text:
- Products and Solutions
- Business Solutions
- Personal Audio
- Looking for?
- Resources
- Support
- How to Buy
Savi 400 Series Support
USB Wireless Headset System
User Guide (8)
- Savi430m-ug
- W440-m-ug
- Savi-w410m-w420m-ug
- Savi-445m-ug
- Savi430-ug
- W440-ug
- Savi-w410-w420-ug
- Savi-445-ug
Product Guide (1)
Knowledge Base
- Accessories
Connects to PC and Mac via USB adapter Ideal for Users in campus-like business environments/remote workers requiring premium sound quality and portability Talk time Up to 7 hr (W440) 1 ; Unlimited (W445) 1 ; Up to 6 hr (W430); Up to 13 hr (W410, W420) Headset weight W440/445 Convertible: 21 g; W430 Over-the-ear: 25 g; W410 Over-the-head (monaural): 74 g; W420 Over-the-head (binaural): 96 g Wireless frequency DECT 6.0, range up to 300 ft. Audio performance PC Wideband: up to 6,800 Hz Hearing protection SoundGuard DIGITAL: protects against sound levels above 118 dBA; Anti-startle (detects and eliminates any large sudden increase in signal level); Time-Weighted Average prevents average daily noise exposure level from exceeding 85 dBA SoundGuard: (W430) protects against sound levels above 118 dBA Models W445 (convertible + deluxe charging cradle kit); W440 (convertible); W430 (over-the-ear); W420 (over-the-head, binaural); W410 (over-the-head, monaural): UC Standard version built for UC applications and softphones from Avaya, Cisco, IBM, Skype and more 2 W445-M ; W440-M ; W430-M ; W420-M ; W410-M Certified for Skype for Business and Optimized for Microsoft ® Lync ® 1 Unlimited talk time with deluxe charging cradle kit, comes standard with the Savi 445. Available as an accessory with Savi 440. 2 Download the latest release of Plantronics Hub to get one-touch call answer/end with these softphones.
- Warranty


text:
tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-82426604218557602522018-03-06T17:12:02.305-08:00By the GlassBy the Glasshttp://email@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-8242660421855760252.post-78742950553390371642009-12-23T10:33:00.000-08:002009-12-23T12:44:33.367-08:00Food and Wine Pairing Part 1Food and Wine Pairing Basics (PART 1)

I was thinking today about the wines to serve with Christmas dinner today – a challenge to find harmony with all the flavours strewn across the table. I usually opt to forego the perfect match (there isn't one) and simply choose a good Pinot and Chardonnay that can work with everything but may not be a perfect match to any one dish.

White gloved sommeliers and magazine editors (myself included) have at times over complicated food and wine pairing to the point of it seeming like a scientific quandry…if you add a drop of this or that to the dish then suddenly the pairing equation changes. While it is true that you can elevate the food and pairing experience to a flavour zenith by deconstructing the food and the wine to both its structural and flavour elements, it's a rare circumstance to be able to match a single dish to the single perfect wine…well, that is if of course you start with recipe first and then look for a wine (we will create a recipe in an upcoming blog beginning with the wine first). I digress; finding food and wine harmony is much easier than you would think.

There are two basic approaches to matching food and wine; contrasting and balancing. We'll quickly look at the two approaches and from this you may find it easier to marry your favourite food and drink.

Contrasting – Using a wine to contrast your food can be an exceptionally effective tool when marrying food and wine. I generally, subdivide the contrasting approach into three additional categories.

1) Cleansing – While this isn't my preferred method of food and wine pairing, it does offer a good solution to some difficult dishes and may really appeal to those that are foodies first and wine lovers second. This approach basically uses the wine to cleanse the palate of the richness of the food with each sip of wine. Essentially, the wine gets you ready for the next opportunity to taste the food. It's a good method with really fatty foods (high in cream, butter, cheese or other animal fats (think duck) but can sometimes leave the wine regulated to secondary status. How do you choose a wine to fulfill this role? Basically, it generally requires wines that have intense character and are high in acidity. If the wine lacks intense flavours it may get washed out by the food and the wine needs the acidity to cut through the richness (the fat) of the food. Champagne and other Traditional Method sparkling wines are the best for this method but good Chablis and top end Sauvignon Blanc work as do some Old World reds; especially good Burgundy and Italian reds such as Chianti Classico and Brunello di Montalcino that offer a great balance of flavours and vibrant acidity.

2)Structure Contrasts – There are dishes that don't allow for the balance approach (the next blog will expand on this). Outside of some Manzanilla Sherry and the odd Old World white such as Vinho Verde, Chablis and a couple other coastal whites (Muscadet, Vermentino etc.) that are so mineral laden that they seem almost salty there is little option for wine when it comes to matching the saltiness of food with similar character in a wine. If balancing isn't an option then finding a great contrast is key. Salty and sweet is a classic contrast that works…think about melon wrapped in prosciutto or why we often add a dab of sweet jelly onto to a piece of blue cheese. I generally reserve this contract for cheese, the saltiness of many blue cheeses matched with Sauternes, Port and other dessert wine styles. When dealing with salty savoury dishes where the flavours and texture of the food just won't gel with a sweeter wine. The saltiness of savoury food does well with tangy whites with good fruit character and low tannin reds such as Beaujolais (tannins and salt isn't a good combination as the salt makes the wine taste more bitter).

3) Flavour contrasts - Here's a point that can take food and wine pairing to a professional level. There are flavour combinations that might seem like opposites but that really work together. My favourite is the smokiness of bacon and florality in wines such as Riesling and Gewurztraminer. Smoked Salmon and Gewurztraminer is a great match and I love bacon wrapped scallops served with a weighty style of Riesling such a good Auslese. I am big believer in the use of balance when it comes to food and wine pairing, which I will describe in detail in the next blog but balance should not be equated to matching the same flavour in food as found in the wine…that's just boring.

Next blog is on how to balance the structure of food with the structure of a wine.

Cellar Recommendation:

2006 Grosset Watervale Riesling (Clare Valley, Australia) – This is a superbly focused Riesling with lanolin, lime, and wet stone aromas. The palate is vibrant, mineral and citrus fruit laden and very slightly petillant. Super Length. Tastes a little lean now but it belies the true wine that will emerge after another 5-10 years in the cellar. I love aged Riesling and this is one that will stand the test of time. Availablility Limited - in NS avail. at the Port of Wines on Doyle Street for $39.29)By the Glasshttp://firstname.lastname@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-8242660421855760252.post-74925492229928833082009-12-17T04:34:00.000-08:002009-12-17T05:28:43.171-08:00My First Wine Blog
Losing My Wine Blogging Virginity

There is always a bit of nervousness when doing anything for the first time and I am sure there will be a good measure of "do they like it", "I am doing it right" for a few posts but hopefully everyone that reads along will appreciate the effort and the intention to please. The blogs will likely be a combination of both food and drink. While my vinous pursuits are my vocation, we can afterall survive - albeit in a more boring manner or is that simply sobriety - without drink. The same can't be said of food. I've been inspired by some local Halifax food bloggers such as Chef Renee Lavallee (http://feistychef.ca/, Kristen Pickett (http://withbite.blogspot.com) and Heather Chase (http://www.theculinarychase.blogspot.com/) to get jazzed up about food and wine again. Heather and I have team up on her site. She does the food and I do the wine - its a lot of fun.

I have a feeling this renewed enthusiasm will spill into my day job www.occasionsmagazine.ca - at least the editing part of the equation. The realities of the modern magazine world is that I spend as much time selling advertising as I do writing articles.

I've been doing some odd outside writing jobs this fall (definitely not the pay) - mostly for the creative outlet of it all. Here are a couple abbreviated versions that I've done for Snap Magazine. The first is about celebrating the season with local flavour while the other is my recipe for squash and pear risotto.

Celebrating Local Flavour, In a Snap

I'm sure I am doomed for an afterlife in one of Dante's rings of hell as my addictions in life are coffee, wine and local food.

I'll discuss my coffee addictions in a later piece but for now let's talk about incorporating local flavour ino your holiday celebrations. For the record, I consider Canadian local if not in a geographic sense but in a supporting our own kind of way. Here are my top 5 seasonal and local food and wine pairings.

L'Acadie Vineyards Brut with Shandolph Oysters
Thirty Bench Riesling with thinly sliced baked ham
Le Clos Jordanne Villages Pinot Noir with Nova Scotia turkey
Blomidon Estate Reserve Chardonnay with boiled lobster served with drawn butter
Benjamin Bridge Borealis Icewine with Tarte Tatin (Nova Scotia apples of course)

Roast Winter Squash and Pear Risotto
Paired with Marques de Murrieta Yqay Capellania White Rioja or Marques de Casa Concha Chardonnay

Ingredients
5 cups 1 cm cubed butternut squash pieces
5 tablespoons olive oil
1 pear, diced
1 cup Arborio rice
4 cups chicken stock
1 clove garlic, minced
1 small onion, diced
1/2 cup white wine
3 tablespoons chopped fresh sage
1/2 cup grated Parmiggiano Reggiano
1/4 teaspoon all-spice
Salt and pepper to taste

Directions:
1. Place cubed squash in a roasting pan. Drizzle with olive oil and season with salt and pepper.
2.Place squash in oven preheated to 400F. Roast for 35 minutes.
3. Remove squash from oven and set aside.
4.Place chicken stock in a pot and place over medium-low heat.
5.Place a second pot over medium-low heat and add remaining olive oil. Add onion and saute until translucent. Add garlic and saute until fragrant (approximately 30 seconds).
6. Add arborio rice and saute ensuring grains are evenly covered in olive oil.
7. Increase the heat to medium and add white wine. When rice fully absorbs the wine add a ladle of warm stock. When the rice has fully absorbed the stock, repeat the process a ladle at a time until the stock is gone.
8. Add the Parmiggiano, diced, pear, squash and sage. Stir until well incorporated.
9. Season with pepper and a touch of salt (remember the cheese is salty so it will act as a seasoning agent).
10. Serve with a White Rioja or oaked Chardonnay.By the Glasshttp://email@example.com

subset: commoncrawl


text:
Ralph Jennings misreports on Taiwan again
Completely unacceptable
On my Facebook wall, Alex Raymond alerted me to a Ralph Jennings piece from Saturday titled "Taiwanese show guarded acceptance of China pact."
Do Taiwanese "accept" this so-called Economic Cooperation Framework Agreement (ECFA) at all?
Take a look this particular paragraph of Jennings' article [emphasis mine]:
Political analysts said the size of the protest, a month after a sit-in in Taipei attracted only a few hundred, was an indication that Taiwan's public accepted the deal, wanted to know more details or believed the government was deaf to protests.The first problem there is that Jennings quotes unnamed "political analysts." Would it make a difference if these "analysts" were close to President Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九) and the party he chairs, the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT)? Yes, it would. (See an earlier example of Jennings' use of similar tactics.)
The next problem is the simple lack of deductive logic. The first paragraph of the article claims that the size of Saturday's protest was "10,000" (and Jennings has greatly underestimated the number of attendees at previous protests by pro-Taiwan groups) and then tells readers of a sit-in that happened "a month" ago (which, in reality, was a 3-day protest which ended just 15 days ago) and which "attracted only a few hundred." Gee, according to my math, "10,000" is a much larger number, and 15 days is only half a month.
While it may be correct to say that Taiwanese "believed the government was deaf to protests," note how it's not the single possibility which was placed in the headline. Despite the addition of the word "guarded," the one which does appear there (and in the article minus the qualifier) is the one which is the easiest to disprove.
Just what do Taiwanese think about this ECFA?
Let's look at a poll from the pro-Chinese KMT TVBS which was released just this past Monday (May 31, 2010) [104 kb PDF file] for some indications [translations, emphasis mine]:
公投題目「是否同意政府與中國簽ECFA?」:同意42% v.s.不同意44%Bias!
Voting on a referendum which asks: "Should the government sign an ECFA with China?" 42% say "Yes" while 44% say "No."
[...] 15%未表示意見。
[...] 15% expressed no opinion.
Hold a referendum on ECFA? Public support increases to 55%, opposition slips to 30%
若辦公投,六成(59%)民眾說會去投票 [...]
If there is a referendum, 59% of the public says they will vote [...]
I don't trust TVBS, but remember that if there's any bias in their poll, it will be in favor of those pushing this ECFA with China. So, I must wonder: Does Ralph Jennings hate Taiwan and the truth, or will he write just anything -- as long as he keeps getting paid to do so?
Don't just accept what you read, especially not when it's written by "pros" who repeatedly provide you with information that is as easily disputed as the stuff Jennings keeps shoveling.
Check out how Reuters dissembles even more by using an image (with a caption that only appears as a pop-up) of cheering Taiwanese atop this version of the article.
Counterpoints: Taiwan, 台灣, ECFA, 經濟合作架構協議, Ralph Jennings, 唐甯思, media, 媒體
Cross-posted at It's Not Democracy, It's A Conspiracy!
Labels: ECFA, media, Ralph Jennings, Taiwan, Tim Maddog, 台灣, 唐甯思, 媒體, 經濟合作架構協議


text: Rajarshi Shahu Law College, Barshi is located in Maharashtra. The education institution was established in the year 1972. The College was affiliated to Solapur University. Rajarshi Shahu Law College offers various courses like BA.LLB. The college has a well developed infrastructure and facilities like computer lab, Auditorium, Sports and more. The college has well trained and experienced faculty members. Rajarshi Shahu Law College address, contact number is provided in contact details.


text:
For one of my projects I made a growth chart for children about the layers of the ocean, which had to be educational. So I had been drawing fish and found these amazing ink textures I did about 3 years ago. I used them for the background to create a underwater environment.
Also created a weird and wacky typeface for the title.
Weird and Wacky Zone Growth Chart


text:
Tbilisi - A court in ex-Soviet Georgia sentenced a top opposition leader to four and a half years in jail for misspending public funds, a charge he denounced as trumped-up and politically motivated.
The verdict came a day after Gigi Ugulava -- former mayor of the capital Tbilisi and an ally of ex-president Mikheil Saakashvili -- was released from custody following the Constitutional Court's ruling that his 14-month pre-trial detention was "illegal".
The original sentence was a nine-year jail term, but it was halved due to the terms of an amnesty act passed by Georgia's parliament in 2012 which covers both the crime Ugulava was charged with, and the period during which they were committed.
Judge Lasha Chkhartishvili found Ugulava guilty of the fictitious employment of hundreds of activists from Saakashvili's party in the Tbilisi municipality but acquitted him, along with former defence minister David Kezerashvili -- who was standing the same trial in absentia -- on money laundering charges.
Ugulava's lawyer Beka Basilaia denounced the verdict as part of "the government's witch-hunt against political opponents".
"We will appeal the illegal and politically motivated verdict to a higher court," Basilaia told AFP. "There is no proof whatsoever of my client's guilt."
Ugulava, 40, is one of over a dozen former top officials prosecuted after his fiercely pro-Western United National Movement (UNM) party lost legislative elections to the current ruling Georgian Dream coalition in 2012.
Ugulava and his lawyers refused to enter the courtroom to listen the verdict in protest against what he claimed was a "farce trial and a chronicle of a jailing foretold".
Hugging his two teenage daughters, Ugulava delivered an emotional speech, standing on the staircase of the court building in Tbilisi as hundreds of supporters chanted his name.
He said his fresh imprisonment was a foregone conclusion and accused Georgia's former premier and billionaire tycoon Bidzina Ivanishvili of orchestrating his prosecution.
Before bailiffs escorted him to custody, Ugulava vowed to defeat the Georgian Dream in the next parliamentary elections, saying that "2016 is the maximum term for Ivanishvili to stay in power".
Ivanishvili stepped down in 2013 and chose his protege Irakli Garibashvili to take over as premier, but it is widely believed that the tycoon continues to wield power behind the scenes over the tiny Caucasus nation of 3.7 million people.
Arrests of former top Saakashvili officials -- including ex-prime minister Vano Merabishvili -- for alleged wrongdoing prompted warnings from the West over selective justice and the perceived persecution of political opponents.
During his tenure as the mayor of Tbilisi, charismatic Ugulava led major infrastructure projects and social reforms which saw a dramatic improvement in living standards in the Georgian capital.
თემატური ბმული Radio Liberty, Eurasianet


text:
Canvas Cross Bars
Canvas Cross bars are used to 'brace' or support stretcher bars to stop 'twisting'or distortion of the square/rectangular frame that the canvas will be stretched onto. Loxley Canvas Cross Bars for canvas stretching are used in conjunction with the stretcher bars. They provide a method of 'firming' up the square frame. Only if you are stretching over 28" will you require these cross bars. No cutting is required as these Cross bars slot into the stretcher bars as they have a keyhole to slot the cross bar into.If using the Loxley Chunky Stretcher bars then Cross bars are not normally required as these are less prone to bowing or twisting.
New Products For February - Canvas


text:
Eurail Pass Guide
Eurail pass guide tells you about the most convenient, flexible and hassle free travel document that you can choose to make your Euro trip the best one.
These Eurail passes are available only and only to Tourists and hence its the most trust worthy and perfect travel doc you can have with you before you travel to Europe.
Whenever it comes to travelling in Europe the main concern among tourists is travelling to different cities in same country or long distance travelling in and out of each country. There are trains,Flights ferries, buses or cars and cabs but the most convenient and budget friendly option is travelling through Trains as Flight and cars is something which everyone cannot afford.
Train travelling is the best way of travelling in and around Europe and to save up on the point to point tickets there is this one document that fits well and is none other than 'Eurail pass'.
In this Eurail Pass guide all your questions are answered so here we go
1. what is Eurail pass ? and why should I opt for this pass?
Eurail Pass is one single travel document or a single pass through which you can enjoy extensive rail travelling for a specific number of days and can travel without taking point to point tickets at each and every junction. The days can be according to your travel plans ranging from 5,7,10,15,22, one month, two months or also up to 3 months.The beauty of this pass is that you can travel number of times to and fro and can take any train at any time.
which pass suits me and which pass should I buy?
There are 3 main types of passes
- Eurail Global passThis Global pass(http://www.eurail.com/eurail-passes/global-pass) is for those who want to travel to more that 4 countries as with this you can travel up to 28 countries in and around Europe.
- Eurail Select PassIn this pass there are 3 sub passes like:
- Two country pass
- Three country pass
- Four country pass
With Select pass(http://www.eurail.com/eurail-passes/select-pass) you can choose up to 4 countries but the only condition is the countries you choose should border each other means they should be adjacent and connected to each other. For Eg if you choose 2 country pass then you can choose Germany and France together but you cannot choose Germany and Spain together as they don't share common border.If you want to do both Germany and Spain then you will have to opt for a 3 country pass and do Germany,France and Spain together. This is how it works and you can select up to 4 countries in it.
The benefit of this pass is you pay only for those countries you plan to visit if your plan is fixed from before and you can choose the countries according to your travel plans
Eurail One country pass
In this one country pass(http://www.eurail.com/eurail-passes/one-country-pass) you can choose that one country you want to experience and can enjoy endless travelling within that country. Many people choose Italy in this category which works perfectly for single country travel.
3. Which trains can I take through Eurail?
With Eurail pass you can take any national railway companies trains i.e. owned by government and also some private trains.
Remember : With Eurail you cannot take all private trains(Like in Germany when we took a train run by BOB which was private, we had to pay extra amount so better check in advance and take the trains which are free and accepts Eurail. Check the participating railway companies here(http://www.eurail.com/europe-by-train/trains/participating-railway-companies)
Don't need to worry about this aspect as there are almost all trains which accept Eurail and there are only a few exceptions.
what are the costs for each pass?Do I need to pay any extra amount for reserving a seat?
Different passes have different costs and it all depends on your travel itinerary and number of travel days.Also your age plays an important role as the costs differ from youth to adults to family(http://www.eurail.com/eurail-passes/global-pass)
When you opt for a Eurail pass the best thing is that you can take any train and at any time so unless for long distance journeys or night travelling you don't need to bother about seat reservations.
Whenever we travelled by any train there were ample of space and many vacant seats for us so we just used to get in the train and find a nice window seats for us but during long distance journeys we did prior bookings and had to pay for the reservation fee.
When you have a Eurail pass, you just need to give the reservation fees for a particular seat and not the entire travel amount as you already have a pass with you.If you don't want to pay extra you can still manage on long distance journeys but the only pit fall would be that you cannot guarantee consecutive seats or may be your group will have to scatter here and there.
From where can I buy this Eurail Pass?? is it available online?
When you reach Europe you can buy this pass at any train station but to save on money its always good to order it online on http://www.eurail.com/help/ordering-pass and have it with you before you start your Europe journey.You can also book it online and get it delivered when you reach Europe.In this case you just need to give the address of your hotel or hostel on which you want it to be delivered.
How can I start using it once it is delivered to my destination?
Once you order your pass and it reaches you,90 % of your work is done. What you need to do is just get it activated for the first time when you start your travel journey. You can activate your pass from any train station.
Activation means they put the stamp with date and time on your pass so that your days starts from that date itself.
How can I plan my trip itinerary and how can I know the train distances and time table of trains?
Once you get your Eurail pass activated your Euro trip starts in the real sense.Now you just have to plan your trip according to your liking and can make use of Eurail train planner app.This app helps you with all information regarding the train travelling. It helps in finding train station,tells you the timing of arrival and departure,rail time tables plus many more extra things.
It works offline too and can be downloaded for free. For android (https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=de.hafas.android.eurail&hl=nl) and for iphone ( https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/rail-planner-offline-timetable/id579547877?l=de&ls=1&mt=8).
Apart from trains can I opt for any other transport vehicle through Eurail?
Along with trains, Eurail also gives discounts on some boat rides and ferries as many Ferry companies have partnership with Eurail. You can also enjoy scenic ocean views with your Eurail pass (for more info on this visit http://www.eurail.com/europe-by-train/ferries)
9. What can I do if my pass gets lost or I need any assistance with my Eurail?
If you feel you are not good at handling travel documents or have a history of losing important documents just opt for a 'Pass loss and theft coverage'.Through this you will have to pay an extra amount than the usual pass amount but it rescues you in tough times when your travel pass is lost. This is like an insurance for your pass so if you feel its necessary then only opt for this service.
If you need any further assistance you can visit any of the Eurail aid offices(http://www.eurail.com/plan-your-trip/travel-resources/eurail-aid-offices) which are mostly situated near the main railway stations and here you can get assistance for your queries.
Travelling by Eurail is one of the best experiences but before that you must know all the things related to it. I think I have covered most of the points here but if you need to ask anything more,feel free to write to me back.
Also check my blog regarding 'Eurail Global Pass' and its benefits that proved to be a blessing for our Euro trip
Till then keep travelling and keep living..!!


text:
Bakkies Botha
|Bakkies Botha, dressed in the Springbok change kit after a pre-match warm up.
|Full name
|John Philip Botha
|Date of birth
|22 September 1979
|Place of birth
|Newcastle, South Africa
|2.02 m (6 ft 7 1⁄2 in)
|124 kg (273 lb; 19 st 7 lb)
|Middelburg THS and Vereeniging THS, South Africa
|Professional rugby union footballer
|Rugby union career
|Playing career
|Professional / senior clubs
|Club / team
|correct as of 30 January 2015.
|Provincial/State sides
|Club / team
Blue Bulls
|correct as of 24 March 2015.
|Super Rugby
|Club / team
|correct as of 25 November 2013.
|National team(s)
|Club / team
|South Africa (test)
South Africa (tour)
Springbok XV
South Africa 'A'
South Africa Under-23
South African Schools
|correct as of 17 November 2014.
John Philip "Bakkies" Botha, (born 22 September 1979 in Newcastle, KwaZulu-Natal Province) is a South African rugby union player who played as a lock for the Springboks until 22 November 2014. He was a member of the national team that won the 2007 Rugby World Cup in France in addition to winning two Tri Nations titles in the 2004 Tri Nations Series and the 2009 Tri Nations Series. Botha plays for RC Toulonnais in the Top 14 after signing from Blue Bulls provincial team in the Currie Cup competition and the Bulls Super Rugby team. Botha was also a member of the Toulon squad which won the 2013, 2014 and 2015 Heineken Cup/European Rugby Champions Cup Finals.
Botha played for the under-19 and under-23 Springbok sides before being chosen for the South African "A" team that toured Europe at the end of 2001. The following year he was selected for the Springbok team and made his debut against France in Marseille on 9 September 2002, a game the Springboks went on to lose 30–10.
Through the years Botha and Blue Bulls teammate Victor Matfield formed a formidable partnership at lock for both their province and country. Botha is known as one of the "hardest" locks in world rugby, and is nicknamed "The Enforcer" for his physical play.[1]
His confrontational style has resulted in a number of controversial incidents. He received a yellow card for stamping in his debut against France.[2] Then in August 2003 he was accused of biting and then eye-gouging Wallabies hooker Brendan Cannon, and although there was insufficient video evidence to consider the biting charge, and he was found not guilty of gouging, he was still suspended for eight weeks for "attacking the face".[3] Cannon has given interviews stating that Botha both bit and gouged him [1] [2], and Botha himself gave an interview to The Times saying that his ban was "for an eye-gouge" [3].
In April 2009 he received a three match ban for striking Phil Waugh in a 2009 Super 14 season match,[4]
In June 2009 whilst playing for South Africa in the second test against the British and Irish Lions, Botha was banned for two weeks for a dangerous charge on the Lions prop Adam Jones in a ruck which left the Welsh player with a dislocated shoulder requiring surgery.[5][6] Botha's appeal against the ban was dismissed, and he missed the third test against the Lions.[7] The injured Jones himself later came out in defence of Botha, saying:
- "Botha shouldn't have been banned for it, nowhere near it. I don't have any complaints. He just cleared me out of the ruck and I got caught. Everyone counter-rucks nowadays and, if anything, I was in the wrong place. He just hit me and I was unlucky. So I was surprised to see he got banned. I know we didn't cite him so I don't know why the independent commissioner did. It was just a fair ruck from a hard player. When I have met him before he seems like a tidy enough bloke so I'm not seeing it as anything malicious."[8][9]
In a controversial move, the whole South African team wore armbands with 'Justice 4' (a reference to Botha's shirt number) written on them in the third and final test against the Lions, in support of Botha and in protest over perceived inconsistencies in the citing process,[10] for which the South African Rugby Union was charged with bringing the game into disrepute by the IRB.
In May 2010, during the Bulls Super 14 game against the Stormers, Botha was suspended for four weeks following a dangerous clearout of wing Gio Aplon.[11] This was Botha's first match as captain of the Bulls. The suspension meant Botha missed the playoffs.
On 10 July 2010, in the 1st test of the 2010 Tri Nations Series against New Zealand, Botha was suspended from all rugby for 9 weeks by an IRB judiciary for head-butting All Black halfback Jimmy Cowan, ruling him out of the remainder of the 2010 Tri Nations Series.[12]
Botha played in three winning Currie Cup finals with the Bulls ('02, '04 & '09), and was also a member of the victorious Bulls team in the Super 14 in the 2007 Super 14 season, 2009 Super 14 season and 2010 Super 14 season. He also won the Heineken Cup/European Rugby Champions Cup with Toulon in 2013, 2014 and 2015. He is now one of the most decorated players in world rugby.[13]
- Vodacom Cup: 2001
- Currie Cup: 2002, 2004, 2009
- Super Rugby: 2007, 2009, 2010
- World Cup: 2007
- Tri-Nations: 2004, 2009
- British & Irish Lions Series Trophy: 2009
- Mandela Challenge Plate: 2005, 2009
- Freedom Cup: 2004, 2009
- Prince William Cup: 2007, 2008, 2010
- Heineken Cup European Champions/European Rugby Champions Cup: 2013, 2014, 2015
- Top 14 French League : 2014
- ↑ "Who's Who of Southern Africa". 24.com. Retrieved 2009-06-06.<templatestyles src="Module:Citation/CS1/styles.css"></templatestyles>
- ↑ "France prance to 30–10 win over Boks". Independent Online. 10 November 2002.<templatestyles src="Module:Citation/CS1/styles.css"></templatestyles>
- ↑ "Botha's biting allegations crop up again". 12 September 2003.<templatestyles src="Module:Citation/CS1/styles.css"></templatestyles>
- ↑ Kyle Mackey-Laws (15 April 2009). "Botha suspension boosts Brumbies".<templatestyles src="Module:Citation/CS1/styles.css"></templatestyles>
- ↑ "Lions lose both props for third test after surgery". The Guardian. London. 28 June 2009.<templatestyles src="Module:Citation/CS1/styles.css"></templatestyles>
- ↑ http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YpSv4r_yJRI
- ↑ "Botha banned for charge on Jones". RTÉ News. 28 June 2009.<templatestyles src="Module:Citation/CS1/styles.css"></templatestyles>
- ↑ http://www.planetrugby.com/lions-09/story/0,25883,3819_5489824,00.html
- ↑ http://www.walesonline.co.uk/rugbynation/rugby-news/2009/08/14/bakkies-botha-hit-was-just-one-of-those-things-says-adam-jones-91466-24438634/
- ↑ Paul Morgan (4 July 2009). "Board probes armband protest after Boks back banned Botha". London: Daily Mail.<templatestyles src="Module:Citation/CS1/styles.css"></templatestyles>
- ↑ http://www.allvoices.com/news/5898355/b/56141166-rugby-videos-of-tackles-tries-funny-incidents-and-more-on-
- ↑ Spiro Zavos (12 July 2010). "The Boks have to play more rugby, less thugby". "The Roar.<templatestyles src="Module:Citation/CS1/styles.css"></templatestyles>
- ↑ http://www.espnscrum.com/heineken-cup-2012-13/rugby/story/183042.html
External links
- Bakkies Botha at SARugby.co.za
- Bakkies Botha at Springbok Rugby Hall of Fame
- Bakkies Botha at itsrugby.co.uk
- Use dmy dates from June 2014
- Use South African English from August 2012
- All Wikipedia articles written in South African English
- 1979 births
- Living people
- People from Newcastle, KwaZulu-Natal
- Rugby union locks
- Bulls (rugby union) players
- Blue Bulls players
- RC Toulonnais players
- South African rugby union players
- South Africa international rugby union players
- Afrikaner people
- White South African people
- Super Rugby players
- South African expatriate rugby union players
- South African expatriates in France
- Expatriate rugby union players in France
- Barbarian F.C. players


text:
I keep getting an error when trying to save settings. I have tried to uninstall and reinstall with the same issues.
It was working, nothing has changed on the server.
Well, I was trying to post the Exception error, but this site thinks it is too "spamy" even though there are not urls. ("Your post looks too spamy for a new user, please remove off-site URLs.")
I have a premium license and am trying to get help.
Exception org.springframework.dao.DataIntegrityViolationException
Message ..................................... (won't let me post this line).........................
Java version Oracle Corporation 1.8.0_151
Operating system Linux 4.2.8
Server jetty/8.y.z-SNAPSHOT
Memory Used 111 of 307 MB


text:
Hey guys! As the monsoons hit, i crave to wear and carry bright colors. I can hardly stand that gloom, so i try and bring my own sunshine through bright and fresh outfits. Like this LAVIE bag, the bright blue reminds me of the fresh blue skies, or the warm Mediterranean blue sea. Absolutely love this bag!
Today LAVIE made me reveal 'what is in my bag?'. Which means, what are the things i usually carry around in my bag everyday. One thing is for sure, my bag is always big and i love to carry my whole world with me. This bag is the perfect size for being the everyday bag which is chic, trendy and good quality. Loving the gold details on the bag and the cutout design.
SHOP this bag here : LAVIE
Here is how i styled this bag! I teamed it up with this gorgeous white off shoulder dress by SHE INSIDE and lace up espadrilles by NEW LOOK.
Eargasm today :
So now let's move on to "WHAT'S IN MY BAG?"
1. Wallet : My Louis Vuitton wallet goes everywhere with me. It is the best wallet i have owned till date as it fits all my cards and money perfectly and is a looker!
2. Car Key : I am crazy about my car! I literally treat my car as a person. I talk to him, cry to him, sing with him. I am sure many of you will agree, the first car will always be your best friend for life. I won't let anyone drive him as well. Even when in high heels there will always be driving flats under my seat. Yup, i am one of those people who cannot drive in heels. Hats off to women who can do that!
3. House Keys : Who wants to get locked out? I have, many times! and the break in stories are hilarious. I will leave that for another time.
4. Phone : Sometimes i feel my phone is an extension of my arm. Well who doesn't?
5. Battery charger : This is the hilarious thing! I always carry this charger around as it is great for emergency charging of the battery gorging iPhone (Instagram is the culprit i think), but when i plug in, most times i realize i forgot to charge the charger. I always promise myself to get home and do that the first thing. Well.... that reminds me....
6. M.A.C. Prep and Prime Compact Powder : I am the oily T zone girl! This compact is just perfect for me.
7. Lip Service : I always carry a lip gloss and a few lip colors with me. These ones are from Chanel, Dior and YSL.
8. Clinique Dramatically Different Moisturizer : Absolutely love this mini Clinique, perfect for moisture on the go!
9. Miss Dior Perfume : One spritz puts me in a good mood and completes my outfit :)
What i wore :
Bag : LAVIE , Dress : SHE INSIDE , Shoes : NEW LOOK , Sunglasses : RAYBAN


text:
Annual Reports and Interactive Data
NARMS Now: Human Data
See how antibiotic resistance for four bacteria transmitted commonly through food has changed over the past two decades.
The NARMS Annual Reports summarize antimicrobial resistance among enteric bacteria. The Annual Reports describe the number and type of isolates collected, their associated antimicrobial resistance, and trends in antimicrobial resistance. These four reports, the Human Isolates Report (CDC), the Retail Meat Isolates Report (FDA), the Interagency Executive Report (FDA), and the Animal Isolates Report (USDA), are published yearly. This web page contains CDC NARMS Annual Human Isolates Reports dating back to 1997.
Learn more about the roles of federal and state agencies who track antibacterial resistance in support of food safety.
Laboratory Testing and Isolate Submissions
The CDC NARMS laboratory conducts antimicrobial resistance testing on isolates from sporadic cases and outbreaks of illness. The lab also confirms and studies bacteria that have new antimicrobial resistance patterns and performs research to understand the mechanisms of resistance and how they are spread. More
2015 NARMS Annual Human Isolates Report
Find out what's new in the 2015 report
- Read the 2015 Annual Human Isolates Report [PDF – 84 pages]
- This annual report includes CDC's surveillance data for 2015 for nontyphoidal Salmonella (refers to serotypes not causing typhoid fever), typhoidal Salmonella (serotypes Typhi, Paratyphi A, Paratyphi B [tartrate negative], and Paratyphi C), Shigella, Campylobacter, E. coli O157, and Vibrio species other than V. cholerae
- Surveillance data include the number of isolates of each bacteria tested by NARMS and the number and percentage of isolates that were resistant to each of the antimicrobials tested. Data for earlier years are presented in tables and graphs when appropriate.
NARMS Annual Human Isolates Reports
- 2015 [PDF – 84 pages, 7 MB]
- 2014 [PDF – 83 pages, 1.88 MB]
- 2013 [PDF – 81 pages, 9.77 MB]
- 2012 [PDF – 88 pages, 1.47 MB]
- 2011 [PDF – 71 pages, 1.46 MB]
- 2010 [PDF – 75 pages, 2.69 MB]
- 2009 [PDF – 75 pages, 16.9 MB]
- 2008 [PDF – 78 pages, 1.59 MB]
- 2007 [PDF – 66 pages, 2.75 MB]
- 2006 [PDF – 69 pages, 2.29 MB]
- 2005 [PDF – 78 pages, 1.18 MB]
- Page last reviewed: August 19, 2017
- Page last updated: August 1, 2018
- Content source:


text:
If I've been a bit out of touch these last few weeks it's because we got back Tuesday from 18 days vacation in England. It was a terrific trip. We had great weather, did lots of walking and sightseeing. In fact we pretty much rolled out of bed early, spent the day on the move, and got back to the hotel at 10 pm and fell into bed. Every day.
I brought socks to knit- and got a sock and a half done. Despite knitting on trains, buses and in restaurants, we were on the move *a lot*. Actually most of the half-sock was knit on the flight home. Here's the completed one:
A nice simple pattern, something I could pick up and put down without losing track of what I was doing.
Naturally, the cats stayed home while we were away. The boys had a sitter who came in every day, as well as several of our friends who dropped by to visit the cats and play with them. I swear, Biscuit and Cookie have a more active social life than we do! They were pretty laid back about our being gone, not anxious or upset when we came back, which was good. Though since we came back I have noticed an increased propensity on Biscuit's part to follow me around and settle wherever I am, keeping an eye on things. Kind of like this:
Clearly, he thinks I need supervision. Who knows what I might get up to without it?
Actually, what I'm likely to do is fall asleep. We got in at nearly midnight Tuesday, and both went back to work on Wednesday morning. Our theory was that the time change going west is easier, which is certainly true. However, this is the longest vacation we've ever taken anywhere, let alone overseas, and we underestimated the extent to which we had adapted to the different time zone. Our bodies remain stubbornly convinced that it's five hours later than the clock says, despite us keeping appropriate hours in eastern standard time. We've been home five days, and today's the first day I haven't woken at 5 am, convinced I'd overslept!
At any rate, the next little while on the blog is going to be consumed by travelogue, a whopping 18 days worth. Don't worry, I'll be editing the nearly 1000 photos we took down to something more reasonable. And if you're not a fan of vicarious travel, check back in a week or so- when we'll be getting back to our regularly scheduled crafting and cat picture content.


text:
The book business as we know it will not be living happily ever after. With sales stagnating, CEO heads rolling, big-name authors playing musical chairs, and Amazon looming as the new boogeyman, publishing might have to look for its future outside the corporate world.
By Boris Kachka
HarperCollins occupies floors 1 through 22 of a giant steel-and-glass box on 53rd Street. But up on 26, the receptionist for a tiny offshoot of the company sits alone, gatekeeper to a few drab rows of empty cubicles. A glass container on a table holds a mysterious pile of bright-yellow lightbulbs.
"Welcome to our temporary home," says 51-year-old publisher Bob Miller, ushering me into a colleague's more inviting office. Inside, he and his staffers prepare to impart a cheery message: They're going to fix publishing!
But first, a horror story. Debbie Stier, Miller's No. 2 at HarperStudio (as this little imprint is called), has been collecting videos for their blog. "You want to see what happens to books after they go to book heaven?" she asks. On the screen of her MacBook, a giant steel shredder disgorges a ragged mess of paper and cardboard onto a conveyor belt. This is the fate of up to 25 percent of the product churned out by New York's publishing machine.
Everyone's eyes widen, as though watching some viral YouTube gross-out. "It's like Wall-E," says marketing director Sarah Burningham. "It's depressing," Miller adds. They had sent in a Flip camera with a warehouse worker. "You can see our books go through there," says Stier. "The Crichton, the Ann Patchett."
Miller recently left Hyperion, which he founded seventeen years ago, to start his own imprint at the urging of HarperCollins's then-CEO, Jane Friedman. She was replaced in June, but HarperStudio lives on. For all its ambitions, it's a modest outfit: Miller and three women, two of them in their twenties, hope to publish two books a month starting next May, having convinced 25 authors to forgo big advances in return for half of their books' eventual profit. The books they'll be doing aren't particularly outré—Emeril Lagasse on grilling, 50 Cent is collaborating with The 48 Laws of Power author Robert Greene—but they're hoping that their process will be revolutionary.
Over the past few weeks, Stier has turned her own Flip camera on friends and colleagues, asking them to hold up those yellow lightbulbs and share their "bright ideas" on publishing. She plays us a few of the clips, including one of a publicist who delivers Stier's intended punch line, tentatively: "Have fewer authors and sell more books?" But the suggestion that gets the biggest laugh in the office is from Stier's 12-year-old son, who says, "So maybe you have to turn all the books into movies so nobody has to waste their time."
"It is a very trying time. I'm kind of down about it myself." —JONATHAN GALASSI, PRESIDENT OF FARRAR, STRAUS AND GIROUX
The demise of publishing has been predicted since the days of Gutenberg. But for most of the past century—through wars and depressions—the business of books has jogged along at a steady pace. It's one of the main (some would say only) advantages of working in a "mature" industry: no unsustainable highs, no devastating lows. A stoic calm, peppered with a bit of gallows humor, prevailed in the industry.
Survey New York's oldest culture industry this season, however, and you won't find many stoics. What you will find are prophets of doom, Cassandras in blazers and black dresses arguing at elegant lunches over What Is to Be Done. Even best-selling publishers and agents fresh from seven-figure deals worry about what's coming next. Two, five years from now—who knows? Life moves fast in the waning era of print; publishing doesn't.
So what's causing this, exactly—this inchoate dread that's suddenly turned "choate," as one insider puts it? The anxiety would be endurable if it was just a function of the late-Bush economy: Sales at the five big publishers were up 0.5 percent in the first half of this year, bookstore sales tanked in June, and a full-year decline is expected. But pretty much every aspect of the business seems to be in turmoil. There's the floundering of the few remaining semi-independent midsize publishers; the ouster of two powerful CEOs—one who inspired editors and one who at least let them be; the desperate race to evolve into e-book producers; the dire state of Borders, the only real competitor to Barnes & Noble; the feeling that outrageous money is being wasted on mediocre books; and Amazon .com, which many publishers look upon as a power-hungry monster bent on cornering the whole business.
One by one, these would be difficult problems to solve. But as a series of interrelated challenges, they constitute a full-blown crisis—a climate change as unpredictable as it is inevitable. And like global warming, it elicits reactions ranging from denial to Darwinian survivalism to determined stabs at warding off disaster—attempts not to recapture some long-lost era but to harness new, untapped sources of power. That is, if it's not too late.
"Flat is not an acceptable position. We are always expected to grow." —CAROLYN REIDY, CEO OF SIMON & SCHUSTER
In its heyday, publishing was a vast array of mom-and-pop shops, in which the pops tended to be independently wealthy. Their competitive advantage was not efficiency or low costs but taste. Maxwell Perkins at Scribner; Bennett Cerf at Random House; Roger Straus and Robert Giroux at Farrar, Straus and Giroux; Barney Rosset at Grove; and Alfred A. Knopf epitomized the gentleman editor as gallerist, snatching up unknown geniuses. One British publisher advised an American at the time: "Take lots and lots of gambles, but small ones." So they did. They took poor writers drinking, put them up in their homes, and defended them in court. They made handshake deals, spent their personal wealth in lean years, and built backlists out of modernist classics. Discovering Faulkner was like buying Picassos in 1910.
In the early sixties, Knopf sold out to Cerf, who sold Random House to RCA, and the era of consolidation began. Formerly independent publishers shriveled into mere imprints of massive corporations. Knopf became part of Random House; so did Doubleday and Bantam and Ballantine and dozens of still smaller shops now distinguished mostly by their names, like corporatized Broadway theaters bearing the monikers of long-gone cigar-chomping producers.
By the nineties, five big conglomerates were divvying up the spoils and their lucrative backlists. Many of the smaller companies that had been struggling, like FSG, Ecco, and Crown, were flush with corporate resources. But in exchange, they gave up final say in how they'd publish their books—or even what books they'd publish. And suddenly an industry accustomed to 5 percent margins was being run by media moguls aiming for double digits.
The corporations began by doing what they knew how to do: acquire, expand, diversify, spend. Sign up all kinds of writers, pay some of them a ton, market the hell out of them, see what sticks. It was the nineties, after all. A few books sold spectacularly, but more failed, and in the last ten years, the bill has come due. So today, the order comes down from beleaguered CEOs: More blockbuster books, fast. Which leads to cutthroat auctions and ballooning advances. You can't win big if you don't bet big.
Lately, the whole, hoary concept of paying writers advances against royalties has come under question. Following their down payments to authors, publishers don't have to pay a cent in royalties, which are usually 15 percent of the hardcover price, 7.5 for paperbacks, until that signing bonus is earned back. The system is supposed to be mutually beneficial; the publishers guarantee writers a certain income, and then both parties share in the proceeds beyond that level. But it only works for publishers if they're conservative in their expectations. As auctions over hot books have grown more frequent, prudence has gone out the window— paying a $1 million advance to a 26-year-old first-time novelist becomes a public-relations gambit as much as an investment in that writer's future.
That money has to come from somewhere, so publishers have cracked down on their non-star writers. The advances you don't hear about have been dropping precipitously. For every Pretty Young Debut Novelist who snags that seven-figure prize, ten solid literary novelists have seen advances slashed for their third books.
Of course, back in the boom nineties, the corporations themselves were pumping up the expectations of midlist writers. Consider Dale Peck. His first novel, Martin and John, came out in 1993 to excellent reviews, and by his third book, in 1998, he was, by his own account, wildly overpaid. Books, he says, "were like Internet stocks, getting enormous advances without demonstrating any moneymaking whatsoever." Having rarely sold more than 10,000 copies, he took up with superagent Andrew Wylie, developed a reputation for being a "diva," and pretty soon couldn't sell a book to save his life. Until he started specializing in genre fiction—first children's books, then horror. Last year, Peck sold Body Surfing, a thriller about demons exiting people through sexual release. He's now splitting $3 million with Heroes writer Tim Kring to produce a trilogy of conspiracy thrillers.
Peck sees an increasingly hostile environment for the kind of books he used to write. "When you get $100,000 for a novel," he says, "you want $150,000 and then $200,000, so when they pay you $25,000 for the next one, and my rent is $2,500 a month, what do you do? The system works just fine for commercial fiction. But for literary fiction, I think we had a nice run of it in the commercial world."
The good fiction that does manage to snag a stratospheric advance is mostly either a follow-up to or a knockoff of a freak hit. The astonishing success of Charles Frazier's Cold Mountain led to a bidding war for his second book, which Grove/Atlantic editor Morgan Entrekin lost with great regret to Ann Godoff at Random House's eponymous imprint (known as Little Random). Lucky him. The price tag, more than $8 million, might well have sunk Grove, one of the few biggish independent houses left, because Frazier's follow-up, Thirteen Moons, sold less than 500,000 copies, according to BookScan. Ann Godoff was fired not long after the deal was made. "It is possible they broke Little Random's neck," says one agent. "Frazier's wife will not have the luxury to buy another racehorse."
But overspending isn't going away, even with a rotten economy. Last month, Harvard economist Anita Elberse wrote a piece debunking the hypothesis of Chris Anderson's anti-blockbuster blockbuster, The Long Tail (which Bob Miller acquired at Hyperion for a mere $550,000). Elberse led off with a tidbit from a study of Hachette's Grand Central Publishing. Of 61 books on its 2006 list, each title averaged a profit of almost $100,000. But without the top seller, which earned $5 million, that average drops to $18,000. "A blockbuster strategy still makes the most sense," she concludes.
It's inherently risky, though. You have to wonder about the prospects for one new book that Elberse had her students case-study—Dewey: The Small-Town Library Cat Who Touched the World. Grand Central, inspired by the best seller Marley & Me, is betting on the new mini-genre of cat-related nonfiction. Grand Central initially offered $300,000, then went up to $1.25 million. Gobs more will be spent on marketing. You'll likely be hearing about Dewey when it comes out this month, and if half a million of you still feel that you can't get enough heartwarming pet stories, it just might earn back its advance.
So publishing ends up looking like a mini-Hollywood, but even more dependent on sleeper hits and semi-reliable franchises. Dan Brown's The Da Vinci Code buoyed Random House tremendously in the past five years, but with Brown's sequel delayed, sales were down 5.6 percent last year. When Simon & Schuster announced that sales were off almost 10 percent in the first half of '08, it cited the 2007 success of The Secret as the reason for the relative shortfall. Other companies did better—but on the strength of surprise hits. Sales grew 11 percent both at Penguin and at Hachette's U.S. division, largely on the backs of two authors—Oprah-touted self-helper Eckhart Tolle at Penguin and Stephenie Meyer at Little, Brown.
Morgan Entrekin remembers meeting Larry Kirshbaum, then-CEO of Time Warner Books, right after two of Kirshbaum's books had been anointed by Oprah in 1999. "It's like winning the lottery twice," says Entrekin, "but Larry didn't seem that happy. He said, 'Now my bosses are going to expect me to do better next year.' '' Kirshbaum eventually left to become an agent.
"If someone like Jane Friedman can't survive the industry, who can?" —AN EDITOR AT A HARPERCOLLINS RIVAL
The ideal publishing CEO can "read vertically and horizontally," in the words of ex-Penguin CEO Peter Mayer. But even those who clearly can do both, like Jane Friedman, seem powerless to keep their bosses happy. Friedman had an odd retirement party. It was thrown not by her former employer, HarperCollins, but by her rival and close friend, Doubleday publisher Steve Rubin. The turnout for mid-August was impressive: Power agents Amanda "Binky" Urban and Mort Janklow and legendary editors Sonny Mehta, Gary Fisketjon, and Dan Halpern all converged on Rubin's elegant roof deck off Central Park West. They surprised the guest of honor by wearing disturbing Jane Friedman masks. Friedman herself gave a defiant speech insisting that it wasn't a retirement party at all. "Books mean civilization," she said, perched on iron steps that resembled a barricade from Les Misérables. Later she proclaimed, "I am not done, and I am not done by a long shot!"
Friedman was an emblem not of publishing's genteel old days but rather its postmillennial media- and tech-savvy era. She came up through publicity at Random House, and over a decade as CEO, she turned HarperCollins from a floundering beast into the business's tightest, shiniest ship. She also attended personally to writers. She had such a good relationship with Michael Crichton that he followed her from Random House to HarperCollins. Yet a few days after being the belle of the industry's annual confab, BookExpo, held in L.A. last spring, she went into Rupert Murdoch's office and was told that her own protégé, Harper No. 2 Brian Murray, was replacing her. As one editor puts it, "She went over there thinking they were going to discuss [her] contract, and instead she got a two-by-four across the face."
Friedman was never known as a gentle soul, but her brutal "resignation" spooked the industry. What exactly had she done to deserve this? HarperCollins's recent numbers were down but had recovered reasonably by June. With both parties refusing to comment, theories abounded, the most plausible of which is that Murdoch thought she had become more noise and trouble than she was worth, running a part of his conglomerate that, relatively speaking, isn't worth all that much to him. There was her messy dismissal of Judith Regan following the O. J. debacle—a tabloid event that dovetailed too well with Friedman's reputed love of publicity. Murdoch, people at the company say, didn't like seeing Friedman's name all over the papers.
Murray looks to be a less conspicuous character. He promises to continue Friedman's innovations, and to accelerate a worldwide expansion of the business. "We have a green light from News Corp. to invest in our business," he says. Friedman, meanwhile, is said to be mulling an Amazon consulting gig.
The new face at the top of Random House, who replaced Peter Olson as CEO the week before Friedman left, is 40 and has never worked in book publishing before. Markus Dohle, a veteran of Bertelsmann's printing business, cuts quite a different figure from, say, dapper, laconic Knopf editor Sonny Mehta, a man who's survived many a CEO and is said to have shrugged comically when he found out—via the New York Times—that Olson was out. "It's like Dohle's 27 years old: He sort of bounces on the balls of his feet the way college athletes do," says one longtime industry observer.
Dohle has spent the last three months on a listening tour, and his subjects nervously await the results. So far, many prefer his demeanor to that of Olson, a man whose voracious reading failed to make up for his coldness (an in-house joke was that he was a Swede pretending to be a German). But managerially, Olson had one saving grace. "He left people alone," says the industry observer. "But [Dohle] doesn't come out of a tradition of editors as geniuses who need to be left alone in a room to smell manuscripts and decide on them."
Random House had a weak 2007, and publishing sources say Olson didn't do enough to eliminate its endemic inefficiencies. Imprints are still allowed to bid against each other for books, thus driving up prices, and every one of them has a major problem or two. Little Random has been without an official editor-in-chief since Daniel Menaker left last year. Doubleday, post–Da Vinci Code, is overextended. And two of Random's down-market imprints, Crown and Bantam, are said to have dragged down past earnings; Bantam Dell head Irwyn Applebaum is a frequent object of anticipatory Schadenfreude. "When business is slow, tongues are fast," responds Random House spokesman Stuart Applebaum, Irwyn's brother, declining a request to speak to Dohle and calling the speculation "fantasy-league Random House." He says there is "zero change" at the imprints, and that Bantam "consistently delivers some of the company's biggest-selling hardcovers and paperbacks."
Dohle has been popping into editorial marketing meetings, something Olson almost never did. At the end of July, Mehta brought Dohle as a surprise guest to a Knopf meeting. Looking over a sales spreadsheet, he muttered to Mehta, "This isn't how the other imprints do it." Editors who were called in during the meeting hadn't all been told Dohle would be there. One such editor, herself a former executive, said of a book with disappointing sales, "It's dead in the water. Don't worry about it." Another person in attendance says, "You could see Dohle's eyebrows going, 'Oh boy, that was candid.' " What was his take on the proceedings? Where would these little observations lead, and how would they affect the people in this room? No one yet knows.
"I think agents often like for there to be problems, because they can be the stalwart support behind a writer." —GARY FISKETJON, KNOPF EDITOR
The blockbuster era makes retaining marquee writers an increasingly complex proposition. Back when Grove's Barney Rosset was boozing around Paris with Samuel Beckett, agents were adjuncts, the ones who handled the details (in fact, Rosset became Beckett's agent too). The editor, both best friend and midwife to genius, had it made. The pay was awful, but what company! And all in the service of art. "We publish authors, not books," FSG's people like to say—and for decades, through best sellers and duds, great writers and prestigious publishers were inseparable. Some still are: Philip Roth, thus far, has stuck by Houghton Mifflin even after its painful merger with Harcourt. John Updike, at Knopf, doesn't even have an agent. But early this year, two of publishing's tightest bonds were broken. Richard Ford left Knopf's star editor, Gary Fisketjon, for Dan Halpern at Ecco (Binky Urban, the agent who handled Frazier's deal, did this one, too). And, after 42 years at FSG, Tom Wolfe left for Little, Brown.
Fisketjon, renowned for his close friendships and even closer edits (Raymond Carver, Cormac McCarthy, et al.), was more than Ford's editor—he and the novelist "would kill furry animals in the woods together," as one colleague puts it. But doing business together had become tricky. Ford's literary reputation and popularity had fallen out of alignment; his last book, The Lay of the Land, sold less than 100,000 copies, per BookScan. Slow-and-steady Knopf didn't seem fazed, but the author himself was. He thought house enthusiasm had waned, and "he never felt the money was commensurate with the work that was produced," says the colleague. It couldn't have been easy when the Lauren Weisbergers of the world were getting better deals than he was. "He's 64, looking for that one last score in the literary world." Knopf offered Ford roughly $750,000 per book, at which point Mehta capped the money, according to the source; Ecco offered $3 million for three books.
Others say that Ford had simply grown unhappy with Fisketjon's editing. Cormac McCarthy left Fisketjon, too, but he stayed with Knopf and had Mehta edit him. When Ford decided to leave, says the source, he left Fisketjon a phone message explaining his move. It was never returned. He sent a follow-up e-mail, which Fisketjon answered with a surly note. Only Ford and Fisketjon know what exact words were exchanged (and both refuse to comment on their relationship after the move), but Ford later told someone that "Gary has to learn he's no longer in high school." This was business, after all.
Tom Wolfe kept FSG afloat in its last decade of independence with The Bonfire of the Vanities, but Jonathan Galassi shrugs off making him a lowball offer earlier this year. Little, Brown paid about $7 million for his next novel, a Miami race parable, after Galassi reportedly balked at an early request for $5 million. "We went through a court dance," says Galassi. "Everyone acted their part, and the result could have been predicted from the beginning."
Wolfe says his divorce was cordial, noting that 42 years is a lot of loyalty—which, by the way, is a two-way street. "Making a living as a writer is much more like Protestantism than Catholicism. In the Catholic Church you built up your bank account through some good works, even if you've had terrible sins."
A close friend of Wolfe's says it wasn't about Galassi, it was about Roger Straus, the charismatic old-line chairman of FSG who died in 2004. After Bonfire, Random House had offered Wolfe millions to leave Straus, but he'd refused. With his old friend gone, Wolfe relied on his most trusted surviving confidante: his agent, Lynn Nesbit.
Writers looking for a boost from a new publisher would do well to remember the cautionary tale of one Salman Rushdie, exhibit A in the case of Editor v. Agent. Sonny Mehta was his editor; they shared virtually identical tastes and backgrounds, and each had helped the other's career. Enter Rushdie's agent, Andrew Wylie, in the late nineties, pitching what would become Rushdie's 1999 novel, The Ground Beneath Her Feet. "Wylie held Sonny up," says a publisher at another house. "Sonny said no and [Wylie] said, 'Well, cheers, we're leaving.' Despite low sales of Rushdie's previous novel, Holt paid $2 million for the new one (plus some paperback rights). It promptly tanked. Rushdie eventually returned—not to Knopf but to Little Random. His career has never been the same.
Many agents contend that, with younger editors being laid off or jumping around to start new imprints, the job of nurturing an author has been left to them. "You hear every day of an editor changing houses," says longtime agent Mort Janklow. "J. R. Moehringer [best-selling author of The Tender Bar], I sold him to Hyperion." Two of Moehringer's editors left the house. "Then Bob Miller decides to leave. This is a young man who writes a book about abandonment! Who does he turn to? The departed publisher?! I take care of him."
Meanwhile, morale among many editorial staffers is dipping to all-time lows. Forget literary taste; everything is cost-benefit analysis. "What I've heard from editors is, 'My judgment doesn't count any longer,' " says Kent Carroll, who left his company, Carroll & Graf, after it was sold to a mini-conglomerate, and who now runs the boutique Europa Editions. "There used to be a reason to get into publishing," says Carroll. "Whether they know it or not, they all want to be Maxwell Perkins. It's a kind of secondary immortality. They didn't flock to publishing because they want to publish Danielle Steel."
"Some people say there's not enough marketing done for a book, and I think that's total bullshit. You do the marketing that works, and not much is working right now." —PETER MILLER, DIRECTOR OF PUBLICITY, BLOOMSBURY
One key advantage of corporate publishing was supposed to be its marketing muscle: You may not publish exactly the books you'd like to, but the ones you publish will get the attention they deserve. Yet in recent years, more accurate internal sales numbers have confirmed what publishers long suspected: Traditional marketing is useless.
"Media doesn't matter, reviews don't matter, blurbs don't matter," says one powerful agent. Nobody knows where the readers are, or how to connect with them. Fifteen years ago, Philip Roth guessed there were at most 120,000 serious American readers—those who read every night—and that the number was dropping by half every decade. Others vehemently disagree. But who really knows? Focused consumer research is almost nonexistent in publishing. What readers want—and whether it's better to cater to their desires or try harder to shape them—remains a hotly contested issue. You don't have to look further than the pages of The New YorkTimesBook Review or the shelves of Borders to see that the market for fiction is shrinking. Even formerly reliable schlock like TV-celebrity memoirs doesn't do so well anymore. And "the next thing," as Publishers Weekly editor Sara Nelson notes drily, "is not bloggers writing books."
Marketing a book these days is like playing a slot machine; hitting one 7 won't get you a dime. "There has to be this constellation of events," says Daniel Menaker, whose departure was tied in the press to the low sales of Benjamin Kunkel's much-ballyhooed debut novel, Indecision. "Not only a Times Book Review front cover but Don Imus talking about it and Ellen Pompeo actually reading the book on-camera. And Barack Obama has just bought it."
It's plausible that publishing would already be in the red if it weren't for Oprah. And "she is reportedly going off the air in a few years," says former Simon & Schuster CEO Jack Romanos. "The most effective marketing tool they have for a book isn't going to be there. If I were still there, I would be figuring out, now, different and better ways to market in anticipation of that being taken away."
This would mean far more than just the few book "trailers" you see online. "They're all the rage right now," says Bloomsbury's Peter Miller, "but I would love to see an example of one video that really did generate a lot of sales. There's a sense of desperation."
"We just don't know what our business looks like without Borders. And that's terrifying. There's just no way of getting around it." —SIMON LIPSKAR, AGENT
If you think marketing is impossible, talk to the people in sales. Their job—forcing books into a shrinking handful of outlets—involves all the supplication of publicity without all the fun and free booze of book parties. And it has the added bonus of bleeding their companies dry.
Borders Group, which controls 10 to 12 percent of the bookselling market, is on death watch, putting publishers in an even less enviable negotiating position with bookstores. The remaindering and shredding of books—a cost borne largely by the publisher—is a relic of a consignment model developed during the Depression that makes no modern sense. Publishers also pay for placement in big bookstores, which they call "co-op," under a complicated arrangement meant to cover up the fact that it's payola (or, as some call it, extortion). Those 300 copies of, say, American Wife stacked precariously at the entrance? Bought and paid for by the publisher. "You feel raped having to pay for placement in a store you're selling to," says an agent.
But at least with two major chains, you can play one against the other. Even in its weakened state, Borders can still boost a book into best-seller contention. If something is selling well at Borders, a publisher can pressure an increasingly stingy Barnes & Noble to reorder. If Barnes & Noble absorbed Borders' business, it would control 30 percent of the market—versus 10 percent for all the independents combined, with big-box retailers and Amazon controlling most of the rest. (At its nineties peak, the indie-only American Booksellers Association had 4,700 member stores; today it has 1,700.) This matters because the following response from Barnes & Noble CEO Steve Riggio is only technically true: "We buy every title published—our business is a long-tail business—less than 5 percent is from bestsellers."
Editors insist that plenty of books get skipped. Richard Nash, head of indie publisher Soft Skull Press, estimates that one in twenty are passed over, though ten to fifteen copies are shipped into their warehouses in case there's a special order. Many more are getting smaller initial orders than ever. That's a very long, very skinny tail.
Barnes & Noble, briefly interested in Borders, has since recanted. Recently William Ackerman, a major Borders shareholder, suggested they should sell to Amazon instead. That probably won't happen, but his reasoning is clear. Barnes & Noble is old news. Amazon is the future.
"The fear of Google [BookSearch] is ridiculous paranoia. The fear of Amazon is enlightened self-interest." —MIKE SHATZKIN, BOOK-INDUSTRY CONSULTANT
Attendance at this year's BookExpo was way down, but you wouldn't have known it if you were among the 700-odd people at a presentation by Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos. Lean, wiry, shaven-headed, and big-eared, Bezos talked up the Kindle, the new e-reader that may or may not account for 1 percent of the book market. No one knows. But while bookstore sales were to drop 7.1 percent that month, Amazon was on its way to 31 percent sales growth (albeit for all media products) for the second quarter. The audience greeted Bezos warily: His sleek, West Coast style made Jane Friedman look like Vladimir Nabokov.
In a Q&A session billed as "Upfront and Unscripted," none other than Chris "Long Tail" Anderson quizzed Bezos on his plans. He couldn't get many straight answers (though Bezos was delighted to discuss the suborbital space vehicle he's working on). How many books would Bezos like to have available on the Kindle? "Well, I probably won't be happy unless we have 20 million, but I'm hard to make happy," he said, and then let loose a honking laugh.
Publishers have been burned by e-book hype before. A few years back, analysts were predicting we'd all be reading novels on our Palm Pilots. Barnes & Noble even began selling e-books. Though it doesn't quite look the part, Bezos's chunky retro Kindle is the closest so far to being the iPod of books. In mid-August, a Citigroup analyst doubled his estimate for this year's sales of the readers—to almost 400,000.
Why weren't publishers elated? What's wrong with a company that returns only 10 percent of the books it buys and might eventually eliminate the cost of print production? Well, it doesn't help that Amazon, which has been on an intense buying spree (print-on-demanders BookSurge; book networking site Shelfari), lists publishers as its competitors in SEC filings. Editors and retailers alike fear that it's bent on building a vertical publishing business—from acquisition to your doorstep—with not a single middleman in sight. No HarperCollins, no Borders, no printing press. Amazon has begun to do end runs around bookstores with small presses. Two new bios from Lyons Press, about Michelle Obama and Cindy McCain, are going straight-to-Kindle long before publication.
Amazon, in short, plays hardball. When Hachette Livre UK couldn't come to terms over Amazon's U.K. payments, Amazon removed the BUY NEW button from its listings for the company's key books. Hachette's CEO responded with an open letter, saying, "Amazon seems each year to go from one publisher to another making increasing demands in order to achieve richer terms at our expense and sometimes at yours."
The ultimate fear is that the Kindle could be a Trojan horse. Right now, Amazon is making little or nothing on Kindle books. Lay down your $359 and you can get most books for $9.99. Publishers list that same Kindle version for about $17.99, though, and—as with all retailers—charge Amazon roughly half that price for it. Which means that Amazon keeps only a dollar on each book, while the publishers make $9.
But Amazon may be offering a sweet deal now in order to undercut publishers later. If their low, low prices succeed in making e-books the dominant medium, they can pay publishers whatever they want. "The concern is they want to corner the market," explains one books executive, and then force publishers to accept a genuine 50 percent discount. "If they took over as little as 10 to 20 percent of the market," says an agent, "publishers simply would not be able to exist."
"We're an industry more willing to watch the boat sink than rock it a wee bit." —ONE FRUSTRATED PUBLISHER
While many in publishing wait in their bunkers, HarperStudio and a few others forge ahead. Back in February, Bob Miller and Jane Friedman met at the bar of the Omni Berkshire hotel for one of their freewheeling chats. "How would you do it differently if you could start all over again," she asked him. He said he'd try to reduce advances and returns, put out only a few books, and focus on cheap Internet marketing. "Why don't you do that?" she asked, and within a week they had a deal.
Miller has worked out separate contracts, co-op and all, with booksellers and authors—capping advances at $100,000 and reducing returns. Their list now includes not just 50 Cent but Michael Eisner, his former boss at Hyperion; John Lithgow (a memoir); and Isabella Rossellini adapting her short-film series on bug sex. All these authors will contribute to their own pre-publication marketing.
Miller doesn't wait for agent submissions, instead accosting writers at conferences, telling them how much more a writer can make under 50-50 profit-sharing. He's even throwing in something literary, 22 previously unpublished stories by Mark Twain, who, Miller points out, ran a profit-sharing publisher that made a killing on Ulysses S. Grant's memoirs. "If he were alive, this is exactly the deal he'd want," Miller says brightly.
Other industry folk, while supportive, note that precious few writers—except those with trust funds—would forgo advances, and that it generally works best for those who have a pre-existing fan base that will gobble up their books. As for Miller's other key ingredients, profit-sharing is not a new concept, and online marketing is catching on everywhere. If there's anything Miller shares with the departed Friedman, it's a knack for making restructuring look like revolution. But in a business as illogical as publishing, maybe it is.
One indie publisher has been pitching an imprint around town that would go beyond what Miller's doing—expanding into print-on-demand, online subscriptions, maybe even a "salon" for loyal readers. He envisions a transitional period of print-on-demand, then an era in which most books will be produced electronically for next to nothing, while high-priced, creatively designed hardcovers become "the limited-edition vinyl of the future." "I think they know it's right," the publisher says of the executives he's wooing, "but they don't want to disrupt the internal equilibrium. I'm like the guy all the girls want to be friends with but won't hop into bed with."
Nearly all of these new ideas already exist in some form or another at independents like Dave Eggers's brainchild, McSweeney's. But can they survive inside a corporate, blockbuster-bound culture? "You can't turn a camel into an alligator," says longtime agent and former Grove editor Ira Silverberg. "I'd rather we have several soft years when investors get out and people who care about the values in the business reinvest."
But going back in time isn't an option. A hundred Bennett Cerfs wouldn't save the current publishing model—not without a hundred Bob Millers puzzling out the way forward, unhampered by fear or complacency. The kind of targeted, curated lists editors would love to publish will work even better in an electronic, niche-driven world, if only the innovators can get them there. Those owners who are genuinely interested in the industry's long-term survival would do well to hire scrappy entrepreneurs at every level, people who think like underdogs.
It'll be rough going in the meantime; some publishers will transform, some will muddle through, some will die. And there will, no doubt, be a lot of editors for whom even this diminished era will look like the last great golden age, when some writers were paid in the millions, some of their books produced in the millions, and more than half of those books actually sold. Book publishing is still a big-league business, and that's a hard thing to let go of. "There's something terrible," says an editor at a prestigious imprint, "about admitting that you're not a mass medium."


text:
The Best Pink Flowers For Your Wedding
Besides white, pink is the most popular color for wedding flowers. There are so many different beautiful options for pink blooms that it can be hard to narrow it down. Here is a guide on the best pink flowers for any style of wedding.
ay wedding, such as a
white gown, pearl bridal jewelry, and a bouquet of roses. For brides who
love all the old-fashioned traditions of weddings, roses are the
perfect flower to carry. Best of all, roses can be found in any shade of
pink that you can imagine, from the palest blush to the hottest pink.
The most classic bouquet of all would be a round nosegay of pink roses
accented with white stephanotis. The little star shaped stephanotis
blossoms are usually have a pearl pin inserted into the center of each
one, which makes them a great complement to your pearl bridal jewelry.
about the most cheerful pink wedding flowers? That award would have to
go to the brightest pink flowers of them all, gerbera daisies. Play up
the fun spirit of these flowers by using them in offbeat ways. One bride
that I knew "planted" several gerbera daisies into a pot of wheatgrass
as her centerpieces. Another really different thing that you can do with
the gerbera daisies is to suspend them in a series of vertical rows as a
decoration behind the altar for your ceremony (this looks fantastic for
an outdoor wedding).
If your taste runs to the nostalgic and
sweet, consider carrying a wedding bouquet of rare and dainty
lily-of-the-valley. A small bouquet of these late spring beauties would
make a lovely little posey for a petite bride. A pretty treatment would
be to tie a vintage silk ribbon around the stems of the
lily-of-the-valley to make a sweet little hand-tied bouquet to carry
down the aisle.
Does your taste run towards something a bit more
dramatic? Then consider using big, showy pink Stargazer and day lilies
in your floral arrangements. A word of caution about lilies: make sure
that your florist removes the orange pollen from the center of each
flower, as it stains terribly. You would also do well to use the day
lilies, perhaps in combination with some fabulous white Asiatic lilies,
for the centerpieces, and reserve the highly scented Stargazer lilies
for arrangements that will not be placed near the food.
brides will love nothing more than a beautiful bouquet of pink tulips.
If you prefer simplicity, a bouquet of pale pink Dutch tulips tied into a
round nosegay is perfect. Brides who like more exuberant flowers will
adore combining a variety of tulips in different textures and shades of
pink into one fabulous bouquet. Tulips are ideal for using in elegant
centerpieces, as well.
There is one type of pink wedding flower
that is easily be used in arrangements ranging from the most grand to
the most casual, and that is the hydrangea. Often seen tipped with a
hint of green, pink hydrangeas look stunning overflowing from a tall urn
at a very formal wedding. What makes hydrangeas so versatile is that
they are equally at home tossed into galvanized pails to make completely
relaxed centerpieces for an outdoor wedding. Not to mention, they are
very pretty!
Whatever your style, if you love pink, there will be a perfect flower for you. Once you have determined the style of your wedding, this guide can help you to find the blooms that will help to make your dream wedding come to life.
|photo credit: elizabethannedesigns.com
|photo credit: bridaltweet.com
|photo credit: bridesmagazine.co.uk
|photo credit: floralatmo.com
|photo credit: flowers-kid.co
|photo credit: blog.bloomsbythebox.com
Whatever your style, if you love pink, there will be a perfect flower for you. Once you have determined the style of your wedding, this guide can help you to find the blooms that will help to make your dream wedding come to life.


text:
- A tendency to think and act spontaneously rather than on FEARS based on past experiences.
- An unmistakable ability to enjoy each moment.
- A loss of interest in judging other people.
- A loss of interest in judging self.
- A loss of interest in interpreting the actions of others.
- A loss of interest in conflict.
- A loss of ability to worry.
- Frequent, overwhelming episodes of appreciation.
- Contented feelings of connectedness with others and nature.
- Frequent attacks of smiling.
- An increasing tendency to let things happen, rather than make them happen.
- An increased susceptibility to the love extended by others as well as the uncontrollable urge to extend it.
--Author Unknown
What I am today
is a result of what I did yesterday.
What I become tomorrow
will be a result of what I do today.


text:
Click here to play this game!
Winter Cake Description
Sarah loves winter season and one of her favorite parts of the day is when the family is gathering around the fireplace and tell stories. Every evening one member of the family is telling a story and tonight it is her turn. She wants to put everybody in a good mood by starting the evening with a delicious cake. She has a yummy recipe from her grandmother and she wants to try it out. Help her bake the cake according to the recipe instructions and surprise her family with the best dessert. Enjoy!
new racing games, shooting games, car games, bike games and sport games are added weekly!
Copyright 2017 Brightest Games
Privacy Policy / Contact Us


text:
SSC CHSL Result 2016 By Name and Roll No
SSC (Staff Selection Commission) has been announced Result of CHSL 2016 that was conducted in 2016, and all information
and Result List for LDC and DEO has been published. You can check out further details about SSC CHSL Result 2016 for DEO and LDC by armybharti.in
Aspirants who had been attended the examination of SSC CHSL, they can check out the result by going official website of SSC CHSL. Dear Aspirants, if you are looking for complete merit list and cut off marks list that is also available by SSC CHSL 2016. To check result, you need to download PDFFile of SSC CHSL, and you can check your name by CTRL+F.
Dear Aspirants, if you need more help, then you can also Facebook Page of Sarkarinaukricareer.com and also if you need solution of your query, then make use of comment box, we'll respond you as soon as possible to solve your SSC CHSL 2016 questions.
Aspirants who get shortlisted through given result, they will be invited for further details and test for typing and technical test. Dear aspirants, you must save PDF file of SSC CHSL result and also you can check out cut off marks list 2016.
Also there are few steps to check SSC CHSL Result 2016
Step1: Download PDF File of Result
Step2: Now check out the complete list
Step3: Press CTRL+F and type your name
Step4: if you get your name listed in file
Step5: Then you are selected for next round.
Step6: Official website of SSC CHSL is ssc.nic.in


text:
It *is* Christmas now! All that anticipation and preparation throughout December has been Advent. Now, it is Christmas, and this is the time I love! John is home; Caroline has fun new stuff to entertain her. Decorations are still festive. And we can continue our focus on the reason for Christmas without the commercialism of Christmas.
With our nightly Advent activities completed, we have moved on to celebrating the Twelve Days of Christmas. They're more than just a song. In liturgical churches, the twelve days from December 25 are the Christmas season, leading up to Epiphany, or Three Kings Day — the day the Magi brought gifts to the Christ child. My original plan had me holding back a "big" gift to give Caroline on Epiphany. That gift was hidden and remained in the guest bedroom … until Caroline followed Poppy into his room and spotted it. "Hey, this is for me!" I let her have it.
For our evening Christmas ritual, I have a neat little activity book I found last year at an after-Christmas sale. Adornaments is published by the Campus Crusade for Christ folks. It has a book with a page explaining each of the Biblical names for Jesus. Each name also has a mini-ornament picture book to go with it. I am really excited about this because Caroline is quite focused on "Baby" Jesus. These nightly discussions will take her beyond the manger and give her an awareness of Christ.
The twelve names are
1. Emmanuel
2. Lion of Judah
3. The Door
4. True Vine
5. Living Water
6. Light of the World
7. Lamb of God
8. Good Shepherd
9. King of Kings
10. Bread of Life
11. Bright and Morning Star
12. Savior
She'll also get quite an exposure to metaphor. 🙂


text:
Members of the laboratory
The directory of the people who have left the laboratory
The following people have left the laboratory, their e-mail address and phone number are given only as an indication, they may have changed without the laboratory being informed.
65 People (Show by Pages)
Doctorant (Supervisor : DARMONT J.)
Tel: 0771871741


text:
Senators warn of security threat from telecom firms
Saraki laments increasing spate of corruption
The Senate has drawn attention to a national security threat arising from recent activities of some telecommunication firms operating in Nigeria.
At the budget defense session of the ministry of communications, the chairman of senate committee on communications, senator Gilbert Nnaji, alerted that "some of the telecommunication companies have started relocating their Network Operation Centres (NOC) from Nigeria to India", a situation he said has grave implication on national security, adding that "these centres would be monitored by foreigners from outside the shores of Nigeria".
While requesting the minister to urgently take necessary actions towards arresting the situation before it degenerated, Nnaji further expressed serious concern over "indiscriminate sack of competent Nigerian employees at the expense of their foreign counterparts; contravention of expatriate quota, casualization, intimidation and discrimination of indigenous staff" by these network providers
Responding, Minister of Communication, Adebayo Shittu, assured the committee that he would critically review those issues and report back immediately to the committee with regard to measures taken.
He also announced that before the end of the first quarter of this year the ministry would inaugurate the implementation committee for the transformation of the Digital Bridge Institute (DBI) located in the six geo-political zones of the country into Information and Communications Technology, ICT, University. This according to him was to start producing graduates and skilled manpower that would fit into the modern GSM industry and international market.
The total budget proposal was N18, 750,951,876 while 11,206,732,734 and 7,544,169,142 represented recurrent and capital expenditure respectively.
Also yesterday, President of the Senate, Abubakar Bukola Saraki admitted that the bane of Nigeria's growth and development is corruption which he noted had eaten deep into the fabric of the Nigerian society.
According to him, the fight against corruption in the country has been very difficult because of what he termed, the inadequacies in some of the nation`s core anti-corruption laws.
Speaking yesterday in Abuja when he declared open a public hearing jointly organised by the Senate Joint Committee on Judiciary, Human Rights & Legal Matters; Anti-Corruption & Financial Crimes; and Foreign Affairs, he lamented that "crime is now established on an international scale."
The hearing was organized by the joint committees to critically examine and collate inputs on two priority Bills, the Mutual Assistance in Criminal Matters Bill, 2016 (SB. 224); and the Small Claims Courts (Establishment Bill, 2016(SB.44) of the 8th Senate.
Saraki explained that the essence of the first bill, the Mutual Assistance in Criminal Matters Bill was to among others, help facilitate and establish strong partnerships between Nigeria and foreign governments in combating criminal activities that transcend geographical borders and assume international dimensions, irrespective of whether they originate from Nigeria.
According to him, the bill is a positive step in bringing an end to the many setbacks we may have experienced and would go a long way in providing the legal framework to bring about clarity in gathering and transmission of evidence or any other information between Nigeria and foreign government agencies in investigations of ongoing criminal matters, adding that the bill is one which targets the affairs of the working class citizenry, who cannot afford to waste their already limited resources in long drawn out court cases.
He said: "While it is generally admitted that as a nation our development and growth has stagnated as a result of the menace of corruption, it is also telling that the fight against corruption has been painstakingly cumbersome because of the inadequacies in some of our core anti-corruption laws.
"As a parliament, we fully understand our role in carrying the constitutional responsibility and obligation of ensuring our laws are constantly reviewed and updated according to modern realities and exigencies".
Saraki who hailed the Executive for sponsoring the bill, however maintained that "fighting and extinguishing corrupt practices can only be successful where the appropriate framework exists. Too many times we have seen stalled cases and investigations because of legal technicalities and loopholes in existing laws."
On the Small Claims Court Establishment Bill, Saraki who noted that it has the potential to address a very pertinent issue that has beleaguered the Judiciary for many years, incessant delays in adjudication of minor cases, said: "Justice delayed is equivalent to justice denied and correcting this anomaly is at the very soul of the Small Claims Court Establishment Bill.
"With the establishment of such courts, the burden on regular courts will be drastically reduced thereby creating a more efficient and effective adjudicative process across all cadres of courts in the country.
"As obtained in developed democracies like the USA where all States have small claims court, the rules that govern them emphasize informality and timely resolution of dispute".
Earlier in his remarks, chairman of the Senate Committee on Judiciary, Human Rights and Legal Matters, Senator David Umaru (APC Niger East), said the public hearing was organized to avail stakeholders and the general public of the importance of the two bills, and to get their contributions for possible enactments as Acts of National Assembly.
No comments yet


text:
|Daniel Jahn, CSCS, USAW
Contact DJ at email@example.com
The Owner of Maximum Sports Conditioning (est. 2007), Daniel Jahn has been in and around sports training for 19 years. He played baseball at the University of Washington from 1997 until 2000 when a back injury ended his career. He was hired as an assistant baseball coach at the UW, and as an intern in the Husky weight room. He became a part-time assistant strength coach the following year, and then full-time in 2002. He was the head of Baseball, Softball, Swimming, and Volleyball, but also worked extensively with Football, and helped with Basketball, Track and Soccer. Along with training thousands of collegiate athletes, and the 2005 NCAA National Championship Volleyball team at the UW, he has trained professionals of all backgrounds ranging from Mixed Martial Arts competitors to Olympic Snowboarders. He has held numerous clinics and seminars for youth of all sports, performed instructional training seminars for personal trainers, organized and facilitated strength and conditioning coaches' clinics, was a guest lecturer at the University of Washington Student Athlete Academic Services center and UW Bothell, organized and facilitated summer baseball camps for kids, and was a part-time columnist for STACK magazine (articles written appear in April 05, Oct. 05, Nov. 05, Feb. 06). In 2006-2007 he was the Director of Training and Education at Endzone Athletics, where he established and operated countless programs for high school athletes. Daniel also serves on the Sports Performance Team for Volt Athletics, which is an online sports conditioning program. Along with many articles, he also wrote the 'College Preparation: Manual for Athletic Success' which is a workbook designed to prepare athletes for college athletics.
In addition to his training background, Daniel is also actively involved in the community. He is the treasurer on the board of the Austin Foundation, which is a non-profit organization that runs health and wellness programs for underprivileged youth. He created a fundraiser for the Austin Foundation called the Washington's Strongest School Competition which was held in 2010 and 2011. He was a mentor in the Bellevue Groundbreakers program, which was a leadership development program for African-American middle school boys from 2011-2013. He serves on the board of Athletes Beyond Borders, which is an organization designed to increase the number of inner city kids playing baseball and volleyball. He is also the 2009 recipient of the Seattle Mariners Fidelity Investments Inspire the Future Award for his work with inner city baseball teams, players, and coaches.