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I know so many people who get married in a church or who see a church and what to get married because of how pretty it is, etc etc. I even know people who claim to be Hindu or Buddhist, but want that traditional church wedding- so they offer money to the church and hire a preacher.
I personally believe that if you are not a Christian and are not attending that church, then you should be married within your own religion at your own place of worship- OR at a court house by a judge. My father is a pastor, and it's just so weird to have people who have no interest in our beliefs or attending our church, randomly stop in and if they can be married at our church. Sometimes they even ask if my father will marry them- a very 'package' deal, you might say. The question that normally follows is, "What about your own church?"
"Oh, we don't normally attend any church. But we believe in God!"
"Oh. We only go to church on Christmas/Easter."
"Well, we're thinking about maybe something attending church here…"
My father's normal response to these people is, "Tell you what. You come to this church for one month and attend four marriage sessions that I'll give to you. And then I'll let you know if I am willing to marry you in this church."
That normally makes the people disappear right away. The serious and sincere ones- and yes, we have had a few who truly meant that they did want to start coming to church- followed through. Even more people pretend they are okay with it, come for one week, two sessions and… fall away.
Okay, can you please try to understand? This is our CHURCH. People come here to connect with God. It is a sacred, religious place to the people who attend. You cannot just adopt a church and a religion for a day just so your wedding pictures look nice. If you and your partner aren't religious people or have no interest in Christianity, you have no business getting married in a Christian church. Go to a judge in a court house. Get married on the beach. Get married in a flower garden. There are plenty of beautiful locations to get married that are not the church.
And hey, I'm not just saying it happens in Christian churches. It applies to ALL religions. If you are not part of that religion, you have no business pretending you are for one day. It's just rude.
Are there some exceptions where it is okay? Yes. If the couple is trying to find a location that is more accessible for family, or a similar situation, then we have no problem allowing them to use our church. Usually those people are so kind, and they ask if their own pastor can deliver the service, which is exactly the way it should be. We do everything we can to make it a special day.
And I'm sorry if this offends people, but I think I'm right. And the real reason that convinces me of this is that the majority of people who are religious and attend a place of worship regularly agree with me. The people who don't follow a particular religion or are undecided, normally disagree. I'm interested to see how readers will respond to this, and if it will follow the normal pattern. 0123-11
I'll start the "pattern". In my church, you cannot use the building to be married unless you are a member of our church and attend 6 hours of premarital counseling OR you are a member in good standing in another church that has required counseling. We do not believe that a building is sacred but that entering into the covenant of marriage is a serious commitment that should not be entered into frivolously or lightly hence the requirement for extensive premarital counsel and a relationship to the church congregation who will help hold the couple accountable to their vows.
Count me among those who think it very bizarre that someone of different religion wants to use another religion's place of worship as their wedding ceremony venue.


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Date: Jan 28, 2016 | Time: 7:00 pm
Disney on Ice presents "Treasure Trove" at the Scottrade Center, Thursday, January 29th through Sunday, January 31st. See website to purchase tickets.
For More Information:
Scottrade Center | 314-622-5400 | Website
Scottrade Center is the home of the St. Louis Blues Hockey Team and is located in downtown St. Louis. Along with the Blues games, Scottrade hosts about 175 events per year, such as family events, ice shows, live concerts, basketball games and other sporting events.
Directions: Located in Downtown St. Louis on Clark Avenue, between 14th and 16th Streets, directly behind the Peabody Opera House.

subset: commoncrawl


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Official OS 220.127.116.116 from Bharti airtel Limited has reached the BlackBerry Torch 9800 today.
If you have a Torch 9800 get out that USB cord and give your a device a fresh OS.
Be sure to let us know how it works for you!
Note: The Software Platform and Applications version numbers can be found under Options-About screen on the handheld.


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Original URL: https://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/07/20/cisco_job_cuts/
Cisco slices HQ staff
It was always part of the plan
Posted in Business, 20th July 2009 09:26 GMT
Cisco is cutting 700 jobs from its headquarters in San Jose, as part of the 2,000 which were announced in February.
The company described the cuts as a limited restructuring and said: "We are doing everything possible to minimize the impact on employees affected by the limited restructuring."
The networking giant announced 250 redundancies in February at its San Jose headquarters and warned that some 2,000 jobs would go in total. In April, the company denied it had plans to cut as much as ten percent of its 66,558 employees.
The company has been hit by the downturn in spending by big corporates and comms firms. Although it saw profits fall by a quarter, it still made $1.3bn on sales of $8.2bn last quarter.
Alongside its router and high-end networking business, Cisco is also getting into consumer technology. Last quarter it said it would buy the company behind Flip Video - the maker of cheap digital video cameras - for $590m. ®


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Credit rating agency Fitch Ratings on Wednesday gave the Philippines its first-ever investment grade, allowing the Southeast Asian nation greater access to low-cost funds.
The agency said it has upgraded the Philippines' long-term, foreign currency-denominated debt to BBB minus from BB plus and long-term local currency-denominated debt to BBB from BBB minus. The outlooks on both ratings are stable.
Fitch cited the Philippines' strong sovereign external balance and persistent current account surplus. The economy has expanded 6.6 percent in 2012 and Fitch expects 5.5 percent growth this year.
President Benigno Aquino III said the upgrade would lower interest on debt and increase investments. He said it was an affirmation of his good governance agenda and economic reform.
"More companies in the real economy can now consider us an investment destination," Aquino said, adding that an investment grade for sovereign debt should lead to lower borrowing costs for Philippine companies in international markets.
Gareth Leather, Asia economist at the economic research company Capital Economics, said the upgrade — and similar expected upgrades by S&P and Moodys — "highlights big improvements the Philippine economy has undergone over the past decade, but the economic benefits are likely to be quite small."
He said government bond yields have fallen to record lows in anticipation of the upgrade and are lower than those of many countries which already have investment grade status. They are not likely to fall much further, he added.
Finance Secretary Cesar Purisima said the Aquino administration remains committed to eliminating corruption, spending on infrastructure and improving the overall business climate.
Fitch credited the Aquino administration's centerpiece reforms, including fiscal management and the recent introduction of higher taxes on alcohol and tobacco to boost revenues.
The Philippines still lags behind Southeast Asian neighbors in foreign direct investment, and foreign chambers of commerce have cited restrictions such as a constitutional ban on foreigners owning more than 40 percent of key industries. Aquino has resisted attempts to amend those provisions.
The Philippines relies heavily on remittances sent by about 10 million overseas workers. The money makes up 10 percent of total economic output and fuels domestic spending but does little to alleviate unemployment at home. About a third of the country's 94 million people live below the poverty line.


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WASHINGTON — Confidence in the economy fell slightly in September from August, as many Americans became less optimistic about hiring and pay increases over the next six months.
The Conference Board, a private research group, said its consumer confidence index fell to 79.7 in September from August's reading of 81.8.
Consumers' confidence is closely watched because their spending accounts for 70 percent of economic activity. The September reading was slightly below June's reading of 82.1, the highest in 5½ years.
While confidence has bounced back from the depths of the Great Recession, it has yet to regain the reading of 90 that typically coincides with a healthy economy.
This month, confidence fell on a dimmer outlook for the next few months. Lynn Franco, who oversees the survey, said that reflects concern about the job market and wages. Consumers were actually more optimistic about current conditions. ''While overall economic conditions appear to have moderately improved, consumers are uncertain that the momentum can be sustained in the months ahead,'' Franco said.
Amna Asaf, an economist at Capital Economics, said higher interest rates and lower stock prices contributed to the drop in confidence. But she noted the survey was concluded before last week's decision by the Federal Reserve to make no changes in its bond-buying stimulus program. That decision sent stock prices up and interest rates down.
''We suspect that if the rebound in equity prices is sustained, along with the drop back in gasoline prices, confidence will rebound,'' she said.
On Tuesday, the average US price for a gallon of gas was $3.46 — eight cents cheaper than a month ago.
Recent data suggest economic growth may be slowing. Consumers spent more cautiously in August. And higher interest rates are threatening to slow home sales.
The economy added 169,000 jobs in August, hardly enough to signal robust job growth. The US unemployment rate fell to 7.3 percent from 7.4 percent. But the decline was mostly because more people stopped looking for work and were no longer counted as unemployed.
A weaker outlook for the rest of the year was a key reason the Federal Reserve decided not to slow its $85-billion-a-month in bond purchases. The purchases have kept longer-term interest rates low, making mortgages and other consumer loans more affordable.
The economy has been held back this year by tax hikes, federal spending cuts, and weaker global growth. It expanded at an annual rate of 2.5 percent in the April-June quarter. But many economists say growth has slowed to an annual rate of 2 percent or less.


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Well not everyone but for me, Alani & Blaze. Alani & Blaze have been matting a lot lately and I was trying to comb them out every other day or so. I gave up when I found several more mats on Alani. They were both very good boys at the groomers and they told me that they had 8 cats there today. I guess getting your long haired cat shaved down is becoming much more popular. Usually my cats are the only ones at this groomers. Now they both look like little lions and my hair is much shorter and curlier again. Here are a few pictures. Enjoy!!!:)
Both Boys;
More pictures coming up.>>>>>


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Shower parties for all occasions
Woman's Press, 1949 - Games - 128 pages
Suggestions for various types of showers and parties.
From inside the book
11 pages matching soap in this book
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The Planning and Etiquette of Shower Parties
Showers for the BridetoBe
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adhesive tape animal crackers Anniversary attached baby baby shower ball blindfolded blue bottle bowl bridal shower bride bright cabbage cake Can-Can candles candy cardboard cellophane centerpiece circle clothespin cluster balloons coffee colored cone contest cotton covered cream crepe paper cutout decorations dessert doll edge eggs embroidery hoop favors filled flowers four-leaf clovers friends gifts give green guess guest of honor gumdrops heaped hearts honored guest hostess inches inserted invitations Jack Horner kitchen lacepaper doilies letters luck lucky marshmallow match menu Mother Goose nut cups occasion packages pair pencil pink pipe cleaner pipe-cleaner place cards played player points prize quoits refreshments ribbon ring salad score serve side silver soap square stork string strips sugar suggest teakettles toothpicks tossed tree wedding wire wish word wrapped write


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Economists cut their estimates for how much the US Federal Reserve will reduce the amount of its monthly asset purchases, a Bloomberg survey shows.
Policymakers led by Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke will trim their so-called quantitative easing program to US$65 billion a month at the meeting of the Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC) on Oct. 29 and Oct. 30, from the current level of US$85 billion, according to the median estimate in the survey of 59 economists this week.
In a similar survey before the Fed's meeting on April 30 and May 1, economists predicted the first move in the fourth quarter.
Debate among central bank policymakers over when and how to dial back their unprecedented easing campaign has shaken financial markets.
The Standard & Poor's (S&P) 500 Index has dropped 2.8 percent since reaching a record closing high on May 21, and the yield on 10-year US Treasuries has risen to 2.08 percent from as low as 1.63 percent last month as investors weighed the timing of a reduction in the central bank's stimulus.
"Even those who are advocating for tapering are thinking that it could be a pretty small first step to see how it goes," said Julia Coronado, chief economist for North America at BNP Paribas in New York and a former Fed economist. "That's one of the few things we've learned" from the debate among policymakers.
When the first move comes, officials will split their US$65 billion in purchases between US$30 billion a month of mortgage bonds and US$35 billion a month of Treasuries, a US$10 billion reduction in each category, according to the survey, conducted on Tuesday and Wednesday.
In the previous survey, economists expected the tapering to be larger, with the Fed cutting purchases to US$50 billion from US$85 billion in its first step down.
Two of the 59 economists surveyed this week expect the pace of purchases to be reduced at the FOMC meetings on June 18 and June 19 or on July 30 and 31.
Sixteen say tapering will begin at the meeting on Sept. 17 and Sept, 18, 14 see it happening on Oct. 29 and Oct. 30 and 15 forecast the first tapering on Dec. 17 and Dec. 18. Twelve see tapering next year or later.
"If jobs growth continues in the 150,000-to-200,000 per month range, that's probably sufficient to lower the unemployment rate slightly," said Tom Lam, chief economist at DMG & Partners Securities in Singapore. "Coupled with real GDP growth recovering to 2.5 percent, that would be sufficient for them to consider tapering modestly at the December meeting."
Philadelphia Fed President Charles Plosser has called for tapering to start as early as the central bank's next meeting.
Federal Reserve Bank of New York President William Dudley said in an interview last month that he would like to wait three or four months to see "how the tug-of-war between the fiscal drag and the improving economy are going to sort of work their way out."
St Louis Fed President James Bullard said on May 23 in London that more disinflation could prompt additional asset purchases by the central bank, and Boston's Eric Rosengren said the Fed should increase purchases if the incoming data "do not reflect improvements" in unemployment and inflation.
Policymakers will have a clearer view of the employment picture after yesterday's monthly jobs report from the US Labor Department. Economists in a separate Bloomberg survey expect the report to show that employers added 163,000 jobs last month.


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So, you think you have a pretty good product or service to offer? Bully for you! But now the bad news – this is almost certainly not enough to ensure success.
These are tough times. Consumers expect your product or service to be good – that's a given. If you want them to actually notice it, engage with it, buy it and recommend it to their friends, it is no longer enough to allow the quality of the product to speak for itself. You've got to do more than that, and be a lot smarter.


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If you don't like boobies, blood and birds – together. Don't read.
With a hint of the ghoulish, a helping of Alfred Hitchcock's The Birds (and Edgar Allan Poe) and a whole lot of absolutely fashionably delicious, Tom Ford's eyewear advertisements for Fall/Winter 2010-11 are to die for.
… to bleed for if you're Freja Beha Erichsen.
Never failing to make an impression, Tom Ford's campaigns for both men and women over the years are typically stunning, with one element stepping out from the pages and encompassing the visual senses to the point you could almost taste it…sometimes more than one's ready to swallow.
(I've often wondered if both Ford and Marc Jacobs share part of their brains.)
Photographed by Tom Ford with [Read more…]


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FleischBerg is a brewing business[1] based in the state of San Andreas, located in Red County, near the town of Blueberry and Blueberry Acres. Around the factory premises, there are two unique stunt jumps. There is also an AK-47 and a Body Armor spawn around the factory premises. FleischBerg's slogan is "Making Life Mean Something since 1869", which may be a reference to the 69 sexual position.
- "Fleisch Berg", in German, means "Meat Mountain".
- ↑ From the official GTA San Andreas website:
"At the very center of the State of San Andreas, Blueberry is a farming community and home to the Fleischberg brewery."


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Classic begins Saturday with new sponsor, setup
The newly-named 2013 Shale Show Sammy Baugh Classic begins this weekend at Mustang Bowl with a new sponsor and — at least for this year — a new and rather unique scheduling setup.A total of three games will be played this year in the Classic, which is now in its ninth year. But instead of having its traditional Thursday through Saturday lineup, all games at the 2013 event will be played on the weekend — starting with the opening game at 11 a.m. Saturday between Quanah and Miles. For the first time, the Classic is on two weekends.After Saturday, no games are scheduled until Sweetwater plays its home opener at the Bowl on Sept. 13 when the Mustangs entertain Breckenridge at 7:30 p.m. On Saturday, Sept. 14, the Classic wraps up with Brock taking on Booker at 6 p.m.This year's unusual schedule, said Sammy Baugh Classic committee member Ted Thomas, can be attributed to changes caused by the University Interscholastic League's last realignment. "We had a commitment to one of the schools very early on in scheduling (but) when realignment happened, Sweetwater's schedule changed," Thomas said. "What was going to be a home game became a road game." So the committee members came up with a revised plan. "We decided to hold (the event) on two weekends so Quanah and Miles could still be a part of the Classic," Thomas said.Two of the three games involve teams new to the Classic — only Friday's contest between tournament host Sweetwater and Breckenridge will not have a newcomer."We will be welcoming some new faces to the Classic and maybe even first-timers to Mustang Bowl," Thomas said. In addition, Brock is in its first year as an 11-man football school and will play an independent schedule this season.Located about 12 miles from Weatherford, the school made its name as a basketball powerhouse before its recent decision to add football. Brock will make a return trip to the Bowl Oct. 26 for a game with Tornillo (near El Paso). Brock should be a 2A, Division I school next year, Thomas said, according to what Brock's coaches have told him.This year's new Classic sponsor holds its show next month — on Oct. 1-2 — at the Nolan County Coliseum complex where it will highlight many aspects on the ongoing exploration and development of the Shale Discovery Field. According to Thomas, the Shale Show will be a great opportunity for members of the public to see the evolution of the oil field. Also, he said, the committee wants to give its thanks to the Shale Show for sponsoring this year's Classic.Sweetwater will be trying to add to a couple of its Classic records this year when it takes on Breckenridge. In addition to playing in all eight Classics held so far, the Mustangs have the most wins (6). Roscoe, which is missing this year's event, is second on the victory list with four while Rotan has three wins and Colorado City and Snyder two.Breckenridge is making its second appearance in the event, winning 34-13 over Jim Ned in its other game in 2006.


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UH Re-launches RideShare Program
Program aims to help students, faculty and staff find solutions to rising gas pricesUniversity of Hawaiʻi
External Affairs and University Relations
Today, the University of Hawaiʻi announced the re-launch of its online ridesharing program, which was originally implemented during the bus strike to help students, faculty and staff find transportation to the Mānoa campus. The re-launch of the site was prompted by student Daniela Andrade who sent UH President David McClain a letter expressing concern over the cost of commuting to school because of rising gas prices. The site has also been expanded to include all 10 campuses in the university system.
"My congratulations to Daniela for taking the initiative to address a problem that confronts most of our students, and for working with Associate Vice President Karen Lee, Vice President and Chief Information Officer David Lassner and others in the administration to put in place a solution in a timely fashion," said McClain.
The site is accessible to all UH students, faculty and staff through the MyUH portal. A UH username and password are required. Through the site, users become part of a database of potential carpoolers seeking to travel to and from UH campuses. Users select their location, destination and travel times and are able to contact others in the database with similar schedules to see if arrangements can be made to carpool.
"The voluntary program was quite successful during the bus strike in 2003 and we hope that it will once again serve the UH community," said Deborah Noji, assistant director of UH Mānoa Auxiliary Enterprises. "IT specialists Marshal Chu and Chase Kawakami were really instrumental in making this program a reality for students for the upcoming fall semester."
In addition to being able to identify carpool candidates, the site also provides links to other helpful state and city and county resources that promote transportation alternatives.
To visit the UH RideShare program website, visit http://www.hawaii.edu/rideshare/.
For more information, visit: http://www.hawaii.edu/rideshare/


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2 more events today...
Monday, May 21Today's Hours:
Courier Articles by Sandy Schultheis
Sunday, July 11, 1999
Summertime Choices Are Varied And Brief
A busy summer has left me little time for recreational reading so I have been on the lookout for short books. A library convention in New Orleans gave me some brief time slots waiting in airports and a hotel. . Short stories are always a good bet because I can usually get through at least one in a sitting. But many readers shy away from stories and want a novel. Today's recommendations are short, their subjects are varied and all are available through your public library which has summer reading programs for all ages, and is a good place to escape from the summer heat.
The Girls Guide to Hunting and Fishing by Melissa Bank (Viking, 1999).
An East-coast girl learns about life, love and the publishing business. Her brother brings home girlfriends, her aging lover is an alcoholic and her father dies. Sounds more depressing that it really is, actually I found it smart and sassy and recommended it to a friend who was looking for a gift for her twenty-something daughter. Literary but light.
A Prayer for the Dying by Stewart O'Nan (Holt, 1999).
For those readers who are looking for a short book that isn't fluffy. When a diptheia epidemic sweeps through his Wisconsin town, Jacob Hansen--constable, deacon, and undertaker must consider his actions and the nature of evil. One critic describes it as "a philosophical horror novel".
The Basic Eight by Daniel Handler (St. Martins, 1999).
Recommended by a fellow librarian, this wicked tale of a high school girl who is serving time in prison "..because high school can be so stressful, you just want to kill someone". The ultimate revenge fantasy.
Who's Irish by Gish Jen (Knopf, 1999).
A provocative cover and some provocative short stories about the Chinese-American experience. The first story is told from the viewpoint of a Chinese grandmother ho has trouble with her half-Irish granddaughter, her banker daughter and her unemployed Irish son-in-law who is too "manly" to take care of his daughter. Entertaining and offbeat.
The Last Lovely City by Alice Adams (Knopf, 1999).
Thirteen stories dealing with relationships, with the last four stories about a divorced psychiatrist who finds her private life fusing with her patients' lives. I enjoyed the book because many stories were set in the San Francisco and Berkeley area where I spent a number of years. One critic called it "a melancholy but superb collection about aging relationships".
Candles on Bay Street by K.C. McKinnon (Doubleday, 1999).
If you are looking for a short, sweet read this may be it. From the author of Dancing at the Harvest Moon once more writes about the joys of friendship, the problems of growing older and the reunion of two people who once loved each other. Uplifting.
My Russian by Deirdre McNamer (Houghton Mifflin, 1999).
McNamer creates a character to care about in this "Hot Pick" from Library Journal. While her husband and son assume she is vacationing in Greece, Francesca Woodbridge is hiding out in a motel near home examining her life and revealing a series of stories from the past forty years. One reader described it as "disturbing and funny".
Still Waters in Niger by Kathleen Hill (Triquarterly, 1999).
An atmospheric first novel about a middle-aged American woman who returns to her former home in Niger to heal a rift with her grown daughter, and find "…an Africa (she) had longed to see but had not known where to look." Fiction with an autobiographical feeling.
Death in Lacquer Red by Jeanne M. Dams (Walker, 1999).
A historical mystery set in 1900 in which Hilda Johansson , working as a domestic in the home of a wealthy family, discovers the body of a woman who has just returned from missionary work in China. The author lives in South Bend, Indiana which is the setting of this new mystery series.
Sandy Schultheis is a librarian with the Evansville-Vanderburgh Public Library. The opinions expressed in this column are personal and do not reflect policies or official recommendations of EVPL.


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Daily Dose of D
Here in the "True North," Getting Enough Vitamin D -- the Sunshine Vitamin -- Is Especially Important for People With HIV
Winter 2012
Besides making it harder to get out and get active, that lack of sunlight during winter can have health impacts, including lower levels of vitamin D -- which the body produces in response to sunlight. You've likely heard news stories in the past few years about research into the sunshine vitamin's role in health. Low levels of vitamin D have been linked to many medical conditions, but what does all this research mean for people with HIV living in Canada? While there is much left to learn, researchers are finding that people with HIV need to make sure they are getting enough vitamin D.
Classified as a vitamin through the happenstance of history, vitamin D is actually a hormone, meaning that it acts as a chemical messenger in the body and is important for regulating many chemical activities in cells. We know for sure that it is involved in bone health. It also helps with the absorption of the bone-building minerals calcium and phosphorus from the intestines.
Clues for where else vitamin D may act in the body come from where receptors for the vitamin are located. Based on the location of those receptors, vitamin D may be involved in muscle, brain and liver function. Those receptors are also found on immune cells, such as CD4 cells and macrophages, leading researchers to speculate that vitamin D may play a role in immunity.
The body can produce vitamin D in a multi-step pathway that starts in the skin, where heat from sunrays kicks off the process. The liver and the kidneys work next, transforming intermediate forms, called vitamin D2 and vitamin D3, into the active form of the vitamin, calcitriol. Blood tests vary in what form of vitamin D they measure. The most common test measures total vitamin D2 and D3.
There is debate over ideal blood levels of vitamin D. Based on studies of bone health and blood levels of calcium and parathyroid hormone, the American Endocrine Society suggests that the results of vitamin D blood tests be interpreted in this way:
According to a 2009 Statistics Canada study, about one-third of Canadians had sufficient levels of vitamin D. The same study indicated that one in 10 people were deficient. (Note that the study used an older, lower cut-off of less than 37.5 nmol/l to define deficiency.)
Not being exposed to enough sun or wearing sunscreen (which blocks the formation of vitamin D in the skin) can lead to inadequate levels of vitamin D. Other factors that can put people at risk for deficiency include obesity (having a BMI higher than 30), older age and health conditions such as liver and kidney damage or inflammation of the intestines (Crohn's disease, for example).
Less D With HIV?
Scientists are beginning to think that HIV, perhaps through its associated ongoing inflammation, might also change how well the body can produce vitamin D. There is no clear evidence that vitamin D deficiency is more common in people living with HIV than in HIV-negative people. However, in a recent large cohort study of people with HIV in Europe, Argentina and Israel, only one in 10 (11 percent) had vitamin D levels above 75 nmol/l.
In the trial, most (82 percent) of the people were taking antiretroviral therapy (ART). This is of note because some anti-HIV drugs may affect vitamin D levels. Efavirenz (Sustiva and in Atripla) and AZT (Retrovir/zidovudine, also in Combivir and Trizivir) have been linked to vitamin D deficiency.
Protease inhibitors (PIs), on the other hand, particularly darunavir (Prezista), have been associated with higher levels of vitamin D. Hal Huff, ND, head supervisor of the Naturopathic HIV/AIDS Clinic at the Sherbourne Health Centre in Toronto, is involved in the Canadian HIV Vascular Study, which is looking at the relationships between anti-HIV drugs, cardiovascular disease and metabolic problems. In the study, he says, "participants with the highest vitamin D status were more likely to be on PI-based ART rather than on a non-nuke such as efavirenz."
The study did not find a connection between efavirenz and low vitamin D levels; in fact, Dr. Huff says that vitamin D levels in the efavirenz group were relatively high, even in comparison with the general Canadian population. This would make it difficult to see a link between choice of anti-HIV drug and vitamin D levels.
Certain other medications that people with HIV commonly take may also affect vitamin D levels, including:
If you are taking any of these drugs or herbs, talk to your doctor about vitamin D.
Over the past few years, there have been reports linking vitamin D deficiency to various health conditions. In HIV-negative people, low levels of vitamin D have been linked to some types of cancer -- most notably colon cancer, but possibly also prostate and breast cancers. In HIV-positive people, type 2 diabetes and cardiovascular diseases, including heart attack and stroke, have been linked to low levels of the vitamin.
Dr. Huff and the other researchers with the Canadian HIV Vascular Study did not find a link between low vitamin D status and thickness of the carotid artery in the neck -- a sign of cardiovascular disease -- though this might have been because the group had relatively high levels of the vitamin.
They did note a possible link with high blood pressure; however, this does not mean that low vitamin D levels cause high blood pressure. "In our study, as in others, individuals with higher vitamin D status are less likely to be overweight," says Dr. Huff. "And, of course, being overweight increases the risk of elevated blood pressure."
Dr. Huff's comments highlight a weakness with much of the current research into vitamin D. The studies so far have shown a link between two factors, such as low vitamin D levels and cancer, but they cannot prove that low levels cause cancer. More rigorous studies are needed to prove a cause-and-effect relationship, and researchers are undertaking such studies to provide firm evidence.
Finally, Dr. Huff adds that the results of the study may not apply to everyone: "It is important to keep in mind that our study population was composed predominantly of white middle-aged HIV-positive men. For instance, they do not speak to the potential problem of vitamin D deficiency in HIV infection among women, Aboriginal [people], persons with dark skin or the elderly."
There is one area where experts are confident that vitamin D plays a role: bone health. A lack of the vitamin can result in soft bones (osteomalacia) and brittle bones (osteoporosis). Also, several studies have shown that elderly people who take vitamin D plus calcium have stronger bones and fewer broken bones. Vitamin D is needed by the body to properly use calcium, so the two micronutrients should be taken together (they are often sold in a combined pill).
This article was provided by Canadian AIDS Treatment Information Exchange. It is a part of the publication The Positive Side. Visit CATIE's Web site to find out more about their activities, publications and services.
Comment by: Steve N. (London UK) Thu., Feb. 9, 2012 at 1:14 pm UTC
My "Partner" and I both were diagnosed with low vit D levels, not By our HIV consultant but from our local G P. when he reviewed a copy of our blood tests done for the HIV clinic last year,WE both had different forms of it I also had calcium loss whilst My "partner" had something different(cannot remember what) we were given medication and now take that twice a day and it has raised our levels back to the normal levels.Both My partner and I are on diferent Retrovirals as My partner is also a Brittle diabetic controled by insulin. I would sugest to all of us on retrovirals ask our clinic to routenely test You for Vit D decifiency
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Thanks to Doug for the screengrab, and Mikey, Sarah, thesteelersnat, Erik and pensfan1989 for the tip. I wasn't watching tv cos I was out at an awesome Andrew WK show last night. But thanks for the heads-up play, guys!
The Pens Winter Classic jersey. [The Pensblog]
Stan Musial. [WHYGAVS]
Northern Iowa at Youngstown State. [Paneech]
Dan Gilbert starting a business boot camp in Cleveland. [Steady Burn]
Derrick Favors is good. [Josh Q. Public]
MSU fans are lenient. [Deadspin]


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It may not be trendy to say it, but I like watching television, but it has to be interesting television. Some of it I watch over the air in the traditional way, some of it on the web where many fine series are to be found. So here is the third in my series of posts about web series that I have been watching. It is amazing to see the variety of content on offer and all of the people who want to tell their stories, these are just a few of them.
This website uses Cookies to enable reporting of general web traffic information in Google Analytics and to enable the Facebook "like" button to work. Comments are screened by Mollom.
© Liam Green-Hughes 2007 - 2018. Some rights reserved. Content published under a Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 UK: England & Wales License. Please note that information is provided here without any guarantee or warranty of any kind and if you choose to use it then it is at your own risk.


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To read all comments associated with this story, please click here.
I agree. But tell that to the marketers--they'll have a fit insisting that everyone should trust them. Uh... no. Just no.
I take the TNO stance with all the Firefox extensions I use (AdBlock Plus with Element Hiding Helper, NoScript with only certain sites I visit "allowed" to use javascript/Flash, Do Not Track Plus because the *real* DNT is a joke). I allow no third-party cookies... so if I don't visit a site, I accept nothing from them.
By the way... does anyone actually allow cookies on a per-site basis? Firefox has the option hidden where I'd least expect it, but I tried to use it and it's a massive PITA these days. Some sites give you 6 or 12 cookies or more just for one page... even not including third-party ones. Add the third party ones to say "no" to and it basically makes going to even one site a chore.
There's got to be a better way. The closest I've came to decent (but still far from it, because it asks for every third-party cookie as well) is having it remember my choices for certain sites (allow for session, allow, deny). A mixture of "block all third-party cookies" and "ask me every time" would be nearly perfect.


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Wow! It was a busy weekend, and the Bureau County Republican's photographers found themselves running from event to event. While it seems we can't ever make it to every event in the county — especially during the summer, we do our best to get to as many as possible.
I hope you were able to attend the Bureau County Fair Queen Pageant, held Sunday at Princeton High School. If you went, you know there was a group of fine young ladies competing for three crowns — Little Miss Bureau County Fair, Junior Miss Bureau County Fair and Miss Bureau County Fair Queen. These queen candidates put in a ton of time and energy to participate in this event, and win or lose — they should all be congratulated for their participation. I think each one of them would also tell you they had a lot of fun throughout the process, including the pageant itself.
Congratulations to Little Miss Bureau County Fair Queen Makenna Maupin of Wyanet, Junior Miss Bureau County Fair Queen Kendra Cain of Princeton, and Miss Bureau County Fair Queen Ashley Simmon of Geneseo. Even though these young ladies are the ones who went home with the crowns and the titles, I'd also like to congratulate every girl who participated in this event. Also the organizers of the pageants and the family members of the girls deserve a big round of applause. Check out our photos in today's BCR.
The American Cancer Society's Relay For Life of Bureau County was held Friday evening at Hall High School in Spring Valley, and though I wasn't personally able to participate this year, I've heard wonderful comments about the event. If you've never attended a Relay for Life, it's clearly something you want to put on your calendar for next year.
This moving event is for everyone — cancer survivors, caregivers, anyone touched by cancer, anyone who wants to help, family members, friends ... everyone. All proceeds from this important fundraiser go to help cancer patients, to provide education, to assist with cancer research and more ... I can't think of a better cause in which to donate. A huge round of applause to those cancer survivors who understand this brutal disease.
How about this great "summer" weather? I'd be completely satisfied is these temperatures hung around the rest of the summer. You?
Remember when? Just wondering ... Do you remember when gas prices used to go up and down by just a penny or two? Now they go up and down by a dime.
It won't be long before that first school bell rings. I know many of you are already thinking about school supplies, new school clothes and shoes, etc. If possible, I'd like to urge you to buy those items in your hometown or at least somewhere in Bureau County. When you shop locally, it's a win-win situation for everyone.
I'd like to personally thank everyone who submitted a nomination for our inaugural Illinois Valley Living Women of Distinction Award. Wow! I was overwhelmed with the number of nominations we received. We have sent all the nominations to our out-of-the-area panel of judges, and we'll be receiving their selections soon. You'll want to mark Oct. 17 on your calendar for our Women of Distinction Awards luncheon. It will be a fantastic event! Again, thanks for all who submitted a nomination.
Thought for the day: In times like these it is good to remember there have always been times like these." Paul Harvey.
Thought for tomorrow: "Some days you're a bug. Some days you're a windshield." Price Cobb.
It's difficult to believe we've already turned the page to August. Don't let this summer get away from you. Spend time with those you love. And remember ... you are important to me and the BCR.
BCR Editor Terri Simon can be reached at email@example.com.


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School camp brings together winners of environmental initiative
The camp was meant as an award, but also as a further environmental leadership training for the active teenagers. The methods used belong to nature and adventure learning, but also included learning by community service. The programme included low ropes and high ropes activities, orienteering, camp fire, night hike and star gazing.
Participants were also motivated to give something back to the Straja community, a place characterized by invaluable natural resources but, at the same time, by irrational development. The teenagers identified the main local ecological issues – deforestation, water scarcity, illegal waste dumps and threats to wildlife – and then worked on their causes. They came up with projects ranging from building animal feeders and creating information panels on nature protection, to producing stickers that urge guests at local hotels to save water and a petition to the mayor. The group signed an official letter asking local authorities to take steps to address all identified issues.
"The camp has a double purpose", said Barbara Tauscher, leader of WWF Austria's environmental education programme. "We want to encourage participation and real proactive attitudes in both the local communities and among the pupils after the end of the competition. Thus in the long run we want to establish a cross-national network of nature conservation active young people."
The four winning teams represented the American College Arcus, Veliko Tarnovo, Bulgaria, the Scoala cu clasele I-VIII Palanca, Bacau county, Romania, the OS 'Svetislav Golubovic Mitraljeta' , Batajnica, Serbia and the OŠ Karađorđe Velika Plana, Serbia. Five pupils and one teacher from each school team attended the camp in Straja hosted by the VIATA camp run by the New Horizons Foundation.
About "European Schools for a Living Planet"In 2011/2012 the school environment initiative "European Schools for a Living Planet" was held for the fourth time. Since the beginning 3,000 pupils aged 12 to 17 from eleven European countries put their individual eco-projects into action. The initiatives' start was given at a one-week pupil-teacher academy in October 2011 in Austria. Via workshops and outdoor actions WWF experts introduced the pupils and their class teachers to the project topics and presented tools for project implementation. The progress of the nature conservation projects could be watched and commented via a publicly accessible interactive weblog. There the school classes kept project diaries, posted pictures and videos about their projects and had the opportunity to exchange experience.
"This was an intense and inspiring year for all participants of the 'European Schools for a Living Planet'", said Boris Marte, Member of the Board of ERSTE Foundation. "33 teams in nine countries proved once again their commitment and innovative approach to environmental issues of today. Education for sustainable development gives young people competencies and motivation to contribute in an active and responsible way to the future of Europe".
"With ′European Schools for a Living Planet′ we particularly want to show pupils possibilities to get active, to express their opinion in public and to motivate others to take action", Tauscher said. "For us, the pupils' overwhelming commitment is the best acknowledgement of the project."


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Contact details
German by birth, Rudolf Heltzel has lived and worked in Kilkenny since 1966. At his studio in Kilkenny he crafts exceptional contemporary jewellery in gold, platinum and silver, set with a wide variety of of carefully choosen precious stones.
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We've spent the last few days recalling the anniversary of the March on Washington and listening again to the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. talk so powerfully about his dream of a land that is full of love and free of hatred. Stirring words. Inspiring words. Spirit-infused words. We're also reminded that they're only words until they produce action.
It's one thing to be inspired when we hear something, another thing to respond to the inspiration and to do something.
Powerful words play a big role in our lives, challenging us and leading us. God is love. Love one another. Be compassionate. Love your enemies. Whatsoever you do to the least. Your brother's keeper. An instrument of your peace. Give to all. The moral arc of the universe is long, but it bends toward justice. Blessed are the poor. All men are created equal. The common good. Government of, by and for the people. I have a dream. Be the change. Make justice a reality for all God's children.
Those and so many other words inspire us to raise our lives and our world to new heights. But they remain words until we commit ourselves to live them. Then they acquire real power.
Change starts with the moment we invite the Spirit that inspires and infuses those powerful words to get inside of us.
The civil rights leaders had a lot of experience with this. They encountered many people who liked the words, but weren't willing to act upon them or sacrifice for them. The words produced a temporary, good feeling, but left no lasting mark.
When the Rev. King was in a jail in Birmingham, Ala., he wrote about this reluctance to live the words. He hoped that white churches would join the movement to ensure that every person is treated as an equal child of God. Instead, many of them resisted. And, as he put it, "all too many others have been more cautious than courageous and have remained silent behind the anesthetizing security of stained-glass windows."
They wouldn't let the words reach their souls.
The Rev. King greatly admired Gandhi and emulated his way of nonviolent protest. During his campaign in India, Gandhi told a gathering of students that they had "reached almost the end of our resources in speech-making, and it is not enough that our ears are feasted, but it is necessary that our hearts have got to be touched and … our hands and feet have got to be moved."
Inspiration is wonderful. Action is what's needed.
Which brings each of us back to that moment of decision. When we hear the powerful words, do we nod and feel inspired for a moment, only to go back to doing what we've done all along? Or do we let the words get inside of us and change us so that we can bring change to the world?
Do we empower those powerful words?


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Sources close to Microsoft have detailed to TNW a difficult, and perhaps unresolvable situation between the two companies that underscores the difficulty with certain Apple rules concerning its app marketplace, and how far the company is willing to go to protect its vaunted 30% cut of in-app revenues.
The difficulty began when Microsoft rolled out the ability for SkyDrive users to purchase more storage space on the service. From that point, the company was not permitted to update its application in the iOS App Store.
The reason? It doesn't pay Apple a 30% cut of subscription revenue generated by the application through the paid, additional storage. Microsoft, TNW has learned, has a new version of the application ready to go, including a key bug fix that would rectify a crashing bug, but cannot get it through.
Microsoft does not appear keen to pay Apple the 30% cut, as it lasts in perpetuity, regardless of whether a user continues to use an iOS device or not, as the billing is through their Apple account.
Therefore, if a user signed up for a few additional gigabytes on their iOS device, and then moved to Android or Windows Phone or not phone at all, for the length of their account, Apple would collect 30% of their fee for storage. This hasn't sat well with Microsoft.
Microsoft has persisted in trying to work out a compromise with Apple, but has thus far failed to come to an agreement. The company offered to remove all subscription options from its application, leaving it a non-revenue generating experience on iOS. The offer was rebuffed.
If a service has a subscription option, it seems, and it is not listed in the iOS store, the application cannot, and will not be allowed. That is, unless you are small enough that Apple doesn't bothers to check. I assume that smaller companies could slip under the radar.


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How Much Sleep?
A necessary evil or greatest pleasure?
Click here if you are unable to view this video.
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articles, videos and blogs featuring timeless Jewish wisdom.
(17) Anonymous, December 24, 2013 11:56 PM
I'm glad others think the same way as me!
I'm glad other people who have posted comments take issue with Lori. True, Rabbi Yaacov Weinberg, zatz'l, recommends minimizing sleep as one of the 48 ways of acquiring Torah. But this can be dangerous. A sleep expert here in Toronto says we're a sleep-deprived society -- and, as such -- increasingly prone to irritability, instability and inattention. The expert cites the Rambam as an authority for getting at least eight hours of sound sleep a night. And I think he's right. I realize that in much of the frum community, the late-to-bed ideology is much in vogue, whether it be bochurim studying late into the evening, or parents of big broods doing their shopping at 11 p.m. But this sleeplessness eventually catches up with you. I know one person who, because she pushed herself relentlessly, succumbed to systemic fatigue syndrome which virtually crippled her for years. So, sleep isn't anything to take lightly -- particularly in our 24/7, fast-paced, frenetic culture.
(16) Aliza, November 24, 2013 8:44 AM
With all due respect, I also disagree
Different people need different amounts of sleep. Some people CAN get by healthily with 4 or 5 hours of sleep. They are the exception, NOT the rule. Stanley Coren did an experiment for his book, "Sleep Thieves" where he gradually reduced the amount of sleep he got. He discovered it took him twice as long as to handle memos in his inbox (pre-email days!), he was irritable, and his ability to mentally process was severely compromised.
A better suggestion is for each person to find their optimum hours of sleep necessary and ensure they get that every night.
(15) J, November 22, 2013 3:46 AM
Reward yourself after a hard days work with a good nights sleep
I, like most of the commenters here disagree with Lori - medical study after medical study has shown the alarming long term effects of insufficient sleep and trying to cut corners on sleep. Sleep is a reward, and not just a necessary evil - after a hard days work we can rest assure that all of the human effort we have made to accomplishing goals is now being 'matched' by Hashem like an organization matching a donors contribution. It's a beautiful thought that we are not using our hands and minds and simply ' letting go' consigning ourselves to Hashem's loving care. Don't underestimate the power of dreams as well, which are analyzed at length in the Torah.
(14) Richard Dennis, November 21, 2013 7:52 PM
How much sleep you ask?
(13) Anonymous, November 21, 2013 6:13 PM
Im nervous about ppl taking it in an unhealthy way. I do not think trying to get less sleep is the answer in the least. A good nights sleep is the solution to almost every problemp of a persons day. And Its a halacha from the shulchan aruch to leap out of bed in the morning- hitgaber kari laamod baboker lavodas borei- because u are returned ur soul in the morning to be on a mission of productivity in ur day, but hashem created a need of sleep for our bodies to regenerate, our souls to get the rejuvination by learning with Him at night, and for us to understand the need for processing time after productivity and that we are not in control of outcome but we must give the days work over to Hashem for Him to seal it with a stamp of eternal stability as only. He can do. Sleep is critical. We are not the vilna gaon. I do nopt think we should strive for less sleep, but rather to use every moment that we are already awake anyway to be productive.


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Type With Your Brain — Like Stephen Hawking 64
Diggester writes that a group of researchers from Universiteit Maastricht's Faculty of Psychology & Neuroscience Department of Neurocognition "have invented a system that translates thoughts into letters. This really is an incredible breakthrough for any type of handicap, from serious motor impairment to debilitating speech. The system has been in real-world testing and is an extraordinary success. The patients are set up to look at a screen of the alphabet, thinking about each letter for a period of time; they should be able to think-type in real time. While it is not near the speed of actual typing, it is the only program of its kind and can only get better." "Of its kind" being relative, reader cylonlover writes "Tech startup Neurovigil announced last April that Stephen Hawking was testing the potential of its iBrain device to allow the astrophysicist to communicate through brainwaves alone. Next week Professor Hawking and iBrain inventor, Dr Philip Low from Stanford University, present their findings at the Francis Crick Memorial Conference in Cambridge, England. In anticipation, Gizmag spoke to Dr Low about the potential applications of the iBrain."


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by John Calvin (compiled by John H. Kromminga)
Bible Text:
Unto Timothy, my own son in the faith: Grace, mercy, and peace, from God our Father and Jesus Christ our Lord. —I Timothy 1:2
But mark here the order which we must keep. It is this: that first of all it would please God to receive us into his grace, and then to send us those things which are profitable and necessary for us.
True it is that our nature will always draw the contrary way, even as a sick man will be more tormented with his pang than with the cause of his disease. In like sort, when we pray to God, we desire him to give us bread to eat, and that he would send us whatsoever is necessary for us; if we be sick, that he would heal us; and if we want anything, that he would send it to us.
See how stubbornly we approach God. We forget that which is most important, namely his love and his grace, and rely on things of baser sort and less account. One will crave to be rich, another would have whatsoever his lust leads him to.
To be short, we are so froward in our desires that we know not what is good for us. And for this cause, let us follow the rule which is here set down, that when we call upon God, we crave of him especially and above all things that it may please him to be merciful to us, and forgive us our sins and take us to himself; and afterward to govern us and be our leader in all ways. —Sermons
John Calvin was the premier theologian of the Reformation, but also a pious and godly Christian pastor who endeavored throughout his life to point men and women to Christ. We are grateful to Reformation Heritage Books for permission to use John Calvin's Thine Is My Heart as our daily devotional for 2013 on the OPC Web site. You can currently obtain a printed copy of that book from Reformation Heritage Books.
Dr. Joel Beeke, who is editorial director of Reformation Heritage Books, has this to say:
"Calvin shows us the piety of a Reformed theologian who speaks from the heart. Having tasted the goodness and grace of God in Jesus Christ, he pursued piety by seeking to know and do God's will every day. He communed with Christ, practicing repentance, self-denial, and cross-bearing. Moreover, his theology worked itself out in heart-felt, Christ-honoring piety. The selections of this devotional bear this out, and hopefully will be used by God to direct pious hearts in our own day."
These devotional readings from John Calvin were compiled by John H. Kromminga. Be sure to read his "Introduction" to John Calvin's Thine Is My Heart.


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The main navigation provides a quick and easy path for customers to review information on the company's technology offerings from SmartBob inventory management to rotaries, capacitance, vibrating rods, ultrasonics, radar, pressure, and tilt switches. There are quick links to complementary bin accessories including dust and flow detection and aeration devices. The home page features the company's newest offering – the 3DLevelScanner – a dust-penetrating, non-contact inventory system that includes three-dimensional mapping software for bins with irregular material surfaces or material that clumps or sticks to the side of the bin.
The site also has a library offering that includes downloads for brochures, manuals, product specifications, part lists, and application worksheets that help streamline the quotation and installation process. Other user-friendly features include a Quick Response form guaranteeing same-day responses to inquiries and a distributor locator that provides instant access to BinMaster sales experts worldwide.
BinMaster is a division of Garner Industries, an ISO 9001:2000 certified company established in 1953 and headquartered in a 75,000-sq-ft manufacturing facility. The company designs, manufactures, and markets sensoring devices for the measurement of bulk solid materials for the feed and grain, food, plastics, pulp & paper, power, mining, and concrete industries.


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Spotted at the Colorado Water Congress in Vail Friday: Republican Dan Maes standing near a table where Supreme Court Justice Gregory Hobbs was signing books.
The irony was delicious.
The Water Congress invited Maes to speak at its summer meeting because he is the GOP nominee for governor, which Hobbs inadvertently had a hand in.
Most polls earlier this summer showed Maes losing the primary to former Congressman Scott McInnis. But in mid July The Denver Post reported that water papers McInnis was paid $300,000 to write contained plagiarized passages written by Hobbs before he was a judge. McInnis' campaign spiraled after that.
Hobbs, an expert on water law and author of several publications, spoke to the Water Congress Thursday.
(Check out what Maes and Democratic gubernatorial candidate John Hickenlooper had to say at the conference by reading Joe Hanel's account in the Cortez Journal.)


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I hope one of the resident gurus can explain an anomaly I came across recently.
I had to set up a machine on a network which had to connect to a machine on another network ( both connected somehow, I don't know details). The info I was give was as follows:
address 192.168.89.32
netmask 255.255.255.192
network 192.168.89.64
gateway 192.168.89.126
However, when I try to bring up the interface, I get
SIOCADDRT: No such process
presumably because the address is not on the same subnet as the gateway. If I change the address to192.168.89.65 ( on the same subnet) it works fine.
Now, the network in question works. It's used for many applications on the site. So how do they do it? How is routing set up with no default gateway on the same subnet?


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A man living in Cambridge who allegedly raped a toddler with another man inside a Mississippi hotel room in May is facing child sex-trafficking charges in federal court in that state and related charges in Massachusetts, according to records.
The Cambridge man, identified in federal court records as Jemery Atral Hodges, 26, also faces child pornography charges in Middlesex County, according to District Attorney Gerard T. Leone Jr.'s office.
Hodges was arraigned on those charges several weeks ago and is due back in Cambridge District Court for a probable-cause hearing on Thursday, a spokeswoman for Leone said.
It was not immediately clear when Hodges will return to Mississippi to face the federal charges.
According to an affidavit in the federal case, on Sept. 6, Hodges showed pornographic images on his phone of children between the ages of about 3 and 14 to a Cambridge man, who threw Hodges out of his home and called police. The man referred to Hodges as "Jeremy" in the court records.
Cambridge police arrested Hodges, and he told detectives that he had received the pornography from his codefendant in the federal case, identified as Marco Laquin Rogers, also 26, who works at an Atlanta hospital, the affidavit states.
A search of Hodges's laptop later turned up videos of him and Rogers raping a girl, who appeared to be 3 or 4 years old, inside a room at a Days Inn in Jackson, Miss., according to the affidavit.
The time stamps on the videos indicate they were made at about 1:30 a.m. on May 26, the same night Hodges checked into the room, according to court records.
Hodges, formerly of Jackson, told Cambridge detectives that Rogers had access to a 3-year-old girl, whom he took to Memphis, Atlanta, and Mississippi to exploit, the filing states.
Rogers's lawyer could not be reached for comment.
Authorities did not say on Sunday why Hodges had moved to Cambridge or whether any children in the area are believed to have been harmed.
A Cambridge police spokesman referred questions to Leone's office and to federal prosecutors.
Leone's spokeswoman, Stephanie Chelf Guyotte, said she could not comment on the Mississippi case. A spokeswoman for the US attorney's office for the Southern District of Mississippi could not be reached for comment.
It was not clear who is representing Hodges in Massachusetts, and no attorney is listed for him in the case docket in Mississippi.
Authorities did not say on Sunday why the man, identified in federal court records as Jemery Atral Hodges, had moved to Cambridge or whether any children in the area are believed to have been harmed.
Hodges is being held on over $100,000 cash bail in the Massachusetts case, Guyotte said.Travis Andersen can be reached at email@example.com. Follow him on Twitter @TAGlobe.


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Postmenopausal women who have diabetes and take oral diabetes medications or insulin are more likely to have acute, symptomatic urinary tract infections (UTIs) than women who don't have diabetes, women who manage their diabetes by lifestyle changes – or even women with untreated diabetes.
Washington state researchers studied 901 postmenopausal women who had reported UTIs and 913 control subjects. Within the month preceding the study, 13.1 percent of those who reported UTIs had diabetes, compared to 6.8 percent of the control subjects. The number of years with diabetes was insignificant, as were the subjects' A1C levels.
The researchers conclude that an increased risk of UTIs in postmenopausal women is associated with diabetes that is treated with medication.
-Diabetes Care, October 200


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|2009-05-16, 09:17
|Link #1
Playful Explorer
Join Date: Mar 2009
Location: Fair Oaks, California
Age: 29
MAL Updater (a.k.a. MyAnimeList.Net Updater)
MAL Updater is a software used to automatically update your anime list on the website MyAnimeList.Net when you watch something on your computer.
~ Head here to see an overview on the software's features.
~ Head here to learn about MyAnimeList.Net.
~ Head here to see screenshots.
~ Head here to download the newest version.
~ Head here to browse and search for new themes.
MAL Updater Themes:
There are a lot of user made themes
for the MAL Updater Software.
You can find a listing of all of them here.
On the right you can see the most recent ones.
Soon you will also be able to upload
your own themes to the site.
MyAnimeList Updater Features:
This program connects to the website with your MAL user account and retrieves your Anime List.
From here on there's a lot you can do:
* Start watching some Anime in one of the supported players, and MalU will detect which Anime and episode it is, and update your MAL list automatically with the last episode you have watched.
That's right: MalU will check your video players and identify the Anime and episode.
* See how many people are watching the same Anime at the same time, and open a chat window with them.
* Manually sort and update your list from MalU (episode watched, score, status, etc).
* Tell MalU to search in your hard disk for the next episode of the Anime you are currently watching, or from any in your list, and launch it in your default player.
You can even use a Hot Key and hook a mouse button for this. There is also an option so that MalU automatically launches the next episode when you close the player.
* Have it automatically check TokyoTosho for torrents of new episodes for the Anime in your list, have it download and launch the .torrents automatically according to some filters, and even tell uTorrent to store each file in its own Anime folder, if you have set it for every show. You can even have it automatically discard either MKV or AVI when both versions are present.
* Check your hard disk to see which Anime have new episodes available, and how many.
* Show in MSN and mIRC what you are watching, including your score, episode/episode total and a URL to information of the Anime.
You don't need to install any extra plugins or scripts in MSN or mIRC for this.
* Show in mIRC what you are listening to in either Winamp or Last.fm. No extra plugins/scripts either for this.
* You can make your own php forum signature which shows what you are currently watching, your last updates etc.
* Batch rename your Anime files to some criteria like Fansub - Anime Name - Episode.
* Send your computer system info to a mIRC channel (ok this is unrelated to Anime, but you can use this to replace any script/dlls you are currently using).
* It has full 64-bit support and detects more than 4 GB of RAM.
* Easily move and rename entire folders of Anime with a batch tool.
P.S.: By the way, you WILL need an account with MyAnimeList.Net, as well as an up-to-date anime list with MAL.
P.S.S.: I got permission from the moderator "GHDpro" to post this thread.
Last edited by Toddler Naruto; 2010-08-30 at 19:16.
|2009-05-17, 17:57
|Link #3
IT Support
Join Date: Feb 2009
Location: Pennsylvania , United States
Age: 28
It would be great if I could use this, but most of the time I'm in Mac OS X. It would be great if someone made a version of the MAL updater for Mac OS X and Linux without using Wine/Crossover Mac/Linux.
|2009-05-17, 21:11
|Link #5
Playful Explorer
Join Date: Mar 2009
Location: Fair Oaks, California
Age: 29
|2009-05-18, 09:49
|Link #7
Playful Explorer
Join Date: Mar 2009
Location: Fair Oaks, California
Age: 29
By the way, I had absolutely nothing to do with the creation of this program/application, I just want as many people as possible to know about it.
Last edited by Toddler Naruto; 2011-06-13 at 17:43.
|2009-05-26, 19:53
|Link #9
Playful Explorer
Join Date: Mar 2009
Location: Fair Oaks, California
Age: 29
|2009-05-26, 22:18
|Link #10
Gregory House
IT Support
It's still not release quality, and I still want to do it solo for the time being, but the source will be available as soon as I can get something useful and working out of it (read: basic set of supported mplayer features, basic database features). My idea was to integrate features exactly like this one, plus Amarok/iTunes-like collection support, feed aggregation, Wikipedia/ANN/AniDB integration, and whatever else people might want to. So keep your eyes out for a 0.1 release in the coming months
Last edited by WanderingKnight; 2009-05-26 at 22:31.
|2010-03-16, 18:06
|Link #13
Playful Explorer
Join Date: Mar 2009
Location: Fair Oaks, California
Age: 29
|2010-08-30, 19:10
|Link #15
Playful Explorer
Join Date: Mar 2009
Location: Fair Oaks, California
Age: 29
By the way, there's a new update: http://www.malupdater.com/MalUpdater...itle=Changelog
|2010-09-01, 17:03
|Link #16
Senior Member
Whoa this seems great. I use MAL but I'm very lazy and I always forget to go and update the newest episodes. Sometimes I even miss whole series and thus my list is incomplete as it is. So thanks alot for posting this
One thing annoys me though. As I said, my list might be outdated. So for example just as I started watching K-On 22, it complained to me that it's higher than what I last saw. Can't this be '' fixed '' and for it to just update it to 22 then ? D:
|2010-09-01, 17:06
|Link #17
Senior Member
Join Date: Oct 2008
Location: Quebec
Age: 26
One thing I hate is simply that it see even the movies or video I'm watching that are not anime, is there is a way to stop that but still update the anime watched. I didn't find how to find this the last time, and that is why I dropped it.
|2010-09-02, 00:53
|Link #18
Playful Explorer
Join Date: Mar 2009
Location: Fair Oaks, California
Age: 29
|2010-09-02, 04:31
|Link #19
Senior Member
Here's another issue.. I have Download All Torrents automatically checked on options, but it doesn't download them. For example, I just clicked on Manual Search on the torrent thing ( there were no results for some reason even though it should check them automatically ), and Ookami 10 appeared there but it was in gray color. I had to double click it to download it ...
Maybe I failed with setting up the filters ? I put Mazui to the group name, and '' mkv '' to the next part ... I thought this would do it but no ?
|2011-06-13, 17:44
|Link #20
Playful Explorer
Join Date: Mar 2009
Location: Fair Oaks, California
Age: 29
|Thread Tools


text:
Submission + - Has the local browser cache become useless? 1
lesincompetent writes: Think about it. In this age of high end hardware and relatively high bandwidth, storing things on a device many orders of magnitude slower than any other is something we should get rid of. Even for static content: is it really worth the disk I\O effort? How much page loading time am i saving? Not to mention the fact that browser caches are among the first causes of system littering. It's been many years now since the last time i had a browser with disk caching enabled on any of my systems (besides chrome, unfortunately, because you can't deactivate it.)


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When Scott Guy was brutally murdered on his New Zealand farm, many pointed the finger of blame at his brother-in-law. Susan Chenery details the case that shocked a quiet rural community - and transfixed a nation.
Quaint streets are lined with fastidiously maintained flower boxes. With its resolute neatness, the town of Feilding, located on New Zealand's lower North Island, is a study in civic pride. Signs exhort its residents never to drop litter lest it lose its status as the nation's Most Beautiful Town, an award it has won 14 times and looks like it's planning on keeping.
Sitting on a fertile plain, Feilding is a cow town, a hub for the surrounding farming district. It is a polite community that doesn't require traffic lights. Running out from its centre is a long, straight country road. It was on Aorangi Road that the district lost its bucolic innocence.
On July 8, 2010, Scott Guy, 32, rose in the wintry pre-dawn. He made himself a coffee, went online to check Facebook, the news and the weather. At 4.40am, he headed out in his ute to milk the cows. In the pitch dark of the country, he found the gates to his driveway closed and got out to open them; momentarily, he was silhouetted in the car lights. His killer stepped out of the darkness.
When neighbour David Berry found his body next to the ute with its engine still running just after 7am, Guy had been shot in the face, hands and arms at almost point-blank range. The shots not only ripped through the jaw, mouth and eye of Scott Guy, but through the heart of his surviving family.
"Not my baby, not my Scottie!" wailed his devastated mother, Jo, in the disbelieving confusion of the hours that followed the appalling discovery. For the Guy family, that shattered morning was the start of a journey that would only become more painful and surreal as it hurtled towards a foreign terrain of unimagined grief, shifting truths, altered perceptions and betrayal.
"We'd think things couldn't get any worse," says Jo now, "and then, suddenly, [the situation] would flip - and flip again. It was like being tossed around in a washing machine."
The police quickly ascertained that the murder of Scott Guy was "intensely personal". Those driveway gates were only ever closed when stock was being moved. He had been ambushed. But they could find no reason for his brutal end. There was no evidence of any criminal activity in Guy's life - or of a spurned lover. "Scottie was very likeable," says Jo. "He had a lot of friends; he wasn't the sort to tick people off."
Says his sister Anna, now 31, "Scott just had to walk into a room and everybody loved him. He was very outgoing and could make everyone laugh."
Three chocolate Labrador puppies from a litter of eight disappeared from Scott's yard the night he died, leading his father, Bryan, to think he'd disturbed a burglar. "The police very quickly said that wasn't the case," he says, "but that was always my theory [at the beginning]." The puppies were never found.
Photographs of Scott Guy show a handsome, muscular, blue-eyed boy who was full of life. In television footage of national stunt-riding competitions, he can be seen riding a Palomino through flaming jumps. He left behind a two-year-old son, Hunter, and a beautiful wife, Kylee, who was seven months pregnant. A thousand people attended his funeral at Feilding's St John's Anglican Church on July 16, 2010, the winter trees stark against the blue hills.
Suddenly, the Guy family, used to the gentle, unchanging rhythms of life on a dairy farm, found itself blinking in the glare of a huge murder investigation. The seemingly inexplicable murder of a farm boy resonated deeply in this agricultural community. And the media soon discovered something else: they might just be country people, but the photogenic Guy family had charisma.
"We were grief-stricken, trying to understand what was going on and organising a funeral," says Jo. "Then we had the media knocking on the door all the time. Hundreds of people came into the house. I counted 70 one day and remember thinking, 'Who are these people?' "
As events unfolded, the saga started to resemble, noted one journalist, "reality TV without the prizes". Bryan modelled a dignity and fortitude in extremis that captivated the nation. On one occasion, he came straight from viewing his dead child's body to make a television appeal. Holding his weeping wife, he told the country, "You've got to hug your kids, your husband, your wife, your girlfriend."
The Guy family has been farming its 250-hectare property, Byreburn, since the 1920s. It is exceptionally close-knit, with all four of Jo and Bryan's four children - Nikki, Scott, Anna and Callum - either living on the property or very close by at the time of the tragedy.
As a girl, Anna, an attractive blonde, was a natural performer who appeared regularly in school plays and musicals. Her boyfriend, from the age of 15, was local boy Ewen Macdonald, whose father owns a hunting store in Feilding. Few people knew that she battled bulimia during her teenage years. "I was very sick, so I think I isolated myself from my friends and Ewen was that constant person there, so I relied on him a lot," she tells me. He was, she says, "solid and stable and always knew what he wanted to be - a dairy farmer".
Macdonald was drawn to the golden family. He loved the reassuring rhythms of its home life, with church and roast lunch on Sundays. From the age of 18, he worked tirelessly on the farm alongside Bryan, whom he adored. He was known in the district to be obsessed with farming.
In November 2001, when she was just 20, Anna married Ewen and had four children in quick succession: Finn when she was 22, Jack at 23, Lucy at 25 and then Wade at 27. "I just threw myself into it," she says. "The kids were my life. I didn't sleep a lot for a few years."
Nevertheless, Ewen Macdonald expected her to keep their house tidy at all times and for the children to be bathed and in their pyjamas when he came in from work. "I knew he was quite controlling," she tells me, "but I'm not quite the type to do what someone tells me to do, so we clashed a little bit there. He did it in a roundabout way. He'd make little digs when he came home, like, 'What have you been doing all day? The place is a tip.' He didn't drink. He didn't have any friends; his friends were my girlfriends' husbands."
New Zealand's 60 Minutes journalist Sarah Hall interviewed the family one month after Scott Guy's death when their grief was still very raw. "I remember thinking, 'Why is this woman married to him [Macdonald]?' " says Hall. "Anna is so charismatic, vivacious and joyful: he was very quiet and reserved. He clearly didn't want us to be there or to go on camera. He just watched us. He was a kind of periphery figure. It struck me that something wasn't right. Anna says now, looking back, he didn't want to go and see [Scott's] body when everybody else was going and she had to force him to be a pallbearer at the funeral. Afterwards, I got into the car and said to my producer and cameraman, 'The brother-in-law did it.' "
At one point during the 60 Minutes program, Anna tearfully says to camera: "[Whoever did this] how can they sleep at night?" Scott's wife, Kylee, terrified by the fact that her husband's murderer was still at large, fled to her family at Hawkes Bay, leaving empty the brand new dream house she and Scott had built together on the property. She has never returned.
"It was the why and the who," recalls Hall. "I remember Anna saying to me, 'Are one of us going to be next?' " No one knew that the prime suspect was among them, eating at their table or sleeping in one of their beds.
Back in 2002, Scott, disenchanted with the early-morning milking, had left the farm and spent a year working as a jackaroo in the Australian outback. Returning to New Zealand a year later, he went to Hawkes Bay and worked on a beef farm for about nine months; he and Kylee met at a rodeo. "From the moment we met, we just couldn't be apart," she later told the jury at the trial of her husband's alleged murderer. "I just loved him to bits and he loved me. He was one in a million."
When the job on the beef farm finished, his father talked him into coming home. "He still didn't want to milk the cows, so we said he could run the cropping and the young stock, rearing the calves," says Bryan. Macdonald would manage the staff and day-to-day management of the dairy shed. "We thought that if we separated the roles enough, then he and Ewen could be their own bosses in their own areas."
Friction among farming families is commonplace; the countryside is full of the disgruntled descendants of those who have lost the battles for the family property. Those who do not inherit are doomed to work for those who do.
Bryan Guy tried to deal with the fraught business of succession as fairly as he could. As part of the process of preparing to hand it over to the next generation, four years ago he and Jo bought the lovely, light-filled wooden house in town where we meet. They had sold the homestead on the farm to Anna and Ewen for an interest-free $250,000 loan. This was much less than it was worth and the move infuriated Scott. "They were helping Anna and Ewen when we were struggling," Kylee later told the court. (Scott and Kylee were living in a rented cottage on the property.)
Bryan organised for both couples - Scott and Kylee, Anna and Ewen - to each purchase a 10 per cent share of the business (the farm and dairy). He and Jo would retain 80 per cent of the shareholding. "We said to the kids that there was an opportunity to be involved in the farm if they wanted it, and that if we all worked together, we would be able to have a better business than each of us working separately," Bryan tells me. "We were aware that there could be possible tensions and went to quite a bit of trouble to make sure everybody talked about what the issues were.
"We got a facilitator in to help us go through people's expectations for the future. We also talked about exit clauses so that if one party wasn't happy, the opportunity was there to exit from the business. We hadn't decided on future share purchases at the time of Scott's death but, at some stage, Scott and Kylee and Anna and Ewen would likely buy another 10 per cent each, leaving Jo and me with 60 per cent."
Bryan structured the trust funds in such a way that if either of his children divorced, their former spouses would have no claim on the farm.
Scott's sudden return after a long absence caused simmering tensions to surface. "Ewen couldn't stand Kylee," says Hall. "He thought she was a princess." Ewen complained to Anna that he worked far harder than Scott, that it wasn't a fair partnership.
Anna remembers stressful exchanges with her husband. "He'd say, 'First Scott's on the farm, then he's not, then he wants a house and then he wants this and he wants that.' I told him to talk to Scottie or Dad. He'd say, "It's your dad's farm, he can run it how he wants to. It's not my place to say.' Ewen was such a perfectionist and Scottie was so laid-back and cruisy that it got on his nerves."
One night at a concert, after he'd had too much to drink, Scott told his sister, Nikki, that Ewen was "the worst thing that ever happened to our family; the farm would be better if he wasn't there".
In June 2008, Scott informed his family at a gathering that, as the oldest son, he should inherit the farm when Bryan died. His siblings were shocked by his outburst and blamed Kylee for it. His father wasted no time in telling him that this wasn't going to happen: each of them had to work, make a contribution to the business, in order to have a share in the farm. After all, he, Bryan, had had to earn his share when he entered a 50:50 partnership with his own father. Nothing was ever going to be "just inherited".
Scott Guy's assertion that night, the Crown would later tell the court, had been his "death warrant". Says Jo now, sadly, "I thought we'd sorted it all out."
Ewen rarely spoke at the family meetings. Four months later, in October, the old home belonging to Scott and Kylee that was being moved off the property to make way for their new one was torched in the night and burned to the ground. In January 2009, their new one was vandalised. Doors, windows and water pipes were shattered and the walls in every room punctured. Painted on the walls were the words, "FUKEN BITCH SLAPPR". The strength and ferocity of the attack was horrifying.
Soon after, a hunting lodge on a neighbouring farm was burned to the ground. In September 2009, Ewen "went crook" at Scott at a family meal at the Elm Cafe in Palmerston North, saying he was sick of him not pulling his weight. Scott felt that Ewen was "taking over the farm", according to his younger brother, Callum.
After this, says Anna, Ewen changed. He took a silk tree and hydrangea clippings to Scott and Kylee for their garden, helped them with some landscaping and made a montage of photos for them. "All of a sudden he became quite nice and was doing things with Scott and Kylee and doing heaps up at the school with Jack and Finn and I thought, 'Okay, he's obviously realised he can't just sulk and not talk about things,' " says Anna.
"A lot of our arguments were about communication. I'd say, 'You have to talk to me,' and he would just go quiet. It was kind of a love-hate relationship. We were more like flatmates, really."
In June 2010, Scott and Ewen went to a conference in Invercargill, at the bottom of the South Island. They shared a motel room, ate pizza together and came back excited for the future of the farm. But their visions for the future were very different. Scott wanted to subdivide the land and create a recreational lake for wave-boarding. Ewen, on the other hand, was interested in farming technology that would increase production and save costs.
That same month, Anna and Ewen went on holiday to Fiji. "It was good, we had fun," she remembers. "Now I look back and think I didn't know the real person I was there with."
On July 8, 2010, the day that Scott Guy died, Ewen Macdonald, who was in charge of staffing, had rostered Scott on to oversee the early-morning milking, a chore his brother-in-law hated. That night, the family were due to attend a dinner because the farm had been awarded two milk-quality awards. Scott had excitedly bought new clothes: it was a rare night out for a young father. Ewen said he wouldn't go, but didn't say why.
In the months after the tragedy, Anna became wrapped up in her children and her heartbroken parents. "Mum was a mess for about six months," she says. With hundreds of cows to milk every day and without Scott to help, Ewen worked even harder on the farm. Nobody noticed anything different about him. "I ate with the kids and we just lived separate lives," says Anna. "We didn't spend any time together, not even to eat a meal or watch a movie."
On April 7, 2011, nine months after his death, Ewen Macdonald was arrested and charged with the murder of Scott Guy. With all leads exhausted, the police were confident that if they could identify the property vandals, they would have their murderer.
And Callum Boe, a young farm hand at Byreburn, had made a confession. At night, when Anna was sleeping, he and Macdonald had gone out on "missions". They were the deer poachers who'd shot two $20,000 trophy stags on a nearby farm. They'd slaughtered 19 calves using a hammer on another neighbour's farm. They'd gone onto another neighbour's property and emptied a milk vat of 16,000 litres of milk, worth tens of thousands of dollars. But Boe had been elsewhere in the early hours of the morning of July 8.
For five hours, Macdonald denied all involvement with the animal slaughters and property vandalism - before finally admitting his guilt to police. "He couldn't believe that Callum Boe dobbed him in," says Anna. The police interview footage shows him sweating, spluttering, asking for water. Finally, he says pitifully, "I'm not going home tonight, am I?" He hasn't been home since.He denied the murder, however, saying, "I am not that psycho", and continues to deny it.
Ewen Macdonald had been a part of the Guy family for 10 years. When he was arrested for the murder of their son and brother, its members were left reeling in disbelief. Six days after her husband's arrest for the murder of her brother, Anna Guy consented to an interview with Sarah Hall. "She was absolutely shocked to the core," says Hall. "She was scared she was going to break down in the interview. She just couldn't believe that it could be possible. It wasn't just the murder charge; by now, Ewen had admitted his involvement in the other charges [the property vandalism and animal slaughter]."
Anna was falling apart. Torn between the vestiges of love and revulsion she felt for the man she'd married, she was making herself sick. Had she really spent the past 10 years sleeping with a murderer? "I thought the police must have got it wrong," she tells me. "I could understand you might do damage to property; if you're really angry, you probably could do that. But actually hurting anyone or killing someone, that was just too extreme. I didn't marry that person. I didn't know that type of person. I wouldn't have thought I'd choose that type of person. You have history, you've had children. I kind of felt physically sick about it the whole time. I blamed myself for a while.
"The thing I can't understand is that he never raised a hand to the kids or me. I never saw him treat animals badly or hit them or yell at them. It was very hard to understand. He promised he hadn't killed Scott. But the trust was gone."
She had to tell her children that their father had been taken accused of the murder of their uncle. Finn, her oldest child, was just seven.
Anna, who is not divorced but has changed her surname back to Guy, was left without a provider when Ewen went to prison and had to sell the homestead back to her parents. Then, 13 shell-shocked months later, the family faced the most publicised trial the country has ever seen. "They were good-looking white people," said Ewen's high-profile barrister, Greg King, by way of explanation in a TV interview. It was a Shakespearean storyline: a seemingly mild, gentle pillar of the community, on the board of the school trustees, on trial for the murder of his brother-in-law.
The Guy family's lives were dissected in minute detail for a public who fed off every morsel. Their business became New Zealand's business. "We couldn't get over at the trial how [the media interest] took on a life of its own," says Bryan. "It was like being in somebody else's movie. There were never going to be any winners, no matter what happened at the trial. It was not going to bring Scott back."
At the trial, the defence presented evidence that, in the days before his death, Scott had been concerned enough about a white sedan on the other side of the river to call the police. A neighbour said a rough-looking person stinking of alcohol had turned up at his house wanting to know if Scott Guy lived there. He'd felt sufficiently alarmed not to pass on the correct address.
As well, a cigarette had been found at the scene of the crime of the same type - Winfield Gold - that had been stolen in a burglary four days earlier by a man who - when arrested later - was also in possession of semi-automatic shotguns, methamphetamine and other assorted drugs. The man's only alibi for the possible murder of Scott Guy was a meth addict who'd once threatened to kill police.
Then there was Simon Asplin, a farm worker who held a long-standing grudge against Scott dating back to their school days and who'd lost his tractor-driving job on the farm when Scott returned after his hiatus in Australia. "He's pissed a lot of people off," testified Asplin.
It was a cliffhanger trial. Macdonald had, says Sarah Hall, "the best defence lawyer in the country by far, and he did an incredibly good job". Greg King's ringing rhetoric was beamed into New Zealand homes every night to riveted viewers. "The summing up was so good," says Hall, "that the prosecutor went and shook his hand at the end of it. It was a Shakespearean tour de force. The jury was captivated." (King was later found dead beside his car in Wellington on November 3 in a suspected suicide.)
The prosecution's evidence, on the other hand, was largely circumstantial. The gun was never found and a boot print at the scene could not conclusively be proven to be Macdonald's.
Knowing he'd have to face the media straight after the trial, Bryan had written three statements: one for a guilty verdict, another for a not-guilty verdict and a third for no verdict. He and Anna had decided that whatever the jury came back with, they would accept it. Anna could barely breathe.
On July 3, 2012, Macdonald was acquitted of the murder of his wife's brother. The jury believed there was room for reasonable doubt. Emotionless throughout the trial, Macdonald burst into tears as Kylee ran from the court, shouting, "He killed my husband."
In September, Macdonald was sentenced to five years for arson and vandalism, 17 months of which he had already served. Kylee is now working with the Sensible Sentencing Trust to have the case re-examined. The police have told the family that there are, currently, no other suspects, but will reopen the case if new evidence comes to light.
There has been a verdict, but no sense of closure for the Guy family. "Anna genuinely doesn't know whether Ewen did it or not," says Hall, who has become her close friend. "She has been through hell. But what she is saying is that she doesn't want this to be the one moment in her life that affects the next 30 years."
"Until you go through adversity, you don't know how you'll cope," says Bryan, whom Sarah Hall and her producer have affectionately dubbed the Dalai Lama of Feilding. "One of the things we didn't want to be is angry and bitter. We read books about how your emotional state affects your physical health. We don't want to be getting crook. To keep healthy, we've got to keep in a good state of mind. Anna has to get on with life. If she holds that resentment in her heart, it will destroy her and the kids. It's a pretty big incentive."
Says Anna: "I hate feeling cross or sad or angry or anything like that. I don't want to live like that. I want my children to have a happy childhood." She now believes Ewen to be "a bit of an unusual personality. He definitely wanted to be a great farmer, but it just turned into this huge competition. I don't think Scott even knew he was in the competition. Once you're in it, you're kind of stuck in it and that's all you think about. He was so tired, he was kind of just spiralling out of control. [Ewen] was making out that he could cope and I thought he could - but obviously he couldn't."
Incredibly, during all of this, a star was born. Anna was so compelling on TV that offers to work in media are coming her way, and she is working on local radio. There will almost certainly be an interesting second act for the homebody housewife from Feilding.
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text:
NASCAR driver Kurt Busch sits in an Andretti Autosport Indycar as crewmen attend to it on pit lane during a testing session at the Indianapolis Motor Speedway in Indianapolis, Thursday, May 9, 2013. (AP Photo/AJ Mast)
Saturday, May 11, 2013 4:22 pm
Drivers envy Kurt Busch's Indy experience
By JENNA FRYERAP Auto Racing Writer
Busch set a track record in winning the pole for Saturday night's race. Only nobody wanted to hear about his qualifying run, not when Busch could talk about turning laps around Indianapolis Motor Speedway in an Indy car.
Busch completed Indy's Rookie Orientation Program on Thursday, hitting a top speed of 218 mph in defending IndyCar champion Ryan Hunter-Reay's car in a special one-day test that had NASCAR drivers dripping with jealousy.
"I thought it was a cool opportunity for him," younger brother Kyle said. "I wish I would have been able to go do something like that, but I've just never really felt like it was my time."
AJ Allmendinger will run the Indianapolis 500 this year for Penske Racing in the seat Tony Stewart passed on when Penske offered him the ride in December. Stewart last ran the 500 in 2001. Robby Gordon last did it 2004, and John Andretti, who last started a Sprint Cup race in 2010, made five consecutive Indy 500 starts from 2007 through 2011.
Busch has so far said the Indy 500 is not on the table this year - Saturday was officially opening day at Indy - but that he's interested in pursuing the race in 2014.
"That's amazing, an amazing experience. I'm proud of him," said five-time NASCAR champion Jimmie Johnson. "I'm really happy that a NASCAR driver has had a chance to go get in good equipment over there and go to a track and show what we can do.
"We've seen open-wheel guys come this direction and I'm happy to see a closed-body driver go that way. Not that it's easy, in any of the vehicles, but I feel like it's harder for an open-wheel guy to leave all of the down force in the light vehicle that they have and come to a NASCAR vehicle. I think the transition might be a little easier. Time will tell if Kurt pursues this further we'll be able to see it, but I think he'll impress early going that direction and getting out of the heavy car into a lighter car with more down force."
Kyle Busch said he's always been interested in dabbling in other forms of motorsports, and had to pass on a Formula One exhibition with Toyota when it conflicted with NASCAR's season-ending awards banquet.
But he said there's nothing stopping his older brother from pursuing this opportunity.
"If I was in Kurt's position, then sure, I'd do it," Kyle said. "I've always said that if I can ever win a Cup championship, that sort of suffices what you want to do over here. Of course you want to win more than one, but at least when you get one, I feel you can go venture off and do some other things. Like I said, if I was in Kurt's shoes, I'd go do it, too.
"We'll see. Maybe he'll run the 500."
For his part, Kurt Busch said he's interested in putting together a sponsorship and marketing package for a proper Indy 500 deal in 2014. In the meantime, he'd be interested in running some IndyCar oval races this year to get some experience.
"We'll see what the schedule looks like and see if there's any opportunities to run a race or two," Busch said. "I liked it. I really enjoyed it. You never know what might happen next."