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"Look where you're going, not where you've been."
How many times have I said that to the children? And, have I paid attention?
"Do as I say, not as I do," is more like it.
On this second day of the new year, I find myself in a reflective mood. It is easier to think back on the past year than to wonder what the future holds.
Truly, I had a wonderful 2012.
I traveled from one end of the United States to the other, from Maine to Key West, Seattle to Los Angeles, and visited almost all of the national parks in the middle of the country. I saw just enough to realize there was so much to see with many interesting places right here in my backyard.
One element of my tourist trek was a constant: Water.
From the southern waters of the Atlantic Ocean, where the temperatures were warm and inviting, beaches accessible with soft sand, to the rocky shores of New England, where homes perched like bird houses. From Seattle, where I rode to the top of the Space Needle to look down on Tom Hank's houseboat in the harbor, to the heart-stopping ride along the Pacific Coast Highway that rivals the Italian Amalfi Drive for excitement, my favorite times and places involved water.
At Jackson Hole, Wyo., we crowded into rubber rafts, sat on narrow seats wearing oversized life
jackets and went down the Snake River past land belonging to Harrison Ford, through pastures where cows grazed and no man lived, while in the distance, snow-topped Tetons that had so fascinated photographer Ansel Adams, kept watch.
Like my fellow travelers, I love waterfalls, and if there was one around, I wanted to see it.
And, we did.
Some were only drips down a stone wall; others,
like the falls at Multnomah on Washington state's Columbia River are so high, you have to brace yourself and tilt your head all the way back to see it all.
I had flown over the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco Bay, and sailed under it on the S.S. Monterey en route to Hawaii.
But this time, I rode the ferry past this American icon to that controversial island of Alcatraz, which was first a military fort and prison in 1859, then a federal penitentiary for 29 years, and now a national park.
We were lucky.
There was no fog, and sailboats took advantage of the strong wind. When we docked, I looked down into the water, which surged past the ferryboat and saw for myself why it would be difficult, if not impossible, for prisoners to escape by swimming against this powerful current.
On the other side of the country, I rode in a boat similar to the California ferry out to privately-owned House Island in Portland Harbor, Maine.
Like Alcatraz, House Island has a fortification: Fort Scammell, built 51 years earlier in 1808. Both locations are no longer used for their original purposes and are surrounded by frigid water. But whereas Alcatraz is now publicly supported, Fort Scammell is waiting for a buyer who will be able to keep its legend alive for all to visit.
If nothing else, the trips made me understand how people come to our part of the world to savor what we take for granted.
I love telling visitors about where we live, about the uniqueness of our estuaries that challenge naturalists, about the nearby Ashepoo, Combahee and Edisto Rivers Basin to the north and the Savannah Wildlife Conservancy to the south, which is a birder's delight.
And everywhere, we are connected by water, salty, fresh, brackish or tainted brown with tannin or delta mud. And, where we are not joined by nature, man has put his engineering abilities to use.
Look out, 2013, here I come to visit the Panama Canal.
Annelore Harrell lives in Bluffton and can be reached at email@example.com.


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Design Your Dream Home with Design Public and win $250
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I have a confession. I'm in love with Pinterest. I can't stop pinning. I can't help that I find so many PINteresting things over there that I spend all of my spare time on it. I think I may need a PINtervention.
Too many puns?
Anyway, the whole staff here at Design Public has had so much fun with Pinterest in the last few months, we thought we'd launch a contest to bring our favorite peeps into the mix (that's you)! Introducing Design Public's first ever Pin It To Win It Contest!
Interested? Here's how it goes down –
- Create a board on Pinterest titled "Dream Home with Design Public".
- Pin a minimum of 10 things to your board that show us what you'd love to have in your dream home (or what your dream home looks like!).
- At least 5 of the items on your board must come from Design Public (meaning products on our site – not items on our Pinboards. The whole site is your oyster – we have thousands of products. Check it out.) – the rest can come from anywhere you'd like.
- When you're done, fill out this short form to submit a link to your board and you'll be entered to win $250 gift card to Design Public.
That's it. Super simple, and totally fun. Be sure to spread the word – we'd love to see as many boards as possible!
By the way, be sure to check out our very own "Dream Home with Design Public" board for some inspiration to get you started!
And don't forget – the only official way to enter is to submit your link to our form when you're done building your board! Happy Pinning!

subset: commoncrawl


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The Madness Continues: Ann Wright Disinvited to Sail
Introduction by Gilad Atzmon: The adorable solidarity activist Ann Wright, former US Army Colonel and retired official of the U.S. State Department, known for her outspoken opposition to the Iraq War and support of Palestinian rights, is now also subject to Palestinian solidarity internal war.
On her way to meet up with the Swedish Estelle, the next boat to challenge the Israeli blockade, Colonel Wright was called by a board member of the Estelle who ask her to abort the journey. She was disinvited. The explanation was embarrassingly lame - Ann Wright is a member of the new Free Gaza Movement's Board. She supports Greta Berlin.
It didn't take me more than a few minutes to find out that the leader of the current attempt to sail to Gaza is Israeli Jewish activist named Dror Feiler. Feiler is the chairman of the Jews-Only Swedish organization Jews For Israeli Palestinian Peace (JIPF) and the European Jews for Just Peace (EJJP). Once again it is the Jewish activist who decides who should be on board in the Palestinian Solidarity movement. I can't make up my mind whether this is funny or tragic. It is certainly very bad news.
Update: Electronic Intifada's Benjamin Doherty congratulated the Estelle's crew and passengers for cleansing Ann Wright (via Twitter):
Benjamin Doherty @bangpound
.@shiptogazase please transmit my respect to your crew and passengers for holding true to standards and principles. http://j.mp/RxtKkU
I guess that if you really want to grasp what is going on here, you will have to readThe Wandering Who? A Study Of Jewish Identity Politics, Jewish political interest and Jewish hegemony within the Palestinian Solidarity Movement...
The book can be ordered on Amazon.com or Amazon.co.uk
Read Ann Wright's statement:
Statement by Ann Wright on the "Dis-Invitation" of her by the Swedish Boat to Gaza "Estelle" steering committee to be on the boat
Two days ago, on October 13, three hours before I was to board a flight to Europe to meet up with the Swedish boat to Gaza, the "Estelle," the next boat to challenge the Israeli blockade, I was called by a board member of the Estelle who said that because of the furor around Greta Berlin's posting and because I am a member of the new, 2 week old board of the Free Gaza Movement, I was no longer invited to be a passenger on the "Estelle."
The board representative acknowledged that the reason for their invitation to me to be on the "Estelle" was that I am a retired US Army Colonel and former US diplomat who resigned in March, 2003 in opposition to the Iraq war, that I am a vocal critic of Israeli and United States policies on Palestinians and that I have been to Gaza 4 times in the past 3 years, assisted 7 groups to go to Gaza in 2009, helped organize the December, 2009 Gaza Freedom March, was a passenger on the 2010 Gaza Freedom Flotilla, helped organize the 2011 US Boat to Gaza and am an organizer for one of the latest initiatives, Gaza's Ark.
But, because I am a member of the new board of the Free Gaza movement, and despite the fact I, and Greta and all members of the new board have made public statements posted on the Free Gaza Movement's website that neither Greta, nor members of the current or previous board are anti-Semitic, bigoted or racist, the fact that I am on the new Free Gaza board was the reason the board of the "Estelle" was withdrawing the invitation for me to sail on the Estelle due to allegations of anti-Semitism of the Swedish Boat to Gaza by pro-Israelis groups in Sweden.
I am saddened by the decision of the board to withdraw its invitation and I believe it is wrong. All of our projects that have challenged Israeli policies toward Palestinians have been called anti-Semitic by pro-Israeli groups. This is not a new tactic used to scare pro-Palestinian groups.
Phil Weiss and Adam Horowitz in an article posted on Mondoweiss http://mondoweiss.net/2012/10/no-room-for-racism-in-a-movement-working-for-equality-and-freedom.html said – "there is no room for racism in a movement working for equality, justice and freedom for all in Israel/Palestine"---and they are right, but at the same time, there is no room for throwing long-time international activists for Palestine "off the boat," so to speak.
Greta Berlin is not an anti-Semite, a bigot or a racist, and neither am I.
I wish the passengers and crew on the "Estelle" a safe voyage in challenging the Israeli naval blockade of Gaza and call for all who support Palestinians to keep their eyes on the prize—justice, dignity and freedom for Palestinians who are suffering under unjust Israeli policies and actions.
Peace to all and among us all,
Ann Wright


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As lifelong boating enthusiasts ourselves, the entire staff at Lake Keowee Marina shares your love of a great time out on the water. This is why we've put together Lake Keowee's largest full service marina, ready to provide anything and everything you need for an exhilarating experience on the lake and a pleasant stay in Seneca.
For over 30 years, Lake Keowee Marina has been the anchor point for locals and tourists alike, arriving to enjoy the beauty, tranquility and pure fun of South Carolina's gorgeous Lake Keowee. You will find our staff to be incredibly friendly and knowledgeable, and our team of certified mechanics is here to help maintain the integrity of your watercraft all year long. Have questions? Contact us today ? we look forward to meeting you!


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When it comes to security suites, the keyword is balance. These programs have to juggle anti-virus and anti-spyware scanning with PC tuneup tools, online backup, and parental controls, and swath it in an easy-to-use interface that still offers more advanced control for people who want it. Oh, and it can't interfere with your PC's performance much either. While ZoneAlarm Extreme Security offers some unique security features, such as virtualized browsing and hard drive encryption, its ease of use and parental controls could both use improvement.
Installation and Setup
Installing the 111MB program took 1 minute and 9 seconds, one of the shortest times we've seen for a program like this. After this, though, we had to restart, which is common enough with security suite installations, but not something every program requires you to do.
User Interface
Extreme Security's interface isn't confusing but it could use some consolidation: most of the main screen is taken up by three large, glossy boxes denoting firewall security, anti-virus and anti-spyware tools, and browser security. There's also a left-hand pane including these tasks and others, but in a smaller font.
Unfortunately, some features, such as PC Tune-Up and hard drive encryption, appear in a right-hand pane, called Additional Features. When you click on these, a window opens in your browser so that you can download and install these tools separately. These features should come baked in with the original installation, and should appear in the comprehensive list of tasks in the left-hand pane. Moreover, there's no central Settings tab or link on the main page; you'll have to select the feature you want first and then adjust the settings for just that feature.
The stand-out feature in Extreme Security is MyZone, which is hard drive encryption software (also installed separately). The setup involved creating a username and password just for this encryption program, as well as entering our e-mail address; we then had to reenter our e-mail address and password and answer two security questions. Once we finished, we had to restart and boot into a pre-Windows UI where we entered our temporary password and then created a new one. Sound complicated? Well, then we rebooted into Windows, at which point a Wizard prompted us to back up our content for recovery in case of system failure (you'll need a CD, DVD, USB, or hard drive to do this). Note that a pre-Windows log in screen will appear every time you boot your computer.
Since ZoneAlarm is best known for its ForceField virtualization technology, which creates a protected clone of your browser, it's no surprise that virtualization is one ingredient of Extreme Security. The feature, which works with Firefox 2.0 and higher and Internet Explorer 6 and higher, is unique for this class of product, and goes a step beyond other security suites, which might rate sites (ForceField does this too) but not necessarily ward off the negative consequences of users' Web surfing. Extreme Security also includes private browsing, which is like IE8's InPrivate browsing feature in that it doesn't record your history.
Compared to other security suites', Extreme Security's parental controls are weak: all parents can do is block the categories of sites their children can visit (there are 32 in total, and ZoneAlarm is the only vendor to classify "Gay and Lesbian" as a potentially pernicious category). And that's it: you can't block keywords or particular Web sites. You can't restrict usage of certain applications or the Internet at certain times of days or days of the week. There aren't even guidelines for different age ranges.
On the identity protection front, Extreme Security also offers MyVault, for storing sensitive files, as well as free credit bureau monitoring, another unique addition.
Before we installed Extreme Security on our Toshiba Tecra M10, the laptop took 1, 4, 1, and 2 seconds respectively to launch Internet Explorer, iTunes, Google Picasa 2, and Microsoft Word. While running a scan, these numbers rose to 5, 12, 3, and 4 seconds; while the times for Picasa and Word were below the average (5.2 and 5.5 seconds), the amount of time it took to open IE and iTunes were somewhat longer than the average (3.8 and 8.3 seconds).
When you press the Scan button, the ZoneAlarm Extreme Security 2010 will tell you if haven't updated your settings and will instruct you to press OK to look for updates and begin the scan afterward. During the scan there's no progress bar , and you can't opt to shut down the computer automatically when the scan is finished. When we began our scan, we saw a popup in the lower right-hand corner saying a scan was in progress. If you like, you can run game mode, which minimizes alerts (ZoneAlarm warns that this might reduce security, however). According to an independent study by Virus Bulletin, ZoneAlarm offers very strong protection against malware: its rate of 97.8 percent is tied with Symantec's 2008 rating, and creams Trend Micro's 91.3 and McAfee's 93.6.
Once again, you'll have to go to a Web site (the link is on the program's main screen) to download PC Tune-Up, which, as its name suggests, speeds up your computer by cleaning the registry, deleting temporary files, defragging the hard drive, and removing other inefficiencies. It should just install along with the more standard features, such as virus and malware protection. Worse, once you install it, PC Tune-Up opens in a separate window, as a separate program.
The user interface for PC Tune-Up consists of a circle with four steps. You can skip step one, Backup, if you like (or you can begin at any step). Once you click on one of the steps, it'll work like a wizard, complete with "Next" buttons to guide not-so-techie users. It worked fast, too. Only gripe: we wish there were a program that made it easier for low-tech users to remove unnecessary startup programs. We appreciate the before and after graphs you see afterward, illustrating the extent to which your computer's registry was cluttered before, and how clean it is after the scan.
But are these graphs accurate? Our boot time rose an unacceptable 49 seconds. Although almost none of the security suites we tested helped our notebook's boot time, this result was the worst. (The best suite in this regard was McAfee Total Protection 2009, which caused the boot time to drop by 20 seconds).
Online Backup
Extreme Security comes with 2GB of online storage, courtesy of iDrive. Again, you must click a link in the right-hand pane on the main screen to install (or arrive at a download page) for the desktop-based backup client. Then, you have to set up yet another (free) account by giving your name and e-mail address, and creating a username and password. There's also a separate restore tab and icons for syncing, timeline restore, and schedule manager.
At $69.95, ZoneAlarm Extreme Security 2010 brings some one-of-a-kind security tools to the table, including hard drive encryption and the ForceField virtualization technology. However, we recommend paying $10 more for BitDefender Total Security 2010, a lightweight program that combines a better interface with excellent parental controls and malware protection.


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Village of the Damned
Escape from L.A.
They Live
Big Trouble in Little China
Escape from New York
The Ward
Nightmares in Red, White and Blue
Tales From the Script
Going to Pieces: The Rise and Fall of the...
The Fog
Assault on Precinct 13
Memoirs of an Invisible Man
Halloween: Resurrection
All John Carpenter photos
All John Carpenter films
Movies.com, the ultimate source for everything movies, is your destination for new movie trailers, reviews, photos, times, tickets + more! Stay in the know with the latest movie news and cast interviews at Movies.com.
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Security threats explained: Hacktivism & Distributed Denial of Service 'DDoS'
Computerworld Australia examines some of the information security threats facing small businesses and larger enterprises today. We've looked at social engineering and internal negligence and continue the series by speaking to security experts about the problem of hacktivism.
Hacktivism, according to Quest Software, is politically motivated hacking conducted by groups such as Anonymous and LulzSec. For example, in May 2012, Anonymous claimed it had hacked the United States Bureau of Justice Statistics and released 1.7 gigabytes of data including internal emails and database information.
In a statement, the group said it was releasing the data to "spread information, to allow the people to be heard and to know the corruption in their government."
The threat of hacktivism
According to IDC Australia senior market analyst, Vern Hue, while some hacktivists were out to prove a political statement, the majority of hacktivists did not have an intended target or cause, and retrospectively justified the hack once they had success infiltrating a website.
"Hacktivists often seek out for vulnerabilities, most often by means of exploiting a Web application vulnerability on a website," he says. "These threats are very real and scary as these attacks have no logical and predictable trend."
Hue added that every organisation, ranging from governments to enterprises, were vulnerable to the attacks.
IBM Australia security systems business unit executive, Jason Burns, says hacktivism is becoming a threat–not only to organisations but individuals as well– because of the methods used by hacktivists.
"Hacktivists are increasingly resorting to automated password guessing programs, attacks on mobile gadgets and phishing attacks that trick people into downloading viruses or revealing sensitive information," he says. "These attacks pose a serious threat to any organisation."
Sourcefire US vice president of security strategy, Jason Brvenik, likened the hacktivism climate to civilians being the target of warfare.
"Everything and everyone is a target, there are no boundaries and there is no moral code," he says.
Brevenik adds that hacktivism has come to mean criminal use of technology to attack something the hackers don't agree with.
"This hurts ordinary people, damages the perception of the hacktivists, and results in ordinary people being hurt," he says.
Extent of the threat
In order to prove their point, hacktivists are out to either de-face an organisations' webpage or steal valuable data from the server, says IDC's Hue. "Currently, their main form of attack comes in the way of malware and hacking," he says.
"In some cases, hacktivists also launch distributed denial of service [DDoS] attacks in order to bring a webpage down to prove their point."
For the organisation targeted, a DDoS attack would cause a disruption in daily operations and potential financial losses, due to a loss of confidence in the business.
According to IBM's Burns, the attacks can leave a business exposed with sensitive information out in the public domain.
"From an individual perspective, these attacks have a way of manipulating information to make specific individuals look or appear to look bad, when this might not be the case," he says.
Addressing hacktivism
Hacktivism in its proper form is, in theory easily addressed, according to Sourcefire's Brevnik by not making business decisions that challenge the rights of the people.
"This is never as easy as it sounds. As people we make mistakes and don't always see the downstream impacts of our actions," he says.
In addition to designing interal systems that were easily audited and applying appropriate security controls to customer information and intellectual properties, Brevnik added that some adjustments to corporate culture might be needed.
"Develop a corporate culture that values the customer, values their rights, and strives to find the balance between business and people in an acceptable way."
IDC's Hue warns that because anyone can be a target of hacktivists, the best way of addressing hacktivism is to maintain a high level of security fortitude. "The first thing organisations need to do is to perform a network configuration to block the attack by using intrusion detection and prevention systems [IPS]," he says.
According to Hue, the appliances had the ability to detect where the attack is coming from and with the right configuration, automatically block the attack traffic.
"It is also vital that organisations take a proactive step into ensuring that the proper logging is configured in all security devices, so that in the event of an attack, the log data can be examined and handed over to law enforcement agencies," he says.
IBM's Burns says that two areas need to be addressed within organisations to combat possible hacktivism attacks.
The first is to implement a security awareness program. "Education and awareness of security threats throughout any organisation is key to minimising threats and reducing risk," he says. According to Burns, the security policies need to come from C-level executives and be distributed throughout the organisation.
"The policies should also include shareholders and directors of the company, as these attacks can sometimes target individuals," he says.
Once the security policies were in place, the implementation of integrated security products that map back to the policies was essential to reducing the risk of threats.
"All of these elements must be in sync and working together to give organisations a much greater chance of minimising threats," Burns says.
Source: Computerworld


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After videotaped assault, autism group says parents should trust instincts, do research
Police looking for more potential victims of Stephen Jacobs
Autism awareness groups are speaking out after disturbing video of a Wauwatosa therapist assaulting a special needs child went viral.
Stephen Jacobs, 27, a Marquette University dropout, has had access to other children.
Three-year-old Caeden Lowe, a severely autistic child, was seen on a web camera being assaulted by Jacobs, police said.
The boy's parents installed the camera in December after noticing Caeden was not improving from his in-home therapy.
"If I hadn't put a video camera downstairs, we would've never known," Caeden's mother, Stephanie Lowe, said.
Jacobs is now facing felony child abuse charges and has been dismissed from his part-time job as a therapist with Autism Intervention Milwaukee.
In a statement emailed to WISN 12 News from Director Dr. Kathleen Woody, she said, "We completed due diligence background checks, contacted references which were strong, and he successfully completed required training -- all of which gave us no reason whatsoever to be concerned."
WISN 12 News has just learned Jacobs was a therapist with another autism group and volunteered with children at a Wauwatosa elementary school.
Police said they are now in the process of locating more potential victims.
"I would say to trust your instincts; if something seems off, definitely check it out," said Emily Levine, executive director at Autism Society of Wisconsin.
As executive director of the state's largest autism outreach organization, Levine has referred families to Autism Intervention Milwaukee.
Levine said she's never had issues with Autism Intervention Milwaukee in the past but cautions families to do their own research.
"We always encourage people to get references. We require references to be included in our directory, and I would want to see how the provider responds to the situation," Levine said.
The director of Autism Intervention Milwaukee told WISN 12 News now that Jacobs has been fired, it is re-evaluating all their therapists and is reaching out to each client to see if there are any more allegations of abuse.


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Cruise Holidays of Edina
(952) 922-4800
As on any cruise vacation, European cruises offer easy travel between ports, great accommodations and an experienced crew to provide everything you need while you concentrate on new sights and cultures. Still, some aspects of European cruising are different from what you might have experienced before. For example, European ports tend to be relatively close together. If you've been on a Caribbean cruise, you may have enjoyed several days at sea while your ship crossed expanses of water between different island groups. In Europe, many itineraries feature a new port every day. Holland America Line's 12-day Mediterranean cruise visits Barcelona, Spain; Florence, Rome, Naples and Catania, Italy; Nafplion, Katakolon and Corfu, Greece; Dubrovnik, Croatia; and Venice, Italy, not leaving much time for days at sea. With such a busy schedule of port calls, you may want to alternate days when you take a shore excursion with days when you simply take a stroll and enjoy a long lunch in port. Some vacationers are surprised to find that European cruises aren't limited to seaside cities. Some of the great capitals of Europe, such as Rome and Paris, are located inland. Cruise ships will dock as near as possible, then provide ground transportation for a day in the city. Europe also offers an incredible choice of itineraries, usually focused on a specific region. The Eastern Mediterranean includes the Adriatic coast of Italy, Croatia, Greece and Turkey. The Western Mediterranean includes the west coast of Italy, the southern coasts of France and Spain, and islands such as Corsica, Mallorca or Ibiza. Some Western Mediterranean cruises venture further west, to Gibraltar and Portugal. During warmer months, you can cruise Northern Europe. Itinerary choices include Scandinavian capitals like Copenhagen, Denmark; Stockholm, Sweden; and Helsinki, Finland, and Baltic Sea ports such as Tallinn, Estonia, and St. Petersburg, Russia. There are also cruises that focus on the west coast of Norway and its spectacular fjords. You can tour the British Isles of England, Scotland and Ireland on a cruise; or, visit the North Sea ports of Brussels, Belgium; Amsterdam, the Netherlands; and Hamburg, Germany. Some of these cruises also visit Le Havre, France, the port of call for Paris. A cruise of Europe lets you sample a variety of destinations, including some that you may want to revisit in the future on a land-based vacation. For help booking your European cruise, talk with your Cruise Holidays personal cruise expert.


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Discuss the monthly book club selection with snacks at Knitty City. Knitters and non-knitters alike are all welcome. The Knitty City Book Club meets on the second Thursday of each month, 6-8pm.
Can't find a class time that works for you?
We also offer private lessons at $50/hour for the first person + $25/hour for each additional person.
Please call us at 212-787-5896 or email email@example.com to register for our classes.
Materials not included unless specified.
Show: Calendar View / List All / Classes / Free Events / Knitting / Crochet / Spinning / Weaving / Beginner / Intermediate / Advanced / Kids Club / Designer Presentations / Book Club / Charity / Care to Knit / Men's Night / Outside Knitty City
Back to All Events
Earlier Event: October 12Men's Night
Later Event: October 16Crochet Lab


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The inflight cabin wizardry continues to expand in hardware, software and services, and all of it is going faster than ever.
What is in this article?:
- 2011 Cabin Electronics
- OEMS & Apps Aerial View Systems
- Air Partner
- Aircell
- Aircraft Cabin Systems
- ASiQ
- Blue Sky Network
- Custom Control Concepts
- digEcor
- Duncan Aviation
- e.Digital
- EMS Aviation
- Flight Display Systems
- Goodrich Interiors – Cabin Electronic Systems
- Heads Up Technologies
- Honeywell
- IMS Company
- Innotech
- Innovative Advantage
- International Communication Group
- InTheAirNet
- On-Air
- Panasonic Avionics Corp.
- PlaneBill
- Rockwell Collins
- Satcom 1
- Satcom Direct
- Skycast Solutions
- Thales
- Thrane & Thrane
- TrueNorth
- ViaSat
Sometimes it's the simple things that make one realize how quickly technology is morphing our environment. Now there are applications aplenty for business aircraft.
Want to dim the lights? Cool off? Angle that seat back? Change the DVD? Use an app — cabin management system (CMS) makers have them in spades. Need to charter a jet tonight? There's an app for that, too, thanks to London-based Air Charter, which recently announced it has developed an iPhone app for business and leisure travelers interested in flying by private jet.
The new app provides fingertip access to thousands of aircraft worldwide and can be downloaded by searching for "Air Partner" or "private jets" in Apple's iTunes Store. Users can obtain an estimated price based on their chosen one-way or return routing, the number of passengers and travel dates. Search results also display the flight time, plus images and details about the aircraft offered. A GPS airport search facility and a favorite airport save function are optional. The app is free to download and is available in seven key languages.
Speaking of things Apple, at least one air carrier will begin offering iPads to passengers as part of its inflight entertainment (IFE) service. Many cabin electronics OEMs already have or soon will make their IFE offerings as Android-, Apple-, Linux- and Windows-savvy as possible for passengers unwilling to give up their reliance on electronic appendages for the duration of the flight. For this reason, personal electronic devices may hold an edge on seatback IFE. Some of the latest computer games, for example, require "gesture" commands, such as tilting the device, which requires the unit to be equipped with accelerometers and inclinometers — something not typically found in seatback IFE hardware.
Samsung's 10-in. Galaxy Tab or similar tablet computers will be the first to seriously threaten Apple's iPad dominance in the passenger cabin, say industry observers. As evidence, American Airlines chose to replace its current flock of personal entertainment devices (PEDs) in premium cabins on transatlantic and some international flights with 6,000 new Galaxy Tab 10.1 tablets.
Passengers today expect an aircraft cabin system that is on par or better than the digital systems they have in their homes and offices. The industry highlights that follow, as well as the accompanying product and service listings, indicate that the OEMs understand this very well indeed.


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The organisers of MIPTV's Connected Creativity conference have wasted no time in getting the video from last week's event up on to Youtube. Which means that amongst other sessions, you can now watch the Crowd-Sourced-Wrap-Up session from Thursday afternoon featuring: – Me (doing the moderating)– Stuart Dredge (Mobile Entertainment magazine, Guardian)– Cedric Giorgi (TechCrunch France […]
Tag Archives | ewan
Me and the Maemo Guru talking N900
At Nokia World, Ricky Cadden (the Maemo Guru — and Symbian Guru) sat down with me and asked my opinion of the new Nokia N900. Fly over to Ricky's site to watch the video — replete with me wearing the effervescent Mobile Industry Review jacket. Thanks Ricky!
SpinVox and me: For the avoidance of doubt
For the avoidance of doubt and given I've been going off-on-one about SpinVox for the past few days, I'd like to point a few things out: 1) I was a delighted beneficiary of a SpinVox courtesy account. I *think* I used to pay for it but I'm not entirely sure what happened, when. Other than […]
First draft of Mobile Developer TV is complete
That's how Mobile Developer TV is looking at the moment. I'm pretty pleased with the clean lines
I'd like to see a Wakoopa for my mobile handset
I didn't bother signing up for Wakoopa when I heard about it a while ago. I thought it was a cool concept — track the desktop applications you're using (along with 'web applications') and then publish the data to let you track what your friends are using.
My Google Latitude is now live to the world
People I know from London keep asking me, "Are you in San Francisco?" and, people from San Francisco keep asking if I'm in London. The where-are-you question is very, very relevant in the context of business so I've been trying to solve that with the use of a Where Am I function on my personal […]
T-Mobile UK's Hey-Jude video sing-a-long in Trafalgar Square
Would you like to see thousands of people singing 'Hey Jude' together in London's Trafalgar Square? Yes? Good
Vodafone abolishes European roaming charges for the summer
You read that right.
Vodafone Shop: You can't change your price plan here. Call 191.
Well then. What a total waste of time that was
Vodafone's 'App Store': Mobile developers respond
I just published Vodafone's news regarding their 'app store' initiative — and I'm already getting questions and reaction in from developers. Here are some quotes right off the press from some mobile developers.
Vodafone UK's official video unboxing of the HTC Magic
I think Vodafone should do an unboxing video for every single one of their handsets.
Time to visit a Vodafone UK store
It's that time again. I am off to visit a Vodafone store to find out what's going on with my five lines. I'm going to change around some of the price plans and decommission the lines I don't need


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Difference between revisions of "Alcohol and Drug Program"
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<big>ALCOHOL AND DRUG PROGRAMS</big>

The [http://www.adp.cahwnet.gov/ '''California Department of Alcohol and Drug Programs (DADP)'''] assists the p…')
(No difference)
Revision as of 17:47, 7 June 2010
The California Department of Alcohol and Drug Programs (DADP) assists the public by coordinating services with county health departments to prevent alcohol and drug abuse. When individuals call in for advice or assistance, they are referred to their local county health department for a treatment center location relative to their income, insurance, and type of treatment. The department also licenses and certifies treatment centers through a careful application process. The ADP has a treatment center directory for patient referral, as well as a resource center with free publications and videos, but requests for on-site presentations must be made through county health departments.
Department of Alcohol and Drug Programs
1700 K Street
Sacramento, CA 95814
(800) 879-2772
Publications available: None are offered by the Consumer Information Center
See also: "Abuse (Substance)" entry in A of this directory
Other referrals: None
Consumer Resource & Referral Guide
Directory of State Agencies
Directory of Federal Agencies
Return to DCA Home Page


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Unpredictable terrain. Wild weather. Nothing can break the singular focus of the rally car driver. Except, evidently, one random fellow at the side of the road with his pants around his ankles.
Mark Tapper was in good position on the second day of the three-day Rally New Zealand. Until, from out of the bushes, appeared a pasty white ass, pointed in his general direction. "Ah, for fuck's sake," Tapper is heard saying over the radio, as he loses control of his car. He flips, and comes to rest upside down. "That cunt with his ass out!"
What's impressive to me is that this appears to be somewhere in the back country, with no other spectators in sight. So our mooner traveled who knows how long, for the express purpose of showing his ass to any drivers who happen by. Well done, anonymous rump.


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Yes. iPod touch works seamlessly with AirPods. It supports the simple one-tap setup, and it will also set up automatically if you are signed in to iCloud and set up on another supported device.
Yes. The same MFi-certified controllers that you can use with iPhone, iPad, or Apple TV also work with iPod touch. You can download hundreds of your favorite controller-supported games on the App Store.
1 Available space is less and varies due to many factors. A standard configuration uses approximately 10GB to 12GB of space (including iOS and preinstalled apps) depending on the model and settings. Preinstalled apps use about 4GB, and you can delete these apps and restore them.
* AirPods sold separately.


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By Ben Eagle
A frustrating season in Laker Land might finally be hitting a boiling point.
According to a report in the New York Daily News, following a New Year's Day loss to the 76ers, the Lakers two biggest stars, Kobe Bryant and Dwight Howard, almost came to blows.
A league source told the Daily News that the Lakers stars got into a heated exchange following a New Year's Day loss to the 76ers, and Bryant went for a low blow – referencing and agreeing with Shaquille O'Neal's criticisms of Howard being soft.
Howard was restrained from going at his teammate, according to the source, and there have been rumblings from the center's camp that he's been unhappy with Bryant since earlier in the season.
Bryant, long a Twitter hold out, tweeted that the incident didn't happen.
Ramona Shelburne of ESPNLA also said that her sources have denied the incident took place.
The Lakers sit at 15-18, losers of three straight. Howard, who criticized the Lakers' chemistry after their 107-102 loss to the Clippers Friday, is set to be a free agent at season's end. He is averaging 17.3 points, 12.4 rebounds and 2.6 blocks.
This represents just the latest big-man feud for Bryant, who has traded barbs with O'Neal and taken shots at former L.A. big men Kwame Brown and Andrew Bynum. "That was a different dynamic. Shaq and I were a different dynamic," Bryant told ESPNLA when asked to compare his relationship with Howard to his relationship with O'Neal. "That just wasn't going to last."


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Atopy (say "AT-uh-pee") is a predisposition to have allergic
reactions. People who have this predisposition are called atopic (say "ay-TOP-ick").
Atopic people often
have at least one allergic condition, such as asthma, allergic rhinitis (hay
fever), atopic dermatitis, hives or angioedema, or food allergies. The tendency
to develop these kinds of allergies runs in families.
Last Revised:
March 10, 2011
Healthwise Staff
Medical Review:
Sarah Marshall, MD - Family Medicine & Rohit K Katial, MD - Allergy and Immunology
This information does not replace the advice of a doctor. Healthwise, Incorporated disclaims any warranty or liability for your use of this information. Your use of this information means that you agree to the Terms of Use. How this information was developed to help you make better health decisions.
To learn more visit Healthwise.org
© 1995-2012 Healthwise, Incorporated. Healthwise, Healthwise for every health decision, and the Healthwise logo are trademarks of Healthwise, Incorporated.


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Get the Best University Park JobsExpertRating Certifications have helped job seekers from University Park and elsewhere secure premium jobs, as they are an effective and presentable way of proving your skills to an employer. Before you make a move to look for your dream University Park job, make it a point to take an ExpertRating online certification as proof of your skills and to get ahead of the pack.
Employment in Florida - Whether you are an employer, job seeker or partner, you will find important and useful information
Federal Jobs in Florida
Suggest a site to add to this list
Other suggested job sites for University Park job seekers -
Useful tip for Job seekers -
If you are considering a career change, make a list of everything you've ever considered doing even if it seems outlandish. Then make a list of questions you'd like to get answered about those careers. As you get your questions answered, start making commitments about what you WILL have in your next career. Narrow down your choices until you've settled on one to target.
Author: Ann Ronan, Ph.D.
Other Job Categories - Alabama - Alaska - Arizona - Arkansas - California - Colorado - Connecticut - Delaware - Florida - Georgia - Hawaii - Idaho - Illinois - Indiana - Iowa - Kansas - Kentucky - Louisiana - Maine - Maryland - Massachusetts - Michigan - Minnesota - Mississippi - Missouri - Montana - Nebraska - Nevada - New Hampshire - New Jersey - New Mexico - New York - North Carolina - North Dakota - Ohio - Oklahoma - Oregon - Pennsylvania - Rhode Island - South Carolina - South Dakota - Tennessee - Texas - Utah - Vermont - Virginia - Washington - West Virginia - Wisconsin - Wyoming - Find a Lawyer - PerfectLawyers - Personal Trainer Certification - Fitness Certification - Personal Training Certification - Florida, University Park Loan, Mortgage and Insurance Resources - University Park Personal Injury Attorneys in Florida - Personal Injury Attorneys in University Park Florida - University Park Personal Injury Lawyers in Florida - Personal Injury Lawyer in University Park Florida - Home


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Cirque Eloize iD Makes Philadelphia Premiere Beginning 12/26
Tickets now on sale for Cirque Éloize iD, directed by Jeannot Painchaud and winner of the 26th Grand Prix du Conseil des Arts de Montréal for its exceptional international success in 2010. iD will run for eight shows at the Merriam Theatre from December 26th to 30th, 2012 as part of the Broadway Season, presented by the Kimmel Center and The Shubert Organization.
Tickets ranging in price from $25 to $65 are now on sale. Tickets can be purchased by calling 215-893-1999, online at kimmelcenter.org/broadway, at the Kimmel Center box office, Broad & Spruce Sts. (open daily 10 am to 6 pm) or at the Merriam Theater box office, 250 S. Broad St. (open during performances only). Groups of 10 or more will receive discounts for select performances by calling 215-790-5883. Performances include: Wednesday & Thursday evening at 7:30 pm; Friday & Saturday evening at 8:00 pm; Sunday evening at 6:30 pm; and matinees Saturday at 2:00 pm and Sunday at 1:00 pm, with an additional matinee performance on Thurs. Dec. 27 at 2:00 pm.
Cirque Éloize iD transports the audience into the vibrant streets at the heart of a big city. The stage comes alive with the boundless energy of acrobats, break dancers, contortionists and a fearless stunt biker who perform against a kaleidoscope of eye-popping video projections drawn from science-fiction films, comic books and graffiti.
Weaving together urban dance with twelve different circus arts, Cirque Éloize iD showcases the unique talents of an international troupe of artists, showcasing skills such as juggling, contortion, in-line skating, stilts, Cyr wheel, hand balancing, straps, bike trial, Chinese pole and aerial silks, building to a spectacular finale on the dynamic trampowall.


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As a unit of the élite 82nd Airborne Division, Bravo Company found itself in some of the fiercest fighting last year during the advance on Baghdad. Its hundred-and-thirty-odd paratroopers are among the Army's best-trained and best-equipped soldiers, and none died during formal hostilities. The dying came later, after President Bush declared the mission accomplished. Bravo Company was assigned to garrison a teardrop-shaped sector of southern Baghdad defined by a hairpin bend in the Tigris River. The paratroopers, having trained to fight uniformed regiments in open combat, found themselves in an amorphous grind of guard duty, police work, and civil governance. Their main task was protecting the Al Dora oil refinery, but they were also responsible for keeping peace in a large area around it. The district embraced by the river is a pleasantly verdant but particularly hostile corner of Iraq. Many top officials of the Baathist regime owned mansions in the neighborhood, and though they fled the war, their sympathizers remained, doling out hundred-dollar payments to poor date farmers willing to plant a bomb or fire a mortar at the Americans. The area is also home to several radical mosques, behind one of which the paratroopers uncovered a huge weapons cache—among the largest ever found in Iraq. Rockets fired from the brushy banks of the Tigris would drop onto the Green Zone of the Coalition Provisional Authority, and Bravo Company prowled the darkness with night-vision scopes, searching for the shooters. The postwar work was hot, nerve-racking, complicated, and dispiriting. The paratroopers spent hours trying to organize local councils, never knowing if the same people smiling at them by day were firing mortars at them by night. On June 18th of last year, a Bravo Company soldier named Michael Deuel, away from the unit on temporary assignment to battalion headquarters, was guarding a propane station when an Iraqi walked up behind him, stuck the muzzle of a gun under the lip of his Kevlar helmet, and pulled the trigger. It was Bravo Company's first death in Iraq, and though the paratroopers did not witness it firsthand, they were shaken.
An endlessly flat, treeless desert, seemingly of kitty litter, begins within half a kilometre of the Tigris, but the copious bush of the riverside and the inscrutable hostility of the locals led the men of Bravo Company to call their assigned district Mini-Vietnam. Marshes, date-palm orchards, and water-filled ditches held Bravo Company to a few roads, not much wider than their squat Humvees, which were vulnerable to attack by rifles, rocket-propelled grenades, and "improvised explosive devices." The soldiers gave the roads names: Ambush Alley, R.P.G. Alley, I.E.D. Alley. One road in Bravo Company's district, though, seemed peaceful, and it was called, simply, River Road.
Though the district was treacherous, the soldiers of Bravo Company lived in the relative comfort of the Al Dora refinery offices, playing Madden N.F.L. on a PlayStation 2 in their off-hours. From M.C.I., which was setting up cell-phone service for the Coalition Provisional Authority, they cadged a cell phone with a Westchester County area code. They couldn't call out, but family and friends could call in, by dialling 914 and the number—a far cry from, say, the sporadic V-mail of the Second World War. For months, Bravo Company ate nothing but M.R.E.s, packaged rations that, though monotonous, are lean and sanitary. When the Halliburton subsidiary Kellogg Brown & Root showed up, in July, to open a field kitchen, the rich, fried food, perhaps in combination with new microorganisms, made everyone in the company sick for a few days.
Of the thirty-nine paratroopers who belonged to Bravo Company's 3rd Platoon, no two could have been more different than Specialist Solomon Bangayan, a Philippine citizen serving in American uniform, and Specialist Marc Seiden, a Jew from New Jersey. Bangayan was tiny and shy. He stood five feet five inches tall, and his smooth complexion and glossy black hair made him look about fifteen years old. He'd joined the Army in the spring of 2001, about eight months after arriving in the United States from the Philippines, and spoke halting, schoolbook English. For him, soldiering was a means to attain citizenship in the United States and to accrue money for an education in nursing. But he applied a grim resolve to proving his worth as a soldier. Once, searching for weapons in an Iraqi house, he kicked an unyielding door so hard that he landed on his back. He got up and kicked it again and again until another soldier nudged him aside and blasted the lock with a riot gun. The men of Bravo Company gave him the nickname Bang and called his mangled diction Banglish. In a crowd of big, loud white guys, he gravitated to a quiet friendship with Specialist Ricardo Costas, a delicate, latte-colored Puerto Rican with enormous, long-lashed eyes whose squad leader called him Sweetness.
Seiden, tall and broad-chested, from Brigantine, New Jersey, was the company clown. His rugged face, ceaseless ribbing, and New Jersey accent reminded fellow-paratroopers of the actor Bruce Willis. Seiden never let up; in the middle of a firefight, he would turn to a comrade and ask, "Do I look fat?" Pumping out light-machine-gun rounds—with rocket-propelled grenades whizzing past—he would pause to ask, "Do you think my butt's getting big?" At twenty-six, Seiden was older than most of his brothers-in-arms, and he thrived on the excitement and rigor of Army life. He was a post-9/11 enlistee, inspired to join, in part, by the death of a family friend in the World Trade Center attack. He planned to reënlist; last Christmas, he started filling out the forms to become a helicopter pilot.
On January 2, 2004, the 3rd Platoon roused early. It was a Friday, the Muslim Sabbath, a day when clerics in Mini-Vietnam were known to preach mischief. The 3rd Platoon was to take two Humvees and drive down River Road to patrol the Salah al-Din mosque, or Celine Dion mosque, as the soldiers called it. Farther down River Road, at the southeast corner of Bravo Company's district, lay the Tobah mosque, which was thought to be Wahhabi-influenced and deserving of special attention. Of the company's seven Humvees, two were "up armored"—plated heavily enough to deflect rifle fire—and the 3rd Platoon was given both for this mission. The platoon's leader, First Lieutenant Andrew Blickhahn, a balding twenty-six-year-old two years out of West Point, took the shotgun seat of the lead Humvee, the post responsible for spotting any mines in the road. Seiden started to get in beside him, but at the last moment, for reasons nobody remembers, he switched places with Sweetness. Seiden walked back to the second Humvee and took the shotgun seat. Bang slipped into the seat behind him, in the gunner's hatch.
The two Humvees left the refinery compound at about 11 a.m. and headed down a road lined with palms. Calls to prayer issued from mosques, and passersby glared at the soldiers. About ten kilometres down the road, Blickhahn's lead Humvee went around an S-shaped double bend, losing sight of the Humvee behind. Sweetness, his head and torso protruding from the roof beside a huge .50-calibre machine gun, was knocked over by a tremendous blast; he thought his Humvee had been hit. Behind him, though, he could see a cloud rising fast from the date palms. Explosives alone make white smoke; this was oily black, and swirling with debris.
Blickhahn jumped out and ran back down the road. Guerrillas often follow mine blasts with small-arms fire and R.P.G.s, so he fired his rifle randomly in every direction as he ran. Blickhahn's driver, meanwhile, jerked the Humvee through a feverish five-point turn and caught up with Blickhahn at the bend. All they found of the second, up-armored Humvee was a smoky hole in the pavement, and, lying nearby, one door, as thick and heavy as the door of an office safe. The rest of the vehicle had flown across the highway and landed in a deep ditch. The air reeked of explosives and diesel fuel. From where Blickhahn and his driver stood on the road, the thick armor of the Humvee's passenger side looked like shredded cardboard. Blickhahn had never lost a soldier in combat, but before he even climbed down into the ditch he could see that Seiden had absorbed the bulk of the blast and was dead. The two soldiers from the driver's side were alive but badly wounded. One of them, wounded in the throat, was gurgling, "Help me." Bang, who had been behind Seiden, was nowhere to be seen.
Blickhahn expected to be attacked at any moment. "We were waiting for the Chinese to come over the wall" is how he remembers it. From the roof of the undamaged Humvee, Sweetness was firing the .50-calibre machine gun wildly, pouring streams of one-ounce bullets into ditches, garden walls, bushes—anywhere attackers might have been hiding. This was his third ambush; he didn't worry about killing innocents, because he assumed that every civilian in this part of Baghdad had known about the attack ahead of time and stayed away. Blickhahn, focussed on the casualties, was so distraught that when he radioed for a medevac helicopter he couldn't figure out which six-digit map coördinate to give. Two helicopters took off anyway and headed in his general direction. Blickhahn was eventually able to radio the helicopters the right coördinates; within ten minutes, they had landed beside the road. The company's first sergeant, Brett Robinson, monitoring radio traffic at the refinery, heard Blickhahn's call for medevac. He came roaring in with the 2nd Platoon and set up a perimeter to repel attacks. One of the injured soldiers was stuck under the Humvee and unconscious, and the helicopter medics, nervous about a further attack, wanted to amputate his leg to free him. Amid the roar of the helicopters, the Bravo Company soldiers ended up in a shouting match with the Air Force medics; they almost came to blows before another Humvee managed to winch the wrecked vehicle. The soldier's leg, as it turned out, was buried in soft mud and barely hurt.
Blickhahn and another soldier found a wire in the six-foot crater left by the bomb, and followed it about a hundred yards through the bush to a well-dug fighting position. The position, which had a good view of the road, looked to Blickhahn like the work of trained soldiers, but whoever had set off the bomb had simply touched two wire ends to a battery and fled. The expected attack never came.
Blickhahn returned to find a group of soldiers huddled over Bang. They'd found him about fifteen feet behind the wrecked Humvee; he'd been blown out the gunner's hatch and was less visibly torn up than Seiden. As the men tried to insert a tube into his airway, they realized that he was dead, too. First Sergeant Robinson covered Bang and Seiden with ponchos, helped load them onto the back deck of a Humvee, and ordered four men to climb up beside them to keep the bodies covered.
Bang and Seiden now entered the world of Mortuary Affairs, the Army's hidden but exquisitely reverent system for returning fallen soldiers to their families. Every job in the Army has a numerical designation—infantrymen are 11B, medics are 91W, truck drivers are 88M—and those who handle the dead go by the designation 92M, or "ninety-two mike." Mortuary Affairs is a small specialty. The active-duty Army, of nearly half a million soldiers, has only one company of ninety-two mikes—the 54th Mortuary Affairs Company—consisting of two hundred and twenty-five men and women. (The Army is slated to create a second Mortuary Affairs company in 2006.)
Ninety-two mikes are trained in six and a half weeks at Fort Lee, Virginia, by Douglas Howard, a sixty-three-year-old civilian mortician who served as a Mortuary Affairs specialist during the Vietnam War. (The designation was then fifty-seven foxtrot.) Howard's face is deeply lined, but his hair and mustache are inky black. He chose his profession after being told, as a high-school senior, that his personality suited the business; he moves with stiff formality and speaks in soft, clipped tones. The Army has no trouble filling its ninety-two-mike slots with volunteers, Howard said. Many grow up in mortuary families. Others recognize in themselves a capacity for serenity in the face of death. They visit a morgue in nearby Richmond during their training, and Howard watches them closely; he weeds out those who blanch, freeze, or—worse—make jokes in the presence of the dead. At the vaulted warehouse where the ninety-two mikes are trained using hundred-and-seventy-five-pound mannequins, Howard introduced me to Captain Kelly Dobert, a twenty-nine-year-old West Point graduate, who in January will take command of the 54th in Iraq. Dobert is thin and pale, with blond hair and dark circles under her eyes, but she lit up in a bright smile when she shook my hand. "This is the command I requested," she said. "It really touched my heart." Mortuary Affairs is a lonely and subdued specialty. Other soldiers wear insignia to identify their function—crossed cannons for artillery, a screaming eagle for the 101st Airborne—but Mortuary Affairs has no unit patch of its own. Members of the company keep to themselves, in order to protect other soldiers' morale. Other units take two-fisted mottoes—"Death from Above," "Sledgehammer," "No Slack." The motto of Mortuary Affairs is "Dignity, Reverence, Respect."
When an Army division goes into combat, ninety-two mikes quietly establish collection points in discreet locations. Company commanders typically know where they are; soldiers typically don't. A collection point is nothing more than a couple of litters on sawhorses, a hand-washing station composed of a steel basin and a jerrican hung in a wooden frame, and a small desk for paperwork. Camouflage netting covers the station, and a one-square-foot sign announces its function: "Mortuary Affairs Collection Point." A green, generator-powered refrigeration container big enough for twelve bodies stands outside. Six ninety-two mikes generally man a collection point.
Sometimes a unit that has lost soldiers in battle is in no condition to recover its dead, and the nearest ninety-two mikes venture out to gather up the fallen. Usually, though, a unit delivers its own dead to the collection point, in what is officially called a "human-remains pouch," made of thick, rubberized canvas with a steel zipper and loop handles along the sides. Everybody but the ninety-two mikes calls these body bags. (Bravo Company covered Bang and Seiden with ponchos because the unit wasn't travelling with pouches that day.) Soldiers are often distraught when they show up at a collection point carrying dead friends, and the first job of the ninety-two mikes is to assure them that their friends' remains will be cared for. Only when all of a dead soldier's buddies have left the collection point do the ninety-two mikes lift the pouch onto a raised litter and open it.
Throughout the Second World War, the dead were sometimes buried in temporary cemeteries near the battlefield. Often, though, combat soldiers buried their buddies where they fell, marked the graves with a rifle and helmet, and noted the coördinates on a map. Families learned of the death by telegram, often days later. Only after the Allies defeated Germany and Japan did the Army send soldiers of what was then called Graves Registration to recover bodies and either bury them in military cemeteries abroad or ship them home, depending on the wishes of the families. Of the four hundred thousand Americans who died in that war, the remains of about a fifth have never been recovered or identified. America now fights smaller wars, and takes more care with its dead. During the Korean War, helicopters became available, allowing remains to be recovered and shipped home quickly. When I mentioned to Howard how ceremonious and expensive the handling of fallen soldiers seems, given the chaos of war, he fixed me with a cold stare and said, "It is, quite literally, the least we can do for them."
The mission of a ninety-two mike is to deliver viewable remains to the family of a dead soldier within seven to ten days, and the job starts at the collection point. Wearing surgical masks, gowns, and gloves, ninety-two mikes make a preliminary examination of the body, sketching visible wounds on a diagram. They leave a soldier's fatigues intact but search every pocket, cataloguing the photographs, letters, notes, and other effects they find. They either return these to the pockets or place them in a small green bag that they tie to the soldier's wrist. They list the name of the deceased, on all forms, as B.T.B.—"believed to be." Once they've recorded the wounds and belongings, they rezip the pouch and place it, by tradition, in a closed vehicle for transportation either by road or by air to the Theatre Mortuary Evacuation Point, an air-conditioned warehouse in Kuwait.
There, ninety-two mikes place the pouch on a wooden slab similar to an oak tabletop and set the slab atop an old-fashioned roller-conveyor, of the type found in supermarket basements. As they slide the body along the conveyor, they examine the remains again, making sure all personal effects listed on the forms are in place. Finally, they lift the pouched remains into a rectangular aluminum "transfer case" and drape the case with a flag, placing the starred blue field at the upper left, over the soldier's heart. They carry the case, feet first, to a truck that will take it to one of several military airfields. When they need to set the case down, they always lay it flat on the floor. They never stack cases unless a mass-casualty emergency yields limited floor space. Once on the trucks, the transfer cases leave the custody of the ninety-two mikes.
Ritual and tradition attend every step of a dead soldier's journey. At the airfield, soldiers and airmen stand at attention, flanking the ramp. Others unload the cases and carry them into the bulbous cargo bay of an Air Force transport jet. They lay them on the floor in a neat grid. It was photographs of flag-draped transfer cases—not "coffins"—on the floor of a transfer jet that made the rounds of the Internet and major newspapers in April. From Kuwait, the transfer cases are flown to one of two military mortuaries: at Dover Air Force Base, in Delaware, or at the Army's Regional Medical Center in Landstuhl, Germany.
The bodies of Specialists Bangayan and Seiden took a slightly different route. Their friends drove them not to a collection point but, following their two wounded buddies, to the 28th Combat Support Hospital, in Baghdad. The 28th C.S.H.—known as "the China Dragon"—occupies what used to be Saddam Hussein's private hospital, inside the vast compound of palaces that is now the heavily secured Green Zone. Until recently, the person who ran the hospital, under the command of Colonel Beverly Pritchett, was First Sergeant Kellyanne O'Neil, a forty-one-year-old medic with a gun-moll accent acquired in the Dorchester section of Boston. I met O'Neil, who rotated out of Iraq in March, at her home in Fort Bragg, North Carolina, where the 82nd Airborne is based. O'Neil, who keeps a piranha as a pet, has long wavy hair that she pulls back in a severe bun, and tiny hands that are as strong as pliers. She is compact, radiating ferocity, but can in a heartbeat adopt the mournful air of a grieving mother. Known to many soldiers only by her radio call sign, China Master, O'Neil directed the hospital's renovation and then the care of thousands of casualties—Iraqi and American, military and civilian—a hundred and twenty-five of whom died during the months she was there. She is intensely proud of the 28th C.S.H., describing, in gruesome detail, the endless variety of wounds repaired by the hospital's surgeons. China Master was essentially on duty continually for nearly a year, overseeing emergency procedures in the hospital's hallways, sometimes pulling a sheet over the face of a patient she had lost and walking directly to the next stretcher. "When I'm in the nuthouse, I want you to remember I like Hershey's Kisses with almonds in them," she told me without smiling. The day of the attack on Bravo Company, China Master worked first on the two wounded soldiers—both serious enough cases that they had to be evacuated to Landstuhl. She then turned her attention to Seiden and Bang.
It was her habit to undress the dead and cut the name, rank, and unit patches from their fatigues, if they weren't too bloody or torn, to send to the family as keepsakes. From Seiden's, she was able to salvage only the American-flag shoulder patch. She then had Bang and Seiden moved to a small tiled room and used a hose gently to wash the mud and gore from their bodies. "If the unit is coming to see the soldier, I try to make a nice viewing," she told me. She put the bodies in fresh pouches, with blankets around all but the undamaged portions of the faces. (Bang and Seiden were among the last that she would attend this way. In mid-January, the Army ordered her to stop removing fatigues and washing bodies, because medical examiners at the morgues wanted to see all bodies unaltered—as the ninety-two mikes leave them—to learn what they can about how soldiers are dying.)
While China Master worked, the paratroopers of Bravo Company returned to their billets in the offices of the Al Dora oil refinery. Nobody spoke as the men peeled off their web gear, helmets, and body armor. After ten months of war and insurrection, Bang and Seiden were the first comrades they'd seen killed, and they were distraught. One of the unit's N.C.O.s kept bursting into tears. "My platoon sergeant took me aside and said, 'You can't do that. You can't cry in front of the others,' " he told me. Staff Sergeant James Haack, a square-jawed twenty-two-year-old Kansan who'd been both dead soldiers' original squad leader, said, "I know it sounds funny, but it hadn't occurred to me this could happen." Captain Leo Coddington, Bravo Company's twenty-eight-year-old commander, wondered if the platoon had established a pattern of travel on River Road which the Iraqis were somehow able to divine. Lieutenant Blickhahn, who had been riding shotgun in the lead Humvee, replayed in his mind the moments preceding the blast and tortured himself for failing to spot the bomb in the road. He learned later that the massive explosive, made from old artillery shells, had been buried under the pavement by someone tunnelling in from the roadside ditch, a technique never seen before in the area. (In July, Blickhahn was awarded an Army Commendation Medal for his actions that day. The medal can be awarded for "meritorious service," but Blickhahn's was awarded with a bronze "V," for valor. Soldiers, though, are the harshest judges of their own performance. Months after the deaths, Blickhahn told me, "They defeated me.")
Several soldiers helped pack up Seiden's and Bang's belongings for shipment to the Army's Personnel Effects Depot, at Aberdeen Proving Grounds, in Maryland: books, CD players, toiletries, Seiden's GameBoy. Soldiers at Aberdeen would clean and pack them for delivery to the families. Following Army procedure, Coddington made sure that Bravo Company's cell phone and the soldiers' e-mail-capable computers were rounded up so that no news would slip out before the families of Bang and Seiden were notified officially. But Seiden's girlfriend, Tricia Ferri, happened to call before the phone was removed. Everyone in Bravo Company knew Tricia; she'd sent boxes of Oreos and had spoken to most of them when calling for Seiden. Usually, they answered with a cheerful "Hello," but this time the soldier who picked it up said gravely, "Second of the 325th." When he heard Tricia's voice, he hung up.
At three o'clock in the morning, Coddington finally had time to go see his fallen men at the hospital. First Sergeant Robinson, eight years his senior, who has eighteen years of Army experience to Coddington's seven, was still there, and China Master was still working. Coddington had held himself together all day, but when China Master opened the pouches and he laid his hands on his soldiers' bodies he leaned against Robinson and wept.
The Army relied for generations on Western Union to deliver to families the news that their sons and husbands had been killed in combat. At the start of the Vietnam War, the Army discovered that in some cities Western Union no longer employed its own messengers but relied on local taxidrivers to deliver telegrams. In the vicinity of Fort Benning, Georgia, where many of the fallen had been based, the cabdrivers didn't welcome the responsibility. So the Army began assigning its own soldiers to break the bad news to families personally.
Gail Seiden, Marc's mother, woke on January 2nd to the news of a helicopter crash near Falluja, and told herself, in a semiconscious moment of superstition, "O.K., I'm home free. I don't have to worry about today." Gail, who is fifty-eight, plump, and bookish, with short curly hair and a sense of irony that can swing bitter or funny, helps manage a Jewish nursing home near her house. Her husband, Jack, fifty-six, is an accountant—gentle, sedentary, and instinctively risk-averse. Gail and Jack had lived in a state of mild shock since the day Marc was born. He was, progressively, the kind of kid who would shove coins into electrical sockets, skateboard off the roof, or, at sixteen, take the family car on a joyride. His sheer physical energy and passion for excitement were utterly alien to them, and they spent his childhood years alternatively cringing, laughing, or hollering at him to be careful.
Jack and Gail invited me to dinner in a cozy two-story row house in East Windsor whose walls are covered with pictures of Marc and his older brother, Adam. "I'd actually suggested when Marc was nineteen that he join the Army," Jack said, as Gail cut up cantaloupe at the kitchen counter. "I thought the discipline was what he needed. In those days, nobody thought about war." Instead, Marc tried a year of college, then drifted down to Brigantine, a small town north of Atlantic City and one of the few places on the American coastline where the working class still holds the beach. He got a construction job, fell in love with Tricia, and lived an easygoing seaside life with Tricia and her childhood friends. Jack and Gail thought he seemed on the verge of settling down. But as his adolescence slipped away Marc grew restless. The son of some family friends died in the World Trade Center attack, and during the national outpouring of fear and patriotism that followed Marc announced that he was joining the Army. He selected a particularly dangerous specialty, airborne, and flew to Iraq with Bravo Company in March, 2003. Marc's phone calls home were upbeat, but, as Gail recalls, "I lived every day with my heart in my mouth." Last Thanksgiving, Marc called them excitedly; he'd been chosen to share President Bush's surprise Thanksgiving dinner in Baghdad. The Seidens happened to be watching the Presidential dinner on television at that moment, and they had the extraordinary experience of catching a glimpse of their son in the background as he talked to them on the phone. It was the last time they saw him.
The Seidens had just returned from errands at around four o'clock in the afternoon on January 2nd—midnight in Baghdad—when the doorbell rang. Gail was upstairs; Jack opened the door to find two officers in dress uniform—a woman and a man with a silver cross pinned to his collar. "Are you Jack Seiden, father of Specialist Marc Seiden?" the woman asked. "I have an important message to deliver from the Secretary of the Army. May I come in, Mr. Seiden?" In shock, Jack refused. "We'd been told if one person comes to the door, he's wounded; if two people come, he's dead," Jack told me. "I thought, If I don't let them in then it can't be happening. But she kept saying, 'Mr. Seiden, we have to come in, we have to come in.' She was crying." Jack backed away, yelling for Gail. From the top of the stairs, Gail saw a pair of uniformed legs and thought, Marc's home early! As she ran down the stairs, she saw the second pair of legs.
The woman introduced herself as an officer from Fort Dix, New Jersey. "The Secretary of the Army has asked me to express his deep regret that your son Marc was killed in action in Iraq on January 2nd," she said. "The Secretary extends his deepest sympathy to you and your family in your tragic loss."
Notification officers follow a careful protocol detailed in a slim booklet called the "Casualty Notification Guide." They are not to speak to N.O.K., as the booklet calls next of kin, about insurance, personal effects, or possible mistakes made by soldiers involved in the death. They are to use "good judgment" and avoid "gory or embarrassing details." They are not to extend "overly sympathetic gestures." Underlined, with the heading "important," is the warning "Do not physically touch the N.O.K. in any manner unless there is shock or fainting." The woman from Fort Dix told the Seidens that a casualty assistance officer would be assigned to handle all of their funeral arrangements and would call within twenty-four hours. "Mr. Seiden," she concluded, "I must be returning to Fort Dix. Again, on behalf of the Secretary of the Army, please accept the United States Army's deepest condolences."
Helen Bangayan, Bang's mother, left the Philippines in 1981, at the age of thirty-three, to work as a companion to a wealthy, stroke-afflicted American woman in Beirut. She left two-year-old Solomon and his three older sisters to grow up with their father, Max, in Sudipen, a torpid, underemployed village of brightly painted cement houses a day's drive north of Manila. Solomon acquired the nickname Kelly to honor his paternal great-grandfather, Quilino.
Helen did not return to Max. Instead, she moved to the United States with her employer, got a green card, and, after the woman died, met Victor Therrien at a church social in New Hampshire. Vic, a voluble, pious, retired construction worker, took her to live in a farmhouse on Vermont's border with Canada. Vic had five grown children of his own and made it his mission to reunite Helen with hers. It was too late for the older children to immigrate, Vic learned; children of permanent residents have to make it to the U.S. before they turn twenty-one if they want to get green cards. By the time Vic was able to arrange the visa for Kelly, he was seven days short of his twenty-first birthday, and had to abandon his schooling as a diesel mechanic to emigrate. He arrived in Vermont in August of 2000, barely able to speak English.
To make him feel welcome, Vic bought Kelly a used Ford Taurus. "I asked him what he wanted most, and he said in the Philippines if you have a Ford it means you're rich," Vic said. Kelly spent that winter skiing at nearby Jay Peak, riding horses, and delighting in his first snow. But it didn't take him long to realize that immigrating and prospering were two different things; he'd landed in a region with high unemployment, and he had limited English and no diploma. So in the spring of 2001 Kelly did what thousands of immigrants have done to get ahead; he joined the United States Army. A recruiter met the Therriens on the roadside halfway between Burlington and their home, and they completed the paperwork on the car's hood. Non-citizen immigrants have served in the U.S. military since the Civil War, and join for many of the same reasons that Americans do—pay, skills, adventure, love of country—but service in an American uniform has also long been a fast track to citizenship. Beginning in 1952, a legal resident who joined the Army could shorten the wait for citizenship from five years to three. After 9/11, an executive order by President Bush and legislation by Congress made the process easier and faster—waiving immigration fees, letting non-citizens on active duty petition for citizenship immediately instead of after three years, allowing immigrant service people to raise their right hand and take the oath of citizenship at military posts abroad instead of having to travel to the U.S. at their own expense. The services don't specifically go trolling for immigrants to join, though they publish recruiting materials in Spanish and seek out Arabic speakers, who are needed in Iraq as translators. Some thirty-eight thousand service people—about three per cent of the total—are non-citizens.
Vic and Helen Therrien viewed Kelly's enlistment with pride; Vic is a Navy veteran, and expresses a patriotism as pure as his faith in Jesus. Their confidence was only slightly shaken by Kelly's phone calls—he dragged them out for hours, unwilling to let go of the sound of his mother's voice. When he came home on leave last Thanksgiving, he told them he did not want to return to Iraq. He'd seen too many terrible things, he said, and he was afraid he would die there. Vic and Helen drove him to the tiny River of Life church, in northern New Hampshire, where Vic's sister is pastor, and Kelly accepted Jesus as his personal savior. "We didn't know he was going back to be killed, but God knew," Vic said. "God saw to it his heart was prepared." After his leave, Bang flew back to rejoin Bravo Company in Mini-Vietnam. At about eight o'clock on the night of January 2nd, Vic and Helen heard their dogs barking in the freezing darkness outside. Helen opened the door on two officers. "Please tell me he's only wounded," she cried. The officers asked to step inside.
At the Dover mortuary, military medical examiners inspected Bang and Seiden to determine the cause of death and to gather intelligence about methods that the Iraqis are using to kill American soldiers. Under a practice new to Operation Iraqi Freedom, they sorted through personal items that had been shipped with the remains to find what they call "sentimental personal effects"—watches, rings, medallions, and other items that families might want to have at the time of the funeral. They gathered these in velveteen pouches to send with the caskets.
The mortuary has enormous warehouses, filled with every uniform, award, and insignia of the Army, Navy, Air Force, Marines, and Coast Guard. Drawing on the personnel files of Bang and Seiden, civilian morticians decorated forest-green "Class A" Army dress uniforms with silver jump wings, marksmanship medals, insignias, and myriad patches specific to each. Both men were posthumously awarded the Bronze Star and the Purple Heart. The mortuary is extremely careful about the allocation of medals; a missing or incorrect award can infuriate family members. Morticians then dressed and "cosmetized" Bang and Seiden and placed each in the type of casket his family had chosen—wood for Seiden, silver-colored eighteen-gauge metal for Bang.
The morticians make one of three recommendations for the soldier's remains: viewable, viewable for identification purposes only, or non-viewable. In non-viewable cases, the Dover or Landstuhl morticians inject each body part individually with embalming fluid and gather the pieces in a sheet that has been impregnated with embalming chemicals. They wrap this in a second sheet, and finally in a standard-issue olive-green Army blanket. They fold the blanket in a distinctive cruciform fashion, secure it with large safety pins, and place the bundle in a casket. They arrange the decorated uniform on the bundle of remains, so that when the family looks inside the casket they see the correct uniform, more or less in the shape of a soldier. The Army does not require families to view remains; the medical examiners, along with the F.B.I., make the positive identification. But some families insist on opening the bundle and seeing what the Army has deemed non-viewable. "They've sent away their nineteen-year-old son, and they can't believe he's gone. They want to see it," Douglas Howard, the ninety-two-mike trainer at Fort Lee, explained. In such cases, Howard recommends that only one family member, or a family friend, look.
It is remarkable that the morticians at Dover were able to render both Bang and Seiden viewable from the waist up, given the size of the bomb that killed them and the extent of the damage. Seiden's only visible wound was what looked like a port-wine birthmark on his face and neck. The right side of Bang's face was reconstructed with wax, but it was recognizable. When the Dover morticians finished, Bang and Seiden parted ways.
A soldier in dress uniform and carrying the velveteen bag of sentimental effects escorted each casket to the funeral homes the families had selected. The Army also assigned each family a casualty assistance officer, to manage arrangements for the funeral. "I'm not the biggest fan of the Army, but I have to say, ours was terrific," Gail Seiden said of the officer assigned to the family. "He took care of everything. Everything." Jewish law requires the dead to be buried as quickly as possible, and the Seidens wanted Marc home fast. "And no autopsy, I told them," Gail said. "He's been mutilated enough." The Army assigned the Seidens a rabbi chaplain, who hurried Marc's body home and met it at Dover to prevent an autopsy. He recovered the velveteen bag; it contained Marc's dog tags and a key ring. Gail had wanted Marc buried in a Jewish cemetery, but, knowing that the Army meant more to him than Judaism did, she and Jack decided to have him buried in the vast Brigadier General William C. Doyle Veterans Memorial Cemetery, about forty minutes from their house. "They asked us if we wanted a general funeral, and I said, 'Sure,' thinking, you know, a general funeral, like a regular funeral," Jack said. "They sent a general." Since September 11th, any service member killed in action is entitled to have a general preside over his or her funeral. Marc was buried on January 7th, just five days after he died, six thousand miles away. It was bitter cold; his friends from Brigantine remember their tears freezing to their faces. A detachment from Fort Bragg carried Marc's casket to a bier under a canopy. The general knelt before the Seidens and presented the flag and, in a velvet box, Marc's medals. Seven soldiers fired three rifle volleys, and a bugler played "Taps." At first glance, military funerals seem cold and mechanical; every service is alike and everybody moves in jerky tin-soldier fashion. But in its exaggerated solemnity—the slow-motion way the general salutes the casket, the crispness with which the flag is folded into a triangle—a military funeral movingly conveys the grief of the institution. It's a Jewish custom for mourners to sprinkle a shovelful of dirt atop the lowered casket, but the cemetery didn't allow families to approach the gravesite, and on this the cemetery wouldn't budge. "The rabbi said he'd go up there, say a prayer, and put some dirt," Jack said.
Helen Therrien had a special request, too; she wanted her son buried in the Philippines with full U.S. military honors. Bang made it home to Sudipen on January 16th, two weeks after he was killed. The Army flew Helen there (Vic was in the hospital at the time), and she and her daughters used the emergency-expenses money provided by the Army to buy and roast eleven pigs for the mourners. Bang lay in an open casket in his sweltering, cement-block house in Sudipen for four days, while hundreds of people came to sit in folding chairs around the casket and sing hymns. The Philippines is overwhelmingly Catholic, but Sudipen is home to four Protestant churches and each sent a choir to sing over the body. In a video, Kelly's childhood friends look stunned, impressed, and subdued. The Philippines, which the United States seized from Spain in 1898 and held for forty-eight years, was the only colony that the United States ever had, and in many Filipinos affection for America runs deep. "A lot of Filipinos joined the U.S. Army in World War Two," Helen told me. She tapped her two index fingers together. "The Philippines and the U.S.," she said. "Like this."
On the fourth day, an honor guard and a one-star general flew in from South Korea to perform Bang's funeral. They marched slowly through Sudipen's cobbled streets ahead of a white Mercedes hearse, then stood at rigid attention in the withering humidity as hundreds of people gathered in an open-air hall. After "Taps," they slid Bang's coffin into an aboveground cement vault and—in keeping with Philippine tradition—pushed in behind it a bag of clothes, to be worn in the afterlife.
Kelly had taken out a two-hundred-and-fifty-thousand-dollar life-insurance policy, which was paid to Helen, along with the standard twelve-thousanddollar military death benefit. President Bush sent a letter of sympathy, referring to her son warmly by his nickname, which she laminated and placed in an album. "Our nation will not forget Kelly's sacrifice and selfless dedication in our efforts to make the world more peaceful and more free," the President wrote. President Gloria MacapagalArroyo, of the Philippines, sent a letter as well. "We are proud of him," she wrote. On March 5th, another letter came to Helen, from the Citizenship and Immigration Services branch of the Department of Homeland Security: "Your son made the ultimate sacrifice for America; it is only fitting that we bestow upon him our Nation's ultimate honor—citizenship. It is our honor to present you with this certificate of posthumous citizenship."
The men of Bravo Company returned to Fort Bragg on January 28th, and soon afterward some two dozen of them piled into vans for the long drive to northern Vermont. They crammed into Helen and Vic's farmhouse and ate prodigiously, sharing photographs and stories. They brought along an oil painting of Bang—rendered by a Baghdad artist from his official Army photograph—as well as a huge framed drawing of paratroopers leaping from an airplane. The Therriens have mounted these on a prominent living-room wall. Helen also has flown twice to Fort Bragg for memorials and other ceremonies; staying connected to Bravo Company, she said, "is part of my healing."
Though soldiers of Bravo Company also attended memorials in both East Windsor and Brigantine for Marc, the Seidens have since let the contact wither. They declined invitations to go to the two ceremonies at Fort Bragg; they have never met Bang's family. "Am I angry?" Gail asked as she wiped down her stove. "Of course I'm angry. I just don't know who at." The same framed drawing of the paratroopers that Helen has on her wall was stacked sideways on the Seidens' living-room floor, and Gail kept in a closet the oil painting of Marc that the unit had commissioned. Jack has arranged the folded flag and Marc's medals on an electric organ in their living room, next to Marc's bar-mitzvah portrait, as a kind of temporary shrine, but the flag and medals look like they'll soon find their way into a closet. I asked if the Seidens, too, had received a condolence letter from President Bush, and Gail said no. "Sure we did," Jack said. "We have it here someplace." ♦


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Eight centuries ago in the Italian town of Assisi, a young man named Francis had an experience that changed history. As he knelt before the crucifix in the church of San Damiano, Francis heard Christ speak: "Francis, go rebuild my church, which is falling down."
Today at Marian University, San Damiano Scholars of all faith traditions are working to understand what "rebuild my church" means to them. It's a profoundly important—and individual—challenge with societal implications. And it might be for you.


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DailyDirt: Do Not Pass Go, Do Not Collect $200...
from the urls-we-dig-up deptSometimes, a free market doesn't create a thriving bazaar of competition. Occasionally, huge monopolies form, and the result is less competition (and sometimes less innovation). Maybe it doesn't matter if you own Mediterranean and Baltic Avenue, but it could if you have Park Place and Boardwalk. Here are a few examples of monopolies you might run into someday.
- Anheuser-Busch InBev and SABMiller own a lot of beer companies, and Anheuser-Busch InBev wants to buy up Grupo Modelo next. If the deal goes through, 46% of the US beer market would be controlled by a single company. [url]
- Eyeglasses aren't exactly hard to make, but they can be surprisingly expensive for a few grams of plastic. Luxottica is the company behind the glasses that about half a billion people wear, but maybe that will change when Google starts selling its fancy eyewear.... [url]
- If you've ever bought (or tried to sell) a diamond, you've probably run across a little company called De Beers. Chemistry professors should curse De Beers for the broadly held myth that a diamond is forever... diamonds are not the most thermodynamically stable form of carbon by a long shot. [url]
Filed Under: beer, competition, diamonds, eye wear, glasses, innovation, monopoly
Companies: anheuser-busch inbev, debeers, grupo modelo, luxottica, sabmiller


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What members need to remember is that those of us who respond here do so in our free time, because we are interested in language. We are happy to drop in from time to time to respond to half a dozen questions or so about grammar or vocabulary, but we haven't the time, and some of us haven't the inclination, to spend a lot of time discussing longer pieces of work.
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