text:
Five Poets in The Age of Anxiety
This Nest, Swift Passerine, by Dan Beachy-Quick. Tupelo Press, 72 pp., $16.95.
Unincorporated Persons in the Late Honda Dynasty, by Tony Hoagland. Graywolf Press, 100pp., $15.
Other Prohibited Items, by Martha Greenwald. Mississippi Review Poetry Series, 64 pp., $11.
Shot, by Christine Hume. Counterpath Press, 104 pp., $14.95.
Clampdown, by Jennifer Moxley. Flood Editions, 112 pp., $14.95.
So many American writers are going in so many directions these days that it rarely seems helpful—and often becomes counterproductive—to speak in terms of schools or movements. For every devotee of James Wright or Robert Creeley, there's an acolyte of Anne Carson; the would-be disciples of John Ashbery must contend with the newest crop of self-anointed Confessionals. We are too myopic—as most generations are—to clearly see whatever castes or hierarchies may be forming among our contemporaries, and many of us who write poetry have responded to the twentieth century penchant for manifestos by adopting that most unlikely of modern-day virtues: modesty. This virtue, I suspect, is at least part of the allure of popular favorites du jour Billy Collins and Kay Ryan—their work is understated, unassuming, and often self-deprecating—as well as the reason poets such as Bishop continue to generate critical interest even as her more bombastic peers, John Berryman in particular, have faded from view. Yet this quiet trend is not always the product of quiet minds; we may turn to a more humble writing because we fear that the poetic discipline itself is inadequate to articulate, much less confront, the ruthlessly neutral face of the postmodern world. Our modesty may be reducible to anxiety: anxiety for ourselves, for our children, and for the literary future of a country that no longer goes unquestioned as the center of the world. The five poets under question here—Moxley, Hoagland, Hume, Beachy-Quick, and Greenwald—have registered that anxiety, and in some cases internalized it, in profoundly different ways.
The cover of Dan Beachy-Quick's fourth full-length collection, This Nest, Swift Passerine, makes it clear that its pages will be offering us "A Poem," as opposed to a more humble book of one-page lowercase ones. It's an ambitious announcement whose subsequent epigraph only raises the stakes: "Here we find ourselves, suddenly, not in critical speculation, but in a holy place, and should go warily and reverently. We stand before the secret of the world, there where Being passes into Appearance, and Unity into Variety." The quote is from Emerson, who wrote these words as a warning to skeptics; for Beachy-Quick, it's a somewhat more canny beginning since it serves as both an admonition to critics and a reminder that art—or perhaps Art, as Emerson would have had it—is mostly composed of appearances and variety.
For those who have grown accustomed to poetry that allows itself to be read, digested and forgotten in the course of a single page, the appearance and variety of Beachy-Quick's Poem may seem more like smoke and mirrors. Yet the visual chaos of the work, whose terse, imagistic lines jostle for space alongside italicized blocks of prose and a liberal sprinkling of dashes and asterisks, is always controlled, nearly always purposeful, and immensely rewarding to explore. As the poet himself writes later in the work, "The healthy heart lives in chaos." Near the beginning of the poem, at least, this chaos dresses itself in zenlike, punctuationless meditations on the natural world, which alternate with blocks of faux-scientific prose. After observing, for instance, "The eye is made of the light by which it sees. Every eye, and all the world which enters through the pin-hole of the eye, is 1,000,000 years and 8 minutes old," the speaker trades out the science writer's voice for the oracle's: "My amber eye in this amber world / Sees wind seize the cloud and straighten / The cloud and with one gust circle / The cloud unto itself …"
Beachy-Quick further complicates this perspectival game by dropping in excerpts from several poets, philosophers, and theologians, whose words he appropriates in order to cast light on his own. The excerpts begin with passages from the Grasmere Journal of Dorothy Wordsworth, but they quickly expand to include Ovid, John Milton, Martin Buber, Meister Eckhart, Wallace Stevens, Emily Dickinson, Simone Weil, and Henry David Thoreau, among others. The connective thread that binds them is a chronic obsession with what can be seen versus what cannot, and what experiences may arise from the act of seeing. Witness Dorothy Wordsworth's moonlit walk through the woods, which yields "many many exquisite feelings … it made me more than half a poet. I was tired when I reached home I could not sit down to reading & tried to write verses but alas! I gave up." Indeed. Beachy-Quick's gentle satire is very much to the point, as exquisite feelings (alas!) do not a poet make. When he quotes a letter by Milton a few pages later, a compelling contrast emerges between the transcendent but ultimately sterile vision of Miss Wordsworth, and the detached language Milton employs to record the deterioration of his own vision:
It is ten years, I think, more or less, since I noticed my sight becoming and growing
dim And even in the morning, if I began as usual to read, I noticed that my eyes
felt immediate pain deep within and turned from reading as often as I looked at a
lamp, a sort of rainbow seemed to obscure it. Soon a mist appeared in the left part
of the left eye removed from my sight everything on that side.
Milton could console himself not only with the lines he drew from his stupefyingly disciplined mind but also with the thought that he was following the will of a watchful and omnipotent God. The modern writer wondering how long his own poetic visions will last, however, has much less to fall back on. At heart, then, Beachy-Quick's ostensibly visionary work is conducting an earnest and very quotidian investigation of the literary devil that confronts us when we gaze at the blank page and find that nothing (or is it Nothing?) is gazing back at us. This isn't simply glorified writer's block; this is the abyss the writer faces when he occasionally dares to ask why, exactly, he has chosen to write at all.
In the present book, the first sensation that arises from such an inquiry is probably best captured in the words of Thomas Traherne, one of the excerpted writers: "Another time, in a lowering and sad evening, being alone in the field, when all things were dead and quiet, a certain want and horror fell upon me, beyond imagination." For the uneasy mind, the amelioration of this feeling does not come easily. If it does, Beachy-Quick tells us, now in his own words, it is because we have learned to see the emptiness as something else, not as an abyss but a surface: "The blank page reflects. The pond could not hold Echo's voice, but ink does. Every word mine equally yours. Nothing here has not been spoken before. But peering through the deepening pages, I think I see my own reflection." Much ink has been spilled in analyzing the "anxiety of influence." Yet for this poet, it is the very inescapability of influence, the knowledge that we are working in relation to a tradition, however fragmented or quarrelsome, that serves to redeem us. The point could not be clearer than in the book's final section, which begins with three lines from Wordsworth's Prelude. Beachy-Quick quickly interrupts, imitating the Prelude in form and cadence, and ending with a vision of his own:
when I neared the tree the whole tree flew
hundreds of black birds against the sky
occupying but a few feet in the air
flying in a single motion a single mind
until suddenly each bird unwove itself
and the mourning cloth dispersed
This is not necessarily a comforting vision. But it is an accurate one, one that acknowledges the poet's desire—not always realized—to communicate with his literary ancestors, and one that pays tribute to the abundant variety of appearances the modern poem can wear.
To some degree, Tony Hoagland has been complicit in his casting as a clownish figure in the American poetry scene. The title of his latest book, Unincorporated Persons in the Late Honda Dynasty, could have been ripped from the cover of a Tom Robbins novel, and he shares with fellow jesters, such as Andrew Hudgins, a penchant for the juvenile and irreverent. Officious neighbors become "greedy six-year-olds / sucking the last half-inch of milkshake up through a noisy straw," and "Poor Britney Spears" is described, in increasingly discomfiting turns, as "a pink, life-size piece of chewing gum," a Roman "gladiatrix," and "my adorable little monkey, / prancing for your candy."
Hoagland's portrait of America's favorite train-wreck pop star is also indicative of his broader interest in the nation's current political trends, as well as his fondness for what one might call (surely this guy has already fumbled his regrettable way into a poem somewhere) "Joe the Plumber" imagery: the poem "Complicit with Everything" chronicles the misfortunes of "the retired bachelor mailman Bill, // watcher of sports events and CNN atrocities," and "My Father's Vocabulary" begins by tracing its subject's rustbelt roots: "In the history of American speech, / he was born between 'Dirty Commies' and 'Nice tits.' // He worked for Uncle Sam, / and married a dizzy gal from Pittsburgh with a mouth on her." Lines like these run the severe risk of buying into their own kitsch, and in them Hoagland sometimes approaches Albert Goldbarth country, that cluttered wasteland of cheeky, Nixon-era misogynist jokes and plangent odes to the psychotropic weirdness of the sixties. At times he forgets himself and actually starts wandering into that country: in "Visitation," for instance, the speaker recalls the body of a former lover by conjuring "the fine blonde purse of her pussy" and "the basilica / of her high, Irish-American butt," images that could have been gathered from the cutting-room floor (or, let's be honest, the pages) of a John Updike story.
But Hoagland's occasional forays into nostalgia—and they are just that, occasional—are merely symptoms of a deep disquiet that, given America's decade-long identity crisis, is entirely appropriate, and that the poet is usually brave enough to face head-on. The poem "Foghorn," for instance, interrupts its own desultory question on the possibility of racial harmony with a blunt and ugly answer:
Now here we are in time for our own momentof unequal opportunity,which we will probably fail to understandor raise our best selves to.
If Hoagland is a clown, these two stanzas could be the scene in Poe's "Hop-Frog" where the brooding court jester rounds up a ballroomful of horrified royals and sets them aflame. Yet the poem is rescued from its fatalistic conclusion by the "probably" that crouches halfway through the penultimate line, raising to the light a quiet moral challenge: will we, in fact, come to understand the moment we were born to? At first blush, Hoagland's answer seems to be a sour, Larkinish "of course not," especially when he chooses to speak in terms of the collective. Not at all surprisingly, such satirical poems as "Plastic," "The Story of White People," "Disaster Movie," and "The Allegory of the Temp Agency" do not end well. At times, Hoagland is clearly tempted to take a Manichean view of his surroundings, as attested by poems like "Nature" ("I miss the friendship with the pine trees and the birds") and "Wild" ("the bears inherit the earth, / full of water and humans and garbage, / which looks to them like paradise").
But Hoagland is evidently quite aware of this all-too-human tendency to neatly divide the world between good and evil, nature and artifice, the free individual and the suffocating state, as well as the unfortunate products of that division—not merely lazy and facile people, for a start, but also lazy and facile art, which might be even worse. The poet says as much in "The Allegory of the Temp Agency," whose titular painting (one we can only hope Hoagland needed to invent) depicts a pack of vulpine, bloodthirsty corporate moguls chasing down their employees. The real allegory, the poem explains, has nothing to do with predatory capitalists. "Rather, the painting shows that the artist was untalented, / and is an allegory of how difficult it is / to be both skillful and sincere …"
No statement could better summarize the difficulty faced by the poet—especially such a poet as Hoagland, who is very talented indeed, as this quietly self-reflective turn attests, but who is nonetheless drawn by temperament to value sincerity over technical skill. In this sense, Unincorporated Persons in the Late Honda Dynasty is not so much anxious for America's future as it is for its own, and for the delicate balancing act that books such as this one must maintain in order to create an art that, while evaluating the events of the day, is still worth returning to when the sun rises on the next one.
Apparently Martha Greenwald knows a thing or two about temp agencies as well. "You forgot to deduct his disallowed / meals, and forwarded one copy, not three," she complains in the voice of "Joanne, From Travel Accounting," and in a spate of poems from the second half of Other Prohibited Items, including "The Last Secretary," "Addendum," and "Memorandum RE: Garlic Salt," Greenwald slips so naturally into the rhythmless drone of corporate-speak that one is initially tempted to follow suit and tell her to take a week off. Instead, one is gratified to find that she can slip out of it just as easily. The third poem of that triad, for instance, recalls an episode so bizarre that it's almost disappointing to discover it actually happened—a snowbound city, its stock of melting- salt depleted, is rescued at the eleventh hour by the garlic salt reserves of a local spice distributor—and Greenwald recreates the story in the wondering lilt of a folk tale: "This was the beginning of things. / … That night, parsley / dusted moonlight fell down green, / melting dark sidewalks and streets."
Similarly, the strongest lines in Greenwald's debut collection are those in which the poet untethers herself entirely from the quotidian voice of the cubicle dweller and allows her language to approach the more rarefied realm of the purely musical. This doesn't happen often, but when it does, the effect is galvanizing—as in the description of a moving train in "Working the Narragansett Night Owl":
the Westerly woolen mills gone, precisely on schedule—we'll make the Mystic hold-back. Two quick track-switches,
the reading lights flicker once, then a rare trade—the ringof slow brake on smooth rails slurs to sail tack clanging
on masts.
What visionsMight besiege an infant whose sustenance
This is what we might have read eighty years ago if Robinson Jeffers had stayed in Pittsburgh and written about trains instead of hawks in coastal California. That last full stanza is especially admirable, with its "ring / of slow brake on smooth rails" quietly decelerating into the music of sail grommets "clanging on masts." Greenwald achieves a similarly lyrical effect in the final lines of the poem "Three," whose tryptich of ten-line poems (or decastiches, if you must), each offering a snapshot of the poet's three-year-old daughter, ends with the discovery of a stone resembling one the daughter had lost: "gray granite coat, mica-fleck eyes / wide set on a wide head—gone missing that day / she announced I'll eat wind, then stood, mouth / agape to the squall, gulping the lake-effect bitters." This last line is delightfully odd, not because the idea of a toddler doggedly attempting to "eat wind" is particularly strange (children do much stranger things), but because the words are so surprisingly musical: tonal but dissonant, so much so that they seem only barely anchored to the meaning of the phrase they create. They exemplify, in Frost's famous dictum "language under pressure," if not to the highest degree, then at least to a degree higher than one usually encounters in narrative poetry.
Even more successful are two rather uncharacteristic poems, "At Bracknell" and "1813," inspired by Thomas Love Peacock's Memoirs of Shelley and the clinical treatise A View of the Nervous Temperament, by the nineteenth-century English naval physician Thomas Trotter. The poems treat events described by Peacock in his celebrated biography: the first is an apocryphal account of Shelley, who, appalled at his wife Harriet's refusal to nurse their infant daughter, unbuttons his shirt and attempts the task himself, and the second recounts Shelley's nightmarish vision of a human body collapsing into old age. In these poems Greenwald's imagistic dexterity shines through. Here is part of "At Bracknell":
Falls from areolas black as eclipse? CratedStillborns, a cold winter hearth, soup bonesRising from a cauldron, geese resurrected,Feathered ghosts float in muddied broth …
In offering us the venerated English Romantic as he struggles with such bizarre and crowded visions, Greenwald effectively makes him human again, and she does so in quatrains whose muted precision stands in sharp contrast to the dark wintry scene they summon forth. A respite of sorts arrives in the last lines of "1813," where Shelley, sequestered in a cramped carriage but momentarily free of his chronic anxiety at the prospect of growing old, turns to the window: "Outside the landscape was hedgerows and rills. / No pyramids or sphinxes squatted on the horizon." Another foreboding ruin would nonetheless appear when Shelley wrote Ozymandias in 1818, and William Yeats's slouching sphinx would rouse itself a century later, but for now, Greenwald seems to suggest, a relative peace prevails.
On the surface, this decisively nineteenth-century thesis is at tremendous odds with Greenwald's poems of office drudgery, airport etiquette, and grocery shopping. Yet both speak to the instinct that causes us to fear what we cannot control, as well as the only slightly more powerful instinct that reminds us that we must control the fear. When the balance shifts, we're liable to find something like what happens in the innocuously titled "FindAnyone.com," which ends with the speaker's recollection of a temp worker, addled by grief after witnessing the disintegration of the Challenger space shuttle, deliriously photocopying page after page of company minutes that she has decorated with childish cartoons of floating astronauts. We may hope that Greenwald finds a more rewarding job. But in the meantime, she has given us an almost unsettlingly relevant study of the jittery ennui that too often characterizes our waking days.
Shot, Christine Hume's third book, offers its readers a vision of motherhood and family life that will strike some readers as horrific and others as simply accurate. Assuming, that is, that they can decipher it: Hume is a seasoned practitioner of what its historians call experimental or language poetry and what its detractors call nonsense. And Shot is not for the reader who hasn't at least gotten his or her feet wet with Lyn Hejinian or Rae Armantrout. When the speaker in the book's opening poem, "Incubatory," asks, seemingly apropos of nothing, "Where is the nutrient in it?" an unidentified voice responds, "One third of your darkness reflects back. It listens to itself. Black syllables hatch. They flit into the tree. And again. Windwhipped hives, organizing." That's just about all of this review that some people will care to read before skipping over to the next one. Yet "Incubatory" is a good example of a poem that yields its secrets more graciously than one might expect, and by the time the third question, "Can you hear my lullabies?", has established beyond any doubt that the first voice belongs to a mother speaking to her unborn child, the questions that follow—"Can you bear the sound of my voice?" and "What will leaving be like?"—seem not only to make perfect sense but also to explore a uniquely intimate genre of apprehension.
A similar dialogue takes place in "Somniloquy with Interruptions," in which lines such as "One day I can feel my stomach and the next, where has it gone?" and "By her clock, I get the hang of my moodiness" will probably ring familiar to any mother. The poem's titular mash-up of somnolence and soliloquizing deftly evokes the sleep-deprived mental state of early parenthood. Yet Hume seems to approach the experience more as an observer than as a participant, avoiding sentimental or epiphanic narratives in favor of fragmented, counterintuitive vignettes like this one:
How will I get you to stopLet me help you with that gunA tiger licks me everywhere his roar
is pure treatment …
Tell me again the storyof why you lied, why there is no oneyou cannot do something for.Medicine and makeup crowd the table,every hour hits its midnight—isn't it just like you to be quietwhen I'm trying to hear things.
The imagery here is anything but coherent, though perhaps we shouldn't expect coherence in a poem written in the voice of an insomniac. The tone, however, is perfectly coherent: Hume's speaker sounds vulnerable but strangely detached, as if recording her sensations into a tape recorder as they occur. The dialogic form she uses is also worth noting. As one of the more shopworn tools in the language poet's kit, it nevertheless remains one of the more versatile, and here it allows Hume to cut multiple syntactic pathways out of a single sentence: the meaning of the passage changes dramatically depending on whether we choose to read the italicized 'interruption' as part of the speaker's original voice. (The effect recalls her use of footnoted 'substitute' lines in her first book, Musca domestica, which made the poems somewhat redolent of chapters in a "Choose your own Adventure" story.)
Parenthood, of course, often involves a partner, and most of the poems in Shot that don't directly concern a child are instead concerned with the shadowy figure who was (we assume) involved in creating it. The seven-part poem "I'm Talking to You [To Be Read Silently Beside a Sleeping Person]" is most direct, even if Hume's interlocutor remains stubbornly silent:
Those last two lines capture, with damning and clever precision, the sort of petulant stone throwing into which a lover's quarrel—especially a one-sided one—can deteriorate.
So if the speaker seems to be talking to herself in more than one of these poems, the effect is almost certainly intended. If sight is the ultimate sense-paradigm for Dan Beachy-Quick, Hume seems to have chosen hearing: these poems are full of words spoken and ignored, offered up and snatched back, or simply repressed altogether. Such is the case with "Leash," a peculiar homage to Ted Hughes' Crow whose protagonist, 'Tongue,' after (it must be said) some really rather awful rhymes, ends up plaintively projecting its words into a void that, unlike Beachy-Quick's, doesn't return an echo.
Given Hume's keen awareness of sound, it should not be surprising that Shot often cultivates it at the expense of meaning. No doubt this expense wouldn't trouble the likes of Hejinian or Armantrout. For the average reader, though, it means that Hume's poems will probably be most compelling on the imagistic level, where she is free to simply conjoin the musical with the muscular. When Hume is good at this, as the old rhyme goes, she is very, very good. "Between the Way Out And The Way Home" ends with the graphic flourish of the line "Blood knocking in your arms almost makes them float," but only after we've heard the "Chant of feet," "tungsten and fungus," and a "Black river burning off acetaminophen / From forehead to eddy." If the syntactic eccentricity of Shot will likely limit its appeal to only a few intrepid readers, those who do venture in will find some unexpected gems.
Jennifer Moxley is at the top of her game. There is not a poem in Clampdown, her fourth full-length collection, that an editor could justly excise without damaging the whole, and one could say nearly the same for her lines, which gather force from phrase to phrase with a measured, deliberate grace that is seldom seen this side of the second World War. Moxley pays direct homage to the poets of the New York School, particularly Schuyler and Ashbery, and the tinkly noise of their cosmopolitan ruminating is evident throughout. Yet the overarching tone of Clampdown, the undercurrent of moral urgency running beneath its polished blank verse and desultory half-rhymes, brings to mind an older mentor: W.H. Auden. Auden's influence is perhaps most visible in a couple of formal poems whose rhymes lull the reader into a surprisingly unpleasant argument, as in the first and last stanzas of "Mother's Day":The most important work they sayis caring for the young,molding a soul to regret the dayyou looked into the sun …And yet I'd rather drift in dreadof dark oblivionthan forge a law in someone's headthey'll not recover from.
And what if we succeed? Then what. What if we,who are fond of thinking that our lives have beenhindered vigorously by scheming statesmenand entrepreneurs—scummy down to the one—find ourselves out on a stretch of open seawith none but a smooth trajectorythat looks to be of our own making?
Moxley's rhymes are simple without being facile, and even less so the gloomy conclusion that they draw. Few mothers would agree that the parental responsibility to mold one's progeny (which quickly escalates here to "forging") implants in children a worldview from which, in a perfect world, all of them would one day "recover from." But many writers would—and not just Larkin, who suggests something similar in "This Be the Verse." But the judgment here, unlike Larkin's, doesn't fall on parents: the wrong is inherent not in the act of childrearing but in any act that necessitates control.
And this is where things start to get interesting. For while the desire to exert influence, to persuade or convince, plays a fundamental role in the most basic of human interactions, if left unchecked it can also mutate into something more insidious. Or, as Moxley states in "The Drip," "As in trench warfare, / there is no progress. Only the inevitable end game / of a face-to-face with your double: she who awaits / across the checkered plain hoping to do you in." Even minus that hat-tip to Baudelaire in the third line, this is a sobering—one might even say fatalistic—moral proposition: that even our conversations with ourselves boil down to primal power struggles.
It is a political proposition as well, if only obliquely. Moxley remarked in a recent interview that she does not think of herself as a political poet, but that she nevertheless believes there is an inescapable political element to the writing of poetry. Clampdown reflects this element from its very first line—"It's very early in the century"—and the book's nagging concern with the political dynamic between the state and the individual metastasizes into a full-on obsession in "The Occasion," which unflinchingly charts the atmosphere of impotence and helplessness that overshadows a literary dinner party during a time of war.
Yet Moxley robs us—and rightly so—of the luxury of pretending that the way we choose to conduct our lives, in times of war or peace, can be determined by anyone other than ourselves. Here is the first stanza of "Our Defiant Motives":
Stand before each other, self, but other,separate yet one, a missing measure found,a mirror in which no flaws reflect:join and quell this exhausted drifting,join that your kiss might align the starsand stop the planets from their wandering.
Few questions could more effectively capture the current national mood—or, for that matter, the current mood of most of the Western world, which has become so anxious for its own cultural survival that the anxiety itself, as in Cavafy's "Waiting for the Barbarians," has become a kind of perverse solution to our collective fear of losing ground. "Our Defiant Motives" presents us with a curious twist: a solution to the solution, as it were, a reminder that our individual lives, if we choose for them to be, are still very much in our own hands.
In this sense Clampdown, for all its dour prognosticating, is a work of wary optimism. Moxley's gaze is usually fastened on our failings, even to the point of noting that our efforts to overcome those failings can force us into a sterile self-reflection: "The intellect at work can alienate the world," she declares in "The March Notebook." "This is the moment / we have ceased to feel the breathing of others / beneath our feet." Yet to take these sentiments as the final words of an erstwhile existentialist would be to miss the point entirely: Moxley's vision of the world is ultimately more Camus than Sartre, and—just barely—more Epicurean than Stoic. This is especially evident as one nears the end of the book, whose chronicle of human ignorance, selfishness, and parochialism gradually yields to the suggestion that we may not be so irredeemable after all. In "Epithalamium"—addressed to a newly- married couple, as its title suggests—Moxley captures the turn in a sextet whose own marriage of lyricism and prosodic restraint offers us, at last, a clear and welcome picture of redemption:
Perhaps more than any other book of poetry published in the past few years, Clampdown brings to light the invisible, internal war that has come to shape the twenty-first century American conscience: the struggle between the paralyzed anxiety for our future and the seductive lie that the future will somehow work itself out on its own. Between these two extremes, Moxley suggests, lies the difficult task of remaining honest, as much with ourselves as with others.


text:
This library is not your typical Dubstep "loop-set" - this is truly a HUGE pallete of all-new sounds, stabs, wobbles, bass-drops, impacts, beats, construction kits, drum kits, drumloops, melodic loops, vocals, Sylenth1 VST patches, FX noises, and melodic one-shots to help you in building your own ORIGINAL Dubstep-influenced tracks from the ground up!
Every sound, loop and sample has been crafted and tempo-synced at 140bpm, so everything in this pack will "glue" together effortlessly! We're pusing the boundaries of Dubstep wtih "Dubstep Mantis"! ALL samples 24-bit.
We've included EVERYTHING you need to compose your own original tracks from scratch in a wide variety of UK Bass genres and more! From hard & heavy Dubstep, to Trap, Complextro, Elektro and even Drum and Bass! The heart and soul of this collection is the one-shots - over 675 expertly edited sounds to build your own original tracks using your own unique style! There are plenty of loops and construction kits included as well.
Included Formats:
WAV, REX2, SFZ, Sylenth1, MIDI
There is so much content jam-packed into this collection -- let's take a detailed look at what you're getting:
Construction Kits (WAV + MIDI)
4 kits, 50 samples, 143mb
Drum Hit Kits (WAV + SFZ + MIDI)
5 drum kits, 80 samples, 20mb
Drum Loops (WAV + REX2)
40 beats, each beat in wav + rex2, 117mb
Drum Rolls (WAV + SFZ)
15 drum rolls, 2 bars, 13 mb
Melodic Loops (WAV)
78 loops, loops in EVERY key, 182mb
One-Shots (WAV + SFZ)
33 Bass Shots - 8mb
9 Break Impacts - 15mb
71 Falls + Drops - 67mb
11 FX Noiz Shots - 6mb
240 Stabs, 20 stabs in EVERY KEY, 74mb
240 Wobbles, 20 wobbles in EVERY KEY, 50mb
Sylenth1 Patches (.FXB, .FXP)
25 sylenth1 patches in bank and individual formats
Vocals (WAV + SFZ)
38 abstract female spoken vocals, 25mb
16 Raw Vocal FX Hits, 1.5mb
24 "Tuned to C" Vocal FX Hits, 2mb
12 Vocal FX Loops, 1 different loop in EVERY KEY, 20mb
12 Male Vocal Shouts, 2.5mb
1.039 sample files in total, 750mb
ALL samples 24-bit.
Download Free Demo Pack:
Dubstep Mantis Demo
- 750 Mb Complete Pack Content.
- 24 bits / 44.1khz
- PC/MAC Compatible (Logic, Cubase, Live, Reason, SonyAcid, Fruity loops, GarageBand, etc...)
- Wav
- Midi
- Rex2
*Note: Format Rex2 automatically loop sync to the tempo (bpm) project.
All of the content is 100% royalty-free. Once purchased, you can use these audio loops in your music releases, both commercial and underground, with no restrictions.
How to Order:
Simply click BUY "Add to Cart". When you finish your order, click "checkout". If you are a new costumer you need create an account, if you are a returning costumer only fill up the form. Your Download Link will be sent in you account in Loophunter immediately after your payment has been received.
For any problem send a email email@example.com
*Note: The previews are low resolution MP3s. The quality of the files you will receive will of course be much higher, uncompressed WAV-AIFF, stereo, 44k, 16-24 bit.
Producer: Electronisounds

subset: commoncrawl


text:
I agreed with Joan Chittister's article ("9/11, Five Years On," September-October 2006) except for two statements, best exemplified by a sentence in the final paragraph: "What went down is the soul of a country that once put principle over power."
I strongly disagree. From the very beginning of this formal "nation," we excluded Native Americans, blacks, women, and the poor, so clearly elucidated by Howard Zinn. And as Noam Chomsky has articulated, the "principle" that seems more appropriate to our history is to presume that the world's resources belong to us for our consumption and, consequently, that we have the right to dominate and kill people around the world to maintain "our way of life." Scores of examples could be listed: what we did to Nicaragua under the Reagan administration, the slaughter of the Vietnamese during the Vietnam War, our support of the genocide in East Timor through so many administrations, our support of apartheid in South Africa, our support and direction to overthrow governments—Chile and Guatemala, for example.
I would ask Chittister: When have we put principle over power in a more positive way?
Terry Hess
New Berlin, Wisconsin


text:
Learning Center
Ever wonder how electricity gets to your house?
Find out in Energy Explained
Natural gas is a colorless and odorless gas in its pure form, composed of mainly methane. It is used to heat homes and buildings, cook food, dry clothes, warm water and produce electricity.
Natural gas is a fossil fuel that is made up of the remnants of decayed animal and plant matter that has been subjected to immense pressure and heat under the earth's crust for millions of years. The gas itself goes through a filtration process including the removal and rejection of water, acid, mercury and nitrogen before it can be used as a fuel for processes and home use.
The burning of natural gas releases carbon emissions into the atmosphere. These emissions have been linked to many environmental complications including global warming, climate change, air pollution, natural disasters, habitat destruction and chronic health problems.
With our JustGreen Gas and JustClean products, we buy carbon offsets on your behalf. These offsets support emission reduction projects which reduce the carbon emissions released into the atmosphere. Through our JustGreen Gas product, up to 100% of the carbon emissions caused by your household's natural gas consumption will be offset. Click here to learn more.


text:
Objects of Desire: Conversations with Luis Buńuel
Random House Incorporated, 1992 - Motion picture producers and directors - 262 pages
From 1975 to 1977, Bunuel agreed to undertake a film-by-film examination of his life and work through a series of interviews conducted with two old friends. This is revised and edited by the author himself just before his death.
What people are saying - Write a review
LibraryThing ReviewUser Review - nervenet - LibraryThing
The best book about Bunuel's films that has been printed in English. Read full review
Early Years Calanda Madrid
Paris El retablo de Maese Pedro
the Marquis de Sade the drums of Calanda
5 other sections not shown
Other editions - View all
Objects of Desire: Conversations With Luid Bunuel
José de la Colina,Tomŕs Pérez Turrent
No preview available - 1994
Common terms and phrases
actors Alberto Isaac already Archibaldo Art Direction asked believe Belle de jour Black and white bourgeois Bourgeoisie Brute Bufiuel Calanda camera Carlos character chien andalou Christ cinema Cinematography COLINA Dali Dancigers death Director Discreet Charm Don Lope Don Luis dream episode everything example Exterminating Angel Fernando Rey film Francisco friends Garcia girl happened Hurdes idea imagination interested Jaibo Jean Jean-Claude Carriere Jorge Jose Juan kill L'Age d'or later laughs Lilia Prado look Luis Alcoriza Luis Bunuel Luis Bunuel Music Luis Bunuel Screenplay Madrid Manuel Maria Mexican Bus Ride Mexico mother Nazarin novel olvidados Paris Pedro perhaps Phantom of Liberty Pierre play police priest Production Company protagonist remember Sade scene script seems shoot shot Silvia Pinal Simon Spain Spanish streetcar Surrealist Susana Synopsis talk tell things told TOMAS PEREZ TOMAS PEREZ TURRENT Tristana TURRENT Viridiana wife woman young


text:
Huffington Post's "Global Motherhood" Section Features Opinion Pieces on Maternal Health to Recognize Mother's Day
May 15, 2012
The Huffington Post's "Global Motherhood" section continues to publish opinion pieces on maternal health to recognize Mother's Day. Two of those pieces are summarized below.
- Elizabeth Gore, Huffington Post "Global Motherhood": Gore, director of global partnerships with the United Nations Foundation, writes about how motherhood has changed her perspective when working in the Kakuma Refugee Camp on the border of Kenya and South Sudan. "The thought of grabbing my daughter and running from harm for a week or more is frightening. But the prospect of finally reaching safety and then losing her to one mosquito bite is incomprehensible," she writes, noting efforts by the U.N. Refugee Agency (UNHCR) and the foundation's "Nothing But Nets" campaign to distribute bednets in the camp to help prevent malaria (5/14).
- Anne Goddard, Huffington Post "Global Motherhood": A recent report from the World Bank and International Monetary Fund (IMF) found that progress on Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) "related to maternal health have made the smallest amount of headway," Goddard, president and CEO of ChildFund International, writes. Noting "[t]he problem is most acute in sub-Saharan Africa, a region that accounts for literally half of the world's maternal, newborn and child deaths," Goddard describes a program in Senegal run by ChildFund and its partners and supported by USAID. She continues, "While we may fall short of achieving the MDG target by 2015, it is time to redouble our efforts so that we can achieve real and lasting progress" (5/14).
This information was reprinted from kff.org with permission from the Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation. You can view the entire Kaiser Daily Global Health Policy Report, search the archives, and sign up for email delivery. © Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation. All rights reserved.


text:
July 21, 2008
COLORADO SPRINGS, Colo. - Former Gaucho Todd Rogers and beach volleyball partner Phil Dalhausser will be nominated as two of the eight athletes that will represent the United States in the sport at the 2008 Summer Olympic Games in Beijing, China.
Joining Rogers and Dalhausser on the men's side will be Jake Gibb and Sean Rosenthal. The teams of Misty May-Treanor and Kerri Walsh and Nicole Branagh and Elaine Youngs will comprise the U.S. women's contingent.
Beach volleyball teams qualify for the Olympic Games based on points gained at FIVB international tournaments starting on Jan. 1, 2007 and ending July 20, 2008.
Rogers and Dalhausser are currently the No. 1 U.S. team and they lead all other squads in qualifying points due to four-straight podium finishes, including three gold medals, at Swatch FIVB World Tour Grand Slam events in June and July.
Joining Rogers and Dalhausser in China in a coaching capacity will be Bob Alejo, the strength and conditioning director at UCSB since 2005.
Five of the eight U.S. athletes will be competing in their first Olympics, while three are heading to their third Games. Youngs played on the indoor team in 1996 and won a bronze in beach in 2004. Walsh played on the 2000 indoor team and won a gold medal on the beach with May-Treanor in 2004. In addition, May-Treanor competed in beach volleyball with Holly McPeak at the 2000 Games.
Beach volleyball has been an Olympic sport since its debut at the 1996 Olympics in Atlanta. The U.S. won the inaugural men's gold medal as Karch Kiraly and Kent Steffes beat fellow countrymen Mike Dodd and Mike Whitmarsh. The U.S. men struck again at the 2000 Olympics in Sydney as Dain Blanton and former Gaucho Eric Fonoimoana took gold. The U.S. women picked up their first medals in 2004 in Athens as May-Treanor and Walsh won gold and McPeak and Youngs took bronze.
The 2008 Summer Olympic Games kick off on August 8.
-- UCSBGauchos.com --


text:
Joint Neighbourhood Watch Conference - NottsWatch and City of Nottingham NHW Council23/08/2011
Notts Watch and the City of Nottingham Neighbourhood Watch Conference October 2011
Members of Neighbourhood Watch across Nottingham and Nottinghamshire are invited to an annual conference in October.
NottsWatch and the City of Nottingham Neighbourhood Watch Council have joined forces to introduce the joint conference for the first time.
Both organisations are working closely together in the interests of Neighbourhood Watch schemes across Nottinghamshire and the event will be an opportunity for co-ordinators and members to get up to speed on the changes that have occurred over the last 18 months.
Guest speakers will include Nottinghamshire Police's Assistant Chief Constable Paul Scarrott, who is responsible for Neighbourhood Policing in the county, National NHW Network chair Jim Madden and a member of Nottinghamshire Police Authority.
Attendees will get the opportunity to quiz a panel about local issues and there will be the chance to browse stands set up by local security companies and organisations, such as Trading Standards.
The event will be held on Saturday 22 October at Nottinghamshire Police's Arrow Centre, in Annesley Road, Hucknall.
Registration begins at 9.30am and the conference will close around 2.15pm.
Questions for the panel must be emailed to email@example.com before Friday 23 September.
Members can register their attendance for the conference by emailing email@example.com or by phoning 01623 473869. Please note there are only 120 places available so places will be allocated on a first come, first served basis.
The confirmed event programme will be published soon.
|Back to previous page
|For latest news please open
|Joint County and City Neighbourhood Watch Conference 2013
|NottsWatch and CNNWC agree to amalgamate


text:
One interesting item emerging from the poll is that the bows have already monopolized the "beginner kite" market. That's amazing, considering how much they still cost. Then again, I suppose that beginner riders that read this forum are serious about learning to kite, and they might accept higher prices than the average beginner.
Still, the trend is clear: when bow prices go down, the kiteboarding market for beginner Cs and foils will shrink to zero. Foils might still resist in the unpolled "trainer" area, just because it wouldn't make sense to have a 2sqm inflatable for use on the beach.


text:
The babel package, when called with some language options, changes global document layout. For exapmle,
forces first paragraph after sectioning command to be intented, resets
itemize environment and performs a number of other changes to global document layout. On the other hand, there is a package
indentfirst that makes the same changes regarding paragraph identation. And I am guessing that there are packages which could reset list environments on more regular basis. Therefore my question is
Is babel a proper place for resetting document layout?
I am asking because I found that Russian language definition file for babel had in the past similar functions borrowed from French language definition file but they were disabled later.
Having looked at the French language definition file for
polyglossia I would say that
polyglossia does not care document layout and makes no changes to document layout except for switching on/off frenchspacing. Since
polyglossia is promoted as future replacement for babel my question has strategic value.


text:
"Freetimers have been a huge help to us. We'd been using a London Agency, paid £10k up front and then £4,500 per month on Google Adwords. Freetimers took over, got us greatly improved results and saved us £45,000 in the first year alone. They're the best, and I would have no hesitation at all to recommend them."
N Fuchs, MD, Offices Please
Freetimers Internet is a top UK specialist in web design, website programming, database and web development, search engine optimisation (SEO), web marketing, content management and ecommerce. We help businesses of all sizes by developing innovative, effective websites on the one hand, and internet strategies, web marketing and search engine optimisation solutions on the other. Freetimers works as your partner on the Internet, with an implicit understanding that our success is related to your success, and that helping you build your business is our first priority.
To find out how we can help you grow your business, contact us today on 01604 638421.
Our business really is about helping you build yours, and using our IT systems, business management and Internet expertise to help you maximise your business' potential. We will help you get to the top of your field on the Internet, with a great website that will achieve your business goals and build for the future. Many of our most successful clients were start-ups just a few years ago, and some of these have indeed reached the top, and we are still working with them, every day, with new marketing and SEO campaigns, new website functionality, and programming to make them highly efficient by automating their back office processes and integrating them with their websites, to ensure they stay ahead of their competitors.
Freetimers is not just a web designer, developer, programmer or SEO specialist. We are a web strategic partner for your business, and we honestly believe there is no one better than us. We have proven beyond doubt that working in longer term partnership with our clients, and keeping everyone engaged with the website and the overall Internet presence, are the major factors in web success. So if you have been through the mill with other web firms, or are a new startup yourself, make the right decision and choose Freetimers.
Results Summary at end February 2013
20 of 20 most important phrases in Google Top 10
Additional un-monitored phrases in Google Top 10: 25,000 +
No 1 Ecommerce Website in Sector in the UK
Currently 66k visitors, 580k page views, 5 million hits per month
Google No1 for 'garage door' and 'garage doors'
We use cookies to provide you with a better website experience. Close this popup to carry on browsing, or click here to find out more about cookies


text:
I'm going to be using 2012 Razors in Baja this winter coming off 2010 Rise kites. OR makes good gear. My Rises have seen a lot of use and only needed 2 minor repairs.
When it comes to bars you aren't going to make everyone happy no matter what you make. OR still have 2012 bars for sale if you prefer that style over the new bars. I'm still using 2010 bars and probably will until they break.
They are currently offering 3 different bars to suite a variety of tastes/riding needs.


text:
-The goal of uvnc2me was to create a free LogMeIn alternative. A single exe that can serve as viewer or server. Something simple without the need to configure anything...
How do I use it?
The same executable is used as server and viewer, it just depend on who pressed the connect button.
ID: You can compare this with some kind of dynamic DNS, it give your PC a unique identifier. If someone wants to connect to you, they need to enter your identifier.
Password: The password is used in combination with an exchanged key as an encryption key. You can only read data from Access code if you have the same password.
Mail access codes to Partner: opens the default mail program with copied id/passwd as content
Status Services
EU access server online, US access server online: We have 2 access servers online. Only one is required to make the connected. The server that answer first is the server used to initiate the connections.
Repeater online: In case udp fail, we try tcp using a repeater.
Loop test button: This actual just start a connection to his own, your instance of vnc2me server as viewer and server. The only usage is to test fast test the connectivity, if loopback fail, no other connection will work. You don't need to enter access code or password, this test auto use the current.
Connect: makes a connection to the partner
After the encrypted tunnel has been setup you get the application screen.
Show Desktop: This function clone the user desktop, running as normal user.
- Encryption AES 256
You can change the logo icon and access server. To customize uvnc2me you first need to download uvnc2me_custom.zip
Extra downloads


text:
SAN FRANCISCO (MarketWatch) — The U.S. dollar shed gains Tuesday, with the euro rebounding in the wake of a slowing European manufacturing contraction after the prior session's drop on concerns about political stability in Spain and Italy.
The ICE dollar index DXY, +0.29% which measures the greenback against a basket of six major global currencies, traded at 79.504, down from 79.589 in North America late Monday.
The euro EURUSD, +0.0980% traded at $1.3581, up from $1.3511 late Monday after recovering from a slide below the $1.35 level in Asian trade.
The euro fell prey to a bout of apparent profit-taking Monday as Spain's main opposition party called on Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy to resign amid allegations that his party accepted secret payments. Rajoy has denied wrongdoing.
Also, reports that former Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi was gaining ground ahead of elections in the country also weighed on the currency on Monday, pushing up Spanish and Italian bond yields. The specter of renewed political turmoil in the euro zone spooked U.S. investors, contributing to declines on Wall Street Monday.
"Concerns about Spanish politics served as a good excuse for a bout of profit-taking Monday across many markets," wrote Marc Chandler, global head of currency strategy at Brown Brothers Harriman, in a morning note. "To us, the corruption allegations appear to be mere noise, but instead we note that confidence in the Rajoy government has been eroding as the economy deteriorates."
Back to 1987
for stocks?
Our Trading Deck has been home to a spirited debate over whether we're in for a crash.
• L.A. Little: Don't worry | Michael Gayed: Worry
• The warning signs of a 1987-style crash
• Hulbert: Stocks as overvalued as at 2007 high
The euro gained ground in the wake of final January purchasing-managers' index readings. The composite reading for the euro-zone came in above an earlier "flash estimate," indicating that private-sector activity across the region shrank at the slowest pace in 10 months. See: Euro-zone PMI signals downturn eased in January.
The shared currency also gained ground despite French President François Hollande offering the most high-profile complaint yet about the strength of the euro.
Hollande told European Union lawmakers in Strasbourg, France, that the euro shouldn't be left to fluctuate according to the market's mood. He called for the establishment of a foreign-exchange rate policy to protect the currency from "irrational movements," news reports said — the loudest complaint yet about the strength of the shared currency.
Hollande's comments "would carry more weight if they were echoed by the [European Central Bank]," said Adam Cole, currency strategist at RBC Capital Markets. "So far, the ECB has steered clear of commenting on euro appreciation, but we are alert to the risk that it [might come up] in the post-ECB news conference Q&A" on Thursday.
That marks a potential downside risk for the currency, he said.
Against the Japanese unit EURJPY, +0.12% the euro fetched ¥126.88, compared with ¥124.75.
Italian and Spanish bond yields fell back on Tuesday, while the euro and European stocks rallied and U.S. stock-index futures pointed to a Wall Street rebound. See: Stock futures higher ahead of home data, services ISM.
"Caution will prevail in the near term as markets begin to question the veracity of the rally in risk assets registered over recent weeks," said Mitul Kotecha, global head of foreign-exchange strategy at Crédit Agricole.
The dollar USDJPY, -0.01% traded at ¥93.43, up from ¥92.30 in North American trading on Monday.
Elsewhere in the region, the Australian dollar fell after the country's central bank on Tuesday left its benchmark interest rate at 3%, as was widely expected, and said an accommodative stance of monetary policy was appropriate.
The Aussie dollar AUDUSD, -0.0284% was changing hands for $1.0410, down from $1.0439.
The British pound GBPUSD, -0.0160% was at $1.5659, compared with $1.5767 in New York.
The WSJ dollar index BUXX, +0.38% a gauge of the U.S. currency's moves against a slightly wider basket than that used by the ICE index, rose to 71.13 from 70.99.


text:
My countdown to my debut novel's release and a chronicle of my attempt to not go stir crazy while waiting. (I post here on Mondays and Fridays. See you then!)
Friday, March 18, 2011
Friday Field Trip: My Cave
32 comments:
- Andrew Leon said...
My wife says that if I had my way, we'd all live in caves all the time. Well, my family, at least. I'm not really that bad, but she'd live out in a field somewhere, so I guess anything I'd pick would feel like a cave to her.
Actually, I'm sure that if I really did live in a cave, I would paint all over the walls. I've been trying to do that since I was a kid.
- March 18, 2011 at 12:57 AM
- Deborah Lawrenson said...
Enjoyed the behind-the-scenes tour, Sam. Be productive! I am currently in a red-walled, book-lined study on the first floor of an English house looking out at trees and countryside beyond. It was very good for writing books until I started a blog!!
- March 18, 2011 at 1:00 AM
- MuMuGB said...
You cannot be stopped! We haven't seen your first novel and you are already on the second one! How do you do this?
You can only get access to my cave through a small door, and I have a very small desk. But I am home, and just like you I have to have coffee!
- March 18, 2011 at 4:57 AM
Oh boy, I write from my couch! Most of the time at least. You'll also see me with a notebook in just about every room because who knows when inspiration will strike.
- March 18, 2011 at 6:58 AM
- Samantha Sotto-Yambao said...
Andrew - Haha! You belong to the same "art club" as my daughter. Her doodles keep popping up all over the house - and thanks to the wisdom of Randy Pausch in "The Last Lecture," we don't erase them :D
Deborah - Wow! Your writing cave sound lovely! (And yes, scientists have proven that along with Facebook and Twitter, Blogs form the the Bermuda Triangle of writing time. LOL :D )
MuMuGB - Coffee is absolutely ESSENTIAL for writing. Caffeine fuels the soul ;-) I love that you can only access your cave through a small door. It makes it feel more private. At home, I have a smell desk too. It's tucked beside my bed. I prefer small desks. Huge desks make me feel slightly lost. :) (p.s. Don't be too impressed by my second novel. It's as sticky as a tar pit right now and I am firmly stuck. LOL)
- March 18, 2011 at 7:06 AM
- Samantha Sotto-Yambao said...
Kelly - Couches ROCK. I edited Before Ever After on my Lazy Boy. LOL. I carry around a notebook too. Inspiration is too precious not to write down the moment it strikes you :D
- March 18, 2011 at 7:10 AM
- Joy Page Manuel said...
My cave really looks like a cave....small and dark, everything enclosed. It's an armoire/office made of dark brown wood. I have my laptop in front of me but choose to use a separate keyboard just 'cos it's more ergonomically correct for me. This piece of furniture is currently parked in our formal living room and I'm actually looking forward to a bigger work space once we move to the new house. We'll see...Maybe I'd finally be able to write my very first book once I get a nicer space...(sure, excuses, excuses, haha!)
- March 18, 2011 at 7:16 AM
- Samantha Sotto-Yambao said...
You must post photos of your new cave on your blog when you move - it will be awesome to document where your book is "born." :D (I regret not taking a picture of the little corner table in Starbucks Katipunan where I wrote Before Ever After. LOL) :D
- March 18, 2011 at 7:24 AM
- Cathy Kozak said...
I finally have a room of my own and have worn a path from the old red couch to my desk in its perpetual state of wordy chaos, to the books misaligned on the shelves behind it, bindings akimbo, shifting to and fro for the very best view of the mountains; to the window seat and the little flowered ottoman and yes, when the weather's fine - which isn't today - down the creaking stairs and over the snorting pug on the landing and through the Mexican room with its marigold walls and its sand table and the crumpled Rivera print, and out onto the back porch and the old wheezy swing, a handful of words at my fingertips...
- March 18, 2011 at 7:24 AM
- Scrollwork said...
I prefer a small desk, too. Give me a bigger surface and I tend to create piles atop it. Then it's too distracting to try to write when those piles are silently accusing me. This is why I moved away from the dining table—the piles are set in concrete now, for as long as they've been there.
- March 18, 2011 at 7:29 AM
- Samantha Sotto-Yambao said...
Cathy - Your words have transported me. Your cave sounds so romantic and divine. No wonder your writing is always so inspired! *writes note to self - MUST.GET.MOUNTAIN VIEW.* :D
- March 18, 2011 at 7:31 AM
- Connie said...
My son used to make caves all over the house, but especially in closets. I've joined him before and I have to admit that with a couple of pillows, the closet makes a decent cave--assuming you don't have too many shoes or clothes.
- March 18, 2011 at 8:17 AM
- Meredith said...
What a beautiful writing space! It's so open and clean!
- March 18, 2011 at 9:22 AM
- Samantha Sotto-Yambao said...
Scrollwork - LOL! Ah, yes - I am well acquainted with dining table piles. They breed like rabbits at my house. The best approach is to attack them with a shovel ;-)
Connie - Closet caves are awesome - with a flashlight, a pillow, and a smuggled cookie - you're set for the day's adventures. :D
Meredith - Haha! It's clean only because I don't live there. My desk at home is another matter ;-)
- March 18, 2011 at 10:48 AM
- isabelle gregson said...
Full of poetry and imagination as always. What a lovely thing to read on a grey London morning! xxx
- March 18, 2011 at 4:25 PM
- Samantha Sotto-Yambao said...
Thanks, Isabelle! Sending sunny thoughts your way. :D
- March 18, 2011 at 5:00 PM
- ~Wendie said...
Hi Samantha! I can't wait to read your book - it sounds incredible! It's a good thing that it's coming out in the summer - I have a tendency to NOT put a book down once I start and I have 2 little people that tend to get ignored while I do so! Atleast they'll be busy running amuk in the yard while I sit in the shade!
- March 18, 2011 at 6:15 PM
- Samantha Sotto-Yambao said...
LOL, Wendie! I have two little people of my own so I know EXACTLY what you mean. I hope that Max, Shelley and the rest of the characters in Before Ever After will be good company while you sit in the shade :D
- March 18, 2011 at 6:59 PM
- Cathy Webster (Olliffe) said...
What a gorgeous library! And what an inspirational place to write. My cave is the kitchen table in the winter (our house is very small with no room for a desk, never mind an office)... but in the summer I take my laptop out to our screened house or the bunkie (our guest house above the garage). It's quiet and the air is fresh and the kids don't bug me up there because they're convinced it's full of zombies. (I wonder who told them that? ;)
- March 18, 2011 at 7:42 PM
- Samantha Sotto-Yambao said...
Zombies!!! LOL! Perfect! Will DEFINITELY be trying that one out. The kids just started their summer break and I need to put up a zombie zone soon :D
- March 18, 2011 at 7:58 PM
- KLZ said...
Your brain slurp line? So good. Good enough I hope that chapter 13 of novel 2 is about monsters
- March 18, 2011 at 8:20 PM
- Samantha Sotto-Yambao said...
Haha! Close. It's about GHOSTS. :D
- March 18, 2011 at 8:26 PM
- WhisperingWriter said...
Your cave looks really peaceful.
Good luck with the next novel!
- March 19, 2011 at 1:50 AM
- Samantha Sotto-Yambao said...
Thanks, Whispering Writer! :D
- March 19, 2011 at 6:27 AM
It seems moms never really have a place of their own because the whole house is governed by her. However, when there is less need for order, when the kids have spread their wings and there is more urgency in reflection than dusting, then mom claims her space. I have claimed my daughters old bedroom. I close the door and leave the world behind. The walls are covered with what I hold dear, a greeting card that my daughter gave me for my Bday years ago, a drawing my son did while in jail ((DUI), other drawings, books scattered on the floor. My garbage in the wastebasket that if I want will sit there all week. This is my space and here I find peace.
- March 19, 2011 at 8:00 AM
- Samantha Sotto-Yambao said...
Wynnie Bee - "However, when there is less need for order, when the kids have spread their wings and there is more urgency in reflection than dusting, then mom claims her space." Beautifully said! (And it sounds like you couldn't ask for a better cave. You deserve it. :D )
- March 19, 2011 at 8:24 AM
I know where your cave is! *does a little i guessed it right dance*
My cave at home is always being invaded by a little cave girl so most times, I end up at Starbucks.
But I am planning on relocating my cave to Boracay (see Sam's previous post on Boracay).
- March 19, 2011 at 2:08 PM
- Samantha Sotto-Yambao said...
Haha! Take me with you! :D
- March 19, 2011 at 3:11 PM
- Kate Evangelista said...
I;m currently in the throws of writing Reaper--a novel writing itself. Although, I know how it ends, I don't know how I'll get there...yet.
As for my cave, my room and it's balcony. When I'm feeling a little more than trapped (especially by a pesky chapter that refuses to budge) I look out and up at the sky and breathe.
- March 20, 2011 at 2:13 PM
- Samantha Sotto-Yambao said...
Wow! So jealous about your momentum with Reaper. Are you contagious? Can you sneeze on me, please? ;-)
- March 20, 2011 at 2:27 PM
- C.M. Villani said...
Hey Sam,
Sorry it took me so long to comment. I had an 8 year old's birthday party to organize. one word of caution - don't let your 8 year old near a microphone (let alone a dozen) or your ears may bleed. hahaha
Anyway - for the most part my "cave" is my living room after I put the kids to bed. Oversized couches, lots of pillows, and plenty of quiet (not to mention the kitchen right around the corner). But on the off chance I have two seconds to actually escape - I head off to the cafe up the street. Its so nice and cozy. Leather armchairs - good coffee - sweet deserts (which we all know are essentials for writing anything worth a damn. :D) - and it even has a gas fireplace to sit next too. Perfect writing cave. :)
- March 20, 2011 at 9:12 PM
- Samantha Sotto-Yambao said...
Hey, Christina! No worries! (An 8 y.o. X 12 + microphone = scary. LOL.)
Your caves sound great! Couches you can sink in and pillows are a MUST. And leather armchairs? Wow. Just wow! :D
- March 21, 2011 at 10:23 AM


text:
A long time ago in the dawn of the new millennium lived a man. He was working as a software developer in a medium sized company. His life was pretty good all things considered. For the purposes of this narrative, let us call him Junior Developer.
At his workplace CVS was used for revision control. This was okay, but every now and then problems arose. Because it could not do atomic commits, sometimes two people would check in things at the same time, which broke everything. Sometimes this was immediately apparent and caused people to scramble around to quickly fix the code. At other times the bugs would lay dormant and break things at the worst possible times.
This irritated everyone but since the system mostly worked, this was seen as an unfortunate fact of life. Then Junior Developer found out about a brand new thing called Subversion. It seeemed to be just the thing they needed. It was used in almost exactly the same way, but it was so much better. All commits were atomic, which made mixing commits impossible. One could even rename files, a feature thus far unheard of.
This filled the heart of Junior Developer with joy. With one stroke they could eliminate most of their tooling problems and therefore improve their product's quality. Overjoyed he waited for the next team meeting where they discussed internal processes.
Once the meeting started, the Junior Developer briefly reminded people of the problems and then explained how Subversion would fix most of the problems that CVS was causing.
At the other end of the table sat a different kind of man, who we shall call the Senior Developer. He was a man of extraordinary skill. He had personally designed and coded many of the systems that the company's products relied on. Whenever anyone had a difficult technical issue, he would go ask the Senior Developer. His knowledge on his trade had extensive depth and breadth.
Before anyone else had time to comment on the Junior Developer's suggestion, he grabbed the stage and let out a reply in a stern voice.
– This is not the sort of discussion we should be getting into. CVS is good and we'll keep using it. Next issue.
The Junior Developer was shocked. He tried to form some sort of a reply but words just refused to come out of his mouth. Why was his suggestion for improvement shot down so fast? Had someone already done a Subversion test he had not heard about? Had he presented his suggestion too brazenly and offended the Senior Developer? What was going on?
These and other questions raced around in his head for the next few days. Eventually he gathered enough willpower and approached the Senior Developer during a coffee break.
– Hey, remember that discussion on Subversion and CVS we had a few days ago? Why did you declare it useless so quickly? Have you maybe tried it and found it lacking?
– I figured you might mention this. Look, I'm sure you are doing your best but the fact of the matter is that CVS is a good tool and it does everything we want it to do.
– But that's just the thing. It does not do what we want. For example it does not have atomic commits. It would prevent check-in conflicts.
The Senior Programmer lifted his coffee cup to his lips and took a swig. Not to play for time, but simply to give emphasis to his message.
– CVS is a great tool. You just have to be careful when using it and problems like this don't happen.
The Junior Programmer then tried to explain that even though they were being careful, breakages still happened and they had been for as long as anyone could remember. He tried explaining that in Subversion one could rename files and retain their version control history. He tried to explain how these and other features would be good, how they would allow for developers to spend more of their time on actual code and less on working around features of their tools.
The Senior Developer countered each of these issues with one of two points. Number one was the fact that you could achieve roughly the same with CVS if that is really what was wanted (with an unspoken but very clear implication that it was not). Number two was that functionality such as renames could be achieved by manually editing the repository files. This was considered a major plus, since one would not be able to do this kind of maintenance work on Subversion repositories because they were not plain text files. Any database runs the risk of corruption, which was unacceptable for something as important as source code.
The discussion went on but eventually the Senior Developer had finished his coffee and walked over to the dishwasher to put his cup away.
– Look, I appreciate the thinking you have obviously put into this but let me tell you a little something.
He put his cup away and turned to face the Junior Developer who at this point was majorly frustrated.
– I have used CVS for over 10 years. It is the best system there is. In this time there have been dozens of revision control systems that claim to have provided the same benefits that this Subversion of yours does. I have tried many of them and none have delivered. Some have been worse than the systems CVS replaced if you can believe that. The same will happen with Subversion. The advantages it claims to provide simply are not there, and that's the sad truth.
The Junior Developer felt like shouting but controlled himself realizing that no good thing could come out of losing his temper. He slouched in his chair. The Senior Developer looked at the clearly disillusioned Junior Developer and realized the argument had ended in his favor. He left back to his office.
At the coffee room door he turned around and said his final words to the Junior Developer.
– Besides, even if the atomic commits you seem to hold so dear would work, the improvements they provide would be minimal. They are a nice-to-have toy and will never account for anything more than that.
This story is not true. But it could be.
Variants of this discussion are being held every single day in software development companies and communities around the world.


text:
Automotive product placements in movies have reached the point where they're more annoying than anything else, but I'll make an exception for the Corvette Stingray driven by Scarlett Johansson's Black Widow in the Captain America sequel. I think it suits her.
I mean, it's fast, it's high-tech, it looks amazing, and it's capable of taking out much bigger (read: more expensive) rivals. That seems appropriate for the Black Widow, doesn't it?
And now you can see her black-on-black Corvette Stingray at the Chicago Auto Show. In a news release that explicitly states ScarJo will not be there so don't get your hopes up, Chevrolet says visitors to the Windy City's auto show will see the world premiere of the car from the movie. You even get a limited edition Captain America comic book if you go! How neat is that.
On a side note, anyone else excited for Captain America: The Winter Soldider? It looks like it could be pretty decent.


text:
From inside the book
12 pages matching advertising in this book
Where's the rest of this book?
Results 1-3 of 12
What people are saying - Write a review
We haven't found any reviews in the usual places.
Priestly Sexual Abuse
In Defense of Truth in the Science
7 other sections not shown
Other editions - View all
Common terms and phrases
Abortion and Unborn accepted advertising argue argument assisted suicide autonomy behavior Billings Ovulation Method bioethics biological brain death Cancer casuistry Catholic Health Catholic hospitals Catholic Medical Association child Christ Christian Church circumcision clinical cloning concept conjoined twins contraceptive cooperation criteria disease double effect duress ectopic pregnancy embryo embryology euthanasia Evangelium Vitae evil fertilization fetus harm homosexual human embryo human person human suffering Ibid individual infant infected intention issue John Paul Journal killing Linacre Quarterly living mandatory HIV testing means Medical Ethics Medicine methotrexate morphine mucus nature Obstetrics and Gynecology one's organs pain patient personhood Peter Singer Ph.D physician physician-assisted suicide Pope possible potential Practical Ethics pregnant women present priests principle of double proportionate reason question reported response salpingectomy sexual abuse Singer sterilization theory therapy Treatment of Ectopic trophoblast tubal twins Unborn Human University Vitro Fertilization Washington weapons


text:
Lizzie O'Leary joined Marketplace in 2013 and spearheaded the launch of Marketplace Weekend in 2014.
Lizzie kicked off her journalism career at ABC News on the Peabody Award-winning team that reported on 9/11. Prior to Marketplace, Lizzie worked for CNN as an aviation and regulation correspondent; for NPR as a producer and reporter; and for Bloomberg TV, tackling the global credit crisis, the housing market and the government's financial rescue package. She was also first to break the news that major American automaker Chrysler would file for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection.
Lizzie earned her master's degree with honors from Columbia University's Graduate School of Journalism and graduated cum laude with her bachelor's degree from Williams College. When she isn't hosting Marketplace Weekend, she's likely tweeting her sharp and witty take on all things news, politics, business and life. A guest professor at Columbia Journalism School, she can also be seen and heard regularly on Yahoo Finance and BBC Matters, among others.
Twitter: lizzieohreally


text:
So there we have pics and swatches of the new lip shades from the Clarins Spring 2013 collection…which caught your eye? My personal favourites from each product type are…
Tropical Pink from the Rouge Eclat….Watermelon from the Joli Rouge Brillant and Water Lily from the Gloss Prodige! Although I am also loving Red Wine from the Rouge Eclat range for now as the darker berry range is fab for Winter but for Spring I lean towards the pretty pinks!
If you have to pick just one that you love from this range…which would you go for?
Clarins Spring available now from Clarins.co.uk (prices starting at £15.50 for the gloss)
PR samples.


text:
FREE STANDARD DELIVERY ON ORDERS OVER £80 (Mainland England & Wales and parts of Scotland - exclusions apply)
Product Description
Whilst any paint will provide some degree of protection from rust for a while, no other is as permanent as POR-15. When others have chipped, scratched, flaked, and peeled, POR-15 Rust Preventative Paint will still be preventing rust.
Colours available: Gloss Black, Semi Gloss Black, Clear, Grey and Silver.
Available in two sizes:
- US Pint 473ml (which covers approx 4.5 square metres)
- US Quart 946ml (which covers approx 9 square metres)
POR-15 Rust Preventative can be sprayed or brushed on to provide a rock hard, yet flexible, non-porous coating that will not shrink, peel, or crack. It is totally resistant to road salt, petrol, battery acid, etc., and actually dries harder in humid damp conditions. Ideal for suspension and chassis protection, and you can apply a topcoat of any finishing paint. This is protection you can count on.
Metal surfaces should be treated first with POR15 Cleaner Degreaser, then use POR-15 Metal Prep to dissolve rust, etch the metal and leave a Zinc Phosphate for better adhesion of the paint. Use the POR-15 Solvent to thin (if required) and to clean brushes.
Can be sprayed or brushed
Prevents rust from recurring by protecting metal from further exposure to moisture
Designed for application directly on rusted or seasoned metal surfaces
Dries to an incredible rock-hard, non-porous finish that won't chip, crack, or peel (dries faster in humid conditions) - totally resistant to most acid, petrol and road salt.
UV light sensitive (must be topcoated for prolonged exposure to sunlight)
- AUTOMOTIVE: suspension - chassis - doors - trunk areas - engine & fuel tanks - rusty frames - floor pans - corroded battery tray.
- INDUSTRIAL: heavy equipment - truck components - trailers - fuel storage - rebar -steel forms - concrete - storm grates - transformers - wastewater management
- MARINE: decks - bilges - hulls - stem pipes -chain lockers - mast.
- HOME: seal cracks in basement and foundations - Garage floors - Roofs - HVAC - Pipes - Beams - Home appliances.
- Excellent for sealing and repairing fiberglass.
NOTE: Follow instructions on label carefully.
See the How Do I Use POR 15 Rust Preventive Paint? article in the Technical Articles section
See the How Do I Stop Rust Permanently with POR-15 Solutions article in the Technical Articles section
- Great ProductReview by Mustang Tom
- Ideal Review by Seamus
- GoodReview by No
Write Your Own Review
Health & Safety


text:
Top 5 UFO Sightings in Wyoming [VIDEOS]
Unconfirmed reports of unidentified flying objects have been circulating the web featuring videos of evidence allegedly filmed in and around Wyoming state. Eye witnesses and camera-ready community members have been able to capture instances of flashing lights, giant orbs, and other strange occurrences above Wyoming over the years, and today we have practically every video we could find all on one page.
We've compiled a list of UFO sightings all around the state of Wyoming. Hard to say if these are actually green men coming to probe us, but it sure is interesting to form our own theories. Grab you tin foil hat and enjoy...
Do you believe that these are actually aliens from another planets? Dust on a camera lens? Weather balloons? Do you have other UFO videos filmed in Wyoming that you'd like to share? Post your thoughts and links in the comment section below.


text:
Leonardo DiCaprio was determined to reteam with his longtime collaborator Martin Scorsese to film gritty new drama "The Wolf Of Wall Street" because he was convinced no other director could do the movie justice.
The actor, who had worked with Scorsese on four previous projects, including The Departed, picked up the rights to disgraced New York financier Jordan Belfort's memoir in 2007 after becoming captivated by his story about his life in banking and his stint behind bars for securities fraud and money laundering.
DiCaprio took the idea to Scorsese and they landed a deal to make the film with Warner Bros. studio bosses, but the financing agreement collapsed in the stock market crash of 2008, forcing the "Goodfellas" filmmaker to walk away from the movie.
"The Titanic" star approached a handful of other directors to help bring Belfort's story to the big screen, but he didn't feel right working on "The Wolf of Wall Street" with anyone other than Scorsese – and it wasn't until 2011 that the pair managed to strike a new deal with executives at independent production company Red Granite Pictures.
DiCaprio tells New York magazine, "Marty directing was Jordan's dream scenario, absolutely. When Marty couldn't do it the first time, I set it up with a few other directors, but I never felt comfortable pulling the trigger. I was fixated on him (Scorsese). There wasn't anybody else who could bring the rawness and toughness, the music, and particularly the humor required to convey the excitement of these young punks – these robber barons – taking on the Wall Street system."


text:
Clash of The Titans (1981)
Last night I watched the original Clash of The Titans (suggested tagline from Halief: "Letting loose The Kraken since 1981"). I took notes of the movie on Twitter and rewrote them below.
Apparently in Olympus, Zeus always sat in front of his own laser show. The only thing missing was the dry ice effect. "Let loose the Kraken!" commanded Zeus in anger, before he did a voodoo death curse against the King of Argos who threw Zeus's illegitimate son to sea.
"What? Now?" said the Kraken, "I'm not even dressed for the ocassion!" Kraken was apparently the first mythical fashionista. Being a mere special effect, The Kraken couldn't actually touch Argos Kingdom, so it let loose a tsunami against the island.
From the scenes, the tsunami took 0 lives. But it made many people really wet and bothered, because they all wore white robes. Apparently that devastated the kingdom. People were in chaos, "We have nothing to wear!"
"The Kraken's the only Titan left," said Zeus. "Then why is this movie titled 'Clash of The Titans'?" asked Poseidon, who was probably also the reigning Grammar Nazi.
Fast forward several years, Perseus had become an adult. And a goddess, on a whim, transported him to the kingdom of Joppa. This goddess would've made a lot of loyal followers by running a travel agency these days. "A trip from Jakarta to Bandung would only cost you one worship and a donation. And the journey will take only one second!" Million converts, guaranteed! Triple that on weekends.
Perseus, having no proper clothing, was offered a royalty robe by Ammon, a guy who dressed like a homeless and whose duty involved giving robes to strangers. Apparently in Joppa, the difference between a royalty and a homeless was the kind of detergent they used for their robes.
Zeus, finding out that his son was sent even without proper clothing, was furious, "We need to send this sword, shield, and helmet to Perseus immediately!" said Zeus. One god bowed, "Hermes delivery service at your disposal!"
Trying all these gifts from the gods, Perseus realized that the helmet was able to make its wearer invisible! He left immediately to Joppa's capital. "Public women bathouse, here I come!" he said, valiantly.
Meanwhile in Joppa, there were so many men queuing to marry Andromeda. The challenge, however, was that one must answer a riddle or be burned to death. This is the mythical version of: "Marriage or death?"
Having learnt about the beauty of Andromeda, Perseus--naturally--sneaked into Andromeda's bedroom. Just because he could.
"Like father like son, eh Zeus?" said Poseidon.
Just for your information, years before this, Zeus had also sneaked into Perseus's mother's room by masquerading as--I'm not kidding--a golden bathtub.
It must've been hard for Perseus mother to tell her son, "Your father is a bathtub, my boy." Instead, she said, "He's very radiant. And clean."
But enough mythology for the night. I'm going to bed. And next time you go to the bathroom, give your bathtub a hefty kick. Just to be safe.


text:
If you read the front page of Ars, you might know about the P2P experiments taken on by broadcasters in Canada and Norway. These broadcasters have decided to put their content on Bit Torrent, DRM-free, for the world to use as they please. This is a decidedly different stance than most other content providers who are still deathly afraid of what the Internet might do with their stuff (save music, which has finally seen the DRM-free light).
Now, No Starch Press has decided to hop on the P2P bandwagon and give away two of its famed books, Cult of Mac and Cult of iPod (full disclosure: No Starch is the publisher for Ars Technica's Jon Stokes). The company wrote on its site last week that it had made the decision to see whether giving the files away over Bit Torrent would have any affect (and hopefully a positive one) on book sales. "In today's electronic world we can choose to fight a losing battle with DRM, or we can take a counter-intuitive approach and turn things on their head," reads the blog entry.
"[T]here's a political issue here as well. I think that publishers (music and book) are spending too much time circling the wagons and not enough time thinking of ways that they can use technology to advantage," wrote No Starch's Bill Pollock. "Certainly, our move here is a bit unusual, but someone has to take the plunge. May as well be us. After all, we were the first publishers in the United States to come out publicly against the DMCA. Time to put our money where our mouth is, as they say."
A number of other publishers have experimented with P2P in the same way. O'Reilly experimented with it for about a year between 2006 and 2007 and said that book sales weren't hurt by putting the files online. But when The Alchemist author Paulo Coelho put a translated version of his book on Bit Torrent, sales apparently exploded.
Pollock added that the whole experience was rather liberating. Instead of worrying about whether their already DRM-free files were being put up on P2P services and trying to get them taken down, the publisher is now concerned with maximizing visibility on those same services. We wish No Starch the best of luck in its experiment—no matter how you feel about the whole "cult" analogy, the two books present some cool imagery that makes up part of the (crazy) Apple cultural experience.
Update (3/25/08): Leander Kahney, author of both books, wrote me an e-mail with links to both of the torrent files on The Pirate Bay. Check 'em out here: Cult of Mac and Cult of iPod.


text:
Hi TopRacers F1 Manager Fan!
We are sorry to inform you that the game has been closed. After 7 years online we have had a lot of beautiful and funny moments with all of you, but now the time is over.
Although all of our efforts to keep the game up & running it does not make sense to continue with it online without having enough resources to keep it online. You do not deserve that, this is what we believe so we prefer to close it.
Some of you will probably disagree with that decision, some others will agree on that without enough maintenance the game does not make sense, in any case we never intend to harm you. Taking into account that all this started for fun, it has helped us to move to places we never thought about.
What now?
We will be refunding all recents transactions to users that communicate with us at sales(@)topracers.net
If you are a F1 fan...
We are preparing a new mobile version. If you want to be informed when the version is launched please subscribe to the list you will find on the right side.
Kind Regards,
The TopRacers F1 Manager Team


text:
Bob Ouellette grew up in 'Cuda Country, and now he's back.
NEW SMYRNA BEACH — Bob Ouellette grew up in 'Cuda Country, and now he's back.
Ouellette took over July 1 as principal of New Smyrna Beach High School – where the barracuda reigns as mascot – when Jim Tager moved to a job in the school district's curriculum department.
"This right here is a dream job," said Ouellette, who graduated in 1988 from the high school's old campus on the North Causeway where he played football and was a student government officer. He met his future bride, Jacqueline Lacan, there and their older son, Jacques, is now a sophomore at the high school his dad runs.
Ouellette, 43, has already had some practice balancing the dual roles of father and principal. The Ouellettes' younger son, Luke, attended Osteen Elementary while his dad was principal there the past five years, sharing a daily carpool from their home in Edgewater.
They'll both be staying closer to home now that Ouellette has a new job and that's just fine with the man who has such deep roots in Southeast Volusia. It's one of the few areas in the county served by a single high school, which Ouellette sees as a good thing for its 1,900 students.
"You get clusters of students who really know each other," he said.
That also breeds strong community support for the school, which draws much of its staff from the immediate area.
While he faces a transition with the move from elementary to high school, Ouellette said many things remain the same.
"Good teaching is good teaching," he said. "The curriculum can get deeper and more complex, but it's still about how you get (students) to buy in to what you're teaching."
Building positive relationships between teachers and students is a key to that, said the man who still sees himself as a teacher first. As a former teacher at Edgewater Public School and principal intern at New Smyrna Beach Middle, Ouellette already knows many of the students at the high school, some of whom he coached in baseball and soccer as they grew up.
They're likely to see a lot of him on campus, too, and at after-school events once classes resume in August because that's Ouellette's style.
"The best way for students to get to know you is in smaller groups," he said. "I plan to be out in the classrooms."
That's the way Ouellette operated at Osteen Elementary where he was commonly known as Mr. O, said second-grade teacher Carol Martin.
"He was very popular with the children," she said. "He would join in impromptu games on the field, throwing footballs and jumping rope. There were knock, knock jokes going on, but they knew when he was serious and they weren't joking any more."
Ouellette also knows the serious side of being a principal inside and out, said Tammy Blackburn, whose daughter finished fifth grade at Osteen in June.
"When he has to make a hard call, he's not afraid to do that," she said. "He's really good with numbers. ... Overall, I think he's got it all."
Data analysis to develop ideas for school improvement is one of Ouellette's strengths, said Area Superintendent Tom Russell, his boss at both Osteen and New Smyrna Beach High.
"He can slice and dice data and come up with strategies," Russell said. "He will get a vision and he has the drive to get it done."
Ouellette's vision for the high school doesn't include major changes for now.
"This is more about keeping a positive trend going and then tweaking it for the better," he said.
Major changes are more likely for Ouellette's personal and family schedule as he plans to attend as many evening school-related events as possible. Those, he said, are "a chance to see these students shine."
His wife – a media specialist at Champion Elementary School in Daytona Beach — and his sons will probably be by his side at many of those events.
"My family is going to become dyed-in-the-wool Barracudas," he said.


text:
CALGARY — If Canada doesn't secure oil pipelines to the Pacific coast quickly, the in-aptly named "bitumen bubble" currently eating away at the province of Alberta's budget could quickly become a more permanent phenomenon, according report released Wednesday by the University of Calgary's School of Public Policy.
Several proposals are currently being considered that would take Alberta's crude to the Pacific coast and then off to Asia. However, plans to build the Northern Gateway pipeline, which would ship bitumen between Alberta and Kitimat, B.C., and to expand the Trans Mountain line, which runs into Vancouver, have faced serious political and environmental backlash, raising doubts these projects will gain regulatory approval and move forward.
The equivalent of being late is that you've got to take a bigger and bigger discount on your product
Rapidly growing Asian economies are likely to need more oil in the coming years, but Alberta's product is competing with a panoply of other crudes, many of which are less viscous and contain less sulphur and are, thus, much easier and cheaper to refine, said Michal Moore, one of the authors of the report and a professor with the school.
Refineries require expensive technical improvements to handle the West's bitumen — upgrades that Asian countries may be less willing to consider if Canada fails to sort out its transportation and access woes, and quickly.
"If you wait or if you get caught without enough capacity, the market will respond by saying 'Look, we've got a more attractive product, we've got a cheaper product. We're happy to take your product, but we're going to discount it more and more," Mr. Moore said. "The equivalent of waiting, the equivalent of being late is that you've got to take a bigger and bigger discount on your product."
The proposed Northern Gateway line and Trans Mountain expansion are predicted to deliver between 500,000 and 1.1 million barrels of Alberta crude per day to the West Coast.
The report said refineries on the Pacific Basin have the capacity to meet this increased supply, although some will need to be modified. Further, any additional increase in the supply of oil would need to be met with more refineries or upgrades — investments Asian countries may become increasingly unwilling to make if Canada drags its feet, denies the new pipelines or fails to act in a transparent way.
"Canadians will have to show first, and quickly, that we are committed to building pipelines that will bring sufficient volumes of oil to the Pacific coast necessary to give the refiners the certainty that they need to invest in infrastructure for refining Canadian oil," the report read. "If Canada does not approve of the Pacific coast pipeline expansions, or takes too long in doing so, it could find its crude unable to effectively penetrate the world's most promising oil export market."
Alberta is facing a $6-billion shortfall in revenue in the coming fiscal year due to a dramatic decline in royalties collected from its bitumen. Alberta premier Alison Redford has termed the phenomena a "bitumen bubble."
Tied to refineries in the U.S. that are capable of handling its crude, Alberta's product is largely landlocked.
Although it usually sells at a discount to other oils, the spread between bitumen-based oil and the lighter West Texas Intermediate has increased dramatically in the past year thanks to a shortage of pipeline capacity and an increase in oil production from the Bakken plays in North Dakota and Montana.


text:
'Three-Strikes' Prisoners Drawing a Walk
California Starts Resentencing—and Often Freeing—Thousands Incarcerated Under '90s Sentencing Law; Slow Going in L.A.
LOS ANGELES—Eighteen years ago, Richard Packard was caught stealing cigarettes from an Albertson's grocery store in eastern Los Angeles County. That conviction sent him away to prison with a 25-years-to-life sentence, as prescribed by California's "three strikes" law.
A Korean War veteran with a substantial criminal record, including five armed-robbery convictions, Mr. Packard said he "hung up" his guns in the early 1980s, though he still struggled to adhere to all social norms....