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FORTY-NINE YEARS AGO, the anthropologist Oscar Lewis published a book called "Five Families: Mexican Case Studies in the Culture of Poverty," detailing a single day in these families' lives. One family, headed by Jesús Sánchez, a food buyer for a restaurant, continued to tell its story in a second Lewis book, the widely read "Children of Sánchez." Lewis singled out elements of a culture that, he argued, keep those socialized in it mired in poverty: machismo, authoritarianism, marginalization from organized civic life, high rates of abandonment of illegitimate children, alcoholism, disdain for education, fatalism, passivity, inability to defer gratification and a time orientation fixed firmly on the present.
We still call this the culture of poverty today. But the idea has taken on a life far beyond the world of Mexican peasants. And although the concept originated with Lewis, it has come to mean almost the opposite of what Lewis intended.
Lewis was a man of the left. He saw the culture of poverty as a defense mechanism adapted by the poor in response to capitalist inequality. For a while, the culture of poverty remained a leftist idea: Michael Harrington used it throughout his hugely influential 1962 book, "The Other America," which laid the foundation for President Johnson's War on Poverty. But Lewis soon lost control of the concept. With the publication of Daniel Patrick Moynihan's 1965 report "The Negro Family," the "culture of poverty" became a shorthand for black ghetto culture, a defect of the poor. Then Edward Banfield, a conservative political scientist, introduced the notion that the culture of poverty was immutable; his 1970 book, "The Unheavenly City," attacked the key assumption of the War on Poverty — the idea that government can help. Banfield argued that poverty was a product of the poor's lack of future-orientation, and that nothing government could feasibly do would change that orientation or stop parents from transmitting it to their children.
Banfield's book is widely seen as retrograde today, but he still seems to own the culture of poverty. Lewis had used the phrase to describe habits acquired in response to structural factors — the standard left-wing argument that people are poor because of low wages, discrimination and bad schools. But the phrase has essentially become shorthand for the right-wing argument that poverty stems from the limitations of the poor and is largely impervious to outside intervention.
Persistent poverty has retreated from the political debate in the United States. But outside the headlines there has been a gentle evolution in thinking about the causes and cures for poverty, one that moves away from blaming capitalism and blaming the poor alike. Today, the most interesting development in that evolution — one with implications for fighting poverty around the world, including in the United States — is coming once again from Mexico, this time from the grandchildren of the children of Sánchez.Continue reading the main story
WE DO NOT KNOW exactly where Jesús Sánchez was born, but it was a village in Veracruz and it easily could have been Paso de Coyutla, a village of 134 families in the mountains along the San Marcos River. Until just a decade ago, Paso de Coyutla was one of the most marginalized places in Mexico, a place where men scratched out a living farming ever-more-subdivided, ever-smaller patches of corn, joined by their children who left school too early, robbed of a future by the need to work. There, on a recent trip, I met Irma Solís, 37, and Pedro Hernández, 43, a couple that has four children.
Solís's and Hernández's grandparents were poor, their parents are poor and they are poor. Hernández, a stocky man with thick, graying hair and a mustache, raises corn; Solís gathers the husks to sell for wrapping tamales. They live in a pink cement house on a hill in Paso de Coyutla. Early this year, Hernández had to borrow $1,000 at a crippling 20 percent monthly interest to buy seeds and fertilizer. When I arrived in July, he had just harvested and sold the crop — but earlier than he would have liked, because he could no longer afford the interest. He made just enough on his corn crop to repay the debt.
In Paso de Coyutla, it seemed that the culture of poverty was indeed immutable. Generations after Jesús Sánchez, the lack of interest in education, failure to think about the future, machismo and authoritarianism persisted. There was every reason to think that life would be exactly the same for Solís and Hernández's four children.
But it may not be. Today their oldest daughter, Maleny, who is 17, is finishing high school and wants to be a teacher. Her 13-year-old sister, María Fernanda, wants to be a nurse. Two younger brothers also plan to stay in school. Maleny's bus takes up to 20 kids from Paso de Coyutla to her high school every day. "Around here, kids helped their parents in the fields," Solís said. She is solidly built, with a lively intelligence and a ready laugh. "But now they want to do other things," she added, flashing a smile revealing the silver that rims her two front upper teeth.
The change did not come gradually. Lewis's description of the culture of poverty probably still fit Paso de Coyutla 10 years ago. It doesn't anymore. The town has transformed itself in the past decade, a result of a deceptively simple government program that is now rewriting poverty-fighting strategies throughout Latin America and around the world. The program is called Oportunidades, and in 1997, Paso de Coyutla became one of the first places in Mexico to enroll. The program gives the poor cash, but unlike traditional welfare programs, it conditions the receipt of that cash on activities designed to break the culture of poverty and keep the poor from transmitting that culture to their children.
Until recently, for example, children like Maleny did not go to high school. Though Maleny's school is public, families often prefer not to pay the fees they're assessed or to pay for school supplies, food and transportation. More important, if she were not in school, she, too, could be working in the fields. Such work is especially common among girls, as their education has been widely derided as a waste of money in rural Mexico — why educate someone who is just going to get married?
Now Maleny goes to school because her mother is enrolled in Oportunidades. Solís gets $61 a month from the Mexican government on the condition that Maleny goes and maintains good attendance. (If she worked in the fields and earned a typical salary, she would be paid $7.40 for an eight-hour day.) Such grants start for students in third grade, increase for each year of school and are higher for girls, which gives families added incentive to send them.
Solís also receives money for the family's food — again, subject to certain requirements. She gets a $27-a-month basic food grant if she takes her family to regular preventive health checkups at Paso de Coyutla's clinic, which provides vaccinations, pap smears and the like. She must also attend a monthly workshop on a health topic, like purifying drinking water. In total, the grants the family receives for food and the oldest three children's educations come to almost as much as Hernández earns farming.
I first visited Paso de Coyutla on Oportunidades' payday, which falls every two months. Hundreds of people, mostly women wearing their credentials around their necks, small children clutching their legs, were gathered in the town's open-air hall. The atmosphere was festive. The women stood in long lines to receive their envelopes of cash. Others were working behind banquet tables at the back, showing off embroidery and crafts made by Oportunidades beneficiaries.
When the program began, under the administration of President Ernesto Zedillo, it was called Progresa. Zedillo's successor, Vicente Fox, changed the name. Five million families are enrolled nationwide — a quarter of the country's households, including virtually every Mexican family at risk for hunger. Seventy-three of the 134 families in Paso de Coyutla are enrolled today. Oportunidades is now the de facto welfare system in Mexico, and it marks the first time modern Mexico has had an effective anti-poverty program.
The elegant idea behind the program — give the poor money that will allow them to be less poor today, but condition it on behaviors that will give their children a better start in life — is called conditional cash transfers, and the World Bank and Inter-American Development Bank promote it heavily. At least 30 countries have now adopted Oportunidades, most of them in Latin America, but not all: countries now using or experimenting with some form of conditional payments include Turkey, Cambodia and Bangladesh. Last year, officials from Indonesia, South Africa, Ethiopia and China contacted or visited Mexico to investigate. Perhaps the most startling iteration is in New York City. Opportunity NYC, a pilot program begun last year after Mayor Michael Bloomberg visited Mexico, will test whether the Oportunidades model can help the New York neighborhoods where poverty is passed down from parent to child. Britain has been successfully using a form of conditional cash transfers to keep teenagers in school and is now running pilots to broaden the program to other areas. The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation is starting a pilot program in several American states to test whether low-income students will stay in college if they get cash payments to do so.
Conditional cash transfers are a convergence point in two different evolutions in understanding and combating poverty. One is taking place in poor countries, which have long tended to concentrate their social services on building universities and hospitals for the urban middle class — a group with substantial political clout — as opposed to primary schools and clinics for the voiceless rural poor. In such countries that are governed by centrists, politicians are starting to help the rural poor because they now know how — and because the poor, who have not benefited from globalization, have flashed new political muscle by electing leftists elsewhere.
The situation is different in rich countries. In New York, Mayor Bloomberg has been able to experiment with Opportunity NYC because of a philosophical shift in how Americans think about poverty. Liberals have largely abandoned entitlements — the so-called nanny state — that took care of people with welfare and other payments while demanding little or nothing on their part. And most conservatives now acknowledge that government must play a role in fighting poverty. But that role is taking a new form. Lawrence M. Mead, a political-science professor at New York University and a former Republican Congressional staff member, calls it "the new paternalism." The nanny state offered unconditional love; the new paternalism is tough love, directly aimed at smashing the culture of poverty. Paul Starobin, a staff correspondent for The National Journal, has coined the term "daddy state" — government as lifestyle supervisor and enforcer of civic responsibilities. Welfare reform, which imposes work requirements on welfare recipients, is the best-known example.
Conditional-cash-transfer programs, part of the new paternalism, defy the traditional poverty wisdom on both left and right. But intriguingly, they are postideological in another sense too. Do the poor fall into the culture of poverty for structural reasons, as Lewis contended, or behavioral ones, as Banfield argued? Oportunidades and Opportunity NYC have a novel answer to that question: maybe it doesn't matter.
In the mid-1990s, Mexico's antipoverty programs were a failure. A third of the population lived in extreme poverty, which meant their income did not even pay for food. Poverty was both more widespread and deeper in rural areas than in cities. Mexico's help for the poor was dispensed mainly in the form of subsidies on milk, tortillas and bread — a program that was inefficient, badly targeted and corrupt.
In 1994, the Mexican peso crashed, and the next year the economy contracted by more than 6 percent. It hit poor people especially hard. President Ernesto Zedillo — an economics Ph.D. who had run the food-subsidy program (and other social services) as a Treasury official and knew intimately what a mess it was — asked Santiago Levy, an undersecretary in the Finance Ministry, for new ideas on how to protect the poor.
Levy, who had been a professor of economics at Boston University, had long advocated scrapping food subsidies. But the first paper he wrote for President Zedillo, he told me in an interview, also included a new idea that occurred to him — conditional cash transfers. He had concluded that food subsidies were simply an inefficient way to give money to the poor. So why not just directly give them cash?
He presented his arguments to the cabinet. "They said, 'This is nuts,' " he said. Some cabinet members warned that there were good reasons that other countries didn't give the poor cash, and worried that it would be misspent, frittered away on alcohol. Others worried about the logistics of reaching remote villages. There were also more politically motivated objections — some cabinet members realized that their own fiefs were threatened. "That's when I decided to run a pilot program without telling anybody," Levy said.
He set up an experiment in two small cities in far-off Campeche State. He found that people preferred getting cash to buying subsidized food and were willing to meet conditions; he also found that it was feasible to distribute cash and that men didn't beat up their wives, take the money and go to the cantina. Armed with his data, he won approval to start the program gradually, beginning in the most marginalized villages, like Paso de Coyutla.
In part because the program began stealthily, without the usual political bargaining and fanfare, Levy was able to design Oportunidades to resist special-interest pleading and concentrate on the poor. It tries to be comprehensive, tackling health, education and nutrition. It aims at the poorest Mexicans — and research shows that it is successful. The program used census data to find the poorest rural areas and urban blocks, and within those areas, gave out questionnaires about people's income and possessions: Do you have a dirt or cement floor? Own a hot-water heater? The homes of those who qualified were visited to verify their answers. The criteria apply nationally — the program allows for no local discretion. Families must be recertified every six years, and according to Salvador Escobedo, Oportunidades' director today, about 10 percent leave each year, either because they have failed to complete their responsibilities or because they are no longer extremely poor.
Levy also aimed the program at the group that will spend money on the family: women. Surveys show that 70 percent of Oportunidades' payment is spent on food — mostly fruit, vegetables and meat. Much of the rest goes to kids' shoes and clothing and home improvements. The program is also designed to combat the typical afflictions of Latin American social programs. Local political leaders have no influence and so cannot use the payments to extort political support. Oportunidades staff members do not handle money — local banks hand out the envelopes of cash, and recipients are encouraged to open bank accounts to receive direct transfers.
Oportunidades is now one of the most-studied social programs on the planet. The program has its own research unit and publishes all the data it generates. In addition, a wide variety of the program's features have been examined in hundreds of surveys and papers by independent academics. The results are put to work. When research showed, for example, that many children receiving a nutritional supplement still had anemia, the supplement was changed to one with a more absorbable form of iron.
Levy paid for the program in a time of economic crisis by phasing out the general food subsidies. But since Oportunidades has virtually no infrastructure, it is still relatively cheap, costing Mexico about $3.8 billion annually. Escobedo boasts that 97 percent of the budget goes directly to beneficiaries.
The program does have its problems. For one thing, Oportunidades lacks the impact in urban areas that it has in the countryside. This may be because it is newer in cities, and the supply of schools and clinics lags behind the increased demand. Even in the countryside, I met with some students who had classes with as many as 42 children, and I saw some clinics with half-day waits for appointments.
The most widespread criticism of the program's design I heard, from academics who study the program and from Oportunidades staff, is that it should attach more conditions to the handing out of money. These observers say that student achievement, not just attendance, should be rewarded. Oportunidades is now running a pilot program for this, but figuring it out is complicated by the fact that school quality in Mexico varies widely, and in rural zones it is largely awful. An initial study focusing on school achievement found that Oportunidades didn't have much impact on test scores. But the study had some flaws, and the topic needs further research.
Yet in general, Oportunidades is, in many respects, an astonishing success. Though it is still too early to know its impact on the adult life of the children who have grown up in the program, the poverty indicators speak to the effects of Oportunidades today. In 1994, before the peso crisis, 21.2 percent of Mexicans lived in extreme poverty. In 1996, just after the crash, 37.4 percent did. But that figure had dropped to 13.8 percent by 2006. Mexico's economic growth during the decade averaged an unspectacular 3 percent, which would not by itself have produced such gains for the poor. And these statistics underestimate the program's true influence, as its greatest effects were concentrated on the very poorest.
In Mexico today, rates of malnutrition, anemia and stunting have dropped, as have incidences of childhood and adult illnesses. But the most pronounced effects are in education. Children in the program drop out less frequently, repeat fewer grades and stay in school longer. In some rural areas, the percentage of children entering middle school has risen by 42 percent. High-school enrollment in some rural areas has risen by 85 percent. The greatest gains were found in families where the mothers had the lowest levels of schooling.
During my visit to Mexico, I met family after family with distinct before-and-after stories. In the village of Tajin, Veracruz, I met a young mother named Minerva Santes Hernández. We talked on her spotless patio (several of the health workshops have dealt with household sanitation) while her three children, ages 6, 5 and 2, climbed on and off her lap. She entered the program when her two oldest were toddlers. "When we came into the program we found that they were undernourished," she told me. "I took them for weighings every month. The clinic gave me cereal and vitamins and told me to make them fruits and vegetables." The two older kids are fine now — the girl is quite tall. The 2-year-old was born into Oportunidades and has never had a problem, Santes said.
Before Oportunidades started, a major objection was that it could increase domestic violence. Poor, rural Mexicans are machista — and it's easy to imagine that they'd be provoked by Oportunidades, which requires women to leave the house to attend workshops, get their money and go to the clinic. Some of the workshops are about women's rights or about self-esteem. Women also get their own money and control how it is spent.
Among the most macho was Solís's own husband. "He was very angry in the beginning of the program," Solís said. "He'd come pull me out of a meeting, yelling: 'Your child fell down and hurt himself! See what happens when you abandon your house!' "
Pedro Hernández cheerfully pleaded guilty. "I didn't accept it at first," he said. "If the clothes were hanging on the line and it started to rain, I wouldn't take them down — I'd go pull her out of a workshop. Or I'd complain my food was cold. I didn't want to heat it up myself."
I asked if he knew how. He smiled. "Now I even know how to cook," he said.
What changed him was a burst appendix two years ago. Because of Oportunidades, the family received priority at a public hospital, where the operation cost $100, not the $3,000 the private hospital wanted. "I realized that it helps," he said. "We have food, shoes, school supplies, the kids have education. We have fewer problems."
Researchers on Oportunidades have not turned up much evidence that it has increased domestic violence, but they acknowledge that problem is often hidden. In the days before Oportunidades, "rights were only for men," said Reyna Luisa Olmedo Vásquez, the nurse at Paso de Coyutla's clinic. "So when that began to change, we began to see more mistreatment of women." One woman, she recalled, was beaten by her husband for letting a male doctor do a breast examination. But in Paso de Coyutla, it seemed, the men eventually accepted that the world had changed. After about five years, violence began to diminish, Olmedo Vásquez said, and now there is less than before the program started — an assessment echoed by doctors I met in other villages.
OPORTUNIDADE'S SUCCESS has begun to echo in some unlikely places. In 2006, Mayor Bloomberg convened a 32-member group called the Commission on Economic Opportunity, charged with finding new ways to help poor New Yorkers. Oportunidades was discussed. "But there was enormous skepticism," says Veronica White, the executive director of the Center for Economic Opportunity, which was established to carry out the group's recommendations. Linda Gibbs, the deputy mayor for health and human services, says that the members preferred to stick with the idea of caseworkers helping poor families. The group's report did not recommend an Oportunidades spinoff for New York City. But in his response to the report, the mayor did. A pilot program began in September 2007, financed by private donors, including Bloomberg himself.
The study enrolled nearly 5,000 families in six consistently poor community districts in the Bronx, Brooklyn and Manhattan, 80 percent of which are single-parent families, the vast majority of which are headed by women. Half are in a control group and the other half get payments — for example, $25 for attending a parent-teacher conference or discussing test results with teachers. They get $25 per month if an elementary- or middle-school child maintains 95 percent attendance; for high-school students, the rate is $50 a month. (In the case of high-school students, rewards for attendance, accumulating credits and graduating go in part to the student.) Beneficiaries receive $150 monthly for holding down a full-time job — more for taking courses while employed. Participants receive their money after returning coupons signed by their doctors and sometimes their teachers. A family that completes all the requirements can make more than $4,000 per year.
It is too early to know if poor New Yorkers respond to payments as readily as poor Mexicans do; the first evaluation, carried out by the social-science research group MDRC, won't be out for a few months. Gordon Berlin, the president of MDRC (which also designed the pilot), says that precedents exist. He cites programs in Wisconsin, Minnesota and two provinces of Canada that gave the poor extra money for working. All brought increases in work and earnings as well as benefits to the schooling of the participants' young children.
If Chandra Hannah is any indication, many New Yorkers will respond. Hannah is a 41-year-old black woman with six children, ranging from infant twins to a 22-year-old son, living in the East New York neighborhood of Brooklyn. When I met her in August, she had just finished her bachelor's degree and was preparing to start a master's, hoping to open her own early-childhood special-education center in the neighborhood. But she said Opportunity had led her to become far more involved with her own children's health and education. "I talk to their teachers more," she said. "Now I go to conferences all the time. I didn't know about the tests they took before. I mean, I knew about them, but I never really looked." She went to a workshop at school for parents on how to help and motivate their children. "Now I spend an hour with my 11-year-old when he comes home from school on his homework," she said. "With the twins, we'll read to them — I'll read one paragraph and then he'll read a paragraph."
Jose Gonzalez, an enrollment and outreach worker at Urban Health Plan, which administers the pilot program in the Bronx, told me: "Once they find out they're getting paid, their children's attendance in school gets a lot better. Getting them to stay current on health insurance is probably the hardest task. The yearly medical checkup is done most often. That's $200 right there."
But there were a few people enrolled in the pilot program in East New York who hadn't yet even picked up their coupon books, said Candice Perkins, who coordinates East New York's pilot program from the storefront office of Groundwork, a social-service agency. Hannah and Perkins sat in Groundwork's small conference room and dissected the neighborhood's low test scores and high drop-out rates. Perkins said that as part of her duties for Groundwork, she gives talks on the importance of sending kids to school and of being involved with their teachers and counselors. "But sometimes people say, 'I'm too tired to send them to school.' Or the child has asthma — and misses 13 or 14 days." Perkins was a young and earnest black woman, dressed to kill with glitter makeup at 10 a.m. She was frustrated with people's lack of interest in the job banks and training programs offered to help them. "We get less than 5 percent attendance at workshops," she said. "Some people, their mind-set is dependence, and to go that extra mile to get resources is hard."
For conservative critics of Opportunity, this disconnect is crucial. Heather Mac Donald, a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, has written articles on the program that echo Perkins's complaint: "Talk to any inner-city teacher," Mac Donald wrote in The Weekly Standard, "and you will hear how difficult it is to get parents involved in their child's education, or students to bother with homework. Countless schemes for tutoring and job training sit on the shelves unused because the 'clients' never show up."
"If Opportunity NYC goes large scale," Mac Donald told me in an interview, "it will further break down the moral obligation to care for one's child and adopt the repertoire of parenting behaviors the middle class takes for granted. It will replace that with the expectation that I'm only going to do it if you pay me." She cites Banfield that living in the present is the central cause of poverty and echoes his skepticism that government can help. "What government cannot do is create personal responsibility and drive in individuals," Mac Donald has written.
But government can change toxic cultures. If the women of Paso de Coyutla are not yet wearing the pants, as Pedro Hernández nervously jokes they are, they certainly describe themselves as different people than they were 10 years ago. In large part, they've come to believe in their own capacity to take care of their families; they believe they are part of a group; they organize to improve the village; they invest all they can in their children's futures. Change is usually generational, produced by education. But it came astoundingly quickly in many parts of Mexico.
Opportunity NYC will not be able to help those parents too apathetic to pick up their coupon books. But those parents are just a small handful. As for the rest, one of the most tantalizing lessons of the program is that the answer to why Mom skips the parent-teacher conferences may not matter.
This is the symbolic controversy of the poverty debate. Are these absentee moms just too busy working two jobs, overwhelmed with the problems of being poor? Opportunity NYC will probably help them. Or have they just not bothered? It may help them too. "There is no inherent contradiction in saying this problem is caused by something other than lack of money and saying that money is the incentive to fix it," Levy says. "That's Economics 101. But you have to evaluate it."
Linda Gibbs, the deputy mayor for health and human services, agreed. "We know that education and health as children are key to getting out of poverty as adults," she said. "You can have an endless, circular debate about why people don't do things. This program is less focused on the why and more focused on whether a different approach can have an impact in a way traditional approaches have not."
Education and health, however, will take you only so far. Suppose Opportunity NYC succeeds. The likelihood is that these families will still be poor. One in three jobs in America pays less than $11.11 an hour, with no benefits. Full time, that's less than $23,000 a year.
Mexico has it even worse. Anyone reading Oportunidades' reviews might reasonably ask: so why is there still so much misery? One reason is that the payments, helpful as they are, are still heartbreakingly small. Emma Pasarán in the town of Venustiano Carranza in Puebla, told me that one of the benefits of the program is that "I am never without money. If my daughter says, 'Mom, I need a pencil,' I can say to her, 'Here's the money.' " She mimes taking a coin out of her purse, a proud smile on her face.
In the same town, I talked to Elia Valderrama Vargas, a mother of three, in her dirt-floor house, about the jobs that will be open to her soon-to-be-educated children. "My husband cuts weeds with a machete," she told me. "My children will be able to work in a tortilla factory because they'll know how to cobrar" — how to add purchases and give change. For Pasarán, buying a pencil on a whim was the fulfillment of a dream; for Valderrama, it was seeing her children in indoor work.
It is not enough — Oportunidades is only an antipoverty program, just one part of a solution, when what is needed is a whole strategy. Few good jobs await even educated young Mexicans. This is Levy's latest crusade — to get Mexico to channel poor people into productive jobs in Mexico's legal labor market. "Creating formal-sector jobs is Mexico's central challenge," Levy said. Without that, he added, "it is as if Oportunidades were financing an improved labor force for the United States." But if Mexico can find a way to create better jobs, it will have access to a work force that, because of Oportunidades, has acquired more of the good health and education necessary to take advantage of them.Continue reading the main story


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Austin Kennedy reviews the latest films, various different movie lists, and an update on all of his film projects.
Tuesday, May 29, 2012
The 31 Day Movie Challenge - Day 31 - JESUS' SON (2000)
- Rated R for graphic drug use, strong language, sexuality and some violent images.
- Starring Billy Crudup, Samantha Morton, Jack Black, Denis Leary, Holly Hunter, Dennis Hopper, Michael Shannon
- Written by Elizabeth Cuthrell, David Urrutia & Oren Moverman (Based on the book by Denis Johnson)
- Directed by Alison Maclean
- Running time: 1hr 47min
(The 31 Day Movie Challenge was proposed to me by fellow film critic Jessie Hoheisel (from superawesomemovieblog). We each chose 30 films for each other to review for the month of May. The first film chosen will be from 1970. The second film from 1971... and so on. The last day will be a film from 2000. I accepted the challenge!)
Back in the late 90's, I was really into Indie films just for the sake of it. I was an aspiring (still am) filmmaker and I loved anything that was different. It took me until I saw the underrated DONNIE DARKO that I grew out of this rebellious filmmaking phase. If I re-watched at least half of the weird pretentious movies I loved in the 90's, I probably wouldn't dig them so much anymore. Reviewing lots of films over the years I have discovered one true thing. Tastes change. Constantly. When I saw the trailer for this back in 1999, I thought it looked amazing. For some reason, I never made my way to the theater to see it. Being my last film chosen for the movie challenge, I was really looking forward to finally watching it.
Billy Crudup plays Fuckhead. Yup! Fuckhead. He's a drifter in the 70's (I think?) that meets a hippie named Michelle (Morton). They hit it off, I guess.... but they're always on again and off again during this fucking trainwreck. Sorry. Usually I wait until I finish the synopsis to reveal what I thought about the film, but I just can't contain myself. This movie is painful artsy dreck!. So yeah, Fuckhead and Michelle are junkies and they keep splitting up. Every once in awhile Fuckhead will wander around, getting in wacky adventures, like working at an emergency ward in a hospital with Jack Black, or volunteering at a rehab center (when he gets sober). He also meets an older widow played by Holly Hunter who he bangs and then she completely disappears for no reason.
Sorry, I can't really explain the structure and plot of the film, cause there is none. It is told completely in flashbacks, but it's all over the place that I just stopped trying to follow it. The characters take a lot of drugs, swear and yell at each other a whole lot, and then try to have meaningful discussions. This is the type of movie that I would expect from some pretentious film school graduate. Everything has to be experimental. Director Alison Maclean is so determined to make this film not like any other film that all of the experimentation takes the movie completely over, as it just spirals out of control.
The only saving grace is Samantha Morton, who gives a heart wrenching performance as a drug taking bitch. She's definitely one of my favorite actresses, I just wish she would have had a well written character. Everyone tries so hard to be offbeat and strange. Crudup is a lost mess here. Jack Black was still in his annoying "look at me" phase before he became a star, as he gave distracting performances that stood out, and not in a good way (like in MARS ATTACKS and THE JACKAL). I would have liked to see more Dennis Hopper in what was a criminally small cameo, though I guess I'll just watch EASY RIDER 50 more times instead. Michael Shannon wasn't a good actor yet (honestly, I've only liked him in 2 films, BUG and TAKE SHELTER), Denis Leary has a pointless character, and Will Patton is wholly unnecessary.
Director Maclean has made sure that every cheap arty filmmaking gimmick was thrown in so we wouldn't be confused that this was a Hollywood film. When an indie film tries this hard to think out of the box, it makes me ashamed that I am a part of this. When I'm making a film, I just want it to be good. But I don't over-think it, and force it to be something. A film should come about naturally. But this is about as natural as a Cheerleader at a gutter punk rock show.
JESUS' SON is bottom of the line trash that wants to be art. Full of self important crap, tedious performances, and embarrassing experimental flourishes, this is a movie to avoid at all costs.
1/2 (out of ****)
1 comment:
Your a fool. Have you ever had a drug problem, it is wacky hard to follow and at times surreal. With this film following a recovering addict hmm surprised much. I think this whole premise of being lost hitting rock bottom and finding whatever small chance ofsalvation anyone can hope for went straight over your probably very priveledged head. Yup your a fool.ReplyDelete
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Mulled wine is a traditional winter beverage that has been served in Europe for thousands of years. In a classic form, mulled wine is made with red wine, spices, lemon, and sugar, and served warm. Many variations on mulled wine exist, including versions with white wine or spiced drinks diluted with teas and juices, which end up tasting more like a punch. Mulled wine is an interesting and unusual beverage to add to the table of holiday drinks at a party, and is very easy to make.
To make classic mulled wine, start with a bottle of rich and rustic red wine. You do not want to waste expensive wine, as the flavor of the wine will change substantially, but be aware that very cheap wines can sometimes express strange flavors when they are mulled. It is best to stick with a solid, mid range wine from Spain or Italy.
Put the wine into a glass or enamel cooking pot; do not use a reactive substance like aluminum because it will add a strange flavor to the wine. Add spices of your choice such as cinnamon, nutmeg, ginger, and allspice, along with grated orange zest. Warm the mixture slowly, adding in ¼ cup of sugar, and heat it for approximately 15 minutes. Do not allow the mixture to boil, or it will be ruined. It is an excellent idea to taste before serving, to make sure that the flavors are well balanced.
Garnishes for mulled wine can include cinnamon sticks, candy canes, lemon wedges, orange bark, or other holiday themed items. Try to choose a garnish that will complement and enhance the flavor of the mulled wine. To further open up the flavor of the mulled wine, make sure that you serve it in wide mouthed cups.
You can also make mulled wines with alcoholic fruit ciders, or white wine. You may want to adjust the levels of sugar and spices if you use a different base. To alter the flavor of these mulled wines further, you can dilute them with herbal teas or fruit juices, creating an interesting taste for your guests to enjoy and talk about.
While mulled wines are not widely served in the United States, they are warming and refreshing Christmas drinks, and you may find yourself growing fond of them. Visitors from many European nations will greatly enjoy the taste of home, and would probably be happy to exchange recipes and tips with you. Also be aware that mulled wine is still alcoholic, despite heating, and you may want to have alcohol free options on hand for young guests and drivers such as spiced ciders or mulled wine made with a nonalcoholic wine.
Post 2
Many mulled wine recipes can also work nicely with a strong grape juice or other type of juice; while it won't taste exactly the same as traditional mulled wine, it can be a nice option for people who don't want to drink.
Post 1
I like the idea of mulled wine, however I find even the milder versions to be too alcoholic for me. I do like to buy mixes of mulled wine spice, though, and add them to juice, hot tea, or even hot cocoa. It adds that taste without the feelings I get from the wine itself.
One of our editors will review your suggestion and make changes if warranted. Note that depending on the number of suggestions we receive, this can take anywhere from a few hours to a few days. Thank you for helping to improve wiseGEEK!


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You and I are in this together and I am not going anywhere.
Alzheimer's Reading Room
Frontotemporal Dementia is a rare and very aggressive form of dementia. There is no cure.
The video below about Michael and Ruth French is intense and moving.
To read more about Frontotemporal Dementia, Michael, and Ruth in the New York Times go here -- When Illness Makes a Spouse a Stranger.
Also see --
What is Frontotemporal Dementia?
Frontotemporal Dementia: Information for Patients, Families, and Caregivers
Caregivers of Frontotemporal Dementia Patients
|Subscribe to the Alzheimer's Reading Room
More Insight and Advice from the Alzheimer's Reading Room
- What's the Difference Between Alzheimer's Disease and Dementia
- Something Had to Change
- Alzheimer's Caregivers are the Chosen
- What is Alzheimer's Disease?
- What is Dementia?
Original content Bob DeMarco, the Alzheimer's Reading Room


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Let the stylists from Rare Hair in Cheektowaga, New York, pamper you with the best hair and nail services in the area. From haircuts and coloring treatments to manicures and pedicures, our staff has the experience to cater to your needs!
Affordable professional skin and body care will certainly put you in the right mood.
At our salon you will get a full treatment. Professional manicure and pedicure's with the newest practices will make your skin and body the main talk at any party.
Get beach-day ready without spending endless hours in the sun and exposing your body to harmful UV rays. Simply visit us for a safe, sunless tan that lasts for five to 10 days and only costs $20.00!
**Prices may vary**


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January 27, 2017 Published ~ 3 years ago.
Know about Swim Suit and the best place to buy it fromA swim suit is basically designed for water based activities. There are different kinds of swim wear available for men and women including the jammers, bikinis, etc. Latex, Nylon and Polyester are some of the many materials used in making swim suits. eSwimElite is the site where one can find a wide range of swim suits at best price.
January 26, 2017 Published ~ 3 years ago.
Low Calorie Recipes You Should Add To Your DietOne of the sources the Mediterranean Diet gets its health benefits are from the use of olive oil. Shaved Brussels sprouts & pecorino, crisp rosemary & olive oil flatbread, and seafood broth are some of the easy-to-prepare low calorie recipes you can add to your diet.
January 26, 2017 Published ~ 3 years ago.
Improve Fitness & Reduce Pain with Mobility TherapyFitness industry is always improving which means there are many and better ways to exercise for maximum results. Whether you are young or old, regular exercise routine is a must for a healthy body. Mobility training is a great way to achieve better flexibility and higher level of exercise results.
January 26, 2017 Published ~ 3 years ago.
How to Choose Forex Currency Trading BrokersDiscover the 3 factors that make up quality Forex currency trading brokers so that you will know how to choose the right Forex currency trading broker for you and your specific needs.
January 26, 2017 Published ~ 3 years ago.
How to Overcome Less Than Satisfying #SalaryOffersThere comes a time in everyone's life when you get fed up with accepting a minimum wage job.
January 26, 2017 Published ~ 3 years ago.
West coast highway road trip: from Oatman to SeattleIt's funny how just driving along a certain route, stopping at random places you didn't even know existed, can be such a memorable experience.
January 25, 2017 Published ~ 3 years ago.
Benefits of Home Renovations and ConstructionIf you have not experienced any major problems in your home, you might be wondering if you should do any additional work even if it is not broken. Despite not having the need to do any major repairs, you can still benefit from a home renovation or additional construction in Modesto, CA. Having new construction can offer more flexibility in your home. But before you decide to do any major renovations, it is best to plan carefully and to hire a professional who can help you make the best decisions
January 25, 2017 Published ~ 3 years ago.
6 reasons why businesses in Northern Ireland should be online and have a websiteNorthern Ireland has been slower to embrace digital than the rest of the United Kingdom, however that is now changing. This article looks at the main reasons why businesses in Northern Ireland should have a website set up for their business if they wish to remain competitive in the moving world of digital.
January 25, 2017 Published ~ 3 years ago.
6 Big Moving MistakesMoving from one house to another is often very stressful. Here's a way to avoid many common moving mistakes.
January 25, 2017 Published ~ 3 years ago.
The need for the Big Data Analytics training in Bangalore and other placesSuch a form of training is hence a needed one for people who are looking for analysis jobs in the modern world. They impart the current working knowledge to them. One of the things that are trending in the world of jobs at present is the big data analytics training. This field of technological improvements relates to an enhanced process of collection, management as well as analysis of a large amount of facts.
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1.- Completa la oración con la correcta forma de verbos.
wear/wore make/made type/typed am/was sell/sold drive/drove put/put
a) "I worked at a hotel. I _______ a gorilla costume!"
b) "I worked as a cook. I _____ pizzas in a pizza parlor"
c) "I worked as a taxicab driver. I didn´t______ the cab, I rode it!"
d) "I worked in a office. I _____ letters"
e) "I worked as a lifeguard. I ____ on the beach all summer"
f) "I worked at a circus. I ____ snacks and drinks"
2.- Completa la oración con will o won´t
a) Women ___ make more money than men.
b) There ____ be a woman president.
c) There ____ not be as many poor people.
d) Most people ____ be able to travel in space.
e) People ____ not work too much and the they ____ have more time to do other things.
1.- a) wore, b) make, c) drove, d) tiped, put, e) am, f) sold.
2.- a) will, b) will, c) won´t, d) will, e) will, f) won´t, will


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For Fujitsu LIFEBOOK A, E, S, U Series & Tablet T Series
Input Voltage: 100 ~ 240V
Input Frequency: 50 ~ 60Hz
Output Voltage: 19V
Output Current: 4.22A
Power Capacity: 80W
***Without AC Cable
Copyright 2019 FUJITSU BUSINESS TECHNOLOGIES ASIA PACIFIC LIMITED


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These are Adjustable Nylon Dark Gray Suspenders with elastic in the back for strength. They are a Y Back Design with one clip in the back.
The nylon is 1 1/2 inches wide.
The scissor snaps attach to your belt loops and will not slip off like traditional suspender clips.
There are adjustments in the front as well as the back of the suspenders for fine-tuning your fit.
ships to all 50 states


text: Largo is Social - Follow, Like & Share eNews Sign Up Get the latest information on the City of Largo's services, programs and events. Facebook City-WideRecreationLibraryCPPACLargo PoliceLargo Fire RescueLargo RecyclesEconomic Development Twitter City-WideLibraryLargo Fire RescueLargo PoliceLargo Jobs YouTube Largo TV Instagram RecreationCPPAC Nextdoor City-WidePublic Safety LinkedIn Follow and view City job postings, business development and more. LoveLargoFL Share feedback and receive information. City News View the latest City News and updates.


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Facebook is hardly a paragon of security and privacy, even when everything is up and running properly. So it getting hacked is hardly a surprise. Fortunately, no user data was compromised, so really what this boils down to is Facebook being embarrassed.
So what happened, precisely? Facebook's security blog lays it out:
Last month, Facebook Security discovered that our systems had been targeted in a sophisticated attack. This attack occurred when a handful of employees visited a mobile developer website that was compromised. The compromised website hosted an exploit which then allowed malware to be installed on these employee laptops. The laptops were fully-patched and running up-to-date anti-virus software. As soon as we discovered the presence of the malware, we remediated all infected machines, informed law enforcement, and began a significant investigation that continues to this day.
We have found no evidence that Facebook user data was compromised.
In other words, whoever installed this exploit wasn't looking for Facebook specifically. It was essentially the virus version of a dog poop that blends in with the sidewalk, waiting for people to step in it.
It's likely the attack was just looking for proprietary data to sell: Facebook's pipes and wires, not user data, because, let's face it, it's not like that's hard to get.


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Tuesday, 06 November 2018 13:01
A joint mission of Egyptian and German archaeologists found several fragments of stone slabs in eastern Cairo.
Archaeologists working at a dig in Cairo have found several fragments of stone slabs with inscriptions that could be 4,000 years old, Egypt's Ministry of Antiquities said.
Some of the limestones date to the 12th (founded in 1991 BC) and 20th dynasties, of the Middle and New Kingdoms, the ministry said on Tuesday.
German Egyptologist Dietrich Raue, the head of the mission, said one inscription refered to Atum, an important and frequently mentioned god, as being responsible for the flooding of the Nile River in the Late Period between 664 and 332 BC.
Matariya, in eastern Cairo, was once part of the ancient city of Heliopolis, or the city of the sun.
Egypt has seen a haul of archaeological finds over the past two years.
A sandstone sphinx dating to the Ptolemic Dynasty was found in the southern city of Aswa in September.
The Ptolemaic Dynasty ruled Egypt for roughly 300 years - from around 320 to about 30 BC.
In May 2017, Egypt's Ministry of Antiquities announced the discovery of what is believed to be the 3,700-year-old burial chamber of a pharaoh's daughter in a suburb of Cairo.
Archaeologists also found 12 cemeteries that are believed to be about 3,500 years old.
Another 17 mostly intact mummies were found that month in central Egypt. These mummies were thought to be from Egypt's 600-year Greco-Roman period, which began in 323 BC.
Egypt frequently announces archaeological discoveries, hoping this will spur interest in its ancient treasures and revive tourism, called the "lifeblood" of its economy, which declined following a failed revolution in 2011, the military coup that put President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi in power and a series of extremist attacks.
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Today was a gorgeous day in San Diego, so I went for a hike at Mission Trails.There must have been 50 to 100 people on the trail up to the top of Cowles Mountain. When I reached the top I kept going along a ridge to nearby Pyles Peak. There wasn't a single person on the trail to Pyles, but I was rewarded with better vistas, more vibrant plant life, and more active wildlife. Hiking alone on this part of the trail, I realized a few things about what sets the best companies and employees apart from the rest of the pack.
On the way to Pyles Peak. San Diego, CA
The trail to Pyles Peak was just as well marked as the trail to the top of Cowles Mountain. It was just as well maintained. The trail itself was actually an easier hike, though you did have to make it up Cowles first. It's also just as well documented on trail maps. So why wasn't there a single person on the way to Pyles? The answers are very similar to the reasons that so many best practices in business are well documented, and even shared by the companies and people doing great work, but so few organizations follow them.
- It takes longer.
- It is new, unfamiliar territory.
- Nobody else seems to be doing it.
It takes longer.
We area society of quick fixes. We want the answer now, the result now, the goal now. Diet and exercise aren't as interesting as a magic weight loss pill. Saving for something special isn't as easy as buying it now on credit. Getting rich over a long career isn't as compelling as getting rich quickly. Fully understanding and executing a business strategy is much more daunting than finding a few tips and tricks you can implement (albeit badly) this afternoon.
The hike up to Cowles Mountain is 1.5 miles. It is another 1.5 miles from Cowles to Pyles Peak. There are plenty of people that are spent when they get to the top of Cowles, but there are plenty more that could keep going. They simply choose not to or don't realize it is an option.
Last year, I had a promising new client that hired me to help them improve productivity. I soon discovered the client had a quick fix in mind -- he wanted me to do time management training. After spending a half-day with his team I showed him how a few operational changes would solve his team's time management problems and actually gain him the equivalent of two full-time employees in extra capacity. The consulting fees would cost roughly double the fee for the time management class, but the savings would be the salaries of two employees. We had to part ways because the client couldn't see past the quick fix.
Another client of mine recently embarked on a 3 year plan to improve customer service and employee engagement. She had me do some customer service training to help jump-start the initiative, but that was only the beginning. They are already getting great results, but my client won't be satisfied until they've achieved their overall objectives and we're already planning our next moves.
It's new, unfamiliar territory.
I know a lot of people who have hiked to the top of Cowles Mountain. I don't know anyone who has hiked to the top of Pyles Peak. That's not to say Pyles hasn't been hiked. It just means that the population of people who have is much smaller. For most people, Pyles is unfamiliar territory, even it the hill itself is just has visible as Cowles.
I recently had a conversation with an executive who was searching for ways to cut payroll expense. Her organization was having cash flow issues and she knew cutting payroll was a sure way to cut costs. What she couldn't see was that her business model was antiquated and the organization offered several services that were losing money. Through the course of our discussion, it was clear that territory was too unfamiliar for her to venture into.
Another client of mine is doing the opposite. Yes, they are struggling with the current economy and have had to cut costs. They are also working hard to improve their operations, increase employee engagement, and enhance customer service in an effort to strengthen their margins and retain customers. This strategy reduces some expenses now, but it also puts them in a healthy position for the long-term. The only drawback is none of their competitors are doing what they're doing, so they've had to look outside their industry for guidance.
Nobody else seems to be doing it.
The parking lot at the foot of Cowles Mountain was full today. You could see the line of people trudging up or down the trail. Once at the top, there were breathless, sweat-soaked hikers everywhere. What you didn't see was anyone venturing around the bend to the Pyles Peak trail. It wasn't familiar.
I work with a few call center clients and have learned that "talk time", the average time it takes a rep to handle a call, is still one of the most popular performance metrics. Many call centers measure talk time because other call centers measure it and industry associations continue to promote it. It's also easy to understand that paying someone $10 per hour who can handle 20 calls per hour equates to a $.50 cost per call. Or does it?
Most of my clients are adamant about not measuring talk time. They know that pressuring their reps to get off the phone quickly may result in a $.50 cost per call, but it will also result in a $1.50 cost per problem because the customer will have to call back several times. Worse, the customer may choose to do business with someone else. These clients want to be leaders in their industries, so they are not afraid to break away from the herd.
Where to go from here?
We can all get more out of our company, our team, or our jobs if we take the road a little less traveled or go a little farther than we've gone before. If you don't know where to start, find a guide who can help you. If your challenge is customer service or employee performance, I can help you chart a course with a simple, cost-effective assessment.
The view today was definitely worth it!
Yes, this picture was taken in San Diego!


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NEO/Oyaide のケーブルは、USBとRCAの両方とも、デザインとパフォーマンスがクールなバランスで融合している。使い始めてから、DJ setでもStudioでも、サウンドのクオリティが大幅に良くなったよ
Artist Profile
With his notorious residency in one of the best Milan's parties and appearances at Ibizan hotspots over the past few years, Remo has hardly been waiting in the wings of the international club scene, yet now is truly the time for him to step into the spotlight in his role as one of Italy's most important and influential DJs and producers. For it's through playing all of Italy's major clubs as well as at other worldwide parties that Remo has refined both his dark electronic style and his empathic relationship with the audience on the dancefloor; a symbiosis of emotion and experimentation that he is now distilling in the studio and with the launch of his new label Lilith. Every track since his first release Black Sabrina with Chelnois R. Jones on the Giant Wheel label in 2005 has represented another rapid development in both Remo's tech- house style as well as his profile, with Steve Lawler releasing the infamous Mizar on VIVA Music and making Remo resident at the VIVA parties at Space in Ibiza in 2006, whilst the following year saw his solo track Ivision on the UK's Forensic Records taking the Milan based producer and DJ to even greater heights. Equally prolific when it comes to remixing, Remo has also added his unique touch to tracks such as Audiofly's Inside The Beat and Paul Nazca's 1962 Pacific Nuclear Tests. At the core of all Remo's music is a a sound based on melody which combines different influences and genres to create a style that can cross boundaries.


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Happy New Year!!! The holiday season sure went by quickly! I can't believe Valentine's Day is just around the corner. I guess it's time to get those Christmas decorations tucked away! It's amazing to see how fast retailer's swap out the Holiday's and Season's, maybe I need to start planning my home decor like a retailer does and then I'll change out my seasonal decorations in a more timely manner.
Every year I get a little bit more into Valentine's Day. When I was younger I got really upset with the Hallmark holiday, but it really has grown on me and I think I'll just cave and embrace it. The world needs more love anyway!
One thing that really influenced my new found love for Valentine's was my nerdy obsession with Japanese manga's and anime. In every single series you will find the obligatory Valentine's Day and/or White Day episode. I really love the Japanese tradition of women giving men chocolate on Valentine's Day. Then on White Day a month after Valentine's Day the men will return the gift. I absorbed ALL of the lovey dovey stuff like a sponge! What can I say, I have always been the mushy sort.
Since I love to cook and occasionally get crafty Valentine's DIY is right up my ally. One year I made a chocolate covered bacon bouquet presented in couple coffee mugs and another year I made homemade "pocket coffee" chocolates in wooden picture memory box. This year I think I will be baking instead of playing chocolatier. I really do have fun day dreaming up memorable little ways of saying, "I love you!"
Valentine's Day is not exclusive to romantic love. Children's Valentine's Day cards are deposited into ever increasingly creative drop boxes. Co-workers, friends, and neighbors always appreciate a little something special as well. As I mentioned once before, the world needs more love!
What are your plans for the holiday? Are you going to snuggle up at home with popcorn and a movie or are you going out for a romantic dinner?
However you celebrate this Valentine's Day I hope it is filled with L-O-V-E!


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Method of Work
The authentically Belgian clothing line of Annelies Bruneel is identified by an entirely own method of working. She starts from the last step and from there, proceeds towards the very beginning of the garment.
Annelies's signature in her collection is a blue-and-yellow satin ribbon which is being sewn into all garments. Just like the inner lining of the clothing, this step is also being done by hand, for makes for the finest and most qualitatively pleasing finish.
Het pikeren van de stof. Om de vorm van bijvoorbeeld jassen soepel en stevig te houden doet Annelies dit met natuurlijke materialen en met de hand. Dit verhoogt de draagbaarheid en beweegbaarheid van de kleding en zorgt voor een lange levensduur.
Shaping the fabric. To ensure for a supple garment with a durable hold, Annelies treats her fabrics with organic materials and by hand. This increases the wearability and flexibility of the garment and ensures them with a long life.
Annelies chooses to exclusively work with organic materials. Having been trained as a textile designer, working with organic materials has always been her passion. She especially enjoys working with linnen, wool and silk because of their distinct qualities. On the one hand, a fascinating dialogue between the human body and there materials can be observed. On the other hand, she is inspired by the natural beauty and movement of these fabrics.
Annelies buys her fabrics in modest amounts, so that the pieces she creates, really can be considered as unique pieces. Her choice of fabrics is being influenced by both material and colour. Annelies is very sensitive to colours and chooses them carefully and with a lot of attention to detail.
Throughout the years, she has tried out different pattern systems, and always chooses a system which would be most suited regarding the technical aspects of the design. The classical men's cut, for example, is a very simple designed which can be altered endlessly, while ensuring a comfotable fit and organic mouvement in relationship to the body. This design and its wearability is highly appreciated by the customers.
Elke stof heeft zijn eigenheid. Deze wordt bepaald door het materiaal, de garendikte en het weefsel. Met een specifiek uitgekozen stof gaan Annelies aan de slag. Door te experimenteren op een pop leidt ze fysieke eigenheid van een stof af. Ze onderzoekt hoe die eigenschappen haar idee kunnen realiseren.
Annelies often sketches ordinary movements and actions of people. This provides her with insight in the wearability of clothes and, at the same time, encourages her to plunge into the beauty of the common and ordinary in life. Annelies' goal is to create beautiful, well-made and wearable Belgian clothing. Oftentimes, she can be seen with a camera or sketch book in the Belgian world.
Annelies is inspired by clouds, trees, fabrics, windows, shadows, fossils of the everyday life of other people, poetry, lines and the blue colour of ballpoints. It is her passion to translate these sources of inspiration into clothing through her imagination and professional knowledge.
In her thesis on textile design, Annelies chose to elaborate on the position of fashion in this society. In order to do this, she did research on ready-to-wear clothing, conceptual fashion and fashion during the course of history. In her thesis on theater costumes and scenography, Annelies did research on the topic of visual drama and visual language. That Annelies chose for these very different topics, is a good example of how diverse her interests are, which results in a broad field to draw her technical knowledge and inspiration from.


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I did it. I deflated the Patriots' footballs.
It wasn't a ball boy, locker room attendant, Tom Brady, or even Bill Belichick.
It was me.
I wanted to identify myself before the NFL identified me to the world.
Why did I do it? Simply because I have a pigskin fetish. Rex Ryan has a feet fetish,
I have a pigskin one. And I wanted to help Brady win another Super Bowl.
My fetish with pigskin started back in the 8th grade when my father gave me an
NFL football signed by my favorite player at the time, Bert Jones. He was known
as "The Ruston Rifle" and quarterbacked the Baltimore Colts, who ironically, had
a 22-year-old assistant coach on the staff named Belichick. Yep, that Belichick.
The football my father gave me was a little deflated. Perhaps, my father knew that Iwas still growing and my hands were just not that big to grip it. It felt comfortable
and I was zipping spirals as I played with it around the house and in the backyard.
But for the most part the slightly deflated ball stayed on a shelf in my bedroom.
About three years ago, I was back in Boston on business and I heard Tom Brady
talking on the radio and he mentioned that he liked his balls a little deflated and it
brought back memories of the ball my father gave me that had a little air taken out
of it. I remembered how I threw tight spirals with ease and figured that's why Brady
like his balls a little deflated, too.
I had been around Brady a lot when I worked for NESN and was the beat reporter
for the Patriots. I covered every practice and every game for two years and was there
when they beat the Philadelphia Eagles in Super Bowl in 2005. It was the last time
Brady hoisted the Lombardi Trophy.
Knowing how much Brady wanted another title and how much he liked his balls
deflated, I devised a plan to go to Foxboro for the AFC Championship to take care
of his balls.
I wasn't worried about getting past security and into Gillette Stadium. I still had
my old press pass from the Patriots, which I doctored up to make it current. I posed
as a reporter, but underneath my suit from TJ Maxx, I was dressed like a ball boy: shorts,
long-sleeved t-shirt, and a pinney, which I paid $50 to a public works guy in my
town to acquire.
I was good to go.
After making the three-hour trek from my home in Connecticut to Foxboro, I
arrived at Gillette Stadium well before game time. I breezed passed security, blending
in with other members of the media, most of whom I knew from my days covering
the team.
I was quite familiar with the bowels of the stadium, the locker room, game day
offices, and equipment room were in the same location as I remembered. I snuck into a
bathroom to take off my suit, in so doing, I was now a full-fledged ball boy.
I walked causally through the infrastructure of the stadium, but my heart was racing
through the roof. I knew from covering the Patriots, that if I got caught doing something
I shouldn't be doing, I'd never be heard from again. They'd throw me off the Tobin
Bridge in cement shoes and make me swim with the fishes.
From the report I did on the ball boys several years ago, I knew their routine. They
dropped the balls off to the officials for approval about 3 hours before game time.
Pick up had to be done two hours and fifteen minutes prior to kick-off.
I showed up to the refs office a little early, hoping they'd be ready so I could beat
the real ball boy to pick-up. When I arrived to the office, I said to the official who
greeted me, "Are the balls ready?"
dropped them off? I responded, "No. The other ball boy got tied up. I think he was
running a tape down to Belichick. Coach said for me to pick them up."
Anderson reluctlantly handed me the bag of balls marked, "New England Patriots
Game Balls."
Remember that report from Jay Glazer of Fox Sports and Mike Florio from Pro Football
Talk? Yeah, that was me who snuck in the bathroom. But I wasn't deflating the balls
in there. I had some mean chili from the night before and it was screaming to come out.
And yes, I released everything and I mean everything in 90 seconds.
I still had plenty of work to do in a short period of time. I found a room which was filled
with all the practice dummies. I laughed out loud when I saw one of them had a face
painted on it. It was the face of Eric Mangini, the former Belichick disciple and Jets coach
who turned his mentor in for taping signals, creating "Spygate". Belichick has never
forgotten that.
I carried a gauge in my waist band and deflated a little air out of 12 balls. I cradled the
balls in my hands and they felt just like that Bert Jones ball my father gave me as a
youngster. I remember how easy it was to throw perfect spirals with that ball. I knew
Brady would find them to his liking.
Now, I just had to drop them off inside the Patriots locker room and I would accomplish
the mission. From my days covering the team, I knew they'd be in meetings with their
respective position coach going over last minute strategy. This would be a breeze. I
just said hello to security outside the locker room with the bag of game balls. I just
opened the door and dropped them inside. I hit the imaginary Staples button and said to
myself, "That was easy."
I drove back home to Connecticut with a big smile on my face. I got back in time to
see Brady hoist the AFC Championship trophy. He was going to the Super Bowl again
with a chance to make history. Yes, Coach Belichick, I did my job.
Yes, I deflated the balls without Brady's knowledge. I'm sorry for the controversy I
caused. I didn't mean for it to get so out of control. By the way Troy Aikman and
Mark Brunell, get a clue. Brady is not a cheater. He didn't know.
But I certainly did. Enjoy the game everybody, it should be an epic one.


text:
Noryl Open Slot
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frighten (one) to death(redirected from frightened me to death)
frighten (one) to death
To shock or frighten someone very suddenly and/or severely. Hyperbolically alludes to frightening someone so badly as to cause them to die. Don't sneak up on me like that, you frightened me to death! That car accident seems to have frightened Janet to death—she's still shaken by it.
frighten (someone or an animal) to deathand scare someone or an animal to death
1. Lit. to frighten a living creature badly enough to cause death. The roar of the plane engine seems to have frightened the little dog to death.
2. Fig. to frighten someone severely. The dentist always frightens me to death. She scared me to death when she screamed.


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Perry County, Tennessee Juvenile Law Lawyers
Find Perry County, Tennessee Juvenile Law Lawyers by City
Hohenwald, TN 38462
Lincoln Memorial University - John J. Duncan, Jr. School of Law and Middle Tennessee State University
Lawrenceburg, TN 38464
Franklin, TN 37064
Vanderbilt University
Suite 202
Franklin, TN 37064
Western Michigan University Cooley Law School
My passion is standing up for folks who need someone knowledgeable and skilled in their corner to protect their rights.
My passion for standing up for what's right is also delivered in the representation of folks experiencing the challenges of a Divorce or Child Custody battles.
Having started my career primary...
Murfreesboro, TN 37130
Nashville School of Law
Vanderbilt University Law School
Belmont University College of Law
I provide quality representation in a variety of areas of law, including: adoption, divorce, child custody, child support, guardianship, grandparent visitation, basic wills, and pre-nuptial agreements
Franklin, TN 37067
Michigan State University
109 Cleburne Street
Franklin, TN 37064
University of Mississippi
Western Michigan University Cooley Law School
Attorney Jim Widrig practices in all of Middle Tennessee and his main office is located in downtown Nashville. James Widrig founded the law office of Widrig Law PLLC in February of 2007 with the goal to fight for individuals during the most difficult times of their lives. In 2011 James L Widrig was voted one...
Suite 103
Nashville, TN 37201
Chicago-Kent College of Law, Illinois Institute of Technology
Suite 1130
Nashville, TN 37219
Vanderbilt University Law School
When asked why she practices criminal defense, Ms Sherwood replied: "I feel a deep satisfaction from freeing my clients, both in the literal sense and figuratively from the mental burden of a criminal charge. I feel empathy for every client, and I cannot stand to lose."
That combination of empathy and competitiveness has proven to be quite powerful.
Her defense strategies have evolved to embody much more than the "normal"...
Barry University Dwayne O. Andreas School of Law
Nashville, TN 37210
Nashville School of Law
Don graduated Middle Tennessee State University before moving on to pursue his J.D. at the Nashville School of Law in 1985. While in law school, Don was employed in the Circuit Court Clerk's Office; he also gained experience as the Law Clerk for Circuit Criminal Court. Upon admittance to the Bar, Don served as an Assistant District Attorney, responsible for prosecuting both misdemeanors and felonies.
After several years as a prosecutor, Don made the decision to enter private practice with his partners, Jim Higgins and Rick Piliponis. Together, the three attorneys opened...
Totty Building, 3rd Floor
Mt. Juliet, TN 37122
University of Tennessee - Knoxville
Suite 202
Nashville, TN 37201
Nashville School of Law
Nashville, TN 37212
Belmont University College of Law
I provide quality representation in an array of practice areas, including: adoption, divorce, child custody, child support, cohabitation agreements, guardianship, grandparent visitation, wills, and pre-nuptial agreements.
Brentwood, TN 37027
Cumberland School of Law, Samford University
Murfreesboro, TN 37130
Nashville School of Law
Nashville, TN 37219
Nashville School of Law
Brentwood, TN 37027
Nashville School of Law
For over twenty years she has had a private practice defending the rights of parenting, families, and children against the intrusive interference of government entities. Her published case of Andrews v. Hickman County has been quoted many times as the Sixth Circuit's clarification that the...
Suite 4-324
Goodlettsville, TN 37072
University of Tennessee - Knoxville
Marjorie then spent time in private practice primarily representing children and families in juvenile court cases. Then she went to work for the Tennessee Department of Children's Services for more than 6 years where she served as the primary juvenile justice and education attorney, handled employment matters for the 4000 person agency, and advised...
Clarksville, TN 37040
Belmont University College of Law
Franklin, TN 37067
University of Tennessee College of Law
Suite 419
Nashville, TN 37201
Nashville School of Law
Prior to pursuing a career in law, Lisa founded the medical practice management and medical billing firm, MedAccounts, Inc. Upon graduation from law school, she established Ewing Law Office LLC and where...
Franklin, TN 37068
Nashville School of Law
I take pride in my communication and responsiveness to my clients and prospective clients. I always answer inquiries within one business day. Call (615) 926-5805 or email email@example.com today for your free consultation.
Murfreesboro, TN 37130
The Nashville School of Law
I provide my clients with experienced and aggressive representation with the singular goal of getting the best possible results in each situation. Feel free to review my profile at Avvo.com as well.
My job is not only to advise my clients on the law but to also communicate with them in a way that gives them a clear understanding of each and every step of the legal process, so that they can be comfortable that they are making informed decisions in each case.
Suite 200
Nashville, TN 37215
Belmont University College of Law
Ms. Nguyen graduated cume laude from the University of North Texas and earned her Juris Doctorate from Belmont University College of Law.
During law school, Ms. Nguyen interned at Disability Rights Tennessee, Elder Law of Nashville and the Nashville Public Defender's Office. At Belmont, she was recognized with a "Best Performance Award" for her work assisting victims of domestic violence obtain Orders of Protection...
Suite 600
Franklin, TN 37067
Juvenile, Criminal, DUI and Domestic Violence
Nashville School of Law
Murfreesboro, TN 37130
Nashville School of Law
Franklin, TN 37064
Nashville School of Law
Palmyra, TN 37142
Indiana University Robert H. McKinney School of Law
Franklin, TN 37064
University of Tennessee - Knoxville
Mr. Saylor is a Franklin native focused on providing quality legal services to the residents of his community and the surrounding areas. Following graduation from the University of Tennessee College of Law, Mr. Saylor joined the United States...
Lebanon, TN 37087
Nashville School of Law
In 2015, Ashley joined the...
Springfield, TN 37172
Valparaiso University School of Law
Nashville, TN 37212
Nashville School of Law
Marissa is a native of East Tennessee. She received her B.S. from the University of Tennessee, and her J.D. from the Nashville School of Law. Marissa is admitted to practice in the State of Tennessee and Federal Court for the Middle District of Tennessee.
PO Box 335
Goodlettsville, TN 37070
Murfreesboro, TN 37130
Suite C
Gallatin, TN 37066
Perry County Juvenile Law Legal Aid & Pro Bono Services
Legal Services of South Central Tennessee
(931) 381-5533
Columbia, TN
Related Practice Areas
Need a lawyer?
The Justia Lawyer Directory is a listing of lawyers, legal aid organizations, and pro bono legal service organizations. Whether you were injured, are accused of a crime, or are merely engaging in everyday affairs that affect your legal rights or property, an attorney can help you resolve problems or prevent new ones from arising.
Here are just a few situations where you might want to seek the advice of an attorney:
- You were injured in a car or truck accident
- You have been arrested and charged with a crime, such as DUI or shoplifting
- You are considering separating from your spouse
- You have been subjected to harassment or other discrimination at work
Use Justia to research and compare attorneys so that you can make an informed decision when you hire your counsel.
It is important to research an attorney before hiring him or her. Be sure to evaluate an attorney's experience (types of cases handled, prior results obtained, etc.). Although prior results are not indicative of the likelihood of success in your case, they can help you make an informed decision.
Also worth serious consideration is the attorney's location, particularly if you will be traveling to visit him or her for consultations.
Finally, research an attorney to see whether he or she has ever been subject to discipline. Although disciplinary actions do not necessarily impact the attorney's competence to handle your case, they may affect your decision whether to hire.
Researching Attorney Discipline


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Team Building Activities Blue Mountain
Are you looking for Blue Mountain Team Building activities that perfectly balance Laughter with Learning? Do you want Team Building that really works - actually delivers a Lasting Lift and Sustained Benefit? Would you like a choice of 50+ innovative Team Building Blue Mountain events that Motivate, Unite, and Celebrate your People? Do you need Blue Mountain Team Building Activities delivered as the ideal compliment to your Meeting, Conference, Incentive Trip or 'Morale Day'?
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8 Categories - Team Building Blue Mountain
All 50+ Team Building Activities Blue Mountain
Laugh, Learn & Lift Team Building
Team Higher Ground's unique Team Building activities always lead with Laughter. We know 'Laughter is the Shortest Distance Between People!' Some clients want their Team Building event to be mostly about Laughter, about bringing people closer through fun bonding! Some trust Team Higher Ground to employ Laughter to help their people achieve lasting Learning. Either way, Laughter is an integral part of every Program we deliver!
Even when you want your Team Building event to be focused mostly on Laughter, Team Higher Ground ensures lasting learning still takes place. For clients looking to drive powerful and enduring Learning from their Team Building experience, rest assured our 25 years of design experience and our world-class Facilitators combine to make it happen! You tell us how much Laughter and how much Learning and relax as we do the rest!
Team Higher Ground's 'Laugh and Learn' Corporate Team Building events are designed from the outset to make a lasting positive impact on your people and teams. In fact, all our work begins with your critical desired outcomes, then we 'design backwards' to ensure we have the right program and people in place to engage your team! We work tirelessly to create Laughter and Learning that gives your people and teams a powerful Lift that lasts!


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Here at AspiraCloud we have seen all sorts of technology over the years. We are a cloud first company but our background allows us to help you find the best fit for your requirements.
Adrian Edgar – Director
Adrian joined AspiraCloud in 2012 after serving as a teacher for twenty years and nearly ten years at Jaguar Cars. As an Educator, Technology Evangelist and Senior School leader he has always demonstrated a passion for using IT but also understanding how it can affect the working life of other users. In his last post, he was responsible for the strategic development of ICT across a 3-18 boarding school as part of the Senior Management Team, and was instrumental in successfully transforming the school's approach to IT.
Adrian has a wide range of experiences delivering high quality IT projects in all sorts of highly regulated businesses using SharePoint, Office 365 and Microsoft Azure. He has spoken regularly on behalf of Microsoft at events for both Education and the Law industry on topics such as "Adopting a Strong Cloud First Approach to IT", or "Trusting the Cloud", always focusing on helping customers obtain the best value from their investment whilst ensuring a sensible, secure and strategic plan for change. Adrian is an enthusiastic advocate for Microsoft Cloud technology and committed to helping customers achieve all that is possible to improve their business through digital transformation.
Away from the office Adrian is a keen Wasps Rugby supporter and proud season ticket holder. He enjoys baking for friends, amateur dramatics and a good tramp in the woods with his trusted companion, Ella the Lab.
Chris McKinley – Operations Director
Chris is a founding member of AspiraCloud and has worked within the IT industry since leaving university in 2005 with a degree in mechanical engineering. He first started with specialising in SQL and Reporting Services but quickly moved onto working with SharePoint as an architect, administrator and developer. This naturally progressed into the cloud space with an expanding skill set covering may aspects of Office 365, Azure and associated technologies.
Chris' current role within AspiraCloud sees him managing and delivering projects as well as actively engaging with customers to upskill them though workshops and training along with providing ongoing support.
Outside of work Chris enjoys completing DIY projects, spending time with his wife and he also runs a local youth group.
Darren White – Lead Developer
As a keen web developer, Darren has worked with a variety of technologies including; php, asp, CSS, .NET and java. Over recent years, he has transferred these skills into creating a large number of web parts and solutions for SharePoint 2007, 2010 and 2013. He is currently working on making these parts available for SharePoint Online through Office 365. Darren is also our resident Microsoft Federation and Forefront expert. He work covers a wide range of applications, many with data integration of external sources into SharePoint.


text: Meeting Real-World Evidence Generation and Evaluation of Therapeutics—A Workshop When: October 19, 2016 (8:00 AM Eastern) Where: National Academy of Sciences Building • 2101 Constitution Avenue, NW, Washington, DC 20418 Topic Biomedical and Health Research Activity: Forum on Drug Discovery, Development, and Translation Board: Board on Health Sciences Policy Background and Workshop Objectives: The traditional process for evaluating new therapeutics does not produce the evidence that patients, clinicians, and payers need for real-world decisions. The volume and complexity of information about individual patients is greatly increasing with use of electronic records and personal devices. Possibilities for medical product development in the context of this wealth of real-world data are great, ranging from the ability to determine both large-scale and patient-specific effects of treatments to assessing how therapeutics affect patients' lives through measurement of lifestyle changes. However, mechanisms to facilitate efficient use of real-world data to meet the decision-making needs of myriad stakeholders have not been established. An ad hoc committee will plan and conduct a one-day public workshop that will examine opportunities and challenges for incorporating real-world evidence into evaluation of medical products. Subject matter experts will be invited to participate in the workshop through presentations and discussions that will consider: Quality of data from real-world sources, including: Relevance and validity of different sources of real-world data (e.g., user-collected, practice-based) in the context of different clinical/scientific questions; and Strengths and limitations of different data sources at different stages of treatment development and licensing process. Methodologies and best practices for high-quality real-world evidence generation and application, including: Innovations in clinical trial design to maximize value of information for the full range of stakeholders; Considerations of how evidence generation from existing studies could potentially inform the design of future clinical trials and amplify understanding of product efficacy; Discussion of how shared goals of payers and regulators can better align evidence generation processes used for regulatory evaluation and decisions on use by payers; and. Re-evaluation of traditional distinctions between goals and methods of pre-approval and post-approval research. Other novel methodologies and approaches to improve development and evaluation of products using real-world evidence, including: Use of web-based or digital technologies to enhance clinical trial evidence collection and participation. Techniques and case-studies for effectively using electronic health record (EHR) data. This workshop will be webcast. Register Here


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In this Land of 10,000 Lakes, manufacturers that have spent a decade buying water treatment firms are now aggressively adding oil to the mix.
Companies ranging from Pentair and Ecolab to Graco and 3M are making big bets on the energy sector by acquiring specialty equipment makers or introducing new products that protect pipelines or thin, separate, store or decontaminate oil, gas and frac sand.
Ecolab just bought Champion Technologies, an oil and gas chemicals firm, while Graco rolled out a new line of industrial sprayers that insulate oil rigs with fire-resistant foam. Pentair recently doubled its size by merging with Swiss-based Tyco Flow Controls, which plays a significant role in oil and gas refineries.
"We like the long-term growth outlook for the energy industry," said Chuck Rescorla, vice president of manufacturing, distribution and information systems for Minneapolis-based Graco. "We like the fact that it's a global industry and not tied to just one regional area. … We are looking to do more in it in the future."
In two years, Minnesota's stake in the estimated $50 billion energy-equipment sector has grown from less than $1 billion to more than $6 billion in annual equipment sales. Driving orders for this high-tech gear are a growing demand for oil worldwide, a shift toward cleaner, cheaper natural gas, and innovative new drilling methods that make exploration easier. Improved hydraulic fracturing techniques have emerged in North Dakota, Oklahoma, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Canada and Europe. Such processes demand billions of gallons of water, powerful pumps, filters and valves plus durable "frac sand," which fractures shale rock to release gas and oil from the earth.
Analysts say Minnesota's industrial firms are strong candidates to tackle this booming sector because they have capital and the global reach to invest for the long-term. "The bottom line is that a lot of companies have taken notice and invested capital in a growth arena," said Edward Jones analyst Matt Arnold. "That includes some Minnesota companies that are well capitalized enough to pursue it. … A lot of [the interest] comes from the recently discovered domestic opportunity in shale and oil sands."
Manufacturers' rapid growth in the oil market is much like their expansion into water 10 years ago. Companies such as 3M and Pentair snapped up water treatment firms and expanded their businesses tremendously. Now manufacturers are looking to oil equipment as the next frontier.
Hube Visee, director of industrial air filtration for Bloomington-based Donaldson Co. said, "The [U.S. energy equipment] industry has probably grown at a 30 percent rate. When you look at how much natural gas and even oil is being extracted in North Dakota and other places, you can easily get to those kinds of growth rates."
Big deals
In December 2011, St. Paul-based Ecolab got into the oil service sector in a big way. It paid $8.3 billion for Nalco, an Illinois firm that specializes in filtering the water used in oil exploration, refining and paper making. The deal gave Ecolab $5 billion in annual sales, a line of corrosion detectors for drilling and refining, and a line of specialty chemicals that minimize harmful pollutants.
"With Nalco we acquired wonderful technology," CEO Doug Baker recently told analysts. "It allows the continuous monitoring of [oil] products as they work in water flows. It's like having a continuous CAT scan of your arterial water system."
Determined to expand its energy presence, Ecolab paid $2.3 billion in April for 97 percent of Champion Technologies, a Houston-based oil-additives company that gives well-drillers on land the chemicals needed to thin, unclog and de-scale crude oil or gas.
Nalco and Champion now comprise 19 percent of Ecolab's sales."Energy offers a double-digit top-line and bottom-line performance," Baker said. He expects Nalco and Champion's revenues to grow 12 to 13 percent this year and 16 to 18 percent in future years. "We really believe in showing up where the growth is and energy is one of the markets we have great confidence in."
Golden Valley-based Pentair Inc. — largely an industrial pump, water filtration and pool equipment maker — did a mega deal of its own in September of 2012. It doubled in size by marrying Swiss-based Tyco Flow Controls. The Tyco unit gave Pentair a manufacturer of valves and controls that keep oil flowing in refineries and pipelines, along with a line of thermal products.
Tyco Flow also broadened Pentair's international reach from 40 percent of revenues to 60 percent. Tyco Flow "has more sales outside the country," said CEO Randy Hogan said. "They are much bigger particularly in China, in Australia, New Zealand and in the Middle East."
The deal "gives us more control of our destiny," Hogan added.
Today, Ecolab and Pentair are two Wall Street darlings generating roughly $5 billion in energy-related equipment sales. Analysts such as John Quealy with Canaccord Genuity say investors are impressed with the growth potential the energy sector brings to these companies. But Quealy also noted that this burgeoning equipment industry is also fraught with "resource volatility and rapid industrialization."
Growth has to be balanced with the fact that the trade offers volatile energy pricing and sometimes unpredictable income, analysts said.
Peter Johnson, who covers Ecolab, Pentair, Donaldson, Graco and sometimes 3M for investment firm Mairs and Power, noted crises like the 2010 Deepwater Horizon oil spill and rig explosion that killed 11 workers in the Gulf of Mexico. As a result, BP and the rig maker "were blacklisted" and saw their stock tumble, he said. Still, he said Minnesota's newcomers "are all really cautious companies … so it seems they are trying to go after this industry in a smart way" and avoid risks.
Expanding cautiously
Some companies are determined to grow in the sector, but are doing so more slowly or in unique ways.
3M CEO Inge Thulin has said 3M will increase its energy space and has outlined steps to expand anti-corrosion coatings and other products that protect pipelines in Saudi Arabia, Nigeria and other countries.
Thulin "is making incremental changes and trying to help drive top-line growth. We saw last year that they announced these end-market initiatives [around aerospace, oil and gas]. And now he is announcing new geographies," Ajay Kejriwal said.
3M Co. has sold products like drill-bit grinders and pipe tape to oil firms for years. But it upped its sector presence in 2005 when it paid $1.3 billion for Cuno, a water treatment giant that filters briny water from oil wells among other things. In 2007, 3M bought a small, strategic pipeline coatings firm. And in 2012, it bought Ceradyne, a ceramics company with $500 million in sales. The purchase gave 3M Ceradyne's line of drill motor bearings, pump bearings, ball valves, and drilling telemetry tools for oil and gas companies.
Donaldson Co. is also broadening its reach. For 35 years Donaldson has manufactured air-filtration systems for small gas turbines powering offshore drilling platforms. But then came fracking, which allowed large expanses of U.S. oil and gas sources to be tapped for the first time. So Donaldson began making large air-filtration systems for frac sand processing plants. It also started manufacturing the oil, coolant and fuel filters for the mining and oil service trucks. Today, Donaldson's energy-related sales have grown to roughly $250 million or 10 percent of company sales.
Nine months ago, Donaldson piloted a fridge-sized dust-collection system that mounts directly onto frac sand trucks. The trucks haul sand from mines in western Wisconsin and southern Minnesota to sand processing plants that sift the good sand from the bad. The good sand then gets trucked to North Dakota's Bakken oil fields and other places. Donaldson has already received calls about orders from sand processors in southern Minnesota, where rich but controversial frac sand fields have been found and await mining.
Meanwhile, Graco officials described the company's oil technology products as an intriguing but "niche" business. Graco's first oil product came 12 years ago when it converted a commercial paint sprayer into one that could spray insulation onto oil pipelines so the oil stayed warm and didn't clog. Seven years ago, it bought an automated-equipment firm to lube hot-running compressors along thousands of miles of oil pipeline. It then added lube systems for frac sand trucks and oil rig service trucks. Sales from the sector remain small. That's why Rescorla, Graco's vice president of manufacturing, said he was pleasantly surprised when he attended a trade show in China last month and found Graco's truck equipment at an oil industry show. "That was exciting. That was neat for me to see."


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memberships discontinued
As-Salaamu alaikum wa rahmatullaahi wa barakaatuuh
We have now discontinued memberships at Saha wa Afia but if you would like to contribute recipes then you can post them in our facebook page (the link is to the right of our portal page). Some of those recipes may be chosen to add to our main site (with the name of the contributor) then re-posted in our facebook page at the discretion of the admin. Guests will be able to view the recipe topics here in the main site inshaAllah.
WaSalaamu alaikum,
Aisha Om-AbdulRahman (on behalf of the Saha wa Afia team)
WaSalaamu alaikum
- Kitchen Staff
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Join date : 2009-04-25
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Less clutter is the least of the benefits to keeping only a small portion of your kids' "creations." Consider these benefits to your child's creative and psychological growth.
1) Kids who get the message that everything they make is wonderful are less inspired to create new and different things. Stop saving every last scribble and encourage your child to keep experimenting.
2) Kids who learn to distinguish between passing fancies and truly special things are more likely to mature into financially responsible shoppers and less likely to need an Organized Living Coach like me to help them wade through their clutter. Engage your young children in a conversation about which of their objects is most special - and why.
3) We are a culture overly attached to documenting and commemorating our past - at the expense of making time and space for NOW. Be an example to your kids by making room for new creations.