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Kromer couldn't operate hedonism but these days it operated him, in the way that a punctuated cylinder operates a player piano. What he knew came mostly from books—Anaïs Nin, William S. Burroughs, "The Hite Report," stuff gleaned as a teen-ager from his parents' shelves. Yet, in his current circle of Manhattan friends, who were mostly graduate students and legal proofreaders, Kromer played the role of satyr. The more he protested that it was only a single heroin-laced cigarette that had happened to be placed in his hand, or that his so-called threesome had consisted of scarcely more than heavy petting and a brush with sleep apnea, the more they looked to Kromer as their saint of degeneracy.
Kromer's reputation had its origin in the parties he was dragged to by a former schoolmate: a raven-haired, baggy-eyed heiress named Greta. Though these parties were invariably disappointing, Greta invariably closed them down. When a host was reduced to switching off lights and hinting that the sofa wasn't available, Greta took Kromer on her finishing rounds, often in the rain. Kromer worked nights, so the hours didn't bother him, and he had nothing else to do. Greta's legacy, a large trust fund she wasn't permitted to touch until her thirtieth birthday, drove her mad with the determination to die squalorously before she became wealthy. "Hell, I've been in three kinds of threesome," she once told Kromer, her lips tremulous and her eyes fixed on some dreamy distance, in a way that made her look as if she were on the brink of tears or insane laughter, but in fact indicated that she hadn't slept for two or three days. "With two boys, with two girls, and with a couple. The only kind I can't ever be in is the kind I'd really like—three men."
Greta was, in her desultory way, the real thing. The difficulty was an uncoöperative world, slouching through a new propriety under Clinton. Everyone else Greta knew had been molesting their trust funds since prep school. That was the problem—they were responsible to their money, while Greta waged war on hers. Her only privilege was the use of her father's "man," a do-anything emissary and delivery person, who always picked up the phone and, astonishingly, would deliver Corner Bistro hamburgers fresh and hot to any downtown dive bar, usually one occupied primarily by pre-op transsexuals, where Greta and Kromer might be hanging out. Greta sometimes needed to borrow the fifty cents to make the call. Kromer, once he'd learned the trick, urged Greta to use this service often, as it would generally put an evening out of its misery, bringing on the sleep Greta badly needed but resisted. Kromer assumed this deliveryman or fixer was really a butler, but the one time he referred to him as Jeeves Greta seemed not to get it.
From Greta's many aspiring transsexual acquaintances Kromer remained terrified of accepting even a blow job. None of them could have guessed what aura they'd transferred to Kromer. The process was mysterious. A book nerd, a clerk, Kromer sat failing even to drink very much among young blacks in stuffed brassieres who the following day would be late for beauty school or, in some cases, Intro Soc or Psych at Queens College. Their special language—"shemale," "pre-op"—made them a nerd species, too, Kromer understood. Yet, the next day, attending afternoon breakfasts with his wondering cohort of Ph.D. candidates and proofreaders, Kromer played the part of Rasputin or Gurdjieff, expected to launch foul seductions or even abductions. Perhaps this was a matter of sheer phrenology—the suggestion of something sallow and ominous in Kromer's jawline and eye sockets.
Renee and Luna, in History at the Graduate Center—Kromer's names for them were Beautiful Renee and Invisible Luna—practiced the buddy system, never letting themselves be caught alone with him. Kromer learned this fact from their bolder colleague Sarah, who was willing to meet Kromer unaccompanied in Union Square, at least by daylight. The afternoon was bright, pigeons combing mud baked by winter, a scarf keeping Sarah's mouth hidden. Kromer had been speculating that Sarah might want him herself, when she mentioned Renee and Luna's policy.
"They shouldn't be afraid of me."
"They're not afraid. They're dizzy and repulsed. They want to be able to compare notes."
Notes? Kromer was a hinge between worlds, a glimpser. All he had to offer them was his own notes, not the world itself. This situation he couldn't make understood.
Nor could Kromer confess that it was Renee, all-but-dissertation on contemporaneous Western representations of the Boxer Rebellion, whom he loved. Renee Liu, who wore turtlenecks and resembled a whippet, her nose a beacon of melancholy, who furrowed her brow and laughed in suspicion of anything Kromer said that was halfway sincere, whose older sister had been at college with Kromer and Greta, and whose tiny Chinese parents Kromer had once therefore seen picking up Renee's sister and her belongings at her dorm.
Kromer had no idea whether Renee knew this, or whether her sister had told her terrible stories about Kromer's college years. But he couldn't interrogate Sarah on the subject, for fear that she might be injured by being overlooked in favor of Renee. What Kromer wanted to injure was the image of himself as debauchery's emissary. He said nothing. They fled the frozen park for a coffee shop, where Kromer suggested hot chocolate, adding, he hoped, a brushstroke of harmlessness.
Was it Greta and her pre-ops, or the depth of Kromer's eye sockets? Kromer knew it was also his job, what he was a clerk at. The shop was called Sex Machines. There Kromer retailed chunky purple phalluses, vials of space-age lubricant, silver balls and beads for insertion, latex dolphins with oscillating beaks. The shop's owner was a maven of Second Avenue, a hedgehog-like, grubby genius of street-level commerce. The possessor of a block of storefronts, his specialty lay in preëmpting hipster entrepreneurship with his own fake-indigenous coffee shops, video-rental emporiums, and, finally, the erotic boutique.
Sex Machines' interior and stock had been painstakingly derived from that of a famous San Francisco shop, founded by a sex-positive lesbian collective. In lieu of such a collective, the owner had installed Kromer, transferred from the video-rental outlet, as both manager and night man. Night hours were what counted in this instance. A wizard salesman, Kromer switched on and demonstrated the range of speeds on any number of devices with a shame-dissolving forthrightness. At those moments, he thought of himself as a Conceptual Lesbian, a term he'd invented and never spoken aloud, nor advanced into any coherent definition. Kromer was fairly certain he'd never experienced an erection within the bounds of the shop.
Four things. Pre-ops, eye sockets, Sex Machines, and the state of Kromer's apartment. Few had been inside, but word evidently got around. Kromer's boss, whose video store featured "staff picks" shelves with extensive written remarks, had insisted that Sex Machines produce their own version of the San Francisco collective's newsletter, a hallmark of that store's unfurtive friendliness. In the newsletter, pornographic movies were extensively categorized, according to predilections and interests, and rated on several indices: number of key scenes, story or its desirable absence, diversity of performer types, et cetera. It seemed that this was the way to sell porn to bored marrieds, a market Kromer's employer characterized as "Moby Dick."
Kromer, outed once in conversation as a novice writer, was deputized as the editor of Sex Machines' newsletter, as well as its sole contributor and reviewer of new materials. His apartment was a maze of stacked porn. The volume was staggering. The disarranged piles melded into a wallpaper of ludicrous font and slashes of pink, brown, and yellow flesh; though the job was chiefly a matter of inventorying characteristics, tabulating spurts and lashings, Kromer couldn't get through the tapes fast enough. As invisible to him as familiar bookshelves would be to another, the accumulation tended to make a powerful impression on visitors. This Kromer ought to keep in mind, yet didn't.
It should have been foremost, especially on that in-like-a-lamb evening in March, a month or so after his stroll with Sarah, when Kromer improbably pried Renee and Luna loose from a dull celebration, held at a pub just a few blocks from his building (some underdog had passed his orals, on second attempt). Kromer had brought Greta along, and it was she who actually accomplished the trick, keening for Kromer to lead her back to his apartment, where she knew he had a fresh bag of good pot. "Do you want to get high?" Greta, inserting herself beside Kromer, posed this question flatly to Renee and Luna, whom she'd only just met. Greta's dress, mascara, and mannerisms in this company made her appear a woman garbed as a bat or a cat at a party where no one else was costumed. She was an instinctive corrupter and seducer, guilty of everything ever imputed to Kromer. Yet he'd never have carried off the extraction himself.
The walk couldn't have been improved, Luna falling in beside Greta, Renee lagging behind with Kromer, the air nearly balmy. Kromer peppered Renee with teasing questions, even dared express surprise at learning of her sister.
"We must have been at school together. If I tried, I'd remember her."
"Think of me but better looking. She was a model. Now she's a model's agent."
"Not the famous kind. In catalogues for winter gear, under hot lights. She told me you could lose ten pounds in one session, just mopping sweat."
"Like a starting pitcher, I've heard." He threw a pretend forkball.
"Completely demeaning work."
"I'm sure," he said, ignoring the ominous word, failing at that moment to worry about his association with the demeaning work of removing clothes under hot lights rather than piling them on. "You could be one."
This drew her furrowed laugh. "Look at this profile. I'm a pig, I'm a dog."
He held up an "L" of finger and thumb, making the shape of her regal or mournful nose, something he'd practiced alone, imagining fitting his hand to its length. "I'd cast it in gold." The line came from somewhere, surely, but wasn't practiced in the least. It startled not only Kromer but Renee, too, enough to spare him the laugh.
"I've been wanting to find a way to split you from Luna for so long I can't say," he told her. "This little distance of pavement is all I've managed."
Renee watched her feet, and Luna's and Greta's, ahead. "There's always the telephone."
"I'd heard you two had a party line—was I misinformed?" He hoped the joke wasn't too antique for her. Their knuckles brushed. Not quite fingers entangling. No one said ouch.
But the walk, that brief elbow of Houston and Ludlow, was done. Their appointment with his baggie of pot commanded they exit the sweet night, in favor of the radiator thud and hiss of his walkup. The super hadn't yet adjusted the heat to the season, so Kromer balanced blazing pipes with yawning windows. Air so plush at sidewalk level would be like ice coursing through his fourth-story windows. He'd apologize for luring them into a sauna riven with blasts of cool, nothing else.
Did Renee glance at the tapes on the bracket shelves, and the tapes stacked in uneven piles on the floorboards beneath the shelves, and the tapes on the shelf above the closet's hangers, where Kromer put all their coats? Possibly. Kromer caught Invisible Luna's glances at them. Yet it was Renee's containment that Kromer should have taken as a sign. She fell silent, her limbs surrendering their animation. If only the blocks of Ludlow had each been a mile long. Greta sat cross-legged on Kromer's couch and rolled joints with the crafty intensity and patter of a stage magician, so practiced that she could look away from the trick to meet her audience's eyes.
"Is all this yours?" Luna said. "I've never seen anything like it."
Kromer seized the opportunity with relief. The tapes had first to be mentioned, so as to be dismissed. "I find it pretty incredible myself," he said. "My mansion of smut has many doors."
"What's that supposed to mean?" Luna said.
Kromer cut the jokes, opting for efficiency. He described the formulaic nature of the reviews, how he'd become adept enough to write one after slogging fifteen or twenty minutes into a given feature, and the logistical annoyance of the VHS cartons stacking up. "You'd never think they could need so much of it, until you see them in the shop, ravenous for new releases. As if watching the same one twice would be the shameful act." The pronoun "they" was what he meant to put across, a verbal quarantine on the unseen behaviors dividing customer from clerk.
For a few minutes, the subject went underground. The joint circled the room. Kromer was content to see that as it visited under Renee's elegant nose she sipped deeply, eyes closed. He couldn't have predicted that it would be a fuse on a stick of dynamite, a spark sizzling its way to Renee's lips. Or that she'd go off like Yosemite Sam. Kromer was just dropping the needle onto a Cowboy Junkies LP when Renee screeched, "I feel like I'm sitting inside a copy of 'Guernica'!"
"Sorry?" Kromer said.
"I can't let my eyes rest anywhere," Renee said. "It's like a meat shop—carnage everywhere."
Greta's eyes widened, which put them at half mast. "More like Francis Bacon," she murmured. Greta had been an art-history major at college. "Really, if you squint, it's like we're in a Bosch painting."
" 'The Garden of Earthly Delights,' " Kromer said. It seemed a calming phrase to utter, akin to saying the words "The Peaceable Kingdom" or "Everything That Rises Must Converge," or like the narcotic tone of the LP, which presently purred, "Heavenly wine and roses seem to whisper to me when you smile . . ."
"My gender-studies professor did a book of life histories of sex workers," Renee said. "But it'd take a thousand years to debrief this Aladdin's cave of contorted bodies." Renee's expression was mangled, like her words.
"If these walls could talk, they'd moan," Greta said.
"I think they might be screaming at me," Renee said.
"Not everything is . . . the same as everything else." Kromer recognized that his generalized protest against equivalences wasn't going to cut much ice. As it happened, Sex Machines' bookshelf featured Renee's professor's book, a fact Kromer didn't feel obliged to mention.
Renee bolted upright, putting Kromer on alert for a police raid, or a blouse aflame from a loose ember. Instead she darted at the edifice of porn, coming away with three tapes. These she tossed into Kromer's lap, poisoned potatoes. "Tell us what's so different."
Where could he possibly begin? Kromer flashed on the tapes' contents, helplessly. Actually, Renee had done well, for a random stab. Two of these three had some redeeming imaginative elements. He lifted the topmost, "Bare Miss Apprehension." "These—I mean, 'Bare Miss Adventure' and all the sequels—they're really just star vehicles for Jocelyn Jeethers. A picaresque structure, but charming. People like them, I mean. There's a good focus on female autonomy—" Kromer stumbled on the proximity of this word to "anatomy."
"Autonomy of what?" Renee said.
"Autonomy. . . of pleasure, I guess." He felt himself whirling down his own motormouthed drain. "Whereas this—" Having shunted the first tape aside, he held the next, "Anal Requiem 4: The Assmaid's Tale," exposed in his lap. He hesitated over the terms "low end" and "bottom drawer" before settling on "Junk."
"That's your whole review, O mighty critic?" Invisible Luna said. No one threw him a lifeline here.
"Oh, I tallied up the number of certain acts, which is all you're really dealing with in this case." He flipped it away. "This, on the other hand, is actually pretty interesting." The film, called "Social Hormones," Kromer had stayed with to the end. "The Sward Brothers are renowned for their commitment to establishing character arcs and narrative causality, and production values generally—you can actually watch their stuff more or less like a movie, if not a great one." He heard quotes from his own newsletter entry. "Of course, there's a certain ceiling on the quality of the acting." It struck him, too late, that he was attempting to demonstrate that he wasn't a man from the moon by detailing the moon's topology, cataloguing its hollows.
"Let's watch it!" Greta said.
"Or not," Renee said. She looked ill. All glanced involuntarily at Kromer's large black television, stacked with the VCR on its rolling cart. "Is it just me," Renee continued, "or are the walls getting closer?"
The suggestion's power was tremendous. Kromer, though eager for a subject on which to agree with Renee, thought better of saying he'd noticed it, too. "I really should clear some of this out—"
"You could just brick up the windows," Luna mused. "It's like a gothic nightmare, what's it called—'The Prisoner of the Rue Morgue'?"
"By Edgar Allan Porn!" Greta shrieked.
Renee jolted from her chair a second time, now veering to the room's shrinking center, avoiding the looming shelves. She pitched, bent double, attempting a vomity dash for Kromer's bathroom. She nearly made it. The vision she'd offered earlier—the pig, the dog—now came fully into view, though Kromer felt anything but unsympathetic. She brushed him off, after he'd gained a brief, delicious sensation of her long knobbed spine beneath his fingers, and staggered to the toilet to finish her heaves. Kromer's special literacy was, it now seemed, something worse than a complete dead loss on the human scoreboard. It was positively toxic, able to compel vomit from gorgeous women. He thought with relief how, on her knees, at least, Renee would be spared any view of the VHS tapes stacked on the porcelain tank.
Kromer labored at the floorboards with wadded paper towel and citrus solvent, wishing to spare her, too, the shame of her stinky action painting. He glanced over to see Luna and Greta side by side on the couch, charting his efforts with amusement, Greta's short fingers meandering on Luna's archer's-bow thigh. Behind him, the apartment door slammed.
The permanent mystery was how much you seemed to know before you knew anything at all. Or maybe the permanent mystery was how stupid you could be and yet how you clung to evidence that your stupidity knew things you didn't. Kromer, just for instance, had named her Invisible Luna without grasping that it was he, Kromer, who was invisible to Luna. She was, he saw now, a pining, tentative lesbian, in love with her best friend.
Kromer's Conceptual Lesbianism had come with no gaydar. He'd kept Luna blurred in his periphery as a defense against how little he signified, but also for fear of understanding his small role: arousing but creepy, Kromer could keep Renee in a state of prurient susceptibility, yet repulsed by the male prospect. For Kromer and Luna had shared the same quarry, she who'd puked and vamoosed. Kromer's pointless reputation had once again run his tender hopes into the dust. As for Luna's hopes, who knew? Kromer had overplayed his role, or his apartment had.
Likely neither had stood a chance with Renee. Of such stuff booby prizes are made. Invisible Luna's breasts, fully visible now in the street-light glow leaking in through Kromer's bedroom windows, were lovely to touch. Kromer was left alone with them while Luna submitted herself to Greta's actions, lower down. The air was mingled sweat and smoke and vomit, the hour unknown. Needle bumping to the label, at groove's end again. It was all good, it was fine, it was O.K., though Kromer had missed dinner, and felt hungry. For hours he'd been rising from the futon to change the record, knowing he was the inessential factor, never certain he'd be welcomed back when he returned. But the prospect of the exotic thing you'd recall forever, the alluring taint of a sophistication you'd never quite scrub off, kept Kromer's small place open for him, so long as he knew better than to remove his pants. Now he felt too lazy to change the record.
Kromer was once more a conduit, a proprietor. He might as well have been at the counter of Sex Machines, his life a site where others came to test their readiness for what they feared were their disallowed yearnings. Whether that left room enough for Kromer's own yearnings remained unclear. In the meantime, Kromer was the kind of good egg who'd do his best to make certain Luna never knew what kind of threesome Greta truly wished she could submit to. No one would ever understand the little sensitivities that went into making Kromer's sort of sleazeball.
When Luna was gratified, exhausting herself on the horizon of her own possibilities, she gathered up underwear and reassembled herself with a certain horror in her eyes, then followed Renee's path and fled the apartment, leaving Kromer and Greta alone together on the futon. It was the sort of foggy finish they'd given to plenty of evenings, though never before minus Greta's outfit, and parts of Kromer's. Greta, enemy of sleep, rolled another joint. Kromer put on another record, got back into bed. Greta unbuttoned his jeans.
"It's O.K.," Kromer said. Maybe this was what he and Greta had in common. As opposed to oblivious solid citizens like Luna, Greta was another good-egg sleazeball, who'd worry that Kromer hadn't gotten a release of his own.
"No," Greta said, trashing his theory. "I want a dick in me now."
Not Kromer's in particular; this was just Greta's characteristic honesty. Kromer felt he had a bargaining position, for once. "I demand Barney Greengrass. A whole smoked-fish plate, with plenty of bagels. Sable and sturgeon, and chopped liver, too. Call your dad's guy."
"They're not open—it's the middle of the night."
"They'll be open in an hour or two." He stilled her hand with his own. "Call the guy first, set it up. Coffee and orange juice, the whole thing."
Greta sighed, then picked up Kromer's phone and did as he'd asked. Then she took off his pants. Kromer thought, Now I've added prostitution to my roll call of glamorous crimes. I fucked for sturgeon. But no, that would be playing the game by their rules. Kromer knew better than ever his wearisome sacred truth, which no one, perhaps not even Greta, could see: he was innocent. ♦


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Fast forward to the fall of 2009. Paul is preparing for the 2009 North Carolina State Fair where his company Great Specialty Products has been a vendor for the past several years. Although Paul is very familiar with Gluten Free products, he is beginning to hear more buzz about it. His long time customers are beginning to ask him to carry them. He wonders what to do for a minute and then reaches into his back pocket and pulls out that 13 year old letter from Amish farmer/baker Jonas Jones. "Eureka" Paul exclaims as dollar signs form in his eyes. Per their normal routine, Paul sends Jonas an email to order some Gluten Free goodies. Before you know it, Jonas is over at the Kinko's checking his email and receives Paul's order. Jonas gets to work immediately and begins shipping Paul COD deliveries of Gluten Free bread and bagels straight to his booth at the state fair in October 2009. Word of mouth quickly spreads through the Gluten Free/Celiac community around Raleigh, North Carolina which is home to the state fair. One thing is for sure, despite not having electricity, that Jonas can bake some delicious Gluten Free baked goods. State fair customers repeatedly call them "Too good to be true".
Paul immediately gets started on his marketing plan for the NEW Great Specialty Products now featuring Gluten Free items. He decides to keep the Amish and Gluten Free parts of the story, but then makes a few modifications. Instead of Jonas growing and baking all the goods, Paul decides that he'll tell customers that he is growing and baking everything himself. How about a 150,000 square foot dedicated Gluten Free facility? Sure why not, sounds like an impressive facility. Hmm, wait, what if someone wants a tour? That's easy; it's located at RDU airport behind tight TSA security - that will deter them. Maybe a 400 acre family owned farm in Ohio where all the ingredients are grown and no outside suppliers? Great idea. How about some patented recipes and baking processes? Sounds great. Military, State and Federal government contracts? Yep. Constant testing of his products for the presence of Gluten keenly detailed on a calendar hanging in his office? Most definitely. Company history of 12 years because family cannot eat Gluten due to Crohn's Disease and other digestive issues. He's got it all figured out now. With the hype built in the Gluten Free community as a result of the state fair, Paul sets off to rework his Web site. Since Jonas doesn't know what a camera is and Paul doesn't have any good photos of the GF products for his Web site, he decides that he'll borrow some from the Internet. Nothing wrong with that, right? He finds some great pictures on a website for a company that makes gluten-filled baked goods in New Jersey called Tribecca Oven. He finds some more pictures that represent the Gluten Free desserts Jonas is making on another website for Bindi. The new and improved website for Great Specialty Products featuring Jonas' awesome GF products hits the web on November 20, 2009.
About this time, Paul meets up with a local Celiac/Gluten Free blogger (yours truly). Paul tells the "story" of his company and gives samples to the blogger. The products are amazing and the story is convincing enough that the blogger writes a detailed post highlighting Great Specialty Products to the 300 daily readers of his blog. These GF products are unbelievable; tasting and feeling just like the gluten containing baked goods that the blogger remembers before he went GF. The blogger usually waits about a week to see if any side effects from the products occur - acting as a guinea pig - before he posts. He does not have any testing policies in place as the need has not arisen and testing kits are expensive. The sales begin streaming in and Paul struggles to make all the necessary deliveries. Dozens of Raleigh area GF consumers are ordering and enjoying Paul's (Jonas') products. They all are so happy they can have normal tasting Gluten Free products. They all are told the same story by Paul as outlined above. No longer do they have to eat differently than their friends or family, these products are good enough for gluten addicts too. The Gluten Free community rejoices!
Then tragedy strikes for Paul on November 25, 2009. An unhappy customer leaves a comment on the blog warning others that she has become sick from Paul's products. Paul is beside himself. He must get to the bottom of this. He immediately visits the customer to retrieve product so that it can be tested for Gluten. He tells the customer that he will have the EPA and Health Department immediately test the product while he tests via swab in his 150,000 square foot facility down to the delivery trucks themselves. He informs the customer the next day that the product tested for 19 PPM. The customer is not convinced and decides to call the North Carolina Department of Agriculture to file a complaint. Over the next several days, two more customers complain to the Department of Agriculture (the agency responsible for regulating bakeries - not the EPA or Health Department). The Department of Agriculture attempts to contact Paul to investigate the complaints. Paul attempts to contact Jonas to get to the root of the problem. After receiving no response, Paul hops on a plane on December 16, 2009 to Millersburg, Ohio. He informs Jonas of the complaints. Jonas is bewildered. Together they tour the fields where oats are growing. Paul immediately points out to Jonas that a neighboring Amish farm is growing wheat. They investigate further to find that both farms are sharing wagons and buggies to haul harvested wheat and oats. Uh oh. Paul instructs one of his employees to call all customers to warn them of the cross contamination. Customers can cancel orders if they so choose or receive a refund if the delivery has already been made. The NC Dept of Ag continues to turn up the heat on the investigation as more and more complaints are received. They eventually receive "an unprecedented number of complaints" against Great Specialty Products. The GF community here in Raleigh is well connected and the word has spread quickly. Paul is now scared and decides to stall the investigation as much as possible by inventing fake aliases, facilities and an array of illnesses until he and Jonas can get the situation under control.
Do you believe the story that has just been told? No, well neither did 12 citizens of Wake County who served as jurors (I'll call them "The Gluten Free 12") during a criminal trial featuring Paul Seelig as the defendant. Believe it or not, what has been told above is a summary of the actual story Paul Seelig testified to (under oath) while on the stand in his defense during the trial. Now let's get to the facts (as uncovered by the North Carolina Department of Agriculture, the North Carolina Department of Justice, the Wake County District Attorney's Office and the Celiac/Gluten Free community of the Raleigh area) shall we?
Jonas Jones and Risn' Bakeries were never proven to exist by either the prosecutors or Paul himself. Fake invoices from Risn' Bakeries that contained no address, contact information or product descriptions were submitted as evidence during Paul's defense. Paul testified that he willingly offered to drive up to Ohio to show them where the farm was located. The investigators had already done exhaustive research with the Ohio Department of Agriculture, the Holmes County Health Department, the FDA and USDA and found no record of Risn' Bakeries or Jonas Jones. Paul's defense attorney pointed out that no one ever went with Paul prompting the Wake County Assistant District Attorney Jason Waller to counter, "You don't go to the North Pole to find out whether Santa Claus exists do you?" While Paul testified that his company has been in business for 12 years, Great Specialty Products was actually registered in Durham in 2007. Additionally, the nearest Kinko's (Now FedEx Office) to Millersburg, Ohio is located in Canton some 34 miles away. Quite a trip on a horse and buggy for Jonas, huh?
Testimony and invoices from International Gourmet Foods and Tribecca Oven showed deliveries of gluten containing bread to both the state fair and Paul's "facility" which was actually his home in Durham. Lonnie Williard from Tribecca Oven testified that her company "is a Gluten machine" and that Paul had no authorization to use its product photos or sell its products as Gluten Free. Paul sent a letter from a fake legal firm threatening to sue Tribecca Oven unless it paid him money for slander/damages after representatives from the company left blog post comments in an attempt to inform customers of the truth.
Testimony from 27 of Paul's former customers occurred during the 2 week, 2 day trial. Testimony ranged from victims getting violently ill to breaking out in painful DH rashes to delivering a 3.5 pound pre-term baby at 30 ½ weeks. In several cases children were sickened by Paul. One three year old child who was recently diagnosed with Diabetes was also damaged by Paul's misrepresentation of the number of carbohydrates in his bagels. The misrepresentation of carbs (10g instead of 57g) caused the child's parents to dose the child with the incorrect amount of insulin.
Testimony from one of Paul's former employees was particularly interesting. She testified to going to stores like BJs, Costco and Sam's Club with Paul and purchasing gluten containing bagels which she then repackaged and sold under Paul's direction to Great Specialty Products customers as Gluten Free. She also testified that Paul instructed her to not talk to customers as she made deliveries and to redirect all questions to Paul himself. Paul also told her to tell customers that the products were indeed Gluten Free at the state fair.
Paul testified that he made a trip to Ohio on December 16, 2009 and personally sees wheat and oats growing - his entire defense is based on this cross contamination. Anyone else been to or lived in Ohio during December? I lived there for 23 years, less than 2 hours from Millersburg. Not too many crops growing during the winter with potential snow on the ground that I recall.
I personally called Bindi in early December 2009 after reports that Paul was delivering its specialty desserts as GF to determine whether they were indeed GF. The company said no, so I showed it Paul's website featuring Bindi's stolen photos. Bindi said it would "take care of this" and a few days later Paul had removed all the GF specialty desserts from his website.
Paul sent a threatening email to me on December 6, 2009 stating "if I hear that kind of bull again, I will take appropriate action" and "I would and more importantly will start a law suit against you" after I informed him and others that I was testing his products for Gluten with the EZ Gluten home test kits. My intent was to share the test results (positive or negative) with the readers of my blog. Believing his law suit threat, I was unable to provide a warning post or email response to what I knew about the situation. Thankfully others in the community could and did.
Paul attempted to stall the investigation by the Department of Agriculture by using an alias of Jeff Gleason. As Jeff Gleason, he informed the investigators that Paul Seelig had suffered a massive heart attack and was flown to Cedars Sinai in California for treatment. He did not believe that Paul would live. On other occasions, he dodged investigators by saying he had been quarantined for 14 days due to H1N1 infection or was unable to meet due to his chemotherapy treatments for cancer. The Department of Agriculture received 29 complaints in total although it is assumed there were many more affected customers who did not file complaints. In January 2010, investigators grew tired and moved on shutting down Great Specialty Products. Under the Jeff Gleason alias, Paul also sent threatening emails to customers blaming bloggers for the situation. Great Specialty Products would no longer donate hundreds of thousands of dollars to local food banks, the University of North Carolina Celiac Research Center or Military toys for tots. Quotes like "I guess little Johnny won't be getting any toys this year because of these bloggers trashing our name" and "the last thing you want to do is make a company with a large bank account mad at you". Bloggers including myself were also compared to KKK members and Nazi Germany soldiers who unduly persecuted Paul's family during WWII. When did UNC start a Celiac Research Center? Court evidence showed that Paul Seelig made less than $4,000 from this scam.
In an especially low blow, Paul contacted the Raleigh Police Department to turn in a completely innocent person (some enemy of his) for the murder of State Board of Education member Kathy Taft in an attempt to get his GF fraud charges dropped. Unbeknownst to Paul, detectives had already arrested a suspect. My guess is that this kind of payback is what everyone involved in his trial has to look forward to in 10 years when Seelig is released from prison.
Paul has twice before been convicted of related crimes (grand theft and wire fraud), once in 1991 in California and again in 2002 in Federal Court in Montana. He has presented fake documents in court in the past. These charges fall in line with a long history of fraudulent and dishonest behavior.
Experts from the University of Nebraska's Food Allergy Research & Resource Program (FARRP) provided expert testimony in court about their testing procedures on multiple products submitted by Paul's customers that returned Gluten content > 5,000 PPM. Testimony from the Director of FARRP, Dr. Steven Taylor, highlighted how his lab is a leader in the U.S. for testing Gluten in products for a consortium of 57 companies. His lab tested 12,000 products in 2010 with 25% of those tests being for Gluten. He had not previously seen a submitted product score > 5,000 PPM Gluten. While doing testing for Quaker Oats, Dr. Taylor stated that his lab found results of no detectible Gluten to around 1,000 PPM in various samples. Quaker knew it had cross contamination of its oats and sought out FARRP testing to determine the level. This testimony on a proven study of cross contamination debunks Paul's story of cross contamination at Risn' Bakeries as the reason why his customers were sickened. Even if Risn' Bakeries really existed.
The defense attorney in this case made a motion to dismiss all charges due to the fact that there is currently no law stating what the term Gluten Free means for consumer products. This was particularly irritating because of the fact that the FDA has not acted on the proposed labeling term Gluten Free of > 20 PPM even though it was supposed to finalize the term in 2008 and enact law around that term in 2010 (per FALCPA passed in 2006). With no final ruling on Gluten Free labeling, the door is open to companies like Great Specialty Products to defraud and sicken GF consumers. Each company can determine what putting a Gluten Free label on a product means to them, rather than being held to a standard. If you are interested in helping to nudge along the FDA, please visit the site 1in133.org for more information. The organizers (including Jules Shepard) are planning the first ever Gluten Free Food Labeling Summit in Washington, D.C. on May 4, 2011 that will feature a 12-foot tall Gluten Free cake. There are 3 actions you can take to help the cause. Until this regulation can be finalized, it's best to consume products that have been certified Gluten Free (GFCO for example).
After deliberating for less than 2 hours, "The Gluten Free 12" came back with a verdict of guilty on all counts against Paul Seelig for Obtaining Property by False Pretenses. Because Seelig has a related history of fraud and deceit with 2 previous convictions, the prosecution asked the court for a stipulation on all the convictions of an aggravating factor. This allows the judge to sentence in the maximum range of punishment (10 to 12 months per charge). Wake County Superior Court Judge Carl Fox then proceeded to offer some harsh words for Seelig including– "The hardest crime to break someone of is dishonesty", "Stealing money from people is one thing, but poisoning them to the point where they cannot absorb nutrients or deliver a pre-term baby is a whole other level", "It's probably a good thing that your children haven't had contact with you while you've been in prison the last 9 months. I've seen it too many times where parents are in and out of court and the children end up there at some point in the future", "It appears that being dishonest is just part of who Paul Seelig is" and "You might as well have just stabbed or beaten these people, I've seen attempted murder victims who were less hurt than these victims". The judge ended with telling Seelig "I'm not sure if this is the last time you'll be in court or not, but if you don't change your ways you will die in prison". Judge Fox then sentenced Paul Seelig to 110 – 132 months in prison (9-11 years) as well as paying restitution to the victims should he ever be granted work release (although he cannot work in anything involving commerce). Judge Fox also ordered that Seelig repay the nearly $12,000 of attorney's fees for his defense lawyer as well as undergo a full mental and health evaluation. Unfortunately, Seelig was not sentenced to 10 years of having head to toe poison ivy – something my wife wanted for him after she watched me endlessly itch my DH reaction to his fake Gluten Free products. You can learn more about DH and see pictures of my outbreak in this post.
I'd like to take a brief moment to thank the many folks involved in this case. I know I am forgetting some, so my apologies. The folks from the NC Department of Agriculture – Joel Keith, Bret Weed, Jim Melvin, Kay Snipes, Joan Sims, Shirley Burch, Amy Alford and Anita McMullen. The two fine Wake County Assistant District Attorneys prosecuting this case – Jason Waller and Shawn Evans as well as Wake County Superior Court Judge Carl Fox. The folks at the NC Department of Justice – Anne Brown, John Corne and Faison Hicks. Thanks also to the 45 witnesses (many of whom were victims) who testified in this trial on behalf of the Celiac/Gluten Free community. I'd also like to thank the various media members who have covered this case, especially Andrea Weigl from the Raleigh News & Observer. Andrea has been following the case closely, and wrote the first media story on this case, and was a receptive ear when I first called her back in December 2009. Finally, big thanks to "The Gluten Free 12" – the 12 jurors who gave up 2 weeks and 2 days of their normal lives to hear a twisted story about Paul Seelig poisoning Gluten Free consumers. I'm sure you've heard enough about Gluten Free and Celiac Disease to last the rest of your lives.
Sorry for the long recap, but this story is one and a half years in the making. While I'm not overjoyed that someone will be spending the next decade of his life in prison, people have to be accountable for their actions. Whether or not the FDA has finalized the term Gluten Free for product labels, companies cannot lie about the ingredients or origins of its products. The safety of the food supply for those of us with dietary restrictions is absolutely critical. I've seen a lot of uproar over the fact that Seelig got a decade sentence while murderers and drug dealers get much less time. Paul Seelig is actually lucky in my opinion that he didn't kill someone during this 3 month fake Gluten Free fiasco. He very easily could have fed these products he advertised as wheat free/gluten free to someone with a severe wheat allergy and killed them. Hopefully this post will help educate those of you making those comments on just how serious the crimes Paul Seelig committed were. Celiac Disease is a serious health concern and requires a lifelong Gluten Free diet. Failure to adhere to this diet causes damage to our bodies which can result in death. This is not some group of whiny consumers who got sick while trying to purchase products for the latest fad diet. For those of you still in doubt, I invite you to attempt a Gluten Free diet for a period of time so you can walk a mile in our shoes – then get back to me.

subset: commoncrawl


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In a statement, the Italian claimed the club – who announced a takeover subject to Football League approval on Wednesday night – sold influential winger Matt Ritchie to League One promotion rivals Bournemouth behind his back.
The statement read: "It is with great regret that I issue this statement but, unfortunately, the events of the last few days have left me with no alternative other than to consider my position and explain the reasons why.
"We were assured that Matt Ritchie was going nowhere and money would be made available for the squad to be strengthened. Within an hour I received a phone call from Matt Ritchie telling me that the club had agreed to sell him and he was in the process of agreeing personal terms.
"I regard this as a clear breach of my contract with the club and, moreover, a clear attempt to undermine my position not withstanding the success we have achieved in the last 18 months. Matt Ritchie was sold behind my back.
"If it wasn't for the players and fans of Swindon Town, I would have walked away from this club a long time ago. I didn't because I was given repeated assurances that the project to achieve success was always in place and I wanted to deliver this for the players, staff and most of all, the fans of this great club.
"I am forced to consider my future as I don't know how I can continue to work in this environment. Too many questions remain unanswered. The future is clouded with uncertainty. At this moment of time my future remains unclear."
Di Canio, 44, was appointed as Swindon manager in May 2011 and led the team to promotion from League Two as champions last season.
The former West Ham, Celtic and Sheffield Wednesday forward has steered his team into promotion contention again in this campaign, with Swindon currently third in League One.


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Akaroa District Promotions
Akaroa & the Bays web site for up to date information when travelling to this area. We have a variety of accommodation to suit all budgets, things to do, up to date events, where to eat, shop and what activities will entice you to stay longer.
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Akaroa & the Bays. Just 75 kilometres from the city of Christchurch, Akaroa is a historic French and British settlement nestled in the heart of an ancient volcano, and is a stunning village rich in cultural history.
Explore the village with its colonial architecture, galleries, and craft stores. Relax or take part in the numerous activities that can be enjoyed year round. Swim with dolphins, visit penguin colonies, kayak, hike, or take a harbour cruise.
The township has wonderful restaurants & cafes to while away your day on a terrace over looking the sea. There are plenty of accommodation options to suit all tastes and budgets.
www.akaroa.com for all your bookings and information on Akaroa & the bays.
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Akaroa District Promotions, 80 Rue Lavaud, Akaroa, Christchurch - Canterbury, 7520, New Zealand.


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A former SEC examiner is warning chief compliance officers (CCOs) at advisory firms and broker-dealers that two recent cases brought by the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) against CCOs is a sign that "both the CCOs and the firms themselves need to realize how vulnerable they are and their degree of liability," says Amy Lynch, founder and president of FrontLine Compliance. CCOs, Lynch says, need to be more forceful in bringing items of concern to the attention of their superiors.
CCOs have "one of the toughest jobs there is," says Lynch, whose firm has offices in Leesburg, Va., and New York. CCOs perform a balancing act– "they need to keep their distance so they are the cop on the beat, but not be adversarial so they can communicate with the managers," she says. "If they can't communicate, how will they know what is going on?"
The SEC and the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority (FINRA) are both "being much more strict in their compliance," Lynch adds. Now that the SEC has received a budget boost from Congress, the agency is "going to enforce its powers more than ever." The SEC's staff "is growing…and I think [the SEC] will continue to try to hire more experienced staff."
Specifically, Lynch points primarily to two SEC administrative actions taken in May against dually registered advisors and broker-dealers–Aletheia Research and Wunderlich Securities Inc.
In addition to censuring the firms, the SEC took action against the firms' principals, including their CCOs, and reprimanded them for violations to the Investment Advisers Act that continued even after the SEC and a consultant warned them that they needed to comply.
In Aletheia, the SEC found against Roger Peikin and assessed him a $100,000 penalty, noting he was Aletheia's CCO during the relevant period. Peikin is also the company's co-founder.
The SEC order cited Altheia for sending proposals to clients and potential clients that failed
to disclose requested information regarding prior SEC examinations, which Peikin reviewed between 2006 to 2008.
The agency cited both the firm and Peikin for failing to implement written procedures designed to prevent violations of the Advisers Act and stated that from 2005 through 2009, Aletheia, the firm's CEO and CCO Peikin failed to make and/or keep copies of employees' acknowledgments indicating they had received copiet of Aletheia's code of ethics even after receiving 2005 and 2008 deficiency letters notifying Aletheia of that requirement.
The SEC also had problem's with the compan's hedge fund compliance: the firm, the CCO and the CEO (Peter Eichler, Jr.) failed to have an annual surprise examination of Aletheia's hedge funds and to provide their hedge fund investors with quarterly account statements, or provide the hedge fund investors with timely annual audit reports for a five-year period.
As for Wunderlich, the firm was found to have overcharged advisory clients for at least three years; failed to satisfy the disclosure and consent requirements of Section 206(3) of the Advisers Act when engaged in principal trades with advisory clients; failed to adopt, implement and review written policies and procedures; and failed to establish, maintain and enforce a written code of ethics, even after a consultant told them they needed to do so.
The SEC pointedly stated that Tracy Wiswall, the CCO of Wunderlich's brokerage and advisory businesses from 2004 until at least 2009, along with founder Gary Wunderlich, Jr., "willfully aided and abetted and caused WSI's violations relating to its written policies and procedures and written code of ethics." SEC language directed at the CCO rarely gets stronger than this: "Wiswall was a cause of WSI's violations relating to the firm's principal trades with advisory clients," it stated.
Wiswall had hired a compliance consultant beginning in July 2007 to help the firm comply with the Advisers Act. But by April 2008, when the exam staff arrived to conduct the first review of WSI's advisory operations, neither the firm nor Wiswall had implemented written compliance policies and procedures or distributed a written code of ethics, the SEC found.
Wiswall's civil monetary penalty was $50,000, a little more than Wunderlich's, in addition to the firm's disgorgement to clients.
"It used to be," says Lynch, that repeat violations may or may not have resulted in enforcement actions, but now she says the SEC is much more likely to do. That's the case, she says, especially if "they are numerous enough or egregious enough to warrant harm to investors." When that is the case, it's likely to "result in disgorgements to clients and easily result in enforcement."


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Texas Gov. Rick Perry's GOP rivals sharply criticized him during Wednesday night's debate over his 2007 executive order mandating that teenage girls be vaccinated to prevent cervical cancer — a move that drew strong opposition at the time from social conservatives and was later overturned by the state Legislature.
But they failed to bring up a key part of the story that fueled the Texas controversy and which Democrats are poised to pounce on: Perry's order came after the drug company that manufactured the vaccine hired Mike Toomey, his former chief of staff, as one of the firm's top lobbyists in Austin.
Toomey, who is now running the main "super pac" backing Perry's candidacy, was retained by pharmaceutical giant Merck & Co., maker of the Gardasil vaccine, which is designed to prevent the human papillomavirus, or HPV, an infection linked to cervical cancer in women.First Read: Simi Valley debate slugfest
Other political news of note
Animated Boehner: 'There's nothing complex about the Keystone Pipeline!'
House Speaker John Boehner became animated Tuesday over the proposed Keystone Pipeline, castigating the Obama administration for not having approved the project yet.
- Budget deficits shrinking but set to grow after 2015
- Senate readies another volley on unemployment aid
- Obama faces Syria standstill
- Fluke files to run in California
- Animated Boehner: 'There's nothing complex about the Keystone Pipeline!'
His hiring was part of an aggressive lobbying push in Texas by the drug company, which also donated $16,000 to Perry's gubernatorial campaigns in the two and a half years prior to the executive order. Merck paid Toomey between $260,000 and $535,000 in lobbying fees between 2005 and 2010, according to state lobbying records.
Although Perry's GOP foes never brought up the connection during the debate, Democratic political operatives and a public watchdog group said Thursday his association with Merck is likely to be emerge as a prime example of Perry's "crony capitalism," should he win the GOP nomination.Story: Perry, Romney twist records in debate
"When he signed that executive order, it turned a lot of heads because it seemed so out of character and didn't sit well with his base," said Craig McDonald, director of Texans for Public Justice, a group that tracks campaign contributions and lobbying in Austin. "Then people went looking."
Once the Toomey connection was discovered, "it was so obvious ... This is a prime example of how he [Perry] does something for a crony."Story: Perry takes the heat but keeps on smiling
Asked for comment, Mark Miner, a spokesman for the Perry campaign, emailed: "It's a 'prime example' of the Governor standing on the side of life."
On the campaign trail, Perry had recently apologized for the executive order-which would have made Texas the first state in the country to mandate that all teenage girls, starting with 12-year-old sixth graders, be vaccinated with Gardasil.
"I readily stand up and say I made a mistake on that," Perry said during an Iowa radio call-in show last month.
But he appeared to mostly defend the executive order during the debate, saying his goal was to "save lives."
"We wanted to bring that to the attention of these thousands of-tens of thousands of young people in our state," he said. "We allowed for an opt-out … Now did we handle it right? Should we have talked to the Legislature first before we did it? Probably so. But at the end of the day, I will always err on the side of saving lives."Story: Two Texans trade barbs in GOP debate
But that didn't stop Minnesota Rep. Michele Bachmann and former Pennsylvania Sen. Rick Santorum from bashing Perry over the issue.
"I want to get back to this Gardasil issue," Santorum said at one point. "You know, we have — Gov. Perry's out there and claiming about states' rights and states' rights. How about parental rights being more important than states' rights? … I am offended that the government would tell me, and by an executive order, without even going through the process of letting the people have any kind of input. I would expect this from President Obama. I would not expect this form someone who's calling himself a conservative governor."
© 2013 NBCNews.com Reprints


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OnLive On-Demand Cloud Gaming Launches in UK Today
22 Sep, 2011, 01:43 BST
LONDON, September 22, 2011 /PRNewswire/ --
- Play top-tier video games on demand from Internet-connected TVs, PCs, Macs and tablets
- Free membership, free demos, exclusive massive spectating, Facebook integration and more
- BT launches its partnership with OnLive and an exclusive promotion for broadband customers
- OnLive announces strategic partnership with GAME Group plc for both retail and digital service offerings
- First OnLive game just £1 at onlive.co.uk in special launch promotion!
- FREE OnLive Game Systems at Eurogamer Expo!
OnLive, the pioneer of cloud gaming, launches its breakthrough on-demand video game service today at the 2011 Eurogamer Expo in London, bringing amazing new gameplay experiences to the UK. Gamers across the UK can sign up for free at http://www.onlive.co.uk and instantly play about 150 top-tier games via almost any broadband Internet connection on their HDTV, PC or Mac®, and soon on iPad® and Android® tablets.
BT is the first internet service provider in the UK to offer cloud-based gaming to customers through its exclusive partnership with OnLive. BT is the UK's leading high-speed, low latency broadband provider with relationships with 11 million households. To mark the launch, BT is giving its 5 million broadband customers three months free access to 100+ games when customers sign up at: http://www.bt.com/onlive. OnLive traffic will not count towards BT broadband customers usage allowances until the New Year, regardless of their broadband option. BT looks forward to announcing more exciting initiatives with OnLive in the near future.
OnLive is delighted to announce a strategic launch partnership with GAME Group plc ("GAME"), UK's leading videogame retailer. As the first games retailer in the world to become a strategic launch partner for OnLive, GAME will introduce the OnLive® Game Service to millions of customers in the UK and eventually across Europe and elsewhere, starting with GAME's ecommerce sites game.co.uk and gamestation.co.uk later this year. The OnLive Game System, OnLive Universal Wireless Controller and OnLive Game Service digital offerings will then be extended through the Group's 615 UK stores and integrated with the Group's popular loyalty schemes, the GAME Reward Card and gamestation Elite card.
OnLive is a revolutionary new concept in video games, instantly delivering the latest high-end games on demand through the Internet to virtually any device, regardless of its performance capabilities, with the simplicity of streaming video. No console, no high-end computer, no discs, no huge downloads. Plus unprecedented community features like massive spectating, Facebook integration, Brag Clip® videos and spectating voice chat, both throughout the UK and across the Atlantic.
"OnLive is incredibly excited to bring instant-play, on-demand cloud gaming to the UK," said Steve Perlman, OnLive Founder and CEO. "OnLive is an entirely new way of experiencing top-tier video games, anywhere, anytime and on virtually any connected device, whether TV, PC, Mac or tablet, with awesome cloud-powered features and community unlike anything you've ever seen before. UK gamers, welcome to OnLive!"
A flurry of UK launch promotions* are in store for new UK OnLive members:
- First-time OnLive purchasers can get their first OnLive PlayPass Game for just £1, a £39.99 value
- BT broadband customers can get 100+ PlayPack Games for FREE for 3 months in addition to the OnLive PlayPass £1 game offer, a £20.97 value
- Eurogamer Expo attendees can get a FREE OnLive Game System (while supplies last), a £69.99 value
*Promotions subject to terms, conditions and limitations
Be the first to check out the latest games through OnLive, with new titles typically released the same second they are available on consoles and PC: no disc to purchase, no download and no update to wait for. Just click and play. You'll find top-tier games from over 50 publishers in every genre, like Deus Ex: Human Revolution, DiRT 3,Homefront, F.E.A.R. 3, Assassin's Creed: Brotherhood and LEGO Harry Potter: Years 1-4. Play single player or multiplayer with a variety of voice chat modes. Rack up achievements and snap Brag Clip videos of your greatest (or most hilarious) moments and automatically post videos and notifications on your Facebook wall. Spectate (and chat with) thousands of players live throughout the world. And, with web-accessible parental controls, parents can decide exactly what games are okay for their kids to play-or even watch their kids play from a remote computer or tablet and chat with them. OnLive isn't just great games on demand. OnLive is a vibrant, live gamer community from kids to adults.
"We're excited to bring an incredible range of social features to the UK that are unique to the OnLive world," said John Spinale, OnLive VP of Games and Media, "OnLive UK gamers will immediately find themselves immersed in OnLive's international massive spectating and voice chat community, which adds an unprecedented dimension to the gaming experience."
OnLive membership is free at onlive.co.uk, with free demos and free social features. New-release games can be purchased individually at competitive prices starting at £1.99, or members can sign up for OnLive's 100+ game (and growing) PlayPack Bundle program for just £6.99 a month, featuring recent multiplayer games like F.E.A.R. 3, Homefront and Borderlands as well as top classic and indie games like Batman: Arkham Asylum,Saints Row 2, Deus Ex: Game of the Year Edition and World of Goo.
For a limited time only, new OnLive UK members can purchase their first individual OnLive game for just £1. OnLive is also delighted to announce that BT, OnLive's preferred broadband partner, will be offering three months of the OnLive 100+ Game PlayPack FREE to BT broadband and BT Infinity customers.
Come see OnLive at Eurogamer Expo at Earl's Court, and get a FREE OnLive Game System, while supplies last. Try out great new games coming soon to OnLive, including Warner Bros.' Lord of the Rings: War in the North, and try out OnLive games on tablets, both with touch and with OnLive's soon-to-be-released Universal Wireless Controller.
OnLive is available through http://www.onlive.co.uk on virtually every PC and Mac through a simple browser download, on HDTVs via the OnLive Game System, and soon on iPad and Android tablets. OnLive games are available across all devices with no additional charge, so your games are available where you are, on whatever device is at hand.
Find out more at http://www.onlive.co.uk and see the accompanying list of new and upcoming OnLive games.
About OnLive
OnLive is the pioneer of on-demand, instant-play video game services, delivering real-time interactive experiences and rich media through the Internet. With groundbreaking video compression technology, OnLive harnesses cloud computing to provide the power and intelligence needed to instantly deliver the latest, premium game titles to any HDTV via the OnLive Game System or nearly any PC and Mac® via a small browser download. The OnLive Viewer app is available for the iPad and Android tablets and playable versions will be available soon. OnLive is available in North America and the UK and will be expanding into more of Europe later this year. OnLive technology is backed by hundreds of patents and patents pending. The company is headquartered in Palo Alto, California. OnLive investors include Warner Bros., Autodesk, Maverick Capital, AT&T, British Telecommunications (BT), The Belgacom Group, HTC and Juniper Networks. More information is available at http://www.onlive.com and http://www.onlive.co.uk.
OnLive and Brag Clip are registered trademarks of OnLive, Inc. All other trademarks are the property of their respective owners.
OnLive's UK launch and coming soon titles include:
Launch Titles
4 Elements
AC-130: Operation Devastation
Advent Rising
Alarm for Cobra 11 Nitro
Alien Shooter: Vengeance
Alien vs. Predator Classic 2000
Aliens vs. Predator
Alpha Prime
Alpha Protocol
Amnesia: The Dark Descent
A.R.E.S.: Extinction Agenda
Around the World in 80 Days
Assassin's Creed Brotherhood
Assassin's Creed Brotherhood Deluxe Edition
Assassin's Creed II
Batman: Arkham Asylum
Bloodrayne 2
Borderlands: Game of the Year Edition
Brain Challenge
Conflict: Denied Ops
Darkstar One
Defense Grid: Gold
Deus Ex: Game of the Year Edition
Deus Ex: Human Revolution
DiRT 2
DiRT 3
Disciples III: Renaissance
Divinity 2: The Dragon Knight Saga
Doc Clock: The Toasted Sandwich of Time
Dracula 3: The Path of the Dragon
Duke Nukem Forever
Elements of War
Elizabeth Find, MD: Diagnosis Mystery
Evil Genius
F.E.A.R. 2: Project Origin
Faery: Legends of Avalon
Fate of the Pharaoh
Fishdom 2
Flatout 2
Frontlines: Fuel of War
Glyph 2
Grand Ages: Rome
Hitman: Blood Money
Hitman 2: Silent Assassin
Just Cause
Just Cause 2
Kane & Lynch 2
King's Bounty: Armored Princess
King's Legacy
Lara Croft and the Guardian of Light
LEGO Batman: The Videogame
LEGO Harry Potter: Years 1-4
Luxor 2
Madballs in Babo: Invasion
Mafia II
Men of War: Red Tide
Metro 2033
Mini Ninjas
MX vs ATV Reflex
NecroVision: The Lost Company
Night at the Museum: Battle of the Smithsonian
Ninja Blade
Oddworld: Munch's Oddysee
Patrician IV
Port Royale 2
Prince of Persia
Prince of Persia: The Forgotten Sands
Puzzle Quest: Challenge of the Warlord
Red Faction Guerrilla
Red Faction: Armageddon
Remington Super Slam Hunting: Africa
Royal Envoy Premium
Saints Row 2
Shaun White Skateboarding
Shellshock 2: Blood Trails
Silent Hunter 5: Battle of the Atlantic
S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Shadow of Chernobyl
Star Wolves 3: Civil War
Super Granny 6
Supreme Commander
Supreme Commander: Forged Alliance
Syberia II
The Ball
The Bard's Tale
The Maw
Tom Clancy's H.A.W.X
Tom Clancy's H.A.W.X. 2
Tom Clancy's Splinter Cell: Conviction
Tomb Raider Anniversary
Tomb Raider: Legend
Tomb Raider: Underworld
Trapped Dead
Tropico 3
Tropico 4
Unreal Tournament III
Vegas: Make it Big
Virtua Tennis 2009
Warhammer 40,000: Dawn of War II Chaos Rising
Warhammer 40,000: Space Marine
World of Goo
Zombie Shooter 2
Coming Soon
Assassin's Creed Revelations
Assault Heroes 2
Batman: Arkham City
Call of Juarez: The Cartel
Civilization V
Driver: San Francisco
Fallout Tactics
Fallout: A Post Nuclear Role Playing Game
Football Manager 2012
From Dust
Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince
Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, Part 1
Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, Part 2
LEGO Harry Potter: Years 5-7
Might & Magic: Heroes VI
Operation Flashpoint: Red River
Orcs Must Die
Red Bull X Fighters, International Freestyle Motorcross
Red Orchestra 2: Heroes of Stalingrad
Roller Coaster Tycoon 3
Saints Row the Third
Sniper: Ghost Warrior
Super Street Fighter 4: Arcade Edition
Trine 2
Wargame: European Escalation
SOURCE OnLive


text:
"Sightlines", by Emmy Award nominee Mark Eisman, is an intimate two-person play about finding connection in an ever-blurring world.
Starring Daytime Emmy and NAACP Image Award winner Darnell Williams (All My Children's Jesse Hubbard) as Davis, and Tamara Scott as Ruth, "Sightlines" takes us on a journey with two strangers who come together in the oddest of places, grasping in the dark for a human connection that will guide them out of the "rabbit hole." Out of the darkness and into the light. Out of the light and into the darkness, they smash their way "through the looking-glass" into a Lewis Carroll world and a love story defying conventional perceptions.
Walk into the cell and be transported into Eisman¹s Wonderland with Naomi Olson's photographs of the blind community in Hawaii, featuring tactile imagery and sound clips. Round the corner and you¹re in a dark room of work by the Seeing With Photography Collective, a local collective of sighted, visually-impaired, and blind photographers. The Collective's process creates luminous distortions, blurred or glowing forms resulting entirely from their photo technique, provoking the viewer or perceiver to
ask, "What is seeing? What does one choose to see?"
Leading you in an out of the rabbit hole is an original score by ASCAP Fnd/Max Dreyfus Scholarship recipient Rona Siddiqui, fresh off her NYC solo concert debut and featured songwriter stint in Bill Finn¹s Cabaret at Barrington Stage and Lincoln Center's "Broadway's Future" concert series.
On select Sundays, the Collective will offer portrait sessions watch the process! Portraits, as well as the photographs making up the set, will be on sale throughout the run of the production.
The play is directed by Custom Made's executive director, Leah S. Abrams.
$18 General Admission
$15 Students / Seniors


text:
If Zhang Xiao or Qingchuan come to Xiao Yan Zi's Body, Would She become Huan Zhu Ge Ge?
Qingchuan tossed her body on the bed, left, right, left, right, she felt bored has been along day staying in bed. She pressed number in her cell phone but no one picked her call. If only her mom did not forbid her to touch computer, now she would have played GTA, she loved violent so much, shes so addicted to full blood chopped bodies, and felt satisfied if someone died before her, unfortunately she couldnt kill someone in real life, how much she wanted to kill someone without getting arrested, and her number one target was her handsome fiancé. He is not bald, I want bald guy as my fiancé, I always drooling whenever I see shiny bald forehead, that because I never see my own bald butt, she took a long sighed, May be Im not belong this era!
Then she turned on tv, she flipped the channel to Hunan TV, it reran Huan Zhu Ge Ge again, TV definitely need other Qing dynasty series, I want more bald princes! One Wu Age isnt enough for me, and his characters not challenging at all, so composed, I suck on wild guy! and then she got bored again watching old Huan Zhu Ge Ge. Her eyes widened when infotainment reported behind the scene remake Huan Zhu Ge Ge, the reporter was interviewing the little cheerful girl with mole in her chin, From your face, I guess you play as Concubine Ling, do you? asked the dumb new reporter.
Dont you see my cute tassels in my hair do? Does Concubine Ling wear them? Her cheerfulness turned to angst.
Ehm, sorry, I dont see you wearing pants, so you just cameo, where is the next little swallow? The reporter blushed, how embarrassing not recognize a maid and thought her as a concubine.
SHE IS RIGHT BEFORE YOU! Li Sheng roared with flame as her background. The reporter frightened and ran away from her in a blink of eyes. Seeing the flame around Li Sheng, Benjamin headed to her with beef in his hand. XYZ dont cease your fire! I want make barbeque, He said with excellent American accent.
Dont worry, I have to prolong it along the story, my XYZ would become the hottest XYZ! She grinned happily to Benjamin but smirked as she peeked on Zhang Rui. I miss my delicious pork because his belief!
Back to Qingchuan
Bullshit! This remake will be biggest trash, the white guy will ruin the nice story, and this is not historically accurate! I have to come to the shooting location and fix it, I wont let Qiong Yao butchered her masterpiece, if Yu Zheng will, I dont care, he still young and has many women, but Qiong Yao is just widower!"
After that she flopped down from the window and went heading to fake forbidden city to find the shooting crew.
Her mom opened her door room, and surprised that she didnt find her daughter, Oh my, as I thought before, she run away, I should lock her window with super big padlock, I have to find another Qingchuan to replace her! She mumbled. She didnt regret Qingchuan left, she just move on preparing her biggest dream, make engagement party at her antique gallery, My will unstoppable Mrs. Luo laughed menacingly.
?????????????????????????????????????????????????? ??????????????????????????????
Qingchuan strode to the fake palace, her sweat was streamed all over body, Uh so hot, why dont they make greenery shades at first, this is so plain and dull, all of the cherry trees are plastic, shame, shame, shame!
The scene was being shot the duel between Xiao Yan Zi and Saiya, XYZ swung her sword encounter Saiyas whip. Qingchuan ran toward them, and shouted, Li Sheng you should use 9 sections chain rather than sword, or dont you have Vickis persistent to mastering that weapon? QC sneered her.
Of course I could, but the director told me to use sword, how could I dont comply his order? Why do you brag other people, can you use the 9 sections chain yourself? Dare you beat me with that weapon, ha?
Suddenly, from nowhere Li Sheng threw 9 sections chain to QC, and she caught it gracefully like pro. Li Sheng had been trained by martial art director, and she practiced sword stance every day so she would become most capable XYZ, its easy to defeated CQ who just relied on her gut to move the chain. She couldnt control her chain to attack Li Sheng and end up hurt herself, knew that her enemy idle, she stabbed her.
Cruuut! blood splattered her body. She laid lifeless and moveless on the ground. Then siren roared along the road brought culprits to be jailed. The HZGG remake was over, all the crew become suspects murder case, they are proven had the killing happen.
A flying soul drifted in time tunnel on jet speed before the tunnel shaking violently. Its belong to Qingchuan. Suddenly she landed very smoothly in soft bed but everything turn black at QC eyes, she could not see, but she could feel the pain in her chest.
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ +++++++++++++++++++++
Zhang Xiao strolled after work, she looked for antic box for caging her cat. Her destination was an antique gallery which open premiere today, it gave 99% discount today! She smiled as she arrived the gallery, the gallery was full red banners and red bow. She smiled admiring the gallery decoration. If only I were the owner! while she thought it before someone grab her hand and drag her from behind, the attacker has paralyzed her nerve, so she couldnt defend nor scream.
The crazy old woman dressed her a nice red dress, and she could only glare her rude action. You forget your name and your name is Qingchuan now! Qingchuan, Qingchuan, Qingchuan my beloved daughter! The old woman swung her pendulum to hypnotized Zhang Xiao. After that she led the Zhang Qiao or the new Qingchuan to the gallery.
Zhang Xiao smiled at the boy who claiming his self as QCs fiancé, as he kiss her hand. The boys so handsome, QC must be stupid girl, she run away from such hunk, she thought. Then she sightseeing the antique in gallery. Everyone peered her as she strolling around gallery with disbelief look.
QC you must be in Korea lately, a full jewelry lady approached her, her face full surprised seeing the new QC.
I work at office along week, Why I should go to Korea? Zhang Xiao wondered.
Your face change a lot! She studied ZX face closely.
Is it better? ZX pointed her face.
No, you are getting uglier, but never mind, you seems being nicer to me, replied Old Lady.
Thank, you flatter me so much! She smiled happily.
Zhang Xiao was humming happily, she got new lad and rich in law, she wandering around the gallery, her eyes widened when she saw an ink washed painting on the wall. Ma Er Tai Ruo Xi, the name is written under the woman painting, Someone has painted me without my permit, so that would be ok, if I get my picture back to my home, She wanted to grab the painting but it flew away outside the gallery. She ran after it, ran, ran, and ran like catching flying kite.
The gallery attendant didnt recognize ZX as new QC, so she shouted when someone tried to grab the most precious painting in gallery, Someone stole the painting! She ran after to catch ZX hoping she would get prize for Mrs. Luo for catching a thief.
Another one parroted her, Thief, thief! Everyone attention changed to the voices, and flocking outside gallery to help the attendant catch thief.
The painting flew away to the forest, but Zhang Xiao was near-sighted so it so blur to watch the painting away. Instead went to the forest she headed to bustling street. She pondered while ran, where did the painting fly away? Then a painful spell stroke her, she flew away like the painting, before she hit the billboard, and electrocuted by wild wire. Her soul flew away left her body, it flew to very long tunnel, its the longest tunnel that she ever went through


text:
Free shipping over $ 99
Free shipping over $ 99
Attentive to the narrative capacity of objects, the Sicilian architect Mario Trimarchi designed Ossidiana espresso coffee maker. A project created, like the other ones of the designer, from memories and fragments of images narrated through an object's form.
Ossidiana coffee maker, designed by Mario Trimarchi, is made of polished aluminium. It has an appearance that enhances its ergonomics, making it consistent with the shape of the hand and ensuring an easy grip during opening and closing operations. The small knob, thermoplastic resin coated aluminium to avoid burn, looks as if it almost disappears, leaving the body of the coffeepot to showcase all of its visual powers. Ossidiana encloses the memory of the aspects that characterise the traditional moka and the volcanic stone of the same name, bringing to the kitchen all the forces of a good espresso.
Mario Trimarchi, born in Sicily, has lived and worked in Milan since 1983. An architect of the "freehand" generation, he has always moved freely within the visual universe and considers drawing, photography, design and image as equal components with the same theoretical approach. Between 1994 and 1998 Trimarchi was Director of Advanced Design at the Domus Academy and from 1989 to 2000 was part of the Olivetti Design Studio, where he worked with Michele De Lucchi. In 1999 he founded his own Corporate Identity Care studio, FRAGILE. With FRAGILE he designs systems of identity, coordinated image and visual alphabets through which diverse individualities can be expressed. He has designed many trademarks, most notably for Poste Italiane, the graphics for numerous large exhibitions, communications systems for Italian design companies and, finally, many displays and interiors. Never relinquishing his passion for drawing, architecture or design, he is currently working on the theme of unstable geometries, which he utilises within the context of our relationships with everyday objects in an attempt to change, however slightly, our habitual patterns of living.


text:
'A Change Is Gonna Come' for Facebook on Windows Phone
As an Apple fan, I will be the first to say the Windows Phone "Metro" look and feel is dope. If only developers knew what to do with it. Case in Point, the Native Facebook app severely lacks some core features that users on other mobile platforms take for granted.
The folks at Facebook have been keeping their ears to the ground and have been receptive to all the requests. As a result, they are in the final stages of releasing version 2.5 that answers many users concerns.
The news came as a status update on the Facebook for Windows Phone Fan Page wherein they expressed understanding in the lack of key features and have been hard at work giving the users what they want. The update also pointed out some of the features users can look forward to in the new version:
- Threaded and group messaging
- Delete posts and comments from your wall
- Tapping active links in updates to go directly to content
- Tagging users and location in updates by using "with" and "at" features
- 'Liking' comments
The update claims they are in the final stages, but actual date of the rollout wasn't given. So if you're a Windows Phone fan, like the FB for Windows Phone Page for an official announcement.


text:
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Find Out Why Health-Conscious Men and Women
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(Push play button below)
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You can read even more about it here:
Magnetic Flux Therapy
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