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I'd never held a video-game controller until last fall. Which is a pretty sad admission, as if I'd said in 1966 that I'd never watched "Bonanza" or heard a song by the Rolling Stones. My sixteen-year-old son and his friends—his male friends, that is, all of them polite, funny, good-hearted kids—play video games just about every day. They don't watch much TV; they don't have time. Most of the games they play are on the Xbox 360 console—not the Wii or the PlayStation 3—and most involve killing and dying. The big one for the first half of last year was Nazi Zombies, a mini-game included with the best-selling Call of Duty: World at War. In it, you and your friends, linked by audio headsets, hide out in a ruined building, and yellow-eyeballed zombies in Nazi uniforms lurch toward you mumbling and waving their arms and trying to eat your head. You have to shoot them or stab them or set them on fire, and they never stop coming. If they swarm you, you call out, "Dude, they're on me!" and a friend struggles over to save you. If you're near death, you call out, "Dude, revive me!" and a friend jabs you with a revivifying hypodermic. There's a lot of wild laughing.
I still haven't played Nazi Zombies. But since last fall I've been buying some of the biggest new game releases and trying them out. I say "trying" because the first thing I learned is that video games—especially the vivid, violent ones—are ridiculously hard to play. They're humbling. They break you down. They kill you over and over. Eventually, you learn how to crouch and crawl through grass and hide behind boxes. You fight your way to a special doorway and you move up to the next level. Suddenly, you feel smart and euphoric. You reload, with a reassuring metallic click, and keep on going.
To begin, you must master the controller. On the Xbox 360 controller, which looks like a catamaran, there are seventeen possible points of contact. There's the left trigger and the right trigger, the left bumper and the right bumper, two mushroom-shaped joysticks, a circular four-way pad, two small white buttons, each with triangles molded into them, and a silver dome in the middle that glows green when you press it. Then, there are the very important colored buttons: the blue X, the green A, the red B, and the yellow Y. On the slightly smaller Sony PlayStation 3's controller, the buttons are similar, except that in place of the colored letters you've got the green triangle, the pink square, the red O, and the blue X. (The PlayStation 3's blue X button is in a different place than the Xbox 360's blue X button—madness.) In order to run, crouch, aim, fire, pause, leap, speak, stab, grab, kick, dismember, unlock, crawl, climb, parry, roll, or resuscitate a fallen comrade, you must press or nudge or woggle these various buttons, singly or in combination, performing tiny feats of exactitude that are different for each game. It's a little like playing "Blue Rondo à la Turk" on the clarinet, then switching to the tenor sax, then the oboe, then back to the clarinet.
The second thing I learned about video games is that they are long. So, so long. Playing one game is not like watching one ninety-minute movie; it's like watching one whole season of a TV show—and watching it in a state of staring, jaw-clenched concentration. If you're good, it might take you fifteen hours to play through a typical game. If you're not good, like me, and you do a fair amount of bumping into walls and jumping in place when you're under attack, it will take more than twice that.
On the other hand, the games can be beautiful. The "maps" or "levels"—that is, the three-dimensional physical spaces in which your character moves and acts—are sometimes wonders of explorable specificity. You'll see an edge-shined, light-bloomed, magic-hour gilded glow on a row of half-wrecked buildings and you'll want to stop for a few minutes just to take it in. But be careful—that's when you can get shot by a sniper. Stay frosty.
The first game I bought was Halo 3: ODST, developed by Bungie and published by Microsoft Game Studios last September. It's not one of the really beautiful games, but it's instructive. Halo was Microsoft's first hit on the Xbox, in 2001, and this is the latest offering in the long-running series. It's set in 2552, during a space war. ODST stands for Orbital Drop Shock Troopers—people who say things like "You know the music, time to dance," and then drop down through the atmosphere into battle. I plummeted into the city of New Mombasa, Africa, which looked like a dim, cast-concrete parking garage but with grand staircases. An alliance of bad creatures called the Covenant had killed billions of people, and this drop might be an opportunity to save humankind.
Mostly I glided up and down ramps and stairs shooting at enemies, listening to chilly electronica. I played the game in "easy" mode, as opposed to "normal," "heroic," or "legendary"—the menu option reads "Laugh as helpless victims flee in terror from their inevitable slaughter"—but it didn't seem all that easy to me. Short-statured, stocky aliens called Grunts popped up frequently, and with hostile intent—they had munchkin voices and cackled nastily and they said things like "Die, heretic!" I had to kill many of these. Other alien enemies, called Brutes, said, "I will split your bones." They sounded as if they had ripped up their vocal cords by popping steroids. I used several different weapons to kill them, including the needler, which shot explosive needles, and I plundered dead alien bodies for more guns and ammunition. The Grunts and the Brutes jeered and tried to end my life. I got lost and hit cul-de-sacs and said bad words and hopped up and down near a burning car. Sometimes I died.
Whenever you're injured, the screen begins to go red and you hear yourself gasping. Red arrows point in the direction of your attackers. As you near your end, your gasps come quicker and they become odd little yips and yelps of pain. Finally, you die, and the camera lifts. For the first time in New Mombasa—this being a first-person shooter—you see yourself from the outside: a rookie in a helmet falling to the pavement. Another life consumed in this endless war. But immediately you "respawn"—that is, you reappear, ready to try again, at a point a little earlier in the game.
The good thing about Halo 3: ODST is . . . I don't know. If I was fonder of nineteen-seventies cast-concrete architecture, I'm sure I would have enjoyed the experience more. The game seemed to me to be both desolate and repetitive, with incomprehensible Biblical and race-war undermeanings. I flipped through the game guide, published by an imprint of Random House, and read a list of some of the medals you can earn. Killtacular is what you get if you kill five enemies in quick succession in firefight mode; Killtrocity if you add a sixth; Killimanjaro if you reach seven. "Dash about with the Gravity Hammer," I read, "killing large groups of enemies for lengthy kill chains and hammer sprees before swapping to the Magnum and running to the next group of foes, plugging Grunts and Jackals in the head to keep the kill chain going." Forget it.
Uncharted 2: Among Thieves, a production of the Naughty Dog studio, in Santa Monica, was the next game I tried, and it's good. It was a Sony exclusive, meaning that I needed a PlayStation 3 to play it, and I didn't have a PlayStation 3. Just coincidentally, in October my son's Xbox developed the famous red ring of death, a total hardware failure signalled by a warning light around the On/Off button. This seemed a sign from the gods of war to get a PS3, which I did.
Uncharted 2 is about a bluejeans-wearing male model, Nate, who wakes up with fresh blood on his hands and climbs around on a cold train wreck that is hanging off a cliff. It's literally a cliff-hanger, you see. Nate (whom we can see, because this is a third-person game) is remarkably good at climbing on things, and his hands never stick to frozen metal, because he's an action hero. He grunts realistically when he hurls himself up and over the edge of something—the voice actor who plays Nate, Nolan North, is an inspired grunter, and there must be a hundred different expressions of strain on this soundtrack.
Then the screen goes white, and we're in a flashback. We learn that Nate, who can sight-translate medieval-Latin prose, is in search of Marco Polo's lost treasure and that he must break into a museum in Istanbul, dart-gunning or punching or choking its numerous flashlight-wielding security guards. His goal is to find an ancient, precious green lamp that holds a clue. He finds it and, being an American action hero, immediately breaks it like a piggy bank on the floor. The clue within leads him to the jungles of Borneo, where he shoots some Russian-accented mercenaries—people are always shooting Russians in video games—and then it's time to hurry off to sunny Nepal, where there are prayer flags, more mercenaries, and incredible vistas. The acting is often good and includes some funny ad-libs—not just by Nolan North but also by Richard McGonagle, who plays a crusty cigar-puffer. Two women appear in the game—one a tanned Aussie with black unruly bangs and sparkly eyes, who wears a red crop-top shirt that we see a lot of, and the other an old flame of Nate's, an American journalist with Jennifer Aniston hair pulled back—both of them joshing and likable.
It's a visual glory hallelujah of a game. Zebra shadows on leaves and rocks never looked better, nor did sunlit onion domes, nor bombed-out laundromats with puddles in them—and the shirts of the guards glimmering in the plum-purple half-light of the Istanbul Palace Museum are a sight to behold. I wish so many foreigners didn't have to be shot, so many historical sites damaged without comment, but evidently they do or the game wouldn't exist, and it's diverting to clamber around on stone Buddhas, solving (or repeatedly failing to solve) spatial puzzles. When you die, the image desaturates to black-and-white and there's a tactful moment of funereal bagpipery.
The best time I had with Uncharted 2 (which went on to win several game-of-the-year awards) was while eating a submarine sandwich and watching the making-of videos that came with the game disk, fantasizing about what it would be like to work for Naughty Dog as a late-afternoon-lighting designer or a stony-ledge-placement specialist. These people know how to have fun. They've even included an optional zero-gravity mode, in which mercenaries, when shot, flip up rag-dollingly in the air and drift there. After one battle, there were two riot shields and six bulletproof-vested dead people peacefully hanging like barrage balloons in the air in front of a temple.
After Uncharted 2 came the biggest release of the year—Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2, developed by Infinity Ward and published by Activision on November 10th. My son and his friends went to a local GameStop at midnight to get their reserved copies; they played it all night and then fell asleep in school assembly. Modern Warfare 2 sold fast—it reportedly made more money in its first twenty-four hours than "Titanic" or "Avatar" did. Millions of people play it every day. In less than a year, it has become the second-best-selling video game of all time, after Wii Play.
Here's what it's about. It's about killing, and it's about dying. Also, it's about collecting firearms. And it's modern warfare, which means it's set in places like Afghanistan. As in Halo, you are a gun who moves—in fact, you are many guns, because with a touch of your Y button you can switch from one gun to another. But this game has a much crisper, brighter look than the murky Halo, and the graphics engine is better, and the telescopic rifle scopes, their lenses pale blue and curvingly reflective, are a delight to peer through. "Yesterday's enemies are today's recruits," says the narrator, General Shepherd, who is full of little bits of wisdom like that, until he slides over to the dark side.
The first thing you have to do is learn how to aim and shoot, and to do that you run through a training course in Afghanistan with pop-up wooden targets. Some targets depict enemies—they have angry frowns and wear turbans and look like Khomeini—and some depict civilians: boys in blue-striped polo shirts, little girls in dresses, and a plump man in a button-down shirt. The training course keeps track of how many civilians you've killed and how many frowning Khomeinis, while a corporal shouts at you to hurry up: "Go, go, go!" [#unhandled_cartoon]
You do so well as Private Allen, shooting Arabs in Kabul, that you are enlisted to help out the C.I.A., which is up to nothing good in Russia. Then, as part of something called Task Force 141, you begin dying in earnest. I don't know how many times I was killed as I tried to work toward the northeast section of a runway in order to plant a bomb. (This was at a military base in Kazakhstan.) I wandered tensely through cold quonset huts. Each time, a jeep would park, and there was a sudden surge of Russian voices and men would aim at me and shoot me. I was shooting them, too. My name during this phase of the game was Roach. "Roach, search the northeast part of the runway for the fuelling station!" my commander, Soap MacTavish, said repeatedly, in his Scottish burr. When I got someone in the head, MacTavish would say, "Nicely done," or "Good kill." When I shot badly, he would say, "That was sloppy." I always felt better when MacTavish was telling me what to do.
When you're hit in Modern Warfare 2, the bullets make a zing and then a flump. Your field of view jolts and gets alarmingly blood-dropletted around the edges. You begin to gasp. The sound goes hollow, as if you're listening through a long tube, the controller vibrates, and you know that you have only a moment of life left. As your head hits the ground, the screen's image turns suddenly diagonal and fuzzes out. There's a swooshing in your ears, followed by a brief whistling-teakettle sound. The last thing you hear is MacTavish shouting, once again, from far away, "Roach, search the northeast corner of the runway!"
Then, at the blood-blurred moment of death, you are rewarded with a literary quotation. These come from Einstein, Voltaire, Zora Neale Hurston, Edward R. Murrow, Churchill, Machiavelli, Dick Cheney—all sorts of apropos people—and they are confusingly contradictory. Some quotes are cynical, some pacifist, some earnestly pro-war. Cheney says, "It is easy to take liberty for granted when you have never had it taken from you." Gandhi says, "An eye for an eye only ends up making the whole world blind." These neat word packets, displayed just as you've been shot or blown up by a grenade, mock the notion that there is any body of aphoristic wisdom that can be applied to a fatal firefight. You're lying in the snow, dead. Words of wisdom mean nothing now.
But, of course, you're not really dead. Almost immediately, you respawn. You're given another chance. You're given many, many chances, because Modern Warfare 2 is just about the dyingest game out there. It isn't, in my reading, a glorification of modern warfare. You play for three hours and you think, This? This chaotic chattering absurdity and panic and wasted ardor is what we mean by "troop surge"? It is an unjingoistic, perhaps completely cynical amusement. The C.I.A., covertly making everything worse, gets mixed up in an airport atrocity in Russia, which prompts Russia to attack a residential neighborhood in northeastern Virginia, not far from the Pentagon and C.I.A. headquarters (both in flames), with paratroopers and helicopter gunships. "Ramirez," a sergeant shouts, voice-acted by Keith David, "take your team and secure the Burger Town!" Also: "Be advised multiple enemy mobiles have been sighted near the taco joint, over!"
I'd been playing alone, but the "single-player campaign," with its improbable story, is not what Modern Warfare 2 is really about. Most people want to go online and shoot at other real people, not at software soldiers controlled by artificial intelligence. "Single player is like taking a Spanish class," my son explained. "Multiplayer is like going to Spain." In multiplayer, you choose a locale—for instance, the submarine base—and a style of competition. There's Team Deathmatch, Capture the Flag, Domination, and others. And then you run around shooting and setting claymore mines where other players won't see them when they walk into a room. If you kill three people without dying, you can get a U.A.V.—a Predator drone. A kill streak of nine gives you a Stealth Bomber air strike. If you kill twenty-five people in a row, you can get a tactical nuclear weapon, and the game is over. You get frequent bonuses and awards—new weapons, new ammunition, new scopes, new camouflage, new proficiencies. "It's like they've got you on a drip feed of sugar," my son said. "The only way you get the next little drip is by playing a little more."
In multiplayer you kill and die so often that a single statistic becomes extremely important to you: your kill-to-death ratio. As you get better—reviewing your deaths on "killcam" instant replay to see who got you—your kill-to-death ratio goes to one and then to more than one. One of my son's friends, a good student, has a kill-to-death ratio of 1.65. In two hundred and nineteen hours of game-playing, he has killed 32,884 times and died 19,956 times. My son, who believes that wars serve no purpose, has played for ninety-six hours, and he has a kill-to-death of 1.17; it was 1.4 when he was playing every day. Mine is 0.08.
In order to give me a taste of multiplayer madness, as I practiced my shooting and my sprinting skills, my son set us up by ourselves in a location called Rust—a place in Afghanistan where there is an old oil installation. Sitting side by side and watching our characters on the split screen, we spawned out in Rust, and he began running circles around me. I could hear his feet going pad pad pad pad in the sand, and then the sound changed and became hollow as he ran onto a pipe. I would look around, trying to find him—and then I'd see that he was a few feet away, pointing his gun at my head. His character was an American soldier, I noticed. My character, which I saw when I looked at his split-screen image, was some bad jihadist with Arabic writing on my head scarf.
We were very considerate of each other in the beginning. My son could have shot me many times, but he didn't. "Go ahead!" I said. "No, Dad," he said, "I'm not going to shoot you." He followed me around, waiting for me to take some shots. We carried on this peculiar chivalry for fifteen minutes, sometimes using riot shields, whose glass cracks realistically under repeated fire. Finally I wounded him, and he stabbed me, and we relaxed and began shooting and sniping and running and laughing, just as he did with his friends via inter-couchal headsets. We switched to another map, Afghan, which has as its centerpiece a C-130 transport plane that has crashed somewhere in the mountains of Afghanistan. There were thick-budded poppies growing in the sun, with PVC irrigation pipes over them. Again I heard my son's sprinting footsteps—he had a multiplayer perk that allowed him to run forever without tiring. He knew a way to get up on the fuselage—I could hear him running down the metallic skin—and onto the tail, and from there up onto a high cliff. I'd spray bullets in a semicircle, and then there would be a single quick sniper shot and I'd be dead. Then he'd apologize. "Sorry, Dad, I didn't mean to kill, only to maim." I died often enough that I received a temporary health boost called a "painkiller deathstreak." By the end, I'd improved—so he said—and I'd machine-gunned him a few times. We went off to dinner full of weird camaraderie.
Altogether, it took me an astounding twenty-four hours to get through the single-player version of Modern Warfare 2—three times longer than the average player takes. But I made a lot of notes, and that stretched the time out some. What fascinated me most were those moments in the midst of a fierce firefight when you were given a chance to find some "intel"—on the second floor of a house on the Russian border, say, where Makarov, the paleo-Soviet terrorist, was rumored to be hiding out. During these tranced lulls, I found, you could wander at your leisure from room to room while your squadron-mates stood around waiting for you to act. As they waited, they cracked their necks from side to side and scratched themselves, as idle men seem always to do under the guidance of artificial intelligence.
I found many interesting things while exploring this house, not wanting, particularly, to get back into the action and be killed again. Some Russians lay in pools of blood in the upstairs hall. In the master bedroom were books on a bookshelf, including "The Jungle Book," a law treatise, and what appeared to be a biography of the Dutch painter Gerard van Honthorst. I'd seen these same books back in northern Virginia, during a break in the frantic action there, before the bloodbath at Burger Town. In the bathroom there were sections of illegible newspaper and a Teddy bear fixed to the wall with a knife through its nose. I went into a smaller bedroom.
In it were seven or eight sleeping bags, unrolled, empty, and a lot of rollaway suitcases. Also a pinup of a clothed woman wielding a machine gun. There was something touching about this tableau of sleeping bags, since I knew that the soldiers who had slept there were now dead. If I got down on my stomach, I could crawl right through the sleeping bags, which was an interesting experience—seeing the underside of the texture. I could even crawl through a dead body, and I did once—for everything in a video game is just a contortedly triangulated, infinitely thin quilt of surface. What, I wondered, was in the suitcases?
The only way I knew how to look inside a random object was to shoot it. So I shot at a suitcase. A dingy striped shirt flew out. I shot at another suitcase: another dingy shirt. These rang a bell: I'd seen them hanging from a clothesline in the Brazilian favela, the setting for an earlier battle. In the master bedroom, I shot at some cardboard boxes. Bags of potato chips and beef jerky popped out, and little cherry pies. Down in the kitchen, I noticed an old crate of potatoes—also bags of flour and basmati rice. These staples, too, I'd seen in the favela.
I began to think a lot about the hardworking set dressers for this game, who cleverly reused the same props in different ways in different countries. What moral were they offering—that people were basically the same everywhere? That most of life was getting up in the morning, putting on your clothes, and eating basmati rice? That war, even for the soldier, was the aberration? Or were they just being thrifty, or playful?
Modern Warfare 2, at that moment, felt truer, realer than almost all war movies—although it owes much to them, of course, especially "Black Hawk Down." In fact, when I watched "The Hurt Locker" I sensed the rifle-scopic influence of the entire Call of Duty series—as in the long, still standoff in the desert with the tiny figure at the window. Cinematographers and movie directors think more like snipers now because of the Xbox. I went downstairs in the Russian house to resume the battle. When I was shot and died, I was offered a quotation from Confucius: "Before you embark on a journey of revenge, dig two graves."
Next on my master list, appearing on November 17th, was the ultra-stealthy, silver-hooded Assassin's Creed II, set in Renaissance Florence and Venice. (This list, by the way, I'd made with my son's help. He reads the video-game Web sites and listens every week to the charmingly garrulous Giant Bombcast, which is like "Car Talk" but with four vastly knowledgeable gamers.) In Assassin's Creed II, you are Ezio, a man with many missions. You deliver letters and hurry around cities with a loping stride, climbing up the façades of palazzos and churches when the mood moves you. You leap from rooftop to rooftop, and sometimes you leap in the wrong direction and fall, and if you fall too far you die, whereupon the screen goes red and then white, crisscrossed with many schematic lines, and it says "DESYNCHRONIZED"—because in the game's frame story you're not really in Renaissance Italy; you're really a twenty-first-century man (again voice-acted by Nolan North) reclining in a comfortable virtual-reality machine with an orange cushion.
Sometimes you have to assassinate someone—that's your creed, after all—which you can do with hidden wrist knives or poison blades or swords or even an early gun, and sometimes you just have to beat someone up. One of your first tasks, in fact, is to find a lout who is cheating on your sister. You call him a lurid pig, and when you beat him up you make money. You can hire thieves, you can loot dead bodies, you can steal florins from pedestrians (although they will fuss if you do), and you can buy Renaissance paintings from a small art stand. You can even hire a group of murmurously flirty courtesans who wear low-cut pastel gowns and coo provocatively, and if you suddenly decide to parkour around on the roof once again they will wait for you down below.
The game, made by Ubisoft Montreal, has moments of loveliness, as when you reach a lookout high up over Venice and allow your gaze to sweep across the sfumatoed city. The colors are brown stone, weathered brick, the occasional red flapping banner, and pale Mediterranean blue. The wind sounds just the way wind should sound. Not much that's noble or witty or soul-stirring happens in these lovingly re-created cities. If you hang in there for many hours, you get to fly Leonardo da Vinci's bat-winged glider by night. But mostly it's death, death, death—and fistfights, and the accumulation of wealth by acts of thuggery. You leap down on the Borgia Pope in the middle of Mass and punch him out. You're forever pressing the pink square to stab. (Or, on the Xbox, the blue X.) "There's a lot of face and neck stabbing, if you like to stab dudes in the face and neck," Ryan Davis explained on the Giant Bombcast. "There's one really good move where you will stab a dude five or six times super quickly, shank style, like, uh uh uh uh uh, just jabbing—and that's oddly satisfying." The most fun I had was jumping off a building into a pile of hay. My son showed me how to rock-climb to the top of the Tower of San Marco, keeping a lookout for the slightly darker brick where the handholds were. That was a pleasure.
To avoid competing with Modern Warfare 2, many game publishers took cover and postponed their launches, so after Assassin's Creed II there wasn't much going on till late in January. Out of curiosity, I played the demo for Bayonetta, a Japanese game in which a woman dressed in her own hair kickboxes her way through battles with fearsome creatures. She wears hip eyeglasses and looks like Tina Fey. When she goes wild with a kick combination, her hair suddenly swooshes out and forms itself into a swirling lethal force that helps her defeat her enemy. I also fought zombies with a fry-pan and a crowbar in Left 4 Dead 2. A zombie called the Spitter doused me with corrosive stomach acid that emerged in a flume from her enormous toothy mouth. That was the only game that gave me a bad dream: in it, I crouched in a jet engine with my family, hiding out from evil people on the runway, wishing I had a fry-pan.
Meanwhile, my son and his friends were laboriously working their way up the multiplayer ladder of Modern Warfare 2. The goal is to reach the top rank, level 70, in which you unlock an AK-47. At that point, you start again at level 1, but with a fancy star icon next to your name to signal that you've gone "Prestige." My son quit playing the game at that point—many of his friends have continued.
Then came BioWare's gigantic opus, Mass Effect 2, released on January 26, 2010. Commander Shepard (no relation to Modern Warfare's General Shepherd) is in control of a gracefully elongated spaceship, the Normandy, which has bunk beds, fishtanks, and a wisecracking mess officer who also cleans the bathrooms. "This ain't no luxury liner," he says. "I catch what falls through the cracks, heh-heh." Young ensigns flirt outrageously with Shepard as they give him messages, and Miranda, a brunette with "extensive genetic modification" (i.e., breast implants), accompanies you sometimes on your travels. You visit a strip club where a blue alien dances for you and a bartender tries to poison you. You avert a plague by using some big fans to spread an antidote around.
Mass Effect 2 is the most novelistic of the games I played. It's an elaborately catalogued scatterment of worlds in which you slingshot yourself around using mass-effect generators that make you go at light speed. You meet many colorful humanoids, with whom you converse by choosing bits of dialogue with your control stick. It sounds awkward, but it works. After one battle, Shepard encounters a young Krogan standing in a corner. The Krogan, a hulking monster with a huge reptilian neck, was born in a tank the week before. "You are different," the Krogan says. "You don't smell like this world. Seven night cycles and I have felt only the need to kill. But you—something makes me speak."
"How can you speak if you're only a week old?" Commander Shepard asks, providing you prompt this query with your control stick.
"There was a scratching sound in my head, and it became the voice," the Krogan replies. "It taught things I would need—walking, talking, hitting, shooting." Walking, talking, hitting, shooting—that just about sums it up. Video games aim to find and nurture the tank-born Krogan in all of us.
I played for a while, visiting planets and shooting incendiary bullets at waves of venomous antagonists. Then I stopped. It's two DVD disks. It's really enormous. In order to do all the missions and side missions of Mass Effect 2, you can easily spend fifty hours or more, especially if you like trying all the dialogue options, as I do. I craved more sunshine pouring in through the helmet visors, more leaf shadow, more wind, more air—maybe some little Krogans riding on bicycles. Finally, I gave up. I was dying too much, and when you die the music goes bom-bom-bom-bom-bom-bom-bom, while terrible red and black retinal veins grow in from the edges of the screen.
By then, it was the end of February, and time to play the most self-consciously artistic game on the list: Heavy Rain, by Quantic Dream, a studio in Paris that got development funding from Sony. Sony kindly sent me an early copy, in a faux battered shoebox. When I lifted the lid, an audio clip of a woman's voice asked, "Are you prepared to suffer to save your son?" David Cage, Quantic Dream's founder, calls the game an interactive drama. In one interview, in the Independent, Cage said that he feels close to Orson Welles, advancing an art form. And in fact he's right.
For the first half hour, the game is a stunner. "It's flipping genius, Dad!" my son called out as he began playing. The faces have complicated eyes and eyelids, and you, a sad-faced father with a strong resemblance to David Duchovny, do pleasant things with your kids and your wife. Then comes grief: one of your sons dies in front of your eyes. Whereupon you enter the gloomy Heavy Rain universe, switching among several characters, one of whom may possibly be a serial murderer who likes paper folding. You are a woman with amazingly good posture and an impassive face who high-steps around her apartment in her underwear. You are a private detective with a big stomach and a big heart. You are an F.B.I. agent with virtual-reality sunglasses. It's always raining, and the music is lush, and everyone's face is sad and empty, until you can't stand the pop of droplets anymore and you're slogging around in the runoff at the side of the street, wondering whether the clouds will ever part. No, they never will.
Is it a good game? It has realistic eyeblinks and moments of ecstatic mundanity, as when you use the controller to put a frozen pizza in a microwave for your TV-watching son (who is soon to be kidnapped) and then dump it onto a plate. It's forward-looking, too, in the way it uses the control buttons: at moments of high tension, you have to hold down several at once, like Lon Chaney playing a Bach arpeggio, till you've accomplished a difficult action—fought off an attacker, say, or chopped off one of your own fingers. But the plot and the conversational tropes will be familiar—too familiar—to crime-drama watchers. It's an homage to "NYPD Blue" episodes and the movie "Se7en": cops who squabble in Brooklyn accents, some serial killing, some split personality, some amnesia, more lush music—nothing that has any reality in any conceivable life lived anywhere on planet Earth. The endings vary based on what you do—the script is more than two thousand pages long—but my son and I both arrived independently at similar endings, in which the character that we liked the most turned out to be the Origami Killer. Which made us unhappy and made no sense dramatically. In my version of the story, my second son died, too. I suffered, to be sure, but I didn't manage to save him.
Heavy Rain feels like a clinical depression served up in a shoebox. Possibly that's what David Cage intended it to be—and more than a million copies have sold, so it's a successful depression.
The next game on my list was another eagerly sought-after PlayStation 3 showpiece: God of War III, a single-player game set on and under Mt. Olympus. I got about eight hours into it, during which time I cut off the Chimera's tail, ripped off Helios' head, and stabbed somebody in the eye with his own horn. I hooked into the flesh of middle-aged naked birdwomen who flew around as Harpies. I injured a horse and saw its intestines pour out. I cut off Hades' chest muscle and watched it jump around on the floor like a toad; I had to destroy the muscle before the huge Hell god could grab it and slap it back into place. I took hold of the Cyclops' eye like a beach ball and pulled on it till the optic nerve dangled.
Why did I do this? Because I was the muscleman Kratos, a Spartan-born hero who wears a lot of eye makeup and wanders the mythosphere with a spoiled scowl on his face. Kratos is on a rampage, bent on revenge, because one of the gods tricked him into killing his family. He has a flaming bow and arrow, some claws he won from Hades, a long blue sword, and two big blades, and every time he whirls around—and he whirls a lot, because that's how he fights—he's slashing at something. If he slashes well, the words "Brutal Kill!" come onscreen. Once, he runs into a toga-wearing civilian on a window ledge of Olympus. "Curse the gods and their war," the civilian says, quite sensibly, weeping. "My home—everything I own—destroyed!" Kratos knocks the civilian's head against the wall and tosses him down the mountain.
This game isn't satire. It's a slasher movie over which you have control. It uses the Greek stories to trick you, or your parents (few families abide by the rating system), into tolerating a level of participatory gore that would be otherwise impossible in a mass-market entertainment. You think it must be O.K. to make your hero, Kratos, slowly tear off someone's head by whanging away on the O button because the someone is a Greek god and everyone knows that Greek myths are dark, brutal, and Oedipal. It's all in the name of classical culture, isn't it? No—it's a trick.
Even so, God of War III has visual astonishments in almost every scene. You walk around on Gaia's gigantic rocky body. You see her giant stony breast. You climb into her chest cavity and see her stony heart beating. You cut her wrist so that she falls away. The game, to a surprising degree, is about hacking away at half-naked women, or naked half-women. Whenever you see female breasts, you have a pretty good idea that the breasted person is going to die horribly, and soon. God of War III is a confused confection, and the brilliant, smiley, jokey designers who made it should hang their claws in shame for so misdirecting their obvious talents.
The last big game I played was a Western called Red Dead Redemption, made by Rockstar, the people who created Grand Theft Auto. I bought it on its release day, May 19, 2010. You are John Marston, a polite whoreson cowboy with virtuous instincts who has done bad things in the past. John is handy with a lasso and he has dirty hair, as does everyone in the game. He collects medicinal herbs like feverfew, he keeps cows from panicking in a storm and running off a cliff, he shoots and skins skunks, wolves, bears, raccoons, vultures, and coyotes—"Ugh, what were you eating?" he mutters to the dead coyote as blood splatters on the screen—and he travels the dry borderlands of Texas and Mexico helping or hurting innocent people: your choice. When he loots a bounty hunter's corpse, he says, "This ain't nice, I know." A kind woman named Bonnie tries to draw him out, but he's not chatty. "You are being deliberately obscure as a substitute for having a personality," Bonnie says, as she and John canter around her ranch on horseback.
You kill and you die in Red Dead Redemption, of course—with "dead eye" aiming, you can queue up several shots in slow motion, while on horseback—and when you die the word "DEAD" appears on the screen in fat red cracked letters. But after an exhausting day of shooting and skinning and looting and dying comes the real greatness of this game: you stand outside, off the trail, near Hanging Rock, utterly alone, in the cool, insect-chirping enormity of the scrublands, feeling remorse for your many crimes, with a gigantic predawn moon silvering the cacti and a bounty of several hundred dollars on your head. A map says there's treasure to be found nearby, and that will happen in time, but the best treasure of all is early sunrise. Red Dead Redemption has some of the finest dawns and dusks in all of moving pictures. Albert Bierstadt couldn't make morning light look this good. When you do eventually wander back into town, a prostitute pipes up, "I can't stand to see a man walking around town with such a dry pecker. Can I help?"
So those were the games I tried. They showed me many sights I'm glad I've seen, and some I wish I hadn't seen. I liked Uncharted 2 best, but Red Dead Redemption had the prettiest clouds and hootiest owls, and the taciturn Modern Warfare 2 had the deepest moral snowdrifts. My son has been trying out Crackdown 2, where you leap around a city shooting mutant freaks and collecting energy from green orbs. But he's playing less now; he's waiting for September's release of Halo: Reach, which will let players construct intricately ramped battle structures that hang out over rocky coastlines. I think it's time for me to take a break. No war, no gods, no bounties, no kill chains, no vengeance. No convoys in Afghanistan. Just end it. Maybe I'll try a game like Flower, for the PlayStation 3, which is a sort of motocross game for wind and petals. Or even go outside, with my pants legs tucked into my socks so that the midsummer ticks don't crawl up my legs. I miss grass. ♦


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An image of a child playing with blocks.
...on a big future with the LoneStar 529 Plan, a tax-advantaged way to save for tuition and other qualified college expenses. Sponsored by the state of Texas, the Plan makes it easy to save by offering professional management, low fees, and a wide range of investment options.

subset: commoncrawl


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The Pittsburgh Steelers will celebrate their 80th season in 2012. They won't do it in dull threads.
|Isaac Redman models Pittsburgh's new (well, old) threads. (Pittsburgh Steelers)
The team pulled back the curtain on its throwback uniforms during a Tuesday news conference at Heinz Fielday.
These aren't your father's Steelers, but they might be your grandfather's.
The throwbacks recall a design last worn during the 1934 season. Pittsburgh's team was called the Pirates back then, and that '34 team went 2-10, but they looked good interesting doing it.
"We wanted to use a jersey that we wore early in our history as we celebrate our 80th season," Steelers president Art Rooney II told the team's official website. "We have never used those jerseys since the 1934 season, and I think our fans will be excited to see our players wear them in action this year."
Running back Isaac Redman was on hand to show off the new look, featuring black-and-gold-striped jerseys with matching socks.
Reaction to jerseys is mixed -- Steelers linebacker James Harrison tweeted "it's 2012 now though, so send them back!!!" -- but we like the look. At the very least, we're warming up to it. The wild, frenzied bee vibe means trouble for the AFC North. Look out, Joe Flacco.


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Wordless (nearly) Wednesday - Spice
This the front and back of a photo in my mother's boxes of photos. Spice was our family farm dog, for many, many years - during the years we were going through high school and leaving home. I'd been gone six years, the two or three youngest of we five boys would still have been at home.
Mom's writing on the back, of this photo:
Families are Forever! ;-)


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Automate maintenance, safety and environmental tasks
Equipment failures, accidents and environmental issues can be caused by a lack of visibility to your non-instrumented assets or undetected problems during visual inspections.
SolutionThe Mobile Workforce and Decision Support System is a configurable software application and rugged mobile hardware solution that enable workflow, data collection and general task management for plant operations, maintenance management, production tracking and compliance applications.
CapabilityAutomate inspections rounds and precisely follow the requirements according to corporate standards and regulators for safety, maintenance and environmental inspections.
- Proper and automatic integration with upper layer software (including ERP)
- Time stamping
- Trigger special procedures Integration with measurement devices (IR thermometer)
- Integration with barcode and RFID
- Advanced functionalities


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I received a few requests for me to make a tutorial that had something to do with Mother's Day. Now since mothers are considered the root of all families, I decided that it would be nice to make a lesson on what was asked of me. So today we will be learning "how to draw Mothers Day flowers", step by step. One of the main things that mothers get for their special day is a bouquet of flowers. They come in any style which is usually picked out by the individual getting the flowers. Some mothers have favorite flowers like roses, orchids, lilies, and even carnations. I chose to make a simple bouquet of tulips because that is my mother's favorite flower. Drawing Mother's Day flowers is going to be super fun because you can add any type of bloom you want. Since tulips are not normally long stem flowers, the paper that they are wrapped in is closed off at the end. If you plan on drawing roses, or anything else that has long stems, all you have to do is draw the stems from the bottom of the wrap. I guess I said enough, Mother's Day is tomorrow which is May 13th. Have a wonderful Mother's Day, and remember to write "I love you mom" inside of your cards.
DragoArt members upload artwork and drawing tutorials! They are also allowed to leave comments on tutorials, profiles, etc. Many more features, as well; it's way better than just being a boring guest! Register Now!


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Every two weeks we publish a new long-form essay which seeks to offer insight and reflection upon public domain works and the oft overlooked histories which surround them. You'll find pieces on a wide and eclectic range of subjects – from a history of the smile in portraiture to the case of the woman who claimed to give birth to rabbits. Our contributors are drawn from an equally varied pool, from leading writers and scholars – such as Julian Barnes and Jack Zipes – to history and literature PhD students working with fascinating material and seeking an outlet for their more unusual finds. If you'd like to submit (or if you simply have an idea for a good subject) then please visit our submissions page, we'd love to hear from you.
Want the essays off the screen and onto your bookshelf? Then look no further than our "Selected Essays" series.
See here for more info.


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Cupertino Electric, Inc. recently announced that it has expanded its data center operations with a new office in Prineville, Ore., and the addition of project executive and industry veteran Michael Coleman. With more than five million square feet of data center floor design experience and national recognition for data center construction innovation, CEI's business has steadily grown in the last year, despite the economic downturn.
"While we have long engineered and constructed data centers in the Pacific Northwest for industry-leading clients, our new office enables us to extend our offerings for current and future data center customers who rely on us to meet their complex electrical needs," said John Boncher, Cupertino Electric's president and CEO. "Oregon's business climate, weather and abundant natural resources make Prineville a great location for our fifth United States-based office. We look forward to establishing an even greater connection with the local Prineville community."
The growth of Cupertino Electric and its established data center division is due in large part to the addition of new customers with complicated project needs throughout the United States. Most recently, Cupertino Electric completed a three-month, fast-track, Tier III data center spanning 110,000 square-feet in San Antonio for colocation services provider CyrusOne.
Mike Coleman has more than 23 years of engineering and construction experience, with 10 of those years focused on design/build mission critical facilities. For the last decade, he has immersed himself in data center design and construction. In addition to a number of successful mission-critical projects for some of the world's largest software and technology companies, Coleman brings modular data center experience and proven leadership skills to his role at CEI. Prior to joining CEI, Coleman served as mission critical group president of a national electrical contractor based in Seattle, Washington. He completed an electrical apprenticeship early in his career, attended Loyola University in Chicago and is a LEED Accredited Professional (BD+C).


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LEOMINSTER — A Leominster police officer found dead in his home Tuesday died of an apparent self-inflicted gunshot wound, according to authorities. Two days earlier, the officer was involved in a serious car crash.
Officer Christopher L. Asmar was found dead in his home at 88 Rumbrook Road following a 911 call at 11:15 a.m. Tuesday, according to Timothy J. Connolly, spokesman for District Attorney Joseph D. Early Jr.
At the time, state police had opened an investigation into a serious rollover accident involving Officer Asmar. The crash occurred early Sunday.
Mr. Connolly said Officer Asmar was driving a 2000 Volkswagen Passat north on Day Street when the car crossed a double yellow line. Officer Asmar apparently over-corrected, and the car spun through the intersection at Joslin Street and hit a curb and a utility pole before rolling onto its roof, Mr. Connolly said.
Officer Asmar and two passengers were taken to area hospitals with non-life-threatening injuries.
The district attorney's office was notified of the accident at about 3 a.m. Sunday. Two days later, the officer was found dead by fellow Leominster police officers.
Police Chief Robert Healey said Wednesday he could not comment further on the circumstances of the officer's death.
Officer Asmar had been on the Leominster Police Department for less than a year.
"He earned the respect and love of his colleagues," Chief Healey said. "Thee devastation here is he had a tremendous future."
Chief Healey said the department's four-member critical incident stress team has been working with officers in dealing with the loss of their friend and colleague. They were at the scene when Officer Asmar was found dead and will continue to work with the department the next couple of days.
"We'll band together and pull together," he said.
Chief Healey said when Leominster Police Sgt. Richard Kinney, the department's accident reconstruction specialist, went to the accident scene Sunday, he decided to call in state police because of the complexity of the situation in which a police officer was involved and others were injured.
Chief Healey said the department is focusing on the loss of a good young officer.
"Right now we don't have to know the whys, we have to deal with the loss," he said.
Contact George Barnes at email@example.com. Follow him on Twitter @georgebarnesTG


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Senora C Christmas Character Not a Threat to Taos
I Portray a Christmas Character (Akin to Mrs. Claus), Senora C, at Christmas Time.
I am a Professional Christmas Character Portrayer.
What disappointed me when I attended the Taos Parade, was the very Negative Reaction that myself and my Entourage recieved at the Parade.
I may be new to this whole Professional Christmas thing, but my Character is Not a Threat to Taos, to our Community, nor to any other Clauses.
I have a great deal of Respect for any other Clauses and enjoy visiting with them on a Professional basis.
This, along with Product Sales, Family and Historical Research Work, Spiritual and Paranormal Work and Psychic Work (I am a Medium), comprise the majority of my Living.
I don't ask for much because I Never expect much, but would it be too much to ask to be shown a little Respect, especially during Parades?
Last 4th of July, I was Grabbed at by a Drunken woman at the Seco 4th of July Parade and this year, someone did something incredibly Stupid and Dangerous; they ran alongside my Float and stuck a Camera in my Face.
This is Clearly an Ethics, Privacy, Decency and even a Safety Issue that should be addressed.
I have to admit, that made me more than a little Nervous.
This is Not my idea of being shown an ounce of Respect.
If someone is going to take my Picture like that or wants to talk to me, PLEASE save it for After the Parade, ask my Permission (a little Common Courtesy goes a Long way) and I would be more than Happy to accomodate you at that time.
I noticed with a greater degree of Accuracy, Snide Remarks, Laughter, Snickering and general Growliness and Fussing.
People even allowed their small Children to run up to me and yell Epithets in my face.
If this is the kind of Treatment I am going to recieve, simply as a Parade Participant, I am inclined to go elsewhere and attend another Community's Parade, where maybe we can get a little more decency and Respectful treatment.
All I am trying to do, is to get my Name out there, so I can get a few more Paying Gigs, to help support my Family.
This has Nothing to do with anyone else, but with myself and the Job I am trying to accomplish.
If I cannot be allowed to make and earn a Living here, I will be forced to go elsewhere, (No - No One will force me to Move House again, I Won't go and Hell Yes, I will Fight); to do so, regardless of whether or not I can Financially afford to do so.
People here complain about the Lack of Commerce, but then won't do anything to make that happen, because they are too afraid of the Ultra Liberal Crazy Lefties that control this County.
Well, I am Not afraid of them. I Will make a Living here.
I am willing to offer my Services as Senora C at the Holidays, if the City of Taos will accept it.
I come complete with my own Costuming, Props and I can do Any Location.
My Schedule is Flexible.
I charge a Reasonable "Per Hour" Fee, Plus Contract.
You can Book me several ways at your Convenience; In Person, By Phone, by E Mail, via Facebook, or via my Website.
If you see me in Town, come up to me and we can talk Business.
I don't mind that.
I may Not be Santa Claus, but am next best thing, in lieu of.
We Santas, from what I hear tell, are stretched thin this year. There is more demand than what is able to go around.
I hope to fill some Gaps.
I can either appear in lieu of or can assist other Santas for most any Event.
I do know for a Fact, that Senora C is Not a Threat to Taos.
Think on this a bit, if you will.
M. Bryan
a.k.a. Senora C
Arroyo Seco, NM
My Letter to Taos News in protest of Poor Treatment - Christ
Let us know your Christmas thoughts, preparations and details!
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My Letter to Taos News in protest of Poor Treatment - Christ
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Summit County Community Notes, 4-25-2013
Summit Youth Baseball & Softball (SYBS) registration ends on Sunday. Register now at http://www.summitbaseball.com. SYBS is for boys and girls ages 4-14. New this year is an Indoor facility with several batting cages that all players will be able to use. Register now and come join the fun. Questions, call 262-5778.
Please join us for the brain injury support group from 5:30-6:30 p.m. tonight at St. Anthony Summit Medical Center, on the first floor in the classrooms. We will be having a guest speaker, Janet Wolfson, counselor intern with the Colorado Department of Human Services. Her presentation is titled "Learn how the Division of Vocational Rehabilitation with the Colorado Department of Human Services can assist you after a brain injury." For more information, please contact Kim Ramey, director of PT/OT/ST, at (970) 668-6980 in the therapy department at St. Anthony Summit Medical Center/Avalanche PT and Sports Rehabilitation.
Join the Family & Intercultural Resource Center (FIRC) for Dialogue Over Dinner tonight. The topic "Cyber Safety for Adolescents" will be presented by the Breckenridge Police Department from 5:30-7:30 p.m. at the Summit Middle School. Learn about Internet scams, social-media safety for your family and current cyber-safety issues for adolescents. The event is free and includes dinner and child care. Please RSVP with Kerri at FIRC, (970) 262-3888 ext. 330 or email email@example.com.
Parents who would like to visit Summit County Preschool for summer and fall enrollment are invited to an enrollment open house from 10 a.m. to noon and 3-5 p.m. today. Stop in during those times to visit classrooms, meet teachers and complete paperwork for enrollment. Refreshments will be provided and questions will be answered. Summit County Preschool is located at 70 W. Main St. in Frisco and can be reached by phone at (970) 668-5508 or online at http://www.summitcountypreschool.com.
Join The Summit Foundation on Friday for a workshop and lunch from noon to 4:30 p.m. at the Fremont Room of the Summit Community and Senior Center in Frisco. Megan Ledin, executive director of the Grand Foundation, will lead this informative workshop regarding financial basics for nonprofits. Topics will include balance sheets, profit and loss statements, budgets, annual reports and grant management. The cost is $25, including lunch. To register, please contact Wanda at (970) 453-5970.
The Peak School, Summit County's independent nonprofit school for middle and high school students, will hold an open house from 9-11 a.m. on Friday, April 26, at 103 S. Harris in Breckenridge. All interested families and students are encouraged to attend anytime between 9 and 11 a.m. to learn more about The Peak School's unique academic program and see Peak in action! The open house will give visitors a chance to meet teachers and students, and view classes. The April 26 open house will be held at the current Peak School building at 103 S. Harris in Breckenridge. Beginning in August 2013, The Peak School will be located on Main Street in Frisco. The Peak School provides academic rigor, an engaged student community, energetic teachers, Chinese, Spanish, STEM, outdoor education and all core classes along with small class sizes of 8-16 students and a student teacher ratio of 7:1.
Lake Dillon Preschool would like to thank all of the sponsors, vendors, volunteers and guests for their support of our 7th annual Ladies Night Out fundraising event. Thanks to your help, Lake Dillon Preschool will continue to be a high quality early learning center for the children in our community. We couldn't do it without you! A special thanks to our sponsors: Affordable Art & Framing, Alpine Bank, Always Mountain Time, Buffalo Mountain Builders, Connelly Tile, Corpus Sanus Spa, Creative Cabinetry, Ebert Children's Clinic, Grand Lodge & Spa, Land Title, Mountain Managers, Quandt & Snow, RSN, Stewart Title, Stork & Bear, The Klug Law Firm, Tiger Home Inspections, Vista Auto Group, Wildernest Liquor.
Start a dialogue, stay on topic and be civil.
If you don't follow the rules, your comment may be deleted.


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Brooklyn Borough President Marty Markowitz, who has grumbled about running for mayor, was introduced before his State of the Borough speech last night by Christine Quinn, a much-discussed–but undeclared–mayoral candidate.
What was that like?
"Listen, we're both professionals," Markowitz told me last night. "I was very thrilled and honored that she was here. She's a superb public official and I'm honored that she's here. And I don't know whether or not we'll be competitors or not. I don't know. If we're competitors, I'm sure the same warm relationship we've enjoyed, we'll continue to enjoy."
Markowitz ended his approximately 90-minute speech by pulling out a Magic Eight Ball, and telling the audience it may help decide what to do when he's term-limited out of office in 2009. While I was speaking with Markowitz after the address, State Senator Kevin Parker gestured to the Eight Ball and said, "Does that thing say anything about us taking over the State Senate?"
I asked Markowitz if he would ever think of running for a State Senate seat again (he served for in that legislative body for more than twenty years).
"Nah, never. You don't go back," he said.


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Make the shift from fine to fabulous! Hip, simple, fabulous recipes and healthy inspiration for every day.
Clea Shannon is a Board Certified Wellness Coach (AADP), Founder of Live Inspired Today, a web-based wellness company and the creator of Hip, Simple, Fabulous™ recipes and life-changing wellness advice on her award-winning blog www.CleaShannon.com.
Clea is a shining example of someone who is thriving with an auto immune disease. As an International Wellness Coach and successful entrepreneur, Clea has turned her own health crisis into a personal and professional triumph. It was her journey to health that compelled Clea to help others navigate their own health issues and turn these challenges into powerful, life-changing opportunities. Her experiences shaped Clea's philosophy that it's never too late to switch paths or change directions and that small, consistent changes create big, lasting results.
As a graduate of Stanford University, Clea went on to become a Senior Product Designer for NIKE, Nissan and branding powerhouse, Ziba Design. While collaborating with such diverse client companies as FedEx, Whirlpool and KitchenAid, Clea identified strategic opportunities and created powerful solutions with lasting, high-impact benefits. As a collegiate athlete on the Stanford women's lacrosse team, Clea experienced the powerful benefits of regular exercise and the effects of nutrition and lifestyle on optimal performance.
Her professional turning point came when Clea's own health diagnosis required that she make profound changes to her diet and lifestyle. Empowered by her transformation, Clea shifted gears to run a thriving yoga studio well-known for its dynamic classes and transformative workshops. She became well-known for establishing deep connections with her clients and for her ability to help them achieve their goals and ultimately change the trajectory of their health.
Hungry for more, Clea studied with leading experts in nutrition and wellness at the world-renowned Institute for Integrative Nutrition (IIN) in New York City. Her life's work was founded on her deep passion for helping people transform their lives through nutrition and daily lifestyle changes. Today she applies these tools and experiences towards her wellness coaching, collaborating with highly successful individuals, professional athletes and corporate leaders from around the world to achieve their personal goals, feel their best and perform at their highest potential.
Clea specializes in designing a Personalized Wellness Program tailored to your specifics needs to support positive changes in your body, mind and spirit and to resolve chronic health issues. Instead of quick fixes, Clea offers clients a wellness lifestyle based on her customized blend of adaptive fitness, functional nutrition and inspirational leadership.Clea's unique tools have helped her clients to achieve their goals, including weight loss, immune system support, optimal performance and beauty from the inside out. By establishing daily rituals and providing step-by-step instructions for Hip, Simple, Fabulous™ meals, Clea successfully creates an achievable lifestyle in which ANYONE can Live Inspired Today and every day.
Clea is recognized nationally as a Health Coach Advocate for Celiac Disease and an Ambassador for IIN. In 2012, Clea received the prestigious Health Leadership Award. She is regularly featured on radio, television and webinar programs and enjoys speaking to women's groups nationwide. She shares her step-by-step tips for making "hip, simple, fabulous" meals in minutes and establishing daily rituals during her engaging, high-energy workshops. In addition, recipes for Clea's Hip, Simple, Fabulous™ dishes are frequently published in magazines such as Edible and Dining Out.
Clea is passionate about motherhood, writing Hip, Simple, Fabulous™ articles, cooking with her family, practicing yoga, growing edibles in her garden, traveling, and coaching. A Colorado native, she now lives in San Diego, California, with her daughter. Learn more about Clea and her unique approach to supporting you to achieve your goals. Visitwww.cleashannon.com. Clea can always be reached at: email@example.com.
By Appointment | , San Diego, CA


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Earthcomber: Finding Alternative Fuel on Your Phone
Alternative fuels are far from ubiquitous--on the other hand, for better or worse, cellphones are. EcoGeek has the scoop on Earth Comber, an app designed to run on any phone with a Web connection, which can help clue you in to the nearest provider of BioDiesel, CNG (compressed natural gas), E85 (Ethanol), Hydrogen, and Electric (hookups to recharge electric cars and hybrids).
The app is a free download, now works with iPhone, and provides locations for various other services like restaurants, movies, and shopping.


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Part of National Museums Liverpool
Also in this section…?
Multi-media installation by Romuald Hazoumé marking the bicentenary of the abolition of the British slave trade
4 August to 2 September 2007
Please note that this display has now closed
Detail of mask from artwork. © 1997-2005 Romuald Hazoumé. Photo: Benedict Johnson.
The immersive multi-media installation 'La Bouche du Roi' was displayed at Merseyside Maritime Museum as part of the year-long events programme to commemorate the anniversary of the abolition of the British slave trade in 1807.
Literally translated, the title means 'the mouth of the King' and refers to the port in Benin from which many slaves were transported. Benin-born artist Romuald Hazoumé created the artwork between 1997 and 2005 using a number of significant elements, each with its own relevance to the slave trade.
The main body of the artwork consists of 304 'masks' made from plastic petrol cans arranged in the shape of a slave ship. Every petrol can mask represents a living person with a name, a voice and beliefs. In the installation you can hear them calling out in the languages of Benin. The broken masks represent people who died during the voyage of a slave ship across the Atlantic, which could take eight weeks.
Other elements include empty Liverpool-brewed gin bottles, cowrie shells, spices and mirrors, as examples of goods taken to African countries by Europeans to barter for slaves. Haunting sounds and evocative smells emanate from the piece providing a powerful experience.
The arrangement of the petrol can masks refers to the suggested positioning of slaves shown in abolitionist propaganda from 1788, following a decision by Parliament to restrict the number of Africans that a ship could carry across the Atlantic. The campaign featured a diagram of the Liverpool owned slave ship Brookes carrying 454 Africans, which was its regulated number. Abolitionists used this image to expose the appallingly cramped conditions below deck.
The Brookes sailed in 1788 from Liverpool to the Gold Coast in West Africa, then across to the West Indies carrying not the regulatory 454, but a staggering 609 enslaved Africans. The journey took 49 days, during which 19 Africans perished.
'La Bouche du Roi', seen from above. © 1997-2005 Romuald Hazoumé. Photo: Benedict Johnson.
'La Bouche du Roi' toured to five venues through the British Museum's Partnership UK programme. The tour was funded by Arts Council England with additional support through the generosity of the Dorset Foundation.
The acquisition of 'La Bouche Du Roi' for the British Museum was supported by the British Museum Friends and The Art Fund.
Partnership UK is the strategic framework for the British Museum's programme of engagement with audiences throughout the country. The Dorset Foundation has supported the British Museum's touring programme since 2003.
Arts Council England is the national development agency for the arts in England that aims to put the arts at the heart of national life and people at the heart of arts.
'La Bouche du Roi' was at Merseyside Maritime Museum as part of a year long programme of events to celebrate the bicentenary of the abolition of the slave trade at National Museums Liverpool.
Romuald Hazoumé was born in Porto Novo, Republic of Benin in 1962, where he continues to live and work. Hazoumé is of Yoruba ancestry and was raised in a Catholic family. He wanted to dedicate himself to a medical career, then contemplated a career as a professional sportsman before turning full time to art in the early 1980s. He has recently collaborated in founding a gallery and cultural centre, the Foundation Zinsou in Cotonou, Benin with the specific aim of promoting contemporary African and world art.
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© Copyright 2019


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$1,610.00 AUD ex. GST
Or, lease over 36 months for:$45.77 ex GST per month.All figures are indicative and pending credit approval. Contact us for a quote.
Meraki MS250-48LP Enterprise License and Support, 5 Year
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Races: bullpen and otherwise
Lots of live batting practice again at Blue Jays' camp today. One pitcher to take the mound was right-hander Jason Frasor, who promptly did a number on the bat of young slugger Travis Snider.
Frasor broke Snider's bat at the handle, but the strip of lumber remained together. Snider looked the ruined stick, shrugged and stepped back into the batter's box. It wasn't about to stop him from trying to belt a mammoth home run with a broken bat.
Or, not. He just wanted to stay in there to track pitches.
After coming out of the batting cage, Snider laughed when someone mentioned the broken bat.
"Hey, at this point, just making contact is a good thing, right?" he replied.
Shoot. The way Frasor pitched last year, and how he's looked this spring, with the help of that changeup-splitter hybrid he discovered last year, making contact against the righty is definitely a good start. Frasor is now starting to really hone is location with that new pitch.
"He's really starting to command it," pitching coach Bruce Walton said. "Hitters are going to have to start swinging at it, because it's going to be a strike."
After the day's workout, Blue Jays manager Cito Gaston noted that Frasor, lefty Scott Downs and newly-signed Kevin Gregg are the only relievers who are assured jobs in the Opening Day bullpen. "The rest of it's open," said Gaston.
That has pretty much been the assumption to this point, but Gaston made it official. Gaston likes Josh Roenicke, Shawn Camp and Jesse Carlson, but said they need to earn their way onto the roster just like everybody else.
While discussing the bullpen, Gaston also noted that Carlson was pitching through an injury last season. The manager said the lefty had a right shoulder issue that bugged him during the year, adding that it might have played a role in Carlson's struggles at times.
BIRD FEED: Starters for the first three Grapefruit League games will be lefty Ricky Romero, Marc Rzepczynski and Brandon Morrow, respectively. Dana Eveland and Roenicke will also appear in the opener on Wednesday, while Brett Cecil and Kyle Drabek are slated to follow Rzepczzynski on Thursday. Also on Friday, Brad Mills will start a "B" game against Philly. … For those who may have missed it, righty Dustin McGowan threw in a live BP session on Sunday. A few days earlier, Walton said McGowan was not scheduled to take part in that activity. The Jays checked with McGowan and decided to allow him to take that step.
HEADS UP! During a live batting practice session on Monday, Joey Gathright sent the first pitch he saw from Morrow slicing foul over the left field fence. The baseball headed at a frightening angle into the bullpen, where pitchers were throwing off the mounds. A few people yelled and a calm reply came from the bullpen, "Got it!" Taking a break between pitches, reliever Jeremy Accardo reached up and caught the line drive on a fly.
CLUBHOUSE CONFIDENTAIL: The Quote of the Day from the daily schedule sheet on Monday read, "Life is like a train, you expect delays from time to time, but not a derailment." — Willie Stargell. … Scott Richmond (native of North Vancouver) made a "gold" medal in honor of the USA vs. Canada gold medal game. It was tin foil, spray painted yellow (he found the paint in a maintenance shed), forged into a round medallion and hanging from a Baseball Canada lanyard. Before the end of the day, the medal had been destroyed by one of Richmond's teammates. The pitcher also left the clubhouse wearing his Team Canada baseball hat and jersey.
courtesy of Getty images
Richmond with his "gold" medal
MARATHON UPDATE: For anyone wondering, I set a new personal best on Sunday at the Gasparilla Distance Classic in Tampa, my fourth career marathon. I finished the 26.2-mile race in 3:43:45, shaving more than 20 minutes off my previous best. In my age group (25-29), I ranked 30th out of 104. I was 280th out of 1,236 men and 346th out of 2,090 finishers overall. The course was awesome and the weather was perfect.
For complete Blue Jays coverage this spring, make sure you're reading bluejays.com and following me on Twitter at @MLBastian. You can also find spring photos on TwitPic.com.
6 Comments
Congrats on the run! And whoever tore up the medal should man up 😛
26.2-mile race in 3:43:45, wow, I think I'd be happy doing a mile or two in that time. Well done. Nice to see we have a loose clubhouse. I suspect sooner or later someone will leak the name of the culprit to Richmond and justice will be delivered by Richmond. lol
He just wanted to stay in "there" to track pitches.
Yikes. Bad typo. Fixed…
We've got your 6, JB. Keep the great pics coming.
They're just jealous Canada is better. At everything.


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WEadership: We Are All Leaders Now
This post, authored by Kristin Wolff and Vinz Koller, was originally published on the Monitor Insitute's WorkingWikily blog, September 20, 2011.
"As of 2008, the war for good jobs has trumped all other
leadership activities […] The lack of good jobs will become the root
cause of almost all world problems that America and other countries will
Jim Clifton, Gallup Management Journal (September 2011)
"Jobs Wanted." While the jobs bill (America's Jobs Act) commands the attention of elected officials in our nation's capitol, state and local leaders have struggled with employment issues for decades. They know there is no single solution because there is no single problem.
Most communities face some combination of the following:
- Too few jobs (especially those offering health insurance and family-sustaining wages)
- Skills gaps among applicants competing for good jobs that do exist and those in emerging industries
- Young workers having difficulty making the leap from job to career (or from school to job)
- Older experienced workers who cannot afford to retire or simply want to remain engaged but in different roles than they play today
- Labor markets that lack transparency (e.g., applicants submit hundreds of resumes into "black holes")
- Persistent poverty, especially among communities of color, which limits access to job
opportunities and to the social networks that help people advance
- Overcrowded and underfunded public schools and institutions of higher education struggle to cultivate the talents of all of their students
- Ongoing economic shocks—not just unanticipated layoffs, but also natural and weather-related disasters of which there have been 83 in 2011 (a record high in any calendar year)


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by Matthew Dalby, sports information graduate assistant
MILLEDEVILLE, Ga. – The Georgia College softball program (10-29, 5-7 PBC) and head coach Jamie Madewell-Grodecki have announced that Senior Day will begin at 5 p.m. Tuesday, April 5 prior to the Bobcats matchup with No. 22 Armstrong Atlantic at the Peeler Complex.
The Bobcats will be recognizing four seniors for their contributions to the softball programs over the last four years.
Those seniors being recognized are outfielders Kati Pickowitz (Keller, Texas) and Lauren Potts (Gray, Ga.), along with infielders Bailey Thompson (Vidalia, Ga.) and Brandie Monroe (Guyton, Ga.).
The Georgia College Department of Athletics, back-to-back winners of the PBC Commissioner's Cup, sponsors 10 varsity athletic programs at the NCAA Division II level. As a Division II program, Bobcat Athletics prides itself on balancing the life of the student-athlete, evidenced by the teams' multiple appearances in post-season competition as well as documented academic success and community-service involvement. Sign up at www.twitter.com/BobcatSports andwww.facebook.com/gcbobcats for up-to-the-minute reports, and visit www.GCBobcats.com for more information, and to nominate your favorite former Bobcats and Colonials to the GC Athletics Hall of Fame.


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Blaine's Jesse Norling (23) is unable to deflect the puck past Champlin Park goaltender Tyler Nelson. Photo by Dave Madsen (www.facebook.com/spbdm)
Could there be a better description of a David versus Goliath matchup in sectional semifinals than Champlin Park going up against Blaine?
The No.4-seeded Rebels finished the regular season 9-13-3.
They played the No. 1-seeded Bengals twice this year and lost by a combined score of 13-1.
"They are just so good and have so much depth," Rebels coach Pat Janostin said. "They just come at you in waves and a lot of times it just doesn't stop."
Blaine flexed its muscle with 47 shots on goal compared to just 19 for Champlin Park.
It had more shots on goal, more power play goals and more quality scoring chance, but the one thing Blaine did not have more of than the Rebels was total goals.
Champlin Park's Michael Borrell works the puck past Blaine's Alex Copa. Photo by Dave Madsen (www.facebook.com/spbdm)
Champlin Park sent shockwaves through the state with a 5-4 upset victory against the Bengals in the Section 5AA semifinals on Wednesday, Feb. 27 at the State Fair Coliseum.
It will take on No. 2-seeded Centennial with a state tournament berth at stake.
"I just can't describe the feeling right now," Rebels' goalie Tyler Nelson said. "It is pretty incredible"
Nelson made 43 saves and is a big factor as to why Champlin Park will have a chance to reach its first state tournament since 1995.
He never had an opportunity to relax as the Bengals kept rolling line after line in the offensive zone, peppering Nelson from every conceivable angle.
"He (Nelson) was just huge," Janostin said. "It wasn't that he only just made one save, but he would come back and make others. He was so big for us because they never gave him a break."
After Joey Lau opened the scoring in the first period to put the Bengals up 1-0 signs started to point in the Rebels favor.
Blaine was attempting to break out of its zone and was going to start that with a pass from the right corner, behind the net and to the other defenseman.
However, the puck hit the referee and went right to Jack Gromek who buried it to tie the score.
"You start to think a little bit if odd things like that are going to continue to happen and maybe tonight would not be our night," Blaine coach Dave Aus said. "The referee came over and said he was sorry and there was nothing that he could do and it wasn't his fault at all. It was just one of those weird things that happen."
On top of Nelson's performance in net Calvin Spencer added two goals, including the game-winning goal on the power play with 51 seconds left.
The Rebels got control in the Bengals zone and Mason VanTuyl fired the puck on net where Spencer was camped out and he was able to redirect it past Blaine goalie Bailey Ketola and sent the Rebels faithful in a frenzy.
"I work on tipping shots a lot in practice," Spencer said. "Get in front of that goalie and when the opportunity comes my way I have to capitalize on it."
Along with the Rebel supporters the players on the ice went into hysteria.
"I did not see the puck go in, but when the light went on and I saw my teammates arms in the air, I was pretty excited," Nelson said. "When we scored with 51 seconds left in the game, I was feeling pretty good about our chances."
His coach wasn't as comfortable.
"I still saw 51 seconds on the clock and I know that give them (Blaine) three or four chances," Janostin said. "They're too good to think you have it all wrapped up with under a minute to go."
Champlin Park found a way to hold off the mighty Bengals in the final seconds.
Leaving many at the Coliseum in shock of what occurred.
For Blaine it was more than just being shocked.
"It's disappointing," Aus said. "Not because of how we played, because we had our chances and their goalie played really well tonight, so you have to give them credit for that.
"It's disappointing because I think this was one of the deepest teams we have had in a long time. Not only did i think we had the team that could get to state, but we were good enough to make a run at the whole thing. That's why this one is so tough."
Depth is about as foreign as you can get when discussing Champlin Park.
Janostin said there were times this season where the Rebels were not able to dress enough players for a junior varsity game.
"We don't have the number that Blaine and some of those other schools have," he said. "We would go into a game and have three or four guys on our JV bench, but those that stuck with our program now have a chance. That is all we wanted at the end was just a chance and right now we have made the most of it."
No. 4-seeded Champlin Park may have sent a shocker through the whole state with its 5-4 victory against No. 1-seeded Blaine in the Section 5AA semifinals on Thursday, Feb. 27 at the State Fair Coliseum.
Calvin Spencer scored the game-winning goal on the power play with 51 seconds left in the third period to propel the Rebels to the Section 5AA championship game.
Spencer also scored with 1 minute, 11 seconds left in the first period and also recorded an assist..
Rebels' goalie Tyler Nelson was under fire all night facing 47 shots, turning away 43 of them. He faced a combined total of 34 in the final two periods.
Blaine took a 1-0 lead early in the first period when Joey Lau buried a rebound after Jesse Norling put a shot on net.
It would end up being one of those games for the Bengals late in the first period.
A Bengal defenseman attempted to make a pass behind the net, but it deflected off of the referee and went right in front of Blaine's net. Bengals' goalie Bailey Ketola was looking the other way, expecting the puck to be with the other defenseman, but Rebels' forward Jack Gromek was right there and buried the shot right away.
Spencer scored his first later in the period, getting a shot through a scrum in front of the Bengals net.
Bryce Plunkett gave the Rebels a 3-1 lead early in the first period, but it was short lived as Ian Sceid scored two power play goals just nine seconds apart to tie the score.
Champlin Park did not back down despite being heavily outshot.
Reese Woods put the Rebels up 4-3 with an unassisted goal on a wrist shot that found the upper corner.
Blaine's Brandon Notermann tied the score when he put in a shot into a wide open net as Nelson fought through traffic in front of the net and eventually lost his balance.
With 1 minute, 52 seconds left in the third Blaine's Zack Wylie was called for tripping and the Rebels went on their first power play.
Spencer would tip in a shot by Mason VanTuyl with 51 seconds left in the third to give Champlin Park a 5-4 lead.
The Bengals pulled Ketola from the net with 35 seconds left in the third, but could not find a way to beat Nelson.
Blaine finishes the season 20-6-1.
Champlin Park advances to the Section 5AA championship game Friday, March 1 at the State Fair Coliseum.
1. Calvin Spencer, Champlin Park
The junior scored two goals and recorded an assist, but his second goal was the biggest one of the season and may have resulted in the biggest upset in the postseason so far. A power play tally with only 51 seconds left in the third. Spencer used his big frame in every facet. Hitting, positioning, long reach, you name it. He came through when the Rebels needed him the most.
2. Ian Scheid, Blaine
A defenseman that is not shy to get in the flow offensively, Scheid tallied two power play goals just nine seconds apart, which tied the score at 3 in the second period. He displayed his comfort in handling the puck not only in the offensive zone, but in the Bengals zone as well. Numerous breakouts were easily constructed because of Scheid's ability to move the puck so well.
3. Tyler Nelson, Champlin Park
He may have let in four goals, but Nelson was under fire all night and faced 47 shots on goal, 34 coming in the final two periods. In a spot where the Rebels needed their goalie to steal a game, Nelson stood tall to the challenge. If he did not control the puck on the initial save, he found ways to get back and make the second one.
Regular Season
Section Playoffs
Regular Season
Section Playoffs
Regular Season
Section Playoffs


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New York Times Public Editor Arthur Brisbane promised that the Times would take "A Hard Look at the President" during the 2012 presidential campaign cycle, while admitting that "the paper basked a bit in the warm glow of Mr. Obama's election in 2008," in his latest column for the Sunday Review.
That admission is nice to hear, but in fact the paper not only celebrated Obama's election, it worked to put him in the White House in the first place, through biased coverage from the likes of Larry Rohter and Carl Hulse. Even other liberal journalists, like Mark Halperin of Time Magazine, saw "extreme bias, extreme pro-Obama coverage." Times Watch found plenty of ammunition for its special campaign report, "Top 10 Lowlights of the New York Times from Campaign 2008."
The Times even raised journalistic eyebrows by throwing a painfully hip Obama-themed Inauguration party for the president that incorporated his famous "O" logo.
After noting that the Times had been unfair to Republican candidate Mitt Romney in a recent article, Brisbane dug up a couple of novel examples of the paper's Obama favoritism, and concluded:
Many critics view The Times as constitutionally unable to address the election in an unbiased fashion. Like a lot of America, it basked a bit in the warm glow of Mr. Obama's election in 2008. The company published a book about the country's first African-American president, "Obama: The Historic Journey." The Times also published a lengthy portrait of him in its Times Topics section on NYTimes.com, yet there's nothing of the kind about George W. Bush or his father.
According to a study by the media scholars Stephen J. Farnsworth and S. Robert Lichter, The Times's coverage of the president's first year in office was significantly more favorable than its first-year coverage of three predecessors who also brought a new party to power in the White House: George W. Bush, Bill Clinton and Ronald Reagan.Writing for the periodical Politics & Policy, the authors were so struck by the findings that they wondered, "Did The Times, perhaps in response to the aggressive efforts by Murdoch's Wall Street Journal to seize market share, decide to tilt more to the left than it had in the past?"
I strongly doubt that. Based on conversations with Times reporters and editors who cover the campaign and Washington, I think they see themselves as aggressive journalists who don't play favorites. Still, a strong current of skepticism holds that the paper skews left. Unfortunately, this is exacerbated by collateral factors -- for example, political views that creep into nonpolitical coverage.
Brisbane provided an example from an angry reader, and Times Watch has documented on plenty of occasions liberal views in ostensibly non-political coverage, at the Masters Golf Tournament, or photos of glaciers in a Beijing art gallery.
Still, Brisbane insisted the Times slant could be overcome:
The warm afterglow of Mr. Obama's election, the collateral effects of liberal-minded feature writers -- these can be overcome by hard-nosed, unbiased political reporting now.
Kathleen Hall Jamieson, director of the Annenberg Public Policy Center at the University of Pennsylvania, is a co-author of "The Obama Victory: How Media, Money, and Message Shaped the 2008 Election." I asked her what she thought The Times should do to wring out bias in its 2012 coverage. Among other things, she said, "Don't play a sex scandal out when you don't have any evidence," a reference to The Times's controversial 2008 article on John McCain's relationship with a lobbyist.
Going forward, she said, The Times should examine Mr. Obama's record and campaign promises; monitor campaign messaging for deception; emphasize substantive policy matters over petty rhetorical combat; scrutinize the newly powerful "super-PAC" groups, and take care not to let polls overdetermine the coverage.
-- Clay Waters is Editor of the MRC's TimesWatch page


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Britain's best known Paralympic athlete, Tanni Grey-Thompson, won her first Olympic medal in the Seoul Games of 1988. In Seoul, at the age of 19 – a mere four years after the start of her athletics career at the Junior National Games for Wales – Tanni took home a bronze medal in the 400m wheelchair. Tanni was born with spina bifida and has used a wheelchair since the age of seven.
Whilst Tanni has a passion for wheelchair basketball she is more widely known for her successes in wheelchair racing in which she holds a massive 16 Paralympic medals.
On top of her Paralympic success, Tanni has taken home 13 World Championship medals. She has broken World Records in the 100 metre and 800 metres and is currently the European and British Record holder for 100m, 200m, 400m and 800m. Tanni has also won the London Wheelchair Marathon on six occasions. She is without doubt one of the most successful British athletes of all time.
Her sporting prowess has also been recognised off the track. In 1992 she was selected as the Times sports woman of the year and in 2000 she was recognised as BBC sports personality of the year. She has been recognised at the Pride of Britain Awards twice, in 2001 for her outstanding sporting achievements and again in 2005 for her part in the successful London 2012 Olympics bid team. Tanni has also been selected for the Queens Honours several times, being made an MBE, OBE and Dame. In 2010 she was appointed to the House of Lords as a cross bench peer.
As a member of the House of Lords, Baroness Grey-Thompson has spoken out against the shocking measures proposed by the coalition's much criticised Welfare Reform Bill. She has been particularly vocal about the potentially negative effect that changes to the Disability Living Allowance would bring about. She is passionately against people with disabilities becoming 'ghettoised'.
Through her spectacular achievements Tanni Grey-Thompson acts as a guiding light in the fight against gender and disability stereotyping. Her high profile success helps to break many of the stigmas associated with disability.
Tanni retired from athletics in 2007. Today Tanni is involved in a number of charities which work to break down the barriers to children to take part in sports. She is Chair of the Commission on the Future of Women's Sport, and was named as an International Inspiration Ambassador in 2009. She is also a coach and works as a sports commentator for the BBC.


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The 2012 Emmy Awards Nominees Announced
The 64th annual Primetime Emmy Awards will be handed out on Sunday, September 23 at the Nokia Theatre in Los Angeles, and broadcast live on ABC.
The nominations were announced by actress Kerry Washington of ABC's Scandal and Jimmy Kimmel, host of ABC's Jimmy Kimmel Live!
Here are the nominees for the 12 leading categories. For a full list of nominees, head over to Emmys.com.
Drama Series
Boardwalk Empire, Breaking Bad, Downtown Abbey, Game of Thrones, Homeland, Mad Men.
Lead Actress in a Drama Series
Kathy Bates, Harry's Law; Glenn Close, Damages; Claire Danes, Homeland; Michelle Dockery, Downtown Abbey; Julianna Margulies, The Good Wife; Elizabeth Moss, Mad Men.
Lead Actor in a Drama Series
Hugh Bonneville, Downton Abbey; Steve Buscemi, Boardwalk Empire; Bryan Cranston, Breaking Bad; Michael C. Hall, Dexter; Damien Lewis, Homeland; Jon Hamm, Mad Men.
Comedy Series
The Big Bang Theory, Curb Your Enthusiasm, Girls, Modern Family, 30 Rock, Veep.
Lead Actress in a Comedy Series
Zoey Deschanel, New Girl; Lena Dunham, Girls; Edie Falco, Nurse Jackie; Tina Fey, 30 Rock; Julia Louis-Dreyfus, Veep; Melissa McCarthy, Mike & Molly; Amy Poehler, Parks and Recreation.
Lead Actor in a Comedy Series
Alec Baldwin, 30 Rock; Don Cheadle, House of Lies; Louis C.K., Louie; Jon Cryer, Two and a Half Men; Larry David, Curb Your Enthusiasm; Jim Parsons, The Big Bang Theory.
Miniseries or Movie
American Horror Story, Game Change, Hatfields & McCoys, Hemingway & Gellhorn, Luther, Sherlock: A Scandal in Belgravia.
Lead Actress in a Miniseries or Movie
Connie Britton, American Horror Story; Ashley Judd, Missing; Nicole Kidman, Hemingway & Gellhorn; Julianne Moore, Game Change; Emma Thompson, The Song of Lunch.
Lead Actor in a Miniseries or Movie
Kevin Costner, Hatfields & McCoys; Benedict Cumberbatch, Sherlock: A Scandal in Belgravia; Idris Elba, Luther; Woody Harrelson, Game Change; Clive Owen, Hemingway & Gellhorn; Bill Paxton, Hatfields & McCoys.
Outstanding Host for a Reality or Reality-Competition Program
Tom Bergeron, Dancing with the Stars; Cat Deeley, So You Think You Can Dance; Phil Keoghan, The Amazing Race; Ryan Seacrest, American Idol; Betty White, Betty White's Off Their Rockers.
Reality-Competition Program
The Amazing Race, Dancing with the Stars, Project Runway, So You Think You Can Dance, Top Chef, The Voice.
Variety Series
The Colbert Report, The Daily Show with Jon Stewart, Jimmy Kimmel Live!, Late Night with Jimmy Fallon, Real Time with Bill Maher.


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September 1, 2013, 6:00 am
Star Trek history: Take a roadtrip to Riverside, Iowa
Most of you have likely never heard of Riverside, Iowa. But to Star Trek fans, the tiny town south of I-80 in eastern Iowa holds special significance.
Riverside is a sleepy little place south of I-80 on the eastern side of Iowa. It is 1.72 sq. mi. and as of 2010, the population was 993. It also holds the distinct honor of being named the future birthplace of Captain James Tiberius Kirk, noted commander of the U.S.S. Enterprise.


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Tommy Harris is the September LCHS Student of the Month
Send a link to a friend
14, 2012]
The Lincoln Community High School
September Senior of the Month is Tommy Harris of Lincoln. His
parents are Tom and Regina Harris.
His school activities have included soccer, basketball, Fellowship
of Christian Athletes, Spanish Club, Math Club and National Honor
Society, among others.
He is active in the community as well,
including volunteer work with Special Olympics, Lincoln Youth Soccer
Clinic, WLB pancake breakfast, Lincoln Christmas Parade and numerous
other volunteer efforts with his church.
He is planning on engineering as a college major.
Logan County Bank congratulates Tommy on his selection as LCHS
Senior of the Month for September.
[to top of second column]
Logan County Bank sponsors the LCHS Senior of the Month/Year
award and scholarship program. Each monthly winner receives a $50
MasterCard gift card from Logan County Bank and is then eligible for
a $1,500 scholarship awarded by the bank, to be used at the college
of their choice.
[Text from file received]
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