text:
BAD JEWS to Move to Laura Pels Theatre in September 2013
This year, Roundabout Theatre Company is thrilled to celebrate the seventh successful season of Roundabout Underground and the new play initiative, which illustrates a continued commitment to the nurturing of new artists. Through myriad programs and productions, the young artists associated with Roundabout will see their work presented to a wide audience of theater goers.
Harmon's sold out dark comedy BAD JEWS, will make the move upstairs from Roundabout Underground's 62-seat Black Box Theatre to the 420-seat Laura Pels Theater beginning September 20, 2013. The limited run will be a part of Roundabout's 2013-2014 subscription season.
The second playwright to be produced as part of Roundabout Underground (The Language of Trees in 2008), Levenson will see the world premiere of his Roundabout commissioned play The Unavoidable Disappearance of Tom Durnin open in June at the Laura Pels Theatre.
Roundabout will hold their second annual Roundabout Underground Reading series in February, where playwrights such as Joshua Harmon (Bad Jews) made their Roundabout debut. Five up and coming playwrights & directors will have their plays read in the Black Box Theater.
BAD JEWS was first performed at the inaugural Roundabout Underground Reading Series in February 2012. The play was chosen to be the seventh Roundabout Underground production where it opened to critical acclaim on October 30, 2012. The critics raved 'Bad Jews is delicious nasty fun' (New York Post), 'A very promising start by newcomer Joshua Harmon' (New York Magazine), 'Tracee Chimo is marvelous, her versatility is startling' (New York Times). The sold out run was extended two weeks and played its final performance in the Black Box on December 30, 2012. Original cast members Tracee Chimo, Philip Ettinger, Molly Ranson and Michael Zegen will return for the Off-Broadway run, with direction by Daniel Aukin.
Roundabout Underground playwrights are commissioned to write a second play for Roundabout following their Black Box production. The debut of this program was Stephen Karam's Sons of the Prophet which won the 2012 NY Drama Critics Circle Award and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. Next, Steven Levenson's The Unavoidable Disappearance of Tom Durnin will premiere in the summer 2013 at the Laura Pels Theatre. Following that, Bad Jews will move to the Laura Pels Theatre and Joshua Harmon will be commissioned to write his second play for Roundabout Theatre Company.
Sign up to be part of Roundabout's Email Club and members will be notified first about ticket availability.
Roundabout also announces the second annual Roundabout Underground Reading Series from February 25 - March 1. Roundabout Underground Reading Series is a five night event that will include a nightly reading of a new play written and directed by an emerging artist, curtain speeches by Roundabout Underground artist alumni and a post-show reception. BAD JEWS was presented at this event in February 2012.
The plays featured in this year's series include Jonathan Caren's The Recommendation, directed by Laura Savia; Rachel Bonds's Swimmers, directed by Portia Krieger; Mat Smart's Tinker to Evers to Chance, directed by Jeremy B. Cohen; Christian Durso's Shiner, directed by Ed Sylvanus Iskandar; Kate Gersten's Benefit of the Doubt, directed by Gaye Taylor Upchurch.
There will be one reading each night at 7pm from February 25 - March 1, in the Black Box Theatre in the Harold and Miriam Steinberg Center for Theatre (111 W46th St.). A limited number of tickets to the reading series will be available to general public.
These tickets can be reserved by emailing firstname.lastname@example.com.
Monday, February 25
By Jonathan Caren; Directed by Laura Savia
Aaron is smart, privileged and liked by everyone. Iskinder, his college roommate, is modest, unconnected and comes from a middle-class immigrant family. Soon the best of friends, Aaron takes Iskinder under his wing, sharing his world of favors and fortune. But the safe haven of college only lasts so long, and once in the real world, Aaron is thrust into a terrifying situation without his familiar safety net. As the
tables turn, and Aaron is confronted with a crisis, both Aaron and Iskinder have to rethink the meaning of friendship and where loyalty has its limits.
Jonathan Caren (Playwright). Jonathan's work has been developed by The Manhattan Theater Club, Ensemble Studio Theater, Ars Nova, The Flea, The Rattlestick, The Old Globe, New York Stage and Film and The Lark, amongst others. His play, The Morning the Sun Fell Down will be featured in MTC's 2013 7@7 Reading Series this spring. Catch The Fish won most outstanding play in the NY Fringe. He is a 2011-12 Dramatist Guild Fellow, the 2011 New York Stage and Film Founder's Award Winner, a member of The T.S Eliot Old Vic/New Voices Network, a recipient of a residency at SPACE @ Ryder Farm, a two-time Lecomte du Nouy award winner and a recipient of the Theater Publicus Prize for Dramatic Fiction. He was a finalist for the 2012 Laurents/Hatcher Award, a nominee for the 2012 Otis Guerney New American Playwright's Award, a finalist for The 2013 Soho Rep Writers/Director Lab and is currently nominated for a Craig Noel award. He graduate of The Juilliard School's Lila Acheson Wallace Playwright's program and Vassar College, hails from Los Angeles and is a member of the downtown New York theater company, Partial Comfort.
Laura Savia (Director) directing credits include The Mnemonist of Dutchess County (The Attic - upcoming), 'Twas the Night Before Christmas (Naked Angels), House Strictly Private (1st Irish Festival), The Lover (The Drama League), The Color of Justice (Theatreworks USA), as well as numerous short plays for Ars Nova, Partial Comfort, At Play, and the 24 Hour Plays. She has directed workshops or readings for The Public Theater, Roundabout Theatre Company, Atlantic Theater Company, Second Stage, and Ma-Yi Theater Company, among others. Assistant directing includes Broadway's The Merchant of Venice (dir. Daniel Sullivan). Laura is the Director of the Workshop at Williamstown Theatre Festival. She spent five seasons on Atlantic Theater Company's staff, including two as Literary Associate. Co-conceiver and director of The Living Newspaper, which has performed at Joe's Pub, Le Poisson Rouge, and the A.R.T.'s Club Oberon. Faculty at NYU/The Strasberg Institute. 2009 Drama League Directing Fellow. Alumna of Northwestern University.
Tuesday, February 26
By Rachel Bonds; Directed by Portia Krieger
It's Monday. It's Vivian's first day back. Tom is hiding in the basement. Bill just got promoted. Michaelson is on the rampage. Farrah's thinking about the end of the world. Everyone's hoping something might change. A play about grasping for the profound within the mundane.
RACHEL BOND (Playwright). Rachel Bonds' plays have been developed or produced by Ars Nova, Ensemble Studio Theatre, New Georges, Williamstown Theater Festival, Playwrights Horizons, McCarter Theatre, The Arden, and MTC (upcoming), among others. She is currently an affiliated artist of New Georges', a member of EST's Youngblood, and a recent winner of the Sam French Short Play Festival. She is an alum of Ars Nova's Play Group and New Georges' The Jam, and was the Father William Ralston Fellow at the 2011 Sewanee Writers' Conference. She is currently working on a commission for Philadelphia's Arden Theatre as recipient of their 2013 Writer's Room residency. Rachel is a graduate oF Brown University.
Portia Krieger (Director) mostly directs new plays. Upcoming: Eager To Lose at Ars Nova, starring Tansy, the Elizabeth Taylor of Burlesque! Recent credits include The Netflix Plays and Let Me Collect Myself (Ars Nova), Daniel Talbott's Break Your Face On My Hand and Florencia Lozano's BUSTED (Rising Phoenix Rep), Kim Rosenstock's Tigers Be Still (TheaterSquared), Too Much Too Soon (Lesser America), Samuel D. Hunter's When You're Here (Williamstown), and Kathryn Walat's This Is Not Antigone (New Georges). Portia has assistant and associate directed productions both off and on Broadway, including working with Sam Gold on the world premiere of Tigers Be Still at the Roundabout Underground. She's an alumna of the Drama League Directors Project and the Lincoln Center Theater Directors Lab, Ars Nova's 2013 Director-in-Residence, an ensemble member at Lesser America, and a co-founder of the New Georges Jam.
Wednesday, February 27
By Mat Smart; Directed by Jeremy B. Cohen
Lauren makes a rare trip home to Chicago to take her ailing mother, Nessa, to the biggest Cubs game of the year-the infamous Game 6 of the 2003 NLCS. But Nessa has disappeared, leaving behind her caretaker and the fresh manuscript of a play about Cubs great Johnny Evers. As she searches the script and city for her mother, Lauren is forced to answer the question: when is enough enough?
MAT SMART (Playwright) is a Core Writer at the Playwrights' Center, where he was a McKnight Advancement Grant and two-time Jerome Fellowship recipient. Samuel J. and K. premiered at Williamstown Theatre Festival starring Justin Long and Owiso Odera (subsequent productions include Steppenwolf and Passage Theatre). Other plays include: The Steadfast (upcoming at Slant Theatre Project), The Hopper Collection (Magic Theatre and Huntington Theatre Company), The 13th of Paris (City Theatre, Seattle Public Theatre, Horizon Theatre, Public Theatre of Maine, Warehouse Theatre and LiveWire in Chicago) and The Bebop Heard in Okinawa (O'Neill Playwrights' Conference). He has been commissioned by South Coast Rep and Huntington. Co-founder of Slant Theatre Project in NYC. MFA: UCSD. An avid baseball fan and traveler, Mat has been to 28 of the current MLB stadiums, all 50 states and 6 continents - including a recent stint working as a janitor at McMurdo Station in Antarctica. He currently lives in Brooklyn and is a member of the Dorothy Strelsin New American Writer's Group at Primary Stages.
JEREMY B. COHEN (Director). Artistic Director (The Playwrights' Center); Associate Artistic Director (Hartford Stage) where he directed Snow Falling on Cedars, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, Mistakes Were Made, The Scene, Mahalia, I Am My Own Wife, Frankie and Johnny in the Clair de Lune, Bad Dates and A Christmas Carol; Other Directing credits include: The Novelist (Dorset), The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (Actor's Theatre of Louisville, Rep Theatre St Louis, Kansas City Rep), Let There Be Love (Centerstage), Smart Cookie (Alliance), The Scene, Bad Dates, and Trip to Bountiful (Alley Theatre); Hannah and Martin (Theater J/DC & Timeline Theatre/Chicago), Nickel and Dimed and Waving Goodbye (Steppenwolf/Naked Eye); One Flea Spare (Goodman), The Unexpected Man (ATF); Ghosts in the Cottonwoods (Victory Gardens), Cannibals (Red Orchid), Cannibals, Nocturne, Shopping & F***ing and Scraped (Bailiwick), The Idiot Box (Naked Eye/Chicago & Open Fist/LA), Mom's the Word (Metropolis Theatre & Royal George/Chi), Closet Land (NYPW); Founding Artistic Director of Naked Eye Theatre Company/Chicago. Workshops include: NYSF, Woolly Mammoth, Pasadena Playhouse, New Harmony, Denver Center and McCarter. Currently, his workshop production of Brahman/i is playing at La Jolla Playhouse as part of the DNA series.
Thursday, February 28
By Christian Durso; Directed by Ed Sylvanus Iskandar
In the spring of 1994, two outcast teens make a pact to die happy. All they need to do is see Nirvana live in concert and then they will jump off the 101 overpass. But a first kiss, a restraining order, and Kurt Cobain's ailing health threaten their plans. A Grunge Rock Fueled Love Story.
Christian Durso (Playwright) is a playwright, screenwriter and classically trained actor. He holds an MFA from the University of San Diego/Old Globe and a BFA from NYU's Tisch School of the Arts. He is a member of the Los Angeles based IAMA Theatre Company where his most recent play SHINER was named to the Tracking Board's 2012 Young and Hungry List as one of the top 100 scripts of the year. His plays have been performed in Los Angeles and have enjoyed readings at The Old Globe and EST/LA. He is currently developing a young adult novel into a screenplay with REEL FX. Also an actor, Christian has worked regionally at The Old Globe, Shakespeare Santa Cruz, Great Lakes Theatre (OH), Idaho Shakespeare Festival as well as Off-Broadway.
Ed Sylvanus Iskandar (Director) is a 2012 Drama Desk Award nominee for his direction of Sean Graney's These Seven Sicknesses at The Flea, where he also directed Amy Freed's Restoration Comedy (both NY premieres). Ed is Founding Artistic Director of the groundbreaking NYC theatre collective Exit, Pursued by a Bear (EPbB), where he incubated productions of Restoration Comedy, These Seven Sicknesses, Jason Williamson's Lesser Mercies and Arok of Java, King Lear and Jeff Whitty's The Further Adventures of Hedda Gabler starring Whitty and Billy Porter (all NY premieres). Ed currently serves as the Director of Creative Development for Singapore Repertory Theatre (SRT). He is a New York Theatre Workshop Usual Suspect, a Drama League Directing Fellow, a two-time Resident Director at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival, an alumnus of the Lincoln Center Directors Lab,
and the recipient of the Robert M. Golden Medal for distinguished achievement in the creative arts and the Sherifa Omade Edoga Prize for work involving social issues. Ed has taught at Stanford (BA Modern Thought & Literature, and Drama) and Carnegie Mellon (MFA Directing). Upcoming: World premiere of Gabriel Jason Dean's Bacha Bazi (Broadway option, Davenport Theatrical). In 2013: NY premieres of Jason Williamson's All Good Angels (EPbB, recipient of EST/Sloan Foundation Grant), Roland Schimmelpfennig's The Golden Dragon (The Play Company), Ismail Khalidi's Tennis in Nablus (The Culture Project), and the Asian premiere of David Ives' Venus in Fur (SRT).
Friday, March 1
By Kate Gersten; Directed by Gaye Taylor Upchurch
Jane just got dumped and she's hell-bent on figuring out what went wrong, no matter how much dignity it costs her. Jane's best friends try to pick up the pieces, but one's own romantic foibles and the other's unrelenting idealism make them ill-equipped to deal with Jane's teetering sanity. Written by current Juilliard playwriting fellow Kate Gersten, this match.com-age comedy hopscotches through misadventures in dating and the art of being a best friend.
Kate Gersten (Playwright) is currently a Lila Acheson Wallace Playwriting Fellow at The Juilliard School under the mentorship of Marsha Norman and Christopher Durang. Her thesis play, Benefit of the Doubt was produced this year at The Juilliard School and was directed by Danny Goldstein. Her other plays include Father Figure, and Exposed! The Curious Case of Shiloh and Zahara which was produced as part of the Midtown International Theater Festival in 2009 (Dir: Dan Fogler). That production received 12 nominations from the festival for which she won an award for Outstanding Playwriting of a New Script, and was nominated for Outstanding Lead Actress. As an actress, Kate has appeared in numerous film and television projects. Favorite New York and regional theater credits include The Rise and Fall of Annie Hall (Dir: Sam Gold, The Lion Theater), Elephant in the Room (Dir: Dan Fogler), 10X25 (Atlantic), The Cherry Sister's Revisited (Humana), The Miracle Worker (Bay Street), The San Francisco production of Hedwig and the Angry Inch, The Skin of Our Teeth, On the Razzle, A Clockwork Orange, Our Country's Good (All Williamstown). In addition to her work at Juilliard, Kate has a BA from UCLA's school of Film and Television.
Gaye Taylor Upchurch (Director). Off-Broadway: Laura Marks's Bethany (The Women's Project); Simon Stephens's Harper Regan with Mary McCann (Atlantic Theater); Simon Stephens's Bluebird with Simon Russell Beale (Atlantic Theater). Her work has been seen at The Culture Project, La Mama, and Lincoln Center Institute among others, and she has developed new work at Primary Stages, New Dramatists, NY Stage & Film, The Kennedy Center, Dixon Place, Playwright's Center, Geva, LCT Director's Lab, and SPACE on Ryder Farm. She worked with Sam Mendes as Associate Director on The Bridge Project's productions of The Cherry Orchard, The Winter's Tale, Tempest, and As You Like It (BAM/Old Vic/International tour). She is an alumna of the Women's Project Directors Lab and The Drama League.
Roundabout Underground is an initiative launched in 2007 to introduce and cultivate artists in Roundabout's 62-seat Black Box Theatre, at the Harold and Miriam Steinberg Center for Theatre (111 West 46th Street, NYC, NY, 10036). Prior productions include the acclaimed world premieres of Stephen Karam's Speech & Debate (2007), Steven Levenson's The Language of Trees (2008), Adam Gwon's Ordinary Days (2009), Kim Rosenstock's Tigers Be Still (2010), David West Read's The Dream of the Burning Boy (2011), Andrew Hinderaker's Suicide, Incorporated (2011) and Joshua Harmon's Bad Jews (2012).
Major support for Roundabout Underground provided by members of Roundabout Leaders for New Works including, Alec Baldwin, Lois and Irvin Cohen, Linda L. D'Onofrio, Peggy and Mark Ellis, Jodi Glucksman, Sylvia Golden, Caryn and James Magid, the Laura Pels International Foundation for Theatre, Laura S. Rodgers, the Harold and Mimi Steinberg Charitable Trust, Yolanda R. Turocy, Lori Uddenberg, Deborah and Thomas Wallace, and Xerox Foundation.
The Harold and Miriam Steinberg Center for Theatre reflects Roundabout's commitment to produce new works by established and emerging writers as well as revivals of classic plays. This state-of-the-art off-Broadway theatre and education complex is made possible by a major gift from The Harold and Mimi Steinberg Charitable Trust. The Trust was created in 1986 by Harold Steinberg to promote and advance American Theatre as a vital part of our culture by supporting playwrights, encouraging the development and production of new work, and providing financial assistance to theatre companies across the country. Since its inception, the Trust has awarded over $45 million to more than 100 not-for-profit theatre organizations.
Roundabout Underground is an initiative to showcase new plays that will either allow an experienced director to go back to his/her creative roots or give a debut production to an emerging writer or director. Robyn Goodman (Artistic Consultant to the Roundabout), who has significant artistic development experience, produces the initiative that continues to be a creative breeding ground for nurturing new talent.
The 62-seat Black Box Theatre, below the Laura Pels Theatre in the Harold and Miriam Steinberg Centerfor Theatre, allows Roundabout to take artistic risks that are better suited for a more intimate space.
Roundabout Theatre Company presents a variety of plays, musicals, and new works on its five stages, each of which is specifically designed to enhance the needs of Roundabout's mission. Off-Broadway, the Harold and Miriam Steinberg Center for Theatre, which houses the Laura Pels Theatre and Black Box Theatre, with its simple sophisticated design, is perfectly suited to showcasing new plays. The grandeur of its Broadway home on 42nd Street, American Airlines Theatre, sets the ideal stage for the classics. Roundabout's Studio 54 provides an exciting and intimate Broadway venue for its musical and special event productions. The Stephen Sondheim Theatre offers a state of the art LEED certified Broadway theatre in which to stage major large-scale musical revivals. Together these distinctive homes serve to enhance Roundabout's work on each of its stages.
American Airlines is the official airline of Roundabout Theatre Company. Roundabout productions are made possible, in part, with public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs and the New York State Council on the Arts, with the support of Governor Cuomo and the New York State Legislature.
Roundabout Theatre Company's 2012-2013 season features The Mystery of Edwin Drood by Rupert Holmes, starring Stephanie J. Block, Will Chase, Gregg Edelman, Jim Norton and Chita Rivera, directed by Scott Ellis; Picnic by William Inge directed by Sam Gold; The Big Knife by Clifford Odets, starring Bobby Cannavale, directed by Doug Hughes; Talley's Folly by Lanford Wilson, directed by Michael Wilson; The Unavoidable Disappearance of Tom Durnin by Steven Levenson, directed by Scott Ellis.
Roundabout Theatre Company's Tony Award winning Anything Goes has set sail on a National Tour that will cruise into more than 25 other cities during the 2012/2013 season.
Related Articles
More Hot Stories For You
TROIKA Entertainment announced today the tour cities and casting for the 2019-20 North American tour of the Tony Award-winning Broadway revival of THE... (read more)
Renée Fleming Will Lead a North American Tour of THE LIGHT IN THE PIAZZA
Renée Fleming will reprise her starring turn in The Light in the Piazza in the United States this fall. Adam Guettel and Craig Lucas' six-time Tony Aw... (read more)
Lady Gaga Rumored to Be Considering Role in LITTLE SHOP OF HORRORS Film
Lady Gaga is surely a woman of many talents ranging from pop superstar to screen icon. With the success of her roles on American Horror Story and in A... (read more)
Kristin Chenoweth Will Bring FOR THE GIRLS Solo Show to Broadway This Fall!
Kristin Chenoweth will return to the Broadway stage in a live concert celebrating the release of her new album FOR THE GIRLS (Concord Records, produce... (read more)
DVR Alert: Broadway's NEWSIES To Premiere On Freeform Tomorrow!
Newsies: The Broadway Musical is set to premiere on Freeform tomorrow morning!... (read more)
A BRONX TALE National Tour Announces Full Casting and Dates
Full casting has been announced for the 2019a?"2020 North American Tour of A BRONX TALE. Completing the cast is Martin Bonventre, Hallie Brevetti, Lau... (read more)


text:
Collin County Mercury (McKinney, Tex.), Vol. 6, No. 37, Ed. 1 Wednesday, October 24, 1888
Description: Weekly newspaper from McKinney, Texas that includes local, state and national news along with advertising.
Date: October 24, 1888
Creator: Rudolph Bros.
Item Type: Refine your search to only Newspaper
Partner: Collin County Genealogical Society

subset: commoncrawl


text: NEW YORK ( TheStreet) -- Hedge fund Elliott Management is offering to buy computer software as services specialist Compuware ( CPWR) for $11 a share in cash, or $2.3 billion. In a letter sent to Compuware's board of directors, Elliott Management unveiled the $11 a share offer and highlighted that its bid represents a 25% premium to Compuware's shares prior November, when the sometimes activist fund disclosed an 8% stake in the company. Jesse Cohn, a manager of Elliott's tech portfolio, noted in the letter the fund's experience in tech sector investments and its ability to find financing for the prospective takeover. Still, the offer is not legally binding, and Cohn said the $11 a share price is subject to Elliott's ability to conduct due diligence. "We are prepared to meet immediately with you and your advisors in order to answer any questions about our proposal and to work out the details for moving toward a definitive transaction agreement," wrote Cohn, in the letter. It's too be seen whether Compuware rebuffs Elliott Management's takeover entreaties or whether the hedge fund's 8% stake will turn hostile. While the move is a rare buyout offer for the hedge fund, which previously made a similar sized bid for software specialist Novell in 2010, it adds to an increasing list of bets in struggling tech sector stocks. Earlier in 2012, Elliott Management advised BMC Software ( BMC) to consider selling itself after taking a large activist stake in the networking and cloud software player. BMC Software rejected many of Elliott's management but this fall, the company said it had hired investment banks to field buyout offers. The hedge fund also has made activist investments in tech giants like Iron Mountain ( IRM - Get Report) and its bid on now private Epicor. Novell, which rebuffed Elliott's takeover offers was eventually sold to privately-held Attachmate. The hedge fund also has benefited from a recovery in Brocade ( BRCD) after it took an 8% non-activist investment in networking equipment specialist in mid-2011, as the company's shares and earnings plummeted. Compuware shares surged over 14% in late Monday morning trading to $10.90. The company's share gains now stand in excess of 25% for 2012, after gaining roughly that amount in the past month. BMC Software shares have only posted mixed performance since Elliott Management began publicly advocating for the company's sale in May. For more on Elliott Management, see why its BMC Software bet was caught amid a cloud boom & tech sector gloom. Follow @agara2004 -- Written by Antoine Gara in New York


text:
In the southern Mexican village of Colotepec, most mornings unfold slowly as villagers tend to their animals, weed their fields, or shop for the day's food. But on this hot Thursday morning in August, the day begins with a meeting on the town's basketball court. Armed with rakes, brooms, and sticks, nearly 50 villagers of all ages gather to fight malaria. After a brief presentation by health workers, the villagers mobilize and walk down the dirt road past the peanut fields to the small river that runs through the town. They have been taught that water is the enemy-stagnant pools provide breeding sites for mosquito larvae-and they are taking the battle to the insects' own turf. Seeking out the slow-moving water at the river's margins, they scrub the bottoms of such pools to agitate the water and destroy the growing larvae.
It turns out to be a short day of work; the kilometer-long stretch of the river is deemed larva-free in just over half an hour. On the walk back to town, the health workers provide troubleshooting advice. One young man asks if the stirring of standing water must extend to the toilets...and grudgingly accepts the affirmative response. Another villager seeks assistance to make sure his water tank is larva-free. But most seem to already know the answers to these questions, having grown up with visits from government health workers.
The cultural acceptance in Colotepec of the responsibility to deal with malaria is a key element in making this region a successful model for malaria control and prevention. The Centro de Paludismo, a division of the state health system that oversees the management of infectious diseases, has provided education and treatment over the last half century to each of 68 towns scattered throughout the Oaxacan jungle. Through close, longterm contact with these villages, Paludismo workers have made their educational talks a ritual of sorts. Today's town leaders have observed the treatment of malaria symptoms and heard about the importance of vector control all their lives. They have a sense of ownership of the problems of malaria and, more importantly, their solutions. The number of malaria cases in the Southern Oaxaca district has plummeted from several thousand per year a few decades ago to 458 in 2006 and less than 200 in 2007. Malaria deaths are now rare. There is a sense of optimism and empowerment in Oaxaca that has come with the ability to effectively combat malaria.


text:
The most accomplished man in the world's most glamorous sport stands at a drafting table all day. Using a No. 2B pencil and a right-angle ruler, he produces as many as three hundred drawings a week. The energy-drink company employing him dedicates another five staffers to scanning and converting his images into digital form, for analysis and manipulation on a Computer-Aided Design (CAD) system. His name is Adrian Newey, and he is often said to perceive solid objects not by their outlines but by the flow of air currents around them. The drawings reflect this aerodynamic perversion: dense concentrations of swooping lines that flatter a rear suspension, say, and suggest something more on the order of a space shuttle. In a sense, he sketches speed itself.
Newey's sport is Formula One racing, the caviar to NASCAR's Cheetos. He is the chief technical officer for Red Bull Racing, Formula One's premier outfit, and spends most weekdays at a factory in the planned city of Milton Keynes, an hour northwest of London. "It's a bit NASA," my tour guide, Anthony Ward, said when I was granted the rare privilege of admission, last fall. We passed stereolithography machines and giant autoclaves operated by men in white lab coats, and a supercomputer with processing power equivalent to a hundred thousand iPads, according to Ward, who recited that last detail with a mixture of pride and chagrin. "We would be bigger if we could," he said, and began explaining the complex rules governing the ratio of resources that teams may allocate to their computational-fluid-dynamics departments and their wind tunnels, if they choose to have them. Red Bull's wind tunnel, in nearby Bedford, was originally built by England's Ministry of Defense, to test the Concorde. The rules and regulations extend for hundreds of pages, for reasons having to do with safety, politics, and whim; they amount to the "formula" that gives this billion-dollar pinewood derby its name.
Red Bull's drivers, Sebastian Vettel and Mark Webber, live in Switzerland and Buckinghamshire, respectively, and turn up in Milton Keynes only occasionally, to use the video-arcade-like simulator that mimics the track conditions of the various circuits, from the winding roads of Monte Carlo and the long straights of Monza to the steep hills of Spa-Francorchamps. "When Adrian arrived, he said that two things we should do are build a simulator and also introduce a gearbox dyno," Ward continued, referring to a dynamometer that tests the performance of transmissions under volatile, high-speed conditions. Using buttons on the steering wheel, drivers may shift as many as thirty-five hundred times per race.
Some five hundred and fifty people work at the factory, which comprises three steel-and-glass buildings, two of them linked underground. No tires are produced there; Pirelli supplies those. The engines, made by Renault, are shipped from France. The brake calipers are by Brembo, in Italy. There is a gym deep in the basement of one of the buildings, ostensibly for the pit crew to keep in shape, though I didn't see anybody working out. The Milton Keynes operation is principally about engineering and carbon composites: the chassis, or monocoque, and the odd-looking bracketing structures, called "wings," that are affixed on either end to improve the "global flow field around the car," as Newey says. The wings are tweaked throughout the season, in what's known as "bespoke customization" for each race. Everything is measured to within less than ten microns—one-fifth the diameter of a human hair—of Newey's specifications, in the hope of shaving tenths of a second off lap times, the difference between a world champion and a two-hundred-mile-an-hour billboard.
Newey's own office is comparatively spare and low tech. Its distinctive feature is the drafting table—like one in an architect's studio—alongside a filing cabinet of blueprints that have inspired the fastest vehicles on wheels. "I'm probably the last dinosaur in the industry that still uses a drawing board," he said, and nearly winced, calling himself a "creature of habit." Newey is fifty-four, just old enough (and talented enough) to have shrugged off the migration to CAD, in the nineteen-nineties, without seeming like a vain anachronism, and self-aware enough to know that this quirk has helped to elevate him in the popular conception above the rank of mere boffin. The pencil lends him a mystique. Rumors persist that he sometimes gets lost while driving home, deep in thought. Not long ago, a manufacturing trade magazine ranked him as the second-greatest corporate designer of our time, after Jonathan Ive, the creator of the iPod and the iPad, and ahead of Sir James Dyson (the inventor of the bagless vacuum cleaner), Steve Jobs, the electric-car pioneer Elon Musk, and Nintendo's Shigeru Miyamoto. A Twitter account devoted to legends about his supernatural powers of invention ("Adrian Newey designed MacGyver's Swiss Army Knife") has more than six thousand followers. He has been called "the second-most-famous son" of his home town, Stratford-Upon-Avon, and the Michelangelo of motor racing. He is long-limbed, ever so slightly stooped, and aerodynamically bald on top, with short gray hair on the sides framing a large set of ears that interrupt his global flow field.
"Racing cars are very messy vehicles," Newey said, as if apologizing for unseen imperfections. ("He's got to dumb himself down to talk to us guys," Mark Webber warned me. "He's on another planet.") Newey continued, "If it weren't for the regulations, you certainly wouldn't design them the way they are. Having exposed wheels makes an awful mess. Having an open cockpit with the driver's head sticking out the top isn't great."
We sat for a while, discussing brake ducts and double diffusers and kinetic-energy-recovery systems, and then Newey invited me to join him for lunch. He unlocked a door with his fingerprint, and soon we were in the canteen with a consultant and a designer, talking about the upcoming United States Grand Prix, at the brand-new Circuit of the Americas, in Austin. It was to be the first Formula One event in the States in five years, and marked the beginning of a concerted westward push in the sport's marketing, after years of expansion to venues like Shanghai and Singapore and Mokpo, a small South Korean port known for shipbuilding and prostitution. A new street course was being planned in Weehawken, New Jersey, which would offer spectacular views of the Manhattan skyline, if the sport's promoters and Governor Chris Christie could agree on who should pay for road resurfacing. A new television contract with NBC was set to take effect in 2013, replacing the more marginalized SPEED Network. And Ron Howard was working on a movie, scheduled for wide release next fall, about the momentous 1976 Formula One season, with its fiercely contested rivalry between the carousing English lothario James Hunt and the Austrian Niki Lauda.
"Is there much talk about the Texas race in the U.S.?" Newey asked, and they all seemed vexed when I said that I hadn't heard any.
"America's got quite a lot going on there, with the election," the consultant conceded.
"For a sport outside America to break in seems to be quite difficult," Newey said.
The other designer puzzled over the matter a while longer, and asked, "So is NASCAR popular across the States, or is it just for the crazed rednecks?"
Formula One, though concentrated historically in Europe and associated with ascots and champagne, is now perhaps the only truly global sports league—a legitimate world series—with Grand Prix races staged in nineteen countries across five continents. The breadth of its television audience is surpassed only by the Olympics and the World Cup, with more than half a billion viewers from nearly two hundred countries tuning in each season, according to the sport's promoters. Among the competitors in 2012 were an Indian-backed team (Sahara Force India) and a Russian-backed team (Marussia), to go with the likes of Ferrari, McLaren, and Mercedes, as well as a Japanese driver (Kamui Kobayashi), a Venezuelan (Pastor Maldonado), a Mexican (Sergio Pérez), and two Finns. All told, thirteen nations were represented among the twenty-five drivers. The best of those drivers are compensated as well as A-Rod and Kobe, while the bottom half are what's known as "pay drivers"—they're expected to raise money, through independent sponsorships, to offset the privilege of wearing flame-retardant bodysuits covered in advertisements. They're like publishing interns, or the jet-set equivalent of preteen soccer players holding a bake sale to raise money for their spring tournament.
The business relationships between the racing teams and their parent companies can be dizzying to a novice. This was made especially clear to me late last year, as I watched the mostly thrilling Brazilian Grand Prix, in rainy São Paulo, on television. McLaren's Lewis Hamilton was leading for much of the way, until he was clipped by Force India's Nico Hulkenberg in the fifty-fifth lap (of seventy-one) and forced to withdraw because of damage to his front suspension. Force India, like the majority of Formula One teams, has no real expectation of winning races; its cars help justify the existence of a Grand Prix in New Delhi, where monkeys still outnumber luxury automobiles. It also has, as it happens, a "technology sharing" partnership with McLaren, which provided Hulkenberg and his teammate Paul Di Resta with gearboxes and hydraulics. Yet Hulkenberg's aggressive move—"That's what happens when you are racing with a less experienced driver," Hamilton later fumed—cost McLaren twenty-four points in the standings and, in effect, ten million dollars of prize money. "One can only hope that the Force India deal brings McLaren more than that because otherwise the customer programme will have been operating at a loss!" the racing journalist Joe Saward wrote on his blog. It was almost as though the Steinbrenners had lent a pitcher to the Royals to help extend the Yankees' brand awareness in Kansas City, only to watch that pitcher drill Derek Jeter in the head.
Hamilton, in any event, had already announced that he would be leaving McLaren at the end of the season to race for Mercedes—or, rather, to use the teams' more sponsor-friendly names, he was leaving Vodafone McLaren Mercedes for Mercedes AMG Petronas. This was big news. Hamilton, who is twenty-eight, is often thought of as Formula One's first black champion, and he was already the second-highest-paid driver on the circuit. But, viewed another way, you could say that he was merely expanding his commitment to Mercedes, from an outfit in which the company invests fifteen million dollars a year to one in which it sinks seventy million.
On the morning of my trip to Milton Keynes, I stopped to visit the headquarters of Formula One Management, overlooking London's Hyde Park. I was received there by the so-called F1 Supremo, Bernie Ecclestone, a self-made character who would seem to have been invented by Fleet Street to sell newspapers. Great Britain's fourth-richest man, Ecclestone is five feet three, with a white mop of hair and a perpetual squint, from being nearly blind in his right eye since birth. (A Daily Mail writer once called him "a tortoise in an Andy Warhol wig.") Last summer, a couple of months before his eighty-second birthday, he was married for the third time, to Fabiana Flosi, a thirty-five-year-old Brazilian whom he met on the track in São Paulo, and who towers over him. (The joke goes that he can look her in the eye when he is standing on his wallet.) His two daughters from his previous wife Slavica, a six-foot-two Croatian who has modelled for Armani, are the Kardashians of England. Tamara, the older one, recently starred in a reality show called "Billion $$ Girl," and Petra was married in a Roman castle before buying what had been billed as the United States' most expensive house, for eighty-five million dollars, from the Hollywood widow Candy Spelling.
The son of a North Sea herring-and-mackerel fisherman, Ecclestone grew up in a house without plumbing, quit school at sixteen, and became a used-car salesman in South London, earning a reputation for "clocking" odometers, or forcibly rewinding them, in the manner of Ferris Bueller. His ruthless street savvy stood him in good stead when he got involved in racing, which had originated as a pastime for Europe's landed gentry. Racing teams traditionally negotiated with the various circuits individually. Ecclestone persuaded them to negotiate as a block—a sort of racing cartel. He was also quick to see the value in television for a sport in which the contestants were distinguished by degrees invisible to the naked eye, and he envisioned, in the paddock behind the teams' garages, an opportunity to cultivate an exclusive atmosphere such as you'd find at Wimbledon or Henley. By consolidating power over the sport's promotion when no one else could be bothered, he made himself indispensable, even as the cash flow that Formula One was generating, at first through tobacco sponsorships and then through exclusive television rights, attracted banks and larger financial interests. They could buy him out—and, indeed, a controlling interest in the sport is now owned by a London-based private-equity firm—but they'd still need a public face to run the show. As we spoke, in a tall, dark-glass-fronted building he'd bought nearly thirty years ago from the Saudi arms dealer Adnan Khashoggi, Ecclestone was facing the threat of indictment in Germany, on suspicion of bribery in the amount of forty-four million dollars. (He maintains that he was extorted.) But that wasn't what had him concerned. "I think Europe's a thing of the past," he said, and let out a sigh. He meant this both existentially, in the way of a right-winger who sees the welfare state choking itself to insolvency, and as a source of revenue growth for a sport that is sometimes said to thrive on cubic dollars.
"From the day you grow up and start looking at TV, all the sports you watch have an enormous number of little breaks," Ecclestone continued, addressing me as a representative American. "So you can watch any of the games—football, Lakers, whatever it is—you walk away and it's, say, forty-two plays to forty-eight, and you disappear and you come back and it's sixty-three v. sixty-five. And that's how it is! It doesn't make any difference if you don't concentrate. Whereas in English football or Formula One . . . I mean, you can go to an English football match and not see a goal, which would never be acceptable in America, would it?"
The equivalent of a scoreless match in Formula One is a race in which nobody passes anyone—or, at least, in which the driver who begins in the pole position goes on to win, unchallenged from behind for three hundred kilometres, or the better part of two hours. (The starting grid is determined by the fastest individual laps registered during qualifying sessions the day before the race.) After going through a "fairly dark period," a few years ago, as Martin Whitmarsh, the chairman of the Formula One Teams Association, called it, "where we weren't producing a good enough show," the sport's organizers agreed to give trailing cars an artificial boost, like a turbo button in a video game. The technology is called D.R.S.—for drag-reduction system—and it enables drivers to maneuver an adjustable flap on their rear wings, adding about a dozen extra miles per hour on straightaways. You can activate it only on certain stretches of each track, when you're within a second of the car in front of you and hoping to slingshot past.
D.R.S. was introduced before the start of the 2011 season, over the objection of many purists, who felt that this kind of pandering to an impatient audience was beneath the European motorsport. Nonetheless, roughly half of all races that year consisted of Red Bull's German phenom Sebastian Vettel essentially leading from start to finish. In all but one instance, the fastest qualifying laps belonged to Vettel or to his older teammate Webber. Red Bull's cars were simply too much better, owing in large part to Adrian Newey's ingenious use of the cars' exhaust as an aerodynamic aid.
If D.R.S. couldn't sufficiently speed the other teams up, something would need to be done to slow Red Bull down. Haggling over the "outer envelope of permissibility," as Whitmarsh put it, is the hidden essence of Formula One. "If you believe your competitors are driving a performance advantage, you've got to either duplicate it or prevent them from doing it." And so the 2012 season began with an amended set of rules in which exhaust gases could no longer be fed through the rear diffuser, as Newey had been doing, to reduce pressure underneath the car's floor. Red Bull was forced to lower the car's ride height, in compensation. The first seven races produced seven different winners. Parity restored.
Like many kids, Newey was initially drawn by the allure of stardom behind the wheel. His father was a veterinarian and a metalworking hobbyist, who tinkered with his Lotuses and Mini Coopers in the back yard while his younger son looked on. When Adrian expressed an interest in driving, his father proposed a deal. "He said, 'If you want to do it, that's great, but you're going to have to show your commitment,' " Newey recalled. "So what he offered was that for every pound I could earn he would double my money to buy a go-kart." Newey took odd jobs delivering newspapers, washing cars, and mowing lawns, and with his father's subsidy was able to buy a secondhand vehicle. "The combination of it and me was pretty uncompetitive," he said. "More and more, my interest then became modifying the car to try and make it go faster." He learned to weld, and made his own electronic ignition, scouring kits for spare parts. "I'm not sure it actually made it go any faster, but it gave me something to do," he said.
He was an indifferent student. He attended Repton, "a rather Dickensian public school," as he put it, which had been founded in 1557. "Very pretentious," he added. "It revolved around sport more than anything—depending on the term, football, cricket, or hockey." Newey was not a jock. He wore leather jackets and bell-bottoms, which were roomy enough for him to tape bottles of vodka to his shins, for use at school functions. The most memorable of those was an end-of-term concert in 1975, which the sixth formers had organized, bringing the prog-rock band Greenslade to campus. Newey was then a fifth former, and having doubts about proceeding to A-levels. Emboldened by the vodka, and eying the mixing console in the middle of the auditorium, he waited until the sound engineer was on a break and moved in. "I jumped to the controls, set them all to max, and the stained-glass walls that had survived Cromwell and God knows what . . ." With his hands, Newey pantomimed an explosion. That was the end of his time at Repton.
Newey wasted a year at the local community college, during which he mostly rode motorcycles and chased girls, before getting serious and applying to the University of Southampton. He studied aeronautics and astronautics, not because he had any particular interest in flight but because it struck him as the closest thing academia had to offer a gearhead. Racecars were like planes flying into the ground rather than above it. Instead of seeking lift, they relied on downforce, which effectively pinned them to the road as they navigated corners, but the same Bernoulli physics applied. It was all a matter of balancing downforce (good for turning) and drag (bad for straightaways). Upon graduation, in 1980, many of his classmates went to work for British Aerospace or Rolls-Royce. Newey showed up for his first job interview on a Ducati, in riding leathers. This was with a small Formula One team founded by the famous Fittipaldi brothers, Emerson and Wilson. His would-be interviewer noticed the bike and asked if he could take it out for a spin. When he returned, he offered Newey the job.
The position Newey applied for was a junior aerodynamicist, but he soon discovered that there was no senior aerodynamicist. "I was lucky in my timing," he said. Much of racecar design until that point had been mechanically determined. "The aerodynamicist would give a rough idea of what he wanted, and then the mechanical designer would take it, and invariably, if things looked a little bit too difficult to package, he'd just change it and not even report back," Newey explained. "And you could see it in the cars that came out. You'd see all sorts of nasty lumps and bumps on the car where mechanical bits had got in the way of what the aerodynamicist wanted." After the late-seventies rivalry between James Hunt and Niki Lauda, which contributed to the popularity of the sport, budgets were beginning to grow, and this allowed for more research and a greater emphasis on engineering—an opportunity for Formula One teams to demonstrate their technological superiority.
Newey spent much of the nineteen-eighties working in the United States, on the IndyCar circuit. His designs twice produced Indianapolis 500 winners, and, while serving as a race engineer at the track on weekends, he impressed Mario Andretti, who immediately identified Newey as a budding genius. "We were on the grid with ten minutes left, and he came out and changed the front springs to suit the situation," Andretti told me, recalling the Indy 500 of 1987. "As a result, I led from the get-go and had the field covered by one lap, with twenty laps to go—until the engine broke. And you know why the engine broke? Because I should've been turning six hundred more revs, and I was in a bad harmonic range, vibrating. If I had been pushed more, then I would have used that shorter gear, and I probably would have finished. So, ironically, the fact that the car was so good was what killed my chances."
This tension between the abstract pursuit of excellence and realistic limits became a recurring theme in Newey's work as he returned to England and Formula One. It was the end of the turbocharged era, which had resulted in sloppy design, to Newey's eyes. The cars, relying on souped-up engine power, were often big and clumsy. Newey was relentless in his pursuit of efficiency, sometimes squeezing drivers' cockpits to the point of discomfort. Viewed from above, his cars began to look like acoustic guitars, with the chassis tapering into a needle nose. "Adrian was forever trying to find a way of making the needle nose smaller and smaller and smaller," Nigel Roebuck, the editor of Motor Sport, recalled. "He did actually suggest at one point arranging the pedals so that the driver's feet, instead of being side by side, were on top of one another." Roebuck added, "If you talk to any of the mechanics, Adrian's cars are always very, very difficult to work on, because they're always so tightly packaged, and everything has got to be perfect, and sometimes they're too tightly packaged, so things overheat and whatnot."
In November of 1996, Newey was indicted for manslaughter. He was held partly responsible for the death, nearly three years earlier, of the great Brazilian driver Ayrton Senna, at the San Marino Grand Prix, in Imola. Senna, a three-time world champion while driving for McLaren, had defected to the formidable Williams Racing Team before the start of the 1994 season. Among other reasons, he'd relished the opportunity to work with Newey, who was then Williams's chief designer. But he was having trouble adjusting to the car, and remained uncomfortable heading into his third, fatal race with the new team. A scene toward the end of the acclaimed documentary "Senna" shows the driver talking with Newey and the Williams technical director, Patrick Head (who was also charged), after one of the qualifying sessions. He complained about understeering and oversteering, an inconsistent balance from one lap to the next. As Senna approached the course's treacherous Tamburello Corner, he was fending off an aggressive pursuit from the German Michael Schumacher when he lost control, crashing head on into a concrete barrier. He was travelling a hundred and thirty-seven miles an hour.
Fatalities were almost commonplace in Formula One in the nineteen-sixties and seventies, but Senna's was the first to be televised live, and factions within the Italian government called for banning the sport. The local magistrate, compelled by Italian law to find fault in the case of any violent death, concluded that the crash had resulted from a defective steering column, and not simply, as Newey and others believed, from a punctured rear tire caused by debris on the track. A lengthy public trial included expert testimony analyzing the angles of Senna's front wheels and changes in the car's hydraulic pressure, while the broader racing community protested that such quibbling missed the point: of course there was an element of danger, and racecar drivers, like downhill skiers, were well aware of the risks. Formula One team owners, fearing further liabilities under such a precedent, threatened to boycott future races in Italy. The prosecutor, in turn, accused the sport's executives of withholding crucial seconds of footage from the race telecast. Ultimately, the judge ruled in favor of acquittal. A series of appeals, the intervention of the Italian Supreme Court, and a retrial delayed Newey's final absolution until 2005.
The incident haunted Newey—he says that what was left of his hair fell out after Senna's death—and he contemplated quitting the sport. More disillusionment followed after he left Williams for McLaren and found many of his best design efforts thwarted by the sport's sanctioning body, the Fédération Internationale de l'Automobile, for what he thought were political reasons. "The things we were coming up with Ferrari would complain about," he told me. "And anything Ferrari complained about, the F.I.A. would appear to say, 'Yes, we'll get them banned.' " For a while, in the late nineteen-nineties and early aughts, racing insiders joked that the Paris-based agency's initials stood for Ferrari International Assistance. Newey managed to win a world championship with McLaren, in 1998, adding to the several he'd won with Williams, but Ferrari, employing Michael Schumacher as its lead driver, eventually gained the upper hand, ending what had been a decade of dominance for Newey's cars.
Alternately frustrated and bored, Newey thought about switching to designing sailboats. "I have always loved that combination of man and machine," he told me. The America's Cup challenge seemed to offer a chance to work with similar technology under different conditions. "The principles are the same," he said. "Lightweight structures. Composite structures. Simulation techniques in terms of how you operate the boat, how you tune it to maximize its performance, which is exactly the same as we do with the cars." But there were no competitive British sailing syndicates, and to learn from the best he would have had to disrupt his family (he has four children, two of them grown) and move to Geneva. What's more, the America's Cup is held at a different site every four years, depending on the preferences of the previous champion. "So you're a permanent gypsy, which is great when you're in your twenties and thirties," Newey said. "But, from a family and home-life point of view, it's about the only thing more antisocial than Formula One."
A way out of his protracted midlife crisis arrived late in 2005, when Newey got a phone call from Dietrich Mateschitz, a secretive Austrian businessman who had made billions marketing an obscure caffeinated beverage sold in Thailand as a kind of international club drink: Red Bull. As part of his life-style branding strategy, Mateschitz had recently branched out into sports, particularly those associated with speed. He'd bought the shell of Jaguar's Formula One team for one pound sterling, with the promise of investing at least two hundred million more over the next several years. Thus far, most of the money seemed to have been put into style. Red Bull established a floating "energy station" in the Monte Carlo harbor, where the contestants in its "Formula Una" modelling competition could flaunt their bikini bodies. As part of a marketing partnership with the "Star Wars" franchise, the pit crew dressed as Storm Troopers. Plans were under way to host an Arabian Nights party at the Grand Prix in Abu Dhabi, with a tab running into seven figures. Mateschitz needed Newey in order to prevent his team from becoming a sideshow. His recruiting technique involved inviting Newey to Austria for a visit and flying him upside down over the mountains in an Alpha Jet.
"Once a team gets run by an accountant, it's time to move," Newey has said, and Mateschitz was offering "quite a grownup budget," including a salary reported to be in excess of ten million dollars. ("Ferrari have tried to get him," Nigel Roebuck, the Motor Sport editor, told me. "They've offered him the earth. But he doesn't want to live outside England.") Not long before, Newey had revived his teen fantasies of glory behind the wheel and begun racing his own classic cars. In his first year in Milton Keynes, he wrecked a Ford GT40 and a Jaguar E-Type and was hospitalized overnight. "It helps to try and understand some of the pressures the drivers go through," he told me. ("I'm not sure how good his spatial awareness is when it comes to close combat," the retired Red Bull driver David Coulthard countered.) Newey later initiated a tradition of doing doughnuts on the suburban lawn of Christian Horner, the Red Bull team boss, in celebration of the victories they were amassing. "Do you know that he crashed Helmut Marko's car in his own drive?" Horner asked me, referring to the retired Austrian driver who consults for Red Bull. "Helmut lent us his car. There was a little bit of snow overnight. Adrian was keen to show off his car control and rally skills, and for some reason decided to accelerate rapidly—to do a 'Starsky and Hutch' entry—and we understeered straight into a tree and took the right-hand side out of the car."
A few years ago, the makers of the Gran Turismo series of racing simulators for Sony PlayStation approached Newey about designing a pure speed-mobile with no restrictions—a kind of Formula Zero. Newey is not interested in video games, but the abstraction of the idea appealed to him, and he spent a happy weekend sketching something that looked a little like a dragonfly, with encased wheels instead of wings, as well as a vacuum pump that would suck the chassis toward the pavement when cornering. "To be perfectly honest, it would be so fast that it wouldn't really be safe," he told me. As it is, Formula One cars exert nearly fifty pounds of lateral force on the bodies of their drivers when cornering and braking at high speeds, which is why racecar drivers tend to have the necks of offensive linemen. "That would certainly become one of the restrictions: at what point can a driver still hold his head up!" Newey said. Discounting human frailty, he estimated that the Red Bull X2010, as they called the fantasy car, would be about twenty seconds per lap faster than any you've seen on a track.
Designing cars that go ever faster does not, after a certain point, make for a more enjoyable spectator sport, just as the proliferation of agile seven-and-a-half-footers might render basketball claustrophobic. "Most of the regulations are to control the fact that the car's going too quick," Bernie Ecclestone told me. "It's just generally the way the cars are driven that's entertaining—you know, good for the public. 'Cause all of the drivers—well, most of them—drive on the limit, and it's a case of the engineers making the limit more difficult to reach." Circuit safety standards have evolved considerably since the death of Senna, with larger run-off areas and more forgiving barriers, but if cars were to become much faster, many of the venerated old tracks that lend the sport its lore would need to be reconfigured, at a cost of millions.
Because of its direct ties to industry, Formula One is more susceptible to economic forces than most sports; after the financial crisis of 2008, BMW, Toyota, and Honda shuttered their racing operations, and the F.I.A. overhauled the regulations more substantially than at any point in the previous twenty-five years, with an eye toward keeping budgets under control. Broad rule changes appeal to Newey, because they present an opportunity to reconceive the car more or less from scratch. He'll mock up a working layout at half scale on his drafting table, while poring over the rulebook. The 2009 austerity regime inspired his rerouting of the exhaust system, an innovation so beneficial that the team affixed decoy stickers resembling pipes to the sides of its cars to distract spying competitors. Now, after three years of creeping restrictions against everything that had seemed to improve the cars' performance, Newey was finding the conditions less welcome. Tens of millions of dollars were being spent in the pursuit of each last tenth of a second. "Eventually, everybody will converge on the same solution," he said. "Effectively, all the cars end up the same, at which point the only differentiator is the engine and the driver." Ecclestone once famously likened the sport's drivers to light bulbs, in the sense that they were interchangeable. In an overly restrictive environment, Newey feared the same would be said of designers.
Newey is not optimistic about the next regulatory overhaul, planned for 2014, which takes aim at the sport's carbon footprint. It promises less powerful engines, larger batteries, and a greater emphasis on energy renewal—in effect, hybrid racecars. "It's a political idea," Newey said, with an engineer's disdain. Working for Red Bull—a company that's in the business of "selling cans, not cars," as the driver Sebastian Vettel put it—has afforded Newey the luxury of indifference to the sport's relevance to the non-sporting world, a point of pride for others. Newey went on, "There's always been this notion that Formula One should be used to develop the breed—the breed being the road car—and I think if you go back into, let's say, the sixties, then there are successful examples of that. Disc brakes, fuel injection, lightweight construction—all first appeared in Formula One. But the true spinoff from Formula One into road cars now, in all reality, is somewhere between very small and zero, in terms of technology that's developed in Formula One being of real benefit to the road cars, as opposed to a salesman's dream." Any claims to the contrary by the manufacturers, he said, are "pure pretense."
There was talk of President Obama passing through Texas on the weekend of the Austin Grand Prix, and this led some Formula One insiders to wonder if he might make an appearance at the race. "Is Mr. President a big fan of the old motorsport?" Will Buxton, the SPEED (and now NBC) broadcaster, asked, while killing time in Red Bull's makeshift hospitality suite, on the paddock. "He seems like a cool guy. That would be the best thing to make people aware that this is happening."
Obama did not turn up, though the idea was perhaps not as far-fetched as it sounds. During the next several days of walking the paddock, I spied Mexico's President, Felipe Calderón, Texas's governor, Rick Perry, and Carlos Slim, the world's richest man, among lesser dignitaries such as Ron Howard and George Lucas. The journalist Joe Saward, whose racing blog I'd taken to reading regularly, assured me that one of Princess Diana's exes was roaming about as well. Saward then began pointing out some of his fellow motor scribes: one kept a jet car in his garage, another was an uncanny juggler, and a third spoke nine languages. Saward himself is a historian of the French Resistance. "Even the motor-home girls have master's degrees," he said, referring to the hostesses at the teams' hospitality suites. "I always wanted to run off and join the circus, and in a sense I have."
Bernie Ecclestone, whom Saward described (more or less approvingly) as "stark-raving bonkers," wore Texas-appropriate jeans and cowboy boots to the track, and took a break from his daily backgammon game one afternoon to speak with the local media, who wondered if he was concerned about the fact that his big event happened to fall on the same weekend as the finale of the NASCAR Sprint Cup series, in Miami. "I'll let you know on Monday," he said, and granted that the customs official who'd greeted him at the airport had never heard of Formula One. "He seemed quite reasonable," Ecclestone added.
"Away from the venue, what do you look forward to doing in Austin?" one reporter asked, in a deep Texas twang.
"I may go to L.A. tomorrow," Ecclestone replied.
The ace driver Sebastian Vettel, speaking with me before his first practice session, attempted to parse the differences between NASCAR and Formula One in terms that he thought I might understand. "Maybe, you know, baseball and tennis," he began. "Just because you have a racquet . . ." I furrowed my brow in confusion. "O.K.," he said. "Baseball, you don't have a racquet. But something that's maybe similar? Doesn't mean it's the same thing. You know what I mean?" He thought for another moment, and added, "I actually wanted to say golf and baseball. Both times you have a stick, right? But you can't really compare. Obviously, Formula One is much more sophisticated. The cars are high tech, whereas in NASCAR they are low tech. But I don't mean there are only stupid people working there." Vettel's personal manager murmured something to him in German. "She says I'm talking too much," he said.
Vettel has curly blond hair, blue eyes, and an impish charm. He should by rights have been the media darling of this spectacle. At twenty-five, he was already the two-time reigning world champion, and poised to become the youngest driver ever to win three titles. Scattered around the track were posters drawn up in the Wild West style. "Wanted: A World Champion," they said, and featured mug shots of Vettel and Ferrari's Fernando Alonso, who were leading in the individual driver standings, with two races to go. Back in the summer, Vettel had visited New York and appeared as a guest on the "Late Show with David Letterman," where he talked about the "big balls" you need as a Formula One driver. But the more success he had, it seemed, the more credit went to Newey—Alonso himself spoke of "fighting against a Newey car"—and Vettel was getting defensive. "I don't see Adrian or myself being more important than any other," he said. "I mean, when I'm on the track, I'm alone in the car, and if I steer left the car turns left, and I steer right the car turns right, so whatever I do is extremely decisive to the whole project."
I made a habit of following herds of cameras wherever they went, and thereby learned to connect faces with some of racing's legendary names. The elfin man dressed all in plaid was Sir Jackie Stewart, a three-time world-champion driver in the nineteen-sixties and seventies. ("He's too good," Stewart said of Newey. "He's a very clever man.") The extremely tan and perfectly coiffed fireplug who looked as if he'd just climbed off a yacht in the Mediterranean was Mario Andretti. The guy with a monocoque of a proboscis was Emerson Fittipaldi. The awesomely dressed man holding court in front of Ferrari's hospitality suite? "Oh, he's just an asshole," Saward said. "He represents what you might call the indolently wealthy."
But the real paparazzi of Formula One—the guys with the thigh-size lenses that could zoom in on an Ecclestone daughter from two blocks away—are not interested in people-watching. They stalk the pit lane, where the garages are arranged in order of success, and cluster at the front end, among the McLarens, Ferraris, and Red Bulls, hoping to catch an unobstructed view of the cars as they're reassembled each morning. A mysterious bit of film had emerged from the previous race, in Abu Dhabi. It showed Red Bull mechanics fiddling with Vettel's front wing and nose cone, which appeared supple, as if made of rubber instead of carbon. Was this another bit of Newey-inspired alchemy? Or was it a violation of the rules restricting wing flexibility, as some rivals charged? Flexing wings improve grip in high-speed corners without increasing drag on straightaways. Might it explain Red Bull's late-season surge to the front of the paddock after an inconsistent start? All I was able to discern while spying on the Red Bull garage is that its mechanics blast dance music that must be intended to drive the fussy neighbors from Ferrari mad. (You can "check out what the garage are listening to today" via the team's Spotify playlist.) Also, to judge from the open Red Bull cans in view, they may be overcaffeinated.
The course itself looked magnificent, rising out of a dusty field, southeast of the airport, that the city council had voted to annex less than two weeks before the race, in order to boost property- tax rolls. Those not arriving by helicopter had the option of taking a shuttle bus from downtown or parking in cow pastures along the access road, for thirty-five dollars, and using the two- or three-mile walk to get acclimated to the grinding whine of all the engine noise—the "glorious assault on the senses," the official race announcer later called it—as the hundred-and-thirty-three-foot ascent to the first turn came into focus. "Turn One," I'd been told back in Milton Keynes, was "going to be epic." It was a blind hairpin to the left, and would require drivers to downshift to first gear after a furious sprint up the hill. Hermann Tilke, the Robert Trent Jones of Formula One, was the architect, and I gathered that he'd given the undiscerning American audience of a hundred and fifteen thousand an international sampler of sorts, borrowing an S-curve and a horseshoe bend from Interlagos and Istanbul, respectively, and alluding elsewhere to the swift Becketts Corner of England's Silverstone.
Through practice and qualifying, the drivers' times steadily improved as the track was in effect rubberized when the burned residue of the tires formed a smoother surface. Because of the circuit's newness, oil was still being released by the settling asphalt, and the competitors used words like shiny, icy, slippery, wet, and green to describe the conditions. "Green, yeah, dirty," Newey said, sipping a cup of coffee a few hours before the race, and dismissing as an "occupational hazard" the nuisance of shutterbugs who had gathered for a shot of the wizard at rest. Newey had been vindicated in the wing-flexing controversy, which the F.I.A. race director, in a press conference, attributed to an optical illusion, and Vettel and Webber, benefitting from still further tweaks to the front wing angles and the ride height, had secured the first and third spots on the grid.
Ferrari's Fernando Alonso, meanwhile, placed a disappointing eighth, which he deemed "logical," a result of inferior machinery. Even worse, this left him on the "dirty," or less rubberized, side of the track. Ferrari officials then made the cynical decision to sabotage their other driver, Felipe Massa, to help Alonso. With less than an hour to go before the ceremonial parade lap (in classic American muscle cars, naturally), they broke the seal on Massa's gearbox. Massa, who had actually been faster than Alonso in qualifying, was automatically penalized, and forced to drop back five spots. The newly configured grid placed Alonso in seventh, back on the clean side—and tough luck to those drivers from Force India, Lotus, and Williams who in turn were shifted from clean to dirty, as collateral damage. My Twitter feed filled with concerns from Formula One partisans that this might not sit well with an American audience obsessed by questions of fairness ("Yanks like sport over tactics"), ignoring the larger problem of widespread confusion.
Was Turn One indeed epic? There were no collisions or spinouts, so I'd have to vote no, although I was informed, after the cars had disappeared from view, that Alonso had managed to squirt past a driver or two. A veteran race observer once described for me the conversational rhythm among spectators in terms of ninety-second intervals, or roughly the amount of time it takes a car to complete a three-and-a-half-mile lap. That is, you talk for ninety seconds, and then pause out of necessity when the cars whiz by again, trying in vain to hold a thought as your teeth vibrate. I found that this held true only for the first few laps, when the cars remained bunched together, and before any drivers had stopped for a change of tires. Soon enough, the interruptions were more frequent and intermittent, and it was easier to understand the proliferation of champagne as a desensitizing device.
I was fortunate to be watching from Red Bull's section of the Paddock Club, above the pit lane, with the high rollers who had paid five thousand dollars each for the full experience: gnocchi, booze, and even a d.j. from Miami, named Erok, whom Red Bull flies around the world to perpetuate its image as the brash upstart of the scene. Some helpful representatives of Infiniti, one of Red Bull's subsidiary sponsors, distributed handheld video screens that allowed you to shuffle between camera views from each of the cars, and after some experimentation I concluded that the best way to watch the race was from the perspective of McLaren's Lewis Hamilton, who had been made to obscure the painted letters "H.A.M." on his helmet after race officials learned that they were a reference not to his name but to the song by Kanye West and Jay-Z (and meant "hard as a motherfucker").
By the midpoint, it was shaping up as a two-man race between Vettel and Hamilton, with Alonso in a distant third. (Webber's alternator blew on the seventeenth lap, forcing his withdrawal.) Hamilton's car was faster in a straight line—by eleven kilometres per hour, the BBC commentary said—but seemed to lack the Red Bull's downforce, or grip, and he slid more in the corners. On my screen, as I pretended to be Hamilton, Vettel would appear larger and closer each time we approached a sharp turn, only to scurry away again as we accelerated out. The cat-and-mouse game continued for more than twenty minutes, as Hamilton narrowed the gap to within D.R.S.-boosting range.
Newey stood in the pit lane with several team officials, wearing noise-cancelling headphones and staring at a bank of computer screens, in a bit of pageantry for the television production. ("We could probably do a better job in the back of the garage," he confessed. "You're strung out in a line. You can't hear anything.") They monitored live data from the hundreds of sensors in Vettel's chassis and engine, advising on tire conditions, and communicated via radio and instant message with another group of technicians seated in a command center back in Milton Keynes, some of whom simulated the race in real time, forecasting when Hamilton and Alonso and the others might make a pit stop.
The ample technical support was unable to help Vettel overcome his biggest obstacle: the inconvenient slowness of Narain Karthikeyan, of the struggling Hispania Racing Team. Vettel cursed into his microphone as he downshifted into Turn Eleven on his forty-third lap and found himself momentarily impeded by Karthikeyan, bringing up the rear on his own forty-second. The brief logjam brought Hamilton to within a couple of car lengths, and gave him the window he needed on the following straight. Up went the D.R.S. flap on Hamilton's rear wing. More cursing. The cat had overtaken the mouse.
Vettel would have to wait another week to secure his third title, but, in accordance with the complexities of Formula One, Red Bull still had cause for celebration. The second-place finish in Austin was worth enough points in the team standings to clinch the Constructors' Championship, the source of the big prize money, if not of the cork-popping glory. Few in the Paddock Club, or among the departing crowd, for that matter, seemed to notice all the Red Bull personnel assembling on the track for a team photo after Mario Andretti had welcomed the victorious Hamilton and the runners-up, Vettel and Alonso, to the podium for the ceremonial Mumm spraying. The garages were being hurriedly disassembled. On the JumboTron above, a man in a cowboy hat sang "Margaritaville." Newey lingered a while longer, speaking politely to the remaining British TV cameras, and raised his fist and thumb in the air. Last week, a report surfaced in the Italian press that Ferrari had resumed its pursuit of his services. ♦


text:
Tips for new members of Congress
There is an old saying about what it's like to be a new member of Congress. There's so much to learn and so many people giving you advice, it's similar to inserting a garden hose in your mouth and turning on the spigot. These days, with sensitive briefings and orientation sessions, it's more like standing under Niagara Falls.
I remember the pride and exhaustion I felt as a freshman House member. We were attending a bipartisan orientation for newly elected members at Harvard University. Our opening talk was delivered by former House Speaker Tip O'Neill.
Story Continued Below
Tip walked into the room, a mantle of messy and uncombed white hair framing his features. His front pocket was awkwardly sticking out of his pants as if he had quickly grabbed for some loose change. He humbly welcomed all of us to his "home constituency." He proudly proclaimed that we had just won the best job we would ever achieve in life and modestly offered us two pieces of advice for our new public service careers.
First, he said, move your family to Washington, where you'll be able to engage in the work of Congress, its committees and its social life. We must make friends with people in the other party because that is the only way to make the system work, he emphasized. He reminded us that having meals together, getting to know one another 's families, and even sharing a libation, as he did with his buddy, GOP Rep. Silvio Conte, built trust and affinity. This directly led to getting legislation done, he said.
Second, he recommended we travel and experience the world. He was not tacitly encouraging "boondoggles" or visits to exotic resorts but emphasizing serious study of the trade challenges, economic opportunities, national security threats and diverse cultures around the world. You cannot learn this in a briefing book, he said. And you must travel with members of the other political party and show a unified America to foreign leaders.
This was common sense 20 years ago and should be vitally important advice to new members in 2012.
I would add some detail to his wise words for the Class of 2013.
1. Move to Washington. While Tip's advice is not practical for every member and their family, it would be wise to show your constituents that you are smart and effective. Spend quality time in Washington doing your job five days a week. Plan to meet with the members of your committees and state delegations in both political parties. Instruct your staff to seek out sensible bipartisan opportunities with other offices. Schedule meals, bipartisan retreats, even join a bipartisan caucus to potentially work across the aisle. For example, I used to meet regularly with Sen. Dick Lugar (R-Ind.) to explore how to work together on agriculture issues for our state.


text:
|Thread Tools
|Display Modes
Hobbyists house for sale in City of Oconomowoc (1/2 way between Mad and Milw, WI)
Bungalow style -- 3 bedroom (2 up, 1 main), 1 bath (Easy addition to 1.5). Approximately 1100-1200 fairly open sq ft on ¼ acre.
Appliances included (All new within the last couple years when kitch was refreshed inc washer/dryer); Kitch has newer slate tile, travertine backsplash, laminate counter tops. new roof, gutters, windows, in the last couple years (garage and house). Fairly neutral paint, crown molding in every room 1st floor. 6 panel doors though out the entire house (including basement). Jacuzzi tub in the recently refreshed bath, reasonable closets considering the age of the house. Breakers (no fuses), new outlets, switches, and wiring all around. Plumbing is solid, great condition with no leaks. Fenced back yard, new shed. Heat on the budget plan is only $28.00 a month (That's 28!)
1100 sq ft garage with heat and electric. Use the front to park cars, use the rear for storage, workshop, or man-cave. (currently used as a personal workshop). 2 garage doors, 2 side entry doors. Lots of attic space, solid insulation (typically stays around 40 with the heat on just on weekends)
Each and every room top to bottom has been refreshed in the last 5 years. Needs flooring, minor touch up and basement paint at the moment but will be installed soon. Buy it now without these finished items and pay $180. We finish the basement $190. Complete $200. Will be listed with a relator soon at $210 -- 225
BUY IT NOW AS IS FOR A DISCOUNT @ 180!. . ..You will not find a garage, with this nice of a house, in this area and with this condition in this size in this price range!
|Thread Tools
|Display Modes
Linear Mode


text:
Celsius(redirected from Degree celcius)
Also found in: Dictionary, Thesaurus, Encyclopedia.
Anders, Swedish astronomer, 1701-1744. See: Celsius scale.
Celsius (°C)
Etymology: Anders Celsius, Swedish scientist, 1701-1744
temperature scale in which 0° is the freezing point of water and 100° is the boiling point of water at sea level. To convert to Fahrenheit, multiply the Celsius by 1.8, then add 32. Also called centigrade. Compare Fahrenheit.
Cel·si·us scale(sel'sē-ŭs skāl)
A temperature scale that is based on the triple point of water (defined to be 273.16°K) and assigned the value of 0.01°C; has replaced the centigrade scale because the triple point of water can be more accurately measured than the ice point; for most practical purposes, however, the two scales are equivalent.
[Anders Celsius]


text:
Popular Mechanics on Special Effects Used in Half-Blood Prince
Jul 15, 2009
HBP Film
Popular Mechanics has a new article online today that gives some new insight regarding the special effects used for two scenes in Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince done by Double Negative. As seen in the many trailers and clips from the film, HBP features an attack on the Millennium Bridge in London, England to showcase the rampant actions of the Death Eaters, as well as the Inferi in the cave. While there are movie spoilers contained in the article, the piece does contain technical info on how the scenes were created with legendary VFX house ILM:
"Once modeled, the Inferi went
to a painter, who laid down the creatures' color and texture, while
another designer put a skeleton inside the Inferi model to make it
move. Next, animators began motion tests. Because Yates wanted to avoid
zombie cliches, ILM spent a lot of time researching the movement of the
Inferi. "It really came down to their expressions and movements to keep
them out of zombie land," Anderson says. Yates cast actors and filmed
their movements using motion-capture technology,
which was eventually combined with hand animation, to create the
Inferi's final movement. "Not having them groan and stick their arms
out gets you away from the zombie look," Anderson says. Animators used
an in-house software called Zeno to animate the Inferi crowds and the
flocking above and below the surface of the lake.
Creating the Inferi scene "was
extremely challenging work," Anderson says. It took six people 45 weeks
to create the Inferi; once they were created, the team needed 25 more
artists to complete the necessary shots. The final result? Two very
impressive minutes of screen time."
Related: The New York Daily News let us know about some cool pics they have of work done by ILM creating special effects for various blockbusters, including this of the Inferi for Half-Blood Prince, as well as Dobby in CoS.


text:
2004 :: NPS 4X Round 2, Moelfre ...
4X action from the track that the Athertons built. Say no more - apart from that many of the pics are in sequences. Let them load then click forward and back to feel the flow!
You are viewing the thumbnail index - click a pic to enlarge.
All images in this gallery are © [ gravity-slaves ] and may not be reproduced without permission.


text:
Water Plants Stickers
Sheet size: 4.5" x 6.5" (half sheet)
Material: High quality matte paper
Sticker size: .8" x .7"
Number of stickers per sheet: 28
Colors may vary slightly from photo due to different monitor settings. Any watermarks will not be on the final product.
Stay up to date on M&P happenings, receive exclusive freebies and special offers.


text:
NSA questions hit pols back home
LANGHORNE, Pa. — Rep. Mike Fitzpatrick has spent many summers here on his home turf blasting big government, big taxes, big Washington — but recently he's added another item to his list: Big Brother.
Even during his speeches on jobs, health care and the economy, the Republican congressman said he has started fielding a few questions about privacy, spying and surveillance, a sign that fears about the ultra-secret National Security Agency have spread beyond the Beltway as lawmakers embark on their annual town-hall tours.
Story Continued Below
The NSA's powers to obtain phone call logs and Internet chats haven't spawned the fury some lawmakers recall all too well from the fiery battle over health care reform. Nor has government surveillance supplanted the economy as the leading issue on the nation's conscience. New Al Qaeda threats against U.S. embassies, meanwhile, have reinforced for some on Capitol Hill the importance of strong counter-terrorism programs.
( Also on POLITICO: Report: NSA violated privacy rules)
Still, doubts and criticisms about government snooping have started to surface in numerous districts and states, a reflection that Edward Snowden's leaks are kindling public suspicions. Amid the mounting revelations, some voters seem eager to have a debate that President Barack Obama and most of Washington never wanted in the first place. A Washington Post report Thursday that the NSA broke privacy rules thousands of times a year may only add to the questions lawmakers face.
Rep. Chris Van Hollen (D-Md.), for example, already has tangled with protestors who are seething over the pol's position on surveillance, and activists have rallied against House Democratic Leader Nancy Pelosi in San Francisco. Rep. Zoe Lofgren (D-Calif.) has addressed her constituents' deep-seated distrust of government directly. And perhaps looking to capitalize on the news, Rep. Rush Holt (D-N.J.) had invited the reporter who first unveiled the scope of the NSA's surveillance programs — Glenn Greenwald — to speak at one of his campaign events.
"There's a very real interest and concern expressed more frequently than ever before," said Democratic Sen. Richard Blumenthal, who's in his home state of Connecticut. "I think Americans have become strongly questioning about big institutions in their lives — not just big government, but big banks, big corporations."
The national conversation about government surveillance originates with Snowden, whose revelations have illuminated a U.S. intelligence apparatus that's able to obtain a foreign suspect's phone call logs, Internet chats and more. It's also raised new questions as to what extent U.S. citizens' data could be caught in the fray.
( PHOTOS: Pols, pundits weigh in on NSA report)
The White House has insisted it's followed the law, emphasizing it has the appropriate checks in place. And Obama, after weeks of criticism, addressed the matter at the top of a news conference last Friday, promising reforms to a system that many privacy hawks believe has become a rubber stamp for government snooping.
Frustration reached a boiling point on Capitol Hill last month after Rep. Justin Amash (R-Mich.) launched an effort to defund the NSA's phone-records program — an amendment, almost entirely symbolic in nature, that attracted broad bipartisan support. It ultimately failed, but the congressman's move set the stage for a fierce fight that's now evolved beyond the confines of Washington.
It's even touched Fitzpatrick's home base, the economically stratified 8th District of Pennsylvania. Unemployment reached about 7 percent in Bucks County this summer, and jobs and health care still trump all else. But at a town hall in Lower Salford last weekend and a telephone town hall this summer, Fitzpatrick said he found himself diverting from those key issues briefly to answer at least a few NSA questions.
( PHOTOS: 10 famous/infamous whistleblowers)
"There are many issues the American people are concerned about, privacy chief among them. And while it may not come up at every town hall, it is, I believe, based on conversations with my constituents, always on their minds," Fitzpatrick told POLITICO last week, just after speaking at a local Lower Bucks County Chamber of Commerce event dominated not by surveillance but by spending, transportation and health care.
In San Jose, Calif., meanwhile, Lofgren fielded a question during a telephone town hall this month from a local voter who wanted to know why, exactly, Amash's amendment had failed — because it had been "an incomplete idea or … because by and large your colleagues think it's OK to spy on us?"
Lofgren responded that Amash's effort "wasn't as well-written as it might have been," though she stressed the importance of transparency and oversight even as the government scours the globe for terrorists. Lofgren voted for the amendment.
Activists with Demand Progress and similar groups raised their surveillance qualms at a town hall held Tuesday by Rep. Jim Langevin (D-R.I.), a member of the House Intelligence Committee. And a small group of protestors appeared to disrupt Van Hollen's recent August gathering, an event focused on climate change in Silver Spring, Md. The tiny activist cohort carried signs emblazoned, "VAN HOLLEN WRONG ON NSA: Restore the 4th!" The Democratic congressman voted against the so-called Amash amendment because it wasn't "the most comprehensive and effective" approach, according to a spokeswoman, who added Van Hollen does support "rewriting these laws."


text:
- Home
- News
- Sports
- Opinion
- Obituaries
- Features
- Special Sections
- Classifieds
- Public Notices
HILLSVILLE — A motion relating to the natural gas service line approved Feb. 4 by the Carroll Industrial Authority gives a hint to the new utility's future.
The IDA took action in 2012 to provide natural gas service to the Mohawk plant after years of inaction by private companies, and now the effort only lacks about 3,000 linear feet from making that connection.
If you currently subscribe or have subscribed in the past to the The Gazette, then simply find your account number on your mailing label and enter it below.
Click the question mark below to see where your account ID appears on your mailing label.
|ZIP Code:


text:
Architecture Joomla Templates
We have a collection of 40 designs in this area!
You will find that our architecture joomla templates are great for professional services in connection with the design and construction of a building. Some of these joomla templates could be for architects who want to show off their designs and ideas, for engineers who want to show off their past work or future projects, or for architectural or building companies in general. Over thousands of years architecture has changed dramatically, so these architecture template designs could be a good starting point for a historian as well. All sorts of different possibilities for your architecture based project.
Our architecture Joomla templates are designed for use with the open source Joomla CMS platform. Joomla! is one of the most powerful Open Source Content Management Systems on the planet. It is used all over the world for everything from simple websites to complex corporate applications. Joomla! is easy to install, simple to manage, reliable, and allows content writers to know nothing about HTML or other scripting languages. Once Joomla and our architecture template is installed content writers can update content by pointing, clicking, and typing. Joomla! can be used to easily manage every aspect of your website, from adding content and images to updating a product catalog. With Joomla you can add hundreds of available extensions such as document management, image and multimedia galleries, forums and chat software, calendars, blogging software, directory services, email newsletters, data collection, banner advertising systems, and subscription services.


text:
Is 330 enough more like an acoustic IN FEEL of keyboard to warrant $600 more than 320?
It's for practice through headphones so I don't care about more power or other "features"
Just the keyboard feel so skills can transfer.
One theory says neither is the Real McCoy, so just buy the 320.
Sales people say 330 is much more like an acoustic.


text:
Tumwater Gutter Cleaning Services:
- Tumwater Gutter Cleaning & Rain Downspout Cleaning
- Tumwater Rain Gutter & Downspout Repairs
- Tumwater – Each Gutter cleaning service includes disposal of debris
- Tumwater Rain Gutter & Downspout re-attachment & inspection
Gutter Cleaning FAQS:
Did you know that without proper cleaning, a standard 20 foot section of rain gutter hold 260 lbs of water.
Why do I need my gutters Cleaned?
Properly maintained & cleaned gutters can save thousands of dollars in repair and prolong the life and value of your home by preventing water damage, rotten/wet roof fascia boards and standing water by your foundation, which could seep into your basement/foundation.
How often should I clean my gutters in the Tumwater area?
Twice a year; Spring and fall are the best times!
The GHB Window Cleaning & Maintenance Difference:
Neat and Courteous Professionals. On time arrival, full uniforms and shoe covers. Proof of insurance upon request and references. All employees have gone through extensive background checks. Clearly the right choice you can trust for your home and property.
Trosper Rd SW
98512 Tumwater
- (844) 438-4429
Expert Local Gutter Cleaning Services & Repair in Tumwater with Satisfaction Guaranteed & Better Business Bureau Accredited | Free Online Estimates