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Kevin Black Promo For One World Hip Hop Championshop "Sign Up Now For Your Chance To Win $1 Million On MTV2 This Spring" [User Submitted]
J reports "It's official. Industry heavyweight Kevin Black co-signs the World Hip Hop Championship! SIGN UP NOW FOR YOUR CHANCE TO WIN ONE MILLION DOLLARS ON MTV2's "One World Hip Hop Championship" LOG ON NOW: www.WORLDHIPHOPCHAMP.com Referral Code: 8
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Daytime Skyline
If you are so inclined, please feel free to leave any comments or feedback. Also remember that clicking on the photo takes you to my online gallery hosted over at smugmug where you can view this (and my other photos) in various sizes. If you enjoyed this post, please take the time to pass my post(s) on to others whom you also feel would enjoy my work. Thanks for stopping by!

subset: commoncrawl


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The La Jolla Suite is a luxurious 882 square-foot room with one king bed. Includes two 37" TVs with digital pay-per-view movies, a spacious living room and a small table. This room offers a wet-bar to entertain guests plus all standard room amenities and daily fitness access and in-room Wi-Fi at an additional cost.
Room Amenities
- Square Footage: 882 sq. ft.
- Smoking/Non-Smoking: Non-Smoking
- Mattress: Simmons mattress
- Refrigerator: Yes
- Workspace: Yes
- Furniture: Desk, couch
- View: Mountain
- Decor: Modern
- Window Treatments: Blackout Curtains
- Sheets: 300 count
- Tub/Shower: Yes/Yes Separate
- Hair Dryer: Yes
- Bath Products: Gichrist & Soames
- Vanity: Yes
- Makeup Mirror: Yes
- Shower Head: Rain
- Phone: Yes
- On Demand: Yes, extra fee
- Internet: Yes, extra fee
- Laundry: Yes, extra fee
- Room Service: Yes, extra fee
- Television: 37" HD TV
- Telephone: yes
- Alarm Clock: yes
- Iron w/ Board: yes
- Coffee Maker: yes, extra fee after each packet of coffee


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|Your cart is currently empty
|Your cart is currently empty
La Flor Dominicana Air Bender Valiente
Size: 6 1/4 x 60 Box of 20 Cigars
Wrapper: Maduro Ecuadorian Habano
Binder: Dominican Republic
Filler: Dominican Republic
The La Flor Dominicana Air Bender is a Full bodied cigar with a lot of Flavor. Starting off with initial Blast of Cedar Spice, the Air Bender balances out into a Refined medley of Oak, Pepper, Dried Red Fruit, Chocolate, and Leather.
The Mastery of this blend is Phenomenal. The name Air Bender is for the discipline in restraint of power, just like the foundation of Martial Arts. Strong, yet balanced. Try it today.


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Extortion At Work
A new twist from hackers at work is locking your documents and threatening to delete them all unless you pay up a ransom. That is what happened to more than a thousand employees at several security related companies and government organizations. Ransom at work gives the details on some of the companies hit by this attack. The technique was to lure employees to a fake job opening and then infect the pc with a trojan (NTOS.exe) that looks for personal data and uploads it to a website repository, then encrypts everything on your pc. Here's the ransom note they leave on your pc:
Hello, your files are encrypted with RSA-4096 algorithm (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RSA).
You will need at least few years to decrypt these files without our software. All your private information for last 3 months were collected and sent to us.
To decrypt your files you need to buy our software. The price is $300.
To buy our software please contact us at: firstname.lastname@example.com and provide us your personal code -xxxxxxxxx. After successful purchase we will send your decrypting tool, and your private information will be deleted from our system.
If you will not contact us until 07/15/2007 your private information will be shared and you will lost all your data.
Glamorous team
The advice from security experts:
The advice from security experts:
if you've fallen victim to Gpcode or any other type of ransomware, you should never pay up under any circumstances. Always contact your antivirus provider and make sure you back up your data on a regular basis.


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Evan Hecox
Evan Hecox is a Colorado-based artist whose work captures the essence of urban environments through a unique process that involves first-hand observations of his surroundings and then progresses into drawings and paintings that are striking in their graphic simplicity. His work recognizes and evokes the transitory nature of cities and of the lives that exist within them. By visually embracing all aspects of these environments he uses the decay and detritus of modern cities as key visual elements in his work, thereby challenging traditional preconceptions of beauty. Like mental snapshots distorted by the haze of memory they both record a place and time as it actually was and re-write fact by removing certain elements while emphasizing and distorting others. His cross-disciplinary interest in photography, fine art and design infuses his work with an unusual but dynamic mix, ranging from near photo realism to simplified abstraction. He has exhibited his work widely in the United States as well as exhibitions in Paris, Sydney and Tokyo and others.
2014 Artists
- Andrew Schoultz
- Camille Rose Garcia
- Clare Rojas
- Cleon Peterson
- Cope2
- Dana Louise Kirkpatrick
- Deedee Cheriel
- Dzine
- Ernesto Yerena Montejano
- Estevan Oriol
- Evan Hecox
- Gary Panter
- How and Nosm
- James Cauty
- Jamie Reid
- Jen Stark
- Jim Houser
- Keith Haring
- Lee Quinones
- Mark Mothersbaugh
- Maya Hayuk
- Monica Canilao
- Neck Face
- Ravi Zupa
- Revok
- Richard Colman
- Ryan McGinness
- Shepard Fairey
- Skullphone
- Space Invader
- Stanley Donwood
- Swoon
- Thomas Campbell
- Tim Armstrong
- Winston Smith
- WK Interact
Day Time Exhibits
Join us in 2016 for an exhibition unlike any other curated by Shepard Fairey. Artwork will be available for purchase at the event.
Tickets to the exhibit will go on sale in Spring.
A Single-Day Pass gives you full access to explore over 40 world famous street and contemporary artists.
Feel free to walk in any time during daytime hours (10AM – 6PM).
Tickets will be $12* at the door.
Children 10 and under are allowed in free with a ticket-holding adult.
Full Cash Bar available.
Evening Aftershow tickets sold separately.
Art Alliance 2014 was proudly sponsored by Hennessy.
A portion of 2014 event proceeds were donated to Chicago Art Partnerships In Education (CAPE).
*plus applicable service charges
The 2014 Aftershows featured a live performance from Nas, Z-Trip, Deltron 3030 and DJ Shepard Fairey.
2016 Aftershow details coming soon. Join our E-List to be the first to know.
while you experience each unique installation and exhibit from The Provocateurs.
Artwork will be available for purchase at the event. Doors at 9PM, show at 10PM. Advance tickets may be purchased above, at a discounted rate of $20. Tickets will be $22 at the door. 18+
Full Cash Bar available. Capacity will be limited.
Art Alliance is proudly sponsored by Hennessy.
A portion of the event proceeds will be donated to Chicago Art Partnerships In Education (CAPE).
About Art Alliance 2014
One of the largest art shows ever assembled, the 2014 Art Alliance: The Provocateurs, featured trailblazers of the art world such as Shepard Fairey, Swoon, HAZE, Space Invader, Dzine, Mark Mothersbaugh, FAILE, Ryan McGinness, Winston Smith, RETNA, Stanley Donwood, Monica Canilao, Clare Rojas, Estevan Oriol, Evan Hecox, Gary Panter, Jen Stark, Camille Rose Garcia, Revok, Cleon Peterson, D*Face, WK Interact and many others. 2016 information coming soon.
The show was far more than a typical exhibition, combining world class art with experiential and interactive components such as: music, public art, panel discussions, charities, local community interests, and education.
In 2014, the Art Alliance: The Provocateurs exhibition took place during, and in partnership with, Lollapalooza, one of the largest music festivals in the world, which draws hundreds of thousands of culturally sophisticated and creatively curious visitors to Chicago each summer. The energy and vibrance of our selected visual artists parallels that of the musicians who rock the festival every year. Cross-pollinating with the Festival allowed the art show to reach beyond the all-too-often narrow audience for art.
Additionally, the exhibit featured live music and a Saturday night Aftershow to complement the revolutionary spirit of the art in The Provocateurs.
The 2014 event was proudly sponsored by Hennessy.
The Venue
Art Alliance: The Provocateurs was held at Block Thirty Seven, 109 N. Dearborn Street, in a beautiful 25,000 square foot loft-like space encompassing an entire city block in the heart of the Loop.
The Cause
A portion of the event proceeds were donated to Chicago Art Partnerships In Education (CAPE), an organization which inspires students to be passionate about their education by weaving visual and performing arts into their classroom lessons. They bring academic subjects to life through art, and partner teaching artists with Chicago Public School teachers to develop original, creative lesson plans.
Are you interested in partnering with or sponsoring the 2015 event? Please contact Courtney Graber Trucksess for more info.
E-mail List & Social Media
Sign up for our Official E-mail List or follow us on social media to be on the list for special offers & official updates:
For questions on the 2016 exhibit, aftershow or anything else, contact us at email@example.com.
Are you interested in partnering or sponsoring the event in 2016? Please contact Courtney Graber Trucksess for more info.


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BBC Radio 1 is championing "Rudeboy", the insanely brilliant new single from UK D&B heroes Sigma.
It was the station's Record of the Day yesterday and picked up plays from Nick Grimshaw, Fearne Cotton, Scott Mills and Greg James. And Dev loved it so much that he gave the track a spin on his show this morning!
The single is classic Jungle/D&B and features vocals from South London rapper and singer DOCTOR.
If you didn't hear it yet check out all the remixes – including edits from Ray Foxx and Decibel – on our Soundcloud.
The official video has racked up close to 220,000 views on UKF. Watch it here.
"Rudeboy" is out December 15th, but you can pre-order your copy on iTunes.


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Welcome to the Far Eastern Conference
Exiled from the NBA, vilified by the press, and ridiculed for a serious of questionable YouTube videos (eating Vaseline? c'mon!), Stephon Marbury is seeking redemption—and vast riches—in basketball-mad China. Now, if he can just win over his Communist bosses, he'll be the biggest thing since Yao Ming
On his first morning in China, former NBA point guard Stephon Marbury went to the lobby of his hotel to attend what his translator had described as a "banquet" thrown by the management of the Shanxi Brave Dragons, who'd brought in the player for a second consecutive season in the hopes of shedding their reputation as one of the worst outfits in China's not very distinguished league. Enticing Marbury, the biggest celebrity ever to play in the Chinese Basketball Association, should have been cause for jubilation. Yet it was hard to detect much joy at the "banquet," which was taking place in a room the size of a parking space off the hotel's dining hall. The guest list consisted of two grimly perspiring middle-rung ecutives and a translator. No food was served, just tea.
One got the sense that the finer points of graceful living didn't count much in the Brave Dragons' hometown of Taiyuan, an industrial city variously described in the online travel literature as "gritty," "smoggy," and "a fucking shithole." Outside, in the late autumn chill, the coal plants were going full tilt. Even with the windows closed, the air smelled like an emergency and had a salty chemical flavor you could taste with your eyes.
Still, Marbury seemed not to mind. "You get used to it," he told me before the meeting. "Really, it's not too bad, except this—" He gestured out the window at the unhandsome landscape of grease-blackened garages and industrial warehouses engulfed in the brown gloom. "And this—" He pointed at his mouth, indicating his distaste for the local cuisine. "When I first came here, for the first two weeks, I wanted to kill myself. But now I don't think about it."
Unlikely as it may sound to hear a multimillionaire athlete so emphatically resigned to a place like Taiyuan, it's worth recalling that by early 2010, when Marbury first cast his lot with the Dragons, he had reached a place in life where options did not abound. After leaving the NBA at age 32, the two-time All-Star's career had been defined not by his triumphs on the court but by what happened off it—a catalog of errors that included public spats with coaches, romancing a Knicks intern in his truck, and a series of candid Webcasts in which he wept, burst into song, ate Vaseline, and generally volunteered grist for broad speculation that he had gone out of his mind.
But then, when things looked dire indeed, associates put Marbury in touch with Chinese steel magnate Wang Xingjiang, who owned the Shanxi Brave Dragons. Until last year, Chinese law limited teams from paying their American players more than $60,000 per month (a sum Marbury characterized to me as "a little change"). As further enticement, Wang promised to crack China's growing market of 300 million basketball fans for Marbury's Starbury brand of low-cost apparel and shoes, a business that had been on ice since 2008. Promising an initial investment of $2.2 million, Wang and his associates would facilitate the selection of factories, coordinate construction of a nationwide franchise, and assist with the beleaguered point guard's rebirth in the fastest-growing economy in the world.
So Marbury left behind his family in genteel Purchase, New York, tried it out for a season, and found, to his great relief, a population of adoring fans willing to overlook his past. He drew record crowds to Brave Dragons games. At signings in Taiyuan within a month of his arrival, he moved 1,000 pairs of Starbury shoes in a few hours. He'd recently discussed with Shanxi a three-year contract and had not ruled out the possibility of retiring here.
"It's been unbelievable," he told me. "The fans there, they showed me so much love. They gave me a second chance." Here, Marbury raised his sleeve to show me where he'd had the characters of his Chinese name—Ma Bu Li—and a heart beside the word CHINA tattooed on his arm. "Two years ago, no one would get near me," he continued. "Now I got [a major American bank] wanting to invest $50 million in my company. Man, China has changed everything for me. Everything."
With the season opener fifteen days away, Dragons management was eager to check in on the condition—physical and otherwise—of the team's six-foot-two point guard. But Marbury had more immediate concerns. The previous season, he'd stayed at the five-star World Trade Hotel, which sits on the toniest strip Taiyuan has to offer, convenient to Rolex and Burberry shops, with a half-dozen restaurants and a spa on the premises. This year, to his displeasure, he'd been stabled instead at the Grand Metropark Wanshi Hotel, whose sumptuousness was a notch or two below what you'd expect at the Omaha airport Sleep Inn.
Upon arriving, he'd complained to his handlers, to no avail. Marbury did not fancy the idea of spending four months in this hotel, whose rooms were carpeted in cigarette-pocked low-nap the color of earwax and whose mattresses would have registered respectably on the Mohs scale of mineral hardness. Nor did he want to stomach four months of meals at the Wanshi's restaurant, an undersea-themed eatery whose evening buffet included such dishes as Grab Stick, Intestine Duck, Best Thick Seam, Ear Rabbit, Black Fungus, Meat, and Duck Bloody Piece.
In the tiny meeting room, Marbury was ushered to his seat by the Brave Dragons deputy Mr. Song, an unsmiling man with close-mown hair gelled into tidy gleaming barbs. Through the interpreter, a nervous twentysomething who gave her name as Cindy, Mr. Song explained that he was in the process of finding a good factory to start minting Starbury shoes, but that many factories had powered down for the winter and production would likely have to wait until spring. "For now," he said, "we want to concentrate on basketball."
"The business stuff will work itself out," Marbury said serenely. "I'm not worried about any of that. Right now I want to talk about my living conditions. I don't want to be in this hotel. I want to be in the World Trade."
This set off a long, hushed caucus among the Chinese parties. At last Cindy very antsily explained that due to a legal dispute between the team's owner and the World Trade, the hotel issue was a matter of some delicacy.
Marbury offered another proposal: Perhaps the team could arrange long-term quarters. "A three-bedroom apartment," said Marbury. "With TVs and a chef, and a maid to come every day. I could do that as well. I'm gonna be here for three years. It'd probably be cheaper to rent a place anyway."
But Mr. Song pursed his mouth and nodded sourly, giving the impression that he was not in the habit of indulging fussy requests from players. Marbury's Chinese teammates, by way of comparison, didn't get to stay in a hotel at all. They lived by the team's rusting gym on the outskirts of town, in a dormitory of pink concrete with a big pile of coal in the yard.
Mr. Song agreed to take up the hotel upgrade—a $14-a-night proposition—with his boss, then he turned the conversation to basketball. The Brave Dragons, he said, were promising this year, having recently acquired a second American player, Jamal Sampson, late of the Denver Nuggets. The most important thing, Mr. Song said through Cindy, was that the fourteenth-ranked team finish in the top eight.
Marbury gave him a straight look and held up his index finger. "Number one," he said.
And Cindy went, "Yeeeeeeeeahh," part weird cheer, part dubious meow. "So you will, you will lead our team to the top eight? You promise that?"
"Don't worry," Marbury said.
"Okay! We believe you! Ha! Ha!" said Cindy, in a tone of forced enthusiasm. "So, ah, now Mr. Song want to know, before you come to China, you maintain the trainings?"
She cast a nervous eye over Marbury's middle, which was a tad softer and rounder than it had looked beneath the lights at Madison Square Garden. Marbury nodded.
"Every day?"
"Listen," said Marbury. "All you need to know: When December 10 comes, when they throw the basketball up, I'll be ready."
"Auch!" said Mr. Song, though whether he meant, "Auch—what a relief" or "Auch—this person is completely full of baloney" was not immediately clear.
"We believe in you!" cried Cindy.
"No problem," said Marbury. "All love."
Waking up in Taiyuan, a city of 3.5 million located 250 miles southwest of Beijing, was breathtaking in the literal sense. The city lay under an ochre fog of startling opacity. Even behind the fid panes of my hotel windows, the air had a dizzying reek you could faithfully reproduce by sealing your head in a sack of Match Light charcoal. A walk around the neighborhood turned up symptoms of an industrial economy in transition: lots of people driving Mercedeses and Lexuses, yet still more people carrying multiple offspring and lumber on mopeds that seemed to be made mostly of tape. Sephora stores and Cadillac dealerships verged on aged tracts of cratelike concrete buildings Pompeian with particulate grime. Not a single window you couldn't have graffitied with a fingertip.
Inspecting the local firmament, I could see no birds in flight. "If you see one, let me know," said Marbury when I told him this. In fact, during my week in Taiyuan, I would not see a bird, or a rat, or an ant, or a cockroach, or any living creatures at all, except for human beings and a substantial population of upsettingly adorable and horny stray lapdogs.
Still, in the city's defense, "shithole," with its connotations of biotic robustness, was an unfair epithet. It was more like an engine, which was how Marbury regarded his adoptive home. Riding through Taiyuan, he pointed out the gleaming condominium towers going up along the custard-colored Fen River, and the storefronts where he imagined Starbury outlets opening their doors a few months from now. "This is one of the richest cities in China, and I'm here to be a part of it," he told me several times. The Starbury Corporation's future projects here might range from skyscraper construction to lumber and cotton, to "anything that's got anything to do with something being made." Even in the coal soot itself, Marbury saw future riches. "You just gave me an idea," he replied when I marveled at Taiyuan's grime. "Mobile car washes. Give these people a taste for being clean. I'm gonna get the schematics on that immediately."
Improbable as Marbury's schemes of merchandising/real estate/mobile car wash/import-export magnatehood might sound, it's worth considering that _(a) _Marbury is arguably the biggest star in the CBA, and (b) in China's increasingly basketball-obsessed but notoriously stingy consumer population, it's hard to imagine a product better poised for success than a celebrity-endorsed sneaker that sells for fifteen bucks. It is also important to note that behind Marbury's lofty visions are three Starbury corporate offices (North Carolina, New York, Los Angeles) and a staff of eighteen—two attorneys, two MBAs, accountants, a designer, etc.—working full-time to make the dream real.
When I paid a visit to Starbury's operations center in Morrisville, North Carolina, a village of office parks near Raleigh, I did, admittedly, half expect to walk into an empty room with maybe a big TV and a couple of guys playing Nerf hoops on the clock. Instead I found a ten-room suite full of business-clad people hard at work. One woman was busy designing a line of Starbury camisoles. The in-house attorney was straightening out some particulars of Chinese copyright law. The rest of the staff was dealing with the financial intricacies of Marbury's real estate holdings, a $75 million portfolio leased to such disparate and unlikely tenants as a U.S. attorney, the Department of Homeland Security, the National Archives and Records Administration, and the Social Security Administration.
Starbury CFO Gustavus Bass told me that Marbury had so far sunk $10 million of his own pocket cash into Starbury Corp. Once production started in China, he said, the business was forecast to return profits within a year. Bass, a former Wachovia corporate banker, led me down a hall, past a boardroom with a table the size of a duckpin-bowling lane, into Starbury's operations center. He showed me whirring servers, flat files full of blueprints and architectural designs for the Chinese retail stores, and a twenty-five-station call center ready to be staffed. "We've been in the planning stages for a very long time," Bass said. "We're positioned to go."
In China, Marbury's famously erratic personality, too, seemed newly conditioned for popular consumption. Despite his renown as an arrogant megalomaniac outstanding in a field of arrogant megalomaniacs, in person he came across as a warm, even earnest man guilelessly fond of almost everyone around him. "I love the Chinese people" was his reflexive response to complaints about flying sputum on the streets or the sharp elbows of the sidewalk throngs. One night at dinner, he summoned the chef from the kitchen to embrace him. More than once Marbury would tell me, with a nearly uncomfortable directness of emotion, how glad he was that I'd come to China with him and that he'd miss me when I left. Nothing in his manner smacked of PR gamesmanship. Rather, he gave the impression of someone desperate to forget all the haters back home and see only a world full of new friends.
And in Taiyuan, his friends were legion. At one point, I remarked that it must get irritating not to be able to take two steps without some stranger panting on his neck. "Nah," said Marbury. "You never know when the day's gonna come when people stop wanting your autograph."
With no professional obligations pending this week, other than to ease himself through jet lag, Marbury designed his days around two fid points: meals at American fast-food establishments and spa treatments across town at the World Trade Hotel. To my mid relief, the massages were the opposite of the sort I'd been warned might be pressed upon me in China. For two hours, small, strong women tenderized our limbs and thoras, delivering a program of sensations that would have perfectly conveyed to a blind, deaf person the experience of being yelled at. Now and then the masseuses paused their assaults to take photographs of the point guard. My own attendant seemed put out that she'd gotten stuck working my unremarkable anatomy instead of Marbury's famous frame. She repeatedly expressed her frustration by pulling my hair and jamming her fingers into my ears.
Somehow the thrashings seemed to put Marbury in a reflective mood. So while the ladies assailed him, we talked about his early life in Brooklyn.
Marbury grew up in a housing project in Coney Island, in a four-bedroom apartment his parents shared with their seven children. His mother worked in a day-care center. His father made his living "doing whatever he could to get money—construction, gambling, hustling." Marbury's three older brothers were all gifted basketball players who narrowly missed NBA careers. Shortly after Stephon's birth, the elder Marbury brothers set about molding him into a pro athlete. "I was like a lab rat. I was a science project," he said. "They put a ball in the crib with me. They said, 'Okay, we're gonna breed a point guard with Stephon, and we're gonna kick the door down with him.'"
The hazards of life in Coney Island made the project an urgent one. Marbury recalled more than once hitting the deck during games when shots rang out. Three cousins died in gunfights over the years; another served time for killing a man. "We all knew me getting to the NBA was my family's way out," he said.
Doubts about Marbury's future faded early. By the time he was 6, he could shoot and dribble with both hands, and when he was 12, The Hoop Scoop magazine listed him as the top sixth grader in the nation. College recruiters were scouting him at age 14.
After his freshman year at Georgia Tech, Marbury joined the Minnesota Timberwolves and began living out a career narrative the Greek tragedians would have liked. Marbury Agonistes: the story of a young and brilliant basketball player remembered for his bedeviling public contests with one after another of the deadly sins. First came the Parable of Envy of Kevin Garnett, in which Marbury, stricken, allegedly, by jealousy of his close friend's $126 million contract, forced a trade from the Timberwolves, breaking apart one of the most thrilling on-court partnerships in the NBA. Marbury then wandered to unsuccessful seasons with the New Jersey Nets, the Phoenix Suns, and his hometown Knicks. "He only played street ball growing up," says Tom Gugliotta, who teamed up with Marbury in both Minnesota and Phoenix. "In Minnesota, he struggled to find a balance between being aggressive and including the other guys. And in Phoenix, ironically, he had learned what he could and couldn't do, but they asked him to be the guy he always wanted to be, and that's a scorer."
The Knicks years, as his detractors see them, paid him the wages of Anger and Pride, plus the better part of $100 million for five losing seasons. His quarrels with coach Larry Brown ved the fans and the tabloid press, who called him "the most reviled athlete in New York." In 2008, new Knicks coach Mike D'Antoni sidelined Marbury in the season opener against Miami, which caused him to weep in secret on the bench. The exile, apparently, was permanent, and the blow to his dignity was so grave that when D'Antoni surprised Marbury by offering to play him later in the season, the point guard declined and was punished with a $400,000 fine.
Let's pass over, shall we, the Lust Parable about the intern and the strip joint and the sports utility vehicle? The New York Post has already chronicled those details under the cover-story headline KNICKS INTERN: MY SEX IN A TRUCK. That was in the autumn of 2007, when he was entering a period of unpleasantnesses of near bathetic excess. The Knicks tied a record for season losses that year, and in December, his father suffered chest pains while watching a game at Madison Square Garden. Marbury didn't find out until after the game that his father had died. "It still upsets me that I didn't get to see him," he said. "And it was hard on my family—bringing my wife to his funeral when there's reporters everywhere and the whole world knows I just fucked another woman. There's nothing harder than that."
The lone bright spot for Marbury was the Starbury brand, which in sixteen months on the market sold more than 10 million shirts, shorts, and $15 sneakers. The sports media briefly relented their hostilities to acknowledge Marbury's decency in selling sufficiently inexpensive footwear that inner-city youths wouldn't need to kill or rob anyone in order to own. And then, in 2008, Steve Barry's, Starbury's retailer, went bankrupt. Not long after, the Knicks released Marbury, and he was banished from the Garden. "People were saying, 'The brand is over,' " said Marbury. " 'His basketball career is over. He's done.'"
Marbury is so persistently haunted by the public version of his poetic decline that it isn't necessary to ask him about it. Talk to him for more than five minutes and he'll compulsively revisit the story's details, like someone who can't stop picking at a sore.
On Kevin Garnett: "They said I was jealous because he made $126 million, but the league changed the ceiling [of a max contract to $71 million, the price of Marbury's extension]. How could I be jealous of that?"
On refusing to play: "I refused to play? After y'all said to the whole world y'all not playing me and embarrass me on opening night? Have me sitting there in front of my hometown? They exiled me!"
On YouTube-inspired reports of his insanity: "I was just having a good time, playing, yelling, screaming, enjoying my- self, and people took from that, 'Marbury's crazy. He's losing his mind.'"
On the Vaseline-eating thing, specifically: "I had a sore throat. My friend's grandmother said to take Vaseline. I did, and it went away."
Crucified is the word Marbury uses to describe his treatment. And you have to wonder how you could possibly resist developing a Christ complex if you were born to a family who had, for decades, been waiting in faith for a magical child to come along and work miracles from way outside the three-point line, to make more money than God, and to shepherd his loved ones out of Coney Island and into comfortable homes in the suburbs.
Marbury, a recently born-again Christian, saw his resurrection as imminent in China, from which his name and brand would spread across the globe, to India, then through unspecified African nations, then possibly, back to the United States. When I asked him what anyone would do with so much money, he described a corporate vision inspired by the Rapture, not the Robb Report.
"I want to build my own city," he said. The settlement, he explained, would be built on a 4,000-acre cotton farm in South Carolina he had his eye on. The citizens would be "all my family members. They gonna have their own businesses, companies that will feed off of my company. I want to build my own Walmart-style store. I want to build my own hospital and school system. I'll take all the people where I'm from in Coney Island and tell them to leave everything they got inside their homes and move into our new homes. We'll have all the people sign up to be Starbury employees before they move. This is my vision of what I want to do if this thing really pops off the way I think it will if we continue to stay on the path."
And yet, so far, Marbury's days in Taiyuan seemed curiously devoid of the meetings and factory tours you might expect of someone building a billion-dollar empire. Save a single one-on-one workout and a few treadmill sessions, Marbury didn't seem all that concerned with getting in shape. So while the Chinese members of the Brave Dragons were off playing exhibition matches and training twice a day, the preseason stretch in Marbury's entourage was a purgatorial study in petit-opulent torpor: usually emerging from quarters near the two o'clock hour for a meal at McDonald's, Pizza Hut, Subway, or Kentucky Fried Chicken; then to the World Trade Hotel for another bruising massage; then dinner at said American franchises.
The only break in the monotony came one evening when the American members of the Brave Dragons coaching staff mounted a plan to go out on the town. In the lobby, I waited for the others with a young guy named Wes, a former player for Oregon State, who was picking up a few bucks as a freelance assistant coach of the Brave Dragons junior squad.
I asked him how the team was looking. "They got this one kid who's good," he said. "You don't understand. They keep these motherfuckers in a dorm and make them lift weights three, four hours a day."
If the Chinese were such rigorous cultivators of talent, I asked him, why had China produced only one international basketball star, the pituitary marvel Yao Ming?
"This next generation, they'll probably have a few more. You don't know. They're probably breeding the motherfuckers from petri dishes."
We were soon joined by Patrick Sellers, a former UConn coach who'd come to Taiyuan after being implicated in a recruiting scandal. "I got thrown under the bus, and here I am. It's weird here and everything, but man, I think it's a gold mine."
At last Marbury came down, and—by coincidence—we ran into one of the Brave Dragons' chief sponsors, "Brother Wong," an elfin man in Gucci loafers. Brother Wong, who had supposedly amassed a fortune as a builder of local roads, was very pleased to see Marbury. He kept laying hands on Marbury's arms and shoulders and seemed to want very badly to climb into the point guard's lap. He insisted we go immediately to his favorite karaoke bar.
Marbury and I caught a lift in Brother Wong's chauffeur-driven Audi SUV. "You starting to see the Starbury movement," Marbury said. "Brother Wong's like Mark Cuban without being the owner. He wants to buy the team." Wong, said Marbury, was well connected with China's Communist Party, pointing out large yellow O's in the corners of the Audi's windshield, evidently emblems of officialdom. Then, at Marbury's prompting, Brother Wong hit a switch on the Audi's dashboard and a siren on the roof blared and wailed. "Police! Police!" cried Brother Wong, laughing madly. Traffic scurried from our path, and the Audi made for the karaoke bar at a desperate speed.
No one sang at the karaoke bar, a place the term bar is inadequate to describe. It was a fantastic labyrinth of mirrored hallways, astrobe with neon accents and red and blue LEDs, generally creating the effect of inhabiting a giant article of robot lingerie. In a room twice the size of my New York apartment, a rotund older woman dressed in a plaid field-hockey skirt led in a cadre of young women and briskly directed them, singly and in pairs, to sit beside us on the couch. The girls wore an unhookerly mufti of jeans or miniskirts or T-shirts or Annie Hall&#fl013;style sweaters and, as far as I could tell, were not quite prostitutes but merely young women who drew a paycheck to ply lonely men with beer and grapes, and pinch them on the knee. The only hitch in the distribution came when the field-hockey lady ushered in a girl resembling an Asian Julia Child whose eyes happened to be crossed. There was no immediate clamor for her company. She stood before the room for a painful length of time. Finally, Marbury, who'd been obliviously drinking Sprite and BlackBerrying through the whole escort-disbursement procedure, looked up and invited the big girl to his area of the sectional, a quiet act of valor that put the rest of us to shame.
I was partnered with a girl in an ivory body sock who knew enough English to claim her name was Apple. Further attempts at conversation foundered. Apple, who seemed to have mistaken me for a basketball pro from the American mean streets, periodically flashed what looked like gang signs at me and put her mouth to my ear to murmur, "I love basketball." At one point, Brother Wong grew concerned that things between Apple and me were not progressing at a proper clip. He crossed the room and reached out, as though for a handshake. Then he pulled the old grade-school stunt of clapping my palm to the girl's breast and shrieking with laughter.
Mercifully we departed, honor intact, well before dawn. I, for one, was glad to escape, though Wes had sipped a few beyond his limit and was bereft to be going home empty-handed. "Can't we get some bitches?" he kept saying. "Can't we? Can't we?"
The hired friends also seemed glum to see the last of us, or of Marbury, anyway. A few of them gathered by the exit. "Ma Bu Li, Ma Bu Li," they were moaning as we made our way into the benzene-scented night.
In the days after our night on the town, something odd happened: Marbury more or less dropped out of sight. He hardly stirred from his quarters. He canceled appointments or simply did not show up in the lobby at the times we'd planned to meet. I got the clear sense he was avoiding me.
Then, after two days of near invisibility, he e-mailed me, asking me to come to his room. When I entered, he was on the phone with a travel agent, booking a hotel room in Beijing for the following night. "Yeah, sure, the Marriott. I'm just looking for the cheapest thing," he said.
He hung up and gave me an unhappy look. "I'm leaving Taiyuan," he said. "I been compromised." Management, he told me, had informed him that his services as a player were no longer required for the regular season. "If they make the playoffs, then they'll use me, is what they said. Otherwise, they want me to help coach."
He was, in other words, being asked to recapitulate his humiliating final season riding the bench for the Knicks. It was hard to understand this "offer" as anything but a ploy to force Marbury to quit the Dragons, which, he told me, was what he had done.
The source of the trouble, said Marbury, was that the team had recently hired a new general manager named Zhang Aijun, who was cleaning shop. "He didn't like me from the beginning," Marbury said. He gazed out the window. A tatter of Hefty bag danced on the wind. "The Knicks tried to hold me hostage," he said, apropos of nothing. "They fined me 400 grand and said that I refused to play! Refused to play? D'Antoni said I wasn't playing! He said that to the world! What I refuse to do is compromise. I understand what's right and what's wrong."
The old outrage wore on for a time and then exhausted itself. Marbury leaned back in his chair.
"It's bullshit," he said. "But you know, the good thing about this situation, at least I know it wasn't anything I did. You know what I've learned in my trials and my errors in the last three years? You can't let anguish derail you. People are gonna say, 'Oh, Stephon went to China. He messed up, and look what happened.' But I know the truth. This is a time of growth right here. This will work out for the best. I'm just gonna go to Beijing and find another team."
But this seemed an impossible ambition. The season started in less than two weeks, and presumably all the contracts for foreign players had been settled months ago. Marbury's position was, I felt, sad. Surprisingly so. Or, rather, it was really surprising to find oneself suddenly sickened with sympathy for an international sports celebrity with more money to his name than many American small towns.
Then again, it's never pleasant to see anyone's dream collapse, and Marbury's dream of China was about the vastest, most ornately bespired cathedral of ambition I'd ever met anyone trying to build. It contained, so far, $10 million of his own personal cash, one year of his life, the adoration of some number of thousands of Chinese people, putative fame and wealth in India and unspecified countries throughout Africa, his own personal city in South Carolina, skyscrapers, and Marbury's left arm, indelibly inscribed &#fl665; CHINA.
When such an extraordinary volume of wishes comes abruptly to earth, you can't help but feel the ground quiver the tiniest little bit.
There was little left to say. We sat awhile in silence. Then Marbury said he had to call his wife, Tasha. He hadn't yet given her the news, and he wasn't going to now. Their 6-year-old son was sick with impetigo. Tasha was exhausted, and he didn't want to add to her burdens right now. He dialed. Through the receiver, I could hear the fatigue and anxiety in Tasha's voice. "I know it's hard, Boo. I know you're challenged, but it's gonna be all right, I promise," said Marbury, sounding oddly calm and assured for someone whose ultimate hope to redeem himself in the eyes of the world had almost certainly fallen apart.
The following day, a platoon of solemn well-wishers gathered at the Taiyuan airport to say good-bye. Marbury posed for a few last photos. He told his fans how sorry he was to leave Shanxi but said little else. In the meantime, the Brave Dragons' GM, Zhang Aijun, was handling the breakup with considerably less aplomb. Since the rupture had become final, Zhang made a spirited public effort to saddle Marbury with blame for the split. What helped poison the contract, Zhang said, was Marbury's insistence on a $30,000 health-insurance policy for himself and his family and, and, his request for a $14 upgrade to the World Trade Hotel.
Before Marbury's plane had touched down in Beijing, ecstasies of Schadenfreude at his failed Chinese experiment broke out on American sports sites: STEPHON MARBURY: WEARING OUT HIS WELCOME IN YET ANOTHER CONTINENT, one headline ran. "Hide yo Vaseline, hide yo webcams," a blogger warned. "Marbury is on his way back to the United States of America."
But as it happened, reports of Stephon Marbury's professional collapse were premature. Within days of his departure from Shanxi, he secured a spot with a fledgling team in Foshan, on China's southern coast. While not a stellar club, Foshan wasn't much worse than the Brave Dragons. With Marbury, who in March made headlines scoring fifty-five points in a single game, Foshan took down Shanxi in both their matchups, helping to scuttle Shanxi's hopes of a top-eight season finish.
Nor did the split with Shanxi deal a mortal blow to Starbury. To cover the $2.2 million promised by the owner of the Brave Dragons, Starbury Corp. briskly liquidated Marbury's $75 million real estate business. They recently engaged Apple's marketing firm to handle the build-out of their shops and, according to Bass, have already started churning out a Chinese line of shoes at a cautious volume of 5,000 pairs per month.
In Marbury's opinion, the shake-up in Taiyuan could not have worked out better. Shortly after I'd returned from my trip, he called from Foshan. His enthusiasm was so forceful, I had to turn down the volume on my phone. "Man, you wouldn't believe it!" he said. "It's like Florida here! Grass! Sun! Blue sky. Did you see what they said about me? How I got exiled out of China? How I lost a second home? Man, they were just waiting for it. But it shall be well. I'm here, and I'm happy. I've landed. Both feet."


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Express Yourself with Pearls!
This pearl and lace stunner had us at hello at first glance! I mean…seriously first glance – we were stunned at its pure chicness the moment we laid eyes on it at our photo shoot! With its haute couture vibe and high end shimmer with lace, you'll be the true style icon at the prom ball! SHOP THE LOOK HERE!


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A Dover man charged with the July 2011 killing of a father and son n their Dover home has been sentenced to life in prison, the Attorney General's Office announced today.
A Dover man charged with the July 2011 killing of a father and son n their Dover home has been sentenced to life in prison, the Attorney General's Office announced today.
Jason T. O'Neil, 28, was arrested by Dover Police on July 25, 2011 and charged with two counts of first-degree murder in the killing of Howard A. Sheppard, 91, and Howard R. Sheppard, 60, who were discovered earlier that morning at their home by a family member. The senior Sheppard died from blunt force trauma to the head while his son died of multiple stab wound and lacerations. O'Neil was a neighbor of the victims at the time.
O'Neil was indicted on Oct. 3, 2011 on first-degree murder, burglary and other charges by the Kent County Grand Jury. On Thursday, Dec. 20, 2012, O'Neil pled guilty but mentally ill to two counts of first-degree murder. He was immediately sentenced by President Judge James T. Vaughn, Jr. to two life terms in prison without the possibility of parole.
Dover Police arrested a neighbor in a double murder on North Governors Avenue on Monday, the same day investigators began their investigation.
Jason T. Oneil, of 346 N. Governors Ave., was arrested for two counts of first degree murder and other related charges stemming from the double homicide, which occurred at 344 N. Governors Ave. sometime between Saturday morning and Monday morning, police said.
A family member found 91-year-old Howard A. Sheppard and his son, 60-year-old Howard R. Sheppard dead inside their home Monday morning, Dover Police Capt. Tim Stump said Monday afternoon. The family member then immediately called 911 at 9:21 a.m. Monday.
The elder Sheppard still operated Sheppard Furniture Repair out of the house, neighbors said.
The suspect had apparently broken into the residence between Saturday and Monday, Stump said. Both victims were killed during the encounter as a result of head trauma, Stump said.
Investigators said they were able to develop Oneil as a suspect shortly after the bodies were located. The investigation led to a search warrant of Oneil's home, where police say physical evidence was recovered.
The bodies have been turned over to the Delaware State Medical Examiner's Office to determine the exact cause of death, Dover Police said, he said.
"We're waiting on the Medical Examiner's Office to complete their autopsies and then we will have a cause of death," Stump said.
The 'grandfather of the community' & his son slain
John Edwards, 24, has lived about four houses down from the Sheppard home for nearly a year. The Sheppards were always friendly to Edwards and his friends, he said.
"We'd see them walking down the road and they would stop, say hi and joke around a little bit," Edwards said. "I can't even fathom how the family feels about this. I told the police, 'If there's anything we can do, just let us know.' We try to be good, Christian, caring people."
Maria Valentin, 50, and her husband Hiram Maldonado Valentin, 58, have been neighbors with the elder Sheppard for 33 years. They live across the alley from the Sheppards' backyard on the 300 block of North New Street.
"I am in shock because he was a good man,' Maria Valentin said. "He would talk to us and joke. He was a veteran and he worked for the state for so many years. He was a good person, and his son was really nice."
The Valentins' children called the elder Sheppard "grandpa" while growing up, Maria Valentin said. Then, their grandchildren took to calling him by that same term of endearment.
"He was the grandfather of the community," she said.
The community loses a craftsman
Hiram and Maria Valentin admired the elder Sheppard, who was still strong and would still repair old furniture and make it look new again, from time to time.
"He was the only one in the neighborhood who did this work," Maria Valentin said. "Now, there is no one."
Sheppard's son was not as mobile due to an accident, and his father helped him out, Hiram and Maria Valentin said.
"He was always walking," Hiram Valentin said of the elder Shepard. "The last time I saw him on Thursday, he was walking. He was still working, too. He was still strong.
"We always had a good relationship," he added. "He was a good neighbor. We helped each other – whether gardening or whatever."
Problems before
There have been break-ins on this block before, and one woman's van was stolen in January, said Edwards, of the block that is less than a mile from the picturesque historic downtown area of Dover.
"Our car stereo had gotten stolen and there wasn't much the cops could do about it," Edwards said. "So, I hope they catch the person who did this.
"I think it's going to take a major toll on the neighborhood in general," he said. "It's starting to turn into a big city. I moved to Delaware [from Detroit, Mich.] to get away from that."
Laura Morsberger, 36, lives behind the Sheppard home on North New Street with her family. When Morsberger saw the police cars, she thought it was for a routine, domestic dispute call. But, then she learned it was the Sheppard home – a spot criminals have targeted before, she said.
"People take advantage because they know he's elderly," Morsberger said. "It's horrible. Crime has gotten worse and worse."
Something was amiss
Morsberger and Maria Valentin knew something was wrong when Sheppard's truck did not move.
"At dinnertime, you always saw him in his truck because he always went so slow," Valentin said.
"Mr. Sheppard would drive that red [Ford pickup] truck 20 miles per hour all over Dover; he was in and out 10 times a day," Morsberger said. "He'd park over here [on Mary Street] and walk to his house to get some exercise. He'd always tell everyone what was going on in the neighborhood."
—Antonio Prado, Staff Reporter, July 27, 2011


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Women's Organic Polo Shirt by Stanley & Stella is in stock. We will print it as soon as you order it.
Delivery time: 3-6 working days
Form-fitting polo shirt for women, 95 % organic cotton, 5% spandex, brand: Stanley & Stella
Product dimensions measured on a flatly laid out product.
Tip: measure an item of clothing at hand to compare.


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1 Item(s)
Grimm, inspired by the classic Grimm Brothers' Fairy Tales, stars David Giuntoli as Portland Homicide Detective Nick Burkhardt. As a descendant of an elite line of criminal profilers known as "Grimms," Nick must confront all manner of ancient evils. Whether it's our DVD collections, the Grimm Logo Hoodie, or the unique t-shirts, this buzz-worthy Grimm merchandise does this hit show proud!
Grimm - Season 5 DVD$59.95
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The day was warm, too warm for January if you ask me, but it was beautiful, so Andreea and I wanted to take some photos for our blogs, afterward we went through clothing stores and saw too many beautiful things impossible to choose from, and we ended up with just a huge list of "what is necessary for my wardrobe to buy" (which is everything)
Okay enough dreaming and sighing, I have to get back to some work, so no lazy Sunday evening for me.
See you soon!
Wearing: Ilotti coat, Bershka sweater, scarf bought at a fair, Terranova pants, random brand shoes.


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D2 Racing RS Street Coilover System for 11-14 Mazda 2 / 11-15 Ford Fiesta A139
The RS coilover system is a 36-way damper and rebound adjustable monotube full coilover system. The setup has separate height and pre-load adjustments allowing for optimal adjustment and allowing full strut travel at all times. Pillowball upper mounts and top mounts are constructed of 6061 powder coated aluminum. Threads are teflon coated to prevent rust. Rebuildable and serviceable in the US.


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The Five Points are a fictional New York City gang in 1979.
Formation and backgroundEdit
Little is known about the Five Points' formation, except that they were founded sometime before July 12, 1979. They were on the Gramercy Riffs' network.
The meetingEdit
See also: The Warriors (Film), Desperate Dudes
When Cyrus and the Gramercy Riffs called a conclave of New York City's gang, nine delegates of the Five Points were sent to the meeting on behalf of the gang. At the meeting in Van Cortlandt Park, the Bronx; it is unknown what became of the gang's delegates when Cyrus was shot and the meeting was interrupted by the cops.
In The FilmEdit
They attended Cyrus' big meeting.
In The GameEdit
It's possible they were in that large cutscene at the big meeting.
- The Warriors (Film)
- The Warriors (Game) - Desperate Dudes (Intro Only)


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September 2013 - Off-Road RidesPosted in Features on August 13, 2013
American Made
Vehicle: 1997 Chevrolet Silverado 2500 4x4
Owner: Dean Hess
Location: Eau Claire, Wisconsin
Chassis: Sanded and painted frame
Engine: 5.7L V-8 Vortec with Airaid intake, MSD ignition, shorty headers, Jet programmer, Royal Purple oil
Drivetrain: 4L80E automatic, IFS 10-Bolt differential, semi-floating 14-Bolt rear differential, 3.73 gears, full synthetic fluids
Suspension: 2-inch suspension lift
Steering: All Moog components
Brakes: Stock
Tires/wheels: 285/75R16 Goodyear DuraTracs/stock 16-inch steel wheels off a 2004 Chevy
Interior: Custom billet parts
Other parts: 2-inch body lift, MagnaFlow cat-back exhaust
Future plans: Solid-axle conversion, 4-inch suspension lift, Edelbrock E-Tec aluminum heads, stainless-steel plumbing, welded bumpers, custom tailgate, electric fans, differential lockers
Favorite off-road area: Augusta, Wisconsin
Great White
Vehicle: 1999 Ford F-250
Owner: Tyler Cluney
Location: Goose Bay, Newfoundland, and Labrador, Canada
Chassis: Stock
Engine: 5.4L V-8, K&N cold-air intake, Flowmaster Super 44 cat-back exhaust
Drivetrain: 4R100 automatic, NV271F T-case, Dana 50 front differential, Sterling 10.5 rear differential, 3.73 gears
Suspension: Trail Master 6-inch suspension lift with SSV shocks
Steering: Top Gun Customz dual steering stabilizer with FOX Racing nitrogen-charged shocks
Brakes: Braided stainless-steel lines
Tires/wheels: 40x14.50R18 BFGoodrich Mud Terrain KM2s/ 18-inch Dick Cepek DC-2 aluminum wheels
Interior: Custom red and gray leather bench seat, full Kenwood sound system
Other parts: Performance Accessories 3-inch body lift, custom-built spare-tire carrier mounted in the bed to hold a 40-inch spare tire, Bushwhacker fender flares, '05-'07 headlight conversion, Go Industries Rancher grille guard, tinted windows, '08-to-'12 tailgate, WeatherTech floor mats
Favorite off-road area: Goose Bay
S-10 Prerunner
Vehicle: 1996 Chevy S-10
Owner: Staff Sgt. Jeremiah Wilcox
Location: Yuma, Arizona
Chassis: Stock frame, front suspension subframe, bumpers, skidplate, bed cage built with 1.5-inch tubing, cab cage built with 1.75-inch DOM tubing
Engine: 4.3L Vortec V-6, cold-air intake, MagnaFlow high-flow cat, Silverline 3-inch cat-back exhaust, electric fan
Drivetrain: 4L60E automatic built with Monster Transmission kit, shift plates, Corvette shift servo, low stall torque convertor, Hayden transmission cooler in line with stock transmission cooler, big-bearing Ford 9-inch with an open differential and homebuilt truss, 4.56 gears
Suspension: Custom lower A-arm mounted to subframe, custom spindles, J-arm upper control arms with uniballs and rod ends, 12-inch-stroke King 2.5-inch coilovers with 700-pound main springs and 450-pound tender springs, FOX Racing 4-inch-stroke hydraulic bumpstops, strapped at 18.5 inches of travel, Deaver F55 leaf springs, 14-inch King 2.5-inch double bypass shocks with flutter stack valving, FOX Racing 4-inch-stroke hydraulic bumpstops, strapped at 15 inches of travel
Steering: Custom tie rods with rod ends
Brakes: ABS removed, front discs and rear drums, brake bias set up heavier in rear for dirt
Tires/wheels: 33x12.50R15 Mud-Terrains in the front and All-Terrains in the rear on 15-inch aluminum alloy wheels in front and 15-inch Ford Alcoa wheels in rear
Interior: PRP suspension seats, G-Force five-point harnesses, custom dash and center console upholstered in camouflage, center-mounted gauges, lights rewired with covered switches, CB radio, 1980s Firebird three-spoke steering wheel, large medical kit
Other parts: High- and low-beam headlights independently controlled, two 9-inch HID spotlights, two floodlights mounted behind the cab pointed 45 degrees to the side, amber chase light, two train-style horns, PA system, 3-ton floor jack, Hi-Lift jack, toolbox mounted in rear, 4-inch flare front fenders, 6-inch Trailer Products rear fenders
Favorite off-road area: Behind his house, Glamis, and anywhere with dirt!
Submit Your Ride!
Want to see your off-road ride in OFF-ROAD Rides? Take a snap shot and email it to firstname.lastname@example.com or snail mail it to:
OFF-ROAD Rides
1733 Alton Parkway, Ste. 100
Irvine, CA 92606
Please include the following information with your truck submission:
• Vehicle
• Owner
• location
• Chassis
• Engine
• Drivetrain
• Suspension
• Steering
• Brakes
• Tires/wheels
• Interior
• Other Parts
• Favorite Off-Road Area


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(This recipe was originally posted on January 30, 2007. I've updated the recipe considerably; the photo above is from October 2010).
I first served this kind of risotto at a dinner party in January 2007, right after the smoked salmon and dill tartlets. The inspiration for this dish back then came from Anne's beet risotto with garlic, fava beans and goat cheese and Angelika's beetroot risotto with orange and Gorgonzola (blog no longer available). As I had realised during a beetroot and cheese experiment, I knew I wanted to use a blue cheese in my beetroot risotto instead of goat's cheese. Furthermore, I was looking for a vegetarian risotto, so adding crispy bacon or other meaty garnish was out of the questions. I also wanted the recipe to have a slightly Nordic twist, however defined, so I ended up using a fabulous Finnish blue cheese, Aura.
Beetroot & blue cheese risotto
(Peedi- ja sinihallitusjuusturisoto)
Serves 6
2 Tbsp butter
1 small onion or 2 shallots
300 g risoto rice (I used carnaroli)
1 litre hot vegetable stock
100 g blue cheese
salt and freshly ground black pepper
fresh chopped parsley to garnish
Heat the vegetable stock in one saucepan, keep it simmering under a lid while you start making risotto.
Heat the butter in a heavy-bottomed saucepan. Add onion and sauté gently for 5-6 minutes, until onion starts to turn translucent. Add the garlic and fry for another minute or to. Make sure not to burn the onions!
Risotto is ready, when the rice is cooked, but still al dente - this should take about 20 minutes.
Now stir in crumbled blue cheese, which flavours the risotto and makes it beautifully creamy. Season with salt and pepper, sprinkle with plenty of fresh parsley and serve.
UPDATE 14.2.2007: Check out these gorgeous beetroot risotto recipes over at Fiordizucca's blog (with feta cheese) and Bea's blog (with parmesan cheese).


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One of the things which interested me was I wanted to see what the full res pictures would be like. Not because I want 39Megapixels from any camera but because if you're going to digital zoom it means cropping the image down to size. On a full wide angle image it would just be a reduction technique which (reading that they are using some intelligent pixel binning techniques) would result in quite good images.
So beside this image on the Nokia Photostream ..
The next image in their stream was this one ...
Which looks like an original full size and a 5Mpixel digital zoom version.
To support this supposition, the first image's size of the available 'original' was 7152 x 5368 Pixels (38.39 MPixels). So in all likelihood, this is an original full size image. I don't know, but it seems reasonable. Given that they don't say much its easier for them to deny any criticism.
I'll assume it it a full res version.
I know that it doesn't say "this is a sample of the digital zoom", but I get the feeling that it is. Things like the 'zoomed' shot is 5Mpixels (which is the claimed output 2592 x 1944 = 5.04 MPixels) and the obvious aspect that one is 'zoomed in tighter'. Links to these on Flickr are here: original and digizoomed.
A quick glance shows that they are not the same shot, but two shots from different angles.So playing with the full shot in photoshop reveals some interesting things:
- clearly the shots are from a different angle and perhaps even a different place (even a bit closer). This could make the 'zoomed' image look better.
- colour balance is a bit different: but as they have different cameras on the shoot and are stated as being pre-production that further explains the differences (btw I tried to alter the colour balance a bit to get skin tones to match, but the sky didn't)
- If this is a digital zoomed images then the results are spectacular
The above screen grab of viewing at 100% shows both as being very clean. I'd have no issues in getting A4 prints from either of them!
Very interesting stuff.
BTW, if you're happening to wonder why you'd be after such a good digital zoom, the answer in a nutshell is:
- the most fragile part of a digicam is the zoom when its extended. Bringing that in and out is both noisy and takes time and makes the camera vulnerable if you drop it.
- the noise control methods you use to make the zoom work will also work in helping you get great HIGH ISO images out of the camera on wider angles
- it is likely to make the camera cheaper to make (and you to buy)
- even with 10cm close focus its likely to give shit hot macro
So hopefully Nokia can pull the rest of the phone together, in which case I reckon they'll have an iPhone contender!
Fingers Crossed for Finland


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Yes, I know I'm a little behind, wishing you all a Happy New Year 14 days late! Let's just say I have a more relaxed approach to life these days and leave it at that! Haha!
This is a picture of my 5 grandchildren taken just last month. I think their personalities show through quite well in their expressions here. LOVE that! ;)
First, I want to thank all of you who have emailed and called to check on me since closing my store. I'm alive and well...and it's going to be an AWESOME year for me! The last couple of months have been a bit "trying", I will admit. I've been super busy with closing the store and Christmas. I will admit that I am still learning to regroup after living in the fast lane for so long. But I can assure you that I finally have a grip, and life is good! It's all uphill from here!
Saturday, January 14, 2012
Happy New Year?
Yes, I know I'm a little behind, wishing you all a Happy New Year 14 days late! Let's just say I have a more relaxed approach to life these days and leave it at that! Haha!
Posted by Michelle Rodgers at Saturday, January 14, 2012
Labels: Ramblings
10 comments:
- Anne said...
Happy New Year to you as well. Love the photo of your grandsons. I have two aged 6 and 4 and two granddaughters aged 4 and 2. Love being a grandma. Like you it took me a while to wind down when I gave up work - I was teaching and seemed to live to work. Much more relaxed now and able to enjoy being with family, friends and pursue hobbies. I am much happier. Anne x
- January 14, 2012 at 8:19 AM
- Carla Murphy said...
Glad to see you back Michelle. Happy New Year to you as well. This will be a different year for you but I know you will enjoy more time with your family - looks like a great bunch of grandsons you have there! I'm looking forward to starting my blog up again soon. It's been a different & busy few months for me too. Looking forward to seeing your cards!!!!
- January 14, 2012 at 8:26 AM
- Sandy said...
I am so glad to see you post. I enjoy following you on Pinterest. I do miss your store. I was just thinking that I don't know what products are out there because I would always check out your store to see what you were stocking. I look forward to seeing you post your cards again!
- January 14, 2012 at 9:48 AM
- Sue from Oregon said...
Hope your holidays were great ones! Your Grands look like quite a crew! Haw fun Gwamma!
- January 14, 2012 at 11:31 AM
- Colleen said...
Happy and Blessed New Years to you and your family as well.
Great looking grand children you have there.
I have 8 grandchildren myself, ranging from 3years to 21. What a blessing they are
Wishing you the very best throughout the rest of the year and always
- January 15, 2012 at 3:08 AM
- Evette K. said...
Belated Merry Christmas and a Happy Healthy New Year to you and yours. TY for the great family picture, you should have been in it. Dang. Glad to hear you are doing so well post-shop. You might even find out things about yourself that you could not put to use while you were selling and selling. Enjoy that time for yourself. And help me to learn to use my Copic markers as well. LOL ekciampo Best of luck.
- January 15, 2012 at 7:10 AM
- Amy Sheffer said...
Happy New Year to you, too!! Sorry we missed each others" calls on New Year's Eve. Great to hear from you and we will catch up by phone -- SOON! How many hours should we block off on our calendars? ROFL! Love and hugs.
- January 15, 2012 at 8:32 AM
- MizMaryAnn said...
Welcome to retirement. Ain't it grand!
- January 15, 2012 at 9:38 AM
- Joan Ervin said...
Hey, girlie....hope you had a wonderful Christmas, New Year, and Valentines....time sure does march on!!!! Your pic is beautiful...I bet you are spending some fun times with your Grands!!! Hope you are enjoying your *semi retirement* and get to do something fun for yourself once in a while!!!! Hugs!!!
- February 17, 2012 at 10:26 PM
- musesmom said...
Glad you are starting to get used to slowing down, and that you are still blogging. Have a great year!
- April 9, 2012 at 12:04 PM


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Of Bees and Men: For the Hutterites who Live There, Spring Prairie Colony is More
Than a Home
Aksamit, Nichole. "Of Bees and Men: For the Hutterites who Live There, Spring Prairie Colony is More Than a Home." Forum, 15 November 1999, sec. A9.
The modest women of Spring Prairie Colony share a quiet moment in the early morning sun on a trailer behind a tractor headed for a cucumber field northwest of Hawley, Minnesota.
Spring Prairie Colony, Minn.
Through a plastic pipe from the outside, bees carry pollen into a glass-enclosed hive in the bookshop.
Valentine Waldner Sr.'s grandchildren and their playmates swarm around the observation case, full of questions.
"How do they get out?" a little girl asks, her eyes wide as the bees dance under the glass.
"Through the pipe there," Valentine says, putting his work aside and pointing through the window at the bees' only link to the outside world.
"Why do they come back?" asks another.
"It's their home," Valentine answers without hesitation. "Where else would they want to be?"
Such a response comes naturally to Valentine, the former German school teacher, current bookbinder and longtime keeper of bees at this Hutterite colony northwest of Hawley.
He and his wife, Marie Waldner, feed and tend the hives during winter and collect 120 to 160 gallons of honey from them each year.
But that's not all Valentine harvests from the hard-working creatures in his charge.
"I find them fascinating," he says, folding his arms across his chest and shaking his white-bearded head.
It's not hard to see why. There are indeed many parallels between the lives of bees and men at Spring Prairie.
Like the bees, the Hutterites who live here are, as a group, largely self-sufficient. They make most of the things they need to live - food, shelter, clothing - and their livelihood depends on each other and nature.
Just as some bees fetch the pollen and others carry it into the hive, the human colonists have a clear division of labor. Men do jobs involving machinery, animals or crops. Women tend home and garden, staff the kitchen, the bakery, the laundry and the preschool.
And, like the bees, the Hutterites here work harmoniously toward common goals: the survival of their colony and the pleasing of a higher power.
For that reason, Spring Prairie Colony is more than an isolated community of location. It is a community of mind and spirit, where each member surrenders individual desire and personal profit for the survival of all and the hope of heavenly reward.
'All things common'
Guided by this harmony of thought and deed, the Hutterites at Spring Prairie live together from cradle to grave, apart from the larger society. In order to have "all things common," as in Acts 2:44, and to prevent disunity within the group, they share a common purse.
"How else can I prove I love my fellow man as I love myself?" asks John Waldner Sr., Spring Prairie's elder minister. "The community life and the Christian community of goods is the best way I can find."
John says he truly believes God intended for people to live communally.
"Jesus said, 'Go, all of you and sell your possessions and then come follow me," he says. "How would you do that in this world? How would you be able to survive, if not in a group?"
He points to the Israelites of biblical times.
"They had cripples who could not gather manna, but they also had younger ones who could carry three times the amount they needed. So there was plenty for everyone," he explains. "That's how God intended us to live - to care for each other.
"And why else would God give us each special talents? Why should I have one talent and my fellow man another if we were not meant to live and work together?"
Outside the fold
Although Hutterites strive to live according to their interpretation of the Bible, John says they do not think all other people are damned.
"I know there are a lot of good, honest people in the world who are not Hutterites but are morally and sexually clean," he says. "I'm sure glad I don't have to be the judge. I can't think that God would condemn them just because they didn't live community life. They probably didn't know about it."
Unfortunately, that excuse doesn't apply to those already at Spring Prairie: Hutterites sincerely believe members who leave the brotherhood are putting their souls in jeopardy.
"If God has shown me a brighter light and I choose to close my eyes, how can I be saved?" John says.
Although the number of Hutterites in North America has grown by more than 36,000 since 1874, John admits some Hutterites do stray from the fold. His own brother left a colony in South Dakota and married a nonHutterite.
Those who marry outside the faith rarely return, but John says 40 to 60 percent of the others who leave the colonies find the world outside too unsupporting and come back.
No one has left the brotherhood at Spring Prairie in the 19 years it has existed.
John says Hutterites make every effort to dissuade a member who wants to leave, and to reconcile with a member who has left and wants to return. The colonists traditionally accept apostate members as if nothing has happened, once they have been disciplined.
The most extreme punishment, John says, is shunning - a period of ostracism during which no one in the colony eats or works with the shunned member. This is particularly painful for Hutterites, for whom community is so important.
Personal surrender
Hutterites do very little missionary work and few nonHutterites have converted to this way of life. Hutterites' German language and culture provide one barrier, John says, but the main obstacle for nonHutterites is the community of goods (Gemeinschaft) and the self-surrender (Gelassenheit) it requires.
The two are essential components of Hutterite belief and the primary distinction between Hutterites and their Mennonite and Old Order Amish peers, who share the same 16th-century, Anabaptist roots.
Mennonites use many of the same sermons, songs, and religious texts as Hutterites and have tried to affiliate with the Hutterian Brethren Church.
"They won't give up the individual purse," John says. "They have tried to join with us many times, but they couldn't agree on that issue. And it is something on which we will not budge."
Nevertheless, John says the thousands in Fargo-Moorhead, just 20 miles away from here, could function as a colony if they wanted to.
"I don't see why not," he says. "God doesn't teach the impossible."
The challenges of community life
That's not to say that the Hutterites haven't struggled with community life.
For two long periods of their history, during severe persecution from 1685 to 1762, and from 1819 to 1859, they abandoned the common purse.
The guilty consciences of Hutterite leaders helped revive community life in Romania in 1763 and in Russia in 1859.
John says Hutterites will always struggle with community life.
"Whenever there's human beings, there's going to be some challenges," he says. "Human nature is the greatest challenge."
A cautious beekeeper pauses to gauge the disposition of bees in hives west of Spring Prairie Colony.
With only the aid of his smoker, Valentine checks the colony's hives.
Like the bees at Spring Prairie, Hutterites work together toward common goals: survival and the pleasing of a higher power.
Reprinted with permission of The Forum


text:
Transform your photos into one-of-a-kind, hand painted masterpieces!
by Joan De Bot
Williamsburg2 by Joan De Bot - 8.000" x 6.625"
Wood Print
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Wood Print
Williamsburg2 wood print by Joan De Bot. Bring your artwork to life with the texture and added depth of a wood print. Your image gets printed directly onto a sheet of 3/4" thick maple wood. There are D-clips on the back of the print for mounting it to your wall using mounting hooks and nails (included).
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Bring your artwork to life with the texture and depth of a wood print. Your image gets printed directly onto a sheet of 3/4" thick maple wood.
All wood prints ship within 3 - 4 business days and arrive "ready to hang" with mounting hooks and nails.
Wood prints are extremely durable and add a rustic feel to any image.
For additional product photos and information, visit our wood prints product page.
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Coming soon... Joan De Bot Joan De Bot is a Dutch artist currently living in New York. She started her career as a painter of systematical art, large canvases filled with patterns and grids. After a period of free expressionism she set out to travel, painted and exhibited landscapes and cityscapes from the places she came across underway. When she visited Australia she fell in love with the wild, seemingly systematically organized Australian landscape and modern aboriginal art. Hereby inspired, she gradually returned to a variation on the themes she had exploited before, patterns and grids. In the last couple of years she has started to make textile designs. Recently she has also started to make fashion designs.
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If you're not happy with a purchase that you made on Pixels.com, for any reason, you can return it to us within 30 days of the order date. As soon as it arrives, we'll issue a full refund for the entire purchase price. Please note - Pixels does not reimburse the outgoing or return shipping charges unless the return is due to a defect in quality.
Pixels sells thousands of pieces of artwork each month - all with a 100% money-back guarantee. We take great pride in the fact that hundreds of thousands of artists have chosen Pixels to fulfill their orders, and we look forward to helping you select your next piece!
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text:
Giving old industrial floors a new life!
Petrol stations are often burdened by traffic. Their ground surface is often contaminated by petrol and oil, and with regular oil spills, the ground is often slippery.
Many entrepreneurs know the problem: their impervious floor coating is ten to fifteen years old and really worn out. Repair is useless, as not only the joints leak, but the stones are worn out and the old coating peels off. There is nothing left to do than to replace the old floor.
For these types of floors, Quint Coating Systems has a solution: they have developed a specific coating to give these floors a new life. They spray this high quality coating directly on the old floor which provides a good foundation. The coating is liquid proof and within two days, there is a new floor with a lifetime of approximately ten years.
The top coat has better anti-slip properties. A nice feature of this top coating is that it is available in many colours. The floors can also be delivered with a logo design or other patterns. Quint uses a polyurea that is sprayed at 180 bar pressure, which has a pot-life of about 30 sec. They use a Graco Reactor™ E-XP2 with T2™ pumps and a Fusion™ AP gun to apply their coating to the ground.
Applying this specific coating with the above Graco equipment provides the following advantages:
- After one day, cars can drive over the coating
- After 72 hours, the floor is 100 percent hard and chemical resistant.
Quint Coating Systems has been creating new impermeable floors for service stations and car washes for the past three years. Test floors in ten BP filling stations have provided good results which have led to the laying of new floors at more stations.
Quint Coating Systems
Industry Market Sector
Coating Industry
Old floors get a new life
Material Specifications
Own brand of Quint based on Texaco coating
Typical Properties
Pressure is 180 bar. Temperature is 70°C.
Graco Equipment
Reactor E-XP2
Reactor E-XP2 – T2 feeding pumps – 60 m hose length – Fusion AP gun
Graco Distributor Details
Paintit, Da Vincilaan 25
6716 WC Ede
The Netherlands


text:
No Gold Star for Galaxy Gear
Oct 2, 2013 5:00 AM PT
The first reviews of the Samsung Galaxy Gear smartwatch have hit the Internet and they are generally tepid.
CNET editors described the device as offering style over substance and awarded it 2.5 stars out of 5; The Verge's review describes it as "a rough first draft" and "unintuitive, oversized, overpriced and in constant need for a Galaxy guardian"; Wired gave it 4 points out of 10.
However, "I'm not sure how anyone can give it a rating of anything until it is put through its paces over time by consumers actually using it in real-life situations," Larry Chiagouris, a professor of marketing at Pace University, told LinuxInsider. "That will be the most reliable source of feedback."
A Quick Rundown
The Galaxy Gear is built around an 800 MHz Samsung Exynos processor. It has a 1.63-inch Super AMOLED display with a resolution of 320 x 320 pixels.
It has a 1.9 MP autofocus camera that take stills or records and plays back videos at 720p. It has two microphones, one speaker, an accelerometer, a gyroscope, and 4 GB of internal memory in addition to 512 MB of RAM.
The Gear measures 36.8 x 56.6 x 11.1 millimeters and weighs nearly 74 grams.
It supports Bluetooth 4.0 +BLE and comes preloaded with various apps.
Critics Speak
Many reviewers expressed concern over the Galaxy Gear's US$300 price tag, especially because the watch, which runs Android 4.3 Jelly Bean, is currently compatible only with the Galaxy Note 3 and Note 10.1.
For CNET, the good points were that it is attractive and comfortable, and it's easy to see incoming calls. The bad points were lack of email and social network support, limited compatibility with other devices, the requirement for an external charging case, and the inadequately functioning voice control.
The quality of the screen and of the pictures and calls were plus points for The Verge's Vlad Savoy, but the "utterly infantile dependency" it has on its connected Galaxy device, the lack of informative notifications, the fact that two of the apps he installed on the Gear failed to load most of the time and finally offered "frightfully limited functionality" when they did, were irritants.
Both Savoy and Engadget's Brad Molen criticized the Gear's design.
The camera is "an unsightly wart on one of the most visible parts of the watch," Molen said. He liked the screen and the native apps, but was not so pleased with Samsung's "half-baked attempt at notifications" or the S Voice app.
Making and receiving calls with the watch was easier than Wired's Christina Bonnington expected, and she liked the call quality. She also remarked on the good integration with apps such as Evernote and MyFitnessPal.
However, Samsung's execution is not enough to justify the Gear's price tag and "in many ways the smartwatch ends up being more of a nuisance than a convenience," Bonnington added.
What Should Samsung Do?
"I applaud Samsung for being early in the market, and I understand why they are limiting the devices [the Gear] can access, but there are unfortunate consequences to that," Daniel Matte, an analyst at Canalys, told LinuxInsider.
"It's a tricky balancing act, because they didn't have a chipset for the watch -- they took a smartphone chip and downsized the core," Matte continued. "The main thing for them to do is add more sensors to the device."
There have been suggestions that Samsung should provide connectivity for the Galaxy Gear with smartphones from any vendor.
"I think the smart thing [for Samsung] to do is to package it with Samsung smartphones to give them an edge initially, but eventually the market will demand compatibility with all phones," Pace University's Chiagouris said.
The Galaxy Gear "will do well during this holiday season via early adopters and gifters," he predicted. "After that, it will depend on how well it meets consumer expectations."


text:
Washington (CNN) -- Sanctions. International monitors. Increased jet fighters in the region.
Trying to figure out how the United States and its European allies will respond to Russia's Crimea incursion gets confusing.
The tense showdown over Ukrainian sovereignty offers few easy answers, with differing priorities between Washington and the European Union adding to the confusion.
Here is a look at where Western allies stand:
United States -- It is hard to imagine a scenario that would cause U.S. troops to get involved in Ukraine.
At the same time, the Obama administration can't rule out any option as it pushes for direct negotiations between Russia and Ukraine aimed at de-escalating the current crisis and laying the groundwork for peaceful coexistence going forward.
The Pentagon has announced the addition of six F-15 fighter planes to the four currently on a NATO mission in the Baltics. Previously, Washington halted ongoing military cooperation with Russia.
After a series meetings Wednesday with European, Ukrainian and Russian counterparts in Paris, Secretary of State John Kerry told reporters that "all parties agreed today that it is important to try to resolve the issues through dialogue." He added: "They don't believe that any of us are served by greater or further confrontation."
Europe -- The last thing the European Union wants is an armed conflict in its backyard. Only if Russian forces moved into eastern Ukraine would consideration be given to bolstering NATO forces in neighboring countries.
While no obligation exists for NATO to militarily defend Ukraine against Russian aggression, the United States and Britain -- along with Russia -- committed to protecting Ukrainian independence and territorial integrity in 1994 when Kiev gave up its nuclear arsenal that dated back to the Soviet era.
What happens now to Ukraine will have an impact on nuclear nonproliferation programs elsewhere, Ukrainian interim Prime Minister Arseniy Yatsenyuk warned Thursday.
His implication was clear: failure to effectively respond to Russia's aggression in Crimea would embolden North Korea and Iran to further resist Western efforts to prevent them from developing nuclear weapons.
The United States -- President Barack Obama said Thursday that he signed an executive order that laid the groundwork for sanctions against people and entities deemed responsible for the crisis.
The executive order provides the legal basis for sanctions against specific people and entities, but White House spokesman Jay Carney later told reporters no individuals were specifically targeted.
Visa bans are already in effect for some Russian and Ukrainian officials, and the freezing of assets and property could be forthcoming.
The moves fall short of broader economic sanctions aimed at Russia's state-owned banks and energy industry sought by some in Congress.
"This action by Russia cannot go unchallenged," Republican Rep. Ed Royce of California, the chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, said Thursday at a hearing where the panel approved a non-binding resolution backing sanctions.
Europe -- Closer proximity to Russia and crucial economic ties make the issue of sanctions more difficult for European countries. Already, Russia threatens to retaliate with its own sanctions if the United States and Europe take such a step.
Russia is the European Union's third-biggest trading partner after the United States and China, with goods and services worth more than $500 billion exchanged in 2012. About 75% of all foreign direct investment in Russia originates in EU member states, according to the European Commission.
In addition, Russia is the single biggest supplier of energy to the European Union. British energy firm BP is the second-largest shareholder in Russia's leading oil producer Rosneft, and some of the biggest energy companies in Germany, the Netherlands and France are invested in a joint venture with Russian gas giant Gazprom.
"If and when any sanctions are placed on Russia, they are likely to be targeted on key officials rather than on the wider economy," said Neil Shearing, chief emerging markets economist at Capital Economics. "Europe is too dependent on Russian energy to countenance full-blown trade restrictions."
On Thursday, the European Union threatened limited steps if no substantive negotiations between Russia and Ukraine start in coming days.
European Council President Herman Van Rompuy told reporters in Brussels that "in any absence of results, the EU will decide on additional measures such as travel bans, asset freezes, and cancellation of the EU-Russia summit."
Later, Kerry told reporters that no serious gap existed between the U.S. and EU approaches, adding that " there may be some differences of opinion about timing or about one choice over another."
United States -- Kerry announced $1 billion in loan guarantees for Ukraine this week as part of the Obama administration's effort to publicly support the interim government and provide incentive for Ukraine to continue to align itself with the West through the European Union instead of Russia.
Obama called Thursday for Congress to support assistance for the Ukrainian government from both the United States and the International Monetary Fund. A few hours later, the Republican-led House overwhelmingly approved an aid package to authorize the previously announced loan guarantees.
Such support offers a trifecta of being unilateral, enjoying political support at home and backing the goal of bolstering Ukraine.
Europe -- The European Union announced Wednesday it will offer Ukraine at least $15 billion in aid as the country struggles with dwindling cash and the military standoff with Russia.
The package would provide Ukraine with assistance over the next few years, said Jose Manuel Barroso, the head of the EU's executive body, the European Commission. On Wednesday, Ukraine said it would be unable to pay its February natural gas bill to Gazprom.
European aid is the easiest way to show immediate support for Ukraine while avoiding risks of counter-sanctions and other retaliation.
United States -- The United States is working with European allies to create an "exit ramp" for Putin to be able to de-escalate the Ukraine crisis.
Their plan would call for Russian troops in Crimea to return to their barracks, and international observers to come to Ukraine to monitor the situation on the ground, where Russia complains of persecution against ethnic Russians.
In addition, the United States seeks to isolate Russia diplomatically, joining other members of the G8 group of industrial powers in pulling out of preparatory meetings for the scheduled June summit in Sochi, Russia.
The foundation of the U.S. stance is for Ukraine to maintain its independence and territorial integrity, while also recognizing Russia's historical and economic ties to Ukraine.
Obama said Thursday he was "confident" that the international community was "moving forward together" in responding to what he called the Russian intervention.
Europe -- German Chancellor Angela Merkel spoke with Obama on Tuesday about the diplomatic exit ramp, but initial indications Thursday showed little progress with Russia on agreement.
Reflecting the standoff, Merkel said Thursday that the European Union wants to do everything it can to settle the Ukraine crisis diplomatically, but she warned that without any "diplomatic possibility," steps such as asset freezing and visa limitations would be options.
READ: Europe has power over Russia
READ: U.S. paves way for sanctions over Ukraine, Europe threatens to do same
READ: Four things about Crimea's referendum
READ: 5 possible directions in Ukraine
CNNMoney's Mark Thompson, Alanna Petroff and Charles Riley and CNN's Deirdre Walsh contributed to this report.


text:
Infographics usually have a wonderful clean and eye catching design. They are also usually full of interesting information. Your challenge this week is to use that style in your layout.
Images from here: Image 1, Image 2, Image 3
Important Details
Due Date: Sept 26, 2013, 9am (USA Pacific time)
Tag: challenge infographic sept 2013
Make sure you use this tag exactly, so we can browse easily through the gallery and see all the submissions, and so you can get your points. Please only tag one layout.
See basic challenge rules here.
Check out finished and entered layouts here.


text:
Mentor org recruitment
From OLPC
Dear NAME,
Would you like more volunteers for ORGANIZATION? Do you have any content projects you'd like to get done - seminars you would like people to run, outreach programs you'd like developed, photographs you'd like taken, books you'd like written, anything?
If the answer is yes, we would like to invite you and ORGANIZATION to be a mentor organization for the upcoming Summer of Content (SoCon) program. SoCon helps you with recruiting, matchmaking, coordination, and organization of volunteers for your projects; this is a low-cost, almost no-maintenance way to get publicity, projects, and new contributors all in one, and in just 6 weeks and is guaranteed to Get Things Done.
Run by a team from the One Laptop Per Child project (OLPC, http://laptop.org) and the Commonwealth of Learning (CoL, http://col.org), the Summer of Content program matches interns who want to contribute to open content with mentors from existing open-content projects who can help them, and provides stipends to the interns that allow them to work full-time on their project. Organizations such as Fedora, Google, and Name.com are already on board. The program's first run begins on August 10 (see http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Summer_of_Content_2007), and there will be a Southern Summer later this year with projects beginning in December.
If you're interested, contact Mel Chua (email@example.com) - Wayne Mackintosh (from CoL) and SJ Klein (from OLPC) are also involved. I hope we'll see some ORGANIZATION projects up and running in August!
(Please help us spread the word - if you're trying to reach potential mentors and interns, there are some email templates for over at http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Summer_of_Content/Letter_templates.)
Thanks and best wishes,
Your name
PS: Here's a description from the website, http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Summer_of_Content:
The Summer of Content (SoCon) program offers budding creators mentorship and stipends to develop open content and run free culture events throughout the world. Inspired by Google's Summer of Code program, our goal is to support a self-sustaining ecosystem of open content by encouraging growth of contributor communities, and attention to communication and accessibility around projects, where they're most needed.
There are two Summer sessions a year, each lasting approximately 10 weeks: a Northern Summer running between June and August and a Southern Summer running between December and February. (The current Northern Summer 2007 is a pilot run, taking place in August and September 2007.)
Each summer, applicants, mentors, and the open content community define open content projects that need working on. Applicants describe the projects they want to work on and the kind of work they want to do. Mentor organizations describe the projects they can support and the mentors they have available. SoCon acts as matchmaker for mentors and interns, and project work begins! The Summer ends with a series of local Jams around the world to showcase and gather feedback on the new creations.


text:
Kim Kardashian is back to reveling in the spotlight and making sure her sex appeal is front and center.
The "Keeping Up With the Kardashians" star took a three-month public-appearance hiatus after giving birth to her daughter, North, on June 15. But this week she's been clinching headlines with some revealing selfies and braggy updates.
Her latest posts show the 32-year-old in a major cleavage-baring gown from Givenchy designer Riccardo Tisci during her last night in Paris for Fashion Week, where she was making the rounds with her sartorial-minded beau, rapper Kanye West.
"Last night in Paris!" she wrote, posting a triptych photo of herself from different angles. "This dress pulled off the runway from the Givenchy show! Styled by @riccardotisci17 & @crfashionbook for Carine's film Mademoiselle C!"
The dress didn't appear to make it down the runway during the Givenchy presentation Sunday, but it is unclear if it was meant for Kardashian to wear first. However, the plunging gown is still getting its time in the spotlight thanks to the curvaceous starlet's showcase of her post-baby cleavage while wearing it.
Oui, mesdames et messieurs, sex kitten Kardashian is back in full force.
It's the second busty Givenchy dress Kardashian showed off on the trip. She wore another black gown -- one with a sheer top and high slit -- designed by Tisci to the Givenchy show Sunday.
"Thank you Ricky for making this for me the day before the show. I die for you. #Givenchy4lifebaby," Kardashian wrote, captioning a photo of herself in the dress, with West.
The couple have also been hobnobbing with other industry heavyweights including editor Carine Roitfeld, who featured a very pregnant Kardashian in her new magazine CR. The high-end shoot was photographed by Chanel's Karl Lagerfeld and directed by Tisci, West's good friend.
Early last month, Roitfeld debuted her documentary "Mademoiselle C," which chronicles the beginnings of CR Fashion Book after her 10-year run at French Vogue. West attended the New York premiere and party while his baby mama was reportedly at home tending to their new tot.
But it seems as though Kardashian has been keeping up with the couturiers and rubbing elbows with Tisci on her own, posting another selfie on Tuesday posing with the designer for the documentary's cocktail party at Pavillon Ledoyen.
"My date tonight @riccardotisci17," she wrote.
"Best date," he wrote, reposting the image on Instagram.
Kardashian and West reportedly left their 3-month-old back in Los Angeles during their trip to France, but commemorated her with a golden "Nori" necklace worn by mom and tons of baby haute couture gifted to the couple by major design houses including Lanvin, Celine and Alexander Wang.
Follow Ministry of Gossip @LATcelebs.


text:
Tiger Woods PGA Tour
What do you need help on?Cancel X
In Tiger Woods PGA Tour, you can take on Tiger Woods and other golfing greats past and present. Create your own golfer, develop your skills, and step onto the green to challenge the masters on some of the world's top courses. You can even raise the stakes by playing in wireless multiplayer games and showing your friends who will take home the prize. In addition to multiplayer, the game includes brand-new game modes that take advantage of the DS' hardware capabilities.
If you're stuck in Tiger Woods PGA Tour, ask your fellow GameFAQs members for help.
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