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This is a downstream E-blocks peripheral module, designed to be controlled by one of the upstream E-blocks processing boards which are available in a variety of MCU/FPGA architectures.
The E-blocks Motion Sensor Board features an LIS3LV02DQ 3-axis acceleration sensor capable of sensing acceleration at ±2g or ±6g scales. The board can be used to measure G forces or can be used to measure orientation in terms of pan/tilt and roll. A few typical applications for the board include force meters, balancing robotics, calibration tools and digital spirit levels. The motion sensor board connects to your upstream E-block board using the standard D-type connector.
You may want to connect via an EB634 E-blocks extender cable for situations in which you want the forces to be applied to the motion sensor only and not to the rest of your E-blocks system.
The board's patch/jumper system allows you to route the signals to different pins on the downstream E-blocks connector, or to individual female pin headers.
E-blocks can be put together to form a variety of systems that can be used for teaching and learning electronics, and for the rapid prototyping of complex electronic systems.
Each E-block has one or more 9-way D-type connectors that provide up to eight input/output lines and a ground line. These D-type connectors allow connection between E-blocks to be made in buses of multiples of 8 lines, just like a real electronic system. Power is routed separately to those E-blocks that need it.
Processing E-blocks based on PIC, dsPIC, ARM or AVR microcontrollers, Altera FPGAs, Arduino or Raspberry Pi control the whole E-blocks system. Processing E-blocks provide up to five input/output ports with up to eight lines per port.
Please see the E-Blocks Category for a list of available components. For more details on E-blocks, see the E-Blocks User Guide (in English, French, German and Spanish) or watch the Introduction to E-Blocks video.


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Rookie reliever Josh Spence walked light-hitting Ruben Tejada to force home the tiebreaking run and the New York Mets rallied late for the second consecutive game against San Diego's usually dependable bullpen, beating the Padres 5-4 on Tuesday night.
Angel Pagan homered to start New York's comeback and Jason Isringhausen earned his 299th save. The Mets, who trailed by four runs in the eighth inning Monday and by two in the eighth on Tuesday, won both games to move back above .500 (58-57).
Orlando Hudson, starting in the cleanup spot for the first time in his 10-year career, hit an RBI double for the Padres before leaving with a strained right groin. He is day to day.
Wade LeBlanc returned from a brief trip to the minors and pitched six solid innings for San Diego. He was in line for his first major league victory in almost a year before the depleted Mets fought back again.
Pagan, the team's new leadoff man because of an injury to Jose Reyes, homered for the second consecutive night when he connected off Chad Qualls (5-6) to start the eighth.
That cut New York's deficit to 4-3. Justin Turner and David Wright followed with singles, chasing Qualls, and Lucas Duda advanced the runners with a sacrifice bunt.
Jason Bay was intentionally walked and pinch-hitter Nick Evans tied it with a sacrifice fly off Spence, who entered with an 0.45 ERA in 23 appearances.
Ronny Paulino walked to load the bases and the 21-year-old Tejada, filling in at shortstop for Reyes, worked his way back from a 1-2 count to draw a walk that put New York ahead.
Isringhausen pitched a perfect ninth for his sixth save of the season.
D.J. Carrasco (1-2) entered for an injured Manny Acosta in the eighth and escaped a jam unscathed.
Jason Bartlett hit an RBI double and Jesus Guzman doubled twice for the last-place Padres, who arrived in New York with a four-game winning streak.
Heavy rain all afternoon kept the tarp on the field and canceled batting practice, but the game started on time and finished without interruption.
The score was tied at 2 in the fifth when San Diego mounted a two-out rally against starter Chris Capuano. Cameron Maybin singled and scored on Bartlett's double to deep right. Guzman followed with an RBI double to make it 4-2.
Capuano gave up two runs in the fourth, but the Mets scored twice in the bottom half.
Duda singled for the fifth straight plate appearance, including a two-run hit off All-Star closer Heath Bell that gave New York a 9-8 victory Monday night.
Bay reached on an infield single and Scott Hairston hit an RBI double high off the 16-foot fence in left-center. Paulino's sacrifice fly tied it.
Guzman doubled off the left-field fence to start the fourth, extending his hitting streak to 10 games. Hudson doubled over Pagan's head in center to put San Diego ahead.
One out later, Aaron Cunningham hit an RBI single and Hudson scored with a nifty, late, feet-first slide across the plate.
Hudson also left his feet to snare Capuano's line drive in the bottom of the fourth, saving a run. He appeared to be OK, but Hudson was lifted for pinch-hitter Alberto Gonzalez in the fifth.
Gonzalez flied out with a runner at second and remained in the game at second base. He opened the eighth with a soft liner that deflected off Acosta's pitching hand for a single, knocking the right-hander out of the game.
NOTES: Hudson has been on the DL twice this season, because of a strained left groin and a strained right hamstring. … Padres 3B James Darnell went 0 for 4 with two strikeouts and a double-play grounder in his major league debut. Darnell was called up from the minors Monday when 3B Chase Headley went on the DL with a broken left pinkie. Headley is expected to miss four to six weeks. … Maybin charged in for a terrific tumbling catch in center to rob Turner of a hit. … Paulino threw out Maybin trying to steal second in the seventh. That snapped a streak of 21 successful stolen base attempts by Maybin, caught for the first time since April 29. … Mets manager Terry Collins plans to give OF Mike Baxter his first big league start Wednesday night against RHP Aaron Harang (10-3). Claimed off waivers from the Padres last month, Baxter grew up in Queens about 10 minutes from the Mets' home.

subset: commoncrawl


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Join our live RV chat - click HERE
And Dutch compared to VZW who throttled my Jetpack to 600K (Which they call 3G!) at 10GB until the next billing cycle it is a real deal.
The only place I encountered throttling was at The Palace Station hotel in Las Vegas a couple of weeks ago. Just west of I-15 at Sahara Ave. I was there mid-week and the speed slowed down during commute times (go figure).Even so, I was getting 1.5 - 2 Mbps, fast enough to watch SD streaming video. And it went back up to 10 Mbps later that evening. Maximum download speed I've seen is 24 Mbps in the little town of Brawley, CA.
However, it took me some time to find the timeout menu. You have to be on the PC version, not the mobile version of the website that loaded on my iPad.
I also had an order cancelled because they couln't vetify my ID. ATT had done 3 hard credit checks but I got it ordered by going in to an ATT store. That was Friday and it is due Tuesday.
Hi AllI think I have the my Mobley network set-up in my S&B. Using a USB adapter, I have it powered through my desktop. Have connected the desktop and the Kindle wireless so far. It says my signal strength is -98 to -100 dBm. Is that gonna work? Going to try connecting the printer and the Blue Ray now. I left the original password and network name the same as supplied, but will go back and change them once I think all is connected.Linda
What exactly is involved in the program you must belong to for this? AT&T phones or?
What exactly is involved in the program you must belong to for this? AT&T phones or?Tx,Ernie
I thought the USB ports would stay powered even if the computer is off - am I incorrect about this? Or could it be that only some ports will stay powered?Can I use a USB to AC wall adapter plug to get power to the Mobley?
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Jefferson, Walker help 'Cats rally past sagging Magic
ORLANDO — Al Jefferson had 30 points and 16 rebounds, Kemba Walker added 19 points and 10 assists and the Charlotte Bobcats beat the Orlando Magic 111-101 on Friday night.
The Magic dug out of an 18-point first-half hole and pulled to 78-76 early in the fourth quarter. However, the Bobcats shot 16 for 20 on free throws in the final period to help secure the win.
Josh McRoberts and Gerald Henderson added 17 points apiece for Charlotte.
Orlando committed 16 turnovers in the loss, and extended its season-high losing streak to 10 games.
Arron Afflalo scored 24 points in his return to the Magic lineup, and Tobias Harris and Jameer Nelson each added 18.
The Magic looked sluggish early coming off a three-hour, triple-overtime loss to Chicago on Wednesday that saw their starters play at least 43 minutes each.
Orlando connected on just 1 of their first 10 field goal attempts to begin the game, allowing the Bobcats to jump out to a 21-3 lead.
The Magic found some energy as they closed the half on a 50-31 spurt to take a one-point lead into halftime.
Charlotte's shooting kept them in the game, though, and they took a 78-74 lead into the fourth quarter.
The Bobcats seemed to be in control late at 103-91, but Afflalo scored six straight points –including a four-point play — to get the Magic back to 103-97 with 2:55 to play.
But Jefferson scored six straight points as Charlotte responded with an 8-4 run to close out the game NOTES: The Bobcats snapped a three-game road losing streak. … Orlando is now 1-22 this season when its opponent scores 100 or more points. … The Magic honored Horace Grant between the first and second quarter as part of the team's season-long "Legends Nights" series to commemorate its 25th anniversary season. Grant played six plus years for Orlando from 1994 to 1999 and 2001 to 2003.


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Wide, unmistakable and aggressive describes Liberty Walk, a tuner that today can do no wrong. Its widebody builds took SEMA 2013 by storm and we tracked them down for your viewing pleasure. Italian, JDM, Bavarian and Lamborghini, the LTMW presence touched on a range of popular worldwide platforms. Some people might call its work sacrilege, but we like to call it amazing.
Below you will find a collection of Liberty Walk cars displayed at SEMA. Some have made the rounds since car show season started earlier in the year and two were debuted for all to see in Vegas. There is no question that the most buzzed about build at the show this year was the ridiculous Ferrari 458 Italia seen below. Let us know which was your favorite in the comments section below.
Liberty Walk Ferrari 458 Italia
Located in the Nitto Tires booth, the star of the show was unquestionably this Liberty Walk Ferrari 458. Anyone who is willing to cut into the body of an Italian exotic has earned our respect. We were lucky enough to speak with Wataru Kato, the man behind this rolling sculpture and the company, to gain insight into the car.
Major modification include: Liberty Walk widebody kit, cut fenders and frame, lowered via suspension upgrade, bumper, diffusor and ducktail plus a swapped front diffusor, and IPE exhaust. The Liberty Walk kit will run you about $25000 and orders are already in place. Believe it or not, but build time on this car was only about one week.
Would you do this to a Ferrari? Most don't have the guts, but we love that Liberty Walk takes no prisoners with its bend the rules attitude.
Liberty Walk Nissan GT-R
The second big Liberty Walk debut at SEMA, this Nissan GT-R is every bit as awesome as the rest. With killer looks and an oh-so-wide body we wanted to be sure and snap a few photos.
Major modifications include: 600hp engine thanks to a Phoenix intercooler, exhaust system and ECU management, CSD adjustable platinum VIP coilovers, 20" Forgiato wheels, front widened 1.9" and rear widened 3.1", custom upholstery and Takata harnesses.
If you love the brute AWD power of the GT-R than this more aggressive example may be your ticket. Godzilla gained some new attitude thanks to Liberty Walk.
Liberty Walk 2008 BMW M3
Previously featured in the October issue of european car magazine we found this muscular M3 at the Vortech booth. There are just some colors that don't pair, but we happen to love this flat grey and neon green combination.
Major modifications include: 3999cc V8 32v engine with ESS Tuning VT1-550 supercharger kit, Arqray exhaust, Mastermind NA X-Pipe, QTP remote cut-out, CKS coilovers with Swift springs, Rotiform SNA wheels and Nitto Invo tires, Liberty Walk Version2 widebody kit with four fender flares, carbon fiber front spoiler and Type2 rear wing, front splitter and rear bumper trim pieces, Grigio Telesto paint and Verde Ithaca accents.
Seeing this car again made us realize just why we featured it. Not only does it look especially mean, but there is nothing else like it on the road.
Liberty Walk BMW 335i
Whether you want to call it salmon or red, this 335i's finish grabs your attention. Another amongst a growing presence of Liberty Walk cars, we found this one at the Airlift booth.
Major modifications include: Liberty Walk widebody kit, Rotiform wheels, upgraded seats, rear cage, and Airlift suspension with custom rear arms.
The air suspension lowers the ride height four inches while allowing for up to eight presets that can even be used mid-driving. The top of the line Airlift system costs $3000-$4000 depending on how elaborate you want to go with the air management system. The suspension was designed to be used both on street and track, on par if not better than conventional coilover systems, according to Airlift.
Liberty Walk 2007 BMW 328xi Sports Touring Wagon
Once we arrived at the Toyo Tire Treadpass car show outside of the SEMA convention center we were greeted by this ultra-wide 328xi wagon. Not a full out LTMW build, this customer car was definitely worth a second look.
Major modifications include: Liberty Walk BMW M3 widebody flare kit (heavily modified), HRE three-piece S107 wheels (Battleship Grey outers with Florescent Yellow inners), Rotora 6-piston front and 4-piston rear brakes, KW Suspensions V3 coilovers, JSP Fab exhaust, Heatshield Products exhaust wrap, and Recaro Sportster CS seats.
Although there are currently no performance upgrades, the owner plans to conduct an extensive drivetrain swap using either a 335i or 335d replacement. The body kit was heavily modified to fit. Every piece was modified to fit and in some cases portions were completely remade as they didn't fit the wagon chassis. Over 100 hours were spent on these changes. Now that's dedication.
Liberty Walk 2008 Lamborghini Murcielago
Yet another previously featured car on our list. We saw this beefed up Murcielago at the LTMW Summer Show earlier this year and were pleased to see it again at SEMA amongst its Liberty Walk brethren. Just like the 458 mentioned above, this widebody Murcielago puts those willing to cut it up in a special club.
Major modifications inlclude: Liberty Walk widebody kit, front bumper type 2 and rear bumper, side and rear diffusor, rear wing Version 3 and headlight trim, IPE exhaust with Liberty Walk tips and LB performance wheels.
If you had to choose between this widebody exotic or the 458, which would it be? We'll take both, please.
Liberty Walk 2007 BMW 335
On our way back into the convention center we ran into yet another widebodied Liberty Walk BMW. While this 335 doesn't feature any wild colors its 'out of my way' aggressive front end and menacing wide body kept us interested.
Major modification's include: Liberty Walk front and rear bumpers, fender flares, Volk G25 wheels, FFTEC Motorsports top mount twin scroll single turbo kit with Precision 6262 turbo, charge piping and ECU calibration, Vishnu FFTEC in line fuel pump kit and PWM methanol injection kit, ETS 7-inch race intercooler, Spec aluminum flywheel and stage 2+ clutch kit, Synapse synchronic driverter valve, Quaife ATB LSD, and KW Club Sport coilovers.
We've shown you plenty of M3s, but this 335 really took us by surprise.


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We love Lamborghini randomness. Like this video — purportedly filmed for Issue No. 10 of Lamborghini Magazine — of a Lamborghini Gallardo LP 570-4 Super Trofeo Stradale doing a strange, snowy road dance with a black helicopter.
The chopper appears to be along for the filming, but gets in on the hoonage, dipping out of sight into perilous canyons as the supercar drifts around scary looking hairpins on a treacherous, snow covered mountain road.
It's no surprise that those intimidating mountains are in Romania, not far from Dracula's old stomping grounds. The driver whips around corners with undead-like unconcern for personal injury, so we wondered if that's who was behind the wheel. But it turned out to be French driver Sebastien Mordillo, who doesn't appear to be one of the Nosferatu.
I'd like to see this video redone with a black Lambo being chased by a massive black coach drawn by a team of snorting black steeds, and an ominous bunch of bats hovering around the chopper. It's believable. We all know vampires love a Lamborghini. (Hat tip to Baber K. Khan!)
Video credit: OLAF HAUSCHULZ/Lamborghini Magazine


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1. Born 43 years ago in Waco, Texas, Hargrove was always obsessed with the trumpet. As a boy, he practiced in the closet, so as not to disturb his mother.
2. A visit by saxophonist David "Fathead" Newman to Hargrove's junior high school was a major inspiration. The young trumpeter was amazed by the spontaneity and melodiousness of Fathead's playing.
3. At Booker T. Washington High School for the Performing and Visual Arts in Dallas, Hargrove was friends with future R&B singer Erykah Badu. They were in the same biology class.
4. In addition to maintaining his successful jazz career, Hargrove has a funk/R&B band (the RH Factor) and has recorded with R&B and hip-hop artists including Badu, D'Angelo and Common.
5. As he was mentored by such jazz greats as Art Blakey, Wynton Marsalis and John Hicks, Hargrove now mentors the young players in his quintet: pianist Sullivan Fortner, bassist Ameen Saleem and drummer Quincy Phillips. (Justin Robinson, 44, is the band's saxophonist.)
Contact Richard Scheinin at 408-920-5069, read his stories and reviews at www.mercurynews.com/richard-scheinin and follow him on Twitter at www.twitter.com/richardscheinin


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Company News
MRI Interventions to Present at UBS 2012 Global Life Sciences Conference
MEMPHIS, Tenn., Sept. 13, 2012 /PRNewswire/ -- MRI Interventions, Inc. (OTCBB: MRIC) announced today that Kimble Jenkins, MRI Interventions' Chief Executive Officer, will present at the UBS Global Life Sciences Conference on September 19, 2012. The presentation is scheduled to begin at 3:30 pm ET. A live webcast of the presentation will be available on MRI Interventions' website at https://ir.stockpr.com/mriinterventions/ir-calendar. For those unable to listen to the live webcast, a replay will be available on MRI Interventions' website following the presentation.
About MRI Interventions
Founded in 1998, MRI Interventions (OTCBB: MRIC) is a publicly traded company creating innovative platforms for performing the next generation of minimally invasive surgical procedures in the brain and heart. Utilizing a hospital's existing MRI suite, the company's FDA-cleared ClearPoint® system is designed to enable a range of minimally invasive procedures in the brain. MRI Interventions has a co-development and co-distribution agreement with Brainlab, a leader in software-driven medical technology, relating to the ClearPoint system. In partnership with Siemens Healthcare, MRI Interventions is developing the ClearTrace™ system to enable MRI-guided catheter ablations to treat cardiac arrhythmias, including atrial fibrillation. Building on the imaging power of MRI, the company's interventional platforms strive to improve patient care while reducing procedure costs and times. MRI Interventions is also working with Boston Scientific Corporation to incorporate its MRI-safety technologies into Boston Scientific's implantable leads for cardiac and neurological applications. For more information, please visit www.MRIinterventions.com.
Forward-Looking Statements
Certain matters in this press release may constitute forward-looking statements within the meaning of Section 27A of the Securities Act of 1933 and Section 21E of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934. Forward-looking statements often can be identified by words such as "anticipates," "believes," "could," "estimates," "expects," intends," "may," "plans," "potential," "predicts," "projects," "should," "will," "would," or the negative of these words or other words of similar meaning. Forward-looking statements by their nature address matters that, to different degrees, are uncertain and involve risk. Uncertainties and risks may cause MRI Interventions' actual results and the timing of events to differ materially from those expressed in or implied by MRI Interventions' forward-looking statements. For MRI Interventions, particular uncertainties and risks include, among others: demand and market acceptance of its products; its ability to successfully complete the development of, and to obtain regulatory clearance or approval for, future products, including its current product candidates; availability of third party reimbursement; the sufficiency of its cash resources to maintain planned commercialization efforts and research and development programs; future actions of the FDA or any other regulatory body that could impact product development, manufacturing or sale; its ability to protect and enforce its intellectual property rights; its dependence on collaboration partners; the retention of its sales representatives and independent distributor; the impact of competitive products and pricing; and the impact of the commercial and credit environment on it and its customers and suppliers. More detailed information on these and additional factors that could affect MRI Interventions' actual results are described in MRI Interventions' filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission, including, without limitation, the quarterly report on Form 10-Q for the quarterly period ended June 30, 2012. Except as required by law, MRI Interventions undertakes no obligation to publicly update or revise any forward-looking statements contained in this press release to reflect any change in MRI Interventions' expectations or any change in events, conditions or circumstances on which any such statements are based.
MRI Interventions, Inc.
David Carlson
(901) 522-9300
SOURCE MRI Interventions, Inc.


text: I need to edit my video karaoke files and I have Nero 7 Essentials as does my husband. However, his version includes a video editing option and mine doesn't. Can I update to get this feature or should I download Nero 7 again? If I have to download again, do I have to remove my old version?


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When Tony Petite enrolled in elementary school in Denver in the fall of 2005, he quickly discovered that he was the only kid in fourth grade who didn't know how to write in cursive. In the four years he spent in the New Orleans public school system, no one ever taught him how. "In my third-grade school," he told me recently, "they just sit you in the class, and they just tell you to do this, and tell you to do that. In Denver, they help you, and they show you how to do your work."
Tony arrived in Denver along with his parents and younger brother, Troy, as part of the epic exodus of hundreds of thousands of people, including tens of thousands of public-school students, driven from their homes in New Orleans by Hurricane Katrina and scattered to every corner of the country. At first, Tony felt out of place he and Troy were among the only black students in the school and academically, he started off well behind most of his classmates. But he got a lot of special attention from his teacher, and when he and his family returned to New Orleans a year later and he started fifth grade in Jefferson Parish, just west of the city, he was an above-average student.
Over the next two years, though, things slipped. His grades fell from A's and B's to C's, D's and F's, and last semester, he was suspended five times, mostly for fighting. When the school year ended, Tony had failed sixth grade, and his mother, Trineil Petite, went looking for a different option.
I met Tony and his mother last month, when I arrived on the doorstep of their home in Gentilly with Tiffany Hardrick and Keith Sanders, the principals of a brand-new boys-only New Orleans charter school called Miller-McCoy Academy for Mathematics and Business. Gentilly, a quiet neighborhood of mostly single-story homes, was badly flooded after Katrina. The Petites' current home, which belongs to Trineil's 83-year-old grandmother, had been filled with about five feet of water; the front of the house is still marked with a blue X and a zero, spray-painted by a rescue crew in September 2005 to show that the house had been searched and that no dead bodies had been found. (These grim reminders of the flood remain on homes all over New Orleans; down the street, a house still bore the words "DEAD DOG IN HOUSE," in six-inch-high black letters, with a giant arrow pointing to the front door.)
Petite had been searching for a school for Tony all summer, and a week earlier she heard about Miller-McCoy from the principal of a nearby charter school whose admission rolls were already full. Meanwhile, Hardrick and Sanders had been searching for Tony, or at least for boys like him; they had been in New Orleans recruiting students for almost a year at that point, running radio ads, knocking on doors, posting signs on the grassy strips that run down the middle of the city's boulevards. Miller-McCoy would be a combination middle and high school, and Hardrick and Sanders needed 108 sixth-grade students and 108 ninth-grade students, all willing to take a chance on a school with no track record. When Petite called, they had almost reached their goal; Tony got one of the last spots in sixth grade.
Before they moved last year to New Orleans, Hardrick, who is 32, and Sanders, who is 36, were public-school principals in Memphis, graduates of a prestigious program run by New Leaders for New Schools, a nonprofit that trains aspiring principals to work in urban school districts with low test scores and high concentrations of poor and minority students. It was hard to leave Memphis, they told me their schools were thriving, and test scores were rising but they couldn't resist the pull of New Orleans.
It was partly a desire to help right what they felt was a great wrong, a sense almost of moral obligation. After Katrina hit, Sanders told me, he spent the week glued to his television, watching one horrifying image after another. "I remember sitting in my living room and just crying, just really feeling for the people who were involved," he said. "Now we've been given the opportunity to be a part of the rebirth of New Orleans. How often do you get a chance to contribute to something like this?"
But it wasn't only sympathy for the survivors of Katrina that drew them to New Orleans. The city's disastrously low-performing school system was almost entirely washed away in the flood many of the buildings were destroyed, the school board was taken over and all the teachers were fired. What is being built in its place is an educational landscape unlike any other, a radical experiment in reform. More than half of the city's public-school students are now being educated in charter schools, publicly financed but privately run, and most of the rest are enrolled in schools run by an unusually decentralized and rapidly changing school district. From across the country, and in increasing numbers, hundreds of ambitious, idealistic young educators like Hardrick and Sanders have descended on New Orleans, determined to take advantage of the opportunity not just to innovate and reinvent but also to prove to the rest of the country that an entire city of children in the demographic generally considered the hardest to educate poor African-American kids can achieve high levels of academic success.
Katrina struck at a critical moment in the evolution of the contemporary education-reform movement. President Bush's education initiative, No Child Left Behind, had shined a light on the underperformance of poor minority students across the country by requiring, for the first time, that a school successfully educate not just its best students but its poor and minority students too in order to be counted as successful. Scattered across the country were a growing number of schools, often intensive charter schools, that seemed to be succeeding with disadvantaged students in a consistent and measurable way. But these schools were isolated examples. No one had figured out how to "scale up" those successes to transform an entire urban school district. There were ambitious new superintendents in Philadelphia, New York City, Denver and Chicago, all determined to reform their school systems to better serve poor children, but even those who seemed to be succeeding were doing so in incremental ways, lifting the percentage of students passing statewide or citywide tests to, say, 40 from 30 or to 50 from 40.
In New Orleans, before the storm, the schools weren't succeeding even in an incremental way. In 2005, Louisiana's public schools ranked anywhere from 43rd to 46th in the federal government's various state-by-state rankings of student achievement, and the schools in Orleans Parish, which encompasses the city of New Orleans, ranked 67th out of the 68 parishes in the state. The school system was monochromatically black white students made up just 3 percent of the public-school population, most of them attending one of a handful of selective-enrollment magnet schools and overwhelmingly poor as well; more than 75 percent of students had family incomes low enough to make them eligible for a subsidized lunch from the federal government. The dysfunction in the city's school system extended well beyond the classroom: a revolving door for superintendents, whose average tenure lasted no more than a year; school officials indicted for bribery and theft; unexplained budget deficits; decaying buildings; almost three-quarters of the city's schools slapped with an "academically unacceptable" rating from the state.
Tony's mother, Trineil, who is 31, was a product of that system. Before the storm blew her family to Denver, she had never been outside of Louisiana, even for a day, and everyone she knew had been educated in New Orleans public schools. She was familiar with schools that didn't work and educators who didn't seem to care much. So it felt more than a little strange to her to be standing in her home with Hardrick and Sanders, two highly educated, impeccably dressed black professionals, listening to them describe what Miller-McCoy had to offer her son.
"Ultimately, it's my responsibility to make sure that you get to college," Hardrick said to Tony. "You're a sixth grader, and I'm standing in your living room telling Mom that if she will allow you to stick with me until 12th grade, you will be accepted to a four-year university."
School wouldn't be easy, she told him. He'd have to arrive each morning at 7:30 a.m., he'd have to wear a blazer and a necktie every day, he'd have to do his homework every night or stay until 6 p.m. the next afternoon to complete it. Hardrick handed Tony a copy of the Miller-McCoy Family and School Covenant, which she wanted him and his mother to sign, along with his homeroom teacher and Hardrick herself. All four people, she explained, had to make a commitment to get Tony to college.
"If you work hard and I work hard, we'll get you there," she said. "Is that fair? Are you ready to sign and shake and be officially welcomed to Miller-McCoy?"
Tony looked a little nervous, especially about the 7:30 part, but he nodded his head and said yes. Hardrick handed Tony a pen, and while he signed his name, she asked his mother if she had any questions.
"I'm excited," Petite said. "This is different. Y'all are taking time with these kids."
What first sold her on Miller-McCoy, she said, was when the woman who answered the phone at the school told her that the boys would wear matching blazers with the school crest. "I said, 'Blazers?' I've never seen any kids running around in blazers except at St. Augustine" a nearby Catholic high school "and that's where you pay to go to school. This is a public school, and they wear blazers and ties? I want that for my son. I do. I really want it for him. I know he can do it."
When we left, the sun was going down. It was sweltering, like every midsummer day in New Orleans, the kind of day when the only thing you want to do is sit next to an air-conditioner and drink iced tea. But all around the city, things were buzzing. Six other charter-school leaders were preparing to open their doors for the first time, training staff and arranging bus schedules. In an office park down by the Mississippi River, another crop of future principals were meeting to begin planning their own new schools, which they hoped to open in the fall of 2009. Two hundred and fifty Teach for America teachers, nearly all recent college graduates, had just arrived to complete preparations for their new positions in schools in the region. And in a converted office building across town, next to a highway interchange, 80 returning principals and other school administrators were spending the week being trained in new techniques of "instructional coaching" and behavioral interventions.
For many years now, the central debate in American education has been over just how much schools can do to improve the low rate of achievement among poor children. While it is true that for decades the children of New Orleans toiled in a substandard school system, they have also continually faced countless other obstacles to success inadequate health care, poorly educated parents, exposure to high rates of violent crime and a popular culture that often denigrates mainstream achievement. And though the hurricane washed away the school system, it didn't wash away their other problems. In fact, for most children it compounded them with a whole new set of troubles: wrecked homes, frequent relocations, divided families, post-traumatic stress. Were public schools really the right vehicle to attack all of those problems? Were a blazer and a necktie and a lot of hard work enough to get Tony Petite to college?
For Hardrick and Sanders and the dozens of other education reformers I spoke to in New Orleans since my first trip there in March, the answer was a firm yes. They didn't deny the daunting spectrum of problems facing the children they were trying to educate. But they said they believed they could overcome them in the classroom and that the new educational terrain in New Orleans had significantly increased their chances of success.
Before Hardrick and Sanders got in their car to drive off down the potholed streets of Gentilly, I asked Hardrick what had motivated her to abandon a successful school and a comfortable life in Memphis to come to New Orleans and start all over from scratch. She thought for a moment before answering. "I think that when we get it right, we will transform education for the nation, for urban schools everywhere," she said. "We have an opportunity here to create a model that works, so we can say to other schools, other districts and other cities and states: This is what we should be doing. This is how we give all students a quality education."
Of course, there's also the possibility that the model they are building won't work and it is that thought that keeps Hardrick and many of the other new arrivals up at night. What if they don't achieve the level of success they are hoping for? What kind of lessons will people draw from the city's grand educational experiment then?
For the first couple of years after the storm, the schools of New Orleans, like most things in the city, were a mess. Students returned to the city more quickly than state officials expected (in some cases, parents living in Houston or Baton Rouge sent their children back alone, to stay with relatives or simply to fend for themselves), and by September 2006, there were about 22,000 public-school students in New Orleans, one-third of the pre-Katrina population. Though it was more than a year after the storm, the school system wasn't ready for them: there were not enough buses, not enough textbooks; no hot lunches, no doors on the bathroom stalls. There also weren't enough teachers 106 positions were still unfilled on the first day of classes; at some schools, there were as many private security guards, often young and poorly trained, as there were teachers.
Things began to change that spring. In February, Cecil Picard, the state education superintendent, died after a long battle with A.L.S., or Lou Gehrig's disease, and Gov. Kathleen Blanco offered his job to Paul Pastorek, a former president of the state school board who had been running an educational advisory committee since the storm. Although Pastorek was not an educator, he was well acquainted with many of the leading figures in the education-reform world, and before he accepted Blanco's offer, he spent a few days calling around the country, rounding up support, asking one person after another the same question: If I take the job, will you come help?
One call was to Paul Vallas, the head of the Philadelphia school system, who was locked in an increasingly bitter feud with the city's school reform commission over a $73 million deficit in the budget that appeared unexpectedly the previous October. After six years running the Chicago schools and five years doing the same in Philadelphia, Vallas was known nationally as a reformer. Pastorek asked Vallas if he'd be interested in leaving Philadelphia and running the Recovery School District, the state-mandated entity that controlled many of the public schools in New Orleans.
Ever since, Pastorek and Vallas have been the odd couple at the top of the New Orleans school system. Pastorek, compact and neatly dressed, speaks softly and slowly, carefully weighing his words. Vallas, tall and rangy, is a manic talker; sentences take off in one direction and then veer wildly toward another. Pastorek sits still, his hands folded in front of him. Vallas is a compulsive fidgeter, sometimes hoisting his entire body up onto his office chair so that he is perched on the seat in a full crouch.
Vallas is the detail man; Pastorek is the deep thinker. Since taking the job, Pastorek has immersed himself in theories of education, consulting with scholars from Seattle to Toronto to London. His conclusion, more than a year into his work, is that fixing a public-school system is not at its root a question of curriculum or personnel or even money. It is a question of governance. It is simply impossible, Pastorek has come to believe, for a traditional school system, run from the top down by a central administrator, to educate large numbers of poor children to high levels of achievement. "The command-and-control structure can produce marginal improvements," he told me when we met last month at a coffeehouse on Magazine Street. "But what's clear to me is that it can only get you so far. If you create a system where initiative and creativity is valued and rewarded, then you'll get change from the bottom up. If you create a system where people are told what to do and how to do it, then you will get change from the top down. We've been doing top-down for many years in Louisiana. And all we have is islands of excellence amidst a sea of mediocrity and failure."
The theorist who has had the most influence over Pastorek is Paul T. Hill, who runs a research group at the University of Washington called the Center on Reinventing Public Education. In September 2005, while much of New Orleans was still submerged, Hill published an article in Education Week that urged state and federal officials and philanthropic foundations to resist the temptation simply to send emergency aid to whatever programs seemed most in need. "The circumstances call for a coherent strategy, not just a round of do-gooding," he wrote. "Don't spend money rebuilding the old district structure."
In 2000, in a book titled "It Takes a City," Hill and two other researchers laid out a new architecture for urban school reform that they called the Diverse Providers Strategy. Under this model, local school boards wouldn't run a school system hierarchically, the way they usually did; instead, they would oversee a "portfolio" of schools, some run directly by the board and many run on contract by nonprofits, universities or private companies. Schools would receive money on a per-student basis, and principals could then use that money to staff their schools as they liked and pay for whatever instructional methods they chose. Each school would negotiate salaries and work rules directly with its teachers. The system's small central office would be responsible only for oversight, though it would have considerable power to hold principals accountable: schools that didn't produce results would be closed, and successful schools would be imitated and replicated.
It is this model that Pastorek and Vallas have adapted for New Orleans. Pastorek says that he wants the state's role to be that of a "harvester of high-quality schools" in the city nurturing promising ones and weeding out failing ones. "If schools run into trouble, you support them," Pastorek said. "But if they're still failing after you support them, then you pull the plug and bring in a new provider or an experienced provider. Over a period of 5 or 6 years, 10 at the most, we'll have nothing but high-quality operators in our city."
For now, though, the system on the ground in New Orleans is a bewildering tangle of interlocking organizational structures administering 86 public schools, only a minority of them directly controlled by Vallas. The law that expanded the Recovery School District, or R.S.D., allowed it to take over any "failing" school in the city, which meant virtually every school in the city except for the selective-admission magnets. Those magnets stayed as part of the rump version of the Orleans Parish School Board, an elected group that before the flood controlled the whole system and now controls just five schools and oversees 12 independently run charters. Two charter schools that existed before Katrina are overseen by the state school board. There are 33 charters under the supervision of the Recovery School District. And finally there are the 34 schools run directly by the R.S.D.
Looked at one way, this jumble is a classic let-a-hundred-flowers-bloom portfolio system. But in practice, the system is inherently unequal, with each network administered by different rules. Most of the Orleans Parish schools and charters admit students on the basis of test scores and writing samples with, in some cases, preference given to residents of the well-off neighborhood surrounding the school. As a result, they include the only public schools in the city with any significant population of middle-class white students. (Those are also the best-performing schools, by a considerable margin.) Recovery School District charters are "open enrollment," meaning they are required to accept students from anywhere in the city, regardless of academic performance. But the charters can apply some degree of selectivity too, by making the kind of demands that Miller-McCoy's principals plan to make on Tony Petite; weaker students and students with less academically focused parents sometimes can't stand the pressure and drop out. The schools run directly by the Recovery district, as a result, are the schools of last resort, the schools required to admit every student: the kids who can't get into selective schools, the ones who get kicked out of charter schools, the ones who arrive in New Orleans in the middle of the school year, the ones whose parents couldn't get it together to find them anything better.
Many parents and other observers have charged that the city's current structure has recreated and, in fact, codified the unfairness of the prestorm system, which was generally perceived to operate on two separate tiers of achievement and opportunity. According to a 2007 report commissioned by a coalition of civic groups, "Community members believe that in the current system, a select group of students has the opportunity to attend high-quality public schools, while the vast majority of students for the most part poor and minority students are stuck in low-performing schools in which they have little opportunity for growth and development." In the Orleans Parish charters, 19 percent of students are deemed "talented and gifted," compared with 1 percent of students in Recovery School District-run schools and charters.
It is one of the oddities of the organizational structure that governs public-school education in New Orleans today that Pastorek and Vallas, the high-paid hotshots at the top, are responsible for the schools with the biggest problems and the worst test scores, while the schools that are doing best are the ones furthest from their control, the ones they can claim the least credit for. What the two men will tell you, though, is that this is exactly the way things should be. Under a portfolio model, successful schools can be left alone to do their own thing, while failing schools are subject to increasingly active levels of, first, support and then control.
Pastorek and Vallas are employing two parallel strategies for the Recovery School District. First, they're instituting a series of ambitious reforms in the district-run schools. They have expanded the school day by an hour and a half and are trying to extend the school year from 173 days to 193 days. This year teachers (who are working without a collective bargaining agreement) were each given a $3,000 raise. And in every school, principals and teachers are being trained in the "best practices" of the country's leading charter schools. One of Vallas's first acts as superintendent was to offer a prominent position to Gary Robichaux, a Louisiana native who, two weeks before Katrina, opened the first charter in New Orleans associated with the Knowledge Is Power Program (KIPP) schools, the best-known and arguably the most successful network of charter schools in the country.
Last summer, Vallas persuaded Robichaux to leave his new KIPP school in the French Quarter to oversee the Recovery School District's elementary and middle schools, and Robichaux is frank now about his intentions for his new job: he wants to apply as much of the KIPP model to the Recovery schools as he can. He has brought dozens of principals to visit the school he used to run, to observe the KIPP model up close, and this summer he conducted mandatory leadership training for the top administrators in each school.
Although Vallas is a believer, in theory, in decentralization, he and Robichaux are providing a great deal of centralized support for the schools in the Recovery School District. They have created a "managed curriculum" for every school in the district to follow: detailed binders that each teacher can consult to see which skills and what knowledge they should be imparting each week and month in order to keep up with the state's standards. The R.S.D. requires its schools to administer regular "benchmarking" assessments to each child in the district in each core subject, to monitor how much is being learned and taught in each classroom.
But at the same time that Pastorek and Vallas and Robichaux are trying to improve the R.S.D.'s direct-run schools, they are also helping to create a competitive framework citywide that will most likely drive many of those schools out of existence. Part of the competition comes from a new voucher program, pushed through by Gov. Bobby Jindal, that will pay for nearly 900 New Orleans elementary-school students to attend private and parochial schools this year. But the more significant lever of change is charters schools that get public money and are overseen by a government entity but are managed by an independent board. Pastorek, Vallas and Robichaux all say they expect charters to expand their presence in the district, to a point where 75 percent or even 90 percent of the city's schools are charters.
Their evolving plan would involve both the highest- and the lowest-performing schools in the Recovery School District becoming charters, though in different ways. Principals at high-performing Recovery district schools will be encouraged to apply for a charter that would let them run their schools independently essentially, to "graduate" out of the control of the district. On the other end of the performance scale, schools that consistently fall short of state standards, even after all of the training and support that Vallas can muster, will be seized by the R.S.D., which will either hand the school over to a new or existing charter-school provider or shut it down and replace it with a new charter school. Failing charter schools will also be taken over or closed down, by having their charters revoked or transferred to another charter provider.
"Over the long haul," Pastorek explained, "the R.S.D. becomes an instrument that evaluates existing schools, supports existing schools, recommends the closure of schools and recommends the best operator to come in and take over, or the best operator to come in in place of that school. We put people in business, and we take people out of business."
One obvious potential problem with this vision of an almost entirely charterized district is that charter schools are not magic; on average, nationwide, charters don't do significantly better than traditional public schools. In New Orleans, however, there are some sound practical reasons for Pastorek and his team to feel confident about the prospects of a large-scale chartering program. A powerful alliance of nonprofits has emerged in the city, supported by money from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and other philanthropies, to recruit and train new charter operators and to help provide them the support and the personnel they need to set up and run consistently high-quality charter schools.
At the center of this alliance is a well-financed organization called New Schools for New Orleans, run by a former KIPP executive and a former Teach for America administrator. This is the group that "incubated" Miller-McCoy Academy for a year, recruiting Hardrick and Sanders from Memphis and providing them with office space, money and expertise during their year of preparation, as well as continuing support as the academy grows. This month, five schools incubated at New Schools for New Orleans will open their doors, including Miller-McCoy; next year there will most likely be four more. The New Orleans office of New Leaders for New Schools, meanwhile, will be training a new group of principals each year; five of the six members of this year's "class" are going into positions leading charters. Teach for America's regional operation in Greater New Orleans is growing quickly; its incoming class is the second-largest one in the country after New York City's. Each year, the group plans to send 50 or more teachers into charters in the Recovery district, where they will serve as a well-educated and highly motivated, if inexperienced, labor force for the start-ups. (At the same time, Teach for America is sending 75 teachers this year into direct-run Recovery schools, where it perceives a greater need.) Finally, a group called teachNOLA recruited about 100 new teachers this year, mostly career-changing professionals, and three-quarters of them will work in charters.
Pastorek acknowledges that for superintendents across the country, shutting down failing schools has proved to be an exceptionally difficult undertaking. Aside from politically damaging visuals it's never good to have adorable children marching on your office, carrying signs saying, "Please Save Our School" it's hard to shut down even the worst school if you don't have something effective to replace it with. But Pastorek says he is determined not to flinch when it comes time to "take people out of business." And the combined force of those four nonprofit human-capital pipelines will make it much easier, in coming years, for him to pull the trigger. Each year, he'll have a handful of new schools ready to open, each one led by a Gates-financed, fully incubated, KIPP-marinated principal like Sanders or Hardrick the kind of academic superheroes who before the storm just didn't come to work in New Orleans in big numbers. Inevitably, he'll make space for them. And before long, that annual handful will add up. In a city like New York, with its 1,400 public schools, new-school innovations can seem like pebbles tossed into the ocean. But in a city with fewer than 100 schools, 5 or 6 new schools a year will have a big impact. Right now there are probably 100 great charter schools scattered across the country; in a few years, Pastorek and his allies are asking, why can't there be 100 great charter schools in New Orleans?
Pastorek's optimism and determination can be inspiring, but he admits that for now, at least, there's no proof that a portfolio model will do a significantly better job educating poor children than a command-and-control model. When I spoke last month to Diane Ravitch, a historian of education who has spent decades studying and writing about the often dispiriting process of school reform, she said that she was skeptical that a change in the governance model would solve the problems plaguing New Orleans's schools. "The fundamental issue in American education I say this after 40 years of having read and studied and written about the problems is one that is demographic," she told me. Poor children, Ravitch said, simply face too many problems outside the classroom. "If you don't buttress whatever happens in school with social and economic changes that give kids a better chance in life and put their families on a more stable footing, then schools alone are not going to solve the problems of poor student performance. There has to be a range of social and economic strategies to support and enhance whatever happens in school."
Last spring, I paid several visits to a ninth-grade English class on the second floor of Rabouin High, a Recovery School District-run school in downtown New Orleans, just a few blocks from the Superdome. The class was taught by Chelsea Schmitz, a 23-year-old Teach for America corps member who was in her first year as a teacher. Demographically, Schmitz was quite a bit different than her students white, blond and Midwestern but she seemed to have built a rapport with them, in part by encouraging them to write about their lives. The students all arrived in her classroom performing well below the mean; at the beginning of the school year, Schmitz gave her ninth-grade students a set of reading-comprehension tests, and only one was able to read above a sixth-grade level, with many scoring significantly below that. But their autobiographical poems were eloquent and powerful.
What was most striking to me, though, reading the poems and listening to the students read them aloud, was the depth of the social dysfunction they described. I expected grisly stories about Katrina and its aftermath, but most of the students wrote about the problems that existed in New Orleans both before and after the storm: friends killed, cousins shot dead, cocaine deals, abusive mothers, fathers in prison. I was impressed with Schmitz's ability to connect with and motivate her students, some of whom were only a few years younger than she was. But the task in front of her, to turn around the lives of these wounded and poorly educated adolescents, seemed daunting to me, if not to her.
The long-running national debate over the potential impact of a teacher like Schmitz on the lives of children like the ones she faced at Rabouin resurfaced in June, when on consecutive days, two new advocacy organizations announced their formation, each calling for a very different solution to the problem of underachievement in school by poor minorities. One group called itself the Broader, Bolder Approach to Education; Ravitch was a signatory to that one, and the group's declaration echoed her belief that schools alone were no match for the problems of inner-city youth. The second group, led by Joel I. Klein, the New York City schools chancellor, and the Rev. Al Sharpton, was called the Education Equality Project; its declaration blamed not social woes but a broken education system for the failure of so many of the nation's schoolchildren. In the weeks after the announcements, Pastorek and Vallas both added their names to that declaration, and when I met with Pastorek, I asked him about it. What about the other group's argument? Was it really possible to solve the problems of New Orleans's children in the classroom without involving other social services and supports?
"It would be convenient to say that it's a whole lot of other people who need to be part of the equation," he replied. "But we have the job. And we have to do something." Pastorek said he didn't want to fall back on the excuse that he had heard from many other school officials, in Louisiana and elsewhere that it was impossible to fix their schools until other social problems had first been corrected.
But then he switched direction somewhat. In many ways, he said, he was sympathetic to the Ravitch position. "If we want to really get kids to the level that we want to get them," he said, "and we want to do it in a more efficient and effective way, then we would be well served if we took care of those kinds of problems if we provided more resources to kids from conception to early childhood, if we took care of mental-health issues and physical ailments and teeth and eye examinations. Including, you know, where these kids go home to sleep at night. I've lived in this community a long time, and I can't imagine how I could ever feel comfortable in neighborhoods that these kids live in at night. And yet they do, and we still expect them to do well."
Pastorek paused for a moment. "So, now, can I solve all those problems tomorrow afternoon? Can I even get the attention of the people who have control over those things? Right now, in New Orleans, after Katrina, the answer is no, I can't. But I can't take the position that I can't succeed unless I have those things. I have to take the position that we're going to do it in spite of that. Now, will it be hard? Will I be less successful? Probably yes. But I have to take that approach, because I don't have really any other cards to play."
Ideally, Pastorek told me, he would like to go back to the governor and the Legislature and ask for financing for a more comprehensive approach to the needs of his schoolchildren, but first, he needs to deliver some results with the money he has. "If you want to get these schools from awful to good, you don't really need to put out much money," he said. "But if you want to get them from good to great, you have to start spending some money. And that's where I think we are in the Recovery School District. We've got to get our schools from awful to good, and we've got to get there on the money that we've got, knowing damn good and well that it ain't enough. But if I can get them from awful to good, then I can command more money so I can get them from good to great. And I can command other resources and other partnerships with these other people who need to be at the table."
For now, it falls to teachers like Schmitz to do what they can with what they have. At Rabouin, there were metal detectors at the front door and frequent fights in the hallways. The high-tech whiteboard projector, which Vallas had installed in every Recovery district middle- and high-school classroom, was out of order in Schmitz's room when I visited, and its wires hung down from the ceiling. But Schmitz had set high goals for her classes she wanted each of her students to move up at least two grade levels in reading scores during the school year and she worked hard to figure out how to make those goals a reality. She started a 7:30 a.m. "breakfast club" for the students who had shown the most improvement in their schoolwork or their attitude. She invented a reward system in which she handed out raffle tickets, known as Schmitz stubs, for a variety of positive behaviors, from answering a question correctly to helping another student; each Friday, she raffled off prizes like gift certificates to Subway or McDonald's. At the end of the poetry unit, she took her students out to the Sound Café, a coffeehouse in the Bywater District, where they listened to slam poets and performed their own poems for an audience. She wasn't able to hold on to all of her students; some moved away from New Orleans, some dropped out. But some flourished.
One Sunday afternoon in May, one of Schmitz's students, Ronnie Stewart, took me out to see the ruins of the B. W. Cooper public-housing complex, known more commonly as the Calliope projects, where he grew up. He and his family spent seven days trapped in their third-floor apartment by the flood that followed Katrina, until finally they were rescued by a Coast Guard boat. At one point, Stewart told me, when it looked as if help would never come, he and a couple of his cousins had to swim through the oily water that covered Martin Luther King Boulevard to get food and water and diapers for their family from a flooded convenience store. Now the projects are abandoned, surrounded by a tall barbed-wire fence and marked for demolition.
Stewart, who is 18, was a senior; he was taking Schmitz's class because he never passed ninth-grade English. Before Katrina, he told me, his teachers never pushed him very hard. "They always showed us the easy way to get through something," he said. "How to get around it. That's why I think so many people are struggling now, schoolwise. Before the storm, we mostly had teachers just really trying to keep us in high school. No teacher was talking to us about college. But now they are. They're mostly trying to get us out of high school and into college now."
Stewart and his classmates gave Schmitz a hard time when she first arrived. "We tried to get over on her, but she always cracked down," he said. "She was always there for us, always telling me: 'Ronnie, do your work; Ronnie, what college are you going to? Ronnie, did you call the university?' I was like, I finally got a teacher that really cares about me."
The poetry unit had a big impact on Stewart. He wrote a poem called "The Life of a Kid in New Orleans," describing the violence he had seen growing up: "For me just stepping outside the door of my house means/I am taking the risk of seeing death." He memorized it and recited it, first for his classmates, then for a group of Schmitz's fellow Teach for America teachers and finally at the Sound Café.
At Schmitz's urging, Stewart applied to Southern University at New Orleans; beginning later this month, he plans to study criminal justice, a telling choice for a young man with two close friends in jail, one for rape and the other for murder. "Miss Schmitz showed me that there's a lot more to the world than this," he said, gesturing at the crumbling concrete hulks behind him. "If it wasn't for Miss Schmitz, I wouldn't be going to college now."
Earlier this month, the state released test results for every public school in New Orleans. There were signs of improvement: 43 percent of fourth-grade students in Recovery School District charters and district-run schools scored at or above grade level on the state English test, compared with 34 percent in the previous year. But the numbers revealed the great distance New Orleans still has to go; in the percentage of students scoring at or above grade level in 8th-grade math, 12th-grade math and 12th-grade English, not a single R.S.D. charter or district-run school beat the average for Louisiana as a whole and Louisiana is still among the lowest-performing states in the country. The gap between the system's different structures remained, too; 89 percent of the Orleans Parish schools matched or surpassed the state average in fourth-grade English, while just 13 percent of Recovery schools did the same.
New Orleans's newly arrived reformers have set their sights high. New Leaders for New Schools says it hopes that in five years, half of the public schools in the city will be led by principals trained in their system, and they want their principals to attain 90 percent proficiency rates and 90 percent graduation rates within five years of taking the job. Given that proficiency rates in most schools in the Recovery district are currently below 40 percent, those results would represent an educational earthquake. Pastorek's goals are similarly ambitious; he sees a day in the not-too-distant future when the city's white children will return to integrate the public-school system, along with the children of the black middle class, all drawn by safer and higher-achieving schools and the introduction of programs like specialized academies and the International Baccalaureate program.
When I spoke to Frederick Hess, an education-policy analyst at the American Enterprise Institute, he cautioned against putting too much emphasis on a complete transformation of the city's school system. In the early 1990s, Hess worked as a teacher in Baton Rouge, and even then, he said, New Orleans was notorious for running an "abysmal" school district. "So if we're now in a position where 20 or 40 or 50 percent of kids in New Orleans are attending good or even competent schools," he said, "that to my mind is a significant win.
"Of course, the folks down there are the last people to plant their flag on improving things for 30 percent of the kids," he went on. "They're all world-changers. They're all straight from the Great Society. That's great, and I'm glad they've got huge ambitions, but the problem is that if they fall somewhat short of their goals, it will be very easy for critics of charter schooling or critics of Vallas or critics of New Leaders for New Schools or Teach for America to seize on the fact that we haven't seen 100 percent of students served in the way we'd like and to then try to impugn the entire set of reforms."
To Pastorek, the greater risk is the opposite problem that people in Louisiana will be comfortable with the modest successes that he expects over the next couple of years. "Right now, a lot of people believe that you just can't succeed with some kids," he said. He told me about a recent conversation with a "senior-ranking" state senator who served on the Legislature's education committee. "He had this idea in mind where we have to have a dual-track system, a track for the kids who are going to make it, and a track for the kids who aren't going to make it," he said. "There's an assumption that there is a group of kids who won't make it." A big part of Pastorek's job, as he sees it, is to convince Louisianans that that isn't true.
Kira Orange Jones is one of Hess's world-changers. Born in Co-op City in the Bronx, she joined Teach for America after college and was sent to Baton Rouge, where she spent the next two years teaching fourth grade. She earned a master's in education from Harvard, and then in 2006 she returned to New York and started work as the head of new-site development for Teach for America. In the spring of 2007, when she was 27, she flew to New Orleans for a two-day conference, and by the end of the second day, she had made the decision to pack up her apartment and move down to run Teach for America's operation in Greater New Orleans.
When I spoke to Orange Jones last spring, I asked her if she agreed with Hess that there was a danger in setting high expectations for what she and others might achieve in New Orleans. "Yes, there's a risk," she said, nodding. "But there's no real alternative. The reality is that we have a window of opportunity to innovate and to take risks that other places in the country don't have. But if within a matter of years we aren't able to produce the results, that window will close. So we need to maximize this moment to do the work that should have been done a long time ago."
When I asked Paul Vallas what made New Orleans such a promising place for educational reform, he told me that it was because he had no "institutional obstacles" no school board, no collective bargaining agreement, a teachers' union with very little power. "No one tells me how long my school day should be or my school year should be," he said. "Nobody tells me who to hire or who not to hire. I can hire the most talented people. I can promote people based on merit and based on performance. I can dismiss people if they're chronically nonattending or if they're simply not performing."
To Orange Jones, though, questions about the shape of the city's education bureaucracy charter versus noncharter, union versus nonunion, centralized or decentralized were all somewhat beside the point. What really mattered, she said, was the work that was going on in individual classrooms, between teachers and the students who needed their help.
In a few weeks, 250 new college graduates would arrive to begin their assignments teaching in and around New Orleans, and it was Orange Jones's job to make sure they had everything they needed to connect with their students. During the selection process, she said, she interviewed dozens of them, and those conversations made her feel optimistic. "When I hear the stories of why they're joining us in New Orleans, it is really powerful," she said. "They just deeply believe that what we're taking on in the education realm is feasible."
Of course, Orange Jones added, that didn't mean that the job ahead of them would be easy. "The test scores in New Orleans may have been higher this year than they have been in 10 years," she said. "But the reality is that they're not nearly as high as they need to be."
We were sitting in Orange Jones's office on the sixth floor of K&B Plaza, which looks out on the hotels and office buildings of downtown New Orleans. The rapidly expanding Teach for America staff had moved in just a few days earlier, after outgrowing their previous space, and many of the offices and cubicles were still stacked with boxes. It had been almost exactly a year since Orange Jones arrived in New Orleans, and when she looked around her, all she could see was everything that still had to be done.
"We have a long way to go, frankly," she said. "I mean, that sort of goes without saying. But we have to start somewhere."


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The Franklin Township Board of Trustees re-elected Keith Buehrer as chairman and Jon Rupp as vice-chairman at the organizational meeting earlier this month. Mark Ballmer was reappointed to the Regional Planning Commission.
Meetings are scheduled at 7:30 p.m. on the second Monday of each month at the township building.
The 2007 financial report is now available at the office of the clerk, John Winzeler.


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The Fast and the Furriest
Publisher's Summary
Meet Kevin Pugh, 12-year-old couch potato. Now meet Cromwell, his part beagle, part potato chip dog. Kevin's looking forward to spending his summer doing as little as possible. Unfortunately, Kevin's father, former Chicago Bears star player/super-sports fanatic, Howie Pugh, feels differently. So does Cromwell, who has suddenly and mysteriously developed a fascination with agility competitions: running up seesaws, leaping over hurdles, soaring through hoops (sometimes). If he has to do anything, Kevin would rather do something for newly obsessed Cromwell, but dog agility lessons do not constitute a sport in his father's mind, so football camp it is. Until some well-timed events collide, literally, and soon Kevin's found a way for he and Cromwell to take classes, and the upstart Team Cromwell is born.
Andy Behrens has written a hilarious novel with a dry-as-dirt protagonist who's constantly tortured by the goings-on around him. It's also a charming story about a boy and his dog, as well as a meaningful and heartfelt look at a relationship between a boy and his father who don't always see eye-to-eye.
Reviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
- Ed
- 01-10-13
I have a Cromwell. His name is Walter.
This was a fun listen with my 10-year-old daughter. It was made even more enjoyable by the fact that we have a beagle and it was easy to imagine him (Walter) in the role of Cromwell. The narrator was excellent and did an especially good job with Howie and Elka. This is not great literature but it didn't need to be.
12 people found this helpful
- Jami
- 03-28-13
Cute Story!!!!
I enjoyed this young adult book. I found myself engaged in the agility tests and rooting for Cromwell and Kevin. The author did a nice job portraying and developing the family relationships. And come on, who can't like a book about a formerly lazy beagle!?!??!? Although I do have to admit, I don't think I can ever imagine my beagle deciding that he preferred excercise to food!!!!
2 people found this helpful


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AMSTERDAM — Even the grinchiest US national team observer would have trouble fussing and frowning over the January camp squad named by head coach Jurgen Klinsmann on Thursday. The truth, cold as winter, is the boss ticked off several highly-anticipated boxes with a compelling selection.
Of course, it's so incredibly easy to sit at the computer and pick at the edges — so let's go ahead and get that out of the way. If there is any complaint to be made, it's that a roster of 20 seems overly small for this annual look-see camp. As such, we present five guys that may deserve a belated invite.
Todd Dunivant
It's great to have natural 4-3-3 wingback Heath Pearce healthy again and in the mix. He is the only one for the left side, however, that tiny roster can make one wonder why a pro so steady they should have named him Eddie isn't invited.
The shameful reality for a soccer bubble always echoing with left back whines: Dunivant, a 2011 Best XI selection, has won more MLS Cups (three) than US caps (two) in his eight-year career.
Chris Rolfe
Upon initial sight of the call-up list, the first name that popped into my head as being conspicuously absent belongs to the Aalborg BK attack engine. Rolfe's had a good season, displaying big-play capabilities in Denmark, and the camp wing options are a little thin.
To that end, it's doubtful Houston's Brad Davis couldn't also be along. Upon arrival, he'd be the best restart man, if not also the best crosser.
Jeff Parke
So Klinsi is desperate for a central defender that can hold fort and move the ball along efficiently. Yes, we've finally got Geoff Cameron into camp, but there's room for more in January. It says here Parke is long overdue for a look.
Chad Marshall
Speaking of centerbacks comfortable on the ball, why has the Crew stalwart been on a USMNT milk carton for nearly two years? Enough said.
Nick LaBrocca/Dax McCarty
You can pick your favorite of the two or just take them both in place of curious choice Ricardo Clark, who hasn't appeared in a club match since July and was slipping down the US depth chart before then.
It's understandable to want to help keep his form up, if not also spur job transfer interest, but is that proper reason for selection in a group of just 20? The roster looks light on midfielders comfortable covering ground with both bite and ideas going forward.


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inner ear is made up of the cochlea and the semicircular canals.
The cochlea is the main sensory organ of hearing. Sound vibrations from
the middle ear make the fluid in the inner ear move. The fluid then bends tiny
hair cells in the cochlea. When the hair cells move, impulses travel along the
cochlear nerve to the brain. These nerve impulses are translated into sound in
your brain.
The semicircular canals have special cells that detect
motion and changes in position. Tiny calcium "stones" inside your semicircular
canals help you keep your balance. When you move a certain way, such as when
you stand up or turn your head, these stones move around. This helps your brain
know which way your body is positioned.
Last Revised:
December 19, 2012
Healthwise Staff
Medical Review:
Anne C. Poinier, MD - Internal Medicine & E. Gregory Thompson, MD - Internal Medicine
This information does not replace the advice of a doctor. Healthwise, Incorporated disclaims any warranty or liability for your use of this information. Your use of this information means that you agree to the Terms of Use. How this information was developed to help you make better health decisions.
To learn more visit Healthwise.org
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Do these things to keep your veggie garden happy all summer
Lots of Ohioans started gardening this spring, some for the very first time, possibly including ... you. In a time of pandemic and staying at home, gardening gets you out into fresh air and ... garden—one that stretches your food budget, limits your time in the grocery store, and helps ease the strain ...
New veggie garden? 6 tips for keeping it healthy through summer
Kurt Knebusch COLUMBUS, Ohio—Lots of Ohioans started gardening this spring, some for the very ... first time, possibly including you. In a time of pandemic and staying at home, gardening gets you out ... Call it, yes, a victory garden—one that stretches your food budget, limits your time in the grocery ...
Urban Homesteading
Vegetable Gardening (6/21) 6:30-7:30 Urban homesteading can refer to many things including ... practicing urban agriculture or sustainable living techniques. This pick-your-own series serves as an ...
Monthly Gardening Call-In Show
partner with the Ebeid Neighborhood Center and the Urban Agriculture Alliance of Lucas County to connect ... the challenges related to gardening. This is open to all- whether you grow in a community garden or ... the yard or in containers. New gardeners and those who are just interested in learning more are ...
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a multistate outbreak of cyclospora potentially linked to ALDI Little Salad Bar Brand Garden Salad from ALDI ... grocery stores, Hy-Vee Brand Garden Salad from Hy-Vee grocery stores, and Signature Farms Brand Garden ... outreach arm of The Ohio State University College of Food, Agricultural, and Environmental Sciences ...
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Master Gardener Volunteers can help feed the hungry, one row at a time. Together we can make ... garden. The size of your garden does not matter – even growing in containers. Take care to follow COVID ... guidelines if heading out into the stores to purchase garden supplies. There are many ways to order online ...
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includes questions about farm concerns, Master Gardener Volunteers, educational programs, pesticides, ... Find People and type in the name of the person to obtain their contact information. Ohio Agricultural ... Research and Development Center (OARDC) They conduct research on food, agriculture, family and the ...
2020 Gardening During Covid-19
Gardener Volunteer Program, Ohio Certified Volunteer Naturalist Program, Master Urban Farmer Program, ... https://livehealthyosu.com/2019/05/07/making-gardening-accessible-for-all/ OSU Extension FactSheet on Soil Testing and includes a list of both private and public labs – some ... New to vegetable gardening? While we would love to announce an in-person class this spring or ...
Plant Now for a Fall Garden Harvest
Learn from Dr. Timothy McDermott, Agriculture and Natural Resources Extension Educator at Ohio State, as ... he shares what you can plant now so you can enjoy a garden harvest this fall! Tuesday, July 21 6:30 ...
Tools & Techniques to Improve Your Small-Space Vegetable Garden
Join Hamilton County Master Gardener Volunteer, Tom Richey online June 9, 2020 at 3:00 pm for ... a presentation titled Tools & Techniques to Improve Your Small-Space Vegetable Garden. In addition to the ... gardening basics of soil, fertilizer, sun and water, Tom will be discussing his nearly 40 years of ...


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December 2012 Window Shopper
Cup Runneth Over
If you have the need for a custom tank for your vehicle, Dan Fink Metalworks has the solution. They can fabricate tanks for radiator overflow, brake, clutch or power steering reservoirs, dry-sump oil tanks, and even radiator (remote mount) header tanks. Sizes range from 3x3 inch up to 12x12 inch, up to 12 inches tall, and any size in between, all tanks have radius corners and a screw-on cap sealed with an O-ring. They can weld on the fittings to suit your needs. All tanks are made from 3003 aluminum, so they can be polished, painted, or powdercoated.
Dan Fink Metalworks
(714) 841 6200
Something Old is Now Something New
Holley Performance Products now offers the all-aluminum 600-cfm carburetors (PNs 0-1850SA and 0-80457SA). They have been revamped with an aluminum main body, bowls, throttle body, and metering block. That means a 40 percent weight savings and a polished finish that stays shiny longer, all with a price tag that fits any budget. These bolt-on-and-go performance carburetors are available with manual or electric choke (PNs 0-1850SA and 0-80457SA, respectively). Both feature a single push-on style fuel inlet, multiple vacuum ports for accessories, and Ford A/T kick down.The 700-R4 linkage and 4L60/80E TPS kits are available separately.
(270) 781-9741
Custom A-arms
Scott's Hotrods and Customs now offers a service/product for all hot rodders. There are often times that a customer will need a custom application to suit their needs.
The Scott's custom A-arm program simply requires you to ship your set of A-arms to them. They will make a custom set of jigs for your A-arms and you will have a set of custom-built tubular A-arms. (Prices start at $1,099 for most applications.)
In most cases the A-arms will be built from 1-1/8x1/4-inch wall DOM tubing; identical to what their custom A-arms are built from and TIG welded. Included are ball joints and custom cross-shafts if applicable, and carry the same lifetime warranty as all of Scott's Hotrods' other manufactured products.
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Scott's HotRods
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Center Line Classic Rodder
The Classic Rodder in Center Line's Hot Rod Series is a wheel that has a nostalgic look. The two-piece design is available in 15- and 17-inch diameters and many widths, offsets, and bolt patterns. You can get them for $229 each in size 15x7.
Center Line Wheels
(800) 345-8671 ext. 5


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NASHVILLE, Tenn. – After four years as the Tennessee State setter, senior Erika Moss continues to reach accomplishments never seen before at TSU. Saturday it was eclipsing 4,000 assists, with a dish to junior Sherryce Butler in the first stanza.
Moss paced the Tigers attack compiling 45 assists, with junior Naomi Wells and freshman Arijana Anderson totaling 13 kills apiece.
On the block junior Sherryce Butler continued her strong play with four blocks on the day. Both Wells and Moss coupled their strong offensive numbers with double digit digs of 13 and 21 respectively to record double-doubles. Junior Katie Burnett also posted double-digits in digs with 13.
The first frame started with Southeast Missouri (12-11, 4-4) scoring on 10 of the first 14 points, and taking a strangehold on the lead at 10-4. Tennessee State (7-12, 3-5) rebounded with a 4-1 run to trim the Redhawks advantage down to three, 11-8.
Tennessee State continued their rally, closing to within one point twice before leveling the set at, 17-17, off of a junior Sherryce Butler kill assisted by Erika Moss. The helper marked the 4,000th career assist in the seniors illustrious career, as well as becoming the only Tiger in history to reach the plateau.
Southeast closed out the set on an 8-1 run to take the first set, 25-18.
Roles reversed in the second stanza, as TSU claimed the lead 13-11. The teams would trade points, with the Tigers sustaining its slim lead.
Southeast rallied to tie the game at, 18-18, for the first time since 2-2. The tie was short lived as TSU stormed back to regain the lead 23-20. The Redhawks rattled off the last three points to win the set 25-23, and head to the locker room up 2-0 in sets.
The OVC foes traded points out of the locker room, with the set tied at, 6-6, TSU made their charge. Coach Kathy Roulhac and her Tigers made their charge ripping off four straight points and grabbing the 10-6 lead.
Southeast burned a timeout to in an attempt to end the TSU run, the tactic didn't work as the Tigers went on a 4-1 run, after the Redhawks connected on the first play after the stoppage. TSU's response gave the Tigers a 14-8 lead.
Tennessee State maintained the six point advantage, 21-15, when the Redhawks used a timeout to rally. The visiting team used four straight points to close within two, 21-19. Four of the next five points came from the Tigers, including two kills from Anderson to claim the third set 25-20, and cut the Southeast lead to 2-1.
TSU battled to grab an 8-6 lead. A 10-4 run from Southeast gave the Redhawks a 16-12 advantage. From there Southeast would close out the set, 25-16, and the match 3-1.
Tennessee State will return to action on Tuesday, when they play host to Tennessee Tech at 6 p.m. The contest will be off campus at local Pearl-Cohn High School.


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READ MORE - UFC 131 Press Conference Highlights
By FCF Staff
Vancouver's Jack Poole Plaza hosted the pre-fight press conference for this Saturday's UFC 131 event, which will be hosted by the city's Rogers Centre. The card will be headlined by a bout between heavyweight contenders Junior dos Santos and Shane Carwin.
Here are some of today's highlights:
UFC President Dana White is not concerned about the fact that Saturday's event is not sold out yet, in stark contrast to the quick sell out that occurred for the promotion's Vancouver debut last year. White insisted that the UFC will return to the Olympic City once again.
White said they're "working on" the promotion's first event in China, after opening an office in Beijing recently.
Kenny Florian said moving his camp to the renowned Tri Star Gym in Montreal, home of welterweight champion Georges St. Pierre and trainer Firas Zihabi is one of "the best decisions" he's made.
Shane Carwin conceded that Junior dos Santos has "great boxing" and is one of the world's top heavyweights.
White would not confirm recent reports that the UFC is looking to acquire a controlling interest in Comcast's G4 cable network, before admitting that they are "talking to everyone" as the promotion's current broadcasting deal with Spike winds down.
Dos Santos says he is still happy that he decided to fight at UFC 131 rather than wait for current champion Cain Velasquez to recover from shoulder surgery.
White was quick to compliment Yves Edwards when asked if he's glad that the lightweight veteran is back in the UFC, adding that he expects the Edwards, Sam Stout fight to be a "war."
Diego Nunes said Saturday's bout with Florian "is a dream come true," before White added that if Nunes indeed beats Florian it will be a "life changing" fight.
White acknowledged that the UFC has plans to promote an event in Sweden, saying that they had hoped to have a card there "soon."
When asked if the winner of Strikeforce's Heavyweight Grand-Prix could wind up facing one of the UFC's top ranked heavyweights , White said he had "no clue" if it such a cross promotional match-up was possible at this juncture.
Carwin said he wishes former champion Brock Lesnar all the best as he recovers from the recent surgery that was required to address another bout of diverticulitis.
Florian said his weight cut to 145lbs. has been going "smoothly" and has been easier than he originally anticipated.
Nunes stated he would be willing to fight his friend and current featherweight champion Jose Aldo, if the opportunity arises.


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I've detected a certain hole in my life here recently. This hole is not so black that it sucks all else into it, yet it's presence has created a type of longing, a need to belong to something, anything, to fill the void. These flaws of mine, these fragile human emotions. These needs, wants and desires sitting just beyond the periphery of my control, sucking me into a vortex of self-reproach. It is time for me to go shopping. It is time for me to become something better, something more, something of consequence. I need to evolve beyond the base that surrounds me. The options are many, so just how does one choose?
The Tea Party
(Express, Patriots, for Prosperity, Nation, Federation, Conglomulation, Masturbation and all other associated factions and brain fractions)
Ok, I like it when people congregate together, united under a banner of disparate beliefs yelling racist, unintelligible slogans about fascism, government-sponsored baby killing and oppressively high taxes. I really get incensed when poor, lazy people (especially if they are Mexican or Black) think they have a right to receive healthcare for which they didn't even pay! Why should I have to fork over my hard-earned beer money when some dumbass 5-year poor-sot-of-a-kid gets chicken pox? I digress…what else? Well, I like to let my emotions air-out in public beyond the oppressive accountability of logic and reason. This process is cathartic and deeply connects me to like-minded people wrapped in red, white and blue with Jesus resting humbly on righteous lips.
This cult looks pretty good, but the ideologies are a little too wide-ranging and sometimes I doubt my coherence when I'm yelling. I think I could use a bit more structure, some 'rails' if you will to keep me on track, on point with the message. To this end, I think it would make good sense to define some concrete terms and talking points to carry the weight of the message. Additionally, I'm going to need some emotional 'Spackle' to help fill that hole, a hole which simply cannot be plugged even with the most disembrained political venting.
Landmark Forum
Ahhh, structure, beautiful STRUCTURE! I have found you in plentiful supply! And a leadership, oh wonderful authoritarian leadership, scowling on critical thinking as it attempts to bubble-up from the flock! Add to that a heavy dose of unqualified psychotherapy and psychological manipulation leveraged to create a dependency among followers. Oh sweet, sweet emotional euphoria achieved only through the inculcation of anxious dependency on the group and, more importantly, its leaders. Destabilize me through deprivation, abuse and control, then, build me back up into a subservient being acting on a script with a tailored vernacular ('winning formula', 'strong suit', 'create a possibility', 'breakthrough', 'rackets' , 'the vicious cycle', 'already always listening', 'being authentic') connecting me to my fellow drones. Masquerade your harassment as a method of friendly, caring support and exploit me both psychologically and financially while fraying the threads of previously established relationships built over many years. Subtle manipulation to extract my true authenticity? A sublime sort of authoritarian poetry!
(click here if you want to see a BRILLIANT docu-infiltration of a Landmark Forum in France entitled "Journey to the Land of the New Gurus" …oh you know you want to click down this rabbit hole!)
Hmmm, lots of structure and doctrine here, but what I really need is something with a religious pretense and a reputable figurehead. Perhaps something with an extra-terrestrial vibe to help nurture my otherworldly tendencies.
Ahh, the perennial favorite. It has some bona fide star power behind it and a clear, methodical history which pulls heavily from speculative fiction (of which, I must say, I am a Harry Potter nutter to the core!). It also has a scientifically valid 'auditing' method which can detect the most deeply implanted memories in my immortal (yes, I am an alien…cool huh?) brain going back trillions of years. Once detected, I can pay a small earthly fee to get those suckers sussed out. Wham!! I'm all better and I didn't need some bogus shrink to pump me full of drugs. Did I mention I'm a motherfucking alien? That's super cool. Super Star Trek cool.
(or, if you have some time… and prefer to hear it from the founder's mouth: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZDMEt4eIqYQ&feature=related)
I like the self-improvement aspects of both the Forum and Scientology, but I'm looking to go farther, plus, I think I need more than just a dead figurehead. I need a flesh and blood leader, a charismatic demi-god who can opiate my troubled mind, take me by the hand in the direction I'm supposed to go.
Aum Shinrikyo
Alrighty then, a blind yoga master who charges me thousands of dollars to drink tea made from his pubic hairs? Say no more, I'm in. What? What's that you say? Drugs to manipulate my levels of anxiety, survival training, sleep and food deprivation and endless hours of mind-numbing chanting? Yeah right. Next your going to tell me "there's a helmet I can wear that will transmit God's brainwaves directly into my head". No shit, really?
Tens of thousands of followers worldwide manufacturing apocalyptic propaganda in anime/manga fashion, Aum Shinrikyo is a compelling choice. Followers don't simply give voice to their fascination with the end of times, they actually work hard to bring the end of the world by gassing people, extorting members and cultivating member phobia.
Hmm. It sounds pretty good in all, but let me think…
You know, I don't really want to hurt anyone, I'm actually a very peaceful person. But, I do harbor certain concerns about the end of the world. There's clearly lots of evidence that the end is near, and I just need someone to consolidate all of these facts into succinct soundbites and advertisements and plaster them all over the world (focus the canvassing on buses…I like buses). Preferably an older gentleman, with a odd mucously-thick, deep voice who lacks any sort of charisma but has a knack for growing healthy sideburns and establishing communication networks. Contribute my money to the efforts you ask? Of course, why the hell wouldn't I? On
September 6, 1994, I mean May 21, 2011, sorry, I'm not good with numbers; I mean October 21, 2011 the world will turn into a flaming ass-pile of nothingness…in this situation, what use will I have for worldly assets?
Hmmm, I don't usually let my inner skeptic enter a the realm of intellectual thought, but President Bush did teach me an important lesson about not being fooled. It is probably best for me to take his advice in this case. Besides, I'm an alien-lover… can't we get back to something beyond our mundane existence here on Mother Earth? Clearly we have reached the end of times and there is an abundance of proof that extra-terrestrial beings are instrumental in bringing this about.
Heavens Gate
Oh yeah, this is the shit of Kings! Screw a mere demigod, give me a straight line to the Big Man! Here you get a kick-ass name (I'm going to request PEYODY), a nice haircut, and a ride in a spaceship cruising behind a freakin' comet! Heading to that next level in a bad-ass uniform, with a super cool space patch alongside my classmates after being brainwashed by my older members who are really Jesus and his Father in human vehicles…WHOA, this is for me! As a bonus, you get to cut-off those rapscallion testicles which is nice cause everybody knows those buggers are just holding you down like a large, sweaty ball 'n' chain, completely restricting your ability to soar to the next evolutionary level. Learning the real-facts, the real truth about how to leave self and world behind from a nurturing and caring son-of-a-Presbyterian-minister who cut his teeth teaching music. Oh dear, my beautiful extra-terrestrial, comet-trailing salvation, is almost at hand. I want to belong. I want to believe. I want a $10 pair of black Nikes.
Wait, what the f*ck? They've already exited? You mean I missed the comet-ship? Son-of-a-bitch, this had all the goodies I was looking for, now what to do?
Hold On…Scratch All of That…
I don't have to follow. I can harness my inner strength, be an innovator. There is a self-righteous egotist lurking within, waiting for the opportune time to emerge. I just need a regimen, a blue-print for how to control my flock:
If you are still awake after all that, you should check out my debut novel, Where's Unimportant at your favorite online book retailer, or at my website: http://www.danielshortell.com
before you go, please consider using the following addendum section to aid in your choice of cult:
Isolation factor: An unscientific ranking based on a scale (1 – 10) designed to roughly indicated how isolated from the general population an individual should expect to become upon entry into a specified cult.
"everyone loves you – consider starting your own cult immediately" (1) <——-> (10) "you will die alone in a strange outfit"
Tea Party – Isolation factor = (5) "You and thousands of Glenn Beck fans can concoct conspiracy theories and draw tiny mustaches on President Obama together."
Landmark Forum – Isolation factor = (6) "You and several hundred thousand other critical-thinking-haters can empty your wallets and create possibilities together."
Scientology – Isolation factor = (7) "You and a couple hundred thousand aliens worldwide can chat about your respective states of Clear."
Aum Shinrikyo – Isolation factor = (8) "You'll be sipping hair tea with tens of thousands of former communists while putting your PhD to work making sarin gas."
Family Radio – Isolation factor = (9) "You will find companionship among several thousand worldwide doomsday revisionists."
Heaven's Gate – Isolation factor = (10) "You should expect the company of a couple dozen like-minded nuts with cool names and tightly cropped hair."


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We will go today straight to show you all the answers of Word Link Level 4740. In fact our team did a great job to solve it and give all the stuff full of answers and even bonus words if available. This is what we are devoted to do aiming to help players that stuck in a game. This Handfull topic will give the data to boost you without problem to the next challenge. We already know that this game released by Worzzle Games is liked by many players but is in some steps hard to solve.
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