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Life in Maine, where Stephen King has spent most of his adult years, requires long drives down country roads, time that King, whose mind is restless, likes to fill by listening to books on tape. In the '80s, however, he sometimes could not find the books he wanted on tape — or maybe he just did not bother. He had three children: Naomi, Joe and Owen. They could read, couldn't they? All King had to do was press record. Which is how his school-age children came to furnish their father, over the years, with a small library's worth of books on tape.
On a drizzly morning in July, King, his wife and their children gathered in Maine for a reunion the week of the Fourth and compared notes on what constituted chores in the King household. As they talked, they were crowded around a rather small kitchen table in a lakeside guesthouse, where King's 41-year-old son, Joe Hill, was staying, a short drive from the family's summer home.
"I read you that stupid book, that Dean Koontz book," said Owen King, who is 36 and the youngest of the three children.
"Watch it!" interrupted his father, but Owen, seated across the table from his father, kept going: "The one where the dog is a genius, and he talks to him by pointing at Scrabble pieces with his nose."
"Hey, I liked that book," Joe said.
"I loved that book," their father said.
"I remember reading 'The Carpetbaggers,' " Joe said. "I remember feeling that was a very long novel."
Tabitha King, their mother, suddenly sat upright. "That's a filthy book — I didn't know he would have asked you to read that. How old were you?"
"I don't know," Joe said, dodging for his dad. "I was innocent when I started, and I was filthy afterward."
Owen's wife, Kelly Braffet, was seated beside her husband. She had heard some of these details before; it was family lore that Naomi, who is 43, was asked to read and record, at age 12, "Raven," the definitive journalistic account of the Jonestown massacre. "It was horrible," Naomi said.
Stephen finally rallied in self-defense. "But you read me all those Wilbur Smiths!" he said to Naomi. "And 'Anna Karenina.' "
Entertaining their parents, for the King children, was part job, part enrichment. At bedtime, they were the ones expected to tell their parents stories, instead of the other way around. Whatever their methods or intentions, Stephen and Tabitha's shared vocation, and their approach to child rearing, has yielded a significant number of successful fiction writers in their household. Tabitha is an accomplished writer with eight novels to her credit, and two of their three children, Joe and Owen, are novelists. (Naomi is a Unitarian Universalist minister.) Joe's "NOS4A2," a sprawling mix of horror and fantasy that is his third critically praised best seller, was published last April; Owen's second work of fiction, a well-received comedic novel titled "Double Feature," was published in March. Owen, perhaps inevitably, married a writer, Kelly Braffet, whose third novel, a literary thriller called "Save Yourself," is out this month. And Stephen's much-anticipated sequel to the "The Shining," titled "Doctor Sleep," comes out this fall.
Circus performers, klezmer musicians — those are the kinds of entertainers we usually expect to see in a family business, not writers. There are a few exceptions — children of successful writers who have bravely followed their parents. Martin Amis (son of Kingsley) is perhaps the best-known example, but Rebecca Miller (daughter of Arthur) and Ted Heller (son of Joseph) have also published, more quietly, well-reviewed novels. But for sheer volume of books, cultural impact and accumulated readership, none of those families come close to the Kings. The closest comparison would have to be the Brontës, and even they maxed out at a paltry three published novelists, plus one dissipated poet.
If reading was a common escape in the King household, it was nonetheless deeply social. They read on tape, but they also took turns reading aloud after dinner, passing around "The Hobbit" or the Narnia chronicles. It followed that writing came to feel like something they all could share as well. Stephen and Tabitha did not take themselves off to quiet sheds or off-site offices to write; they wrote in their own home, upstairs, as their kids, below, wondered what words were being put on the page and played elaborate role-playing games of their own.
When the group broke from the conversation around the table to pose for a family photo outside, they continued their easy patter on books and pop culture. Joe's corgi, McMurtry, named after the novelist Larry McMurtry, was insistently present, so that someone catching snippets, from a distance, of the family's conversation as they made their way into the yard would have heard something like this: "Neil Gaiman . . . Spielberg . . . McMurtry! McMurtry! . . . Cronenberg . . . Matt Groening . . . McMurtry!"
"Did you see that picture of John Irving that ran somewhere — he was coming out of some swamp with his shirt off?" Owen asked. "He looked like a ninja."
Then they assembled; they posed, as close to a first family of letters as America is likely to have.
"The last photographer who shot me kept yelling: 'Love me! Love me!' " Stephen said.
"That's so 'Zoolander,' " Kelly said.
Then: Flash.
In 1990, when Kelly Braffet was a high-school freshman in Western Pennsylvania, her parents gave her, for Christmas, a Stephen King book-of-the-month subscription, which came, as she recalls, with a six-inch rubber skeleton — "very creepy." It was just what she wanted. She was in her "Stephen King completist" phase, and she was trying to track down hardcover copies of his more obscure books. Her completist phase could have been considered officially over 17 years later, when she married Owen, whom she met at the Columbia M.F.A. writing program in 2001. The day they met, Braffet was carrying around a book by John D. MacDonald, a midcentury crime writer who would not be found on their syllabus but was an icon in the King household. She was a suitable girl: a book-loving, book-writing student who was pretty in glasses and had a healthy appreciation for potboilers. He was an easygoing, attentive boyfriend. Once they swapped manuscripts to make sure they did not hate each other's writing, the relationship quickly moved forward.
Even so, Braffet was nervous about meeting her future in-laws, nervous even at the sound of Stephen King's voice on Owen's answering machine. "It took me two years before I could actually speak in front of Steve and Tabby," she said.
Braffet's father is an E.M.S. helicopter pilot, and her mother is a computer programmer who attended college late in life. Braffet herself worked two summers in a warehouse, where she "picked stickers off of one piece of paper and put them on another," a glimpse of her possible future had she not earned a scholarship to Sarah Lawrence College. Her first visit to the King family home, which is in Bangor, was unnerving: all those endless rooms and hallways, like a real-life version of the hotel in "The Shining," and that crazy, famous fence around their home, with its wrought-iron bats and cobwebs. "Their underground library," Braffet noted, "was bigger than the entire library in the town I grew up in. It was . . . a lot."
Eventually, in 2004, while they were waiting to move into a condo in Brooklyn, Kelly and Owen spent six months living near the Kings in Maine, a period in which they saw them virtually every day. Braffet's nerves clearly calmed. This July, at the Kings' house, during some downtime, Braffet sat next to one of her childhood idols as he pored over his iPad; he was fully immersed in the video game Jetpack Joyride.
The relationship between Kelly and Stephen has the easy rapport of in-laws relieved to enjoy each other's company, the conversation light, less likely to turn to the mysterious process of writing than to the end product — either someone else's work or their own. The Kings' embrace of her writing is clearly not a function of politeness; they seemed to be competing to outdo themselves in their praise of "Save Yourself" when the subject came up.
"It's like David Cronenberg adapted an S.E. Hinton novel for David Lynch," Joe said.
His father jumped in to refine his son's mash-up description of the book's tone: "It's more like James Cain" — another of Stephen's beloved crime writers — "adapted S.E. Hinton for David Lynch."
What they did not say, or maybe even notice, is that the book provides a literary, Internet-age update of King's "Carrie": a story of savage high-school bullying that ends in a blaze of violence; it includes a vampire-inspired cult but stops short of the supernatural.
Asked about it, Braffet said she never made the connection. "Carrie" influenced her "only in the same way that every other horrifying high-school story I'd heard was sort of simmering in my subconscious." To write any kind of page-turner is to run up against the likelihood of overlap with King's work: there are only so many dramatic scenarios to which he has not turned his imagination over the course of 40 years.
It was important to Braffet, until now, that she publish without her in-laws' having so much as read her work, so that she had plausible deniability should people hint that Stephen played a hand in publication. With "Save Yourself," she finally turned to the Kings for advice, when she worried that she had lost her way. "I had no choice," she said. "I'd already imposed on all my other readers." Tabitha provided structural advice; Stephen, some notes on language. Mostly they told her to keep going. And no, she maintained, she was not particularly nervous. "It was more important to me that Owen like my work," she said.
For the most part, Joe and Owen King got along well: two brothers, five years apart, who entertained themselves with "Star Wars" action figures and role-playing games like Dungeons & Dragons and the more obscure Call of Cthulhu. But Joe had one habit that got under Owen's skin. "I can remember being 8, and eventually everything had to stop so he could write for two hours," Owen recalls. It did not matter if Owen was perched on the edge of slaying some imaginary monster, his brother was off: "Gotta get my two hours in."
Joe was 11, a kid in love with his Sherlock Holmes-style deer-stalking cap, when he first started writing daily. Following his father's equally compulsive example, he made no exception for weekends or holidays. By high school, Joe was serious enough about his literary ambitions that he was already worrying about getting out from under his father's shadow. He came up with the pen name Jay Stevenson (a pun on "J., Stephen's son") and started asking his parents: What would it take to change my name legally?
He attended Vassar College, then moved to New Hampshire and started writing full time, under the pseudonym Joe Hill. "I was very insecure, and I didn't want to sell something because someone saw it as a way to make a quick buck and then have it come out and someone would say it was terrible," Hill says. He signed with a New York agent, from whom he concealed his actual identity for eight years. (Over that time, they never met in person.) If he gave a reading and a blogger noted that he bore an uncanny resemblance to a young Stephen King, Hill privately requested that the blogger remove the reference. He spent several years on a novel, which was universally rejected. Years passed. A second novel went nowhere. His parents financially supported him, his wife and his first two children, never once suggesting that he might want to re-examine his options. (He and his wife are divorced.)
And then finally, in 2007, at 35, Hill published "Heart-Shaped Box," a ghost story with an aging rock star as its hero, a novel less schematic than many of his father's books, more dreamy. Firmly grounded in celebrity culture, unpredictable both in form and plot, the book was almost immediately a best seller.
At times in his life, Hill actually contemplated hiring an actor to do readings of his work, to conceal that unmistakable resemblance to his father. By the time "Heart-Shaped Box" was published and he had forged ahead with some readings, his alias had been blown. In the end, in light of the book's success, that did not seem to matter; now he's comfortable writing in a genre his father dominates. "Sometimes I think the kid who's like, 'I'm never going to be like my dad in any way whatsoever,' is less his own person," he said.
His acclaim brought different stresses. "I think the pressure of that success resulted in some anxieties picking up," Hill said. At its worst, about five years ago, while he was writing his second novel, "Horns," Hill's anxiety crossed into something more like classic paranoia. "I would do stuff like get to a hotel room and tear the room apart looking for fiber-optic video cameras — I once took my car apart." He developed other compulsions: he could not stop working if a sentence ended on an odd count of letters; he missed appointments because he made so many trips back home to make sure he had turned off the oven.
Hill suspects that those tendencies are another inheritance from his father, along with the compulsion to write and a fascination with the macabre. Stephen King is uneasy about the number 13, which is not something he puts on simply to charm the press (asked to donate $13,000 to bring home some Maine troops for the holidays in 2009, he donated, instead, $12,999). He is compulsive about certain kinds of counting. He has concocted a mind-numbing game that involves continually resetting his car's odometer while crossing out numbers in a notebook. And "ravens freak him out, crows freak him out a little bit," Joe says. "They're harbingers of death. My mom is more like the family reality check — I learned the oven stuff from him."
Hill's most recent book, "NOS4A2" (pronounced Nosferatu), features an immortal villain who whisks children off to a hellishly jolly Christmasland. The book is filled with details so troubling they border on nauseating: implied sexual violence, a mentally impaired reprobate, desperate messengers of doom. To marvel at how deftly he disturbs is to wonder how talent — and this particular talent — passes from father to son.
King and Hill have a way of turning questions about the roots of their dark imaginations into opportunities to sound more wholesome and sane than the person posing the query. In a recent interview with Terry Gross, King joked about how journalists inevitably try to turn into "Dr. Freud and put me on the couch," then confessed to a happy childhood. Hill, too, seemed, at first, to think the investigation is pointless. "I wonder why no one looks at an engineer and thinks, What was it in his childhood that made him want to be an engineer?" But Hill eventually conceded that something about his particular mental makeup did lend itself well to his subject matter — and it seemed he had thought about that subject quite a lot. "I've had a lot of practice spinning paranoid scenarios in fiction — which means I'm good at spinning paranoid scenarios in my own life," he told me. "It's a chicken-or-egg situation: Which came first? Is fiction and creating scenarios a way of getting rid of that anxiety? Or is it the practice of writing that has made me more vulnerable to the panic attack?"
A low dose of Paxil has kept Hill's paranoia in check, as he wrote on a post on his Tumblr account, which he titled "Took Off My Crazypants." His writing is not suffering, and he is enjoying success. And unlike his father, he said, "now I don't really care about the number 13."
In 2003, Stephen King won the Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters and was invited to give a speech at the National Book Awards. King spent close to the first half of the lengthy speech celebrating his wife for always believing in him, for encouraging him to write, even when they were scraping by in a trailer home with two kids and she was working at Dunkin' Donuts and he did shifts at a laundry. You could develop the impression that Tabitha — Tabby, as she's known — was the stand-by-your-man type, a wife who would graciously defer to the dreams of her husband at the expense of her own comfort. That may all be true. But after seeing her with her family, I came away with the strong sense that if she encouraged King to keep going, it was because she was no fool — she had editorial judgment and knew good writing when she saw it. They were both students at the University of Maine in 1969 when King handed her a short story to read. "I remember thinking," she recalled, "This guy's publishable right this second."
One of Tabby's favorite T-shirts reads, "If I'm speaking, you should be taking notes," and frequently, her family members do. "When I wrote 'NOS4A2,' I wrote a really bleak ending, and I was artistically committed to it, come hell or high water — right up until Mum read it," Joe said, sitting at the table with his family. "She said, 'You know, Joe, that ending really won't do.' I was like, 'Aww, all right.' My artistic integrity lasted about 15 seconds on the phone with my mum."
The feedback goes both ways. "And when you wrote 'Survivor,' Tabby, we all ganged up on you about the ending in that book," Stephen recalled.
"Yeah, and the changes made it a best seller," Tabby joked, then blew a loud raspberry. The book came and went, although Library Journal called it a "compelling psychological drama," a book that "belongs in most fiction collections." Tabby, who is slowly working on her ninth book, clearly feels ill served by the publishing industry, so much so that she encouraged Joe to use a pseudonym. "The perception that Steve's success got me published cannot be erased for some people," she said. The assumption, natural though it may be, is misguided: a trilogy of novels she wrote set in Maine — "Pearl," "The Book of Reuben" and "One on One" — is pure narrative pleasure (the author Jennifer Weiner said "Pearl" was one of her all-time favorite reads). It may have been her husband's shadow that held her back, or it may have been the same problems that hold back many midlist writers — work that falls between literary and comedy, novels with no gimmicks or glamorous locations. That her books aren't better known pains her sons, both of whom consider her influence on their work as strong as that of their father's. "At least, I hope that's true," Owen says. "Her sense of place, her sense of character — it's just so strong."
If Tabby does occupy something of a saintly status in the King household, it is not just because she stood by her husband when he was young and desperate, but because she threatened to walk away, years later, when he was famous and a full-blown alcoholic with a coke habit. In 1987, Tabby staged an intervention that all three children — Naomi, then 17, Joe, 15, and Owen, 10 — attended. All Owen knew until that point was that his father "consumed massive amounts of alcohol — but I might as well have assumed that everybody's dad did that." Tabby explained to all of them that if their father did not agree to get sober, she would ask him to leave. "I didn't want to lie to my kids," she said. "I've never really gotten lying anyway, because all you do is postpone the day at which you're revealed to be a liar." As the family discussed the intervention all these years later, the conversation grew almost hushed. "It was terrifying," Naomi said. "Are you going to have a dad anymore?"
It took about two years, but King finally did get sober. Then there was a period of calm, until 1999, when King ran up against a series of near-tragic events. While walking down a country road near his home, he was hit by a van that tossed him 14 feet and reduced the bones in his lower left leg "to so many marbles in a sack," in the words of one doctor. In chronic pain for months of recovery, he developed (and eventually kicked) an addiction to the painkillers. And finally, he came down with pneumonia, checking into the hospital within 24 hours of the speech he gave toasting his wife at the National Book Awards. "The pulmonologist wasn't sure he'd get through the night, but that's just what he did," Tabby said. "I've told him, I'm not doing that again. It was just too hard."
There was a moment during the interview when one of the King children was talking about a book, and Stephen turned toward his wife and took her hand. He grasped it, tightly, and they both closed their eyes and leaned in toward each other, as if in prayer. Later, when asked about that moment, Stephen could not remember what inspired that moment — maybe nothing at all. "Sometimes I just take her hand," he said. "We've always been close, Tab and me. I love her."
It is an odd twist of fate that Stephen King's first child, Naomi, was born with a chronic deficit of the hormone adrenaline. She grew, over time, to be an avid reader, but the power of her father's books was lost on her, as terror, she believes, is a hard emotion for her to access. So her father asked her, when she was a teenager, what it was that she did like. She told him she liked dragons, and her father wrote her a book, "The Eyes of the Dragon," a fantasy tale complete with an evil, conniving magician in the king's palace. He dedicated the book to her.
As a young girl, long before she met the Kings, Braffet used to stare at that dedication. "And I remember thinking to myself, Wow, Naomi King's life must be awesome," Braffet recalled at the Kings' kitchen table. Naomi responded, with the same light sarcastic tone her mother employs to great effect, "Every minute."
The advantages of being a King are, of course, considerable, and the family is close; but there were also the difficult years of Stephen's addiction, years Naomi was old enough to recognize as painful. And then there are the assumptions people have about her as the offspring of Stephen King. "There's the expectation that I love horror as a genre or that I care about monsters," she said. "And I do care about monsters — I care very much about theological interpretations of how we make friends with our monsters. If we demonize other people and create monsters out of each other and act monstrous — and we all have that capacity — then how do we not become monsters ourselves?"
Naomi sounds, maybe, like what Stephen might sound like if, in some alternate universe, he entered divinity school to become a minister, as Naomi did in 1999. It was uncharted territory in the King household. "I truly can't imagine a more secular family than ours," Owen said. But Naomi maintains that religion was always there: Tabitha's family was Catholic, and Stephen, who grew up with devoutly Christian family members, used to win prizes at Sunday school for reciting Bible verses. "I'm not sure you can grow up with those stories without them influencing you and making their way into your everyday speech," Naomi says. And then, of course, the presence of A.A. in their home was its own kind of influence, if not a religious one, then a spiritual one.
If Naomi is at peace with her choice, the family still seems to be mulling why she did not pursue fiction. "I think possibly Naomi has been more intimidated by the production of fiction than you guys were," Tabitha said, meaning Joe and Owen. "She made a deliberate choice to find her own area."
Stephen added: "But you know you were always good — she was always good. She wrote fantasy when she was a kid and into her teenage years, and it was all terrific stuff. It just needed some seasoning."
Naomi sighed — the encouragement was well intentioned but misplaced. "I have different stories, and those are the ones I tell. It's just a different genre." There are the stories she communicates to readers through her online ministry. There are also the stories she creates through sock monkeys costumed as adventuring pirates, whose exploits she creates and then documents on her Flickr account. "It's about play, and it's totally congruent with who I am as a religious leader," she said, "but that isn't what people have been taught to think." Like every other member of her family, she has stories in her life, and they sustain her.
Although she writes daily prayers that she posts on Facebook and her blog, Naomi's ongoing health problems have made a full-time ministry impossible. She now works at the Pietree Orchard, a shop and property near her parents that they purchased in 2007, rather than see it converted to condominiums.
She likes her work, and although she also reads widely, she has never secretly hoped that a 600-page zombie novel will spring from her mind. There is an old Hasidic tale Naomi likes to share, about an aged scholar named Zusya. One after the next, his students approach him, concerned that they might not be measuring up to greatness. Why, one asks him, am I not more like Jacob? Why, asks another, am I not more like Moses?
Naomi smiled as she narrated the ending: "When I die, I'm not going to be asked why I wasn't like Moses," Zusya tells them. "I'm going to be asked why I wasn't like Zusya."
It was a good story. She told it well.
Owen's first novel, "Double Feature," opens with a young man awakening abruptly from a dream: "A shadow grew, grew and grew, its mountainous shoulders overwhelming the bright frame." The young hero panics. His pulse "was in his fingers and his toes, behind his eyes, under his tongue. He was afraid." Then the shadow speaks: it is the son's father; he has read the son's screenplay; he wants to share some notes.
That one page — with its slapstick nod to the anxiety of influence, to the literary shadow that might well be on readers' minds — is as close to writing actual horror as Owen King ever gets. He is not drawn to the genre; by the time he was 10, he had been exposed, he felt, through his father's films, to enough maggot-infested corpses and severed heads to leave him "a little bit squeamish." "Double Feature" feels more Nick Hornby than Stephen King, tracing the story of an ambitious indie filmmaker — the son of a well-known B-movie actor — whose pet project becomes a cult classic for all the worst reasons.
Owen insists that any resemblances in the book to anyone living or dead is purely coincidental, unless that person is Orson Welles. But the emotional architecture seems clearly modeled on something familiar from his own home. "I think the particulars are completely different," says his friend Tom Bissell, a cultural critic, "but it is about influence and feeling somehow trapped by that influence. And I think in some wonderful ways the book is an escape act — he did it."
Tabby has sympathy for her children's desires to stake out their own territory but also feels that their burdens are hardly unusual. "Everybody's got parents, and they carry something from that," she told me. "Sometimes it's the children of a doctor dealing with: Is dad ever home or is he too demanding? Or else you're the child of the town drunk or the town minister. You're the child of somebody who has cast some sort of a shadow over your life, from whom you have to differentiate yourself."
Owen spent years watching B-movies as research for the book and is known among his friends for being the kind of person who will forever be capable of naming them all, while cross-referencing their third-string stars with those actors' other, even more obscure works. His brother and father also share that skill. "The King men seem able not only to read and write and allude faster than the rest of us — they seem to watch TV faster, listen to music faster, to defy the physics of consumption," says Joshua Ferris, a novelist and close friend of Owen's. Of the two brothers, Joe is the more enthusiastic fanboy — picture him unironically wearing his favorite "Jaws" T-shirt, because "Jaws" is one of his four favorite movies. Owen's favorite T-shirt ever, by contrast, was for a defunct girls' magazine and read, "Jane: Everything Great About Being a Girl." He wore it to meet Kelly's parents for the first time.
Like Joe, Owen, as a young boy, often sat down with his father to talk about books — in his case, to deconstruct what made a Flannery O'Connor story work or to find the ways he could make his own writing more vivid. He enjoyed these sessions, but not because he already had some idea that he wanted to be a writer. "It was something I'd seen my dad do with my brother, and I sort of wanted to feel included," he told me. As much because of temperament as subject matter, Owen's current relationship with his father is less intensively collaborative than that of Joe, who gets feedback on all his drafts from both parents and frequently calls to talk shop. "I have a much more typical relationship with my parents," Owen said. "I'm looking for unconditional love from my parents. I'm not particularly interested in getting heavy literary criticism from them."
On one public occasion, he got it anyway. His father, in an interview with this magazine in 2000, casually characterized Owen's early work as "flavor-of-the-month, New York relationships." Owen was angry at the time, but he is easy on his father now, even protective. "Yeah, that wasn't the greatest," he said. "My dad felt really bad. But that was a long time ago, and what I do has become easier for my parents to understand." His father apologized, and Owen, who was getting his M.F.A. at Columbia, kept writing. While he was there, on two occasions, professors at Columbia extravagantly dismissed his father's body of work while Owen was in the room. He learned that if he was going to write, he would have to be fairly confident that he could find his own voice, regardless of who was talking to him about what fiction should be. When Owen's novel came out, Stephen turned his Web site into an enthusiastic ad: If you are in the mood to laugh your posterior off, he said in his own vernacular, " 'Double Feature' will perform that surgery and painlessly."
Owen can live with selling fewer books than his brother or father, both of whom set unusually high standards for that metric. "I think my brother's and father's drive for success is greater than mine," he said. "I just want to sell enough books to be able to justify continuing to write." As the youngest of the siblings and the one who stayed home, rather than go to boarding school, he was exposed more often than they were to his father's growing fame — the snapping cameras everywhere, the strangers forever approaching them. "I want to be as successful as I can be while still living a very private life," he said, "and I think my ambition is probably a little bit limited by that desire."
His brother, by contrast, embraces the public's attention. He recently posed for a series of photos in which he pantomimed being strangled and stabbed by fans, then posted them on Twitter. Owen admired the project but could not relate to the impulse. "I don't want to be choked by a stranger," he said. "Not even pretend choked."
On the Fourth of July, the extended King family gathered at the Pietree Orchard and ate pizza on the picnic benches outside the shop. Some of the grandchildren had gone strawberry picking; later there would be fireworks. Stephen King, sitting on a picnic bench, turned to his 10-year-old grandson. "So if I had a stroke," King asked him, "what do you think I should do? Should I go into a nursing home? Would that be the best thing?"
The questions were both matter of fact and macabre — a late-in-life version of what the family called the writing game, in which they would each take five minutes to rescue some hero from peril, only to place him once again in danger before passing the challenge on to the next family member. This is the kind of plot twist that most haunts King now: illness, dementia, the loss of his uncommonly active mind.
A few minutes later, he was eager to share an image he had on his iPad. He whisked past pictures — his grandchildren, trees, whoops, there goes Meg Ryan — and then there was a black-and-white photo: a smiling woman sitting on the knee of a merchant mariner. "Those were my parents," he said. His father abandoned the family when King, the younger of two children, was 2, but when King was about 10, he stumbled upon his father's stash of old pulp novels. It was Stephen's first introduction to horror — among the finds there was "Lovecraft," with a cover of a monster crawling out of a grave. Either because he is his father's son or because he was a son seeking out his father — King believes it's the first of those options — he was immediately obsessed, reading every book in the collection and seeking out more wherever and whenever he could. His father, his mother told him, wrote stories, good ones, too, and although he did not stick with it, some magazine editors had encouraged him. The subtext of King's personal narrative would seem to be that of a child trying to please an absent father, as loudly and successfully as he can. King, however, sees it as a matter of simple genetics. So the fact that his sons, in turn, would be writers, that one of them might even write horror, is therefore wholly predictable to King. "I do think it's built in," he said. "You know, sometimes people say to me, 'Why do you choose to write that creepy stuff?' And I usually say, 'What makes you think I have a choice?' "
At the guesthouse, after the group portrait was finally taken, the family started to disperse. "Did you really think that the Neil Gaiman book was — what did you call it? Something like 'an incomparable masterpiece?' " Owen asked Joe, referring to a recent blog post about Gaiman's new novel. "You like everything on Twitter — you can't like that much stuff."
Joe shrugged. "I'm a positive guy" he responded, "not a negative guy."
He had proposed earlier that they gather that evening to play an old game called Ex Libris. The game, a bit like Balderdash, would have them all competing to write the most convincing first line of a randomly chosen actual novel. Somebody wondered: How old was this game?
"It's as old as storytelling," Stephen intoned.
"Yeah, the very first Irish balladeers were playing this game," Owen said. That got a laugh from his dad, so he kept going. "The Gilgamesh guy was playing this game."
Joe, who had been strenuously trying to turn the conversation back to the rules of Ex Libris, joined in. "They were playing at the Alexandria library," he said. "As it burned."
It went on like this for a few minutes. Naomi made a reference to an obscure ancient manuscript depicting beer, Owen cracked a joke about pulps in Mesopotamia.
"In the Old West — " Joe started.
His father suggested, not unkindly, that they wrap up the conversation. Maybe they would play the game some other time. After lunch, Owen and Kelly wandered down toward the lake with Joshua Ferris and his wife, who were visiting. Stephen and Tabby went back to their primary summer home. And Joe headed inside with the book he had been carrying around all day, a galley his dad gave him of another author's horror book.
A few days later, Joe and Stephen were having another typical conversation: hashing out what novel could be considered the "Moby-Dick" of horror.
That one with all the footnotes, they argued — no, not that one, the other one: Mark Danielewski's "House of Leaves."
Joe bragged that his youngest son, who is 10, was doing some writing of his own. "He's working on two stories: one is called 'Scrap'; the other is called 'The Bad Thing.' "
Stephen brightened: he liked that, "The Bad Thing." "I'm sorry," he said, as if he had just found someone else's shiny penny, "I might have to use that."
Joe understood. "I know," he said. "I had the same thought myself."

subset: commoncrawl


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Let's do this!
Dear Friends and Family,
Once again, I have decided to get off my $%#*& and do the Ride for the Feast, a 2-day, 140-mile Maryland bike ride from Ocean City, Maryland to Baltimore City, May 2-3, 2020.
The event raises money for Moveable Feast, the only Maryland nonprofit that delivers healthy meals to people living with HIV/AIDS, cancer and other life-threatening illnesses. Last year, Moveable Feast delivered 656,158 life-saving meals to 4,365 Marylanders. This ride is also symbolic - the fundraising minimum of $1,500 equals the food costs to feed one client for a year. 140 miles represents the furthest distance Moveable Feast travels to deliver to a client.
With your help, we are working to deliver 1 million meals in a single year – each one made and delivered with love. 100% of your donation goes directly back into the services provided to our clients. Your support will aid thousands of our neighbors here in Maryland.
Please help me support Moveable Feast in their efforts to help those in need.
"Moveable Feast is more than just the nutrition that they give you food-wise; they give you spirit. It changes your life." Marvin, a Moveable Feast client.
If you think this page contains objectionable content, please inform the system administrator.


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The Following actress Natalie Zea is engaged, her rep tells TVGuide.com.
Zea and her boyfriend of more than 10 years, Travis Schuldt, got engaged during a recent trip to Hawaii. The couple met when they co-starred on the NBC soap opera Passions 10 years ago.
See other celebs who are engaged
"He wanted to make sure he gave the car a thorough test drive before he bought it," Zea joked in a statement.


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Do we really need a study to tell us that most experienced drivers would fail their written tests if forced to take it again? Probably not.
In fact, just last night I parked my car in what I considered to be a respectable distance from a fire hydrant, but my friend was convinced that the parking spot wasn't legal. How far away does one have to park from a hydrant to avoid a ticket? Neither of us knew, and after a brief argument over whether it was 10 or 20 feet away (by the way, it's 15), we decided to find a new place to park just to be safe.
But I did obtain a near-perfect score on my written driver's test only six years ago. How? I skimmed through the whole book right before my test, memorizing the numbers well enough to pass the test but forgetting them as soon as I traipsed out of the DOL with my shiny new license in hand. And I'm guessing I'm not the only one.
A study conducted by LeaseTrader.com found that around 75 percent of experienced drivers would fail their written drive test if it was administered randomly — and I'd guess you aren't shocked to hear that.
I'm also guessing it won't shock you that there was not a single perfect score on any of the 500 tests given. And it won't shock you that that drivers with more than 20 years of experience scored an average of 46 percent on a ten-question driving quiz. It probably also won't shock you that a longer time spent driving correlates with a lower score on a hypothetical drive test.
But here's another thing that won't shock you: I was a terrible driver at 16, and not in the typical reckless teenager way — I just didn't know what I was doing. I may have known the specific rules of the road, but a conceptual understanding of driving doesn't help much when you're actually behind the wheel.
So failed tests or not, I think most of us would take someone with 15 or more years of driving experience than a technically savvy 16-year-old any day.


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Progressive lenses can be called progressive addition lenses (PAL), progressive power lenses (PPL) or graduated prescription lenses.
What are progressive lenses?
Multifocal lenses help people see clearly across all distances, without the need to switch lenses. An alternative to bifocals or trifocals, they correct refractive errors like presbyopia (age-related change in the focus system of Eye, common in people over the age of 40).
How do they work?
A channel (or corridor) of different lens powers runs down the front of a progressive lens. This seamless channel allows the wearer to look up to see objects at a distance, look straight ahead to see objects at middle distance, and down to read or do other close-up activities without changing lenses.
What are the benefits?
Progressive lenses are often preferred aesthetically as they don't have the visible line that marks the two different zones of a bifocal lens (or lines, in the case of a trifocal lens). Instead, progressive lenses provide a seamless graduation of lens strength. This avoids the jump in vision a wearer gets with bifocals and trifocals, and actually trains the eye to improve vision.


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In preparation for Sunday's 63rd Primetime Emmy Awards, PopcornBiz spent time picking the brains of several major nominees in the acting categories to discover what's been on their minds – and we found a lot more there than just what they'll be wearing on the big day.
From how they feel about their characters and what clicked for them this season to what their nomination means to them and how they knew they were being called to the performing life, these nominees offer a glimpse inside the thoughts of actors at the top of their craft.
Jon Hamm, "Mad Men"
U.S. & World
News from around the country and around the globe
Nominated for Best Lead Actor in a Drama Series
On the fall and rise of Don Draper:
"As dark and deep as it went this season, there were a lot more colors to explore. This season was really more about this guy breaking down in many ways, and that was exciting to get the chance to show. We get to see this guy seemingly have everything under control, while we as the viewer and certainly me as the character know that underneath it all it's all kind of falling apart. Then, of course, it really DID fall apart. It was nice that the season ended on a little bit of a seeming uptick for the guy and a little bit of redemption came for him. But we'll see: Our show has constantly trafficked in the idea that you never really know what's coming next, just like life."
On choosing the actor's path:
"I kept getting drawn back into the theater or acting, getting up in front of people and making a fool of myself. I just kept doing it and people kept saying, 'Hey, you're pretty good at this. Maybe you should keep trying.' There kept being enough positive reinforcement and this is an industry where there's plenty of negative reinforcement to say, 'Oh, maybe I should try for this and maybe this will be something that I can do.' Ten years later I became kind of an overnight sensation."
Amy Poehler, "Parks & Recreation"
Nominated for Best Lead Actress in a Comedy Series
On being Leslie Knope:
"There's so much about Leslie that I really love: her ability to jump in and to swing big and think big, her ability to rally the troops, her ability to still kind of believe that one person can make a difference. She finds cynicism to be a waste of time. It's really fun to play a person who isn't an eye-roller or the naysayer. That being said, what's so fun about playing Leslie is that there's nothing smooth about her. She's not really cool and therefore she kind of overreaches. She kind of misplays things. She's always trying to find a balance between her enthusiasm and the reality of the situation. It's also just fun to be the lead weirdo among a bunch of weirdos in a small town."
On her previous awards show experiences:
"I have to be honest: I don't love getting dressed up and I'm not very photogenic, so I don't love that part of it. I'm always kind of starving and nervous, which I guess would probably a good way that you should navigate Hollywood in general – just nervous and starving. It's going to be the name of my book. So the actual event is super-cool to be invited to, but I always kind of can't wait until after when the awards are done and I can force S. Epatha Merkerson into a corner and ask her about Jerry Orbach."
Chris Colfer, "Glee"
Nominated for Best Supporting Actor in a Comedy Series
On being Kurt Hummel:
"I just love Kurt. He's so strong and he lives in an environment where everyday he's told he shouldn't be and can't be who he is and what he is, but he's true to himself. I sometimes get very inspired by Kurt because of his strength and his drive. I feel like if I went out and did or said something stupid I feel like it'd take away credit from Kurt. So I think the best thing that I can do is make sure that I handle everything with respect and make sure that Kurt is being respected and treated fairly on the show, which the writers do for me. I never have to worry about that."
On how acting changed his life:
"It's absolutely ludicrous to think about the contrast of who and where I was three years ago and who and where I am now. It's one of those situations where when I think about, 'What would've happened if I didn't go to the 'Glee' audition? What would've happened if one executive said no, they weren't going to write me into the show?' It's insane. It's crazy. I try to think that something bigger than myself is what caused it to happen, because things like that don't happen every day."
Connie Britton, "Friday Night Lights"
Nominated for Lead Actress in a Drama Series
On being Tami Taylor:
"Tami's really kind of just someone that you want to get behind. I think that audiences found her very relatable and very representative of things that they cared about. I just have so many women who come up to me and say, 'Tami makes me want to be a better mother' – or a better wife, or a better college counselor or whatever. And I think that because of the accessibility of the character, the authenticity of the character and just the genuine struggles that we got to see her go through, people really responded to that and appreciated it. Audiences felt really spoke to them in a personal way."
On her road to becoming an actor:
"In high school I knew acting was what I would love to do if I could do anything, but I didn't actually think that was a reality. I went to college, did a play my freshman year, didn't have the greatest experience, and thought 'Okay, that's it. That was a fun thing in high school, and now I'm going to let that go.' I spent the first year studying Chinese, went to China and had this great experience, and then I came back to school and I just happened to wander down the place where they had postings for different productions that were casting, and I was like, 'Maybe I'll just audition for that,' and I got the lead role. And once I was back in it, I continued to do theater throughout college. It's such a long shot, especially when you're a girl who grows up in a small town in Virginia – the idea of actually being able to be successful at this is such a huge idea that I needed a few sort of nudges along the way in order to really feel like I could actually take it seriously and pursue it."
Michael C. Hall, "Dexter"
Nominated for Best Lead Actor in a Drama Series
On being Dexter Morgan:
"That's something that I probably won't be able to answer until I'm done playing it, to be honest, but I think it was a real trick from the beginning to play someone who claims that he's incapable of authenticity when as an actor you're preoccupied for conveying something that seems authentic. It's like you almost can't think about it too hard."
On his acting future:
"I don't know that I have another five plus years commitment to a character in me. So I think I'm looking just to move forward with stories that compel me, the character. It doesn't really matter the size. It's more about the story and their function in it, and yeah, I'm certainly looking to mix it up. It took the last hiatus to catch my breath a little bit, but I look forward to getting some other balls rolling."
Kelly MacDonald, "Boardwalk Empire"
Nominated for Best Supporting Actress in a Drama Series
On discovering who Margaret Schroeder was:
"I didn't know too much about Margaret at first. She was a bit of an enigma. I feel hugely sort of privileged, because she's not like a one-note character, not in any way, and I think it was Martin Scorsese who said the great thing about television is that it's what happens after the movie finishes with the characters and things. So I've never had such an opportunity before to play such dramatic scenes week after week, like I get. Every episode I have some really amazing scenes to perform with some really amazing actors, and I'm really enjoying it."
On her path into acting:
"In retrospect I can see that it's where I've always been headed, acting. I went to drama school because that's all I did in my childhood: recreating scenes from my favorite films – but completely privately, on my own. I was always playing around with voices and acting."
Johnny Galecki, "The Big Bang Theory"
Nominated for Best Lead Actor in a Comedy Series
On being Leonard Hofstadter:
"There's always a hundred different ways to play things for him, because he's reaching outside of this world that they have. So it can be contentment, it can be great frustration, it can be annoyance and exasperation. The road is pretty broad in the choices that you can make with that character and the romantic relationships, be it with Penny or Priya. Those are the things that first attracted me to the role, because generally, beforehand, those weren't storylines that I got to mine. It was very much uncharted territory. Initially, Chuck Lorre talked to me about the Sheldon role, and I said, 'I think I like this Leonard thing.' Even if it was just flirtation, at the time it wasn't something that I'd gotten the chance to play."
On adding "Emmy nominee" to his resume:
"It's a complete and utter shock. Martin Mull said once 'My head explode if the termites weren't holding hands.' I don't know exactly what that means or what it's in reference to, but that's how I've been feeling. I had no idea. I wasn't watching. My phone was out of batteries and it took them a couple of hours to track me down and tell me. It's wonderful."
Evan Rachel Wood, "Mildred Pierce"
Nominated for Best Supporting Actress in a Miniseries or Movie
On earning an Emmy nomination after growing up on TV:
"It's kind of a milestone. I have been working in TV most of my life, and so I feel like I've grown up. I was really excited because I did work really, really hard, and so it's great. I was so happy for the film. It just killed in the nominations and I was really happy for Todd Haynes because he's so incredible. I don't know how he did this and kept it together so well."
On her path to becoming an actor:
"I think I knew when I was about eight or nine. It was my first role where I was carrying the film and I was in every single scene, and I was like, 'Man, I have to do this everyday and work all day. There's no time to play. This is so hard!' But I was still having so much fun. I got really into it, and I was such a hyper kid that I felt like I could really channel energy into something cool. I think that's when I knew that this was a job, but that it was still extremely fulfilling."
Walton Goggins, "Justified"
Nominated for Best Supporting Actor in a Drama Series
On being Boyd Crowder:
"It's somebody that I connected to immediately, and someone that I had a hand in kind of architecting. And I just quite enjoy his intellect – he's a poet. He really is a poet, and everything that he looks at is seen through worldview and that prism. And I just can't wait to get back to work. I can't wait to say these words that come out of his mouth. Honestly, I can't wait to be cool again. Because I'm so uncool."
On becoming an Emmy nominee:
"It's just been like every single day I kind of wake up and pinch myself. And I'm just so grateful to be able to kind of share it with this cast of actors that I've gotten to play with for a couple of, at least Tim, for a couple of years now. And one of my best friends Johnny Galecki is nominated as well, so we're just having the best time."
Alan Cumming, "The Good Wife"
Nominated for Best Supporting Actor in a Drama Series
On being Eli Gold:
"He's a very confident, very manipulative person who at the same time has a lot of kind of foibles. It's a very rich mixture of things and that's what I think all great characters are – I'm still finding out the foible things as well. The thing that I really enjoy about the show is the thing that I really hated to start with, which was that normally I'd done films and you know where the story is going to end. So each scene you kind of know where it fits in to your idea of what you want to show in each moment. But in a television series you don't know what's going to happen next."
On almost missing out on that Emmy nominated role:
"I put the word out that I'd quite like to do a TV show and one in New York. I craved routine in my life. And then this came along and my agents and managers said, 'Do this one.' It was their decision really – I would've turned it down if it had been my choice, just because of the logistics at the time, not because of the material. I didn't really understand it and felt like it wasn't really me. So it's been an amazing thing to suddenly be like, 'Wow, I really, really like it.' I'm forever grateful to them. It's opened up a whole new thing for me actually. I think it's been interesting to see people look at me in a different way as an actor. It has been palpable that people are like, 'Oh, he can play real people in suits.'"
Margo Martindale, "Justified"
Nominated for Best Supporting Actress in a Drama Series
On becoming an Emmy nominee:
"I did 'Justified' out of the pure joy of acting. So it never came to my mind that there would be a reward for it. It felt like acting when I was a little child. So it's sort of like just playing in the backyard, really. The thing that I find with this show that's been interesting is that the ease in my acting has gotten that much better. That sounds obnoxious, but because of age and experience I have great ease. I think that makes it more fun. It's not battle."
On recognition after a lengthy career as a "working actress":
"I was always respected by my peers, always. Casting directors have been my biggest boosters, always, and then actors who I've worked with. They've always recommended me. Paul Newman and Robert Benton, and Sidney Lumet was a real champion of mine. There have been many, many people who have been kind and wonderful and supportive of me. Even from college on, I've always believed in myself, tremendously. Even through the lean times I never questioned my talent."


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Ya Tu Sabe: Latinos Showing Love To 50 Cent! Wisin Y Yandel Bring Out G-Unit Live At Madison Square Garden (Crowd Almost Brings Down The Stadium With Their Scream)
50 Cent made a surprise appearance at the Madison Square Garden for Wisin Y Yandel show in NYC He perfromed "Ok, You're Right", "Mujeres En El Club", and Baby By Me
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Inside Look at Special Training
Most of the intensive, two-week pre-deployment training takes place in the high mountains
Into the War Theater
An Inside Look at Special Training
When Special Agent Rick M. deployed to Afghanistan for temporary duty in 2004, only a handful of FBI personnel were assigned to the war theater, and the Bureau had no formal training program to prepare them for the experience.
Today, much has changed. Hundreds of our agents, analysts, and support staff have volunteered for assignments in Afghanistan and Iraq, and Agent M.—who has returned overseas several times since his first trip—is one of the people in charge of their pre-deployment training.
About This Series
Now, all FBI personnel going to Afghanistan and Iraq—with assignments ranging from four months to a year—attend an intensive two-week training program to prepare them for what the military calls the "non-permissive environment" they will encounter.
FBI.gov attended a recent training class in Utah, and over the next several weeks—with articles, pictures, and video—we will report on the training, the veteran instructors who administer it, and the "students" who will soon be using their new knowledge in-country to support a variety of FBI missions.
"We base the training in Utah—especially in the remote mountains around Salt Lake City—because the area is similar to conditions in Afghanistan," Agent M. said. "The climate, elevation, and topography are in many ways the same."
Run by our International Operations Division, the pre-deployment program consists of indoor classroom training—everything from administrative details about visas and passports to briefings on insurgency activity—as well as outdoor instruction in Utah's harsh winter climate at nearly 6,000 feet above sea level.
Classes include hands-on weapons training, land navigation techniques, and emergency trauma medicine. "We go through a lot of fake blood," said Agent M., one of the program's four coordinators. He added that the 12 consecutive days of rigorous instruction is "like taking a drink from a fire hose," but there is no other alternative.
"To try to train somebody overseas—when they've just traveled on an airplane for 30 hours, are sleep deprived, and are under real-world stress—is not really an option," he explained. "What we strive for with pre-deployment training is that you shouldn't see or hear anything in country that you haven't already seen or heard here first."
The program has expanded as our mission in the war theater has expanded. When Agent M. first went to Afghanistan, the few agents there mostly provided expertise to the military. But now, working through our legal attaché program in coordination with the governments of Afghanistan and Iraq, the Bureau is involved with just about every kind of investigation in the war theater that we carry out domestically, from public corruption and kidnapping cases to terrorism and weapons of mass destruction matters.
"We've given this training to agents, analysts, linguists, IT specialists—you name the discipline, they've come through the class," he said.
Since the pre-deployment program was officially established at the end of 2004, hundreds of Bureau personnel have benefited from the instruction.
"For the FBI folks who raise their hand to go into a war zone," Agent M. said, "we owe it to them to provide the most applicable and relevant training possible prior to their deployment."
Next: Day 1 of Training


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New Jersey's Congressional Redistricting Commission will wrap up its new map before Christmas, and it's beginning to look like Congressmen Steve Rothman (D-9) and Scott Garrett (R-5) will be the two getting coal in their stockings.
While the commission continued to meet behind closed doors last night, all indications are that Rothman, an early supporter of President Obama in his 2008 primary campaign against Hillary Clinton, will be facing off against Garrett, the most conservative member of New Jersey's House delegation, in a matchup of incumbents in a redrawn district stretching across the state's northern border.
Because New Jersey's population grew more slowly than other states', the Congressional Redistricting Commission faces the unenviable task of consolidating the states' 13 congressional districts into 12.
Democrats currently hold a 7-6 advantage in the House delegation, and John Farmer, the Rutgers Newark Law School dean who is serving as the independent tie-breaker for the 13-member commission, has been pushing the six-member Republican and Democratic delegations toward a "fair fight" compromise solution that would pit an incumbent Democrat against an incumbent Republican in a competitive district.
"We're looking to finish up tonight," former Assembly Speaker Joseph Roberts, chair of the six-member Democratic delegation, said last night. "That's what the independent member wants."
Farmer had originally scheduled the commission to meet Monday, December 19, through Wednesday, December 21, in an effort to reach a decision, with the option of reconvening after the holidays if necessary in order to meet the January 17 legal deadline for the commission to complete its work.
But sufficient progress was being made last night that Farmer and the partisan delegations were looking to reach agreement by 10 this morning in order to have the commission agree to send out the required 24-hour legal notice for a formal commission meeting and vote tomorrow (Friday) in Trenton.
By all accounts, Garrett, a Sussex County Republican, and Rothman, a Bergen County Democrat, appear to be the odd men out.
Commission members and staff declined to discuss the plan itself, and one commissioner cautioned that "anything I tell you could change." Michael DuHaime, Gov. Christie's political strategist and the chair of the Republican delegation, insisted that "this is not down to a single geographic area," and noted that decisions made in one part of the state have repercussions on district lines elsewhere.
But Tom Jackson, the president of the Garden State Bar Association who was part of a delegation of minority leaders who met with the panel yesterday morning, came out and reported that the commission was indeed focusing on the state's northern rim, where Garrett's 5th District, Rothman's 9th and Democratic Congressman William Pascrell's 8th Districts come together. Combining the Garrett and Rothman districts is the easiest fit.
While the commission theoretically could combine any two of the state's 13 districts, population figures and U.S. Voting Rights Act protections for minority representatives effectively forced the commission to consider only seven districts for consolidation.
While every district in the state needs to add population, the four South Jersey districts represented by Reps. Rob Andrews (D-1), Frank LoBiondo (R-2), Jon Runyon (R-3), and Chris Smith (R-4) are relatively close to the ideal population of 732,658. As a group, the four districts need to add only 164,000 residents; presumably, Smith's district will need to push north into the districts represented by Reps. Rush Holt (D-12) and Frank Pallone (D-6) to pick up that population.
But the district that needs to add the most voters is the urban 10th District, which includes most of Newark and other Essex County cities and is represented by Democratic Rep. Donald Payne, the state's only African-American congressman. The 10th needs to add 98,315 voters, and the Hudson-dominated 13th District, represented by Democratic Rep. Albio Sires, the state's only Hispanic congressman, needs to add 47,693 more.
The seats of Payne and Sires are effectively protected by the Voting Rights Act, and because their districts are surrounded by the Democratic 9th, 8th and 6th Districts, the only place for them to get the 148,000 voters they need is to take them away from fellow Democrats, pushing the districts of Rothman, Pascrell, and possibly Pallone further west to pick up suburban towns with more Republican voters.
The reality of the four South Jersey districts pushing north against Holt and Pallone, and of the two majority-minority districts pushing west into the districts of Rothman and Pascrell or south into Pallone territory meant the commission really had only two options if it wanted to create a fair fight competitive district matching up a Republican and a Democratic incumbent.
The first option, which was originally considered the likely scenario, would have matched Rep. Leonard Lance, (R-7), who ranks second-lowest in seniority in the House delegation, against Holt or Pallone in central New Jersey.
The second option, which now appears to be the choice, would match Garrett against either Rothman or Pascrell. Rothman, whose district is farther north, was always considered more vulnerable. Pascrell outranks Rothman in seniority and his district ranks third in the state in minority population (54.3 percent), bringing together large populations of African-American, Hispanic, Asian, and Middle Eastern voters in a Passaic County-dominated district centered on Paterson, Passaic, and Clifton. Dividing the minority populations in this district would certainly have provoked a lawsuit — which was probably one of the not-too-subtle messages that Jackson's group communicated to the commission yesterday.
Pascrell geographically would be easier to pit against Rep. Rodney Frelinghuysen (R-13) than Garrett. But Frelinghuysen is one of the most senior members of the New Jersey delegation and serves as a House Appropriations subcommittee chair, and his Morris County-centered district is one of the most compact in the state.
Population changes work against Rothman and Garrett too. Rothman's 9th District is 71,279 voters short of the ideal size — the third-highest number in the state – and Garrett's 5th District is 66,107 voters short, ranking fourth. Pascrell's 8th District, which is 72,234 voters short, could pick up some southern Bergen voters from Rothman, as could Payne and Sires, while Lance and Frelinghuysen, who are each almost 60,000 voters short, would need to push north to carve out the voters they need from Garrett's 5th District .
That would leave Rothman and Garrett to battle it out in a competitive district stretching across the state's northern border.


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- Invoice for a trunk of merchandise shipped from Newport [Rhode Island] by Samuel C. Taggart for Gardner & Dean on the Brig Friendship. Includes instruction to sell the goods on the coast of Africa and use those funds to purchase "negroes" for sale in Charleston [South Carolina]. Dated March 12th, no year given.
- Two-page letter to Captain Nicholas Power of Providence, Rhode Island, denying a request for insurance against 'the mortality of slaves' and 'Barbary Cruisers' [probably Barbary corsairs] for an upcoming voyage. Power is encouraged to request insurance for his Brig 'against the Danger of the Sea [and] the Insurrection of Slaves.' Includes discussion of London Premiums for Coast to Market voyages. Letter signed 'S. S.'


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The international music lobby group IFPI has come out in support of Danish ISP TDC in litigation brought by the country's songwriters.
TDC's Play service bundles an all-you-can-eat music download service with an internet subscription, and it added streaming at the end of last year. Real numbers are hard to find, but Play is credited with slowing down unlicensed file sharing, encouraging interest in physical sales (which didn't collapse, and may have increased slightly), and reducing churn for the ISP. But TDC's license with Denmark's performance rights society KODA expired at the end of last month, and KODA took the telco to the country's copyright tribunal.
IFPI, which represents the global recording business, says KODA's royalty schedule is far higher than in other countries, which is why Spotify gave Denmark a miss.
"One of IFPI's most important tasks is, after all, to develop the market. So we cannot just remain a spectator, when someone attempts to make the development come to a halt - whoever it may be", said IFPI's Henrik Daldorph, who wants to intervene in the tribunal. More details via MusicDish, here.
Last year, KODA paid out over €50m to overseas performance rights societies and saw around €5m in return.
A surprising move? Not really. It may even be a sign of things returning to normal. Up until the 1960s, it was the publishers who were the power in the industry. Record labels were appendages of electronics companies or cottage operations.
Songwriters, composers and publishers have frequently clashed with record companies over royalties, and lawyers for each side racked up costs of eight figures in the UK when publishers clashed with the BPI over the share of digital copyright royalties. The Copyright Tribunal's decision in 2007 left things pretty much where they were. ®


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/CMA/ Nashville, TN -- By Eileen Sisk
The Grand Ole Opry suffered the biggest loss of talent in its 87-year history when a small plane carrying Patsy Cline, Cowboy Copas and Hawkshaw Hawkins, along with Cline's manager Randy Hughes, crashed on the evening of March 5, 1963, in a heavily wooded area roughly 100 miles west of Nashville. Now, 50 years after the crash the we are remembering Patsy Cline, Cowboy Copas, and Hawkshaw Hawkins.
The singers had performed at a benefit on March 3, in Kansas City, Kan., for the family of radio DJ "Cactus" Jack Call, who had died in a car accident a little more than a month earlier. Foggy weather kept them from flying out immediately, and they had to wait a day before they could leave.
Operator error was cited as the cause of the crash because Hughes was not instrument-rated and took off despite warnings of severe windy conditions after a fuel stop in Dyersburg, Tenn. The clock on the plane stopped at 6:18:15 PM, while Cline's wristwatch stopped almost 17 minutes later at 6:30 PM.
According to Eddie Stubbs, on-air personality at WSM-AM/Nashville and Grand Ole Opry announcer, this was the most tragic event ever to strike the Opry family. The second-worst event, he added, was when Billy Walker, his wife, Bettie, and two musicians, Charles Lilly and Danny Patton, were killed in a 2008 van wreck in Alabama. Ironically, Walker had been scheduled to fly on that fateful night with Cline and the other passengers, but Hawkins gave him an airline ticket he had so that Walker could be with his family in Nashville sooner.
Ironic and equally tragic was the death of Opry member Jack Anglin, who was killed in an automobile accident just two days after the plane crash while driving on his way to Cline's funeral.
"When you mention the names Cowboy Copas and Hawkshaw Hawkins, more often than not, people will say, 'Oh, they died in a plane crash with Patsy Cline,'" Stubbs said. "What a shame to just be remembered for how you died."
Stubbs believes that Cline's portrayal in two movies, by Beverly D'Angelo in "Coal Miner's Daughter" and Jessica Lange in "Sweet Dreams," helped elevate her to larger-than-life stature in death, even though Copas and Hawkins were bigger stars at the time of the crash.
Copas, who died at 49, had been featured on the cover of Billboard and had the first recording of "Tennessee Waltz" (written by Pee Wee King and Redd Stewart). Hawkins, 41, had had a smash hit with Justin Tubb's "Lonesome 7-7203," which stayed at No. 1 for four weeks after the crash, and was married to future CMA Country Music Hall of Fame member Jean Shepard, who was eight months pregnant with their second son when her husband died.
Hughes, 34, who was married to Copas' daughter Kathy, had played guitar for many stars in addition to performing as a recording artist in his own right and being a businessman, Cline's manager and a private pilot.
Cline, 30, had a way of wrapping her rich contralto around a song and infusing it with wisdom, heartache and regret. Surprisingly, she had had just two No. 1 hits, "I Fall to Pieces" (Hank Cochran and Harlan Howard) and "She's Got You" (Cochran) when she died. Two of her other classic songs, "Crazy" (Willie Nelson) and "Walkin' after Midnight" (Alan Block and Donn Hecht), peaked at No. 2.
The anniversary of their fatal flight gives fans the opportunity to reflect on and celebrate their musical legacies in at least three ways: a three-day tribute in Camden, Tenn., a WSM radio tribute and an exhibit at the Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum.
"Gone, But Not Forgotten"
The city of Camden, Tenn., in promotional partnership with WSM, will host a 50th-anniversary memorial event Feb. 28 through March 2, called "Gone, But Not Forgotten," to honor the crash victims.
Highlights will include an antique car show, a Cline/Copas/Hawkins sing-alike contest, a panel discussion in which attendees can have a one-on-one with relatives of the deceased as well as artists including Jan Howard, performances by Whisperin' Bill Anderson, Cline tribute artist Mandy Barnett, David Browning aka "the Mayberry Deputy," The Grascals and Jean Shepard, and a candlelight vigil at the crash site. Shuttles will be available to take visitors from the core venue of the New Beginning Annex to the crash site, which is about 14 miles north, near Big Sandy, Tenn.
"I really believe that it's incumbent upon us to properly memorialize these people and their fans and respect them," said Bill Kee, Executive Director, Benton County/Camden Chamber of Commerce. "We're trying to do some video interviews so that there will be something lasting that the county of Benton and the city of Camden can have in perpetuity."
"You've got the business aspect and musicianship of Randy. You've got the songwriting and the performance of Cowboy Copas and Hawkshaw Hawkins. You've got a powerful woman stepping into the limelight in Patsy Cline," noted Claire Ratliff of Laughing Penguin Publicity, who is helping to coordinate and publicize the Camden event. "Everything that is good about today's Country Music is a part of these four people."
For further details and ticket information, visit bentoncountycamden.com/Patsy_Cline and Facebook.com/Remember1963.
Eddie Stubbs Leads On-Air Remembrance
"Every year since 1997, we have done a tribute program annually to remember the talents of Patsy Cline, Cowboy Copas, Hawkshaw Hawkins, Randy Hughes and Jack Anglin," said Stubbs, who was inducted into the Country Radio Hall of Fame in 2012.
"We do this program every year to celebrate their contributions and what they gave to the music, not to glorify their passing. When we have the families in, there's always a lot of laughter. A few tears are shed, but it becomes a celebration of what they gave us, their contributions as human beings and what they did for the industry."
All who perished in the tragic crash receive equal time on the WSM tribute. "Each of these artists is a star to us," Stubbs emphasized. "They all receive equal time." He recalled that Cline's widower, Charlie Dick, said completely unprompted during the last memorial broadcast, "Hey, when that plane went down, Cowboy Copas was the biggest star onboard!"
Stubbs names Dick, Kathy Hughes, Jean Shepard and Bobby Wright, Anglin's nephew and the son of Kitty Wells and Johnnie Wright, as likely guests for this year's show. The tribute will be archived at WSMonline.com/shows/the-eddie-stubbs-show.
"Crazy For Loving You"
The biographical exhibit "Patsy Cline: Crazy for Loving You" opened last August in the East Gallery of the Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum. The exhibition, which will continue through June 10, draws extensively from myriad letters Cline wrote to her family and her first fan club president and explores the impact the singer had on Country Music.
One key element of the exhibit is a film created by Museum staff, featuring interviews with four members of CMA's Country Music Hall of Fame: Harold Bradley, Brenda Lee, Willie Nelson and the Jordanaires' Ray Walker, each of whom knew and worked with Cline. Other highlights include archived performances and audio clips from Owen Bradley's original three-track recordings of some of her greatest performances.
On Saturday, March 2, at 1:30 PM, the Museum will also host "Forever with Us: The 50th Anniversary of a Country Music Tragedy," reflecting on the legacies of those who perished in the crash. Eddie Stubbs will play recordings and show historic video footage as well as moderating the panel, which will include Charlie Dick, Kathy Hughes, Jean Shepard and Bobby Wright.
Further details are available at Country Music Hall of Fame & Museum.
Timeless Music
Jan Howard, a close friend to Cline, Hawkins and Shepard, said, "I could talk about Patsy all day long. She had a big heart, a great sense of humor and a wonderful voice. If she liked you, she loved you. If she didn't, she told you so. She was just a rare person. She lived when she lived, if you can understand that. She didn't just exist, she lived."
Cline loved Country Music and Western swing, but, Howard remembers, she had her own ideas about arrangements and argued over them with producer Owen Bradley, who can be credited for their timeless quality. "If you listen to Cowboy Copas' and Hawkshaw Hawkins' music today, it sounds like it was recorded in the '60s," observed Bill Kee. "You listen to Patsy Cline music, with the orchestration and the background vocals, and it could have been recorded in Nashville yesterday."
"Owen stood up to her," Howard added. "He was a genius as a producer and as a musician. He was my producer. He'd go in and sit down at the piano, and he and the musicians did the arrangements most of the time. It was a combination of a great producer and a great artist with a great voice. If she'd had her way, it wouldn't have been. Thanks to Owen, her music lives."
© 2013 CMA Close Up® News Service / Country Music Association®, Inc.
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text: mbguitars 0 Posted July 5, 2013 I am currently using my second DL4, it is the best delay pedal I have come across when it actually works. My first one was fine for about a year then (just after my warranty was up) it started to behave oddly. Often the sound would cut out mid song (it would work on bypass, or the power would just cut out. sometimes it would come straight back on other times it didn't come back on, but often it would work again then next time I tried to use it (a few days later). Since it was out of warranty I bought another one, this one was fine for a while, then it started having similar problems, I took it back to where I bought it and they sent it to line6 for repair, I got it back a couple of weeks ago with a note stating the repair work they did - which seemed to be only cleaning an eprom socket. It took over a month to get this done and sent back to me and it has already started going wrong again. I have been using an official line6 power supply with it, so the power isn't an issue. I can't afford to have this die on me in the middle of a gig again, the loop and delay functions are important parts of our sound. Is this a problem I can expect to have with all line6 delays? I see a lot of professional musicians using them so I can only assume they must actually work for some people. I don't want this to continue happening as I have already spent close to £400 on these pedals and currently have 2 which are very unreliable. I am worried that it will continue to happen and cause me further issues. Does anyone have any advice, or is it just send it back to them (which I have already tried). It's really quite frustrating, a pedal that costs that much money should be much more reliable. I have several much cheaper pedals (including a very cheap digital delay) which have never gone wrong following several years of gigging. Any help would be appreciated! Quote Share this post Link to post Share on other sites


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1 Bulldog Lane Machias, ME 04654
Phone: 207-255-3812
Fax: 207-255-3093
Graduate Local Scholarship Redemption
1 Bulldog Lane
Machias, ME 04654
Coastal Washington County Institute of Technology is committed to maintaining a workplace and learning environment that is free from illegal discrimination and harassment.
In accordance with applicable Federal and/or State laws and regulations, the Coastal Washington County Institute of Technology prohibits discrimination against and harassment of employees, candidates for employment, students and others with rights to admission or access to school programs, activities or premises on the basis of race, color, sex, sexual orientation, religion, ancestry or national origin, or disability. for the purpose of this policy, "sexual orientation" means a person's actual or perceived heterosexuality, bisexuality, homosexuality, or gender identity or expression.
Inquiries or grievances regarding compliance with the Title IX, Title VI, and Section 504 may be directed to:
Mr. Brian Leavitt
Director, Coastal Washington County Institute of Technology
1 Bulldog Lane
Machias, Maine 04654
Telephone Number: 207-255-3812


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ISC West Day 2: A new look at locks, and at home with radar
My second day at ISC West—Wednesday—was the first day the show floor opened. And among other things I learned from my visits to various booths was how to view locks from a new perspective.
For example, at the Kwikset booth, Stanley Black & Decker national account manager Brian Willis told me that as dealers work to convince homeowners to add home automation features to their security systems, "a lock is that transition piece." Kwikset is part of the Hardware and Home Improvement Group of Stanley Black & Decker.
The door locks that the California-based manufacturer makes serve as a bridge to home automation. For example, one of the many features of the 2nd Generation SmartCode deadbolt lock with Home Connect technology that Kwikset introduced at the show on Wednesday is its ability to integrate with home security and automation systems.
That means the lock can communicate with other wireless products in the home. For instance, Willis said, the lock can be set up so that if a smoke alarm in the house goes off, the door will automatically unlock. As Keith Brandon,Stanley Black & Decker director of residential access solutions, put it, such features "add value to consumers and dealers."
Not surprisingly, ASSA ABLOY, a Sweden-based door opening solutions company, also was talking locks—a lot of them.
Martin Huddart, executive VP and CEO, said the company has launched 280 new products in the last three years. He said that typically 95 percent of a building's doors require mechanical locks because they are low-risk entry points and 5 percent of the doors are high risk, so require more expensive access control.
But Huddart said ASSA ABLOY also has solutions for medium-risk entry points and he urged integrators to explore with their customers "matching the right level of technology with the risk." He estimated about 15 percent of a building's entry points might require those medium solutions.
Another highlight of my day was learning about a new form of residential security: radar. That's the latest development from SpotterRF, which makes compact radar systems for military and commercial markets—and now for the residential market. SpotterRF, a company established in 2009 that has offices in Herndon, Va. and Orem, Utah, announced at ISC West that it has installed radar security at a luxury estate.
CEO Logan Harris told me that he can't reveal much about the client for privacy reasons, but he said he believes the job was the first of more to come in the high-end luxury market. Installed was a 100-acre, 360-degree perimeter security system in just one day that cost about $12,000, he said.
Harris said that radar "gives you the capability of sticking on GPS tracker on someone without their actually knowing anything about it."


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The hour swept clean to the crowing of cocks.
The hour when earth betrays us.
The hour when wind blows from extinguished stars.
The hour of and-what-if-nothing-remains-after-us.
The hollow hour.
Blank, empty.
The very pit of all other hours.
No one feels good at four in the morning.
If ants feel good at four in the morning
--three cheers for the ants. And let five o'clock come
if we're to go on living.
Translated by Magus J. Krynski and Robert A. Maguire
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"Four in the Morning" from Sounds, Feelings, Thoughts: Seventy Poems by Wislawa Szymborska. Copyright © 1981
Princeton University Press. Reprinted with the permission of Princeton University Press.


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1. Save Money
Everyone wants to save money nowadays, it makes perfect sense. It doesn't matter how much you earn, if you can pay less why not do it? Saving money is the most obvious reason to shop online. Online shopping has grown tremendously over the last few years and with time it will become the most popular way to shop. With this expansion has come an expansion of online savings. Thousands of online retailers have teamed up with numerous web sites that pass these saving on to consumers in the form of online coupons. These online coupons can be redeemed via the online retailers' website by simply clicking on a link from one of these coupon sites. Consumers shopping online should take advantages of these coupons and the saving they have to offer.
2. Smart Shopping
Besides saving money, using coupons to shop online is a smart choice. Online coupons have become easily obtainable and even easier to use. If you are not already taking advantage of these coupons it's time to become a smart shopper. You'll be surprised how many of your favorite retailers offer online coupons. If you don't take advantage of these online deals you're simply not being a smart shopper.
3. Time is Money
This one is a gem, who has time to waste at the mall or clip paper coupons. Most of us spend some time at work surfing the web. Yes, I said it and you know it's true. If this wasn't the case why do online retailers have Cyber Monday? They know most of us are at work and chances are we're in front of a computer. I'm not saying that you should ignore your work but if you have time to update your Facebook status and read what your friends are doing. Then you have time to do some online shopping through endless stores and endless products. OK, so maybe you don't surf the web on company time but the fact is that you do surf the web. So why not take some of that time and direct it towards some online shopping? Shopping online will save you countless hours. Hours that can be better spent with friends and family.
4. Save on Gas
Wow, have you seen the prices at the pump lately? I'm personally tired of all the excuses of why we are paying more for gas. Oil spill, gas goes up. Change of season, gas goes up. News out of the Middle East, gas goes up. Do yourself a favor, if you bypass the mall you save on gas. That's money you can use to watch a movie or go out to dinner.
5. Save Your Car
Driving to the mall puts wear and tear on your vehicle and unnecessary miles. Plus those dings and dents you get when someone with a clunker parks next to your pride and joy. Save yourself the headache and expense, stay home and use those coupons from the comfort of your home while shopping in your PJs…now we're talking!
6. Beat the Crowds
This is especially true during the holidays and if you are like me who waits until the last possible moment the crowds are brutal making every shopping task unbearable. It all begins when you arrive at the mall; you fight for a parking space. Then with your luck you get stuck at the register behind the shopper that picked up that item that has no SKU and you wait until a salesperson retrieves the same item from the floor. To make matters worse the cashier turns out to be a temp or new hire that has entered something incorrectly and to top it off you waste more time waiting for a Manager overwrite. Save yourself the hassle and just shop online.
7. Find Rare or Discontinued Items
Instead of shopping aimlessly calling every store within a 100 mile radius looking for that item you know is no longer available. Why not expand that search radius by shopping for those rare and discontinued items online. There is no need to drive to the next county or state to get that item. Online retailers use online coupons to move these discontinued items and they even dedicate entire portions of their sites to discontinue and clearance merchandise. Not only will you save money but you can find that rare purchase in a matter of minutes.
8. Find Sold Out Items
Ever shop for that sold out item during the holidays? Ever camp out at the local store because you got a tip that a new delivery is coming and there is a chance that maybe three items might be delivered that morning? You might say, merchandise also sell out online and yes you're correct but at least you save yourself the torture of sleeping outside for the "chance" to get that sold out item.
The bottom line is that shopping online with the combination of online coupons can equal huge savings.
Online coupons are broken down into three categories.
Coupons– These are simply links that offer a saving. The only thing required is to click on the link provided by the coupon site. Once the link is clicked on you get redirected to the online retailer where the saving will be automatically deducted from your shopping cart.
Coupon Codes (Promo Codes) – These are codes that you must write down or in the case of some sites you click on the code and it copies code so you can paste on the retailers site. Either way, these codes are used during the checkout process. Look for a small box that says something like "Coupon Code" or "Promo Code". Enter or paste the code into this box and hit submit, this will apply the savings.
Free Shipping Coupons– The name says it all, these coupons are for free shipping. They can be in the form of a link or a coupon code.
Don't forget to use these money saving tips on doorstep loans today next time you are about to purchase anything online.


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How do you deal with it?
Hello! Total Newbie here!
So, a little bit about myself. I went vegetarian several years ago for Lent. I had a very good friend who was vegetarian. She encouraged me, and helped me learn how to make healthy vegetarian food. My blood pressure at the time was borderline high, but after Lent it was well below normal, and I felt good, but my husband didn't like not having meat, so I went back to being an omnivore after Lent.
Now to present time: I'm having issues with my blood pressure again, only this time, it's not borderline: it's high. I have decided that meat isn't worth having a heart attack over (it doesn't even taste that good!), and have decided to become vegetarian again (possibly eventually vegan, but I'm going to take things one step at a time.) It's been a week and I'm already feeling much better.
The problem: My family loves me, but they are openly hostile to the idea of me being vegetarian. Like, my mother bringing home dinner and getting me a Big Mac, and my husband cooking three dishes for dinner and putting meat in every single dish. This from the man that usually makes at least one meat-free dish when he cooks. I realise that I am going to have to do my own cooking all the time (even though both of them will happily eat vegetarian meals as long as diet isn't mentioned) and I'm down with that.
Most/all of the people on this forum have had to deal with people feeling threatened by the choice they made to go veggie, and I am hoping to get some good ideas on how to deal (and even what not to do) with my family, because going back to meat is not an option, and I really don't want to turn this into a war. So, what would you do? What have you done?
tl;dr: I've become a vegetarian and my family is hostile. What would you do?
I too am the only one in my house that is Vegan. I was vegetarian for a while but my cholesteral was still really high and just like you I knew that meat was not the only thing making me sick. I have been vegan for almost two weeks. The way I got my husband and two teenagers to be supportive was to explain to them that I wanted to be healthy and not die of a heart attack or stroke at a young age. I asked them if they would rather me eat just like they do and possibly not make it to my old age or live a vegan lifestyle and enjoy being with them for a long time. After explaining to them they are supportive as long as I cook my food and allow them to cook what they want. The funny thing is all of them are cutting on their meat intake. It might take time to get them to understand but it will happen.
It doesn't sound like it like they are being hostile if they agreed to cut their meat intake.
I know what you mean Truzibon...I will battle this alittle with the in laws on Sunday. They are having a brunch feast and they know about my veganism. However instead of my hubby wanting to ask them to make me something I told him I would eat before hand and then bring my own food. Unlike you my hubby is totally supportive of me and will eat my meals when we have dinner. In your situation maybe you could say thank you...be graceful and then trash it. Also maybe say no thanks I have eaten and keep a stash of nuts in your purse...It will take time...but always remind them that you are doing this for your health!!! there should never be a better reason then that!


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You are here
WASHINGTON - The U.S. Department of Energy today announced the first industrial plants in the country to be certified under the Superior Energy Performance program -- a new, market-based industrial energy efficiency program. The energy management certification program is accredited by the American National Standards Institute (ANSI) and will serve as a roadmap for industrial facilities to help continually improve their efficiency and maintain market competitiveness. The industrial and manufacturing sectors, which account for roughly one-third of energy use in the United States, include significant opportunities to improve the overall efficiency of their operations. By reducing the energy necessary for their industrial processes, companies can save money, save energy, and help create new clean energy jobs.
"This program is helping to lay the groundwork for broad improvements in industrial efficiency in the U.S. and internationally," said Secretary Chu. "By implementing the latest energy management practices and technologies as part of the Superior Energy Performance certification program, these U.S. companies are saving money, reducing carbon pollution and making their businesses more competitive in the global marketplace."
DOE presented three companies with awards during the World Energy Engineering Congress in Washington, DC, recognizing their successful completion of the certification program and their place as some of the energy leaders within the U.S. manufacturing sector:
- Cook Composites and Polymers Co. (Houston, Texas)
- Freescale Semiconductor Inc. (Austin, Texas)
- Owens Corning (Waxahachie, Texas)
These newly certified plants participated in the Superior Energy Performance program's pilot. The pilot program began in May 2008 as a partnership between DOE and Texas Industries of the Future, located at the University of Texas at Austin, in order to ensure that Superior Energy Performance would offer value and flexibility for plants of various sizes and experience in managing energy. A series of additional Energy Management Demonstration projects are now underway in other regions around the country to further test the Superior Energy Performance program.
Along with support from DOE, the U.S. Council for Energy Efficient Manufacturing (U.S. CEEM) is leading the development of Superior Energy Performance to help make it possible for companies to conform to the upcoming International Organization for Standardization (ISO) 50001 energy management system standard. ISO, the world's largest developer and publisher of international standards, identified energy management as a priority due to the significant potential to save energy and reduce greenhouse gas emissions worldwide. Based on broad applicability across national economic sectors, the ISO 50001 standard could eventually influence up to 60 percent of the world's energy demand.
The Superior Energy Performance will be well positioned to provide a transparent, globally accepted system for validating energy intensity performance improvement and management practices. Consistent with this goal, the program is already serving as the basis for the Global Superior Energy Performance initiative, a multi-country effort to create and harmonize nationally accredited energy performance certification programs. Together, these programs are expected to produce significant global energy and carbon savings.
Read more about the Superior Energy Performance program.
To learn more about industrial energy efficiency, visit DOE's Industrial Technologies Program website.
Follow the Department of Energy on Facebook, Twitter, Youtube and Flickr. Follow Secretary Chu on his Facebook page.
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