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My Blogs
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Post-Birthday Gift List13 years ago
About to activate and move away from the bb13 years ago
Monday, July 05, 2010
Post-Birthday Gift List
So its a few days after my birthday and I think the gifts stopped coming in now. This is what I got so far:
* A Spa Package from a group of friends - 4.5 hours at Essence Spa. I cant wait. This was on my wish list and Im excited.
* A Massage from a friend from Essence Spa. I will bulk it with the spa package and spend the entire day there. LOL
* My favourite perfume Narcisso Rodriguez and the shower gel from Daddy.
* A Hyatt Privelege Card from my sister which includes a one night stay at the Hyatt and a whole bunch of other things.
* A One night stay at the Chedi from my brother. Actually it was the thought. He gave me the cash for it and Im still carrying it around. So I guess I can get myself the one night stay at Chedi or just use the cash for shopping or whatever.
* Other gifts from friends included Swarovski earrings, Escada perfume, Sayed Junaid arabic perfume and a bra and panty bags. LOOOL.
Im 30 and Im happy.
Wednesday, June 09, 2010
My 30th Birthday Wishlist - Part 2
* A Spa Package - I guess Im just the kind of person that is too lazy to go treat myself. But this is something that I would really like / enjoy.
* An Areej Gift Certificate - I need to stock up on makeup and cosmetics.
Tuesday, June 08, 2010
My 30th Birthday Wishlist
* An all expenses paid trip to Dubai for my birthday weekend - As per tradition, Ive been going every year for my birthday and making all the arrangements and even driving myself and my friends there. This time I wanna go without a care in the world. I want someone to make full arrangements and everything. I wanna go and relax with friends and loved ones. Chill by the beach, get a killer tan and come back relaxed.
* A Tag Heuer Formula 1 Edition Watch - Now Ive had my eye on this watch for a while. Its a mens watch yes I know but I dont have problems since I wear my dad's watches all the time. Isnt it a beauty??
* A specific Gucci Bag - Now this is something Ive also had my eye on for a loooong time. I love the shape of these ones but I never liked the mirror / metal bits they usually had on them and then they came out with some gorgeous non-metally ones such as this one. Yesterday I was watching a movie on TV and the exact same one I want was carried by the girl in the movie. The movie was about a bratty rich american chick who goes to a suburban English boarding school (black and white creases folded in - had a pic of it will put it up when I find it)
* A Narciso Rodriguez Eau De Toilette gift set - and I mean the full shebang. With the body lotion and the shower gel and everything. Its my all time favourite perfume and I decided not to buy it myself when mine ran out last week to keep something affordable on this list. LOOOL. People dont be fooled by the limited edition whatevers - its the exact same perfume they just come out with different bottles every once in a while.
* A Night at Al Bustan Palace Hotel - Ive seen some of the rooms there and they are out of this world after the renovation. Preferably one of those lagoon rooms where you access a semi-private "lagoon" pool from your balcony.
* Peace of mind - will leave it at that
Sunday, March 28, 2010
Dear You, The Blood Running Through My Veins
Another cliche comment / remark that is often used when someone is complaining about their life or about what they want and are not getting. This is a typical thing I always say to people when I am their shoulder to cry on or ear to listen to.
What goes around comes around. God takes from you and gives you back in multiples.
How many times have we said these things but not really applied them to ourselves. How many times have we given advice to people that we don't follow ourselves. This is human nature.
When you least expect it, it falls into your lap.
Never before have I ever truly believed in this. Until recently. To be exact Saturday 20th of March and confirmed on Monday 22nd March 2010. This is a day I will cherish forever.
Dear You,
I now truly believe that I have been a good person in my life. I now truly believe in all those sayings that I often used to comfort others. I now truly believe that the time for my own happiness has come. I now truly believe that it is MY time. I have found myself in you. I have realised my aim in life and it is to be with you.
I am finally at peace. I am finally happy. Whether the end comes or not, I will still cherish every moment spent with you. You are my family, my life, my future and most importantly my present. I look forward to more days to come. I have walked away from my childhood home towards you. I just hope the destination is not too far away.
Yes, things are happening too fast. Yes, I am hesitant and not as adventurous as I believed I am. But I like it that way. The controls are not with me. For once, I am being led instead of leading and I cannot imagine having it any other way anymore. Yet, I am confident with every step of the way. Sure of every move.
I wake up with a smile on my face. I sleep with a smile on my face. Tears are foreign to me now. Sleepless nights are a thing of the past. It is time for a new beginning.
I belong to you. I belong WITH you. I want to announce to the world how I feel about you and that I am yours but since I cannot yet, this is my "scream from the rooftops".
Only yours,
For My King
Wednesday, February 03, 2010
He Got Married
Biltawfeeq - minik ilmal oo minha il3eyal
Sunday, October 18, 2009
Thursday, October 08, 2009
Dear Stranger
You are now a stranger to me because the one I knew no longer exists. The one I knew would never have gone this far. Do I forgive you?? Yes I have forgiven you a looooong time ago. You know me, I am not one to hold grudges. Do I forget?? Never.
I am moving on. No scrap that, I HAVE moved on a long time ago. Why am I not in anything permanent?? Dont flatter yourself. I do not compare anyone to you. I guess I am just not willing to put any effort anymore. I am no longer interested in sharing my life with anyone or anything. I am no longer emotionally capable of trusting blindly such as I was with you. I am not even willing to give anyone a chance. Its my defense mechanism. I do it to protect myself. And I have you to thank for that. You made me the person I am today. Stronger, independant and cold. Very very cold.
I do not blame you. I blame myself for allowing the situation to go as far as I did. All the signs were there I just chose to ignore them. Everything I said I would never do, I did. Everything I said I wouldnt be, I have become.
This is the way God wanted it. And this is the way I will live my life. This doesnt mean that I will sit back cross-armed and not attempt to make my life a better life. No. I am working on it. Hard. Killing myself in fact physically, emotionally and mentally. But I have an aim in life. And I am going to acheive my aim. Including all the dreams I discussed with you. Except I will hold my head up high and proud because I would have done them all myself. Even if it means that you are not by my side. It is your loss not mine.
You are just a flicker of a memory in the back of my mind. I will not deny, I still cry over you sometimes. But mostly tears of joy for getting out of it before it was too late.
Good luck and I truly hope you are leading your life the way you intended.


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Demas & Mark: A Word of Warning and a Word of Hope for Stumblers
What happened to Demas?
We don't know. All we know is that some of the last words the Apostle Paul wrote before his Roman execution expressed a heartbreak: "Demas, in love with this present world, has deserted me and gone to Thessalonica" (2 Timothy 4:10).
Maybe Demas feared being executed with Paul and fled to safety. Or maybe he succumbed to immorality. Or maybe he simply caved in to the relentless temptation of a more comfortable, prosperous life in the large, cosmopolitan, pluralistic, wealthy, culturally interesting city of Thessalonica. Whatever it was, he surrendered to the world.
But just a few sentences later in this letter to Timothy Paul says something very hope-giving: "Get Mark and bring him with you, for he is very useful to me for ministry" (2 Timothy 4:11).
Remember Mark? He had been the first to desert the team. Back in the early days, during the first missionary trip with Paul and Barnabas, Mark took off from Pamphylia and returned home to Jerusalem (Acts 13:13). Again, we don't know why. But Paul didn't approve. In fact, when Barnabas wanted to bring Mark back on the team after the Jerusalem Council, Paul would have none of it (Acts 15:37-40).
But here is Mark, at the end of Paul's life, fully reconciled to and fully trusted by Paul and very useful in the gospel ministry.
Demas and Mark serve as contrasts. One provides a word of warning, the other a word of hope. And as people who stumble in many ways (James 3:2), we need both.
Demas is a warning to us. He began well. Four or five years earlier, during another imprisonment, Paul refers to Demas as a "fellow worker" in the gospel (Colossians 4:14, Philemon 1:24). There was a time when Demas apparently chose, like Moses, "to be mistreated with the people of God than to enjoy the fleeting pleasures of sin" (Hebrews 11:25).
But he doesn't appear to end well. Having once fought alongside of Paul in kingdom battles, he seems to have sided with the enemy.
So the warning is this: "Be soberminded; be watchful. Our adversary the devil prowls around like a roaring lion seeking someone to devour. Resist him, firm in your faith" (1 Peter 5:8-9a). Our enemy is very real and very crafty. He threatens and seduces. And even those who start strong and are leaders, like Demas, are susceptible to his deception.
Mark, on the other hand, gives us hope. He had a weak start. He didn't appear to have the right stuff. He disappointed his leaders and friends by leaving them to bear the heat of battle while he went home.
But Mark ended well. Barnabas proved right in the long run. Mark rejoined the battle and proved a faithful, trusted, useful warrior. And, if tradition is correct, the Lord even used him to contribute a gospel to the New Testament canon.
So the hope is this: "Even youths shall faint and be weary, and young men shall fall exhausted; but they who wait for the Lord shall renew their strength; they shall mount up with wings like eagles; they shall run and not be weary; they shall walk and not faint" (Isaiah 40:30-31).
Let us then be on our guard. We live with indwelling sin that is inclined toward insanity, because it is inclined to believe lies that lead to our destruction. When we are feeling the powerful pull of worldly temptation we need to take Paul's exhortation very seriously: "But as for you, O man of God, flee these things. Pursue righteousness, godliness, faith, love, steadfastness, gentleness. Fight the good fight of faith. Take hold of the eternal life to which you were called" (1 Timothy 6:11-12). Paul knew what he was talking about. He watched co-laborers fall.
But let us also remember that God is in the business of forgiving sins and restoring stumbling sinners to himself and to useful service. Paul knew this too. "I thank him who has given me strength, Christ Jesus our Lord, because he judged me faithful, appointing me to his service, though formerly I was a blasphemer, persecutor, and insolent opponent. But I received mercy…" (1 Timothy 1:12-13).
We don't know the last word on Demas. I hope that he repented in the end. But because of Mark, we know that failure doesn't have to be the last word for us. Rather, may our last word be "But I received mercy." And whatever may have happened in the past, let us resolve to pursue Jesus as our treasure and seek to live lives of useful service for him from this day forth.
Grateful for the mercy and patience shown to this stumbling sinner,
Jon Bloom
Executive Director
P.S. One of my all-time favorite messages John has ever given is called "Live to Die." I listen to this message at least once a year as one way of remembering what life is all about. It always stirs up my love for Jesus and my desire to seek the kingdom first. So we're making it our September feature message.
If you would like to make a financial contribution to help us continue to make messages like this free online for everyone, we would be very grateful. The Lord uses friends like you to help provide for our needs. Thank you for your prayerful consideration.


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Home Page Chess Life Online 2008 July Chess Beach Reading
Chess Beach Reading |
By Elizabeth Vicary | |
July 18, 2008 | |
vehement debate on my blog about how important solving tactics problems is or should be in a training regimen. The popular and obvious answer is "very," but I've heard the opposite view from enough high level players to believe the question is complicated. Several years ago, Daniel Ludwig said in an interview with me that he prefers to analyze complex positions without clear solutions, and then compare his analysis with the published thoughts of strong players. I asked Alex Shabalov if he solved tactics growing up and he practically echoed Ludwig's thoughts: "The answer is no; I hated tactical problems and was very bad at solving them ....certainly never did it on my own. But I was solving a lot of ambiguous attacking problems...like the Alekhine games, where the answer is never clear and could have been argued with a coach. When I was able to argue in my favor a clear crap, then I knew I was way better than them. That worked all my way up until GM Bagirov became my coach....the crap never worked with him." One big problem with tactics books is that the answers are cut and dried, much more so than in real games. How often do you really get a chance to sacrifice your queen? And if the answer really is 1 in 10,000 games, then why practice it over and over? It's like trying to model your life after movies: day to day existence isn't nearly so dramatic. It might be much more useful to practice other skills, like deciding which pieces to exchange in a given position or evaluating the difference between two non-forcing positional moves. My own feeling is that you have to look at your games to figure out what work needs doing. Personally, I'm pretty sure that solving mates in three won't help me much, but I definitely do miss a lot of forcing variations, especially when they involve quiet moves. I've also noticed that I'm bad at deciding whether a position really is perpetual check, so that's on my list of problems to work on. But of course, I do solve tactics, because it's easy, fun, and clearly to some degree helpful. I have two modes for this. When I'm serious, I set the harder positions up on a board, take my time, and write out the solutions. For this, my current favorite book is Perfect Your Chess (Volokitin and Grabinsky). If I'm just solving puzzles for fun, then I want to be able to read the book comfortably on the subway/ at the beach/ while lying in bed. This means the solutions have to easy enough that I can follow them in my head. In the first instance, I'm doing the hard, rewarding work of practicing analysis and calculation; in the second I'm enjoying myself and maybe working a little pattern recognition and visualization in the mix. With that in mind, let's take a look at two recent tactics books. Jon Speelman's Chess Puzzle Book is perfect for summertime beach reading. The problem selection is good: interesting, easy-to-medium difficulty, and, for the most part, the problems are fresh and unrecycled. I like the feel and look of the book, the font and the layout. The organization is thoughtful: the first half is arranged by the type of tactic; the second half by difficulty. While I've enjoyed reading this for my own pleasure on trains, I found it even more useful for teaching. The one thing that puzzles me is the somewhat-randomness of topic selection. Why a whole section on knight forks but nothing on any other kind of double attack? Why does the section on opening and closing lines come before the section on pins? Why no discoveries at all? But these are minor questions and do not detract from an otherwise great book. Charles Hertan's Forcing Chess Moves is a much more serious study partner. Hertan's premise is that we all need more practice in identifying and analyzing the forcing moves—the checks, captures, mate threats, threats of captures-- in any position. By training ourselves to systematically check every forcing move in every position, we develop "computer eyes," -- by this he means both the ability to accurately calculate variations and the ability to see unusual but strong moves. Each section starts with a "lesson," where Hertan guides the reader through the thinking process, followed by exercises, where you practice. Let me come out and say upfront: I love this book, mostly because the positions are absolutely exquisite. I have a student who exclaims "Sexy!" whenever we do a problem in class that he finds aesthetically pleasing, but I've never been tempted to think of chess in those terms until I read this book. Let's look at some examples: From the "Forcing Retreats" lesson: An exercise from "Equal or Stronger Threats": Doesn't that make you catch your breath? Send shivers down your spine? It does for me. Almost every time I open this book, I find something new and beautiful. I also find Hertan's explanations amusing, particularly his intermittent but endearing use of ALL CAPS. Here is another example, from the chapter "Quiet Forcing Moves." "Your COMPUTER EYES must learn to shed human bias to find the following quiet connector, almost as routinely as you would consider a check or capture, as we have studied a very similar STOCK idea: My only quibble with Forcing Chess Moves is the logic behind the cover photo. It shows a flexed, muscular arm, but one that has been digitally altered to make it appear pixilated. The photo seems to imply that seeing things through computer eyes blurs representations of natural human strength—surely this is antithetical to the entire message of the book? It's a catchy, interesting image, but I wish it made more sense. But this is just a detail, and doesn't stop me from recommending the book wholeheartedly, both for the reader's training and enjoyment. For more by Elizabeth Vicary and books, check out a recent post on her blog on two books by Quality Press. |
There was recently a


text: On Thu, Jul 03, 2008 at 12:09:49PM -0400, Joshua Baker-LePain wrote: > On Thu, 3 Jul 2008 at 9:34am, Tim Cutts wrote > >On 2 Jul 2008, at 4:22 pm, Prentice Bisbal wrote: > > >>B. Red Hat has done such a good job of spreading FUD about the other > >>Linux distros, management has a cow if you tell them you're installing > >>something other than RH. > > Erm, do you have any examples of that? All I see is RH a) trying to sell > their product (nothing wrong with that) and b) in general, being a pretty > good member of the OSS community. > > >Fedora did not exist, and I'm still not sure how separate from Red Hat > >Fedora and CentOS really are, but that's probably just my ignorance. The > >fact that > > CentOS is in no way officially associated with Red Hat. At all. They use > the freely available RHEL SRPMs to build the distribution, and they report > bugs upstream when they find them. But that's it. > > As for Fedora, see <http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Board>. Hi, Red Hat is indeed an exemplary member of the OSS community. They never violate licenses. What they do do, is they take every advantage they can to differentiate themselves. This results in very unfriendly distributions to modify and customize -- Red Hat wants service contracts that are not really compatible with such activity anyway. Its by design. And quite effective. Fedora Core is dominated by Red Hat employees. It is for all intents and purposes a hybrid distribution that is semi open to the public. It is definitely a beta distribution for RHEL. CentOS is not related to Red Hat in any way. These folks just use the GPL to produce a free clone of RHEL releases. And I might add, it is very well maintained. I highly recommend it to folks who are going to modify and customize RHEL, because your RHEL service contract won't permit that anyway. If you are interested in such issues, you might want to pay attention to the recent and ongoing discussion about systemtap (A Red Hat managed project.) And the consternation of other folks in the OSS community at the difficulty in working with the project independent of Red Hat. In this case, we are talking about the kernel development community. Just follow the thread from here: https://lists.linux-foundation.org/pipermail/ksummit-2008-discuss/2008-June/000149.html Actually a very interesting thread, dealing with more than systemtap. Thanks, Karen -- Karen Shaeffer Neuralscape, Palo Alto, Ca. 94306 shaeffer at neuralscape.com http://www.neuralscape.com


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Girlie Radish Salad ♥
Oops, so there is no radish called 'girlie'. But aren't the colors -- pink, purple, red and white -- just gorgeous and ever so teenage girlie?
I set out for a recipe that would preserve the beautiful colors but still cook the radishes. Call my search half successful: the radishes cooked too long in the microwave too long; less time would likely preserve more color.
The microwave? Yes! These radishes are cooked in the microwave! And the taste is truly extraordinary, creating something entirely different than the bite of raw radish. Very good ... and a great side dish, too, if not a salad.
Many thanks to the husband-wife growers at Farrar Out Farm, who show up at my hometown Kirkwood Farmers market every week with fresh produce like my 'girlie radishes' plus eggs and pasture-raised Berkshire pork that I plan to try, soon!
FROM THE ARCHIVES Til now, I've only cooked radish once but there are several radish salad recipes in the Recipe Box. For an easy make-ahead appetizer, there's no beating the surprising easy easy radish spread.
TWO YEARS AGO Fiddlehead Ferns, ... "utterly delicious and so very, very pretty"
PRINT JUST A RECIPE! Now you can print a recipe without wasting ink and paper on the header and sidebar. Here's how.
NEVER MISS A RECIPE! For 'home delivery' of new recipes from A Veggie Venture, sign up here. Once you do, new recipes will be delivered, automatically, straight to your e-mail In Box.
Time to table: 15 minutes (10 minutes for just the radishes)
Serves 4
1 pound radishes (or fewer, this is easy enough to cook 1 serving)
1 teaspoon good vinegar (red wine or malt, as I used today)
1 tablespoon butter (or leftover blender hollandaise, as today)
Salt & pepper to taste (I skipped this)
Parsley to taste (I skipped this)
Salad greens
Radish or daikon sprouts
Trim radishes. Cut in half, lengthwise (to show off more color); the pieces should be equivalent in size so small ones need not be cut, extra large radishes might be quartered. Place in a large microwave dish with vinegar. Cover with plastic wrap and cook til done. (Six minutes was too long in my mike for six radishes but it's the time specified for a pound by the recipe.) Toss with butter, seasonings and parsley. Re-cover and cook for 1 more minute.
Meanwhile, wash/dry greens and arrange sprouts. Top with warm radishes and serve immediately.


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Japan ranked as the second largest net importer of fossil fuels in the world in 2012, trailing only China. This follows the Fukushima nuclear disaster in 2011, after which Japan suspended operations at all of its nuclear power plants. The loss of nuclear capacity resulted in a shift in Japan's energy mix toward oil and natural gas. Japan is now the third largest oil consumer and importer in the world behind the United States and China. Furthermore, it ranks as the world's largest importer of liquefied natural gas (LNG) and second largest importer of coal behind China. Japan has limited domestic energy resources, and the country meets less than 15% of its own total primary energy use from domestic sources.
Oil. Oil remains the largest source of primary energy consumption in Japan, although its share of total energy consumption has declined from 80% in the 1970s to 43% in 2011. Japan was the third largest net importer of crude oil and petroleum products in the world after the United States and China in 2012, having imported 4.6 million barrels per day (bbl/d). After Fukushima, Japan increased imports of crude oil for direct burn in power plants.
Japan is primarily dependent on the Middle East for its crude oil imports, as 83% of Japanese crude oil imports originated from the Middle East in 2012, up from 70% in the mid-1980s. Saudi Arabia is the largest supplier of oil to Japan, making up 33% of the import portfolio, or over 1.2 million bbl/d of crude oil. The United Arab Emirates, Qatar, Kuwait, and Iran are other notable sources of oil to Japan.
Natural gas. Because of its limited natural gas resources, Japan relies on imports to meet nearly all of its natural gas needs. In 2012, Japan consumed 4.4 trillion cubic feet (Tcf) of natural gas, up 50% from the 2000 level. More than 95% of Japan's gas demand is met by liquefied natural gas (LNG) imports. Japan, the world's largest LNG importer in 2012, accounted for 37% of global LNG demand in 2012, up from 33% in 2011. As a result of the March 2011 earthquake and tsunami, Japan's overall LNG imports rose 24% between 2010 and 2012, from 3.5 trillion cubic feet per year (Tcf/y) to 4.3 Tcf/y.
Japan uses most of its natural gas in the power sector (64%), followed by the industrial sector (21%), residential (9%), commercial (4%), and other sectors (2%) in 2012, according to PFC Energy and the Federation of Electric Power Companies of Japan (FEPC). A third of Japan's LNG imports originate from regional suppliers in Southeast Asia, with no one supplier having a market share greater than 20%. Japan's top five natural gas suppliers provided 70% of its natural gas imports in 2012.
Coal. Typically used as a baseload source for power generation, coal remains an important fuel, and coal-fired generators accounted for nearly 27% of Japan's electric capacity in 2010, according to the FEPC and the International Energy Agency (IEA). Domestic coal production ended in 2002, and Japan began importing all of its coal, primarily from Australia. Japan imported 204 million short tons of coal in 2012, a slight increase from 194 million short tons in 2011. Japan had been the largest global coal importer for three decades until 2011, when, according to World Coal Association estimates, China surpassed Japan by a narrow margin. By 2012, this gap widened as Chinese coal imports grew.
For more information, see EIA's Country Analysis Brief for Japan.
Principal contributors: Candace Dunn, Mark J. Eshbaugh


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Ukrainian Tones on Canadian Soil
THIS is a story about heritage, exile, adaptation, but mostly about catching sight of one's life in a fuzzy mirror. Like hearing oceans through a conch.
The words sound familiar, nearly recognizable. Yet I can't speak this language which, as I arrive in Winnipeg in south-central Canada, echoes around me. Like a softer version of the Russian my grandmother taught me: imperfectly learned, but mysterious, mystical, cherished.
I try to decipher four lines: Boritesia - poborete./ Sam Boh pomahaye;/ Za vas syla, za vas volya/ I pravda svyataya.
Ukrainians both at home and in the countries to which they have emigrated memorize this excerpt from "Caucasus" by Taras Schevchenko (1814-1861). When in the 1890s the first Ukrainian pioneers headed westward across Europe, the Atlantic, and North America, braving harsh climates and unforgiving environments to homestead in the wilderness, they brought little more than the clothes on their backs, cooking pots, and a few farm tools. With their Bibles they carried Shevchenko's poems in a volume entitled "Ko bzar.Kobzar" means a sort of troubadour who played an instrument like a bandura, which is rather like a lute.
Shevchenko's portrait hangs like an icon in this book-lined office in Winnipeg, and everywhere else here. His statues stand before the Manitoba Legislature, and in the Winnipeg park - and even in Washington D.C.
I memorize the quatrain, try to translate it. Easy: in Russian, syla means "strength." Volya means "will" and pravda "truth." Something about "holy truth?"
"No," says Professor Jaroslaw Razumnyj of the University of Manitoba's Slavic Studies department and president of the Winnipeg chapter of Canadian Friends of RUKH, the Ukranian independence movement. "In Ukrainian Volya means 'freedom.' Pravda here conveys a sense of 'justice.' 'Sacred' or 'holy' justice."
"Beware of false cognates, les faux amis!" The warning of a former old French professor resounds in my mind. With greater caution I rearrange the word order to end with a strong one-syllable word.
"Fight - you will win./ God is helping you./ On your side are freedom,/ Sacred justice, and strength."
Shevchenko's poems are usually less abstract. More polemic than poetic, this seems a battle cry rather than a poem. A battle cry, indeed, for millions of Ukrainians who persevered, often in silence, the ideal of an independent republic.
"We do best keeping our communities across North America informed on issues and events there," says Nicholas Hryn, the Ukrainian-born managing editor of Winnipeg's leading Ukrainian newspaper, Voice. "But Ukraine is their country ... No, not the Ukraine. And Lviv isn't Lvov either."
One vowel assumes great political significance, even here in snowy Winnipeg.
Probably it is also snowing in Ukraine, and in what for nearly seven decades was called Leningrad. In the late 1920s my Russian grandmother was summoned before the local Bolshevik commissar for calling it St. Petersburg. In Ukraine, until recently, one could get arrested for publishing a poem in Ukrainian, for speaking Ukrainian instead of Russian.
"Nobody in Kiev would speak Ukrainian to me when I visited in 1988," says Anna Wach, who was born in Ukraine but emigrated to Canada as a little girl and now edits several bilingual magazines. "Whereas even fourth-generation Canadian-Ukrainians maintain the language at home through classes and especially our churches - Ukrainian Orthodox, Roman Catholic, and Baptist - in the mother country Ukrainians seemed to have forgotten their mother tongue. Most churches were closed. People looked over their shoulde r before speaking with foreigners.
"Yet when I revisited Kiev last August," she continues, "yellow-and-blue flags were flying, churches and synagogues were being restored. Our Ukrainian choir from Winnipeg sang mass outside a cave in a Kiev park because the church couldn't hold all 60 singers and the congregation. Suddenly a contingent of Soviet militia surrounded us. I thought: They are going to break this up, arrest everyone ... .
"We kept singing. Gradually most militiamen filtered away, though some stayed for the whole mass. And now everyone in Kiev, even young people, speaks beautiful Ukrainian."
My own father, who escaped Russia through the Crimea in 1920, spoke Ukrainian, as well as Russian, English, and French, but didn't teach me. My grandmother, who left the Soviet Union in 1933, taught me Russian and French, but no other child in my childhood spoke any second language.
Was it this semi-isolation - coupled with a strong sense of heritage - that nurtured me as a poet? And poetry was hardly a profession in the America of my childhood ....
During my own first visits to the Soviet Union, in 1986 and 1988, customs officials looked warily at my books of poems. Intourist hustled me through Kiev. I feared my ungrammatical Russian with its Anglo-French accent would scare off potentially friendly Russians. But I didn't dress like a tourist, and my accent was mistaken for Baltic. By the last visit, December 1990, my Russian had improved, and foreigners and poets were no longer feared.
In Winnipeg's community of Ukrainian exiles, however, Russian is "the language of the oppressor." Perhaps only a shared love of poetry - instilled in me by parents and grandmothers who recited poems before I was old enough to understand the words - made me acceptable here.
In Ukraine poets are revered: Taras Shevchenko, Ivan Franko, and dramatist Lesya Ukrainka among the most famous. Plato would rejoice over how many of the current liberal politicians and parliamentarians there would fit in his kingdom of poet-philosopher kings: Ivan Drach, head of Ukraine's independence movement RUKH, is a poet; Dmytro Pavlychko, chairman of the parliament's foreign affairs committee, is a poet; Volodymyr Yavorivsky, in charge of ecology for parliament, and Yuri Shcherbak, member of parl iament, are novelists. And now they can publish freely.
Winnipeg editor Nicholas Hryn also receives submissions of poetry from Ukraine. We translate one by Maria Bratachuk, a teacher in Ternopol, western Ukraine: "You are a tall poplar/ but you have grown thin and dry,/ wounded by foreigners./ Rise from your knees,/ My Ukraine, look around:/ you can see other nations/ now the wind has blown clouds away./ I pray you outlive your assassins."
No longer is it lonely to be a poet here either. I sometimes visit classrooms under artist-in-the-schools programs. Today in Winnipeg I meet Ukrainian artists-in-the-schools at the multilingual Ralph Brown elementary school. Principal Vicky Adams, a fourth-generation Ukrainian, has invited accordionist Myron Duda and his wife Zoriaslava Hlyadak, a choreographer and ballet-mistress, from the Verkhovyna Professional Folklore Ensemble of Drohobych-na-Lviv, to coach Canadian children mainly of Ukrainian extr action, but Filipino, Indonesian, Anglo-Saxon, and other backgrounds have joined in. Myron Duda has them singing an ancient Ukrainian song, which in translation means:
God, hear our prayers./ Misfortune ruins our land./ In unity our nation is strong./ God, give us unity.
Myron Duda and Zoriaslava Hlyadak are rehearsing for the traditional Malanaka pageant January 13, the saint's day of St. Malaniya, which according to the old-style Ukrainian and Russian calendar is also New Year's Eve.
"These celebrations of renewal and revitalization date from before the time, literally 1001 years ago, when ancient Kiev became the birthplace of Christianity in Russia," Myron Duda explains. "The early Christians superimposed saints' days on the existing pagan holidays. Gradually the rituals intertwined."
In Winnipeg, old and new rituals intertwine. Like the onion domes and grain elevators interspersed across the prairies. Myron Duda teaches old Ukrainian songs, while his wife composes new Ukrainian verses for the pageant.
It is "a wonderful new experience for me to write pieces that I know will be performed," she says. "At home, a Communist Party apparachik would shove some officially sanctioned script before an actor's nose right before curtain time."
Russian is our lingua franca, as these two visitors from Ukraine speak no English but perforce learned Russian.
"I'm not timid about my lack of English," Zoriaslava Hlyadak says. "Many people here speak Ukrainian. Canadians are wonderful. We are so grateful for their help, especially after Chernobyl. Yet I'm sad: here people live in the 20th century, while in Ukraine, we live in the 17th."
"But we wouldn't emigrate," Myron Duda adds. "We'd never abandon Ukraine."
Especially now that independence has been voted in. While freedom to travel may bring a fourth wave of emigration, most intellectuals are expected to stay in Ukraine to rebuild society.
The first wave of Ukrainian emigration, which began a century ago, brought the true pioneers. A second wave came after the Russian Revolution and Lenin's brutal end to Ukraine's short-lived independence (1917-1920). The third wave followed World War II, when the survivors among those thousands of Ukrainians captured by the Nazis ultimately found refuge in North America.
Will many Ukrainian-Canadians return to their ancestral land now? "We're removed by a half-century from present-day Ukraine," says the Very Reverend William Makarenko, chairman of the presidium of the Consistory of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church of Canada. Born of Ukrainian parents in a Displaced Persons camp in Germany after World War II, he visits Ukraine, and welcomes visiting Ukrainians to Winnipeg. Yet like other Ukrainian-Canadians he is passionately concerned about Ukraine's survival through diffic ult times ahead, but his parishes are here.
MEANWHILE, everyone here ships food parcels to relatives there. More vital than handouts, Ukrainians insist, is expertise: exchanges of technicians, farmers, managers - and scholars and artists, keepers of culture's flames in both hemispheres.
Myron Duda is overwhelmed by the treasure of books, folk songs, and choral music unavailable in Ukraine but preserved at Winnipegs' Ukrainian Cultural and Educational Center, especially the archives of composer and conductor Olexander Koshetz, whose choir continues to perform in Canada and abroad.
Another "national treasure" is the Rusalka Dance Ensemble, one of the best of the many Ukrainian emigre dance groups in North America. Director Irka Balan invites me to watch Rusalka rehearse for tours of Canada, the United States, and Ukraine.
Again, I live vicariously: I yearn to dance. A character in my novel-in-progress is a ballerina. When I was four my mother zipped me into a puffy tutu and enrolled me with a Russian ballet master; he soon hoped I possessed other abilities. Though in secret I danced, even composed on my mother's piano, teachers deemed me "unmusical." Yet I love music - Russian, Ukrainian, gypsy, classical, and folk.
Ukrainian-Canadians, age 16 to 35, leap across a gym. They pirouette, kick, gallop, spin, soar. While listening to Zoriaslava Hlyadak, they sag into that eloquent dancers' slouch. Suddenly, in our honor, the ensemble performs an entire kopak dance.
I am dancing inside every dancer.
Many Russians feel uneasy about losing Ukraine from their empire, which several of my own ancestors fought to incorporate while other ancestors resisted. Yet I, too, rejoice in Ukrainian independence.


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Marshmallow Popcorn Balls
2012 CookingChannelTV.com
8 oz. mini marshmallows
1/4 cups unsalted butter
8 cups popped popcorn
1/2 cups pretzels *
1/2 cups mixed salted nuts *
Place popcorn in a large mixing bowl.
Melt butter in a sauce pan over medium heat. Once it has melted, stir in marshmallows and stir until just melted.
Quickly pour melted marshmallow over the popcorn and fold to combine. Pour in pretzels and mixed nuts. Stir to mix.
Using greased heatproof gloves, take a handful of the popcorn mixture and roll it into a ball. Place on the prepared baking sheet. Repeat to form 12 balls. Let sit at room temperature about 15 minutes before serving. Wrap individual popcorn balls in plastic wrap or store in an airtight container.
* You can use seasonal candies to replace the pretzels or nuts, or you can use both. Go crazy!


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Reyner Banham Loves Los Angeles: South LA
"I learned to drive in order to read Los Angeles in the original" -Reyner Banham, Los Angeles: The Architecture of Four Ecologies
This provocative Esotouric bus adventure begins downtown and works its way south through Vernon, Bell Gardens, Santa Fe Springs and Downey, and through the past two centuries, exploring some of L.A.'s seldom-seen gems. Turning the West Side-centric notion of an L.A. architecture tour on its head—just like Banham's book did for the historical monograph – the bus goes into areas not traditionally associated with the important, beautiful or significant, raising issues of preservation, adaptive reuse and the evolution of the city. The locations all speak to the power, mutability and reach of the Southern California Dream. Some of the tour stops are:
Rancho San Antonio (1840). One of the oldest adobe structure in Los Angeles County, it was built by the Lugo family, whose rancho spread all the way to South Gate–the south gate of the property. This fascinating home sits smack dab in the middle of a 65-year-old trailer park on the banks of the Rio Hondo River in Bell Gardens. Between the layers of context at this site is the history of migration and growth in the Southland, from Spanish land grants to the dust bowl to the vast waves of stucco suburbs.
The Clarke Estate (1920). A lost masterpiece by tilt-slab concrete architect Irving Gill, this Mission Revival-inspired dwelling features symbolic leaves pressed into the walls and feels like a time capsule from a simpler California.
Johnie's Broiler (1958/2008). A cautionary tale about historic preservation, this beloved Downey diner with its landmark neon sign was illegally demolished by a renter who wanted to park use cars in its place. The site was barred from further commercial use due to public outcry, and has been restored as a Bob's Big Boy.
No other city has so fascinated architecture critics and scholars of urban and cultural studies than L.A., that sprawling, self-referential zone of mystery and glamour. British writer Reyner Banham was the first to love Los Angeles for what she was, her ugliness as well as her beauty. In the early 1970s he abandoned his academic preconceptions to revel in this city of freeways, foothills, beaches and suburbs, built on mobility and flux by a series of invaders. Along the way, he discovered extraordinary spaces in neighborhoods that were often overlooked for being too remote, too industrial, or simply occupying invisible "flyover country" beneath the great L.A. freeways.
In this city on the edge of the western dream, nothing was like what came before. Status was no longer communicated through the construction of stone palaces that looked like they fought every step of the journey over the Rocky Mountains, but rather by freeway access and wacky drive-thrus, light, ventilation, organic design and a sensitivity to a built environment— commercial and architectural innovations which would have been unthinkable anywhere and anytime else.
Gone was the unified vision of a city, and yet there was a method to L.A.'s madness. What Banham saw was something far more complicated: behind this urban sprawl was a pattern, almost a language, which could not be understood through old modes of architectural and urban criticism, but which had to be viewed through the organic facts of its own ecologies.
Esotouric guides Richard Schave and Kim Cooper studied under Banham as undergraduates at UCSC, and both were deeply influenced by his work. In Fall 2007, we launched the "Reyner Banham Loves Los Angeles" architectural series in tribute to our late professor, who showed us our native Southern California through fresh eyes.
ABOUT REYNER BANHAM: Reyner Banham(1922-1988) was a prolific architectural critic best known for "Theory and Design in the First Machine Age" (1960) and "Los Angeles: The Architecture of Four Ecologies" (1971). Professor Banham taught at the University of London, SUNY Buffalo and the University of California, Santa Cruz, where he was Chair of the Art History Department.


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Nearsightedness increasing in the United States
Study suggests growth of more than 60 percent since the 1970s
By Nathan Seppa
It looks like nearsightedness is on the rise in the United States.
Researchers tapped into a wide-ranging health survey to rate vision in the population in the early 1970s and roughly 30 years later. They compared eyesight information for more than 4,400 people tested in 1971 and 1972 with data from another set of 8,300 people tested from 1999 to 2004.
This broad survey showed that 25 percent of those examined in the early 1970s were deemed to be nearsighted, compared with 42 percent examined three decades later, the researchers report in the December Archives of Ophthalmology. That's an increase of 66 percent.
Myopia severity also increased, with moderate nearsightedness doubling between the two time periods and severe cases, although uncommon, also rising sharply. Mild myopia cases increased slightly, from about 13 percent to 18 percent. This group included some people who did not need corrective lenses, says study coauthor Susan Vitale, an epidemiologist at the National Eye Institute in Bethesda, Md.
Among blacks, the overall myopia rate was lower than in whites but still jumped from 13 to 34 percent over the three-decade span.
When analyzing the more recent eye-exam data, the scientists used only diagnoses that were made with the same technology used in the 1970s — mainly standard eye tests and trial lenses. Including diagnoses made with more advanced technology that has become available only recently might have biased the comparison, Vitale says.
The cause of nearsightedness is poorly understood. Past research has linked added risk to both a genetic predisposition to nearsightedness and to excessive amounts of near work, the kind of tasks that require peering at written words or small objects.
"Some people would say near work is a reasonable explanation," Vitale says, particularly with the advent of video games and other electronic devices. Children also spend less time outdoors than they once did, she says. And some researchers contend that more outdoor time means seeing in better light, focusing farther.
The nature of near work has changed dramatically in the past 30 years, says Jane Gwiazda, a psychologist at the New England College of Optometry in Boston who researches vision problems. But while near work probably accounts for some of the myopia increase, it's been difficult to pinpoint the specific detrimental aspect of near work that's to blame because the nature of such close work varies. Some people take frequent breaks or have better lighting than others. "There are lots of factors there," Gwiazda says.
Meanwhile, compelling data link a lack of outdoor time with increased myopia risk, she says, with questionnaire-based surveys finding that children with myopia spend less time outdoors. "Some people think that more distance viewing sends a signal to the eye to stop growing," she says. Nearsighted eyes tend to be elongated. Natural light might also stimulate dopamine production, which is known to inhibit eye growth, she says, and extra vitamin D from the sun might contribute to regulating eye growth.
As for hereditary factors, research shows some added risk for children born to nearsighted parents. "It might be that somehow the population has changed and that there are more people floating around that have more genetic risk," Vitale says.


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As originally published in Toward Freedom, Winter 1998/99
Recent opposition to biotechnology and genetic engineering has focused on these technologies' implications for food and agriculture. This is entirely necessary, as tens of millions of acres of U.S. farm land are being planted with genetically engineered crops that have serious consequences for our health, and for the integrity of living ecosystems. With multinational chemical companies like Monsanto and Novartis buying up major commercial seed companies at a staggering pace — Monsanto alone has purchased six of the largest and most influential seed companies in the past two years — the cause for alarm is beyond question.
Medical research using the methods of genetic engineering raises a more difficult dilemma for critics. With researchers promising to find a genetic basis for diseases like cancer and AIDS, not to mention scores of rare but debilitating genetic disorders, many are hesitant to criticize. Even Jeremy Rifkin of the Foundation for Economic Trends, perhaps the world's best known critic of biotechnology, has recently equivocated on this question. While describing in detail many of the serious ethical and social consequences of biotechnology, Rifkin's latest book, The Biotech Century, describes promised future medical advances with an enthusiasm, and an air of historic inevitability, that only the industry's most loyal boosters could match.
There is, however, one group of people who have not hesitated to criticize today's genetics-centered medical research agenda. They are the representatives of the many indigenous nations throughout the world that are increasingly the subjects of genetic research. In a search for genetically distinct groups of people, from which genes linked to particular disease-related traits can be isolated and identified, scientists have traveled to the ends of the earth. Since the most isolated populations are usually the most genetically homogeneous — and since conditions of poverty and undernourishment increase the likelihood that a genetic propensity to disease will be expressed within a person's lifetime — researchers often focus their efforts on remote indigenous populations.
Scientists have trekked to Saudi Arabia in search for genes for glaucoma, to Ghana and Nigeria to study diabetes, to Mongolia for studies on congenital deafness, and to the remote South Atlantic for research on asthma. Researchers from the University of Iowa regularly travel to a remote Philippine island to collect blood and tissue samples from a population with an unusually high incidence of cleft lip and palate. A group from the University of Toronto has been searching blood samples from a remote island in the South Atlantic for a gene for asthma. These expeditions were funded by a California based company called Axys Pharmaceuticals, which in turn sold its rights to the German pharmaceutical giant Boehringer Ingelheim for $70 million. The pharmaceutical industry clearly expects profitable results from this kind of research.
Indigenous activists see it very differently, however. "Fraud, deception and bribery are being used to take samples from indigenous populations around the world," Debra Harry, founder of the Indigenous People's Coalition on Biopiracy, recently explained at a scientific symposium sponsored by the American Association for the Advancement of Science. The cases of bribery are well documented. Populations that agree to donate blood and tissue samples are often promised significant improvements in medical care. Researchers promise better community health services, provide hard-to-get medicines, and introduce people to the latest Western technologies, from cameras and tape recorders, to thermos bottles and even solar refrigerators. However, communities are rarely informed about the full range of uses for their genetic information. They have never been party to the multimillion dollar agreements between research institutions and pharmaceutical companies that have become routine in the world of biotechnology.
There are serious cultural conflicts as well. Many traditional peoples maintain long-standing strictures against meddling with another person's body, their blood, hair, saliva, clothes, or even their excrement. Burial ceremonies are designed to assure that the entire body of the deceased, and often their most treasured belongings, are buried with them. Many cultures carefully protect placentas against tampering until they are buried according to traditional practices, and some Pacific island cultures even share a tradition of not violating another's footprints. The taking of blood and tissue samples for research is seen by many as a threat to the integrity of the traditional lifeways that have sustained them for millennia.
In the context of centuries of colonial and neocolonial domination, it is easy to understand why many indigenous activists see this kind of research as yet another step on the road to extermination. "[T]he more information the outside world has of our natural resources, the more they rob and destroy them," wrote Ruth Liloqula of the Solomon Islands in a 1996 special issue of Cultural Survival Quarterly devoted to this question. "The only thing we have left and can call our very own is our genetic make-up. When this becomes the property of another body through a government that takes no part in our daily life and has no involvement at all in the composition of our genetic makeup, we are no longer safe from being exterminated or from being exploited to the point of non-existence." Just a few years ago, the people of the Solomon Islands, along with the indigenous Guaymi people of Panama and the Hagahai of Papua New Guinea, were the subject of patent claims on their genetic material that were granted to the U.S. government's National Institutes of Health (NIH). Each of these patents, justified by the laboratory identification of unique genetic traits, were subsequently renounced by the NIH in the face of widespread international outrage.
"Over the last 200 years, non-Aboriginal people have taken our land, language, culture, health — even our children. Now they want to take the genetic material that makes us Aboriginal people as well," writes John Liddle, director of the Central Australian Aboriginal Congress. Since the early 1990s, sixteen separate gatherings of indigenous activists around the world have passed resolutions questioning the social, economic, political and ethical implications of genetic research on indigenous peoples. The International Indian Treaty Council, based in San Francisco, has called for a moratorium on this research until indigenous people's concerns are fully addressed and the United Nations adopts international standards. This indigenous opposition was crystallized in 1994 by the establishment of a Human Genome Diversity Project by agencies of the U.S. government.
The Human Genome Diversity Project was created at the urging of prominent scientists to correct the distinctly Eurocentric bias of the multibillion dollar Human Genome Project (HGP). The HGP is a worldwide effort, supported by most of the world's leading industrial nations, which seeks to discover a complete, sequential map of the human species' 100,000 odd genes by the year 2005. The HGP, which is managed in the U.S. by the Department of Energy, has jump-started the emerging field of human "genomics," and led to an increasing focus on identifying human genes that are of potential commercial interest. With the cooperation of HGP agencies around the world, biotechnology companies have expedited the discovery, patenting and commercialization of human genetic traits, and are using this knowledge to consolidate their growing influence over the rapidly concentrating pharmaceutical industry. This past May, a former NIH researcher, Dr. Craig Venter, teamed up with a leading scientific instrument company, Perkin-Elmer, to establish a private, for-profit company to accelerate the process of identifying — and patenting — important human genes.
While most genetic mapping protocols developed under the HGP are designed to sequence a "typical," i.e., Euro-American set of chromosomes, the Genome Diversity Project claims to offer a more balanced view. Proponents promise a scientific blow against racism by demonstrating, for example, that genetic variations among individuals are far greater than between so-called "racial" groups. Geneticist Kenneth Kidd suggests that such knowledge can reveal useful information about the causes and consequences of human genetic variation, the evolution of disease resistance, and biological adaptations to climate and other natural conditions. Kidd's own research has demonstrated a vastly greater genetic variation among various tribal peoples in Africa than exists in any other part of the world. He views this as supporting the hypothesis that human migration out of Africa was a single unique event in evolutionary terms, one which occurred only within the last 100,000 years.
The concerns of indigenous activists are little assuaged by such findings, however. Not only does such research challenge traditional origin myths, but researchers have demonstrated little concern for the real-world survival of the groups they have studied. Indigenous peoples are described as "isolates of historic interest," and scientists focus on the need to collect and immortalize tissue samples before various populations disppear from the face of the earth.
Indigenous activists see little meaningful distinction between the scientific undertakings of the Human Genome Diversity Project, the commercial patenting and ownership of human genetic material, and the aggressive efforts of transnational pharmaceutical companies to expropriate indigenous knowledge as "intellectual property" under the rules of the World Trade Organization. Each of these activities reflect an endemic disregard for indigenous people's biological and cultural integrity, and a continuation of the Western legacy of colonialism and conquest. Medical research, the identification and patenting of genes, and bioprospecting for commercially useful plants and other products from native lands are often undertaken by the same people, and sponsored by the same thoroughly unaccountable institutions.
To allay the vocal concerns of research subjects, the Human Genome Diversity Project and the NIH have collaborated on efforts to develop a "Model Ethical Protocol" for genetic research. This document, presented to the scientific community at a meeting in Philadelphia earlier this year, urges researchers to respect cultural diversity and address human rights issues, advocating sensitivity to group identity, divergent world views, and awareness of the ravages of colonialism. But precise definitions are often difficult, and the problem of group rights is rife with ambiguities.
Are researchers to recognize the sovereignty of particular villages? Of official tribal governments? The conflicts between traditionalists and assimilationists in many indigenous communities are persistent, and often intractable. What does it really mean for people to share in the benefits of research? Should research subjects be able to restrict commercial uses, or alter research priorities to better match their community's needs? When does providing medical services to sampled populations cross the ethical line and become a form of bribery? Questions such as these are inherently open-ended and sometimes unanswerable in principle. While commercial research on human DNA is proceeding at an accelerating pace, the Human Genome Diversity Project is serving as a forum for ethical debates and detached scholarly debates, while providing a symbolic lightening rod for critics of genetic research. The Project's primary goal of providing a worldwide repository of blood samples and human cell lines in the public domain has yet to receive any substantial funding.
Even if these profound ethical issues are someday resolved, the Model Ethical Protocol does not even begin to address the profound genetic bias that has diverted the course of medical research in recent years. Spurred by advances in biotechnology, modern medicine has radically shifted its focus from external causes, such as viruses, bacteria, and environmental toxins, toward identifying internal, inherited susceptibilities to disease. We are conditioned by the media, and increasingly by medical practice, to accept that the identification of a particular gene, even if it is shared by only a small portion of those who contract a particular disease, means that the gene "for" that disease has been discovered. For example, the widely publicized "breast cancer genes" account for less than ten percent of all cases of breast cancer; nearly 95 percent of breast cancers are not familial, and those who carry one of the dreaded genes still have about a 50 percent chance of contracting the disease.
Yet both research priorities and media attention have shifted dramatically from the well-known environmental causes of cancer, toward an ever narrower focus on so-called "cancer genes." This blaming-the-victims approach has largely superseded research on the underlying environmental causes of many chronic diseases. Research on environmental illness is being reduced to identifying and screening for genetic "markers" that identify those who may be most susceptible; a new government-sponsored Environmental Genome Project allocates $60 million for this purpose.
Even where the genetic basis of a disease is well understood by scientists, it rarely brings us any closer to a "cure," but the easier identification of disease susceptibilities, in adults or prenatally, has opened the door to new kinds of discrimination. For example, one in ten African American babies in the United States is born with at least one copy of the sickle cell gene, while only one in 500 actually has sickle cell anemia. Although the exact molecular basis of sickle cell anemia has been known for thirty years, scientists still do not understand why some people afflicted with the condition become seriously ill as young children, while others are affected much later and to a far less serious degree. Yet discrimination by insurers and in the workplace against those who test positive for the sickle cell gene has been widespread since genetic tests for this condition first became available in the late 1970s.
"What if the earlier generation of public health workers had spent their research money on figuring out which arm of which chromosome holds the 'gene for' susceptibility to cholera?" sociologist Barbara Katz Rothman asks in her new book, Genetic Maps and Human Imaginations. Would this knowledge have superseded efforts to provide everyone with safe drinking water? This is a very apt metaphor for the outlook of today's medical biotechnology. While the methods of genetic screening, DNA-based drug identification, and even gene therapy might offer tangible benefits for some people, the narrow genetic bias of such research ultimately diverts attention from the underlying, preventable causes of common human afflictions. To address these causes requires not only a different research agenda, but a real commitment to address the underlying social and economic roots of poverty, social decay and environmental destruction.
A longer, fully footnoted version of this article was published this past summer as an Occasional Paper of the Edmonds Institute (20319 92nd Ave. W., Edmonds, WA 98020). Brian Tokar is the author of Earth for Sale and The Green Alternative, and is currently editing a comprehensive anthology on the implications of biotechnology.


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I need to reconcile these 2 facts:
- I don't feel comfortable working on Linux;
- I need to develop software for Linux.
Some background: I have a 10+ years of programming experience on Windows (almost exclusively C/C++, but some .NET as well), I was a user of FreeBSD at home for about 3 years or so (then had to go back to Windows), and I've never had much luck with Linux. And now I have to develop software for Linux. I need a plan.
On Windows, you can get away with just knowing a programming language, an API you're coding against, your IDE (VisualStudio) and some very basic tools for troubleshooting (Depends, ProcessExplorer, DebugView, WinDbg). Everything else comes naturally.
On Linux, it's a very different story. How the hell would I know what DLL (sorry, Shared Object) would load, if I link to it from Firefox plugin? What's the Linux equivalent of inserting __asm int 3/DebugBreak() in the source and running the program, and then letting the OS call a debugger? Why the hell release builds use something, called appLoader, while debug builds work somehow different? Worst of all: how to provision Linux development environment?
So, taking into account that hatred is usually associated with not knowing enough, what would you recommend? I'm ok with Emacs and GCC. I need to educate myself as a Linux admin/user, and I need to learn proper troubleshooting tools (strace is cool, btw), equivalents to the ones I mentioned above.
Do I need to do Linux from Scratch? Or do I need to just read some books (I've read "UNIX programming environment" by Kernighan and "Advanced Programming..." by Stevens, but I need to learn something more practical)? Or do I need to have some Linux distro on my home computer?


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Where did you grow up?
I was raised in a house on the far South Side of Chicago, in a development erected on landfill made from slag and other industrial by-products a few years after World War II. My father worked in a nearby steel mill—I learned later in life that he was a manual worker as a matter of conscience—and my mother worked for an opinion research company, going to people's homes and interviewing them about their reactions to products and advertising. Helping companies perfect their advertising did not exactly square with my parents' leftist ideas, but my mother needed work that allowed her to make her own hours. The houses on my block were identical, row houses made of pale pink brick, and each had a living room (which my parents, to my great shame, insisted on called "the parlor") a dining room (which—shame's second wave—we called "the library") and a kitchen. Upstairs there were two bedrooms and a bath.
My playmates were Polish and Irish. As an only child I loved them in a burning, desperate way, they were siblings in every way except that their parents were rough and said nigger and kike, and my parents said democratic centralism and proletarian. My closest friend between the ages of 5 and 12 was named Dickie Dork. Everyone knew Dick had a dirty meaning, but "dork" as a pejorative was completely unknown, at least to me; it wasn't until I spoke of him many years later, when I was trying to insinuate myself into a literary crowd, that I realized his name struck my new friends as an attempt at Dickensian humor. I grinned like a frightened chimp. This literary crowd and their opinions was important to me. Growing up, I did not know anyone who wrote anything, not even letters to the editor—they were all so well-educated and some of them worked for publishing houses, and some were even published. Until them, the closest I'd come to meeting and saying Hello how are you to a writer was the time in college when James Dickey (I had no idea there were going to be so many Dicks in this!) wandered into a party I was attending.
Where do you live and why?
By the time I was 14, my most burning ambition was to leave my home, leave my neighborhood, leave my city. I kept it a secret wish. It was easier done than said. It wasn't only that I wanted to leave Chicago—I wanted to live in New York City. And I did—for a time. I was sure that in New York there resided the smartest people in the world, and I suppose I was half-right about that. But I couldn't tolerate walking my dogs along the city streets, the constant noise was wrecking me psychologically, and even after I had some success I didn't have enough money to rent or buy an apartment large enough for my wife and two children. We moved 100 miles north, to the Hudson Valley. The wife has left, the kids have grown up and moved away, but I am still here. A few novels ago, I started using my town as a prototype for the fictional town of Leyden, New York, and the novel I am working on now spans 40 years in this re-imagined landscape, with a few of my old characters coming back to join me. It could very well be that once I am done with the book, I will be done with this place, once and for all!
Describe your morning routine.
Where I live it's better to write in the morning, because the night is really, really, really dark, and I do believe you'd go mad if you weren't asleep for most of it. I usually rise between 6:30 and 7:30, let out however many dogs are living here, and, when we are keeping domestic ducks, go out to the pond to see if all of them survived the night—with its many sharp-eyed predators, night for ducks is even more harrowing than it is for writers. The woman who delivers the New York Times is truly stalwart, and about 350 days out of the year the paper in its cheerful blue plastic sleeve is somewhere near the house. I fetch it, make coffee in one of those old-fashioned espresso pots, toast some bread, and read the paper until about 830, and then go straight to my desk (a messy place, but reliably welcoming to me) and work until about 1145, at which time I take two hours off for tennis, outdoors in the mild weather, indoors when the snow flies. I try to keep a steady pace with my writing. I have found that super-productive days are usually followed by two and even three days when I can hardly write a word. I used to try for 1000 words a day; now I am high-fiving myself after 500. I would be finishing a novel a year if I kept my 500 words a day, but I write in drafts—draft after draft—and usually it takes me three or four years to get a manuscript ready. The novel I am working on now will probably take longer than four years. I am already at least two years into it. I have lots of notes, character sketches, ideas for scenes, sentences I like but have not found a home for, but I don't have a clear idea of where this thing is leading, even though I already know the characters about as well as I know anyone. Doctorow famously said that writing a novel is like driving at night—you can see about as far as your headlights shine. He's right about that, I think (just as he's right about so many things). But I would slightly embellish it, and remind writers that those headlights are powered by language and the more charged your language the brighter your headlights burn and the more you are able to see.
Is there anything distinctive or unusual about your work space? Besides the obvious, what do you keep on your desk? What is the view from your favorite work space?
I have two desks and two computers because there are times—less frequently now than before, when my bills were mounting more quickly—when I am working on two separate pieces simultaneously, and I use one desk for project A and another for project B. They are both in the study of my old farmhouse, in a room that has three nice sized windows, each with a lovely, bucolic view. However, the desks are situated so I can't look out a window, but instead face a wall. I don't want to get involved with anything that isn't going on inside my own head.
What is guaranteed to make you laugh?
These days Louis CK has a pretty strong purchase on my funny bone, but laughter for me is often a matter of surprise and its sources remain unpredictable.
What is guaranteed to make you cry?
Tears are another matter. If I want to indulge in weepiness, my favorite dog is buried about 1000 feet from my house and I can go out and talk to him. Music, too, can dismantle me—for instance, this morning: Sam Cooke singing "Touch the Hem of His Garment." The Faure Requiem can bring tears, too. And sometimes when a great tennis player weeps after a match I cry along, too, so moved am I by the effort, aloneness, and artistry of what has just transpired.
If you could bring back to life one deceased person, who would it be and why?
Many people I have loved are deceased and since the fun of this question is dependent on keeping the reanimations to one, I can't chose. So I will resurrect someone I did not love—J. Edgar Hoover. I primarily want him to know that his secret life is no longer a secret, and that after a lifetime terrorizing people he has become a figure of fun, a man routinely mocked and ridiculed, and what I imagine was his greatest fear—that his private life would become public—has indeed come to pass. I want him to walk around with the knowledge that everyone he meets has an image of him in a dress. I recognize that it's ungenerous of me, but I think it would be good for everyone if he knew that.
What is the story behind the publication of your first book?
It's a tale that is both encouraging and discouraging to beginning writers. My first novel was submitted to nearly twenty publishers before it was accepted by Houghton Mifflin, thanks to the enthusiasm of an editor named Joyce Hartman. The encouraging part is that after a couple of years of rejection, frustration, and sadness, I got what I dreamed of, longed for, and worked toward—the certifiable right to call myself a novelist. (Until then, it was something I kept mainly to myself.) That first book, called Last Night at the Brain Thieves Ball was not a success. Ms. Hartman and her colleagues were certain that I had written a chilling, sci-fi novel about the dangers of electronic snooping—unlike NSA snoopers, my brain thieves planted electrodes into the brains of their subjects, mostly for market research purposes. (A nod to my mother's old door-to-door job.) I was too nervous that Houghton-Mifflin would back out of the "deal" and I would have to give back the $2700 I'd been paid. But the truth was I had written what I thought was a comic novel, composed under the spell of Despair, an early Nabokov. The book sold reasonably well to members of my immediate family, and I was launched, given not only the beginnings of a career but the beginnings of a new identity. The parts of this story that are discouraging to beginning writers is that an agent from an established agency was willing to send the book out 20 times, and, most chillingly, there were so many different mainstream New York publishers in the 1970s that Houghton Mifflin was twentieth on her list. I think half the publishers who rejected that book have gone out of business—though not because they failed to publish Last Night at the Brain Thieves Ball!


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Gary Klein of the LA Times interviewed Mike Scioscia, Don Mattingly, and Tommy Lasorda to get their insights on how to construct a decent lineup card. Regarding Mattingly's case, I was definitely interested to understand his perspective since his lineups seem incredibly befuddling. But after reading the entirety of this article, I think Klein's piece can be summarized more cleanly (so I'll save you the time of reading):
There you have it! Now you can be a manager as well.


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ATLANTA (AP) — Jim Fregosi, a former All-Star who won more than 1,000 games as a manager for four teams, died Friday after an apparent stroke. He was 71.
The Atlanta Braves said they were notified by a family member that Fregosi died early Friday in Miami, where he was hospitalized after the apparent stroke while on a cruise with baseball alumni.
Fregosi ended more than 50 years in baseball as a special assistant to Braves general manager Frank Wren.
"Jim played a vital role in our club over the last 13 years," Wren said Friday. "As a senior adviser he was someone you could always pick up the phone and get a feel for the players in the game. He covered all 30 teams for us and was such a positive, knowledgeable resource. He lit up a room and had just great relationships throughout the game.
"When I first became GM, one of the things that made the transition so easy was having Jim as close as a phone call for advice and help or encouragement."
Fregosi managed the Philadelphia Phillies to the 1993 National League pennant and the 1979 California Angels to their first American League Western Division title. He also managed the Chicago White Sox and Toronto Blue Jays.
Phillies president David Montgomery said the team and others in baseball "lost a dear friend."
"He'll be remembered for his vibrant personality, wisdom and love of the game," Montgomery said in a statement. "Our deepest sympathy is extended to his widow, Joni, daughters Nikki, Lexy and Jennifer and sons Robert and Jim."
Fregosi was an infielder in the majors from 1961 to 1978, hitting .265 with 151 homers and 706 RBIs. His best seasons came with the Angels, where he was six-time All-Star as a shortstop.
The Angels, who retired Fregosi's No. 11 in 1988, said in a statement Fregosi was a personal favorite of former owner Gene Autry.
"His contributions and passion for the Angels, both as a player and manager, have served as the standard for others within our organization through the years," the Angels said.
"Jim's induction into the Angels Hall of Fame and the retiring of his uniform No. 11, were among the prouder moments in club history. His personality was infectious, his love of the game legendary, and his knowledge endless."
Fregosi left the Angels in a 1971 trade with the New York Mets that sent Nolan Ryan to California.
Fregosi later played for the Texas Rangers and Pittsburgh Pirates. He began his managing career at 36 with the Angels in April 1978 — two days after his final game as a player with the Pirates.
In 15 seasons as a manager, he posted a 1,028-1,094 record.
James Louis Fregosi was born in 1942 in San Francisco and starred in baseball, football basketball and track and field at Serra High School. He signed with the Boston Red Sox out of high school and went to the Angels in the 1960 expansion draft.


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On Monday, the head of NASA's astrophysics division warned that tight budgets could keep the agency from continuing to fund all of its ongoing astronomy missions when they come up for review early next year. A day later, the head of NASA's planetary science division offered a similar warning regarding planetary science missions, with the possibility that some high-profile missions may lose funding and have to shut down after 2014.
Speaking at a meeting of the planetary science subcommittee of the NASA Advisory Council, held via teleconference on Tuesday, NASA planetary science division director Jim Green said planetary missions that have already completed their primary missions would be subject to a senior review next year, the guidelines for which will be finalized in early 2014. A number of missions will be involved in that review, including Cassini, Curiosity, Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter, Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, Mars Odyssey, Opportunity, and NASA contributions to ESA's Mars Express mission. Spacecraft that have not completed their primary missions, like Juno and New Horizons, are not included, and Green said the MESSENGER Mercury orbiter would also not likely be included in the senior review because it will be nearing the end of its mission as it runs out of fuel.
The overall budget for funding extended missions will be about the same in fiscal year 2015 as it is in 2014, at least based on the administration's budget proposals, Green said. The challenge is that there are more missions up for review, most notably with the inclusion of Curiosity, which completes its primary mission in 2014. "This will be a very interesting competition," Green said. "We have two very expensive flagship missions, Cassini and Curiosity, which are expensive to operate even in an extended mission phase, along with a lot of our other missions, which are doing tremendous science at a lower cost. So, this particular competition we'll have to do very carefully."
That upcoming senior review has already raised concerns in the planetary science community because of the perceived competition between Cassini and Curiosity. The convention wisdom in the community is that there is not enough money to afford to continue operating both Cassini and Curiosity; or, if they are both continued, fund any other ongoing missions. In a head-to-head competition, Curiosity, on Mars only since August 2012, would seem to have the advantage over Cassini, which has been orbiting Saturn since mid-2004. On the other hand, scientists note that Mars is a frequent destination for NASA missions, while there are no Saturn missions on the books after Cassini.


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Mighty Oprah Winfrey has felt a lot less … mighty these days, hasn't she?
On Friday, Oprah abruptly fired CAA and her agent Kevin Huvane, who is incredibly powerful in his own right. His past and present roster includes Meryl Streep, Penelope Cruz, Jennifer Aniston, Sandra Bullock, Tom Cruise, Brad Pitt, Keanu Reeves, Nicole Kidman, Clive Own, Sarah Jessica Parker, Uma Thurman, Renee Zellwegger, Julianne Moore and Ethan Hawke, and, as many of you know, his brother is publicist Stephen Huvane (Jennifer Aniston, Gwyneth Paltrow, Anne Hathaway, and more). In 2009 he made it onto Lainey's Freebie 5 for kicking Ebola out of a party. Kevin Huvane is Major.
Huvane helped broker Oprah's OWN deal, arguably the riskiest and most defining moment of her career. In 2008, another agent helping with the deal, Michael Camacho, head of CAA's Alternative TV department (as in unscripted/reality TV), decided to try to personally gain from the deal and lobbied for an executive position at OWN (unbeknownst to Kevin). Her team was understandably peeved, and in turn CAA fired Camucho. It's like a bad Entourage storyline.
Putting the underhanded agent aside though, there's been an obvious decline in the Oprah/CAA relationship since she launched OWN. By firing Kevin Huvane, Oprah is publicly proclaiming that no one is safe and no one and nothing is above her interests.
Massive power comes with massive ego, and egos don't do well when they aren't fed. A decision to sever her long-term working relationship with a well-connected agency (and she's no doubt benefited from their influence when securing celebrity interviews) would not have come lightly. A few different things could have factored in to her decision: maybe she felt Huvane wasn't paying enough attention to her (which, as her agent, is his job); maybe the trust level never fully recovered after the Camacho debacle; or maybe she felt like she's outgrown CAA (although you don't get much bigger than CAA, so where will she go, if anywhere?).
The bigger problem facing Oprah is the subtle lessening of her Midas Touch.
There's been no glaring misstep, but there have been several bumps: Gayle leaving to work at CBS, layoffs, poor press. OWN was not a huge success out of the gate, which she freely admits. I was never an Oprah Winfrey Show convert, but I watch a few shows on OWN (Our America with Lisa Ling, Oprah's Next Chapter, Oprah: Where Are They Now and Season 25: Oprah Behind the Scenes). There is some good programming there and it's not TLC…but where is the big hit?
Part of the problem is that her talk show audience is less loyal than I think she expected. When she launched OWN, it stopped being about what they wanted to hear and it started being about what she wanted to say. Much like when she starred in Beloved (a bomb), Oprah's flock will only follow her so far. And then really, what's the point of them? If your flock isn't following, aren't they just a drain and an energy suck? It's ironic that someone who has championed personal growth and evolution (however new age-y or contrived) has an audience that is largely unenthusiastic about HER growth and evolution.
It's a loss of relatability as well. Oprah is no longer the talk show host struggling with her weight and sitting in your living room at 4 p.m. to chat and recommend books (and let's be honest, she was never just that, but she was brilliant at making it seem as though she was). She's powerful, she runs a network, she can move mountains. She's not "with" her audience anymore, day in and day out. Instead, people can turn to a new celebrity eco-system to find people to relate to instead: reality stars.
All this can't be blamed on her, of course. Starting a network is an incredibly massive task and she suffers from society's expectation for immediate success. If it's not overnight, it's not celebrated.
How can she capture the hearts and minds of a society that wants to watch adults fight on camera (preferably while they guzzle wine)? Has she overestimated a demographic that, for years, has watched a group of women compete for the attention of a man so they can reach the holy grail (an engagement ring)? Oprah's mistake may simply be that she's misread the pop culture zeitgeist, and I don't know if a new agent can fix that.


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The monarch called a Bráhman near
And said, 'Now speed away
To Kas'yap's son, 2 the mighty seer,
And with all reverence say
The holy child he holds so dear,
The hermit of the noble mind.
Whose equal it were hard to find,
Returned, is dwelling here.
Go, and instead of me do thou
Before that best of hermits bow,
That still he may, for his dear son,
Show me the favour I have won.'
Soon as the king these words had said,
To Kas'yap's son the Bráhman sped.
Before the hermit low he bent
And did obeisance, reverent;
Then with meek words his grace to crave
The message of his lord he gave:
'The high-souled father of his bride
Had called thy son his rites to guide:
Those rites are o'er, the steed is slain;
Thy noble child is come again.'
Soon as the saint that speech had heard
His spirit with desire was stirred
To seek the city of the king
And to his cot his son to bring.
With young disciples at his side
Forth on his way the hermit hied,
While peasants from their hamlets ran
To reverence the holy man,
Each with his little gift of food,
Forth came the village multitude,
And, as they humbly bowed the head,
'What may we do for thee?' they said.
Then he, of Bráhmans first and best,
The gathered people thus addressed:
'Now tell me for I fain would know,
Why is it I am honoured so?'
They to the high-souled saint replied:
'Our ruler is with thee allied.
Our master's order we fulfil;
O Bráhman, let thy mind be still.'
With joy the saintly hermit heard
Each pleasant and delightful word,
And poured a benediction down
On king and ministers and town.
Glad at the words of that high saint
Some servants hastened to acquaint
Their king, rejoicing to impart
The tidings that would cheer his heart.
Soon as the joyful tale he knew
To meet the saint the monarch flew,
The guest-gift in his hand he brought,
And bowed before him and besought:
'This day by seeing thee I gain
Not to have lived my life in vain.
Now be not wroth with me, I pray,
Because I wiled thy son away.' 1
The best of Bráhmans answer made:
'Be not, great lord of kings, afraid.
Thy virtues have not failed to win
My favour, O thou pure of sin.'
Then in the front the saint was placed,
The king came next in joyous haste,
And with him entered his abode,
Mid glad acclaim as on they rode.
To greet the sage the reverent crowd
Raised suppliant hands and humbly bowed.
Then from the palace many a dame
Following well-dressed S'ántá came,
Stood by the mighty saint and cried:
'See, honour's source, thy son's dear bride.'
The saint, who every virtue knew,
His arms around his daughter threw,
And with a father's rapture pressed
The lady to his wondering breast.
Arising from the saint's embrace
She bowed her low before his face,
And then, with palm to palm applied,
Stood by her hermit father's side.
He for his son, as laws ordain,
Performed the rite that frees from stain, 2
And, honoured by the wise and good,
With him departed to the wood.
30:1 The Michelia champaca. It bears a scented yellow blossom:
30:2 Vibhándak, the father of Rishyás'ring.
31:1 A hemis'loka is wanting in Schlegel's text, which he thus fills up in his Latin translation.
31:2 Rishyas'ring, a Bráhman, had married Sántá who was of the Kshatriya or Warrior caste and an expiatory ceremony was necessary on account of this violation of the law.


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Allen Ginsberg's Beat Family Album
The famous beat poet's photographs reveal an American counterculture at work and play
The two men pose for the camera at right angles to each other. They're in a room in Tangier in 1961. Nothing in the picture indicates place or time, though, and neither really matters to understanding the image. Clearly, it's about who rather than where or when. You don't have to know that the subjects are the Beat poets Allen Ginsberg, in back, and Gregory Corso, in front, to realize this is the case. The photograph is all about the two individuals in it, both separately (each man has a striking appearance) and together. In fact, what most comes across is a sense of conjunction: "Siamese poetry twins," as Ginsberg writes in his caption. True, a right angle, being square, isn't exactly Beat geometry; but that very squareness makes the angle all the more solidly joined.
The photograph, which was likely taken by Ginsberg's longtime lover, Peter Orlovsky, is one of some six dozen that make up "Beat Memories: The Photographs of Allen Ginsberg," which will be at the National Gallery of Art through September 6. Ginsberg started taking photographs as a young man, in the 1940s, and kept doing so through 1963, when his camera was left behind on a trip to India. The result was a kind of Beat family photo album: informal, affectionate, full of personality—and personalities. We see, among others, Jack Kerouac, William Burroughs, Neal Cassady and Orlovsky. Ginsberg liked to say he was "fooling around" with the camera (whether behind or before it). These were pictures, he felt, "meant more for a public in heaven than one here on earth—and that's why they're charming." As befits such casually taken images, Ginsberg would have them developed at his corner drugstore.
"Every writer since the invention of the Kodak has probably made snapshots," says Sarah Greenough, senior curator of photographs at the National Gallery, who organized "Beat Memories." Yet very few have amassed a notable body of photographic work. Ginsberg thus joins Lewis Carroll, George Bernard Shaw, Eudora Welty and Wright Morris (who's probably better known today for his photographs than for his novels).
Ginsberg resumed taking pictures, more seriously, in the early 1980s. He was inspired by the example of an old friend, the photographer Robert Frank, and a new one, the photographer Berenice Abbott. "What's interesting about Ginsberg is he makes a lot of pictures from 1953 to 1963," says Greenough. "Then it's only beginning in the early 1980s that he rediscovers them. By then he's already established himself as one of the most important writers of the 20th century. He can then, if you will, afford to turn his attention to photography. I think photography came at the right moment in Ginsberg's career."
Ginsberg began using better cameras and having his photographs printed professionally. "I had been taking pictures all along," he told an interviewer in 1991, "but I hadn't thought of myself as a photographer." The most noticeable difference was a simple yet distinctive way he found to marry image and text. He began writing captions, sometimes quite lengthy, on each print. He extended the practice to earlier photographs, too. His images, Ginsberg felt, "all had a story to tell, especially the old ones," and his captioning was a way of acknowledging that. Ginsberg's printers had to start making his images smaller to leave room for the words he was writing beneath them—not so much captions, really, as brief excerpts from a running memoir.
Ginsberg spoke of his photographs as his "celestial snapshots." He could as easily have been referring to artistic stardom as the heavens. In addition to shooting fellow Beats, Ginsberg photographed Robert Frank, Bob Dylan, the painter Francesco Clemente and the poet Yevgeny Yevtushenko. The biggest star of all was Ginsberg himself. Not an especially handsome man, he nonetheless had an attractiveness the camera responded to. Frank considered a Richard Avedon nude portrait of Ginsberg and Orlovsky the best photograph the celebrated portraitist and fashion photographer ever took.
You can see in the double portrait with Corso how photogenic Ginsberg was (strange that he should look a bit like Arthur Miller in it). You can also see from the way he appraises the camera that this is someone already very much aware of the lens and what it can do. The camera's partiality to Ginsberg is no less apparent in the self-portrait he took 35 years later on his 70th birthday. It's evident how well he's weathered the blunt passage of time (not something that can be said of Corso in Ginsberg's 1995 portrait). The intensity of the gaze, the nest-like invitingness of the beard, the air of sage authority: Ginsberg has the look of a rather sexy, and very dapper, rabbi. How dandyish of him to note the provenance of his clothes. Have "Goodwill" and "Oleg Cassini" ever otherwise figured in the same sentence?
Mark Feeney, who covers the arts and photography for the Boston Globe, won the 2008 Pulitzer Prize for criticism.


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Shotgun Customizing by Curtis Wilbanks
aka; Gun Docc
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Customized Shotgun work for over 30 years.
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to achieve this goal through my customized shotgun work.
If you do not see a price on a service that you need, e-mail me
with complete details of what you want and I will e-mail you
with a price usually within 24 to 48 hours.
Price List for Choke Tube Installations
Price List for Match Gun Work for Card Shooting
Price List for Miscellaneous Gunwork
American Hunter Magazine Article ( Custom Turkey Guns )
American Hunter Results of Firing Tests @ 25 Yards
American Hunter Results Turkey Guns Range Comparison
Acutal Turkey Targets with Wilbanks Converted Guns
Shipping Instructions
This little rascal was too skinny to shoot but he makes a great e-mail carrier.....


text:
White Horse Challenge
NEWS 06th June 2023:
WHC 2024 on 21st April.
Many thanks, WHC TEAM.
Helmet Timing Tag: CLICK HERE
facebook: CLICK HERE
Results: here
Photos: here
Date: 21st April 2024
Entries: Open on 01 July 2023.
Route: 90 mile & 70 mile option.
Start/finish: Shrivenham, Oxfordshire
Entry cost: £35
Tech T-shirt available in S, M, L, XL, 2XL, 3XL sizes
Sponsorship: Sponsorship raised from this event will be donated to WaterAid (funds will be used to provide clean & safe water to those who most need it).
If you prefer not to collect sponsorship, there is an option to make a donation to WaterAid instead.
This will be a useful early season ride that will enable riders to gauge their fitness level as they cycle around 90 miles through Wiltshire, Berkshire and Oxfordshire with about 1400 metres of climbing. The route has been carefully selected to keep the riders interested and challenged by their surroundings, on decent road surfaces and with minimal traffic.
What can riders expect?
Start and finish at the Memorial hall in the village of Shrivenham, Oxfordshire.
Pass by four white horses: Uffington, Broadtown, Cherhill & Hackpen (Uffington White Horse is the oldest of all British chalk figures and dates back almost 3000 years).
Passing through Avebury which lies in the heart of the Wiltshire downs. The Avebury stones are thought to have been constructed in neolithic times (2700 BC to 2400 BC).
Enjoy beautiful views across the Lambourn & Marlborough downs.
Other historical places such as the Saxon town of Cricklade and picturesque villages such as Hannington and Castle Eaton.
What's included:
- Clearly signed route with marshals to help at key locations
- Electronic timed event (each rider will collect timing chip at the start)
- Two well stocked feed stations
- Finishers medal
- Mechanical support kindly provided by Nick Gordon (mobile mechanic) and Tony Staples (Mobile Cycle Medic, Shrivenham www.mobilecyclemedic.com)
- Official Photographer (www.21Cphotos.com)
- Individual times will be added with Gold, Silver and Bronze standard
- Results will be published on the website shortly after the event
- Event T-shirt available for £10 (please order your T-shirt at the same time as entering the event)
For details of other cycling events please visit the Cyclosport website (click the logo below)
© White Horse Challenge 2007-2023


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The German manufacturer will install six of its N90-2500 machines on the 15MW Jack's Lane wind farm in Norfolk in the east of England.
Woolley Hill wind farm in Cambridgeshire, also in eastern England, with a capacity of 10MW, will feature the N100-2500 turbine.
Construction of some of the infrastructure has already begun at both projects. The turbines are due to be delivered in the middle of the year, with commissioning due before the end of 2014.
RES and Nordex have previously worked together on several projects in Northern Ireland with a total installed capacity of 90MW.


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Just a day before Asteroid 2012 DA14 was to fly by the Earth, a meteor streaked through the Ural region in Russa and crashed somewhere in Chelyabinsk. Full report on Russia Today – Meteorite hits Russian Urals: Fireball explosion wreaks havoc, up to 1,200 injured
Related: Why Almost Everyone in Russia Has a Dash Cam. Yup I was wondering that too.


text:
The holidays are just around the corner. While some are preparing for a Thanksgiving feast, many retailers are hoping to catch the eye of shoppers with show-stopping deals on hot-ticket items.
Walmart released its Black Friday advertisement, featuring deals on televisions, laptops, surveillance cameras, cookware and clothing.
The company says the deals will be available in-store starting at 6 p.m. on Thursday, Nov. 22. If you want to skip the hassle of the store, the sales will also be available online starting Wednesday, Nov. 21 at 9 p.m.
Last week, Target released its Black Friday advertisement. In addition to the deals, company officials say that shoppers will also be able to take advantage of 'skip the line' service.