin," with Ellis Larkins, and racing home, to find out what "Someone to Watch Over Me" sounded like when played by someone who knew how. Music represented for me not the endless, shifting weather-cover of sound that it does for my kids, a cloud in every sense, a perpetual availability of emotion to suit a mood and moment. Music meant difficulty—and, when the difficulty was overcome, the possibilities of life, too. It was something to master.
The faculty club at McGill, a cozy converted brownstone, hadn't changed since my father lunched there, on fading Anglo-Canadian specialties. (I recalled once ordering steak-and-kidney pie, and picking past the kidneys.) I hadn't seen Bregman since my wedding day, thirty years earlier. He had aged and whitened over that time, but his mind was as gently acute as I remembered. Among highly intelligent people, there are two kinds of minds, the sharp and the soft. We expect smart people to have minds like swords, made to fight and slash and slay. Soft smart minds, though, are of another, rarer kind. They absorb great quantities of data and opinion, often silently, even sluggishly, and turn them around slowly until a solution appears. Darwin is probably the best instance of the soft style in science history, and Bregman is very much in this soft-mind tradition. Sitting down for lunch, I haltingly tried to describe Choueiri's work in 3-D sound, and he quietly nodded. "Yes, I suppose he must be finding a way of re-creating the delays in the appearance of the signal to the ear," he said, "though I suppose he'd have to base it on generalized features of human heads? Or else broaden the signal. But either way it must have a really small spatial range, right?" I weakly agreed.
Having lunch with us was Robert Zatorre, an organist turned neuroscientist, and an expert on what music actually does to the brain. Zatorre explained that there seem to be two "systems" in the brain that respond to music. One is "veridical," and responds to the pleasant sounds of the songs we already know. The other is "sequential": it anticipates the next note or harmonic move in an unfamiliar phrase of music and is stimulated when the music follows the logic of the notes or surprises us in some way that isn't merely arbitrary. We recall the meaning of single harmonies from the melodic sentences they conclude. We "learn" music as we learn language, and, with both, our mind disguises from us the complexity of our brain's calculations. The poignant C-major seventh saves your life when your emotions are already pitched somewhere around a hard-edged, unresolved G7.
Bregman's work showed that the thrum of sound against that vibrating membrane was organized instantly by the brain not just into a stream of passing information but into an "auditory scene," a kind of dimensional space in which sounds are instantly separated, streamed, and regimented. "For me, the big question about music is, simply, why do we like it?" Bregman said. "I started studying it because I was interested in language. How is it that, when we hear this stream of sounds, what we hear is words? How does the mind know when they start or stop—how does it organize this stream of pressures on your eardrum into language and background noise? What we discovered is that the ear is a lot like the things that the Gestalt psychologists had found out years before about the eye—that it is a piece of the mind. The ear creates aural figures and aural backgrounds the way the eye makes figures and ground."
If, for instance, you play a three-note synthesized signal, oscillating between low notes and high, the signal "comes apart" as it accelerates, and the brain turns one stream of oscillating sound into two distinct streams of pulsing sound. On a strange and wonderful CD, Bregman has catalogued and named such auditory illusions with charming specificity, including "Segregation of a melody from interfering tones" (we hear a melody separately from any noise that might occur right in its midst; we don't strain to hear the tune—it just appears) and "Stream segregation of vowels and diphthongs" (we "over-divide" words into their component phonemes, hearing boundaries in our heads that don't exist in the recorded sequence).
"So now the question arises: What has this got to do with music?" Bregman went on. "Look at some of the features that we use to pull sound apart in the environment—we have to pull musical sounds apart in a musical composition, you have to be aware of many lines more or less at the same time. That's why I think that music exploits a feature that allows you to store information and manipulate it and play around with it." He turned to Zatorre. "And, you know, Robert, what's always puzzled me is that melody is based on steady tones—and steady tones are almost nonexistent in nature. The natural environment doesn't have periodic pitch. Leaves, winds, and rain—they don't have a harmonic structure."
In "Auditory Scene Analysis," Bregman made a daring suggestion: that music is essentially a form of what he dubbed "chimerical perception." (The Chimera was a beast in Greek mythology with the head of a lion, the body of a goat, and the tail of a serpent.) "We use the word Chimera metaphorically to refer to an image derived as a composition of other images," he writes. "An example of an auditory Chimera would be a heard sentence that was created by the accidental composition of the voices of two persons who just happened to be speaking at the same time. Natural hearing tries hard to avoid chimeric percepts, but music often tries to create them. It may want the listener to accept the simultaneous roll of the drum, clash of the cymbal, and brief pulse of noise from the woodwinds as a single coherent event with its own striking emergent properties." In some sense, our taste for music may be a by-product of the way our auditory-processing system intends to eliminate auditory chimeras. We want to distinguish the rustle of the vines from the slither of the snake. Musical sounds both draw on and stymie the mind's mechanisms for making distinctions.
After lunch, I went to visit the lab of another of the McGill music men, Daniel Levitin. Though most people who study music tend to have been musicians once themselves, Levitin is unusual in the extent of his early musical career. He was a successful commercial producer and sound engineer for musicians as varied as Santana, the Grateful Dead, and Blue Öyster Cult, until the deeper questions that had been nagging at him, the "why"s of music, compelled him back to school and on to a second career as a psychologist and neuroscientist. (He keeps in touch with his earlier world—he's the author of the liner notes on the recent Stephen Stills boxed CD set, full of smart stuff about guitar clusters and Nashville harmonics.)
A visit to Levitin's lab is a bit like going to the music department of the Academy of Lagado in "Gulliver's Travels." He studies systematically things that one would not have thought open to systematic study. In one music room, there is a hyper-cold bath; you dip your arm until it becomes painful—as it very quickly does—and then you listen to music. Levitin and his students have shown that you feel less pain if you listen to music and much less pain if you listen to music you like and have chosen yourself; and, as an improbable older experiment predicted, that men report much less pain if they are in the presence of a woman whom they are trying to impress with this strange sort of music appreciation.
Levitin's prize possession is what might be called the Expressive Piano. It's a Yamaha Disklavier, a kind of electronically assisted player piano. It can record the precise fingering and pressure of a pianist, and then play it back. Levitin and his team had a professional pianist play Chopin into it, and then laboriously spoon-fed the expressive dimensions, the "phrasings," into a computer program: first, how hard he pressed down on the keys, and then how much he varied speeds within a fixed rhythm. Then they taught the computer to intensify or minimize those variables—to play versions of the same Chopin piece with much more variation within the tempo, or much less; with more variations within the volume of notes, or much less. It turned out that people sought out an optimal middle of expressiveness; they liked the Chopin the way the pianist had played it, with enough rubato and musical italicizing to indicate the presence of a player, a human hand, but not so much that it all became randomized mush.
That's not surprising. We prefer a touch of vibrato in a singer's voice to the full Kate Smith tremolo. We like a pianist who, as the phrase so rightly has it, tickles the keys, and dislike one who bangs them. But, Levitin suggested, the smallness of these results is made sane by their sureness. "We're only taking these little thimblefuls of knowledge from the great sea of music," he said. "But what we know now we really know. We're not guessing, or just assuming, or just asserting things about the way these expressive dimensions work, or how universal they can be shown to be. We really know. And if I had to, so to speak, explain to the muse of music what I'm trying to do in my life now, I'd say, I'm trying to show that what you make seem so beautifully simple is really, really hard. So hard that you have to study it note by note."
Later on, I asked Levitin about Riemann and his missing undertones. He pointed out that most of the lowest notes on most pianos are actually inferred rather than heard. The soundboard on most pianos isn't long enough to produce the bottom octave, but the brain hears the right overtones, which the piano can produce, and neurons in the brain begin to fire at the frequency of the missing bass note. Riemann may have been hearing "undertones" of that sort, unknown to the psychology of his time, and was aptly, if not entirely accurately, generalizing from them. Here, I thought, was where psycho-acoustics mattered: it mapped with a new precision the hazy but crucial area between what the sound-sensitive ear hears and what the pattern-detecting mind infers, which is exactly the place where music happens.
Spending a day among scientists who study music can seem disappointing at first: people like music played with a bit of, but not too much, expression; our minds take sounds and turn them into scenes. There was one truth, though, that connected the McGill music men's work to Choueiri's: the vital role of the not-too-perfect in our pleasures. The two expressive dimensions whose force in music Levitin had measured and made mechanical were defections from precision. Vibrato is a way of not quite landing directly on the note; rubato is not quite keeping perfectly to the beat. Expressiveness is error. Just as, at a subliminal level, Choueiri could make music come alive in space by introducing tiny errors into the amplitude and timing of the XTC wave, Levitin could show that what really moves us in music is the vital sign of a human hand, in all its unsteady and broken grace. (Too much imperfection and it sounds like a madman playing; too little, and it sounds like a robot.) Ella singing Gershwin matters because Ella knows when to make the words warble, and Ellis Larkins knows when to make the keyboard sigh. The art is the perfected imperfection.
In the academy, there is another account of how music works. The new discipline of "sound studies" takes as its subject what might be called the sociology of sound—how styles of recorded music interact with social aspirations and the friction of economic classes, producing a map of music listening that has more to do with money and mass culture than with the way neurons trigger and ears organize.
One of these music men is in Montreal, too—Jonathan Sterne, the author of "MP3: The Meaning of a Format" and "The Audible Past: Cultural Origins of Sound Reproduction." The morning after my day with the psycho-musicians, I marched up to his office, in the Art History Department, where I had spent many hours studying art, after learning from Bregman that it didn't matter what I studied. Well, it had once been the Art History Department; now, inevitably, it was the Department of Art History & Communication Studies, and, alongside seminars in Duccio and Giotto, I now saw classes listed on "Hacker Culture and Politics" and "Media and Urban Life."
Sterne is a hefty, Minnesota-bred guy who plays the double bass. He was a big kid, and when he was ten, he recalls, the instrument "seemed appropriate to my body size. They told me, 'You can play electric bass guitar when you get a little bit older.' I still mess around. I sort of identify as a bassist—it's a personality thing. I'm the reasonable person in the band. I like to play with other bassists, because they're all reasonable people."
As a reasonable person, he says, "I don't see the grand synthesis of one truth of hearing." In particular, he mistrusts the desire of the psycho-acousticians "to universalize—'the brain does this, therefore that.' Sure, everyone can agree that there's a biological part of experience. For me, I'm much more interested in the questions about what we can and should change. I think actually that the fundamental insight of psycho-acoustics is incredibly profound for a humanist. Human ears aren't natural reflectors of sound in the world. They are themselves these transducers that make reality—the perception of sound is not a mirror of nature. Therefore, perception in a way makes sounds, and it makes sounds differently from a microphone and a computer detecting vibrations out in the world."
Sterne's preoccupation is with the fallacy of what one might call the official, Whig history of sound recording—a constant ascension to better fidelity, the triumph of signal over noise. Instead, he emphasizes the double movement where technology makes the musical signal more and more compressed, more "lossy" than it ever was before, as is the case with the information in an MP3. What's lost in the compression process is supplied by both the mind's capacity to fill in musical gaps and the public's willingness to tolerate what is in some ways a worse product in exchange for the constant novelty of a changing one.
"We have the story of ever-increasing verisimilitude," he says. "But, throughout the stories of infrastructures that transmit electronic signals, there's this very basic engineering problem: you've produced this experience and over here you have this storage medium and you want to put as much as possible on it, but you want to reduce the cost of doing it." That's what happened with the advent of MP3s: "They say, We'd really like to transmit CD-quality sound through the lines, but there's not enough bandwidth, so we have to do something. And they investigate what parts of the sound people are unlikely to hear—you omit those parts and send the rest down the line. That's also what happened in the phone line way back when. Bell Labs' human-hearing research goes back to the twenties: we don't want to reproduce sound that people don't need to hear and still have intelligible phone conversations. All of information science comes out of these acoustic questions from the nineteen-twenties—Bell Labs people trying to figure out how to cram more signals into a phone line."
The notion of a pure musical experience is, for Sterne and his cohorts, the last sad effort of a nineteenth-century cult of attention that placed the solitary alienated (and almost always male) listener in a temple of silence, the concert hall. Everyone faces forward, no one moves, applause is tightly regimented, and no one ever does the things that human beings normally do when they hear music: dance, move, act, eat, flirt. "It isn't strange that the MP3 generation walks around with earbuds on and listens to music while they're doing everything else," Sterne says. "That's the normal human condition of listening. It's very, very unusual to have any concept of music apart from a dance practice—the separation of music and dance is very late and highly unusual." The sociologists, his work suggests, are dissolving music back into the field of sound from which an act of Western will has divorced it.
Sterne's diagnosis of Choueiri and the other high-end researchers is that "they're trying to resolve the anxiety of the modern by reproducing the anxiety of the modern." He means that the anxiety that produced the isolated urban listener in the concert hall is only aggravated by the technology that, pretending to liberate listening from the concert space, simply makes for more lonely domestic concert halls. The sweet spot on the sofa is a sad place to be.
I am, both by temperament and by training, a little allergic to this kind of thinking, but there is no denying that it adds a necessary historical dimension to the study of music's workings. Choueiri's project could, as Sterne suggested, be seen as an allegory of the engineer's dream: incredible intelligence put to work to solve a problem whose solution merely re-states the problem. In this view, the BACCH filter, with its narrow listening spot and its Rube Goldberg-style machinery to take that sweet spot with you, is an elaborate ode to a dying practice: it is a way of mechanizing the cultural prestige of attention, of enforcing the kind of listening that we think we ought to give to music and mostly don't. There doesn't, in truth, seem to be much dissatisfaction with what people have now; those tiny, tinny earbuds playing music from detail-diminished MP3s are satisfying because, as Sterne says, in all but a handful of aberrant cases nobody sits down to listen to music.
When I got back to New York, Choueiri had something new to show me—a true Mr. Peabody device, which he calls the Stereo Purifier. It is designed to fit into one large box, and to simplify the business of finding the one right filter for your particular ears. Inside the box is jammed every imaginable audio cable connector, to accommodate any possible listening system, and jammed among all the cables and electronic components is a Mac Mini and the BACCH filter. In this newest iteration, everything has been automated—in neat, self-generated, Deco graphics—so that the tiresome adjustments that he had to make by hand before can now be done in half a minute. You put on in-ear microphones, and the Stereo Purifier measures the air pressure at the entrance of the ear canal.
Choueiri admitted that the Stereo Purifier was more likely to flourish as an aid to video gaming than as a way to hear Baroque choral music. "There may be new 3-D audio techniques," he said, "that will combine ambisonics and binaural dimensionality, and that would be the ultimate delivery system." Choueiri can actually imagine a new musical frontier where you could go to hear Bach at Carnegie Hall with microphones in your ears, and come home to reproduce the concert in your living room, exactly as you'd heard it.
He was, I thought, at once encouraged by the commercial attention the BACCH filter was beginning to receive—it has become available in what's called a Jambox, and there is lots of Chinese interest—and discouraged by the realization that the "high end" of music listening was very small. We listened to Bach, and then sat briefly in silence, and I suddenly remembered something I'd been meaning to ask him. Passing through the bedroom on an earlier musical visit, I had noticed that Choueiri had a small, old-fashioned record-player by his bed, the kind I had as a child. I asked him what it was, and why he had it near his bed.
It was, it turned out, a single-tube monaural record-player made the year he was born, 1961, and though its fidelity was, technically speaking, "horrendous," he thought that the pleasure to be had from a scratchy record of Rosalyn Tureck playing a Bach prelude came through unscathed. "I often use it when I am in bed reading or relaxing," he wrote me later, admitting that "our minds tend to automatically compensate for the shortcomings in tonal fidelity and get to the music almost irrespectively of how shrouded the sound is." He likened it to "a sublime apple pie that transcends its unpalatable shortening."
Reading his letter, I was put in mind of an entry I had recently come across in a diary kept by the English essayist Edward Marsh, written in England at the height of the Blitz, about listening to a concert of madrigals on a floating platform in Cambridge. "The river lined with canoes and punts, and crowds sitting on the banks or standing on the grass, in a delightful atmosphere of joy in widest commonalty spread," he wrote. "The programmes were sold out by the time I got there, so I don't know what they sang—but it was beautifully done, and such a lovely calm bright warm evening."
That is music as we hear it, and its pleasure, as we know it, with the beautiful train of undivided adjectives—lovely calm and bright and warm. To worship music's fullness as a fabric of sound is to deny its thickness as experience. The answer to Bregman's question "Why do we like music?" isn't this thing or that thing but many things at once pressing down hard, and then lightly, on our minds, as Ellis Larkins presses on the keyboard. The few writers we think of who capture something of music on the page do so not with a crisp formula or any kind of technical precision but through a gentle, fluid, many-adjectived, metaphoric web of words, laid out over the pool of sound. Music is a current of hard choices, made to seem easy by the mind. I like to think of Choueiri, amid his dreams of dimensional music, listening to his small imperfect record-player before he goes to sleep. I can imagine the sound of it travelling across the New York night, calm and bright and happy, filling all the ears and spaces between. ♦


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Serena Williams defended her Wimbledon title in the women's final on Saturday, crushing Vera Zvonareva, in two straight sets, 6-3, 6-2.
In just 67 minutes, top-ranked Williams beat the 21st seeded Russian, winning her fourth Wimbledon title and 13 Grand Slam Championship.
"My dream was able to come true," Serena said after lifting the championship dish above her head. "Everyone's dream can come true if you just stick to it and work hard. This one is very special."
"Lucky" number 13 moved Williams to sixth place on the all-time list of women's Grand Slam champions, ahead of the legendary Billie Jean King.
"Hey, Billie - I got you. This is No. 13 for me now," joked Williams to King, who was sitting in the royal box for the match, reported AP. She added, " It's just amazing to able to be among such great people."
With Williams unloading nine aces in the match and only being broken by Zvonareva three times, the Russian never stood a chance.
Williams finished the entire tournament without losing a single set.
Between the two William sisters, Serena and Venus have now won nine of the last 11 Wimbledon titles, continuing the family dominance of the English grass courts.


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Welcome to Sweet Charity
Sweet Charity is a shop filled with previously loved brand name women´s and children´s clothing, shoes and accessories. We believe in running a socially responsible store with a fun and whimsical atmosphere in the heart of historic downtown Strasburg.
Sweet Charity gives a portion of profits to the charity Imagine Goods and supports local community artists.
For Jewelry and Sunglasses check Higashi!


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Earlier this fall, I visited Oliver Sacks in his Manhattan apartment to talk about his new book "Hallucinations." Blending case studies, personal experience and clinical observation, "Hallucinations" is, like much of Sacks' work, an investigation into neurology, psychology, the border line between mind and body: an overview that casts hallucination not as something alien, but rather as human to the core. Sacks is smart and soft-spoken; his reflections on the book, and on the art of revelation, appeared in this Sunday's Arts & Books. Here is more of our conversation.
What was the genesis of "Hallucinations"?
Originally, I was writing a book about various visual problems, including my own, and hallucinations. Then, in 2009, it became obvious that this book would be too large so "The Mind's Eye" was carved off. After that, I was able to concentrate here on hallucinations. Like so many of my books, this grew out of something smaller. Originally, there were going to be two or three case studies or chapters, and then it took off. I've often written about hallucinations of some sort or another in the past, but I wanted to bring them all together, especially because the last few years have seen brain imaging while people are hallucinating. It's a little like "Musicophilia," which also started out of two or three case histories.
You start the book by writing about visual issues, particularly Charles Bonnet Syndrome, in which people who have lost their sight often see people or other figures.
I encountered this most commonly among the elderly people I see with visual problems, and I was originally going to write about it in "The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat," although for various reasons, I didn't. I have a little bit of Charles Bonnet myself, not too exotic, but I see geometrical patterns and figures that look like writing, although I usually can't read what they say. I've lost sight in my right eye.
Do these figures appear in the blind spot?
All I can say is that they take place in my visual space. They're very clear if I close my eyes. If I look at a blank area, like a wall or ceiling, it is covered with runes, like the Rosetta Stone. Occasionally I will get a word....
Throughout the book, you make the case that hallucinations are real, or substantial experiences, profound in their own right.
Hallucinations are not like imagination. They're much more like perception, but unexpected perceptions that you haven't ordered and don't own, and may not control. And they may behave in their own fashion, quite oblivious of you. This is certainly the case with something like the Charles Bonnet hallucinations.
With Charles Bonnet, the activity is relatively low, confined to the visual. You may see faces, all distinctive but none of them recognizable and none of them noticing you. But at higher levels, you are very much involved and you may have a strong feeling of agency. You also often have your waking critical intelligence. A fellow physician saw God during temporal lobe seizures -- a white bearded iconic image, with whom she argued. God said, "Don't you believe your senses?" And she said, "Not when I'm having a temporal lobe seizure."
You touch a bit on psychosis and schizophrenia, but this is not a big part of the book.
In a way, coming from the clinical or physiological end, I'm most concerned with what goes on in the brain while one is hallucinating. Questions of meaning, they're not my concern. There are many, many sorts of hallucinations.
You often refer to the case study as part of both your literary and your medical heritage. What is the value of narrative as a clinical tool?
Where the earlier descriptions of patients were often detailed, rich, empathetic, even novelistic, after publication of the first DSM, things changed. Instead of a description, one would be given a list of fulfilled criteria, sort of a checklist, suitable for a diagnosis and reimbursement. So much so that you look at some of these charts and you have no idea what the person was like, what their experience was. Basically, you were just given a diagnosis. When I worked in a migraine clinic in the 1960s, it was easy enough to make the diagnosis of migraine, but then the challenge was: What role does this play in your life?
For people such as Dostoevsky, there's a kind of bliss, or even transcendence, attached.
George Eliot wrote that she would feel dangerously well before a migraine.
The stories bring their own meaning, a way of understanding the experience from the inside.
In 1986, I met Francis Crick. I met him at a dinner, and he took me by the shoulders and sat me down next to him and said, "Tell me stories." I said, "What sort of stories?" And he said, "Stories of visual disorder and perceptual disorder." These great theorists were parched for evidence -- whether it was experimental evidence or cases. So I hope these cases will stimulate other people as well.
How do your literary and clinical goals coincide or contradict each other?
Chekhov said, "Literature is my mistress and medicine my lawful wedded wife." Or something like that. And some of Chekhov's tales could only have been written by a physician. Like "Ward Six." But the clinical and literary aspirations seem to come together to some extent in the case history, although I am uneasy with the word "literary." I was particularly annoyed at being misquoted by the Wall Street Journal. I was asked, "Are you a writer first or a physician first?" I said, I'm a physician first and then a writer." They put it the other way round.
I think I always respect the patients, but this coincides with the desire to write, which is uncontrollable and deep. Some of my stuff is considered kosher by my colleagues and in allowable case history format. But that certainly wasn't the case with "Awakenings" when it came out. It was something of a literary sensation in England in 1973, but there was not a single medical review or response.
In "Hallucinations," you touch on fatal nightmares, and memories or images that haunt us in what seems to be a malignant or dangerous way. Do you think there's a real relationship there? Can our beliefs affect reality that directly?
In general, not. Although there are some interesting coincidences. There was an autobiographical account in the 1920s by a man who'd been obsessed by images of trains. "The Locomotive God" was the title. When he was 3 or something, he saw a locomotive with a glaring light and smoke; he thought of it as a mythical beast or a god. Two weeks after the book was published, he was killed by a train. The discoverer of iridium was obsessed throughout his life by the fact that his parents had been killed because their horse-drawn carriage overturned. He walked a great deal and avoided carriages. But one day, he took a carriage and the horse bolted or something and the carriage overturned. And he was killed. An eminent stand-up comedian lost his mother when he was 12. She committed suicide by drowning and said: "You will follow me." When I saw him, in the course of an unrelated neurological problem, he was haunted by this command and I got a sense of helplessness. And he did commit suicide; he drowned himself. One somehow felt that fate had intervened. A psychiatrist might be able to give you many examples, but certainly I, too, have felt endangered by many things.
Philip Roth has retired, he saysPoet Jack Gilbert's time of triumph and loss
biography fame" href="https://www.latimes.com/features/books/jacketcopy/la-et-jc-paula-broadwell-all-in-bestseller-20121112,0,250066.story" target="_top">'All In' and Paula Broadwell's unenviable path to biography fame


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LCC Honors Program
About the Program
The Honors Program at Lansing Community College offers enriched courses, special advising services, community service options, and other enhanced learning opportunities for students capable of a special challenge in higher education.
Each year, the program offers up to 36 Honors Program Awards to new students who have demonstrated outstanding academic achievement and plan to complete a two-year transfer curriculum at LCC and then transfer to a four-year institution to pursue a bachelor's degree. College-wide, nearly 1000 students participated in the program.
Program Requirements
In order to maintain their membership in the Honors Program students must:
- Follow an approved LCC transfer curriculum.
- Maintain a cumulative grade point average of 3.2 or higher.
- Successfully complete at least twelve academic credits Fall and Spring Semesters. Summer Session enrollment is optional. Summer Session enrollment requires at least three approved credits.
- Successfully complete at least three Honors courses or sections each academic year.
- Successfully complete Honors Colloquy each fall semester.
- Submit their proposed class schedules for approval before registering each semester.
"Honors Colloquy was fascinating because we had different speakers every class period and I learned a whole new gamut of information that I don't think I would have learned anywhere else. The Honors Program staff also prepared me to transfer to a four year university easily with providing information during a transfer day in Honors Colloquy 2. I will miss the Honors Program!"
Emily Delano
Honors Program Student 2007-2009
Honors Program Awards
To find out more about the awards, and the Honors program, please contact us.
Connect with LCC Honors
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Arts and Sciences Bldg, Room 1117
Phone: (517) 483-1010
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Error PBR9012 occurs when making a purchase from your Xbox One console
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Serena Williams will go on maternity leave after she welcomes her baby and will take some time off from tennis until 2018, a representative told reporters.
The 23-time Grand Slam champion and world's highest paid female athlete, posted on her Snapchat Wednesday a selfie of her showcasing a baby bump, with the caption "20 weeks." She is engaged to the social network's co-founder Alexis Ohanian. Her representative confirmed to E! News that Williams is pregnant and due to give birth this fall.
Her representative told Reuters and Press Association Sport that Williams would sit out the remainder of the 2017 tennis season and will return to the court in 2018.
For Williams, who earns nearly $29 million in salary and sponsorship earnings, becoming pregnant makes her even more appealing to corporate sponsors, industry executives told Reuters.
The 35-year-old has not competed since she beat sister Venus Williams to win the Women's Singles Match at the 2017 Australian Open in January, nabbing her record 23rd grand slam title, while she was two months pregnant. Last month, she withdrew from the BNP Paribas Open in Indian Wells, California, and the Miami Open, citing a knee injury she suffered in 2016, which had also sidelined her for four months in late 2016--part of which marked the start of her first trimester of pregnancy.
Williams has taken breaks from tennis in past years. In 2010 she injured her foot twice, and in 2011 she was hospitalized for a blood clot in her lungs.
Other female pro tennis stars have left the tour to have children and then successfully resumed their careers, but all have been younger than Williams. Kim Clijsters was 26 when she returned after her maternity leave in 2009. Belarus' Victoria Azarenka, 27, missed most of the 2016 season to have a baby and is set to resume her career this summer.


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19-year-old Nader Boraie is living the American Dream. Boraie is the founder of Labyrinth Designs & Clothing, a clothing brand that he started 3 years ago with the idea of providing design help to friends that were in local bands. Since then, Boraie has took his brand to the Internet and has watched it flourish.Â
With a new Fall line being released today, Nader was eager to talk a little about the new direction he took, design wise, for the just released tees. He also discusses the origins of Labyrinth Designs & Clothing and how he is able to balance his time between college and running his own business.Â
Coty: Labyrinth Designs and Clothing has been around for a while now. You began your brand nearly 3 years ago. How and why did you get started in the merchandise design business?
Nader: Labyrinth originally was started as only a design company. Labyrinth was started by myself, and my good friend Lee. At the time we had a handful of friends in bands that needed some design help, so we figured that we loved to draw, so why not help out our friends and make it a business and spread the word? So I started out doing desktop wallpapers, AIM icons, and little things like that and eventually started getting into t-shirt designs. As a promotional idea, Lee and I decided to hand draw some designs and get them printed (and these designs were pretty much made in Microsoft paint and using cheap photoshop filters because we really didn't know how to use photoshop too well at the time haha). We sold the shirts for $10 a piece and got rid of a bunch of them fairly easily to friends and just people at school and such.
After that, Labyrinth officially became a clothing company as well as a design company, and that's when we started hand silk-screening shirts and got a bit better at designing. Eventually Lee left Labyrinth all up to me, so I took it upon myself to run it as best as I could. I had full artistic freedom which was a new feeling and I quickly started to design the 07'/08′ Fall/Winter line which was the first actual line to be professionally printed and had 6 brand new designs.
For me, the reason I got into design was purely for the satisfaction of people appreciating my art. Labyrinth was created to design affordable, unique, and creative shirts. I'm not concerned with making a great deal of profit, (although that would be nice) I am more concerned with people appreciating my art enough to wear it on a day-to-day basis. That is the satisfaction of it all. Most of the money I make, if not all is invested back into the company to produce more shirts for a great price.
Coty: Based on your Myspace and Facebook, you're a pretty young guy. You started Labyrinth while you were in high school. How did you fund this big endeavor and how did you go about managing both school and running your own business.
Nader: Haha, yeah I'm 19, I started Labyrinth when I was around 16. Funding Labyrinth was a little tricky, for the promotional shirts that I mentioned we made before, Lee and I saved up $250 each and used that to print the first batch. Since then, Lee left Labyrinth before heading to college, so I took upon all funding, design, and promotion myself.
Managing school and running Labyrinth has been a little difficult. In high school it wasn't so bad because I had a lot of free time and the space to print Labyrinth shirts. But realizing that I was going to college while at the same time I was getting better at designing, I decided I would get the 07'/08′ line of shirts printed professionally (by a company called def-star) so I wouldn't be overworked at school.
Coming to college has been a lot tougher to manage Labyrinth and school. There's not a ton of free time I get where I can just sit back and relax, but I do my best to manage Labyrinth as best as I can and if that means no sleep, I'll deal with it. Last year I felt like I kind of sat back on it and let it promote itself, which is a little frustrating in retrospect, but I'm trying to change that this year by featuring a lot nicer options, and freebies with every purchase and at the same time just working a lot more on it and not letting things get pushed back.
Coty: You've got a new line with three new tees ready to be released. Tell us a little about the new designs. Design wise, they look different from the rest of your product line (I actually prefer the look of the new stuff to your older stuff). Who designed these and should we expect more designs like these in the future from Labyrinth?
Nader: Thanks- I actually like these new ones a lot better too. The new line comes out this Friday and I'm really excited about it, I put a lot of effort into it. Design wise, these are definitely way different than everything else I've done with Labyrinth. I worked on these designs a lot more than the previous ones, I wanted a cleaner feel to these rather than the whole grunge influence I had before. I wanted to design something different and interesting. I wanted to create more of a series rather than a group of random tees which I felt the 07'/08′ line was like.
So for these, I was really influenced by animals, whether that be realistic like the "Float Away" chick or the cartoony "Dino's." But everything since the 07'/08′ Line has been designed by myself, and all the new shirts are hand drawn designs that I worked on in my sketchbook and brought into illustrator or just drew straight into illustrator.
Coty: You've mentioned to me in the past that when you started Labyrinth you printed your own shirts. Do you still print your own shirts? If not, who do you go to for printing and what process do they use for printing? How have your shirts improved, quality-wise, since you first started 3 years ago?
Nader: I am actually trying to get back into printing my own shirts again. My friends and I in Boston are working on building our own silk-screening press at the moment, very inexpensively, which I am really happy about because I have plans for some limited edition shirts. But as for the new line of shirts coming out this Friday, Bandwagon Merch printed them all, and they did a great job with them; I cannot thank them enough for that. Pure Buttons also helped me out with the button packages that come with the first 100 orders.
As for improvements, it can be seen across the board, from the design quality to the quality of shirts and to the quality of the inks used in printing. I have had a strong emphasis on improving the quality of the line. Before, I just wanted to go with the normal cheap stuff (hanes, jerzees, fruit of the loom) to produce a low cost shirt that I could sell really cheap, but after learning and growing as a designer, I've realized people will pay for better quality and a few more dollars won't hurt. These new shirts are all printed on American Apparel 2001 unisex shirts for a great fit as well as comfort, and the inks printed on the shirts are made to be absorbed into the material, so they are super soft and part of the shirt as opposed to lying on top of the shirt. Also, I am very excited to include with the first 50 orders one of three limited edition Labyrinth Posters relative to the design purchased and as another bonus, for the first 100 orders a free "Dinos" two pin button pack.
Up to this point, these shirts have been presold at only $12 and on Friday they will be released at full price, $17, which I don't think is bad at all. For a regular American apparel shirt, that's around $16-$20, so for a unique design, free button pack, and free poster, I think this is a great deal.
Coty: Who would you say Labyrinth's target audience is? How do you market to this target audience?
Nader: It's weird, I feel like there is no specific target audience for Labyrinth, I mean, of course I'm marketing to a group of people probably from around the ages of 16-28, but I feel like especially with the new designs I have been coming out with, there has been no real target audience. I find that a lot of different people from different social groups find my designs to be appealing, and I like the idea of that – you know? I like having no specific audience, just reaching anyone who appreciates my designs, and my art is fine by me, but that also makes it a lot harder to market.
As for marketing, I do the whole MySpace and Facebook thing. For me, I feel that marketing is my weak point. Lately, though, because of my new emphasis on marketing Labyrinth, I've seen a lot of improvement. I've been getting a lot of help from my parents, my brother, my girlfriend and my friends. They have helped spread the word by telling all of the people they know and by printing and distributing flyers and stickers. I just can't thank all of them enough.
Coty: I think that your new line would look splendid printed on onesie's for babies! Both Dinos! and Float Away are uber cute and I'm sure any mom would proudly dress their babies in your new goods! Any plans on expanding beyond just adult tees (i.e. bags, shoes, hoodies, etc)?
Hahaha, that's something I thought about after seeing these printed. My girlfriend was just saying how these reminded her of a cartoon show. If there was definite interest in putting these on kids shirts or onesie's, I would definitely do it; I'm just not sure how I would go about that yet. We will see though! Haha.
I am definitely interested in expanding beyond adult tee's. I have done hoodies in the past and I am definitely interested in doing more. At some point I also see myself designing tote bags and tees specifically for girls. I'm always looking for new niches to fill. So in the future, definitely look out for Labyrinth evolving, because it is already starting to.
Coty: Have you ever seen any of your designs being worn in the wild? If so, how did you react?
Nader: Haha yeah, its funny, I get random calls from friends saying they passed by a kid wearing one of my shirts in a mall and stuff like that, but until recently, I haven't spotted many myself, I actually just saw 3 people wearing Labyrinth shirts in a day a few weeks ago, I knew two of the kids, but one of them I had no idea how he grabbed a Labyrinth shirt, and I just kind of pointed and said to my friend, "… Hey… I made that… that's weird." Haha. It was a bit of a shock, but it's a great feeling, and I hope that I see a lot more random people wearing my stuff.
Coty: As a young entrepreneur, what advice would you give to a high school kid or up-and-coming designer that wants to start their own brand and business?
Nader: I would definitely say do a lot of research. That was one of my main setbacks. I pretty much just dove into Labyrinth with no expectations or real knowledge about how a brand or business worked. But over the past few years, I have been learning a lot of essential things (i.e. marketing). It's kind of like a trial and error process.
However, the past year and a half or so, I've been doing a lot of research on other companies, gathering ideas, comparing, seeking inspiration, and getting feedback from friends, family, and anyone that is willing to help. You have to be willing to have an open mind and hear what others have to say. You have to step outside yourself and take a look at others around you and see if you can benefit from previous examples. The best piece of advice I can give you youngsters is just enjoy it.
Thanks to Nader for taking the time to chat with me about Labyrinth Clothing! We look forward to great things from Labyrinth in the future! Be sure to check out Labyrinth's MySpace and online store if you're interested in purchasing some of his new tees!


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Cockapoos Are ..........
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We offer a non-profit service and rely on good will donations to operate in the best interest of the Cockapoos in need.
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Yearly Archives: 2014
Rebellion in the World of Opera
The rebellion of William Tell over the tyrant Gessler, wasn't the only coup happening on the stage of Chicago's Harris Theater Wednesday evening. The fact that the North American tour of the Teatro Regio Torino performance of Rossini's renowned opera premiered in Chicago alone is a triumph elevating the cultural scene of the "Second City".
The Italian company chose Chicago for its first stop to bring their orchestra, choir and some of the opera's best voices who bring the libretto to life. The abridged opera was still 4 hours in length and kept the audience on the edge of our seats ever moment.
Stripped of the staging, the music is the focus and what a delight to amongst the first hear this lush and seldom heard opera. Each performer's voice seemed to be more powerful than the last with soprano Angela Meade's Matilde stopping the show while professing her love for Arnold, who is conflicted between his love of the princess and his love of country.
The broad shoulders of conductor Gianandrea Noseda were fitting in our "City of Broad Shoulders" and needed to lead this sumptuous and demanding opera. And he did not disappoint. From the beginning, to the last note, he guided the orchestra passionately.
Teatro Regio Torino will perform in Toronto Friday December 5th, Sunday December 7th at Carnegie Hall in New York City and finish in Ann Arbor, Michigan Tuesday December 9th.
Kudos to Harris Theater for being the first to welcome William Tell and Teatro Regio Torino for sharing an experience of a lifetime. Let's hope this coup is long lasting for Harris Theater and Chicago at being a first stop for many great performances.


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If the Dodgers go up for sale, some familiar names are making a pitch to catch them.
Orel Hershiser has joined Steve Garvey's exploratory ownership group.
Dodgers: The Changeup
Hershiser told the LA Daily News that he and Garvey have kept in touch over the years. The News reported that the two met Friday with other possible investors.
"When (Garvey) called and said he wanted me to be part of this group, I said, 'Garv, I'd always be interested in helping and doing something like this that would be a lot of fun,'" Hershiser told the Daily News. "We're forming a group that's investigating situations as they arise. That would be very interesting for me."
The former Dodgers pitcher, 52, works as an ESPN analyst. He won the Cy Young Award in 1988 -- the same year he was named the World Series MVP -- and spent 13 seasons in LA.
The Dodgers face financial problems that led Major League Baseball in April to appoint a trustee to oversee the team's finances.
"It hurts my heart," Hershiser said of the team's situation.
Despite baseball officials who believed he didn't have enough money to cover the team's end-of-the-month payroll, the embattled Frank McCourt was able to cover Dodgers-related expenses last week, said a person familiar with the situation who requested anonymity because he wasn't authorized to speak publicly. If McCourt wasn't able to meet payroll -- a question that lingers for the remainder of the season -- Major League Baseball would have taken control and paid the team's bills.