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The first month of meteorological winter is nearly at an end, and if one trend has developed, it's been the lack of truly cold air in the Southeast.
Most meteorologists point to persistent low pressure over the Pacific Ocean, off the western coast of the United States, as the dominant player in our weather for December. The counter-clockwise flow around the low has blocked the intrusion of polar air into the Southeast.
First, let's get the whole winter definition thing straight. Meteorologists define winter as being from Dec. 1 through Feb. 28 -- or about three weeks ahead of the traditional definition of the season.
December 2012 will be among the 15 warmest in the 137 years of record-keeping in Charlotte. The average temperature will be about 6.7 degrees above the norm. There were nine days when the high was 65 degrees or warmer.
The final part of the month was cooler, but the chilly weather recently came far short of negating what happened earlier in the month.
For those hoping a winter storm would arrive in Charlotte, December has been a bust.
The month started dry, continuing a trend that began in September and created severe drought conditions in most of the Charlotte region. But over the last half of the month, the storm track has been pushed to the south, and a steady stream of low pressure systems has crossed the Carolinas.
For the first time since September, we're experiencing above-average rainfall for the month.
What's ahead?
Most of the long-range meteorologists I've read are predicting mild weather through the first two-thirds of January. It's possible a renegade winter system could develop, possibly in a cold-air damming situation, but if the experts are to be believed, it will be at least the 20th of the month before cold air arrives in the Carolinas. And there's really no guarantee it'll come then.
One warning ... long-range forecasts come with plenty of shortcomings. After all, we heard predictions of polar outbreaks in the Charlotte region in early December and again around Christmas. It didn't happen.
Meteorologists say the forecasts of five to seven days are a lot more reliable. For now, we're looking at a continuation of the recent trend -- temperatures at, or slightly below, seasonal averages; and precipitation every three days or so.
Monday, December 31, 2012
After one month of winter ...
The first month of meteorological winter is nearly at an end, and if one trend has developed, it's been the lack of truly cold air in the Southeast.
Monday, December 24, 2012
Big storm looms for Christmas night, Dec. 26
A major storm system appears likely to bring a wide variety of bad weather to the central and eastern United States on Christmas night and Wednesday.
The Carolinas might escape the worst of the system, instead getting what we need most -- lots of rain.
But strong winds behind the storm system could be a problem, and we're still not clear from the threat of severe weather Wednesday.
The storm is expected to bring heavy snow and blizzard conditions to parts of the Midwest and Great Lakes, and an outbreak of severe thunderstorms and tornadoes is possible in the Deep South.
This is not what holiday travelers need, and it might be best for anyone planning to hit the road to consider waiting a day -- or leaving a day earlier.
In an effort to make some sense from this storm, I'll break this into three categories -- winter weather, severe weather, and the Carolinas.
WINTER WEATHER -- Areas north and northwest of the low pressure's center will get the heavy snow and blizzard conditions.
As of now, meteorologists expect the storm to cross the Rockies, move over the Midwest (somewhere near St. Louis), then push eastward along the Ohio River before making a rather northeast turn over Indiana and central Ohio.
Snow likely will hit the Rockies late Christmas Eve and early Christmas Day, and it will reach the Mississippi River area later Christmas Day. Snowfall will come Wednesday over southern Illinois, central Indiana and Ohio.
As of now (and this is subject to change), cities that stand a chance of getting heavy snow include St. Louis, Indianapolis, Detroit and Cleveland. People in places on the edge of the heavy snow band -- Chicago, Milwaukee, Cincinnati, Louisville and Pittsburgh -- show pay close attention to forecasts over the next 36 hours.
SEVERE WEATHER -- We could be looking at a tornado outbreak on Christmas Day. The Storm Prediction Center in Norman, Okla., has issued a "moderate" risk of severe storms and tornadoes on Christmas from central and northern Louisiana eastward across central Mississippi and Alabama.
On Wednesday, the threat moves eastward into the Carolinas and northern Florida. The area from Charlotte eastward is included in the risk of severe thunderstorms.
CAROLINAS WEATHER -- Rain likely will spread into the Charlotte region by Christmas evening or night. Then forecasters expect milder air to blow into the area overnight. That will make the atmosphere unstable, and when a cold front being dragged by the big storm system moves across the Carolinas during the day Wednesday, severe weather is possible.
Rainfall could total 1 to 2 inches across the region.
The other threat will be post-frontal wind. A strong circulation around the low pressure system will bring gusty northwest winds into the Charlotte region Wednesday night and early Thursday. That, combined with all the rain, could topple trees and cause power outages.
After weeks, even months, of calm weather, we're about to get a stormy 36-hour period across the region.
Friday, December 21, 2012
Snow ... it was a long time coming
Heavy snow was falling Friday afternoon in the typical lake-effect areas, where northwest and west winds were delivering a steady flow of cold, unstable air.
That included North Carolina's mountains, where Beech Mountain picked up 3 to 5 inches since around daybreak. At midday, there were numerous reports of 1 to 3 inches on the ground in the high country, and that's certainly good news to the ski resort operators.
It's also enough to bring a smile to those who were looking for a White Christmas in the mountains.
It also was snowing hard in the places where northwest flow typically does its thing -- near Buffalo; east of Cleveland, on the Michigan side of Lake Michigan; in the Pennsylvania and West Virginia mountains; and, of course, in upstate New York south of Lake Ontario.
That comes on the heels of the heavy snow that fell late Wednesday and Thursday across Iowa, Wisconsin and parts of northwest Illinois.
I saw some amazing numbers, that tell a lot more about last winter than this season.
Last winter, of course, was among the mildest on record in much of the eastern United States. Charlotte's total snowfall was a trace, and it all fell in a one-hour period -- in the form of sleet -- on a Sunday evening in February.
It was the same story in the Great Lakes, the Midwest, and on the East Coast. And the early part of this year has continued the trend. It was colder than average in November, but little or no snow fell.
So when snow finally came down Thursday in Chicago, it marked the time in 290 days that the white stuff fell in the Windy City. Cleveland got snow Friday -- also the first time in 290 days.
Those are among the longest periods in history without snow.
Long-range trends point toward colder-than-average temperatures in January, so I think we can expect that snowfall will come with much more frequency now.
Tuesday, December 18, 2012
Weather Service eyes change in warnings
The National Weather Service is launching a three-month test on changes in the wording of its winter weather advisories and warnings.
The test is the result of a study showing that some people are confused by exactly what is meant by a Winter Weather Advisory, Winter Storm Watch, and Winter Storm Warning.
The goal is to make the headlines a bit clearer, so people get an idea of what type of winter weather threat is possible, and when it might happen.
Basically, a Winter Weather Advisory is issued when relatively minor amounts of snow, ice or sleet are expected. In an advisory situation, we're told that the wintry precipitation will be a nuisance, but not enough to cause a major problem.
The Winter Storm Watch is much like a Tornado Watch or a Hurricane Watch. It's notification that a potentially significant winter storm is possible, although meteorologists aren't certain enough to issue a warning.
And the Winter Storm Warning is used when a significant amount of snow, sleet and/or freezing rain is expected in an area soon.
Here are some examples of how it would change.
For advisories ...
Current: "The National Weather Service has issued a Winter Weather Advisory for snow."
Change: "The National Weather Service advises caution for light snow."
For watches ...
Current: The National Weather Service has issued a Winter Storm Watch."
Change: The National Weather Service forecasts the potential for heavy snow."
For warnings ...
Current: The National Weather Service has issued a Winter Storm Warning."
Change: The National Weather Service has issued a warning for a dangerous snow and sleet storm."
The experiment will take place until March 31 at 26 National Weather Service offices across the country. The Charlotte region is served by four offices. Greer (S.C.) oversees Charlotte and most other area counties. Raleigh oversees Anson, Richmond, Stanly and Montgomery counties in the Charlotte region. Columbia handles Lancaster and Chesterfield counties in our area. And the Blacksburg (Va.) office oversees Watauga, Ashe and Wilkes counties in the Charlotte region.
Blacksburg is the only Charlotte-area office asked to participate in the experiment this winter.
But if the Weather Service likes what it sees, we all could be getting our winter weather advisories, watches and warnings a new way next year.
Monday, December 17, 2012
Between now and the Belk Bowl ...
We're in for a little of everything over the next 10 days, but the overall trend will be from mild to chilly, and there's even some wintry precipitation in the forecast for some of us, probably.
Many people will be traveling this weekend, in advance of the Christmas holiday, and there'll be additional activities next week, including the Belk Bowl football game Dec. 27 in Charlotte.
It looks as if we'll see three rain episodes -- today, Thursday, and Dec. 26 or 27 (that might be more than rain ... we'll deal with that later). Temperatures will be above average the next four days, then dip gradually and finish below-average by Christmas week.
Let's break it into five parts:
TODAY ... We got some much-needed rainfall Sunday evening and overnight, with many areas receiving a half-inch or more. There was .58 of an inch in my rain gauge, as of daybreak Monday. Another area of rain will move into the area around midday and continue into this evening. Overall precipitation totals could be an inch for many people in the Charlotte region.
Temperatures will probably remain in the upper 50s for the rest of the afternoon.
TUESDAY-WEDNESDAY ... This will be one of the quiet periods. Mild Pacific high pressure will dominate the region, with sunny to partly cloudy skies much of the time. Temperatures will be well above average (53 is the average high), climbing into the low 60s Tuesday and the mid 60s Wednesday.
THURSDAY ... A strong cold front will advance on the region. It'll cloud up Thursday, with showers arriving by afternoon. Temperatures will reach about 60 degrees, but it'll be the last mild day for a stretch.
FRIDAY-CHRISTMAS ... Colder air will filter into the Carolinas on Friday. There's a good chance for a northwest-flow snow event in the mountains Friday, with a fetch of cold, unstable air being carried to the Tennessee-North Carolina border from the Great Lakes. That could produce a couple inches of snow in the mountains -- just in time for Christmas.
Down here in the lower elevations, high temperatures will only reach 50 degrees Friday (a gusty breeze will make it seem colder), and then the lower 50s Saturday and Sunday. But it'll be sunny, and those temperatures are average for this time of year.
Incidentally, that cold front will bring strong winds and some heavy snow to parts of the Midwest and Great Lakes. If you're planning travel in that direction late this week, you could have problems.
Gradually cooler air will push into our region Christmas Eve and Christmas Day, but a continuation of dry weather is expected. As of now, look for highs in in the upper 40s for Christmas Eve and the low to mid 40s on Christmas Day. It'll be a chilly Christmas.
DEC. 26-27 ... This is where it gets tricky. The consensus is that a storm system will cross the central and eastern United States. But the details are unclear.
Certainly, cold air will be in place across the East, and precipitation will be snow somewhere in the Midwest and Great Lakes. The best bet for the Carolinas, at least in the lower elevations, is for a chilly rain event.
But if cold air damming were to establish itself -- which would happen if strong high pressure were parked in New England on Dec. 26 -- then freezing rain would be a possibility in parts of the Carolinas.
For now, the computer models seem to be indicating temperatures will be in the 40s in the Charlotte region during the precipitation. But we'll be watching this.
Friday, December 14, 2012
Much colder ... in time for Christmas
We've been talking for so long about a possible change to more wintry conditions in the Carolinas, and it looks more than ever as if a big cool down is coming in time for Christmas.
The computer models are in agreement that a shot of arctic air will push into the eastern United States next weekend and hang around through Christmas.
For now, it looks like dry cold -- i.e., no snow or ice. But with temperatures that cold, even a minor disturbance zipping across the Carolinas could bring a little holiday excitement.
The National Weather Service office in Greer, S.C., is hinting at the change in its latest forecast, predicting a high in the upper 40s next Friday. Its forecast range is seven days, so it'll be interesting to see what the prediction for next Saturday (Dec. 22) is.
If some of the forecasts verify, we could be in for a few days when high temperatures struggle to hit 40 degrees and morning lows are in the teens. That would be around Christmas.
Before all that happens, we're finally looking at a chance of measurable rain on Sunday and Monday. The heaviest precipitation is expected across Georgia and western South Carolina, but the computer models paint a swath of a half-inch to three-quarters of an inch in much of the Charlotte region.
We'll update this Christmas forecast over the weekend. With many people hitting the road for holiday visits, the weather will be a big issue.
Thursday, December 13, 2012
Something to watch tonight: Meteor shower
We've been talking for days about possible storms and possible outbreaks of polar air.
Today let's talk about something that's certain to happen -- a meteor shower.
It's the Geminid meteor shower, an annual December event, and astronomers say the peak viewing will be tonight. This year's shower could be better than usual.
That's because the moon is in a new phase, which means there won't be any moonlight to distract from the sight of meteors zipping into the Earth's atmosphere.
The meteors are fragments of an asteroid, and astronomers say there could be 50 to 100 per hour at times overnight.
You'll be able to see them from about 9 p.m. until dawn. They'll be soaring across the sky, but they seem to originate from the constellation Gemini the Twins. That is above and a bit to the left of Sirius, one of the brightest lights in the nighttime sky.
At 9 p.m., Gemini will be rather low in the east-northeast sky. By 2 a.m., when the meteor shower will be at its peak, Gemini will be almost overhead. It should be quite a show.
One warning ... dress for the weather. Tonight will be the coldest night in Charlotte for about two weeks, with lows in the upper 20s by Friday morning.
You also might want to check out a Web chat sponsored tonight by scientists at NASA's Marshall Space Center. You can find it at http://www.nasa.gov/connect/chat/geminids2012.html.
Wednesday, December 12, 2012
Storms, and rumors of storms
We've been waiting for weeks to see a change in the weather pattern across the United States, especially the Southeast.
For several weeks, the weather generally has been warm and dry, with only a few exceptions. The storm track, for the most part, has been to our north, which means we've missed out on the significant rainfall. And when it does rain, as is happening today, the precipitation is much lighter than what we need, to put a dent in our big rainfall deficit.
(By the way ... at 2:15 p.m., there seem to be some radar returns that indicate a few sleet pellets might mix with the rain. But any sleet will be transitory. Today's system is a rain-maker.)
What is expected, at some point, is for the storm track to be pushed farther south, so that low pressure systems cross some part of the Southeast; and for polar air to break free in Alaska and move southward into the continental United States.
There's no definitive sign from the computer models of a major cool down in the Southeast anytime soon, although it appears as if our above-average temperatures will fall back to average levels -- and maybe a few degrees below average -- by the middle of next week.
The storm track also is a question mark.
One major system is expected to sweep across the country this weekend, but that storm is expected to run across the Great Lakes. The next low pressure system is expected around the middle of next week. Some computer models show that storm crossing the Southeast and bringing the potential of heavy precipitation, but the recent runs have been trending farther north -- once again, keeping the much-needed rain away from us.
Now the talk is about a system that could develop in the Dec. 22-24 time frame, with a storm coming off the Pacific Ocean, sweeping across the Southwest, and then moving across the country -- just in time to make a mess of holiday travel.
Once again, the big question for us in the Carolinas is what path the storm will follow after it exits the Southwest. Will it move into the Gulf of Mexico and then come across the Southeast? Or will it curve northeast, and move up the Ohio Valley or across the Great Lakes?
Either way, it seems as if we're moving into a stormier pattern, much as had been expected for the second half of December.
Friday, December 7, 2012
The real story -- drought
If this were June, we'd be in a state of panic across the Carolinas.
We'd be complaining about brown, dried-out lawns, and crops withering in the fields. We'd worry about lake water levels plummeting in the midst of summer heat.
Fortunately, our current drought has arrived in late autumn and early winter, so it's not quite the story it might be in summer.
But make no mistake about it. We're in a drought.
State officials said Thursday that Mecklenburg and surrounding counties are in a Moderate Drought, the lowest level of drought. In all, 65 counties have drought conditions, which is up from 54 a week ago. We're coming off one of our driest Novembers ever, and October also was bone-dry.
December has started the same way.
"Although we still haven't had any reports of public water supplies being affected, we are seeing impacts to streams, groundwater levels, and inflows to reservoirs," Tom Reeder, director of the N.C. Division of Water Resources, said Thursday.
Autumn typically is a very dry time of year in the Carolinas, but this fall has been extraordinarily dry. The storm track has been pushed well to the north of the region, and when a storm system moved up the East Coast, it was too far east to bring rain to the Charlotte region.
When will things change? Who knows?
Meteorologists initially predicted El Nino conditions this winter. That would have increased the rainfall chances for the Southeast. But now the El Nino forecast has disappeared, and we'll have what's called a "neutral" winter.
The computer models offer little or no help. In late November, some of the models predicted a change to cold and stormy conditions in early December. Instead, it was unseasonably warm and dry.
I wrote two days ago about the latest predictions, of a change to wet and much colder weather after the middle of the month. But in the world of weather, the saying is, "The trend is your friend." It's been dry, so until we see a change, we can expect more of the same.
A cold front will bring us a chance of showers and thunderstorms later Monday, but that won't cure our ills. Rainfall in Charlotte this year is more than 9 inches below seasonal averages. One cold front won't make up for that.
Wednesday, December 5, 2012
Big change coming for mid/late December?
Weather bulletin boards have been abuzz for several days with discussions about a major change in the weather pattern coming later this month for the central and eastern United States, including the Southeast.
This could have major ramifications on a lot of people's travel plans over the Christmas and New Years holidays.
The consensus seems to be that two changes are headed our way:
-- Wetter conditions, which seems rather likely.
-- Colder weather, which is not quite a certain bet.
The computer models, for the most part, show a shift in the pattern at higher latitudes (i.e., Alaska, Canada, Greenland, northern Europe) that would allow much colder air to slide southward into the United States. Some of the models have been inconsistent on the details, but it seems likely that the colder air will at least reach the northern half of the country.
That, in turn, will push the storm track -- which has been north of the Carolinas -- a lot farther south. We could see a hint of that next week, with wetter conditions in parts of the Southeast.
Eventually, the thinking goes (at least for some meteorologists), colder air will seep even farther south. Add that to a much wetter pattern, and you have the chance of cold rain or frozen precipitation in parts of the south.
When will this happen? The consensus seems to be somewhere around Dec. 20, just before Christmas.
My brother Michael, who I've written about before, has been harping about this to me for several days. He's much better at interpreting the models, and Michael insists a colder and stormy pattern will descend into the central and eastern part of the country as December progresses. I'll take his word. He correctly predicted the major pattern shift in mid-February 2011, when the Southeast turned balmy after 2 1/2 frigid months, and last winter's very mild conditions.
Some signs point to the eventual arrival of cold air in the Southeast. There's a negative North Atlantic Oscillation and Arctic Oscillation, and the computer models show signs of high pressure building in Alaska. Those are conditions that mean cold in the eastern United States.
But there also is a persistent trough in the Pacific, which has blocked the southward movement of cold air.
I suspect this is a topic we'll be following closely over the next 10 to 14 days.
Tuesday, December 4, 2012
10 years ago ... coated in ice
Ten years ago today, the Charlotte region awoke to the sounds of cracks and crashes.
It was a symphony of tree limbs and trees crashing onto roofs, cars and the ice-covered ground, in the wake of the worst ice storm in decades.
The ice storm of Dec. 4-5, 2002, left millions of Carolinas residents without power, some of them for many days in winter cold. It caused at least three deaths, changed the region's tree scape permanently in places, and served as a reminder that ice -- not snow -- is the big winter danger in the region.
A cold front ushered in arctic air a few days before the storm, bringing unseasonably cold temperatures into the Carolinas. Then a low pressure system formed over the lower Mississippi Valley and moved eastward.
The area from York County northeast to Raleigh was locked in a cold air wedge. Chilly air was funneled into the Piedmont from a high pressure system parked over New England. Precipitation from the low pressure system moved into that pocket of cold air.
Farther to the north, in Virginia, the temperatures in the atmosphere -- from higher levels to the ground -- were below freezing. So the precipitation fell as all snow, dumping 1 to 2 feet along the Interstate 81 corridor.
But in the Piedmont, a pocket of above-freezing temperatures a short distance above the ground melted the snow as it fell, turning it to rain. Temperatures at the surface were below freezing, however. So when the rain hit the ground, it froze.
Freezing rain is not uncommon in the Piedmont, but the amount of rain that fell in the December 2002 storm was heavy enough to cause buildups of 1 inch of ice in many places. Meteorologists say that accumulations of a half-inch or more are enough to cause trouble.
The December 2002 storm caused plenty of trouble.
The storm broke a record for Duke Energy power outages in the Carolinas -- 1.375 million customers left without electricity. Other companies across the Piedmont were similarly hit.
In comparison, about 700,000 outages were reported in a December 2005 ice storm that hit the western Carolinas and northeast Georgia. Hurricane Hugo caused 696,000 power outages.
Across the Charlotte region on the morning of Dec. 5, 2002, trees and tree limbs fell.
Road conditions weren't bad. For the most part, the streets were wet. But power was out almost everywhere.
A number of people made the mistake of trying to heat their homes with charcoal grills. More than 250 carbon monoxide cases were reported across the region on the first day of the storm.
Don McSween, Charlotte's city arborist, said 30 percent of the oak trees were damaged.
Charlotte-Mecklenburg police reported burglaries increased 54 percent during the five days after the storm, as crooks took advantage of homes where residents had left, seeking shelter in hotels or with friends fortunate enough to have electricity and heat.
Duke Energy paid $87 million to repair the damage, including $56.5 million to pay for outside labor -- repair crews who came from across the eastern United States to help restore power.
The Rev. Brad Busiek, pastor at Newell Presbyterian Church, had arrived from Texas a few months before the ice storm. On the Sunday after the storm (Dec. 8), Busiek began his homily with a variation of a familiar poem: "Twas the ice before Christmas, when all through the house, everyone was shivering, especially my spouse."
At St. John Neumann Catholic Church in east Charlotte on that Sunday morning, there was a moment that almost seemed miraculous. In the middle of Mass, being celebrated in candlelight, the power came back on.
What would be different if such a storm hit today?
Duke Energy, which received generally good grades from the N.C. Utilities Commission in a post-storm study, has changed some its policies. One of those includes a beefed-up database for keeping track of power outages. That system has been helpful in storms since 2002, company officials say.
Duke's staff of meteorologists also earned praise, for correctly predicting that significant ice damage was likely in the Piedmont. That allowed the company to position its repair crews properly. In the wake of Hurricane Hugo, Duke Energy restored power to an average of 38,667 customers a day. After the ice storm, that daily average was 152,777.
The arrival of smart phones and other hand-held devices would create a different scenario today, especially in distributing information. In 2002, if the power was out, so were people's computers, for the most part. Today, residents could get news from their phones and other "smart" devices, without the need for electricity.
As was the case with Hurricane Hugo, we can hope that the December 2002 ice storm was a once-in-a-lifetime event.
Photo: Dec. 4, 2002 in Winston-Salem. From left, Darren Richards, Trayshawn Davis and Jasmine Carter, play in the snow. Winston-Salem Journal, David Sandler


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Seibon's created replacement carbon fiber bodies for the Smart and Elise. The former? Ludicrous. The latter? Potentially amazing, as carbon fiber's for making things lighter. Unfortunately, both are heavier and $10,000 more than stock counterparts.
Yes, you read that right, both bodies are heavier than the currently offered versions, thus negating any actual benefit gained by the effort of carbon fiber and negating the entire exercise to one of obnoxious indulgence. We knew SEMA would eventually show its true form.

subset: commoncrawl


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from Chicago Tribune (US) / by Michael Phillips
I had never before interviewed an actress in her trailer. Utter cliche. But Marion Cotillard is the sort of actress (Oscar-winning, French, glam, pleasant) a fella doesn't mind for his first time.
The 33-year-old Cotillard received an Academy Award for her portrayal of singer/perpetual tragedian Edith Piaf in "La Vie en Rose." In "Public Enemies" she plays Evelyn "Billie" Frechette, John Dillinger's lover for a time. Born to a French-Canadian father and a Menominee Indian mother, Frechette kicked around Wisconsin and South Dakota before making her way down to Chicago at 18. She served a two-year prison sentence for harboring a criminal and was behind bars when Dillinger was killed.
Before they met, Frechette ran with anonymous low-lifes and Chicago underworld denizens as she worked as a coat-check tootsie, a dice thrower, a dance hall hostess. After Dillinger's death — and this part, like so many parts, didn't make director Michael Mann's film — Frechette toured in a late-vaudeville-era traveling show called "Crime Doesn't Pay," telling her story, fielding questions from a gangster-obsessed audience.
A rich character, says Cotillard. Her trailer is one of four parked outside Chicago's Union Station, where various interviews for the North American "Public Enemies" press junket are being conducted. If you're shooting a 1930s gangster picture or a 1930s love story — the movie is both — and you want classy period architecture or need a shot of a train pulling into a station, Union's your station. (One of "Public Enemies'" highlights is a brief, beautiful shot of a train bearing G-men arriving in Chicago, met by Christian Bale's Melvin Purvis.)
Mann threw tons of research at his leading lady. In northern Wisconsin, she met with relatives of Frechette's. "I really wanted to know about her childhood. I remember with Edith Piaf, there were things about her I didn't understand, and it's really hard to be someone 100 percent when you don't understand the person. I found all my answers in her childhood."
Frechette attended a Catholic missionary school followed by a strict boarding school. "Not being allowed to speak your own language, not allowed to live your own culture … it creates a new personality," says Cotillard. "I think she distrusted authority. And she had that in common with Dillinger, among other things."
Mann's onscreen worlds are ruled by men, yet Cotillard asserts that "in each of his movies there's a very strong female character. That's one of the things I love about his movies. I love 'Collateral.' Jada Pinkett Smith has a real part to play, even if it's small. She really has something to defend. Gong Li in 'Miami Vice' — such an interesting role."
The research relating to Frechette, she says, took her down some unexpected paths. "Michael feeds you the information that will bring out of you the emotion he wants," she says. She met with convicts' wives. She met with strippers. "I thought, 'Why am I meeting with strippers?' [In Las Vegas, no less.] I wasn't sure why, since Billie Frechette was not a stripper. But Michael told me he wanted me to meet them because they know who has the money. Women in that profession know it's not always the obvious guy with the good suit buying bottles and bottles of champagne." In real life and in Mann's film, Dillinger moved in fast and claimed Frechette as his own; Cotillard believes the seduction was mutual, and that it really was love.
The real homework, she says, related to Billie's dialect. Cotillard has worked in English-language films before — her first was Tim Burton's "Big Fish" — but here she tackled a French-Canadian-Menominee-Wisconsin-Chicago amalgam.
"It was kind of … hard," she says, deliberately, making sure to hit the "h" in "hard" distinctly. Billie's not supposed to have a French accent. Fortunately she had French blood, so it works with my touch of French accent. But I knew it would never be as I wanted it to be. I started to learn English too late [at 11] to be able to have a perfect American accent. I'm working on it. I love the language, so that helps. But it was hard. It might be the hardest thing I've had to do, really."
She smiles. "Playing Piaf, an old lady on drugs, that was easier."


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Not necessarily the traditional colors for the background, but still fun, right? =)
The adorable image is called Maya - Witch & Kitty on Broom and it's stamped on PTI's Stamper's Select White cardstock, colored with Copic markers then trimmed to size.
The patterned paper is from Mischievous 6x6 Designer Paper Pad by My Mind's Eye. The sentiment and bats are from Happy Halloween set. The spider charm and black grosgrain ribbon are from WoJ as well.
That's all for now. Hope you have a fun and safe one! =)
cardstock: (white, cardstock) Papertrey Ink
rubber stamp: Whiff of Joy Stamps
patterned paper: My Mind's Eye
dye ink: (Tuxedo Black) Tsukineko, (Smokey Shadow) Papertrey Ink
fiber: (black grosgrain ribbon) Whiff of Joy Stamps
accent: (spider charm) Whiff of Joy Stamps
dies: (label) Whiff of Joy Stamps, (scallop border) My Favorite Things, (filigree border) Papertrey Ink
tools: (die-cut machine) Provo Craft, (Corner Chomper) We R Memory Keepers
other: (foam tape) 3M, (foam squares) Recollections
Copics used:
skin: E13, E11, E01, E00, E000, R20
hair: YG17, YG13, YG01
outfit: V09, V06, V04, YR18, YR16, YR15, YR12, BV29, BV25, BV23
kitty: C9, C7, C5, C3, E02, E00, C1, C00, 0
broom: E59, E57, E55, E37, E35, E33, E31
card size: 5 1/2" x 4"


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Ramadan Bombathon 2016 Day number 8
Muslims often insist that other religions are just as violent as theirs and that the bigger problem is "Islamophobia".
We put that narrative to the rest each Ramadan with a running count of ALL terror attacks categorized by motive.
Motive – Terror in the name of Islam………………..Attacks = 65……….Kills = 528
Motive – All other religions combined …………….Attacks = 0…………Kills = 0
Motive – By Islamophobes…………………………….Attacks = 0…………Kills = 0
Source: TheReligionofPeace.com
Those who live by the sword will be shot by those of us who have progressed.
Author unknown


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ROCKWOOD, Mich. – A 10-year-old boy says he's alive today thanks to a chance encounter with a Rockwood police officer.
"It felt like someone was holding my throat and choking me," said Nick McArthur.
That's how he described an asthma attack he had on Monday morning while getting ready for school.
The instant it happened Nick's mother put him in the family's SUV, and sped off to the hospital.
"He's telling me that he can't breathe. I'm like, 'Oh my god,' and so then I start panicking," said Rhonda McArthur, Nick's mom.
Rhonda said Nick was almost running out of breath when she ran a red light and an officer pulled her over.
"I thought this was going to take forever," said Nick.
That's when Officer Nicholas Mitchell realized something wasn't right.
"I could hear somebody in the car with very labored breathing; couldn't breathe at all," said officer Mitchell.
Rhonda says Mitchell realized something was wrong right away.
"He walked up to the car, and his first question was, 'Is he OK?' And I was just like, 'Oh my god, no, no he's not OK," said Rhonda.
Officer Mitchell immediately sprang into action to help, but with now ambulances available, it was up to him to help save Nick.
"Officer Mitchell just said, 'Let's go, get in the car,' and he drove us all the way to the hospital, lights and sirens, as fast as he could," said Rhonda.
Doctors said Nick arrived at the hospital just in time.
"It makes me feel good and that's why I do this job, to help people," said Mitchell.


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Round house: Squares nicely with environs
ADDRESS: 334 Rainbow Ridge Road
SIZE: 1,200 fin. sq. ft.
NEIGHBORHOOD: Faber, Nelson County
CURB APPEAL: 7 out of a possible 10
LISTED BY: Owner Lydia Dixon 361-9059
The plethora of housing choices is just one of the reasons many people feel compelled to locate in and around Charlottesville. Forget the endless tracts of plastic siding covering Northern Virginia, and the four varieties of beige governing subdivision color choices– somewhere in Albemarle County one can find something unique, guaranteed. (Of course, for those seeking the beige subdivisions, there are a couple of those here, too.)
So each week's real estate listings inevitably offer a little "stand out." It seemed obvious that the picture of this house– perched atop what looks like a mighty hill– would have been impossible to take without mountains looming somewhere in the background.
Finding this abode, then, amid hilly roads, created another kind of stimulus: horizons stretching away in all directions. Add to the appeal claims that such vistas have been shown to increase the output of natural-occurring serotonin: a perfect antidote to the keyboard and monitor-driven habits of today's workforce.
As the paved roads lead farther into the hills toward Faber (like many old country "towns," "Faber" exists in name only) the first substantial building we spy marks the beginnings of the Monroe Institute. Established in 1985, it caters to a certain section of the population interested in higher awareness and alternative modes of consciousness.
Its visual impact, though, is slight, dwarfed perhaps by the landscape. A few houses dot the hillsides, each different from the next and situated such that privacy remains inviolate.
Easily identifiable– it's the only round house in the vicinity– this structure has small yet perfect proportions. It was designed by Deltec of Asheville, North Carolina, a company that can ship any of its nine models ready to erect. From a Deltec brochure, "The walls and pre-insulated floors are factory assembled into panels that are shipped directly to the building site along with the roof system, decks, exterior trim, and all the hardware needed to construct your shell."
Although the homes are not actually round (this model, the Monterey, has 15 sides), it's the circular design that allows for less exterior wall, thereby saving building costs and increasing energy savings while encompassing the same square footage as a conventional rectangular house.
One of the quandaries of modular home ownership is deciding whether to have interior walls. They're not necessary, so living arrangements can be designed to fit individual needs. But once inside this place, the spectacular use of windows makes one feels less inside than, say, in a tent. As more people show up to take a look during the impromptu open house, we're all drawn to the majesty and proximity of the rolling hills. The one thing lacking is a deck.
The thrust of a round house is its openness: no dark corners or dead space to contend with. The main room, with a cathedral ceiling, encompasses living, dining, and kitchen areas partitioned by furniture placement.
One space-enhancing addition is a large mirror along the kitchen wall. The reflection consists solely of the opposite windows– one literally gets surround-mountain scenery. Better love those hills, because if you purchase this house, you'll see them everywhere.
A large-ish bedroom featuring walk-in closet and full master bath with Jacuzzi tub is a nice nod to the contemporary amenities required by today's fixation on clean living. Another bedroom on the other side of the big room could suit a child, but possibilities include guest/office suite. To round it all off, a small nook leading outside accommodates storage area and stackable washer and dryer (which convey).
Obviously whoever lives here needs to enjoy– in fact, revel in– the great outdoors. An established deer-proof vegetable garden awaits a green thumb. Several outbuildings could have multiple purposes, and for those who need a jumpstart on firewood, a huge pile comes with the property.


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reasonable places to eat near Latin Quarter/Gobelins
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Joined: 01 Oct 2004
Posts: 256
Location: Richmond, VA, usa
Posted: Sun Oct 03, 2004 3:25 am
Post subject: reasonable places to eat near Latin Quarter/Gobelins
Any suggestions for good/reasonable places to eat in Latin Quarter/Moufftard/Gobelins area? We are coming in a couple of weeks to visit our student daughter who lives near Jardin des Plantes.
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Joined: 30 Sep 2004
Posts: 1
Location: London
Posted: Wed Oct 06, 2004 11:29 am
Post subject: Places to eat in the Latin Quarter
I was in Paris just over a month ago and we stayed between Place Monge and Cardinal Lemoine Metro stations - perfectly placed for Rue Mouffetard and surrounds! Off the Rue Mouffetard is a little street called Rue Pot du Fer which is just PACKED with restaurants. All of them had very reasonable prix fixe menus and I would happily have tried them all. We ended up going to Le Vigneron which served French cuisine from the South-West and we had a delightful meal - three courses for about 22 (although there is a suplement to pay for the cassoulet or foie gras). The night we were there it was full of French people and felt pretty off the beatn track, which was great.
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Joined: 24 Sep 2004
Posts: 443
Location: Paris, France
Posted: Wed Oct 06, 2004 10:00 pm
Post subject:
Hi Melinda!
I can suggest an excellent and very affordable restaurant called Le Pré Verre (8 Rue Thénard) in the 5th. I've been there a few times and was never disappointed.
Do let us know where you end up going!
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Joined: 04 Oct 2004
Posts: 1
Location: Paris
Posted: Thu Oct 07, 2004 2:08 pm
Post subject:
Hi Melinda,
in my opinion its quite difficult to find good restaurants in this area because its very touristic. Especially near the rue Mouffetard many restaurants are pure tourist traps not bad but definitively nothing special.
I agree with Clotilde that the Pre Verre is an excellent choice, I was there also several times and we were never disappointed. I'll add you some more suggestions which I really like:
Le Vin Sobre, 25,rue Feulliantines a nice bar a vin with an excellent choice of Cote du Rhone vines, traditional kitchen, simple dishes but perfect preparation
La Truffade 4, rue Blainville This is a good tip for lunch. In the evening its a very expensive restaurant, where you have this top class restaurant feeling with well dressed waiters a heavy wine list etc. For lunch (also saturday) you have a 20 euro menue 3 courses and wines by glass, the same excellent service. Classic but not at all heavy french dishes.
L'Ourcine, rue Broca a newly opend neo bistro with a 28 euro menue. We were there last week a very welcoming personal service, perfect cooked dishes bistro style and very well priced wines.
Finally L'Estrapade, rue Estrapade. A very small and intime Restaurant. They changed now their menue to a fixed price of 25 Euros which is oin my opinion an excellent bargain. Classic french kitchen
Hope that helps enjoy your meals there and have a good time in Paris
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Site Admin
Joined: 24 Sep 2004
Posts: 443
Location: Paris, France
Posted: Thu Oct 07, 2004 5:52 pm
Post subject:
Leave it to Christoph to give you fabulous recommendations! Thanks Christoph, I'll write these down as I, too, find it very difficult to find decent food in that area.
Oh and a bit closer to the Luxembourg, there is also "Les Papilles" which I wrote about for Bonjour Paris, at 30 rue Gay-Lussac. Here's a link to the
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Joined: 01 Oct 2004
Posts: 256
Location: Richmond, VA, usa
Posted: Tue Nov 09, 2004 3:50 pm
Post subject: good eats
now that I'm back from paris....here are 2 places we stumbled on and had good meals....Cave de Bourgogne...on a square at the southern end of r Moufftard....good duck confit & entrecote, and Au Bon Coin, 21 r de la Collegiale (www.restoauboncoin.com)...neighborhood place, great prices...huge tureen of fish soup, another confit (do you see a pettern here? we hardly ever get this in us) and creme brulee..my daughter got a moelleux chocolat au caramel...wow...a gooey chocolate pudding/cake in a pool of caramel....I think I ate a cheese per day...should have taken a chance & brought some camembert back...am having stinky cheese withdrawal
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In a time where singers who play covers and accompany themselves on a semi-acoustic guitars seem to be a dime a dozen, Tamer Emad is in a refreshing league of his own.
Not only does the half British, half Egyptian Emad have a great voice, he accompanies himself with his guitar which makes the music flow seamlessly and his choice of songs is surprisingly different. We saw him perform on a Thursday night in The Club House in El-Gouna.
Emad grew up in the UK and dabbled a little in music but never seriously. "As a kid I had a couple of years of guitar lessons and I was part of a punk-rock band. That was not singing though, that was screaming," he said. "I did not really start singing until 2007."
It is not a coincidence that this was also the year when Emad moved to Egypt. "Living in Egypt has softened me up a little, I defrosted living here. I have learned to express myself and I have come out of my shell," he said.
When asked why he prefers to live in Egypt, Emad is very clear: "I like the traditions even though in the beginning they were very alien to me, an English man who grew up on a council estate. I feel my roots are here and my temperament, level of sensitivity and reactions are very Egyptian."
After a summer visit Emad decided to stay in Egypt and he moved to the family farm for a while, where he caught himself singing around the house a lot. "I would hear myself hum and sing and I liked it. My father had an old guitar and since it was lonely on the farm I had all the time to practice and learn to play the songs that I liked," he said.
When friends invited him to Hurghada, he took a chance and played and sang in one of the local bars for food and drinks. The reaction of the audience was good and the bar owner asked him to come back. "It gave me a chance to stay in Hurghada, eat and learn on the job," Emad said smiling.
Emad never looked back, he collected his own setup, consisting of a new semi-acoustic guitar, an old microphone from his father, a small mixer and a music stand and started playing in the local hangouts. "I remember the first gig I played where I was paid in cash and not in kind. I was completely broke, did not have money for a taxi and had not eaten in a few days but I had to get to the venue. So I walked the 15 kilometres, with all my equipment," Emad said.
Those days are long gone though. These days Emad has a large repertoire of songs and he has started writing his own. "I sing my own versions of other people's songs and I sometimes slip in one of my own songs but I do not announce them as such. I have close to 30 originals ready but I am waiting to go into the studio and record them properly before I start playing them in public," he said.
When asked what makes the Thursday night gigs so popular and special, Emad said: "The Club House is the only place in town where literally everyone is welcome and I do not have to pretend, I can just be myself. It makes it easier to perform. I like to map the songs I play to tell a story and I use them to make the audience feel like I do. When that works, everything falls into place and we all have a great night."
The large group of locals, frequent visitors, a few tourists and we certainly did last Thursday.


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BBC News
- Sunak to unveil £2bn home insulation scheme
- Coronavirus: Majority testing positive have no symptoms
- Coronavirus: Boris Johnson criticised over 'cowardly' care home comments
- Coronavirus: Three England pubs close after positive tests
- Former Labour MP Eric Joyce admits child sex offence
- Coronavirus: Wear masks in crowded public spaces, says science body
- Tom Meighan: Ex-Kasabian singer admits ex-fiancee assault
- Duchess of Cornwall 'can't wait to hug' her grandchildren
- Johnny Depp's libel case against The Sun begins
- Brexit: Application for border posts at ports sent to EU
- Domestic Abuse Bill: MPs back ban on 'chilling rough sex defence'
- Bike sales surge helps Halfords through lockdown
- Workers not eligible for furlough: "It's been very stressful'
- Coronavirus lockdown: Eight ways the lockdown has changed the UK
- Arts industry welcomes £1.57bn govt support package
- Wales tourism hopes as five-mile travel limit ends
- The North Korean refugees supplying PPE to care homes
- Coronavirus lockdowns: Where is next after Leicester?
- Coronavirus doctor's diary: Bradford worries about the whack-a-mole mallet
- Coronavirus: How will London's economy look after lockdown?
- Coronavirus: Contact tracing 'a steep learning curve'
- Coronavirus: Widnes couple say 'I do' after clock strikes midnight
- Racism and statues: How the toxic legacy of empire still affects us
- Rishi Sunak's summer statement: Five things he may do
- Coronavirus: They avoided hospital but they still aren't getting better
- Working from home: 'I'm a bit brainier than he thought I was'
- Coronavirus: Two Metres of Separation
- Coronavirus: 'Super Saturday' tales as bars reopen
- Friends embrace 'Super Saturday' as pubs and bars reopen
- Coronavirus: Before and after portraits of haircuts as hairdressers reopen
- The Vulcan: memories and mysteries uncovered as Cardiff pub is rebuilt
- 'They paused my chemo because of Covid'
- Racism and statues: How the toxic legacy of empire still affects us
- Nigel Slater's Toast returns in digital production
- Bianca Williams and partner Ricardo dos Santos stopped by Met Police
- The West End's longest running show to reopen
- Body positivity movement: 'Why is my body not important?'
- Newspaper headlines: China's warning to UK and 'naughty Tory' on trial
- London's North Circular drivers rescued as water floods route
- Bobby Storey funeral: Minister must recognise 'harm done'
- Coronavirus: Vaughan Gething 'really worried' despite 'important milestone'
Our traditional ANY-Village websites can still be found at their original location:
Below we are listing some of the most popular UK property websites advertising homes for sale in the Wainhouse-Corner area:
Nestoria (WAINHOUSE Map Search)
Vebra.com (WAINHOUSE Map Search)
Rightmove (WAINHOUSE Map Search)
Zoopla (Wainhouse-Corner Map Search)
Homes for SALE / Flats for SALE in WAINHOUSE
Homes for RENT / Flats for RENT in WAINHOUSE


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You can use DSCC to perform this task. For information, see Directory Service Control Center Interface and the DSCC online help.
The attribute;binary subtype indicates that attribute values must be transported over LDAP as binary data, regardless of their actual syntax. This subtype is designed for complex syntax that does not have LDAP string representations, such as userCertificate. The binary subtype should not be used outside of this purpose.
When used with the ldapmodify command, appropriate subtypes can be added to attribute names in any of the LDIF statements.
To enter a binary value, you may type it directly in the LDIF text or read it from another file. The LDIF syntax for reading it from a file is shown in the following example:
$ ldapmodify -h host1 -p 1389 -D cn=admin,cn=Administrators,cn=config -w - Enter bind password: version: 1 dn: uid=bjensen,ou=People,dc=example,dc=com changetype: modify add: userCertificate;binary userCertificate;binary:< file:///local/cert-file
To use the :< syntax to specify a file name, you must begin the LDIF statement with the line version: 1. When ldapmodify processes this statement, it will set the attribute to the value that is read from the entire contents of the given file.
By default, the search returns the binary attributes when used with the ;binary option. Set the compat-flag to norfc4522 to disable rfc4522 compliance.


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Born on Third traveled to Kane County today to take in the Peoria Chiefs game against the Cougars, here's a recap, mostly pictures, from the day.
We actually bought the tickets before Javier Baez was assigned to Peoria, so it was a bonus that he was playing for the Chiefs and we couldn't wait to see the 2011 first round draft pick of the Cubs. Unfortunately, the Peoria Chiefs politely warned us of something on the way to the game..
Yes, that was the Peoria Chiefs twitter account letting us know that Javy Baez was not in the lineup today, oh well I guess, at least we still get to see the Chiefs and Kyler Burke pitch. We got to the park around 11:30 because we were expecting the gates to open at 12 which is what the website said but they had the gates open already.
NOTE: Click the picture for the full size, it's worth it! (Please feel free to use my pictures, but please ask, I would like some credit, thanks!)
5th/3rd Bank Field is easy to look at from the outside
Massive picture recap after the jump!
Continue reading "A Day With The Peoria Chiefs (Lots of Pics)"


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Defining the Value of a SuperstarThis year's MVP race has inspired a lot of heated commentary. Dirk Nowitzki and Steve Nash are generally considered to be the top two contenders, with Kobe Bryant an intriguing "third party candidate" based on his individual brilliance and his widely accepted status as the "best" player in the game--which many people do not necessarily equate with being the "most valuable" player. The heart of the question is not just who should win this year's award but how exactly should a player's value be defined.
One way to look at this is to consider each contender's impact on his own team. At 82Games.com, Roland Beech tracks every player in the NBA in many categories, including "on court" and "off court." As you would expect, those numbers show how a player's team performs when he is on the court and off the court respectively. These numbers can be combined into a "net" value that consists of subtracting the off court total from the on court total. Beech further refines the "net" value by accounting for the player's individual performance and the production of the other nine players, resulting in a "Roland rating." There are 12 NBA players who have Roland ratings of at least 10 this year and most of them are likely to garner MVP and All-NBA consideration.
Dirk Nowitzki has the best Roland rating as of April 2, while Steve Nash ranks 10th. Kobe Bryant is seventh in Roland rating but his off court numbers show that the Lakers go from being pretty good when he is on the court to the equivalent of a lottery team when he is not in the game. Again, it must be emphasized that the on court, off court and net ratings only evaluate a player's impact on his own team and do not necessarily prove (or disprove) how well he would do with a different team. Since the Roland rating does account for the production of all the players on the court it is, in theory, a more reliable indicator of a player's overall "value." You can read more about this subject--and find out who are the other nine players with 10-plus Roland ratings--by checking out my most recent NBCSports.com article, which can be found here:
Defining the Value of a Superstar
posted by David Friedman @ 8:34 PM


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Interrobang?! — Interrobang!?
One of the least heralded, but arguably most important new features of the new ClearType font collection is the support for a previously little used character—the interrobang. This character was developed in 1962 by Martin Speckter with the intention of conveying additional information for advertising text.
People have many different opinions on this character. The reactions have varied from, "You want to add what character to the fonts‽" or "Cool, when will I be able to use it in the font‽"
These fonts are not the first fonts that Microsoft has worked on that support this character. Other fonts include Arial Unicode, Palatino Linotype, Lucida Sans Unicode, Frutiger Linotype, and Berling Antiqua.
Here is a look at the interrobangs in the new ClearType font collection.
Note: if in the above sample sentences you see a rectangle, that is not the shape of the interrobang. That just means the font being used in your reader or browser doesn't support the interrobang. If you are using Internet Explorer with font embedding, you should see the correct character.
Edit: Update Image Reference.


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Route 8 shut down by crash with tractor-trailers
Accident caused closure in Harrisville and Mercer Township
An accident involving three tractor-trailers closed part of Route 8 in Butler County on Tuesday morning.
The crash happened in the area of Boyers Road, just south of Interstate 80 and not far from Slippery Rock.
SLIDESHOW: Photos of the crash scene
State police said one of the trucks was headed south when the driver jammed on the brakes to avoid a car that was stopped in front of it waiting to make a left turn.
The truck veered into the opposite lane, where it clipped an oncoming truck.
A third truck that was apparently traveling behind the first truck slammed into the back of that truck's trailer.
The driver of the first truck was flown to a hospital. The other drivers declined medical treatment.
investigating the crash.
State police also said the driver of the first truck appeared to be following too closely behind the car preparing to turn, forcing him to slam on the brakes and veer into oncoming traffic.
Accident investigators said charges are pending.
Route 8 was closed in both directions between Boyers Road in Mercer Township and Browntown Road in Harrisville while police investigated.
See the latest breaking news photos shared on u local in the slideshow below.View and share breaking news on u local


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Anyone got a particular brand to avoid? I'm after a reasonably cheap (couple hundred bux) one that'll do paper (duh), old cards like credit cards / sim cards and CD's. Office works has something that looks like it'll do it, but reading the review says if you try to shred cd's it jams the machine. What brands do you guys use (if you use one)?
Otherwise I may have to get creative in finding ways to destroy stuff. Like when I exploded a CD in the shed, putting dents in the walls, using a dremel. Not eager to do that again :)
We had a Fellowes at an office once that did all that with ease. Can't recall model but I've used a few at various offices and they seem quite good.
Old CD's can be good for crafty type things so once you've nuked them maybe a local school or kindy might be interested.
Only terrorists have something to hide??!
Only terrorists have something to hide??!
I'm using it to make confetti for weddings
Aldi released a shredder on Australia Day, I bought one and so far it's working really well. It shreds cross-cut, does CD/DVDs and credit cards as well, the only thing I could say as a negative is that it's noisy in operation. But who really cares about that?
Costs $40 or something, worth it.
Fark no, golf club
As a former Officeworks employee, I'd suggest over-speccing.
I don't think the use the same Fellowes machines that they used to, but in my experience, people buy for "occasional use" and then smash them with their built up piles of documents.
The shredders complain by releasing the smoke.
haha well yeah we already have a paper shredder, but there's a pile of old CD's here I want to get rid of too. I did try the old dremel method but that resulted in shards of CD flying off everywhere, dents in the shed walls and a sound that I imagine would have sounded like a gunshot (never actually heard a gunshot up close). So I decided that idea was probably eventually going to result in bits of CD sticking out of my eyeballs and decided not to go with that method, as funny as it was at the time.
I'd suggest over-speccing.
I always seem to go the whole Tim "the tool man" approach of "MORE POWAH" and I'll go out with the intention of buying the cheapest thing that'll do the job, then I see some massive thing that's like 5x the price & go yep, I'm 'avin that.
for the safety nazis, I was hiding behind stuff when I made the cd go boom, I was in no real danger apart from my ears ringing for about 15 minutes


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If you do not have an account yet, you can register ( Here ), or you may retrieve a lost user/pass ( Here ).
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Author : Connie H. Deutsch
Connie H. Deutsch is an internationally known business consultant and personal advisor who has a keen understanding of human nature and is a natural problem-solver. She has counseled people who have OCD for more than 40 years,
Connie is the author of the books, "Round and Round Goes the Merry-Go-Round: Drugless Therapy for OCD (Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder)" "Whispers of the Soul," "A Slice of Life," "Whispers of the Soul for the Rest of Your Life," "From Where Im Sitting," "Are You Listening?," "View from the Sidelines," "Reaching for the Brass Ring of Life," "Purple Days and Starry Nights," "Here and There," "And Thats How it Goes," and "The Counseling Effect." Her website: http://www.conniehdeutsch.com/
See more of her articles by clicking here ConnieHDeutsch Articles
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BGS International Residential School, Bangalore, India, was founded by His Holiness Jagadguru Padmabhushana Dr. Sri Sri Sri Balagangadharanatha Swamiji of Adichunchanagiri Mutt, in 1997 and formally inaugurated on 19th January 2001 by the Prime Minister of India Shri. Atal Bihari Vajpayee. The school is one of the finest centers of learning in India. It is a co-educational and also residential school having foreign and NRI students from all over the world.
The school reposes in the lap of nature off Bangalore-Mysore National Highway, in a sprawling 100 acres of safe and pollution free environment surrounded by a beautiful valley. The campus is absolutely calm, quiet, with large areas of gardens, lawns and playgrounds that merges with nature.
The courses of study and curriculum have been designed with a vision that students from all over the world can take their Secondary and Senior Secondary school certificate examination under the Central Board of Secondary Education (C.B.S.E).


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Earl Aldridge posted this review of Collateral Damage on Amazon: "Hannibal Jones larger than life" detective and a world traveler. He is a hard-hitting troubleshooter. Finds himself tangled in a web of murder and treachery. An interwoven tale where everything is not as it seems. Hannibal, nearly super type hero, takes the lead in this tale of a missing person. A must read for the detective inside of you."
Views: 11


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City of RenoHome Menu
Each Board and Commission is listed alphabetically below. Agendas and minutes, if available, are listed on the main page for each body. Upcoming meetings are also listed in the City Calendar.
If you are interested in applying to serve, please complete the Online Boards & Commissions Application.


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NVIDIA's GF100: Architected for Gamingby Ryan Smith on January 17, 2010 2:00 AM EST
- Posted in
- GPUs
At this year's Consumer Electronics Show, NVIDIA had several things going on. In a public press conference they announced 3D Vision Surround and Tegra 2, while on the showfloor they had products o'plenty, including a GF100 setup showcasing 3D Vision Surround.
But if you're here, then what you're most interested in is what wasn't talked about in public, and that was GF100. With the Fermi-based GF100 GPU finally in full production, NVIDIA was ready to talk to the press about the rest of GF100, and at the tail-end of CES we got our first look at GF100's gaming abilities, along with a hands-on look at some unknown GF100 products in action. The message NVIDIA was trying to send: GF100 is going to be here soon, and it's going to be fast.
Fermi/GF100 as announced in September of 2009
Before we get too far ahead of ourselves though, let's talk about what we know and what we don't know.
During CES, NVIDIA held deep dive sessions for the hardware press. At these deep dives, NVIDIA focused on 3 things: Discussing GF100's architecture as is relevant for a gaming/consumer GPU, discussing their developer relations program (including the infamous Batman: Arkham Asylum anti-aliasing situation), and finally demonstrating GF100 in action on some games and some productivity applications.
Many of you have likely already seen the demos, as videos of what we saw have already been on YouTube for a few days now. What you haven't seen and what we'll be focusing on today, is what we've learned about GF100 as a gaming GPU. We now know everything about what makes GF100 tick, and we're going to share it all with you.
With that said, while NVIDIA is showing off GF100, they aren't showing off the final products. As such we can talk about the GPU, but we don't know anything about the final cards. All of that will be announced at a later time – and no, we don't know that either. In short, here's what we still don't know and will not be able to cover today:
- Die size
- What cards will be made from the GF100
- Clock speeds
- Power usage (we only know that it's more than GT200)
- Pricing
- Performance
At this point the final products and pricing are going to heavily depend on what the final GF100 chips are like. The clockspeeds NVIDIA can get away with will determine power usage and performance, and by extension of that, pricing. Make no mistake though, NVIDIA is clearly aiming to be faster than AMD's Radeon HD 5870, so form your expectations accordingly.
For performance in particular, we have seen one benchmark: Far Cry 2, running the Ranch Small demo, with NVIDIA running it on both their unnamed GF100 card and a GTX285. The GF100 card was faster (84fps vs. 50fps), but as Ranch Small is a semi-randomized benchmark (certain objects are in some runs and not others) and we've seen Far Cry 2 to be CPU-limited in other situations, we don't put much faith in this specific benchmark. When it comes to performance, we're content to wait until we can test GF100 cards ourselves.
With that out of the way, let's get started on GF100.
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Zool - Tuesday, January 19, 2010 - linkThere are still plenty of questions.
Like how tesselation efects MSAA with increased geametry per pixel. Also the flat stairs in uniengine (and very plastic, realistic after tesselation and displacement mapping), would they work with collision detection as after tesselation or before as completely flat and somewhere else in the 3d space. The same with some physix efects. The uniengine heaven is more of a showcase of tesselation and what can be done than a real game engine. Reply
marraco - Monday, January 18, 2010 - linkFar Cry Ranch Small, and all the integrated benchmark, reads constantly the hard disk, so is dependent of HD speed.
It's not unfair, since FC2 updates textures from hard disk all the time, making the game freeze constantly, even in the better computers.
I wish to see that benchmark run with and without SSD. Reply
Zool - Monday, January 18, 2010 - linkI want also note that for the stream of fps/3rd person shooters/rts/racing games that look all same sometimes upgrading the graphic card doesnt have much sense these days.
Can anyone make a game that will use pc hardware and it wont end in running and shoting at each other from first or third person ? Dragon age was a quite weak overhyped rpg. Reply
Suntan - Monday, January 18, 2010 - linkAgreed. That is one of the main reasons I've lost interest in PC gaming. Ironically though, my favorite console games on the PS3 have been the two Uncharted games...
-Suntan Reply
mark0409mr01 - Monday, January 18, 2010 - linkDoes anybody know if Fermi, GF100 or whatever it's going to be called have support for bitstream of HD audio codecs?
Also do we know anything else about the video capabilites of the new card, there doesn't really seem to have been much mentioned about this.
Thanks Reply
Slaimus - Monday, January 18, 2010 - linkSeeing how the GF100 chip has no display components at all on-chip (RAMDAC, TMDS, Displayport, PureVideo), they will probably be using a NVIO chip like the GT200. Would it not be possible to just put multiple NVIO chips to scale with the number of display outputs? Reply
Ryan Smith - Wednesday, January 20, 2010 - linkIf it's possible, NVIDIA is not doing it. I asked them about the limit on display outputs, and their response (which is what brought upon the comments in the article) was that GF100 cards were already too late in the design process after they greenlit Surround to add more display outputs.
I don't have more details than that, but the implication is that they need to bake support for more displays in to the GPU itself. Reply
Headfoot - Monday, January 18, 2010 - linkBest comment for the entire page, I am wondering the same thing. Reply
Suntan - Monday, January 18, 2010 - linkLooking at the image of the chip on the first page, it looks like a miniature of a vast city complex. Man, when are they going to remake "TRON"…
…although, at the speeds that chips are running now-a-days, the whole movie would be over in a ¼ of a second…
arnavvdesai - Monday, January 18, 2010 - linkIn you conclusion you mentioned that the only thing which would matter would be price/performance. However, from the article I wasnt really able to make out a couple of things. When NVIDIA says they can make something look better than the competition, how would you quantify that?
I am a gamer & I love beautiful graphics. It's one of the reasons I still sometimes buy games for PCs instead of consoles. I have a 5870 & a 1080p 24" monitor. I would however consider buying this card if it made my game look better. After a certain number(60fps) I really only care about beautiful graphics. I want no grass to look like paper or jaggies to show on distant objects. Also, will game makers take advantage of this? Unlike previous generations game manufacturers are very deeply tied to the current console market. They have to make sure the game performs admirably on current day consoles which are at least 3-5 years behind their PC counterparts, so what incentive do they have to try and advance graphics on the PC when there arent enough people buying them. I am looking at current games and frankly just playing it, other than an obvious improvement in framerate, I cannot notice any visual improvements.
Coming back to my question on architecture. Will this tech being built by Nvidia help improve visual quality of games without additional or less additional work from the game manufacturing studios. Reply


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Although their kings and queens don't come cheap and are today only figureheads, most Brits seem to thoroughly enjoy having a royal family.
Right now the country is excited over the birth of William and Catherine's baby, who is in line to become the country's 43rd monarch since the Norman Conquest.
The royal heir was delivered in a private wing of St. Mary's Hospital, the same wing where Prince William and his brother, Prince Harry, were born.
Until those deliveries, royal births were home births. As you visit royal palaces in and around London, you're also visiting the birthplaces of some of Britain's kings and queens.
Here's a rundown on these royal palaces and who was born there.
Kensington Palace (www.hrp.org.uk) is on the royal radar because it will be the new home to William, Catherine and the baby. The family will be moving into a thoroughly renovated Apartment 1A later this summer. While some of the palace is open to the public, these private quarters are strictly off-limits.
The palace has long been associated with Britain's longest serving monarch, Queen Victoria, who was born here in 1819. Sitting primly on its pleasant parkside grounds in central London, the palace is immaculately restored.
A visit here gives a fun glimpse into the lives of several important residents, such as William and Mary, George III and Victoria. After Queen Victoria moved the monarchy to Buckingham Palace, lesser royals bedded down at Kensington.
Unless you are in London in August or September, it is unlikely you'll get a peek inside the royal birthplace of Prince Charles, Buckingham Palace. A 41-gun salute marked his birth here in 1948.
Today, the queen opens 19 of her palace's lavish State Rooms to the public, but only in August and September when she's out of town. Book early. (www.royal collection.org.uk).
Fifteen miles up the Thames is Hampton Court Palace, the 500-year-old royal hangout that was a favorite of Henry VIII, Elizabeth I and Charles I (www.hrp.org.uk). Henry's only legitimate son, who became Edward VI, was born here in 1537.
The stately palace stands overlooking the Thames and includes some impressive Tudor rooms, including a Great Hall with a magnificent hammer-beam ceiling.
The industrial-strength Tudor kitchen was capable of keeping 600 schmoozing courtiers thoroughly — if not well — fed. The sculpted garden features a rare Tudor tennis court and a popular maze.
Trains from London's Waterloo Station drop you across the river from the palace — just walk across the bridge. Or consider arriving at or departing from the palace by boat like Henry VIII did; one of London's river cruise lines has service to Hampton Court (www.wpsa.co.uk).
Farther out on the Thames is yet another royal birthplace: Windsor Castle (www.royalcollection.org.uk). In 1070, William the Conqueror built the first fortified castle on a chalk hill above the Thames; later kings added on to his early designs, rebuilding and expanding the castle and surrounding gardens.
Edward III was born at Windsor in 1312; more than a century later Henry VI was born here in 1421.
Trains from Paddington Station spit you out into the Windsor Royal Shopping Pavilion, only a few minutes' walk from the castle. At the royal site, you'll see sprawling grounds, lavish staterooms, a crowd-pleasing dollhouse, a gallery of Michelangelo and da Vinci drawings, and an exquisite Perpendicular Gothic chapel.
The Queen Elizabeth considers Windsor her primary residence, and the one where she feels most at home. She generally hangs her crown here on weekends, using it as an escape from her workaday grind at Buckingham Palace in the city.
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I want to find the most concise and clean list of CharOp ordered by base-class, and not by build ideas.
If you take a look at brilliantgameologists forum the list is a bit messy and hard to find what you are looking for.
And some have broken links, eg WotC (Look at this question). Has someone put it together yet?
Or should I get in motion and put it together myself?


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I made her that card because it has been awhile since we have seen each other. It would be fun to have a "date" with my best friend. Tee hee!
Speaking of friends, I have made a lot of wonderful friends through this wonderful crafting hobby of mine. Many I have met, and others I have yet to meet. One of my friends that I have yet to meet, is following through on a dream of hers, and I am so excited for her! Her name is Christine, and she is an amazing paper and digital crafter. She has started a scrapbooking retreat called "Scrap Retreat House at French Valley". I urge you to follow the link, and check it out. It really is a gorgeous getaway, where you can spend your weekend scrapping away. I can't wait until I get a chance to attend this magnificent place! She is also doing a RAK on THIS POST at her blog. All you have to do is visit the retreat site and then go to her blog and let her know what you think in the comments of that post I have linked for you.
Have a great night,
24 comments
Your photos are great! I was expecting something completely different and think the cards look great! Alos, you are glowing and not a "goober". I think the pictures capture how truly happy you are.ReplyDelete
Both of these cards are beautiful Lea! I just any style you go with:)ReplyDelete
Thanks for playing!
Great cards Lea! And you've reminded me how important dear friends are. My BFF had a beautiful little boy in November after trying for years and I'm so happy for her and her hubby. And don't you love looking at "old timey" pictures BEFORE digital! LOVE THEM!ReplyDelete
- AnonymousFebruary 9, 2009 at 10:50 PM
Love those cards! The chandelier is awesome!ReplyDelete
You are such a talent Lea! I love your cards with all the product but I am totally loving these simple ones too!ReplyDelete
It is so wonderful to have a friend like that!
(-: Heidi
magnificent cards...I absolutely love the chandelier one!!ReplyDelete
- AnonymousFebruary 9, 2009 at 11:53 PM
These are GORGEOUS!!! I absolutley love your bows and the colored rhinestones just make me smile!!!ReplyDelete
L♥ve how u used the chandelier stamp! It's a gorgeous card!!!ReplyDelete
- AnonymousFebruary 10, 2009 at 5:46 AM
Beautiful cards Lea...ReplyDelete
A `true` friend indeed your photo`s are fab..TFS:)~X~
Both cards are great! Love the cheerful colors on the fist one and all that bling on the second. TFS!ReplyDelete
What a sweet post!! I just love those cards!! I so want to get a cuttlebug!! Those swiss dots are calling my name!! I haven't gotten my CPS challenge done this week, but I am determined!! HOpe you have a great day my friend!!ReplyDelete
Beautiful cards! We all need a friend like that in our lives...so glad you have each other!ReplyDelete
Love your cards Lea.....I really like your "simple graphic" look. The pictures are very sweet & I hope you 2 get together soon.ReplyDelete
What awesome pics of you two and I love love love the two cards. I have no fave, hard to pick, LOVE both!!!ReplyDelete
- AnonymousFebruary 10, 2009 at 1:01 PM
What a great cards !! I love the sentiment on the first one ! The second one is so elegant !ReplyDelete
looooooove both of the cards and i so love the story and the pics of havin' a very bestest friend!ReplyDelete
Beautiful cards! What a perfect card for a friend. It's so great to have a timeless friendship like that where you can not see each other for a while and when you do you just pick up where you left off. Those are truly the friendships to cherish and they last forever :)ReplyDelete
Lea, your cards are 'simply' gorgeous, love them! And beautiful photo's too. It's a wonderful gift to have such a beautiful friendship. I think I might have to borrow your idea of a 'date' card, it's so cute! My closest friends are actually quite a distance from me so I don't get to see them anywhere near as frequently as I would like, so a card like this would be so sweet to send. TFS!ReplyDelete
Hugs Mrs Jx
Gorgeous cards and what an amazing frienship you have!ReplyDelete
Love this post about your friend :)ReplyDelete
Gorgeous cards!
Such cute cards and the photo's of you and your friend is so sweet... Pretty dresses! Cherish your friendship!! :)ReplyDelete
Your cards are beautiful. Loved reading about you and your BFF. Aren't true friendships just wonderful? I cherish mine as well!ReplyDelete
What an endearing story of best friends you have shared with us. Without friends we will never make it on this planet. The hang-out card is just perfect to get you two face to face again. Have a great Valentines tomorrow. Hugs from DesireReplyDelete
Sounds like you have a great friendship there :)ReplyDelete
Love your cards!!!


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An Imaginary Trip to Hobohemia
The bindle stiff looked around cautiously as he exited the alley. He'd been carrying the banner and was long weary of going by hand. Distracted by a high ball in the distance, he nearly jumped out of his skin as a bone polisher hackled on the front porch of a nearby house. "Shut your bazoo!" he hissed at the ragged creature, shifting his turkey in order to raise his roll of California blankets in a threatening gesture.
He was eager to leave this hungry town and go with the birds. Eating snowballs was not his style. Though he was glad for the new front he'd gotten at the sallie, he had no intention of sticking around and turning into a mission stiff. His blistered feet found the uneven walkway just as a group of Lizzie tramps rolled by and slowed down to look him over. "Hey, Bud... where's the main stem?" one shouted. "Down yonder," the bindle stiff nodded toward the west and noticed a couple of road sisters coughing behind handkerchiefs in the back. As he made a move to get back on his way, he stopped suddenly and turned. "Mind them yeggs!" he added with a touch of concern in his voice, while mindlessly scratching his crums.
His thoughts turned next to his stomach, and he jingled the thin ones in his ragged pocket. Maybe he would use the last of them on a little punk and gut before flipping a rattler down at the yard. It sure had been a long time since he'd seen a nickel note…
Although I wouldn't recommend writing about your ancestors in exactly this fashion, it's fairly easy to add color to your family history by using slang from the appropriate era. In this case, I used an excessive number of "hobo-isms" to tell a story.
I found a great little website explaining and illustrating Depression era slang, a project created at the University of Virginia. Check it out: "Hit the books, schlepper, there's a lot of slanging to be done!"


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August 22, 2013
LAWT News Service
The We Still Have A Dream Coalition will hold a march and rally to commemorate the 50th Anniversary of the march on Washington. The event will be on Saturday, August 31 from 11:00 a.m. to 3:00 p.m. in Leimert Park (located at Crenshaw Boulevard and Vernon Avenue in Los Angeles). The rally/ program, "Act Now For Human Rights", will open with words from Rev. Tullus of Al Sharpton's National Action Network. Nautica De la Cruz of KJLH Radio will emcee the event. There will be a wonderful line up of speakers and there will be performances by the KJLH Performing Arts Choir, the First AME Church Unity Choir, a solo by Elaine Gibbs, along with a few surprises, and concluding with a march down Crenshaw Boulevard.
The coalition is calling on Americans to join together to repudiate and fight against the ongoing legislative and political attacks on communities of color, while honoring the diversity and continued fight for freedom from oppression.
The We Still have a Dream Coalition is a non-partisan organization of individuals and groups who have joined together, which include Rev. Al Sharpton's National Action Network, the NAACP, First AME Church, the MLK Coalition, Word Empowerment Ministries, the ACLU, MoveOn.org, Common Cause, and MOVI For further information, call (310) 709-1698.


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A judge has denied a request by lawyers for Bill Cosby's wife to postpone her deposition in a defamation lawsuit brought by seven women who claim the comedian sexually assaulted them.
The judge ruled late Sunday that the deposition, scheduled for Monday at 9:30 a.m. ET in Springfield, Massachusetts, can proceed.
A judge had ruled Friday that Camille Cosby's deposition must proceed. However, defense lawyers filed an emergency motion late Saturday requesting it be delayed, saying 71-year-old Camille Cosby "has had no involvement with the facts or allegations underlying this case." They said her public testimony would serve "no purpose other than to harass and embarrass her."
Camille Cosby is slated to answer questions under oath in the suit that alleges Bill Cosby sexually assaulted the women decades ago.
Bill Cosby has repeatedly denied allegations made by dozens of women who have accused him of sexual misconduct or assault dating back to the 1960s. He countersued the seven women suing him in Massachusetts, claiming they had defamed his character. The defamation case doesn't involve the woman in a criminal case against Cosby.


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06 April 2010 - Stamford, CT (USA)
Health Care Excel selects Tagetik 3.0 Enabled by Microsoft SharePoint
Tagetik's flexible multi-platform and Microsoft's sophisticated technology empower a highly collaborative budgeting environment
Tagetik, a global provider of Performance Management, Financial Governance and Business Intelligence software solutions, announced today Health Care Excel, Inc. has selected Tagetik 3.0 Enabled by Microsoft SharePoint for their budgeting and planning needs.
Health Care Excel, Inc. is a private, not for profit corporation established to promote the effective, efficient and economical delivery of health care services and operates under contracts awarded by Medicare and Medicaid. Health Care Excel is recognized as one of the most experienced health care utilization management and quality improvement organizations in the United States. HCE needed a budgeting and planning solution that was flexible and easy to use and allowed them to handle software upgrades and maintenance internally. After evaluating a number of niche players, they chose Tagetik for its revenue, expense and payroll planning capabilities along with its ability to manage the complexities of their allocation cycles.
HCE also chose Tagetik because it allows budget managers to enter forecasting information, enables them to set and monitor financial targets, and is able to provide an income statement and balance sheet at any month within a fiscal year, as selected by the user. "Tagetik 3.0 was best able to meet our forecasting needs which included the ability to manage 'event based' and rolling forecast requirements, as well as incorporating new business pricing and bids into the forecast," said Kim Courtad, Director of Financial Services at Health Care Excel. "In addition, Tagetik 3.0 Enabled by Microsoft SharePoint allowed us to leverage our prior investment in Microsoft technologies, as keeping costs down is a primary objective across our organization."
"This is an exciting new customer for us. Tagetik 3.0 Enabled by Microsoft SharePoint is able to support a wide range of markets and deliver a complete solution for customers like Health Care Excel—most importantly with a low cost of ownership and without major investments. Companies, therefore can count on Tagetik 3.0 Enabled by Microsoft SharePoint to be a solution that supports all key financial processes and can maximize the collaboration capabilities and full power of Microsoft business intelligence," explained Mark Corsetti, Vice President and General Manager of Tagetik North America.
"Tagetik – recognized as a Microsoft Certified Partner – has experienced a rapid growth in the last few years, supporting the company's ongoing global expansion strategy. Tagetik 3.0's seamless integration with Microsoft SharePoint and Business Intelligence Platform is our answer to increasing market demands", added Manuel Vellutini, Chief Operating Officer at Tagetik. "Today's CFO need a highly collaborative software to communicate goals and deadlines with teams, share information, manage complex financial processes, and analyze data across all the enterprise. Many of our customers benefit from powerful features to flexibly model pervasive budgeting and forecasting processes that extend financial data visibility to underneath drivers and numbers, thus understanding underlying business assumptions. In this way, companies can translate strategic plans into operational activities – from production to HR and sales departments – and align the entire organization in executing the planned strategy.
About Health Care Excel, Inc.
Health Care Excel, Incorporated (HCEI) is a private, not-for-profit organization that provides proven health care solutions that enhance the quality, accuracy, and efficiency of its clients' services. Incorporated in 1974, the organization was established to provide clinically based, objective, and independent monitoring of quality, appropriateness, and medical necessity of health care services. The HCEI corporate headquarters are located in Indianapolis, with locations in seven other US cities, including Ohio. www.hce.org
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When me, my wife Yeyette, and daughter Krystal visited Ternate last August 21, we passed by several Caviteño towns and cities. At the Antero Soriano Highway which coursed through Tanza, we noticed banners announcing that a week later, August 28, the town will celebrate the feast day of its blessed guardian, Saint Augustine. Me and my wife decided to attend the festivities.
A couple of days after our Tanza visit, I posted pictures of the event in Facebook. The photos (some are shown in this blogpost) showcase an array of handsome Philippine ancestral houses. I shared the album to a friend of mine who is a native of Tanza. Upon seeing the photos, she commented that she once read in a history book by the late historian Isagani Medina that Tanza was the only Caviteño town which sided with Spain during the tumultuous years of the Katipunan rebellion.
My first reaction upon reading her comment was that of concern. I have not read that book she was referring to, and I don't mean to judge books that I haven't even read yet. But based on her comments on my Facebook photos, I'm inclined to ask: was that book trying to point out that the reason for being of Tanza's bahay na bató homes was the result of the town's fealty to Spain during the tumult of the late 1890s? If so, then that information is misleading for I noticed that many ancestral houses in Tanza, although handsome and charming, appear not to have been built during the Spanish times. One perfect example is Casa Tahimic, one of Tanza's oldest houses built in 1927 (see below).
But I hope that my hunch is just a hunch.
The fact is that Tanza was not the only town which sided with Spain. Many, if not all, local governments condemned the Katipunan for the single reason that their cause —no matter how honestly noble they thought it was— was nothing more but an infraction. To wit: the Katipunan was an underground movement perpetuated by conspirators who were mostly anti-friar. Local governments did not exactly put their cards in favor of this Tagalog underground movement. Rather, the movement was engineered, fueled, and powered by individual dissidents who had no powerful connection at all to each municipio/ayuntamiento around the Philippines, particularly the Tagalog region (there were a few exceptions, of course, such as the case of Emilio Aguinaldo: he was a gobernadorcillo when he joined Freemasonry and the Katipunan). That is why the Katipunan resorted to blackmail, destroying the reputation of many a rich individual who refused to support their secessionist cause.
Indeed, many factors should be taken into consideration when studying (and reassessing) the sad, sad case that is Philippine History.
Iglesia de la Santa Cruz de Malabón
Like most towns in the Philippines, Tanza was very much attached to the history of its town church. Perhaps unknown to many today, a parish is not just a church: it is a territorial unit historically under the pastoral care of a parish priest. At the onset of Philippine History (or at the start of our nation's founding on 24 June 1571), all towns started out as a parish. That is why at the heart of every old town or población, it is not unusual to find a church there, along with a plaza fronting it as well as several bahay na bató scattered around the area.
Researching about Tanza later on, I learned that this little town used to be a barrio of San Francisco de Malabón, now known as General Trías. In fact, during its barrio days, Tanza was known as Santa Cruz de Malabón. People called it sometimes as Malabón el Chico to differentiate it from Malabón el Grande that was the población of San Francisco de Malabón (el Grande).
Tanza became an organized community in 1752. In 1760, the friars built a big residence and granary in the area. The place was eventually called Estancia (a ranch or a place for vacation). It was only seven years later when Estancia became known as Santa Cruz de Malabón. It became a full-fledged parish on 29 August 1780, just a day short after Saint Augustine's feast day. That is why he was taken as the town's patron saint. Today, the people fondly calls him by a Filipinized nickname: Tata Usteng.
The term Malabón was derived from either the old Tagalog words "labong" (bamboo shoot) or "mayabong". It was said that in the early days, bamboo shoots were abundant in the area (I assume that was also the case for Ciudad de Malabón in Metro Manila). The Spanish words santa cruz (holy cross) were attached to Malabón as a testament to the people's devotion to the sacred image of the Santa Cruz, a wooden cross said to be miraculous. The image is now on display inside the town church.
It is quite sad when in 1914, the name Santa Cruz de Malabón was changed and shortened to just Tanza. According to popular belief, Tanza was a corruption/mispronunciation of the word santa. The culprit of this unnecessary name change was a congressman of the American-sponsored Philippine Assembly: Florentino Joya, a lawyer from the said town. How this guy disrespected his hometown's history I just could not fathom.
Speaking of history, Santa Cruz de Malabón's place in Philippine History was a major one: it was here where officials of the Revolutionary Government elected in the Tejeros Convention took their oaths of office. This took place inside the convent of the Santa Cruz de Malabón Church on 23 March 1897. This event served as the prototype of the first República Filipina that was disrespected by the US WASPs later on.
A curious scene during this oath taking was the participation of a priest, Fr. Cenón Villafranca, who was said to be still under the authority of the Vatican (I'm just not sure if he was a Spanish friar or a member of the native clergy). On that same date, Fr. Villafranca administered the oath of office to Aguinaldo and other officials (elected during the Tejeros Convention), calling on "God to witness the solemn moment". He was later denounced by Aguinaldo's rival, Andrés Bonifacio, for having joined the Magdalo faction of the Katipunan.
Casa Tahimic / Calle Real Restaurant
Along Calle Santa Cruz, where many ancestral homes can be found, there was this one house that grabbed our attention.
The house became doubly interesting when we noticed that it also serves as a restaurant. Whenever me and my wife visit old towns, we content ourselves to just taking photographs of ancestral houses. We seldom go inside for fear of disturbing the peace of its residents. But this house has a different allure and mystique to it. And since Yeyette is a food connoisseur, we both decided that this is one place that we should not miss.
So after taking pictures of other ancestral homes along that street and after attending mass at the church, we went back to Calle Real —the name of that house-turned-restaurant— for lunch. We were met by Mr. Michael Tahimic, brother of the owner of Calle Real (his sister, actually).
Due to the festivities, Mr. Tahimic told us that the restaurant was closed that day. Instead, he accepted us not as customers but as guests…
Because, yes, food was served inside the restaurant to celebrate the feast day of Tata Usteng!
Calle Real Restaurant is located on the ground floor of the eighty-four-year-old Tahimic ancestral house (where entresuelos are usually found). The restaurant started out in 1998. According to an article written by food expert Victoria Reyes-Ferrer for FOOD MAGAZINE (July 2003), Mildred (or Millie, Michael's sister), and her husband Noel Lozada gave birth to this exotic-looking restaurant.
He designed and tested the menu; she dressed up the place. He takes charge of running the restaurant; she takes care of the ambiance… While Noel worked on the menu, Millie indulged in her love for interior decorating. She wanted an ambiance that suited the age and style of her ancestral home. Thus they filled the restaurant with antique and semi-antique collections from upstairs, they put on their collection of old records, hats, and old things.
The turn-of-the-century mood and ambiance of Calle Real complements the delectable Filipino dishes served here. At Calle Real, the clock seems to turn counterclockwise with every bite.
Reyes-Ferrer mentioned that the Lozada couple used antique stuff from the house's second floor for their unique restaurant's design on the ground floor. But not all were spirited away for business use. Just take a look at all the marvelous treasures found inside the house proper…
FILIPINO eSCRIBBLES would like to salute La Familia Tahimic for conserving their ancestral home. They did no harm to their ancestral home's look even though they made use of its ground floor for business. And even the ambience of their business complements the Filipino feel not only of their house but also of their community. Because of extreme care rendered to their ancestral home, Casa Tahimic now serves as one of the bridges to our nation's past in general and to Tanza's history in particular. No doubt, . The love, care, and pride that they have manifested towards their very own bahay na bató, the true home of the Filipino family, should be emulated by those who still have that kind of house as their property.
Calle Real Restaurant is located at #8 Calle Santa Cruz, Población, Tanza, Cavite. To avail of their catering services (only ₱10,750 per head!), please contact them at (046)505-2836. Click here for their Facebook fanpage.
Please click here for more of our Tanza fiesta walkathon!