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According to data released by NASA and NOAA this month, April was the warmest April globally on record. Here are the data for NASA's analysis; here are NOAA data and report. The two agencies have different analysis techniques, which in this case resulted in slightly different temperature anomaly values but the same overall rankings within their respective data sets. The analyses result in different rankings in most months. The two techniques do provide a check on one another and confidence for us that their results are robust. At the beginning, I will remind readers that the month-to-month and year-to-year values and rankings matter less than the long-term climatic warming. Weather is the dominant factor for monthly and yearly conditions, not climate.
The details:
April's global average temperature was 0.73°C (1.314°F) above normal (14°C; 1951-1980), according to NASA, as the following graphic shows. The past three months have a +0.63°C temperature anomaly. And the latest 12-month period (May 2013 – Apr 2014) had a +0.62°C temperature anomaly. The time series graph in the lower-right quadrant shows NASA's 12-month running mean temperature index. The 2010-2012 downturn was largely due to the last La Niña event (see below for more). Since then, ENSO conditions returned to a neutral state (neither La Niña nor El Niño). As previous anomalously cool months fell off the back of the running mean, the 12-month temperature trace tracked upward again throughout 2013 and 2014.
Figure 1. Global mean surface temperature anomaly maps and 12-month running mean time series through April 2014 from NASA.
According to NOAA, April's global average temperatures were +0.77°C (1.386°F) above the 20th century average of 13.7°C (56.7°F). NOAA's global temperature anomaly map for April (duplicated below) shows where conditions were warmer and cooler than average during the month.
Figure 2. Global temperature anomaly map for August 2013 from NOAA.
The two different analyses' importance is also shown by the preceding two figures. Despite differences in specific global temperature anomalies, both analyses picked up on the same spatial temperature patterns and their relative strength.
Influence of ENSO
Figure 3. Time series of weekly SST data from NCEP (NOAA). The highest interest region for El Niño/La Niña is `NINO 3.4` (2nd time series from top).
There has been neither El Niño nor La Niña in the past couple of years. This ENSO-neutral phase is common. As you can see in the NINO 3.4 time series (2nd from top in Figure 3), Pacific sea surface temperatures were relatively cool in January through March, then quickly warmed. This switch occurred because normal easterly winds (blowing toward the west) across the equatorial Pacific relaxed and two significant westerly wind bursts occurred in the western Pacific. These anomalous winds generated an eastward moving Kelvin wave, which causes downwelling and surface mass convergence. Warm SSTs collect along the equator as a result. These Kelvin waves eventually crossed the entire Pacific Ocean, as Figure 4 shows.
Figure 4. Sub-surface Pacific Ocean temperature anomalies from Jan-Apr 2014. Anomalously cool eastern Pacific Ocean temperatures in January gave way to anomalously warm temperatures by April. Temperatures between 80W and 100W warmed further since April 14.
The Climate Prediction Center announced an El Niño Watch earlier this year. The most recent update says the chances of an El Niño during the rest of 2014 exceeds 65%. There is no reliable prediction of the potential El Niño's strength at this time. Without another westerly wind burst, an El Niño will likely not be very strong. Even moderate strength El Niños impact global weather patterns.
An important detail is whether the potential 2014 El Niño will be an Eastern or Central Pacific El Niño (see figure below). Professor Jin-Yi Yu, along with colleagues, first proposed the difference in a 2009 Journal of Climate paper. More recently, Yu's work suggested a recent trend toward Central Pacific El Niños influenced the frequency and intensity of recent U.S. droughts. This type of El Niño doesn't cause global record temperatures, but still impacts atmospheric circulations and the jet stream, which impacts which areas receive more or less rain. If the potential 2014 El Niño is an Eastern Pacific type, we can expect monthly global mean temperatures to spike and the usual precipitation anomalies commonly attributed to El Niño.
Figure 5. Schematic of Central-Pacific ENSO versus Eastern-Pacific ENSO as envisioned by Dr. Jin-Yi Yu at the University of California – Irvine.
If an El Niño does occur later in 2014, it will mask some of the deep ocean heat absorption by releasing energy back to the atmosphere. If that happens, the second half of 2014 and the first half of 2015 will likely set global surface temperature records. 2014, 2015, or both could set the all-time global mean temperature record (currently held by 2010). Some scientists recently postulated that an El Niño could also trigger a shift from the current negative phase of the Interdecadal Pacific Oscillation (IPO; or PDO for just the northern hemisphere) to a new positive phase. This would be similar in nature, though different in detail, as the shift from La Niña or neutral conditions to El Niño. If this happens, the likelihood of record hot years would increase. I personally do not believe this El Niño will shift the IPO phase. I don't think this El Niño will be strong enough and I don't think the IPO is in a conducive state for a switch to occur.
The "Hiatus"
Skeptics have pointed out that warming has "stopped" or "slowed considerably" in recent years, which they hope will introduce confusion to the public on this topic. What is likely going on is quite different: since an energy imbalance exists (less energy is leaving the Earth than the Earth is receiving; this is due to atmospheric greenhouse gases) and the surface temperature rise has seemingly stalled, the excess energy is going somewhere. The heat has to go somewhere – energy doesn't just disappear. That somewhere is likely the oceans, and specifically the deep ocean (see figure below). Before we all cheer about this (since few people want surface temperatures to continue to rise quickly), consider the implications. If you add heat to a material, it expands. The ocean is no different; sea-levels are rising in part because of heat added to it in the past. The heat that has entered in recent years won't manifest as sea-level rise for some time, but it will happen. Moreover, when the heated ocean comes back up to the surface, that heat will then be released to the atmosphere, which will raise surface temperatures as well as introduce additional water vapor due to the warmer atmosphere. Thus, the immediate warming rate might have slowed down, but we have locked in future warming (higher future warming rate).
Figure 6. Recent research shows anomalous ocean heat energy locations since the late 1950s. The purple lines in the graph show how the heat content of the whole ocean has changed over the past five decades. The blue lines represent only the top 700 m and the grey lines are just the top 300 m. Source: Balmaseda et al., (2013)
You can see in Figure 6 that the upper 300m of the world's oceans accumulated less heat during the 2000s (5*10^22 J) than during the 1990s. In contrast, accumulated heat greatly increased in ocean waters between 300m and 700m during the 2000s (>10*10^22 J). We cannot and do not observe the deep ocean with great frequency. We do know from frequent and reliable observations that the sea surface and relatively shallow ocean did not absorb most of the heat in the past decade. We also know how much energy came to and left the Earth from satellite observations. If we know how much energy came in, how much left, and how much the land surface and shallow ocean absorbed, it is a relatively straightforward computation to determine how much energy likely remains in the deep ocean.
The fact that April 2014 was the warmest on record despite a negative IPO and a neutral ENSO is eye-opening. I think it highlights the fact that there is an even lower frequency signal underlying the IPO, ENSO, and April weather: anthropogenic warming. That signal is not oscillatory, it is increasing at an increasing rate and will continue to do so for decades to centuries. The length of time that occurs and its eventual magnitude is dependent on our policies and activities. We continue to emit GHGs at or above the high-end of the range simulated by climate models. Growth in fossil fuel use at the global scale continues. This growth dwarfs any effect of a switch to energy sources with lower GHG emissions. I don't think that will change during the next 15 years, which would lock us into the warmer climate projections through most of the rest of the 21st century. The primary reason for this is the scale of humankind's energy infrastructure. Switching from fossil fuels to renewable energy will take decades. Acknowledging this isn't defeatist or pessimistic; it is I think critical in order to identify appropriate opportunities and implement the type and scale of policy responses to encourage that switch.


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I Cheated on My Husband... With Food
I have committed infidelity. This thought occurred to me as I fished through the plastic bag for the telltale receipt. I needed to get rid of it. I didn't want my husband, Chris, to see that I had bought a bag of caramels at the drugstore.
The caramels were already gone. I had eaten them on my walk home, tucking every last crinkly wrapper into the original bag, which I then tossed into a garbage bin in the park.
I love my husband, but it did feel as if I were having an affair. Crumbs on my sweaters were the proverbial lipstick on the collar. I'd brush them off, praying that Chris wouldn't check our bank account and notice my string of purchases at fast food joints and bakeries. Mostly, I paid in cash.
The only time I exerted some self-control—or pretended to—was when Chris was with me, as I did on one crisp fall morning when he said, "I could really go for a pumpkin doughnut."
It happened to be a morning when pumpkin doughnuts would have felt right, along with a glass of cider. I didn't tell him that I'd already inhaled two iced pumpkin scones earlier that week, at nearly 500 calories each. Instead, on this day at the Dunkin' Donuts where we had stopped, I dutifully ordered an egg-white sandwich, as if I were actually on a diet. I'd have enjoyed those scones far more if I'd eaten them with my husband across the table, rather than shoveling them into my mouth as I waited for the barista to hand me my coffee, which, by the way, had a little whipped cream on top.
Chris and I could have used some more early-morning togetherness. After sleepless nights with our new daughter, we were too tired for our pre-parenthood a.m. ritual of coffee and conversation. Worse, with the extra weight on my frame, I worried that one day Chris might go to work and not return, fed up with me and my too-big body. Each night, I was surprised to see him walk through the door.
It's not that my husband didn't know what it was like to have a fat wife. When we met, I was at my heaviest—about 360 pounds. As we got to know each other and began to fall deeply in love, I found myself trying to keep up with his active lifestyle. We walked together, worked out together and (the most wonderful calorie burner of all) made love. With Chris, I did things I'd always dreamed about, like hiking and traveling. Along the way, I lost weight. Six years into our relationship, we celebrated my 120-pound weight loss by trekking up Mount Kilimanjaro. I was the happiest I'd ever been.
Yet my weight and eating habits have always been touchy topics for us. Chris is an average-sized guy, content with three square meals and a snack. Mostly, he stayed mute on the subjects, but once in a while, he'd venture a gentle "Should you be eating that?" One birthday, he gave me a book about healthy eating, and I exploded. "Who buys a diet book for his wife on her birthday?!" No wonder he hesitated about being on calorie patrol.
But I needed patrolling. For me, eating has almost always been an illicit activity. At age 9, I hid in the pantry as my parents fought, stuffing my mouth with all manner of snacks and collecting a closetful of plus-sized clothes along the way.
Things got worse when I turned 12. I was a latchkey kid, and one day, while I was sprawled on the carpet watching MTV, my 16-year-old brother and his 18-year-old friend came home unexpectedly. My brother went up to his room, but his friend drifted over; he wanted to watch TV, too, or so I thought. He started out sitting on the couch, then he slithered on top of me, pinning me to the nubby rug and rubbing his body against mine. The only way I could think of to elude his grasp was to say, "I'm hungry. Do you want something to eat?"
My polite query caught him off guard, giving me the chance to escape his groping and hurry to the kitchen. Once again, the pantry door offered protection as I stalled for time, dipping my finger into the peanut butter jar and opening a sleeve of Saltines with jittery hands until I heard him scamper upstairs.
When he returned to our house another night, I blocked my bedroom door with a dresser until my mother came home from work. Later, I crawled into bed with her, finally telling her what had happened. The next morning, she called the police.
He didn't bother me after that, but I made sure to fend off any further male attention by putting on 40 pounds that summer. I accumulated candy wrappers under my bed and Swiss Colony catalogs with dog-eared photographs of petits fours I intended to order. My mother sent me for counseling and signed me up for a diet program that involved downing chalky drinks twice a day. On the other hand, she also sometimes left bowls of treats around the house for me and my brothers, especially during the holidays. I ended up eating most of them.
I broke the 200-pound mark by my junior year in high school. I wanted to date, but I didn't have my first real kiss until my graduation trip, on a porch with a stranger. Later, I heard his pals ribbing him about kissing the fat girl. I put on 10 more pounds that summer.
I met Chris after college, at age 25. With him, I learned to be comfortable with myself, and the pounds began steadily dropping off during our years of friendship, dating and, eventually, marriage. Then, at 32, I got pregnant. At my first prenatal visit, the nurse said, "Congratulations! Say good-bye to having control over your body." Despite her words, I fantasized about delivering a baby, then looking down at the scale, lighter than on the day I'd conceived.
It didn't happen that way. Once I was expecting, I had an excuse to feed my former addiction—ice cream was now a cute pregnancy craving—and the weight piled back on. I started hiding food again, something I hadn't done since my teenage years. The fatter I got, the more I acted like the fat person I once was, giving up my habit of reading the nutritional information on labels. I also stopped exercising; I felt too lousy to move. The more I ate, the worse I felt, so I ate even more and gained more—and the cycle of shame and gaining continued.
But although I hid my bingeing habit from my husband, the effects were clear. Chris first said something after a hike with his family. I was five months pregnant and slogging behind, mostly because I had already put on 30 pounds—more than some women do during their entire nine months. Later, he told me he was worried about me. "I can't diet. I'm pregnant," I said and fled to my office, which we were converting to a nursery.
I told myself Chris didn't get it. As a kid, he'd stow his candy in a special drawer out of the way of general consumption, but he hardly ever opened it. As an adult, he kept up his candy-drawer habit. He's had a foot-long candy cane in there for four years; I'd eaten mine by the time we were home from the holiday party.
Two weeks after I gave birth, I went for Chris's drawer. Housebound with a colicky baby, I badly needed a candy fix, but I was too embarrassed to ask my husband to bring some home. So, on the sly, I dug into Chris's private stash of peanut butter cups. I'd gotten them for him on Valentine's Day; the candies had red and gold wrappers, and the bag had little red hearts. Even as I'd bought them, I'd wondered if I would eat them before he had the chance.
I promised myself I'd take only five, then tell Chris that I'd been craving something sweet and couldn't leave the house. But over the next few days, I dipped in again and again, until the candy was gone. Guiltily, I buried the red and gold wrappers in the trash, saving the bag in case I wanted to refill it. The next week, on my first solo outing since giving birth, I went to the drugstore for more Valentine's candies, but they were gone. I hoped Chris wouldn't notice that his replacement bag lacked hearts.
Back at home, I made a beeline for Chris's drawer, the candy hidden in my jacket. My heart was pounding, and as I gently deposited the bag, trying not to make a sound, he called out from the living room, "Hey, what happened to my peanut butter cups?" Busted! "I ate them," I said. "I wanted something sweet. I have more candy for you here," I reassured him cheerfully, backtracking to his office to retrieve the new bag.
"You were trying to hide the fact that you ate them, weren't you?" Chris asked, shaking his head. Apparently, he was on to me and my unfaithful ways.
"It's just chocolate," I said, trying to make light of the situation.
"It's not the chocolate. It's the deception. It makes it hard for me to trust you," he said angrily.
I know! I know! I wanted to shout. When I'm in the throes of obsessive overeating, I'm a bottomless cavern, yet I feel bound to keep up the pretense that I'm on a diet when I'm in front of others, especially my husband.
I didn't say any of this to Chris. Instead, I retreated down the hall, utterly ashamed. I was tired of lying to myself, my husband and everyone around me. I'd always used food to distract myself from pain. Now I was worried that my bingeing habit would result in the most painful thing I could imagine: losing the man I loved.
I needed to take control again, starting with being honest about my eating. I was up 50 pounds from before I'd gotten pregnant. If I kept going down this path, I would return to my peak weight and beyond. I wanted to have a long life with Chris and my daughter, not a short life with unlimited junk food.
Since the peanut-butter-cup incident, my husband has been more aware of—and more vocal about—my eating patterns. It's not that he counts the snacks, but he does notice when large amounts of food have gone missing, holding up an empty box and saying, "Do you know where all the cookies went?"
"I had some the other day," I answer, perhaps a little defensively but always honestly. I wish he wouldn't ask, but I know he's doing his best to support me, and I'm grateful that he's beginning to understand my food issues. If I do eat an entire box of something, we both know it's time to talk about what else is going on.
Usually, though, I make a conscious effort to eat as if I were seated at a table with Chris or a group of friends, even when I'm alone. If I'm going to eat something, I'm going to own up to it. I make a point of never secretly replenishing our snacks, and I generally wait to have a sweet treat until my husband comes home from work and it's time for dessert. I love seeing his look of pride when I make a healthy choice. But I love relinquishing the extra weight of my old ways—and the guilt—even more.
Photo Credit: Steven Puetzer/Getty Images

subset: commoncrawl


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Pictures of Red Carpet, Afterparty, Fashion, and Beauty From 2011 Golden Globes
Golden Globe Awards Afterparties, Show, Fashion, and Beauty Roundup!
We're taking a closer look at the Golden Globe Awards from the star-studded arrivals to the amazing afterparties and beyond. Check out all of the night's best fashion and beauty, take a look back at the show's most memorable moments, and test your red carpet knowledge with all of our exciting coverage!
- Tell us what you think was the biggest surprise of the night.
- Did you hear the 10 funniest quotes?
- See if you can guess the red-hot moms on the carpet.
- Can you guess which foodie hit the red carpet?
- Get home inspiration with retro geometrics from the HBO party.
Red carpet fashion coverage:
- Play Fab's addictive new faceoff game with all your red carpet favorites.
- Vote on all of Fab's fashion red carpet afterparty love it or hate it polls.
- A closer look at the night's best accessories.
- Who was the best dressed lady in pink?
- Check out all of the fashion details you may have missed.
Red carpet beauty coverage:
- Get Olivia Wilde's fresh and clean face.
- Try out Lea Michele's peachy look.
- How to get Dianna Agron's soft Chanel makeup and vintage curls.
- A breakdown of Tina Fey's makeup palette.
- Re-create Jennifer Lopez's glamorous metallic eyes.
- Step-by-step tips to get Sofia Vergara's sexy lashes and lids.
- All of the most stunning hair and makeup looks.
Check out Buzz to see the full list of Golden Globe Award winners and let us know if you agree with them!


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Online, over the airwaves, or via satellite, the Met offers a range of ways to hear the world's greatest operatic performances, both live and from the company's unparalleled archive.
Listen live to Met performances, streamed here on our website once a week during the season.
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Help support the Met broadcasts for special access to great bonus listening: performances, features, talks, and more.
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Our products selection for Meat Selection:
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text: Today - we've launched B.o.B: The Adventures - a video game in which you have to drive around the world collecting beautiful girls. You'll go to London, to Paris, even way out there to Tokyo. Back home down in Georgia and to New Orleans. Oh yeah, NYC too. Not quite, but just like a Nintendo 64.


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Learn how MacUpdate Desktop can install apps on MacUpdate with the simple click of the icon. Plus, keep all your apps updated.
ZeusDraw is a drawing program with a fluid, graceful interface. It has a different, more intuitive approach to paths (Bezier curves) and great brushes. Quartz and Cocoa let ZeusDraw show you what you are doing, as you do it. When you move or rotate an object, you see the object move or rotate, not its bounding box. When you draw with a brush, you see a close approximation to the final brush stroke as you draw, not a dotted line that is filled in later.
- Both vector brushes and textured, pixel-based brushes that remain objects that can be selected, edited (path and attributes), moved, scaled and rotated.
What's New in ZeusDraw
- This is a Snow Leopard compatibility release. It fixes a problem that can cause high-resolution bitmaps and pdf images to be replaced with screen resolution (or lower) bitmaps when ZeusDraw 1.3.3 or earlier is used on Snow Leopard. If you are using Snow Leopard you should update before doing any more work.


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Back to granite on Cima Dome
Mark Wilson March 17th, 2011
ZZYZX, CALIFORNIA–Our last stop of the rapidly-cooling day was on the huge Cima Dome east of Zzyzx in the Mojave National Preserve. The dome is so large (about 70 square miles) that it is impossible to detect when you are actually on it, but easily visible from miles away. It apparently is the eroded root of a granitic intrusion formed during subduction in the Jurassic to Cretaceous. The alkali granite exposed here is very similar to that of the Granite Mountains we saw yesterday.


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Your Reliable Resource for Buying and Selling Residential Property in Vancouver, BC
When it comes to knowing everything about residential property in Vancouver, look no further than RE/MAX Crest Realty. Established in 1980, we have earned a reputation for providing the utmost service within the greater Vancouver area. Our experience and expertise make us one of the most reliable when it comes to finding the best condos for sale, houses for sale, commercial leases and other real estate.
Whether you are looking to sell the Vancouver condo you presently own or are in the market for a new home, our team of real estate professionals will help you with everything you need. Some of the resources we work with include our own featured listing as well as the MLS® (Multiple Listing Service), both of which we can use to sell your property or find you your ideal home.
When selling, we aim to market your home through the best avenues possible to ensure it attracts the right type of potential buyers and ensures that you get a great deal for your property. If buying, we use all our resources to help find the home that fits exactly what you are looking for, from location, features, to price. If you need financial assistance with your purchase, we also offer mortgage and financial options that have competitive rates via our Dominion Lending Centre.
If you are ready to sell or buy a condo or house in Vancouver, please contact us at RE/MAX Crest Realty. Our team looks forward to working with you.
For more information on our service areas, Vancouver, Burnaby and Richmond, Canada, and the province of British Columbia-Greater Vancouver Area-Vancouver Island,
click here


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Archive - Jan 14, 2012
Early Mock Draft
Here is our first extended mock of the year. This year's draft promises to be one of the deepest and most talented in years.
7-foot phenom joins Notre Dame Prep
Mid Major Blog
Player of the Week:
Damian Lillard, Weber State, PG, Junior, 6-3 195 lbs.
Lillard is the nation's leading scorer, averaging 25.8 PPG, and is one of the nation's best shooters as well – 47.8 FG%, 46.7 3P% and 90.7 FT%. He has led Weber State to a 13-3 record, including a 7-game win streak as well. This past week Lillard and Weber State beat Portland State (8-9) and Montana State (7-8). Against Portland State, Lillard finished with 38 points (12-23 shooting), 5 rebounds, 5 assists and 1 steal. In Thursday night's game against Montana State, he finished with 17 points (4-14 shooting), 6 rebounds and 3 steals. Lillard is widely considered to be a late first round to early second round NBA Draft prospect. His sharp shooting skills, ball-handling ability and relentless style of play make him the leading candidate for the Big Sky Player of the Year honor and also a candidate for All-American considerations.
Who's Hot?
O.D. Anosike, Siena, PF, Junior, 6-8 232 lbs.
Anosike leads the nation in rebounding (12.5 RPG) and his performances during this past week of games furthered that standing. Siena (8-8) beat Rider (6-12) and Niagara (6-11) and in both games, Anosike finished with 14 rebounds. Against Rider he poured in 23 points and against Niagara he scored 27 points. For the season he's averaging 14.7 PPG, 12.5 RPG, 0.6 APG, 1.1 SPG, 1.3 BPG and shooting 50.5 FG%. His free throw percentage could definitely use some work; currently it sits at 53.3 percent. Anosike is a bull in the paint and clears space by using excellent "box out" techniques.


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Port Lockroy and Petermann Island
Our fifth day found us at Port Lockroy getting ready to visit Base A, now a museum and gift shop, on Goudier Island . We also visited Jougla Point on nearby Wiencke Island. After the visit we once again sailed through the Lemaire Channel on our way to an afternoon visit to Petermann Island.Read More
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TALLAHASSEE, Fla. (AP) Jamie Adams scored 18 points as Florida A&M held off Maryland-Eastern Shore 55-54 Saturday night in Mid-Eastern Athletic Conference action.
The Rattlers (6-14, 3-3), who have won two in a row after an eight-game skid, led 55-49 with 3:29 left after an Adams' 3-pointer. The Hawks then scored five unanswered points, capped by Ishaq Pitt's jumper with 51 seconds remaining. After Florida A&M's Muhammad Abdul-Aleem turned the ball over, Kevin Mays missed the potential game-winning jumper with 5 seconds to go.
The Rattlers pulled away early in the second half following seven ties. Knotted at 32-32, Florida A&M rattled off eight straight points and led by as many as 10 after the break before the Hawks closed the gap.
Maryland-Eastern Shore (1-14, 1-3), coming off its first win of the season, 58-53 over Delaware State, was led by Mays with 20 points and 13 rebounds. Troy Snyder added 15 boards.


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MacKinnon leads Avs to OT win over Wild
DENVER — Sometimes, it's hard for the Colorado Avalanche to remember that Nathan MacKinnon is just 18 years old and only a rookie.
Because he keeps coming through in big moments.
The speedy MacKinnon scored 3:27 into overtime after P.A. Parenteau tied the game late in regulation, helping the Avalanche rally for a 4-3 win over the Minnesota Wild on Saturday night and a 3-2 lead in the first-round series.
"The kid's special," Parenteau said. "I know it's cliche to say, but it's pretty impressive to see. … This is the kid we want on our side."
MacKinnon is having quite the series, with two goals and eight assists.
Surprised at all by his youngster's poise?
"We knew when we drafted him what kind of player we were drafting," Avalanche coach Patrick Roy said as the series switches back to Minnesota for Game 6 on Monday. "He had a solid game."
A memorable one, too. After all, it's not every day a rookie scores an OT winner in the playoffs.
MacKinnon corralled the puck and poked it past Darcy Kuemper's glove with two defenders near him. Soon after, MacKinnon was mobbed by teammates.
He deflected the credit, though, saying it should go to Paul Stastny or Gabriel Landeskog for their roles on the play.
"Paulie forced the puck down in their end, Landy got it on the half-wall and I was screaming for it," MacKinnon said. "Definitely a good play by him."
MacKinnon's time in the spotlight was made possible by Parenteau, who scored with 1:14 left after Roy pulled goaltender Semyon Varlamov with 2:22 remaining. The strategy worked out again, just like in Game 1.
There may have been some controversy on Parenteau's tying goal, though, with Stastny possibly being offsides on the play.
At least, that was the Wild's take.
"They missed the call and we paid for it," Minnesota defenseman Ryan Suter said. "No excuses. We have to play better in overtime. We've got to get more pressure on the kid (MacKinnon) when he comes to the net."
Wild coach Mike Yeo is hoping the breaks equal out.
"I would say we're due for, I don't want to say luck, but for stuff to go our way a little bit," Yeo said. "I'm not going to dwell on what happened in the game."
When his team trails, Roy has been rather liberal in pulling Varlamov all season long, preferring to send out an extra skater with plenty of time left on the clock. It worked in the series opener, as Stastny scored with 13.4 seconds remaining in regulation and then added the OT winner.
"We believe in ourselves more when we're down a goal," Landeskog said. "It's exciting to be a part of. It's not something we want to make a habit of doing."
Nick Holden and Cody McLeod also added goals for the Avalanche.
Kyle Brodziak, Zach Parise and Matt Moulson scored for the Wild. Two of Minnesota's goals came after a Colorado defenseman shattered their stick and had to play without one.
Parise tied the game at 2 early in the third when he glided down the left side and beat Varlamov with a shot over his glove.
Nearly two minutes later, Brodziak gave the Wild the lead after defenseman Jan Hejda broke his stick and struggled to cover anyone.
McLeod had a short-handed goal at 8:04 of the second period, when he redirected a pass from Ryan O'Reilly past Kuemper.
The lead was short-lived as the Wild answered 1:13 later when Moulson tipped in a shot by Jared Spurgeon from the blue line. On the play, Maxime Talbot gave his stick to defenseman Andre Benoit after his broke and then Jamie McGinn passed his to Talbot, leaving McGinn without a stick.
There was a little scuffle between captains Mikko Koivu and Landeskog, with both receiving roughing penalties.
Advantage Colorado, though, since the 4-on-4 situation opened up more room for the speedy Avs to maneuver. Benoit lined a shot wide of the net, but Holden stuck out his stick and deflected the puck by Kuemper to give the Avs a 2-1 lead.
This could help the Avs offense: They may soon have leading scorer Matt Duchene back in the lineup as he skated with the team Saturday morning. Duchene has been sidelined since hurting his left knee when he ran into a teammate against San Jose on March 29.
Expect Duchene back for Game 6?
"We're going to take a serious look at it," Roy said.
NOTES: The Wild were without suspended LW Matt Cooke for a second game after his knee-on-knee hit knocked Avs D Tyson Barrie out for at least a month. … The Avs are 1 for 18 on the power play.


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K-Rod, bullpen fuel win, recent Brewers' run
MILWAUKEE -- How far can the Brewers push this bullpen?
Or, put differently, how far can this bullpen push the Brewers?View Full Game Coverage
MILWAUKEE -- How far can the Brewers push this bullpen?
Or, put differently, how far can this bullpen push the Brewers?View Full Game Coverage
"Really far," said Francisco Rodriguez, his right shoulder encased in ice after saving a 4-3 win over the Padres on Monday at Miller Park.
The Brewers held onto the best record in baseball, 15-5, after relievers Will Smith, Tyler Thornburg and Rodriguez finished what Wily Peralta, Ryan Braun and Co. had started. Peralta delivered the Brewers' 15th quality start of the young season. Braun logged his first two Miller Park RBIs. Aramis Ramirez added a solo homer and Scooter Gennett a key RBI triple.
The bullpen did the rest, combining for 2 2/3 scoreless innings to drive down Milwaukee's relief ERA to 2.55, a figure that would look even better had Rob Wooten and Wei-Chung Wang not combined to allow nine earned runs in 1 1/3 innings against the Pirates last week. The Brewers' bullpen is a bright spot, despite the fact that Wang is a Rule 5 Draft pick and has only pitched twice, and regular setup man Brandon Kintzler is on the disabled list with a shoulder injury.
Kintzler is due back Friday, and should further fortify the group by giving manager Ron Roenicke a third reliable eighth-inning option, with Smith, who hasn't allowed a run in 11 appearances, and Thornburg, who hasn't been charged with a run in his last 10 appearances. The Brewers hope Jim Henderson, who is off to an inconsistent start, joins that group.
"They've been unbelievable," said Peralta, who won his third straight start after allowing three Padres runs (two earned) in 6 1/3 innings, thanks to the big assist from Smith. "It's been huge for us. It's huge for me, too."
What impresses Rodriguez about this particular relief corps?
"We've got a bunch of young guys who are hungry, first of all," Rodriguez said. "We've got guys who can go up to the mid-90s, to guys who know how to pitch. It's a good balance. As long as we stay healthy, we're going to throw the ball pretty well."
He added: "When you start coming with tendinitis here, tightness over here, tightness over there, and you get out of your line, that's when all the drama starts."
Roenicke is aware of that worry. Rodriguez has extensive relief experience, but the role is new for Smith and Thornburg. Asked how far he could push the current crop, Roenicke paused.
"Good question," the manager said. "We think about it. We talk about it every day. We talk to the guys after they go out and play catch. Relievers are always out there early to see how they're doing, and the guys are pretty honest. When they're gassed and they're hanging, they let us know. We know what we're doing [Tuesday] already. Hopefully, we get a lot of runs tomorrow."
Padres starter Andrew Cashner had surrendered only four earned runs in his first four starts of the season combined, but allowed that many in six innings against the Brewers. Three of the runs scored in a third-inning rally sparked by Peralta's leadoff double to the left-center-field gap, with Gennett, Braun and Ramirez driving in a run apiece.
The Padres cut that deficit to one run in a two-run fourth, scoring the second one on a tough error charged to Gennett. He was trying to complete a double play, but his throw struck the charging runner, Yonder Alonso, on the arm, and bounced away. Chase Headley scored.
The Brewers made it to 4-2 on Braun's RBI single over a drawn-in infield in the fifth inning, but Chris Denorfia answered with a home run off Peralta to lead off the seventh. When Smith averted further trouble in that inning, it helped Peralta improve to 3-0 this season.
"He came out firing," Padres manager Bud Black said of Peralta. "He had a good, tight slider that got under our swings. He's been pitching well. It looks like he's followed in line with what the other guys [in the rotation] are doing."
The Brewers blew an opportunity in the bottom of the eighth inning to give Rodriguez a night off. With runners at first and third with only one out, Roenicke ordered a squeeze from catcher Martin Maldonado, one of the team's most proficient bunters. Maldonado bunted two chances foul, then watched as Herrera took off for second on a ball in the dirt and got thrown out, and Segura got thrown out between third and home on the same play.
That meant Rodriguez had only one run to work with. He allowed a one-out single to Evereth Cabrera that ticked off Gennett's glove, but retired Yasmani Grandal and Seth Smith to end the game for his eighth save and his 11th scoreless appearance.
Over the past six days, Rodriguez has thrown 78 pitches with only one day off. But he insisted he felt better Monday than he did Sunday afternoon in Pittsburgh, and felt better Sunday than the day before.
"I'm the kind of pitcher, the more I throw, the much better I've felt," he said. "My whole career, I'm used to having a big workload. This is not something new for me. I just have to do my maintenance and be sure to do things the right way."
Rodriguez was asked whether he admits when he needs a day off.
"All the time," he said, surprisingly. "Every time they ask me if I want a day off, I look at the schedule."
So when pitching coach Rick Kranitz asked the question on Monday afternoon, Rodriguez knew the answer.
"Thursday," he said, referring to the Brewers' next off-day.
If Kranitz asks again before the series continues Tuesday, "I'm probably going to give him the same answer," Rodriguez said.
Adam McCalvy is a reporter for MLB.com. Read his blog, Brew Beat, and follow him on Twitter at @AdamMcCalvy.


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Jan 2 (Reuters) - Detroit Pistons forward Charlie Villanueva has been fined $25,000 for a flagrant foul on Sacramento Kings guard Isaiah Thomas, the National Basketball Association said on Wednesday.
Villanueva was ejected for the foul, which occurred with four seconds left in the second quarter of Detroit's 103-97 home win over Sacramento on Tuesday. (Reporting by Mark Lamport-Stokes in Los Angeles; Editing by Steve Keating)


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During a teardown at this year's DesignCon in Santa Clara, Calif., Kyle Weins, the CEO of iFixit, blasted Apple for switching out its Phillips screws for new tamper-resistant screws.
Weins, who has written a hardware manifesto stating that users should be allowed to tinker with their own devices, called the move "diabolical" on Apple's part.
"This is not a standard Torx, and there are no readily available screwdrivers that can remove it," he said, though iFixit has recently built a tool that can do the job. "Apple chose this fastener specifically because it was new, guaranteeing repair tools would be both rare and expensive."
Click the image below to view a slideshow of the iPhone 4S in various stages of disassembly:
The screw that Apple is using is similar to a Torx -- except that the points have a rounder shape, and the screw has five points instead of six.
Apple's service manuals refer to them as "Pentalobular" screws, which Weins admits is a fairly fitting description.
"This screw head clearly has one purpose: to keep you out," he said.


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From version 1.00, more than one backup configuration can be maintained.
The configuration and operation of RecPointX is simple and finished with a few steps.
The program can be deactivated without problems for a longer period since with every backup an adjustment of the last backup to the current data is always
What's New in RecPointX
New features:
- Maintenance of various backup configurations
- Now including a newer version of rsync. This improved the protocol output and the backup speed.
- Modification date and time of files now preserved correctly.
- 0.99b: Initial release of RecPointX - very stable beta.


text:
Rachel Ehrenberg
Previously the interdisciplinary sciences and chemistry reporter and author of the Culture Beaker blog, Rachel has written about new explosives, the perils and promise of 3-D printing and how to detect corruption in networks of email correspondence. Rachel was a 2013-2014 Knight Science Journalism fellow at MIT. She has degrees in botany and political science from the University of Vermont and a master's in evolutionary biology from the University of Michigan. She graduated from the science writing program at the University of California, Santa Cruz.


text:
Shows processes blocking a file from being moved.
Developer website: Oliver Matuschin
Lock-UnMatic shows processes blocking a file from being moved or deleted
Sometimes, files on the Mac cannot be deleted, moved or renamed. This can be caused by insufficient access rights, or because some processes are still using these files
Unfortunately, the OS X Finder doesn't tell the user which processes exactly are causing the lock. Also, these processes are often running hidden in the background - so they can't even be quit using the Dock
Here, Lock-UnMatic comes into play. Simply drag and drop the affected files onto the application-icon (or into the application-window), and Lock-UnMatic shows you a nice overview of all blocking processes. It's also possible to kill these processes from within the application
What's New
- Have multiple filelists open at the same time.
- Extended network settings with proxy support for update checking.
- Support for fullscreen mode.
- Reduced memory usage.
- Signed application to support Gatekeeper.
- Enhanced window menu.
- Filechooser now implemented as sheet.
- Improved scrolling inside the list.
- Added menu entries for all toolbar buttons.
- Fixed a typo in the comments dialog.
- Column widths were sometimes not correctly remembered.
- Fixed some issues regarding the application preferences.
- OS X 10.6 or later
- Java 1.6


text:
Product 41/74
The El Ray sneaker silhouette is one of our favorite (and iconic) speed-inspired styles. It's one of those low-profile kicks that goes with pretty much anything jeans/cords/khakis-wise (who doesn't love versatility?), and our designers are always playing with new takes on its clean, California-cool style. The version features a durable synthetic leather upper and slip on styling.


text:
Knowledge Hub
Research delivers insight into Global Brushless Servo Motors Industry 2017
Press release • Feb 20, 2017 01:16 EST
MarketResearchReports.Biz has announced addition of new report "Global Brushless Servo Motors Industry 2017, Trends And Forecast Report" to its database.
Brushless Servo Motors Report by Material, Application, and Geography Global Forecast to 2021 is a professional and in-depth research report on the world's major regional market conditions, focusing on the main regions (North America, Europe and Asia-Pacific) and the main countries (United States, Germany, united Kingdom, Japan, South Korea and China).
Click here to know more: http://www.marketresearchreports.biz/analysis/970684
The report firstly introduced the Brushless Servo Motors basics: definitions, classifications, applications and market overview; product specifications; manufacturing processes; cost structures, raw materials and so on. Then it analyzed the world's main region market conditions, including the product price, profit, capacity, production, supply, demand and market growth rate and forecast etc. In the end, the report introduced new project SWOT analysis, investment feasibility analysis, and investment return analysis.
The report includes six parts, dealing with:
1.) basic information;
2.) the Asia Brushless Servo Motors Market;
3.) the North American Brushless Servo Motors Market;
4.) the European Brushless Servo Motors Market;
5.) market entry and investment feasibility;
6.) the report conclusion.
Request a sample copy of this report: http://www.marketresearchreports.biz/sample/sample/970684
Table of contents:
Part I Brushless Servo Motors Industry Overview
Chapter One Brushless Servo Motors Industry Overview
1.1 Brushless Servo Motors Definition
1.2 Brushless Servo Motors Classification Analysis
1.2.1 Brushless Servo Motors Main Classification Analysis
1.2.2 Brushless Servo Motors Main Classification Share Analysis
1.3 Brushless Servo Motors Application Analysis
1.3.1 Brushless Servo Motors Main Application Analysis
1.3.2 Brushless Servo Motors Main Application Share Analysis
1.4 Brushless Servo Motors Industry Chain Structure Analysis
1.5 Brushless Servo Motors Industry Development Overview
1.5.1 Brushless Servo Motors Product History Development Overview
1.5.1 Brushless Servo Motors Product Market Development Overview
1.6 Brushless Servo Motors Global Market Comparison Analysis
1.6.1 Brushless Servo Motors Global Import Market Analysis
1.6.2 Brushless Servo Motors Global Export Market Analysis
1.6.3 Brushless Servo Motors Global Main Region Market Analysis
1.6.4 Brushless Servo Motors Global Market Comparison Analysis
1.6.5 Brushless Servo Motors Global Market Development Trend Analysis
Chapter Two Brushless Servo Motors Up and Down Stream Industry Analysis
About Us
MarketResearchReports.biz is the most comprehensive collection of market research reports. MarketResearchReports.Biz services are specially designed to save time and money for our clients. We are a one stop solution for all your research needs, our main offerings are syndicated research reports, custom research, subscription access and consulting services. We serve all sizes and types of companies spanning across various industries.
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text:
From cchtml.com
Xgl is the GLX on OpenGL implementation by David R. at Novell.
fglrx works for the most part, but there are a few bugs known to exist.
- Enabling FSAA causes corruption and instability.
- Mesa library is required for pixmap_to_texture support.
- Screen limit of 2048x1024 (so no dual screen)
- Closing the Xgl server without restarting X will cause a hardlock.
- Restoring a window that has been minimized sometimes causes the window to not be fully redrawn (random percentage is not redrawn, or sometimes the whole window is drawn).
- Restoring a window is not smooth and only appears when fully maximized (no smooth transition such as minimizing).
- On ATI cards, Xgl can only be started with a higher display number than the Xorg it is running on, i.e. DISPLAY=:0 Xgl :1 will work, DISPLAY=:93 Xgl :0 will not.
See also the openSUSE wiki for workarounds about some of the driver bugs.
Supported Cards
fglrx 8.24.8
- Radeon 9700
fglrx 8.29.6
- All cards from R300 and up


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Contact & General InformationEnvironmental Defense Fund
257 Park Avenue South
New York, NY 10010
Tax Status: 501(c)3
Other Names
Is this rating different than what you expected based on what the charity reports about itself or what other raters report about this charity? Read about what makes CharityWatch's independent ratings different from other sources of information.
Calculated Total Expenses (rounded) : $172,000,000
A charity's Program % is the percentage of its cash budget it spends on Programs relative to Overhead (Fundraising and Management & General Expenses)
Joint CostsEnvironmental Defense Fund's rating was adjusted for Joint Costs. If you are a donor who considers direct mail, telemarketing, and other Joint Cost solicitations to be true charitable programs, the below efficiency ratios, which were not adjusted for joint costs, may better reflect your goals.
|Program %
|Cost to Raise $100
Government FundingCharityWatch calculates the percentage of a charity's cash revenue received from government sources for informational purposes for those donors who would like to factor a charity's range of government funding into their giving decisions. Donors should keep in mind that funding from the government does not automatically signal that a charity is well-governed and/or more efficient than other charities.
For the reporting year rated by CharityWatch, this charity received cash grants/contributions from government sources within a range of:
0% to 24%
Financial DocumentsEnvironmental Defense Fund's rating is based on CharityWatch's in-depth analysis of the following documents for the fiscal year represented:
|Document Type
|Tax Id #
|Environmental Defense Fund
|Audited Consolidated Financial Statements
|Environmental Defense Fund
|IRS Form 990
See the CRITERIA to learn why CharityWatch analyzes multiple documents before computing a charity's rating.


text: Linux on Microsoft Azure 12 November 2014 david Code I've recently been messing about with Microsoft's Azure platform; and I already think it's brilliant. I didn't expect the support for Linux Virtual Machines to be quite so good. Literally with just a few clicks I created a Linux box on the cloud (I went for Ubuntu), I can't really see it getting much easier. I suppose I should have known when I recently saw that Microsoft's CEO Satya Nadella had presented this: Anyway, the first thing that I did with Azure was test my Linux VM out by copying over my C webserver code and compiling it. Everything went perfectly. But I quickly realised that it would be useful to be able to leave my code running in another terminal session when I disconnected from the console. That's where I tried out GNU Screen which allowed me to start my program in a session and leave it running after I had disconnected. GNU Screen is a nice simple solution, which means that I can keep my code simple. I like this :-) And at the same time I noticed a couple of bugs in the webserver code which I had not spotted before, so I was able to fix them too. It's great to think that I can write some C code on my MacBook; cross-compile and test it on a small router running OpenWrt, then move it to the Azure platform without any worries. This is one reason why I still like programming in C (and Linux). Next I decided to copy my H2D2 server across to Azure (of course). Again, everything worked perfectly. So I'm currently testing H2D2 on the cloud, let's see how stable it is. I also took the opportunity to tidy up the html, to make it look more presentable as well: For some reason it came out in grey. I don't really know why. Since I'm expecting to see a few crashes, I have used a simple shell script like this one which will restart my server program when something goes wrong. Originally, I started with the most basic type of VM on offer, with a shared core. But then I did an upgrade to an 8-core machine, which gave a noticeable performance boost (as you'd expect). It was nice to see that Azure can upgrade your VM really easily, yet again it was all done with a couple of clicks (and a reboot of the VM). But now, to save CPU I've gone back to the shared core again which will be less of a drain on my account.


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MONDAY, July 18 (HealthDay News) -- Although Hispanics tend to have lower self-esteem than blacks or whites in the teen years, by age 30 their self-esteem has increased to the point that they have higher self-esteem than whites, a new study suggests.
Latest Mental Health News
And in both adolescence and young adulthood, blacks have higher self-esteem than whites. By age 30, whites trailed both Hispanics and blacks in terms of self-esteem, according to the report published online July 4 in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology.
Researchers at the University of Basel in Switzerland made this finding after analyzing U.S. survey data of more than 7,000 young adults from 1994 to 2008. The participants ranged in age from 14 to 30 years. Over the course of 14 years, the study authors examined how five personality traits (openness, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness and neuroticism) affected the youth's self-esteem.
In addition, the researchers also looked at the participants' sense of life mastery, risk-taking tendencies, gender, ethnicity, health and income.
"We tested for factors that we thought would have an impact on how self-esteem develops," the study's lead author, Ruth Yasemin Erol, said in news release from the American Psychological Association. "Understanding the trajectory of self-esteem is important to pinpointing and timing interventions that could improve people's self-esteem."
The researchers found that conscientiousness, emotional stability, a feeling of mastery and being extraverted are key to predicting the direction a person's self-esteem will take as they grow up, and that income did not affect this course. These findings, they pointed out, could assist health professionals in targeting treatments.
And, contrary to popular belief, there are no significant differences in the way men and women feel about themselves during those periods of development, the investigators found.
"The converging evidence on gender similarity in self-esteem is important because false beliefs in gender differences in self-esteem may carry substantial costs," said Erol. "For example, parents, teachers and counselors may overlook self-esteem problems in male adolescents and young men because of the widespread belief that men have higher self-esteem than women have."
-- Mary Elizabeth Dallas
Copyright © 2011 HealthDay. All rights reserved.
SOURCE: American Psychological Association, news release, July 14, 2011


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mniemiec wrote:BlinkerSpawn wrote:Do you guys think that 15.786 can be taken off the list given an improvement on 13.82?
That also gives 14.269 (EDIT: not 14.239) and 15.782 from 10. When and where was the improvement for 13.82 announced? I hadn't been aware of it.
What I was trying to ask there is if it seemed reasonable *to* reduce 13.82 enough that 15.786 could be removed.
I wasn't aware of any actual improvement at the time.


text:
U.S. Vision is looking for an independent optometrist to run their own office located in or adjacent to our JC Penney Optical Department in our Houston, Texas location! This is the perfect opportunity for an Optometrist that is looking for a profitable practice opportunity that is completely TURNKEY!
This opportunity does not require any investment.
U.S. Vision is the seventh largest retail optical chain in the United States. We have been engaged in the retail optical business since 1967.
We are the second largest independent operator of optical stores in host retailers in terms of store count and the first in terms of the number of brands.
We are located in 47 states and across Canada. We operate a state-of-the-art manufacturing laboratory in Glendora, NJ.
Some of the many benefits of associating with U.S. Vision are :
If you are self-motivated and looking for a career in optometry that has the benefits of being a private practice owner in terms of scheduling flexibility and financial opportunity without the hardships and investment of opening a practice cold, contact us today! New graduates welcome!
related disorders and conditions
US Vision is an equal opportunity employer. We value diversity and an inclusive, accessible workplace. Decisions of employment are made based on business needs, job requirements and applicant's qualifications without regard to race, color, religion, gender, national origin, disability status, protected veteran status, genetic information and testing, family and medical leave, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression or any other status protected by law.
US Vision is a drug-free work place. We participate in the E-Verify program.


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June 25, 2007
It is only natural for athletes to work on improving during the off-season. But what about a mascot?
Just like any athlete who practices all year to perform at a high level for the audiences entertainment, those fury faced friends that fans have come to love must dedicate time to master their art.
LU Bison is no exception. Despite already being one of the top mascots in the A-Sun, if not the entire world (according to LU himself), LU Bison worked on honing his skills by learning from one of the best in the business.
On June 16th, LU Bison took his act on the road to Baptist Sports Complex and attended the Titans mascot camp to learn some new skills from T-Rac of the Tennessee Titans.
"T-Rac is an awesome mascot," LU Bison said. "He is a role model that all we fuzzy guys look to for advice and guidance. Ever since he began his career as the official Tennessee Titans mascot in 1999, T-Rac has been like a brother to me. Learning from T-Rac is like taking tennis lessons from Andre Agassi. It doesn't get any better."
Starting at 8 a.m. and going until about 3 p.m., LU Bison along with other area high school and college mascots worked on enhancing their skills, performance, and overall presence as a mascot.
"The camp was designed not only for seasoned veterans like me, but also for mascots with little to no experience," LU Bison said. "It was also used for us mascots to get feedback and ideas from fellow mascots about performance ideas."
During the camp, the mascots worked together on different skits and stunts in order to be critiqued by T-Rac himself. T-Rac gave many insights on innovative ways to win over the crowd, because pleasing your audience is the number one goal of any mascot.
"As a mascot, my main job is entertainment," LU Bison said. "How can I win the crowd? T-Rac gave us ways to win the crowd, how to get the crowd fired up, and how to show as much energy as possible."
LU Bison's story dates back to the 1990-1991 basketball season, when LU Bison's father, "Big Dave" joined the Bisons cheerleading squad. Big Dave wowed crowds for years in the historic McQuiddy Gymnasium until his retirement in the late nineties.
Allen Arena and a move to NCAA Division I meant change, and for a while Bison fans were left with no visible symbol of their team roaming the stands and harassing other teams. However, in 2005 that all changed when LU Bison continued the rich mascot tradition at Lipscomb and took over his father's footsteps by joining Lipscomb's promotional team.
"Ever since I was born on the plains of Oklahoma, I knew that I was special," LU Bison said. "I knew that grazing was not the life for me. Being a mascot has always been my dream, and Lipscomb made that dream come true."
LU Bison walked the sidelines for the first time in his new home of Allen Arena at the first annual HoopapaLUza. Now preparing to enter into his third season as part of the Lipscomb family, LU Bison has become a mainstay at Lipscomb games.
It is LU Bison's dedication to Lipscomb that led him to Titans mascot camp. Striving to serve Lipscomb better every time he walks onto the court, LU Bison thinks his practice this off-season could be just what he needs to help the Bisons to another successful season.
"I learned some great things about being a better mascot and look forward to my third season as Lipscomb's official mascot," LU Bison said. "Going to the Tennessee Titans mascot camp just gave me more of an edge to being the best mascot in the A-Sun, and in the world."


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Friday evening Mrs. Flannestad and I met up with our friends Robby and Mrs. Virus for a nice evening out.
We went for dinner at a new-ish upscale-ish Beer Bar here in San Francisco called Monk's Kettle.
There was a beer from a Fairfax, CA, Brewery I'd never heard of called Iron Springs. Fairfax is a small town past San Anselmo on Sir Francis Drake in Marin. Kind of a scruffy hippy outpost on the outskirts of upscale communities like Corte Madeira and Sausalito. So, being Mr. "drink local beer," and actually knowing folks who live in Fairfax, I figured I better give it a chance.
Called "Anne Marie's Amber" it was a very good beer. No disrespect or slight to the brewery intended, but it tasted like really good, honest, home brew. To explain what I mean, I've had some good and bad beer that friends have brewed. But when unfiltered home brew beer is fresh and really good, there is nothing better. Magnolia Brewpub reminds me of really good home brew and I know part of it is because they don't filter, just fine. And it isn't bottled, just served fresh from the keg.
Anne Marie's Amber reminded me of that. I can only describe the texture as almost chunky, there was so much chewy beer goodness. Plus, not over the top in sweetness, bitterness, or ABV, so you can drink a few without doing cartwheels down the street.
They have a number of very good beers on tap at Monk's Kettle and a good list of Belgians and other beers in bottles. As far as the food goes, it's no Hop Leaf, but at least they are trying. Excellent fresh baked soft pretzels…
…and some pretty tasty house made charcouterie.


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In our new series, we will take a look at comedy and comedy related news from around the internet in the past week. If you have a story you'd like us to link to, email us at email@example.com
Sadly, the top story of the comedy world this week was the death of Patrice O'Neal, after suffering a stroke this past October. Comedians reacted to the news on the web with their memories and admiration of the much loved O'Neal. Comedy Central released this tribute, and it has been announced that they are working on a larger tribute. Sandpaper Suit posted some thoughts, and linked to two interviews with O'Neal. Luke Giordano wrote this piece for Everything You Like is Stupid, and it was announced that a posthumous album from O'Neal will be released next year. A sad week for comedians and fans of comedy.
Nominations for the Grammy Awards were announced this week prompting Laughspin to write this article praising the quality of the nominations for this year's Best Comedy Album.
Laughspin also released their list of the 10 Best Comedy Albums of 2011.
In Philly related news the trailer for Tim and Eric's Billion Dollar Movie was released this week. You can watch the red band trailer here.
Sandpaper Suit wrote this piece about one of my favorite movies of all time, Groundhog Day.
Splitsider posted this email exchange between Marc Maron and Bob Lefsets on the business of podcasting. It's a good read for people interested in the business behind new content formats.


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Ikea monkey's owner wrote to trainer that Darwin was a 'time bomb'
Allison Jones, The Canadian Press
Published Thursday, January 31, 2013 6:14AM EST
Last Updated Thursday, January 31, 2013 2:55PM EST
TORONTO -- The woman who refers to herself as the Ikea monkey's mom wrote in an email that she was "unfit" to care for the primate, calling him a "time bomb" because she couldn't stop him from biting, court heard Thursday.
Emails from Yasmin Nakhuda to an American monkey trainer were read out during a court hearing in which Nakhuda is attempting to get Darwin back from the primate sanctuary where he was sent after being seized at Ikea by Toronto Animal Services.
The emails describe Nakhuda's struggles in controlling Darwin's behaviour. Her husband received "the most vicious bites" but Darwin was also biting her 12-year-old son, she wrote.
Monkey trainer Lisa Whiteaker responded to Nakhuda's email by saying Nakhuda had a lot to learn about primates and that she desperately needed help.
"He will attack someone in your office," Whiteaker predicted. Nakhuda, a real estate lawyer, took Darwin to her office every day since getting him in July, court heard. "One bite from the wrong person and he will be taken away."
Whiteaker, Nakhuda's lawyer noted, was convicted in the United States under animal welfare laws of contributing to a monkey's death.
Nakhuda was surprised by the negative response, her lawyer said, and was upset in her reply to Whiteaker.
"I have concluded, judging by the tons of mistakes you say I have already made ... that I am truly unfit to be a caregiver for Darwin," Nakhuda wrote. "You are right to say that I am sitting on a time bomb ... I don't believe Darwin can change ... All I can do now is to take Darwin to an animal shelter and I don't even know one here."
Nakhuda's lawyer, Ted Charney, suggested his client didn't really mean that. She was despondent over the criticism from Whiteaker, he said.
Charney suggested that the two emails -- the first one sent at the end of November -- are what the Story Book Farm Primate Sanctuary is using to form incendiary allegations of abuse.
They allege Nakhuda "strangled" the monkey, hit him and didn't change his diapers for several days.
Charney said the choking allegation comes from the way Nakhuda held Darwin while bathing him. The email refers to the breeder -- not Nakhuda -- hitting Darwin, Charney said, and the emails contain one reference to Nakhuda leaving Darwin in the same diaper for 36 hours because she had difficulty changing it right after she brought him home.
Ontario Superior Court Justice Michael Brown is deciding where Darwin should live until the case can be fully heard at a trial. Nakhuda argues that the longer Darwin is away from her, the more the bond between them will suffer.
Charney cited evidence from a woman who has experience with primates, who said that there would be a regression with such a bond after a separation of two to four months, and "devastating consequences" for the bond if the separation lasts longer than four months.
Charney is also arguing in court that animal services wrongly told her that once they seized the monkey they owned him and that she had to sign the surrender form. Nakhuda maintains she signed the surrender form because she was told that if she did she would not face criminal charges for owning an illegal animal.
One of the officers gave evidence in advance of Thursday's hearing that he suggested there could be repercussions for Nakhuda under provincial laws if she didn't sign a form surrendering Darwin.
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In his 1844 manuscripts, Karl Marx writes about money as an agent of inversion. Once I have money, Marx says, I am no longer bound by my individuality: "I am ugly, but I can buy for myself the most beautiful of women. Therefore I am not ugly, for the effect of ugliness—its deterrent power—is nullified by money. I, in my character and as an individual, am lame, but money furnishes me with twenty-four feet. Therefore I am not lame. I am bad, dishonest, unscrupulous, stupid; but money is honored, and therefore so is its possessor." In tone and rhythm, this is a cynical visiting of St. Paul's invocation of charity in I Corinthians, with money substituted for charity (a rewriting performed by George Orwell in his money-ridden novel "Keep the Aspidistra Flying"), and it culminates in Marx's most comprehensive reversal: "If money is the bond binding me to human life, binding society to me, binding me and nature and man, is not money the bond of all bonds? Can it not dissolve and bind all ties? Is it not, therefore, the universal agent of divorce?"
Trapped in the implacable cash nexus of the recent recession, we have all had time to reflect on money's demonic brilliance, watching it pose as the bond of all bonds while it has really acted as the universal agent of divorce. (To be an investor in Bernard Madoff's exclusive and supposedly "familial" fund was to be, in effect, an ignorant child of secretly estranged parents.) Two new novels deal intelligently with the implications of the recent crisis, and are especially acute about the moral alienation of greed, and about how hungry amoralists might use and abuse the idea of the family in order to nourish their ruthlessness. Jonathan Dee's "The Privileges" (Random House; $25) concerns itself with a golden couple, Adam and Cynthia Morey, who profit from insider trading and then establish one of New York's leading charitable foundations, thus effectively laundering their illicit gains; Adam Haslett's first novel, "Union Atlantic" (Nan A. Talese/ Doubleday; $26), is partly about a banker, Doug Fanning, whose appetitive overreaching brings his bank, and the financial system, to near-collapse. He is prosecuted, but slips bail and flees to the Middle East. In both novels, the protagonists are more or less successful amnesiacs. They have severed ties with their sloppy or otherwise embarrassing parents, and have no need of superfluous emotional encumbrances: they march into illegality with efficient supply lines. They see money in the avaricious way that Madame Merle, in "The Portrait of a Lady," sees friendship: "When a friendship ceases to grow," she thinks, "it immediately begins to decline." Adam Morey (the name suggesting both "money" and "more" of it) finds it "unsettling to think of money in terms other than those of growth, of how it might be used to make more money. Something about it smelled of death to him but he didn't know why." Neither he nor Doug Fanning seems very interested in what money can buy. They get involved in shady deals because the logic of perpetual growth pushes them beyond propriety, and because they enjoy the superiority that accompanies secrecy: "More than the money, which had to be spent with some care, it was about exercising that ability to repurpose information those around him were too timid or shortsighted to know what to do with," Adam thinks. "That was what kept the whole scheme fresh at this point, that was its engine and its reward: the sense of living in two realms at once, one that was visible to others and one that was not."
"The Privileges" is a clever, taut, cynically angry book about a couple with no moral tether. The Moreys care about their children, and about each other; their son describes their love as "epic." Aside from that, everyone can be used. Dee is admirably relentless. There is a minimum of authorial omniscience—hardly a moment in the novel is not narrated from the perspective of Adam or Cynthia or one of their two children, April and Jonas. Most contemporary realist novels employ this kind of limited point of view, but most contemporary novelists quite like their characters. Not Dee. Since Adam, Cynthia, and April are astoundingly selfish and limited people, the book feels appropriately constricted, colored as it is by the evil banality it depicts. Money contaminates the very language of the narrative. Cynthia, for instance, finds it hard to stay in one Manhattan apartment for very long. Her husband understands: "He got why she didn't mind packing up again, why there was such romance in the new, why it was so hard to stay in a place that had maxed out its own potential."
This kind of ventriloquism allows for savage satire, because the book is effectively one long skein of unreliable narration; the reader is forced to pick a desolate path through a wilderness that thinks itself a garden. Dee seems to sympathize with his characters, but at every moment is subtly undermining them, a shifty kind of writing familiar to anyone who has read Thackeray's "Vanity Fair." For comparison, here is a man looking at his wife, in Richard Powers's earnest and unironic novel "The Echo Maker": "He held back a lock of her mocha hair and grazed her forehead. Her hair was thinner than it had been in college, when they'd met. How searchingly beautiful she'd been. But lovelier to him now, at peace with herself at last. Lovelier, because graying." And here is how Dee does it, as Adam, now aged forty, regards Cynthia: "She looked older than she used to, that was true, and the unfairness of that made him a little sad." That's all; nothing more. It might seem, at first, that both novelists are indulging in a bit of sentimental relaxation. Why shouldn't poor Adam get a bit sad? It is sad to get older. But, by this point in the novel, Dee has taught us how to negotiate his ironies, and that single noun, "unfairness," with its tinge of self-pity, its metaphysical absurdity (how can it be "unfair" to age?), and the scream of its context (Adam is himself a stranger to fairness), is the little knot that ties together the whole sentence.
This, after all, is the Adam Morey who, after graduation from college, spends four years at Morgan Stanley, and then moves to Perini Capital, a private equity fund, "an outfit with a shitload of money behind it but so few people working there that Adam knew everyone's name by the end of his first day":
The money, pre-bonus at least, was actually a little less than he'd been making at Morgan, but it wasn't about that. It was about potential upside, and also about his vision of what a man's work should be: a tight group of friends pushing themselves to make one another rich. . . . The job's only drawback was that it required some travel—the occasional overnight to Iowa City or the equivalent, to sound out some handful of guys who thought their business deserved to be bigger than it was. And strippers: for some reason these aspirants always had the idea that strippers were the lingua franca of serious money men. In truth Adam considered few things in life a grimmer bore than an evening at Podunk's finest strip club, but he went along with it, because his job was to make these people admire him, a job at which he excelled.
And here, twenty-five pages later, is Adam in Podunk—stuck with nothing to do in a Milwaukee hotel:
Back at the hotel Adam tried to book a flight home that same night, but there was nothing—some kind of storm was coming in, and flights were being canceled in bunches. A hotel room these days was basically like a mausoleum with a big TV in it; he couldn't just sit there. But the health club in the basement was closed for renovations; and there was a Journey tribute band playing in the bar. It was like a nightmare. He hadn't even brought any work with him.
"It was like a nightmare." There is nothing especially complex or delicate (sometimes not even especially subtle) about Dee's use of this close third-person narration; the effectiveness is cumulative, and has to do with the novel's shrewd balance of access and claustrophobia. The easy, contemporary flow of the writing carries us along so smoothly that we barely notice how alienated we ought to be from the characters' preoccupations. At one point, Cynthia's stepsister, Deborah, complains, "You've never not gotten anything you wanted. And now those kids of yours are growing up the same way. Like a little ruling class. . . . They have no idea how the other ninety-nine percent lives." Cynthia then reflects:
It wasn't the first time she'd reached the conclusion that, on the subject of children, most people were full of shit. What was supposed to be the point of denying them anything? Who decided that not having things that your parents hadn't had either was character-building somehow? Narcissistic bullshit. Your children's lives were supposed to be better than yours: that was the whole idea. And what was the point of getting hung up on how much things cost? You were expected to complain when things were, or seemed, more expensive than they should be: braces, for instance, which their dentist said both kids were eventually going to need. Fifteen grand, probably, before that was all over. But the fact was they could afford it. They spent sixty thousand dollars a year just to send their kids to school and they could afford that too.
Cynthia justifies herself by the myth of steady generational improvement. But Deborah's point is that Cynthia's children are already exactly like their selfish mother, so it is not clear how they could possibly live materially "better" lives than their wealthy parents. And Cynthia is deft at turning ethical questions into purely material ones: "how much things cost" is morally irrelevant to Deborah's complaint. Anyway, Cynthia's chilling conclusion runs, she can afford it all, so case closed.
The coldness of the novel's narration is worth emphasizing, because there is some evidence that it will be softened by sentimental readers eager for characters they can "sympathize" with. The novel's publisher calls this novel "an odyssey of a couple touched by fortune, changed by time, and guided above all else by their epic love for each other. . . . A timely meditation on wealth, family, and what it means to leave the world richer than you found it." I fear that the reference to "epic" love here is devoid of Dee's irony. The reviewer for Publishers Weekly mysteriously claims that "Adam and Cynthia's nuanced personalities and playful, sincere exchanges form the novel's empathic backbone." But Dee's narrative is about moral invertebrates, and is in fact shaped around a series of subtle suppressions. The book opens at Cynthia and Adam's wedding. "Memory time!" the wedding photographer cries, yet both young people are keen to shuffle off their childhood memories. There is "nothing constructive about remembering," Adam thinks, years later. Cynthia's parents are divorced—her father has been loving but inconstant; her mother's neediness irritates her. Adam's father is a pipe fitter who became a union executive. "For a long time Adam had known his father mostly as a short-fused bastard, but then in his teenage years something had shifted, and he'd felt like both his parents were a little afraid of him. It wasn't such a bad feeling, actually." His parents are dispensable. At Perini Capital, several years after his marriage, Adam's boss asks him about his father. "He's dead" is the startling reply. He has died in the past year. It is the first we have heard about it, and the omission is telling.
The novel's largest narrative suppression is structural, and nicely ambiguous. Despite a three-hundred-and-fifty-thousand-dollar bonus, Adam grows impatient at Perini; his wife, who has chosen to stay at home with the children, is clogged in low-level depression. At a party, Adam watches a Merrill Lynch broker named Devon engage in petty theft (he steals a watch), and almost whimsically decides to break the law, selecting this man as the chief partner in his insider-trading ring. He approaches Devon, and murmurs his proposal. "The Privileges" seems now bound to a conventional course, in which the rest of the story will chart the rise and fall of Adam's perfidy. Sure enough, Adam prospers, and is then forced to shut down his operation. It looks as if the authorities are closing in. He goes home and confesses all to his wife. At which point, however, Dee cuts to a new section. It is several years later. Adam now runs his own hedge fund, and Cynthia is the head of their charitable foundation. They are admired and envied throughout Manhattan. Devon is in charge of "the fund's nascent commercial-realty speculation arm," which is Dee's reticent way of hinting at the essential criminality of mortgage-backed derivatives. (The novel is set sometime before the current recession.) The decision not to answer the story's natural question—will they or won't they get away with it?—is of a piece with the novel's commitment to ironic third-person partiality: Adam and Cynthia, who never thought they were doing anything wrong, have stainless consciences. Wrongdoing can just be forgotten. The novel ends without any suggestion of requital or real atonement; and, of course, nothing is more judgmental, in the end, than Dee's avoidance of obvious judgment.
"The Privileges" is trenchant, but narrow. It knows exactly how to fill out its limits: well-chosen food on small plates. Adam Haslett's first novel, "Union Atlantic," is more ambitious, but clumsier, and often spills over its edges. Haslett is the author of a distinguished book of stories, "You Are Not a Stranger Here," and he has confessed in an interview that this novel took several years to write, partly because "the long form intimidated me." There are signs of that intimidation throughout, especially in the first half. At the level of structure and language, Dee's book is hardly radical, but "Union Atlantic" is excessively conventional, and tends toward overexplanatory realism. The novel begins, for instance, with a prologue set in 1988, on the U.S. naval ship Vincennes, where Doug Fanning, then a young man, is one of the sailors responsible for the infamous shooting down of an Iranian passenger jet. The rest of the book takes place in Boston and New York in 2001 and 2002, but Doug's old military connection, and his guilt, allow Haslett to keep the Iraq-war buildup in sight throughout the novel. This amplifies the fictional world, but at the cost of providing a slightly easy, cinematic backstory for Doug's later moral weakness. Doug's Vincennes episode fairly screams "fault line!"
Where Jonathan Dee is canny and parsimonious—that little touch about Devon now working in the "nascent" area of mortgage speculation—Haslett seems more obviously to have gone to the research well and brought back several full buckets. Major players are introduced with big splashes of authorial explanation, and the effect is more normative, less seditious than Dee's cynicism. This is a character called Henry Graves:
As president of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, Henry Graves had oversight responsibility for all the banks in his district, including Taconic. He also regulated the large bank holding companies that had come to dominate the industry. But the New York Fed, unlike the other regional Federal Reserve banks, was more than simply a supervisory institution. It was the operational hub of the whole Fed system. It acted as the Treasury's agent in the market, buying and selling T-bills. Nearly every country in the world held some portion of their sovereign assets in accounts at the New York Fed. The wire service the bank ran cleared a trillion dollars in transactions each day. Simply put, Henry Graves was in charge of the biggest pumping station in the plumbing of global finance. His most vital function was to keep money moving. To do it quickly. And, above all, to do it quietly.
Likewise, characters tend to get access to their memories in traditional, "novelistic" ways. Doug builds a huge house in the town of Finden, Massachusetts, and moves in: "The first night he slept in Finden he remembered his dreams as he hadn't in years. . . . He woke on his stomach, sweating. . . . He rolled onto his back and stared at the stilled ceiling fan, its rounded chrome fixture as spotless as the deck of the Vincennes on inspection day." Two chapters later, some more dreams: "That morning he'd slept through his alarm, which he never did, caught up in dreams again, the remnants of which stuck with him as he cleared the town traffic and made it onto the Pike. . . . He'd dreamt of his cousin Michael and it had reminded him of when Michael had told him the story of Doug's father." We then get the story of Doug's father. The next chapter opens with Henry Graves, in a hotel room, waking from a dream involving his sister: "Swallowing dryly, turning his head on the pillow, Henry half opened his eyes." (Didn't Haslett, a graduate of the Iowa Writers' Workshop, notice that every other story in his workshops began with someone waking up?) Graves's sister, Charlotte, is awarded an entire chapter of memory (she remembers her brief relationship with a man who died) which creaks into shape thus: "But even now as she tried to concentrate, to keep her mind here in the present, memory, like a troubled friend whispering through the screen, brought the image of her old apartment on West Eleventh Street."
Ambition drives Doug to skirt banking rules and funnel enormous amounts of money, almost invisibly, to his trader in Hong Kong, a man named McTeague (in a hat-tip to an earlier American novelist about the hazards of wealth, Frank Norris). A hot streak turns cold; soon there are losses to be concealed. But at the center of "Union Atlantic" is a struggle between memory and amnesia. Doug, who has quit the Navy, and has moved to Boston to work for Union Atlantic, a commercial bank, decides to build his house in Finden, having chosen the property with triumphal care. He grew up in the poorer next-door town, Alden, and his mother cleaned the houses of people from Finden. She was also an alcoholic, and Doug has had no contact with her since he joined the Navy. "Noticing how the memory of her held him back, he decided he would no longer permit himself guilt." His monstrously large house is an affront to the aged and eccentric Charlotte Graves, a former teacher who lives next door in a fine, ramshackle old place that her family has owned for decades. Convinced that the land Doug has built on is legally protected from such incursions, she files a lawsuit against the town for selling it to him.
On one side, then, there is the thrusting, semi-legal banker, with a murky, repressed past and a manic devotion to the American tabula rasa; on the other, the old Massachusetts blue blood, who wants everything to stay the same. As with the Vincennes prologue, this opposition seems a bit too helpful, since Charlotte Graves not only spends a great deal of time wandering down corridors of memory but is also an actual history teacher, the past both her pedestal and her former profession. Still, this guardian of the status quo is a vivid, thorny creation. Charlotte resembles Elizabeth, in Haslett's moving story "The Volunteer," an apparently eccentric woman who hears voices from the past. Charlotte thinks that her two dogs speak to her, one in the persona of Cotton Mather, the other in the persona of Malcolm X. Though potentially irritating, this oddity is managed by Haslett with a matter-of-factness that renders it nicely credible. And the opposition between Charlotte and Doug is properly complicated by the introduction of Charlotte's younger brother, Henry, who is atavistically loyal to his sister, but who, as president of the New York Federal Reserve, and the grand vizier of zillions, is an accelerant of her obsolescence.
Haslett is a curious writer, who, despite the prizes and citations that were showered on his first book, still seems uncertain, and variable—often eloquent, but sometimes flowery, and sometimes workmanlike. He is timely, but a bit tweedy: "Union Atlantic" owes much more to, say, "Howards End" than it does to Don DeLillo's money-infested "Cosmopolis." Oddly enough, though, the weaknesses of his novel gradually become strengths. The sincere realism of the narrative, while somewhat stagey, allows him to move through many different social settings and classes: there are the posh Graves siblings; the lower-middle-class Fannings (we see Doug's mother in a late scene); the relatively classless Jeffrey Holland, who runs the Union Atlantic bank, and who also lives in Finden; Nate Fuller, a gay teen-ager and floundering high-school student, who goes to Charlotte Graves for private tutoring in history, and begins an unexpected relationship with Doug; and Evelyn Jones, African-American, a high-level administrator at Union Atlantic, who travels to New York to report Doug Fanning to Henry Graves, and brings the tale to its finale.
Exactly as you would expect in such an ample, socially rich novel, the drawstring of the plotlines gradually tightens, and Doug Fanning, who had wished to escape all ties, past and present, finds himself the center of a cash nexus of his own making: harried by Charlotte, abandoned by Jeffrey Holland (who connives in his illegalities but in the end is happy to sacrifice him to the authorities), lustfully pursued by Nate, and turned in by Evelyn Jones. Doug's huge, mostly unfurnished house, built on land once owned by the Graves family, is Haslett's Forsterian symbol; as with much else in the book, the reader at first resists the sheer size of this thematic obviousness, and is gradually won over by it. "The Privileges" is the abler novel, but "Union Atlantic" is the more likable.
And, behind it all, money lurks—too pervasive to be a symbol of anything, yet always a symbol of everything; magical in its combination of the absolutely palpable and the intrinsically metaphorical; bond of all bonds and agent of divorce. In both books, rich people strive to turn the palpability of money into metaphor, much as they do in Henry James's fiction. Pursuing acquisitions that are spectral and secretive (hidden, offshore accounts and the like), Adam Morey and Doug Fanning perhaps wish to repress the gross materiality of money; they get rid of it by rendering it unspeakable, illegal, almost imaginary; they push it under the table. But the repressed always returns. "Union Atlantic" has a powerful scene, near the end of the book, that takes place in the New York Federal Reserve, when Henry Graves shows Evelyn Jones the bank's vaults filled with gold bars—"cages containing dark-yellow bars ten feet high and twenty deep. After a moment, she turned to look down the aisle, taking in the sheer number of separate compartments." Graves remarks that visitors always want to look at the money, and then quotes John Kenneth Galbraith: " 'The process by which banks create money is so simple the mind is repelled. A deeper mystery seems only decent.' I suppose this is what's left of the mystery." ♦


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