text:
New Camaros tear down runway to help U-2 spy planes land
The Air Force is in the midst of swapping out the fleet of high-speed sport cars that chase down its sinister-looking black spy planes at breakneck speeds.
For more than 50 years, the chase cars have been critical to the high-flying U-2's mission.
The jets have such long wingspans -- 105 feet -- that it's difficult for pilots to take off or land without people on the ground telling them about wing angles and clearance. So a pilot in the chase car radios to the pilot in the cockpit and lets him or her know how things look.
"We say the U-2 is the easiest plane to fly between 6 inches and 60,000 feet," said Drew Buchanan, an Air Force spokesman. "But it's the most difficult plane to land."
The sports cars have to be in top shape to hurtle forward from a standstill to chase down the ominous U-2. Now the Air Force has opted for the new 400 horsepower V-8 Chevrolet Camaro SS to replace its fleet of Pontiac GTOs and Pontiac G8 GTs.
PHOTOS: The cars that chase down the U-2 spy plane
"They're not like normal cars; we run them pretty fast every time out there," Buchanan said, indicating that the cars can go in excess of 100 mph at times.
The Air Force said all the vehicles are mechanically stock. They are outfitted with radios to allow communication with aircraft.
U-2 pilots drive the chase cars and assist the landing pilots through radio calls. To become a U-2 pilot, you must also take a course that teaches you how to maintain high-performance cars at top speeds, the Air Force said.
Pilots are trained near Sacramento at Beale Air Force Base, where the U-2s are based.
The Air Force has a fleet of 33 U-2s and about 20 chase cars located across the globe.
The high-flying U-2 spy plane was first designed during the Eisenhower administration to breach the iron curtain and, engineers said, snap "picture postcards for Ike" of hidden military strongholds in the Soviet Union. The U-2 continues to play a critical role in national security today, hunting Al Qaeda forces.
Flying a nearly six-decade-old plane may sound risky, but the military's U-2s are regularly "rebuilt, redone and retrofitted," according to the plane's maker, Lockheed Martin Corp. Each of the nation's 33 U-2s get refurbished at Lockheed's new Skunk Works facility in Palmdale.
Similarly, every decade or so, the Pentagon has upgraded to faster and more capable cars.
PHOTOS: The cars that chase down the U-2 spy plane
In the 1950s and '60s, U-2s were slow, so the Air Force could use old work trucks. But the military used El Caminos in the 1970s and 1980s. Starting in the 1990s, GTOs, G8s and Camaros took over as chase cars. The newest Camaros are being swapped in today.
Ford's new engine is so small, it fits in a carry-on suitcase
Hennessey offers up supercharged upgrades for Mopar muscle
More than a dozen Shelby Mustangs to be sold at auction


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Interesting Week for Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump
Putin's latest move
I don't follow the western corporate media so I don't really know how much coverage this development has received in the West, but in Russia and the Ukraine the big news is the decision by Russia to begin recognizing official Novorussian documents such as passports, driver licenses, school and college diplomas, etc. The Russians were pretty specific in the way the made the announcement. They said that it was a temporary measure dictated by humanitarian considerations. They have a point. Until now, the residents of the Donetsk and Lugansk People's Republics had to travel to the Nazi-occupied Ukraine to try to get their documents. Which, considering how the Ukronazis consider anybody from the Donbass was not only futile, but sometimes dangerous. This decision makes perfect sense practically. But, of course, it has a far-reaching symbolic dimension too. The timing is also crucial: by recognizing the documents issued by the DNR and LNR authorities, the Russians have de facto "semi-recognized" the authorities which issued them and that is just a fairly short step away from recognizing these republics.
Right now, the Kremlin is vehemently denying any such thoughts. But all the Kremlin-affiliated commentators are rather blunt about what this really means. According to them, the message for the junta in Kiev is simple: if you attack Novorussia or if you officially ditch the Minks agreements we will immediately recognize these two republics. And, once that happens, it's over for the Ukronazis, these republics will be gone just like South Ossetia or Abkhazia. Of course, nobody will officially recognize the independence of these republics, but neither will anybody do anything meaningful about it. And, let's be honest, the Russian authorities couldn't care less about what western politicians or their corporate media have to say: they already heard it all and it's not like they could be demonized much futher.
The next logical move would be to move the Russian border control from the Russian border to the line of contact. Or not. If the Russians don't do it, this might be a sign that they support the official position of the Republics which is that they want to liberate the totality of the Doentsk and Lugansk regions. By the way, the Russian Border Guards are elite and highly militarized forces whose presence on the line of contact would in no way prevent a Novorussian (counter-)attack against the Ukronazi forces. So the decision about where to deploy them would have a primarily political dimension and no real military consequences.
Right now the Ukronazis have basically gone officially on record in declaring that they never intended to abide by the terms of the Minsk 1 and Minsk 2 agreements. Here is what Anton Gerashchenko, a special adviser to the Minister of internal Affairs of Ukraine and a member of the Board of the Ministry of internal Affairs of Ukraine openly declared on Ukrainian national TV: (emphasis added).
Let's immediately say that the Minsk Agreements were not implemented from the day there were signed in Febuary 2015. This was a temporary measure on the side of the Ukraine and, I will be honest, a deliberate deception. Remember that the first Minsk Agreement was signed following the military disaster near Ialovaisk when we had no forces to defend the front from Donetsk to Mariupol. The second Mink Agreement was signed following the treacherous Russian aggression on Debaltsevo and the formationm of the "Debaltsevo Cauldron". These agreements are not international agreements or anything else.
Needless to say, NOBODY in the West paid any attention to this statement, and why would they, after all, their line has always been that Russia is not abiding by the Minsk Agreement, even if Russia is not even a party to them (Russia is only a witness and guarantor). And if a senior Ukronazi official says otherwise, who cares?!
This amazing admission by Gerashchenko is only the latest in a series of steps taken and statements made by various Ukronazis to the effect that "we are done negotiating and from now on, we will solve this problem by force". So far, the "force" applied has been primarily in the form of a total blockade of the Donbass which included the prevention of a large amount of vitally needed coal to the Nazi-occupied Ukraine from the Donbass even though this shipment had already been paid for. Officially Poroshenko does not condone this blockade, but in practice he is either unwilling or unable to prevent or stop it. Another sign that the Independent Banderastan is falling apart.
There is a strong feeling in Russia that Poroshenko is powerless and that the Ukronazi crazies are up to no good. Clearly, nobody in the Ukronazis elites has any intention of actually implementing the Minsk 1 and Minsk 2 agreements. That, by the way, might be a dangerous approach for a number of reasons:
First, these agreements were endorsed by the UNSC and every country out there, at least as far as I know. So Gerashchenko is wrong – the Minsk Agreements are binding under international law.
Second, the Ukrainian authorities recently found and released a document showing that Yanukovich had made an official request for a Russian intervention in the Ukraine. They wanted to show that he was a traitor. But in the process, they also showed that the last legitimate president of the Ukraine had made a legal request for a Russian intervention which might well mean that, at least in legal terms, any subsequent Russian intervention in the Ukraine would be 100% legal.
Even better, Yanukovich is still in Russia. And, from a legal point of view, you could make the case that he is still the legitimate president of the Ukraine. If the Yemeni President in exile Abdrabbuh Mansour Hadi could ask the Saudis to intervene in Yemen, why would that no be an option for Poroshenko to ask for such an intervention in the Ukraine?
Right now, the Russians are making no such legalistic statements. But you can be sure that they have already aligned all their ducks in a neat row just in case they do decide to openly intervene in this civil war.
How realistic is the possibility of a Russian recognition of the breakaway republics or an overt Russian intervention in the Ukraine?
I think that it all depends on what the Ukronazis crazies do. If they really attack Novorussia I expect the Kremlin to recognize the DNR and LRN. A Russian intervention? I doubt it, but only because I believe that the DNR/LNR can handle a Nazi attack. So the only question for me is how long Poroshenko will stay in power and what the real crazies will do once they overthrow him. Right now this mostly depends on the US but since the US elites are locked in a desperate struggle for power, I don't see the Trump Administration taking any dramatic decisions anyway, not in the Ukraine, not elsewhere. At least not as long as there is a question mark as to who is really in charge in the White House. Everybody is waiting for the outcome of that struggle, including Moscow and Kiev.
Trump – all words, no action, but good words
In the meantime, Trump has been busy giving speeches. Which sounds pretty bad until you realize that these are good speeches, very good ones even. For one thing, he still is holding very firmly to the line that the "fake news" (which in "Trumpese" means CNN & Co. + BBC) are the enemies of the people. The other good thing is that twice in a row now he has addressed himself directly to the people. Sounds like nothing, but I think that this is huge because the Neocons have now nicely boxed Trump in with advisors and aides who range from the mediocre to bad to outright evil. The firing of Flynn was a self-defeating disaster for Trump who now is more or less alone, with only one loyal ally left, Bannon. I am not sure how much Bannon can do or, for that matter, how long until the Neocons get to him too, but besides Bannon I see nobody loyal to Trump and his campaign promises. Nobody except those who put him in power of course, the millions of Americans who voted for him. And that is why Trump is doing the right thing speaking directly to them: they might well turn out to be his biggest weapon against the "DC swamp".
Furthermore, by beating on the media, especially CNN and the rest of the main US TV channels, Trump is pushing the US public to turn to other information sources, including those sympathetic to him, primarily on the Internet. Good move – that is how he won the first time around and that is how he might win again.
The Neocons and the US 'Deep State' have to carefully weigh the risks of continuing their vendetta against Trump. Right now, they appear to be preparing to go after Bannon. But what will they do if Trump, instead of ditching Bannon like he ditched Flynn, decides to dig in and fight with everything he has got? Then what? If there is one thing the Neocons and the deep state hate is to have a powerful light pointed directly at them. They like to play in the dark, away from an always potentially hostile public eye. If Trump decides to fight back, really fight back, and if he appeals directly to the people for support, there is no saying what could happen next.
I strongly believe that the American general public is deeply frustrated and angry. Obama's betrayal of all his campaign promises only made these feelings worse. But when Obama had just made it to the White House I remember thinking that if he really tried to take on the War Machine and if he came to the conclusion that the 'deep state' was not going to let him take action or threaten him he could simply make a public appeal for help and that millions of Americans would flood the streets of Washington DC in support of "their guy" against the "bastards in DC". Obama was a fake. But Trump might not be. What if the Three Letter Agencies or Congress suddenly tried to, say, impeach Trump and what if he decided ask for the support of the people – would millions not flood the streets of DC? I bet you that Florida alone would send more than a million. Ditto for Texas. And I don't exactly imagine the cops going out of their way to stop them. The bottom line is this: in any confrontation between Congress and Trump most of the people will back Trump. And, if it ever came to that, and for whatever it is worth, in any confrontation between Trump-haters and Trump-supporters the latter will easily defeat the former. The "basket of deplorables" are still, thank God, the majority in this country and they have a lot more power than the various minorities who backed the Clinton gang.
There are other, less dramatic but even more likely scenarios to consider. Say Congress tries to impeach Trump and he appeals to the people and declares that the "DC swamp" is trying to sabotage the outcome of the elections and impose its will upon the American people. Governors in states like Florida or Texas, pushed by their public opinion, might simply decide not to recognize the legitimacy of what would be an attempted coup by Congress against the Executive branch of government. Now you tell me – does Congress really have the means to impose its will against states like Florida or Texas? I don't mean legally, I mean practically. Let me put it this way: if the states revolt against the federal government does the latter have the means to impose its authority? Are the creation of USNORTHCOM and the statutory exceptions from the Posse Comitatus Act (which makes it possible to use the National Guard to suppress insurrections, unlawful obstructions, assemblages, or rebellions) sufficient to guarantee that the "DC swamp" can impose its will on the rest of the country? I would remind any "DC swamp" members reading these lines that the KGB special forces refused not once, but twice, to open fire against the demonstrators in Moscow (in 1991 and 1993) even though they had received a direct order by the President to do just that. Is there any reason to believe that US cops and soldiers would be more willing than the KGB special forces to massacre their own people?
Donald Trump has probably lost most of his power in Washington DC, but that does not entail that this is the case in the rest of the USA. The Neocons can feel like the big guy on the block inside the Beltway, but beyond that they are mostly in "enemy territory" controlled by the "deplorables", something to keep in mind before triggering a major crisis.
This week I got the feeling that Trump was reaching out and directly seeking for the support to the American people. I think he will get it if needed. If this is so, then the focus of his Presidency will be less on foreign affairs, where the US will be mostly paralyzed, than on internal US politics were he still might make a difference. On Russia the Neocons have basically beaten Trump – he won't have the means to engage in any big negotiating with Vladimir Putin. But, at least, neither will he constantly be trying to make things worse. The more the US elites fight each other, the less venom they will have left for the rest of mankind. Thank God for small favors…
I can only hope that Trump will continue to appeal directly the people and try to bypass the immense machine which is currently trying to isolate him. Of course, I would much prefer that Trump take some strong and meaningful action against the deep state, but I am not holding my breath.
Tonight I spoke with a friend who knows a great deal more about Trump than I do and he told me that I have been too quick in judging Trump and that while the Flynn episode was definitely a setback, the struggle is far from over and that we are in for a very long war. I hope that my friend is right, but I will only breathe a sigh of relief if and when I see Trump hitting back and hitting hard. Only time will tell.
By The Saker
Source: The Unz Review

subset: commoncrawl


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Protection for your investment.
Rental property insurance throughout Northeastern Ohio.
Don't be fooled, just because your tenant has rental insurance doesn't mean that you—the owner—are protected. Rental property insurance is specially designed to cover the risks faced when you rent your property to others.
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In addition to damage to the building itself and your personal property (such as included furniture), rental property insurance often covers lost income if property damaged means you can't rent it out for a period. The policy will also often include coverage for liability you might face if a tenant sues over injury suffered in the property.
Other covered risks can include any costs you have to pay to move a tenant in or out of the property during repairs, and any compensation you have to pay to a tenant if damage puts heating or air conditioning out of action.
One point to watch is the fact that policies usually don't cover loss of income if a tenant fails to make rent payments, or the costs of evicting a tenant if necessary.
If you've got any questions on rental property insurance or want to find the best policy, contact us today.
Rental Property Insurance Quote Request
As an independent agency, we offer multiple options at competitive prices.


text: Fjord is a contemporary nursery made of light oak. This furniture has a grey-washed finish with a board pattern. The large metal handles give a fitting finishing touch. Create your own dream world by combining this room with beautiful colours on the walls and matching covers on the bed and the chest of drawers.


text:
Why Choose Loring Woodriff Real Estate Associates?
We are a local, one-office, boutique real estate firm and that translates into:
- Conscientious and personalized service
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We believe in the power of effective, aesthetically sophisticated real estate marketing. That means:
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Our Sales Associates live and breathe residential real estate. They work in this field full-time to the highest standards of integrity and professionalism. As a result of its associate's commitment to their profession, Loring Woodriff Real Estate Associates enjoys the 2nd largest sales volume of any real estate firm in the Charlottesville /Albemarle area. In terms of re-sale properties (excludes new construction), the firm enjoys the largest sales volume in the area. Yet comprised of just 30 Realtors, the firm is truly "boutique," unlike the competition.
Read more here about LWREA & The Competition.
Come see us at 401 Park Street, in Downtown Charlottesville. You won't be disappointed!


text:
Published May 1, 1997
EPPC Online
Children of the Revolution, written and directed by Peter Duncan, represents the less attractive side of the Australian sensibility I have so often had occasion to praise here. For it is a too-natural development out of healthy skepticism to turn merely cynical, and that is what, I take it, we have here. There is, to be sure, a certain amount of affection for poor old Joan (Judy Davis), who is so besotted with Soviet Communism that she goes to Moscow, goes to bed with Stalin (F. Murray Abraham) and, in effect, kills him with the subsequent exertion he is called upon to make. It is a cute idea, too, to show the bloodthirsty dictator cosying up to her like a teenage boy at the movies, and even to show Malenkov, Beria and Khruschev appearing at her door in the morning with bouquets of flowers. "How can they be so happy?" she asks her new friend, the Australian double agent David Hoyle, aka "Nine" (Sam Neill).
I even like the fact that Nine is not sure himself which side he's really working for but that he doesn't much care because the Russians don't much care either. Australia just doesn't matter enough. When he tells Joan that he has orders from the Australians to kill her and from the Russians to protect her, she (not unreasonably) asks what he proposes to do. "Frankly, Joan, it's a bit of a tangle." But after Stalin's death he manages things very efficiently for her journey home.
"It's all right. You'll be safe. The Russians will tell the British who will tell the Australians that you're a mole for MI6." "Thank you," she says.
But the joke will not bear all the weight that's being put on it here, and the satire or humor or whatever it is lumbers heavily through the story of the life of Stalin's illegitimate son, Joe (Richard Roxburgh), who discovers early on in life a fascination for prisons and handcuffs and later makes a name for himself as leader of the Prison Guards' union and the police. "Isn't the point to help people?" he asks his appalled mother.
"Well, people, yes; not the police!"
The picture, which can't quite make up its mind between the documentary style and straightforward narrative, makes its point in an yet another style, a fantasy interview between young Joe and his father, where young Joe in his bluff Aussie style dismisses the old man's cant about wanting to do the best for his people and presses him uncomfortably on how it was that he came to be a monster. "I don't know," Stalin is finally forced to admit. He also memorably punctures his mother's dreams of revolution by telling her that if she thinks the Australians are going to shake the sand off their beach towels, put their berets on and storm the opera house, she's either stupid or mad. And he knows she's not stupid.
It is good to see error exposed, but only if truth is put in its place. Here Duncan has nothing to put in its place. There is a brief spurt of interest as we see poor old Joan watching the collapse of Communism on television and being driven to distraction by that "walking birthmark,"
Mikhail Gorbachev. The real capstone for her is the idea of a McDonalds in Red Square. It is the end of civilization as we know it. "The devil doesn't carry a gun," she rails to her long suffering husband, played by the always-excellent Geoffrey Rush; "the devil carries fast food, cheap appliances and bad television." But the film ends with a final plunge into cynicism and some dull and predictable satirical barbs directed at the celebrity culture of the media. By this time not even Rush, nor Judy Davis's terrific portrait of Joan, by far the best thing about the picture, has been able to inspire us with anything but relief at seeing the back of these tiresome characters.


text:
Please see here for changes made at the beginning of this year.
Before I tell you about this week's challenge, I need to let you know the winner of challenge 321.
Number 8: Jane Willis, with this lovely card:
Congratulations, Jane. Please email me at email@example.com with your full name and address so I can arrange for you to receive your Contemporary Christmas design pad.
From now on, every CHNC challenge will be 'anything goes as long as it's Christmas', which will, hopefully, encourage as many crafters as possible to join in with their festive creations. However, there will always be an optional theme, which this week is 'recycle/upcycle'. I want to stress that this is purely optional.
Please note that winner needs to claim the prize by 11 March (2 weeks)
From now on, every CHNC challenge will be 'anything goes as long as it's Christmas', which will, hopefully, encourage as many crafters as possible to join in with their festive creations. However, there will always be an optional theme, which this week is 'recycle/upcycle'. I want to stress that this is purely optional.
Challenge 322:
anything goes as long as it's Christmas
optional theme: recycle/upcycle
Every week I will be giving a prize to a randomly chosen winner - this is the prize for this challenge:
This is my card following the optional theme: recycle/upcycle. The panel in the middle was taken from a Christmas card received - you can read about it on My Crafty Outlook here:
Now it's over to you. You can use any materials, any techniques - it's anything goes as long as it's Christmas, with the optional theme of 'recycle/upcycle'.
I look forward to seeing what you come up with for this challenge - please add a link to your blog post (not your blog, but the actual post where your creation can be found) by 20:00 UK time Friday 3 March 2017. Please include a link to this blogpost within the post for your creation.
You can enter as many times as you wish and also link to any other challenges that allow you to do so, but new work only, please.
A new challenge will be set on Saturday 4 March, 2017 at 09:00 UK time.
Please add your link to inlinkz. If by any chance it disappears, please leave a comment with the link to your blog post and I will make sure it is added.
If you haven't done so already, please become a follower and grab my bright pink button to post on your sidebar and help continue to spread the word about this challenge blog - thank you.
Please also consider going to CHNC Facebook page and clicking 'like' if you haven't done so already and encourage your friends to do the same.
Don't forget that 'anything goes' monthly challenges are on my Craftyhazelnut's Christmas Challenge Extra blog (these are still being sponsored by Bugaboo Stamps with a prize of four digital images for the randomly chosen winner each month) - you can share any Christmas creation you make throughout the whole month, including those that you link here - there is no restriction on the number of entries you can make throughout the month - the link for CHNC challenge extra for March is here.
I also run a challenge blog called Craftyhazelnut's Patterned Paper Challenge - anything goes as long as you use some patterned paper - with a randomly chosen prize winner every month. Please click on the link to find out more. If you have used patterned paper for your Christmas creation, please enter it there too. And please be aware that the Patterned Paper Challenge is not restricted to Christmas - it is for any occasions as long as some patterned paper has been used.
Thank you for your support
I look forward to seeing your entries


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This much I know. So here's my clever way to send $20 to my nephew for his birthday.
I think I watched this money origami shirt & tie how-to video on YouTube about 56 times before I finally got it right. Totally worth it though. It's so cute. Might have to use this idea again next month for my father-in-law's birthday. It'd be perfect for Father's Day too.


text:
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text:
Updated July 20, 2021 at 12:47 PM ET
Wearing a cowboy hat under the West Texas morning sun, Jeff Bezos crossed the bridge to enter the capsule made by his company Blue Origin. He was accompanied by three others – his brother Mark Bezos, female aviation pioneer Wally Funk and 18-year-old Oliver Daemen.
Then the shuttle hatch closed and just before 9:15 a.m. ET, the four blasted into space on the first human flight on Blue Origin's New Shepard launch vehicle.
Bezos is the second billionaire this month to reach the edge of space: Richard Branson rocketed there last week aboard a vessel made by his company Virgin Galactic.
The date of the New Shepard's maiden launch is no accident: July 20 was the day in 1969 that Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin landed on the moon.
The crew went 62 miles above Earth in minutes
The New Shepard suborbital flight path was designed to go higher than the Kármán line, which is often considered the boundary of space: about 62 miles above Earth.
That line has been a sticking point in the space race between Bezos and Branson.
Branson's SpaceShipTwo hit a peak altitude of around 282,000 feet – higher than NASA's designated Earth-space boundary of 50 miles, but short of the Kármán line.
About three minutes into the flight, the booster separated from the crew capsule. Then the New Shepard passed the Kármán line, with hoots of celebration heard over the in-shuttle audio.
A sonic boom was heard as the booster returned to Earth. The capsule remained aloft longer, floating against blue skies.
The astronauts, as Blue Origin calls them, were briefly allowed to unbuckle.
"Who wants a Skittle?" Jeff Bezos asked, tossing one of the candies slowly across the capsule, which Daemon caught in his mouth.
"Oh Jeff, look at those, it's dark up here!" Funk was heard saying a minute later, apparently looking out the capsule windows. "Two thousand miles an hour."
At about the eight-minute mark of the flight, parachutes deployed from the capsule to give the crew an easy touchdown.
The capsule touched down in the desert sand, and a soft plume of dust rose around it. All together, the mission lasted roughly 11 minutes from takeoff to touchdown.
After the capsule landed, cars arrived carrying crews to open the hatch and videographers to document the moment. Scant winds meant the capsule landed where it was expected to.
Jeff Bezos stepped off the capsule first, followed by Daemen. Then Funk emerged, her arms flung out in glee. Mark Bezos came out last, and the four embraced family and friends.
The trip featured the youngest and oldest people to travel to space
The New Shepard's flight included both the oldest and youngest people to travel to space.
Funk, 82, is one of the last surviving members of a group of female pilots who were part of a test to see whether women were fit for space travel back in 1961. The women passed many of the same tests as the male pilots, and they became known as the Mercury 13 – but NASA never sent them to space.
Daemen, an 18-year-old Dutch student on a gap year, was the first paying customer aboard the New Shepard.
His father, Joes Daemen, founder and CEO of Dutch investment company Somerset Capital Partners, initially secured a spot for his son on the second flight. But the mystery winner of an auction for a spot on the New Shepard's voyage apparently had a scheduling conflict, and Jeff Bezos invited Oliver Daemen aboard.
The start of a space tourism era
The launch was a big day for Bezos but also for Blue Origin's space tourism program. The company's webcast touted that interested viewers should get in touch about booking a spot on a future Blue Origin flight.
Two more flights are scheduled for 2021.
Bezos announces new $100 million awards
At a news conference following the landing, Bezos announced a new philanthropic award, the Courage and Civility Award.
The award's first winners are political commentator and social entrepreneur Van Jones and restaurateur and humanitarian José Andrés. Each winner will receive $100 million, which they can give to the charities of their choice.
Bezos touted that the awards feature no bureaucracy. "They can give it all to their own charity, or they can share the wealth," he said. "It's up to them."
NPR's Scott Neuman and Bill Chappell contributed to this report.
Copyright 2021 NPR. To see more, visit https://www.npr.org.


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Vestis Group Brokers Scottsdale Neighborhood Shopping Center Sale
Vestis Group Brokers Scottsdale Neighborhood Shopping Center Sale
By Sarah Stecko | Commercial Executive Magazine
Vestis Group, a commercial brokerage and investment firm, is pleased to announce the sale of Via Linda Plaza, a 16,158 square-foot neighborhood shopping center, located at 10810 E Via Linda, in Scottsdale, Arizona for $2,500,000 or $155 per square-foot.
"This transaction was a win-win for all parties involved," says Matt Morrell, President of Retail Investments at Vestis Group and the lead broker for this transaction, "The seller achieved their desired exit sales price and the buyer is looking forward to improving and re-leasing the neighborhood shopping center. Vestis Group has been engaged by the new ownership to help reposition the retail investment property."
The Phoenix based Vestis Group commercial brokerage team of Matt Morrell, Natan Jacobs, Les Litwin and Chad Barber negotiated the transaction on behalf of the seller, MORE VLP LLC of New York, NY. The buyers, Wayne and Vicki Wentz of Paradise Valley, AZ, were represented by Mark Mangianti of Commercial Investments Advisors, Inc.
Via Linda Plaza is a single-story, neighborhood shopping center located at the northeast corner of 108th Street and Via Linda in North Scottsdale. The commercial property was built in 1987, with block construction on 1.47 acres of land. The well manicured retail center enjoys a prime North Scottsdale location south of Frank Lloyd Wright Boulevard and north of Shea Boulevard, approximately 3.2 miles east of the Loop 101 Freeway. – more at cem-az.com


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The ARM Research Summit is an academic summit to discuss future trends and disruptive technologies across all sectors of computing. On the first day of the Summit, ARM Research will host a gem5 workshop to give a brief overview of gem5 for computer engineers who are new to gem5 and dive deeper into some of gem5's more advanced capabilities. The attendees will learn what gem5 can and cannot do, how to use and extend gem5, as well as how to contribute back to gem5.
The ARM Research Summit will take place in Cambridge (UK) over the days of 11-13 September 2017. The gem5 workshop will be a full day event on the 11th September.
The workshop is being streamed live and all talks will be available on YouTube after the workshop.
An archive of the event can be found here.
The primary audience is researchers who are using, or planning to use, gem5 for architecture research.
Prerequisites: Attendees are expected to have a working knowledge of C++, Python, and computer systems.
See the main ARM Research Summit website for details about registration.
The workshop will take place on Monday the 11th September 2017 at Robinson College in Cambridge (UK). The workshop starts at 9.00 and runs in parallel with the main Summit program until 16.30 when it joins the main program.
The gem5 modular simulator provides a rich set of CPU models which permits balancing simulation speed and accuracy. The growing interest in using gem5 for design-space exploration however requires higher simulation speeds so as to enable scalability analysis with systems comprising tens to hundreds of cores. One relevant approach for enabling significant speedups lies in using trace-driven simulation, in which CPU cores are abstracted away thereby enabling to refocus simulation effort on memory/interconnect subsystems which play a key role on performance. This talk describes some of the work carried out on the Mont-Blanc european projects on trace-driven simulation and discusses the related challenges for multicore architectures in which trace injection requires to account for the API synchronization of the underlying running application. The ElasticSimMATE tool is presented as an initiative towards combining Elastic Traces and SimMATE so as to enable fast and accurate simulation of multithreaded applications on ARM multicore systems.
Dr Gilles Sassatelli is a CNRS senior scientist at LIRMM, a CNRS-University of Montpellier academic research unit with a staff of over 400. He is vice-head of the microelectronics department and leads a group of 20 researchers working in the area of smart embedded digital systems. He has authored over 200 peer-reviewed papers and has occupied key roles in a number of international conferences. Most of his research is conducted in the frame of international EU-funded projects such as the DreamCloud and Mont-Blanc projects.
Alejandro Nocua received the Ph.D. degree in Microelectronics from the University of Montpellier, France, in 2016. Currently, he is a postdoctoral researcher at the French National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS). His research interests include the analysis of high-performance and energy-efficiency design methodologies. He received his Master degree in Science from the National Institute of Astrophysics, Optics and Electronics (INAOE), Mexico, in 2013. Alejandro was awarded his BS degree in Electronics Engineering from Industrial University of Santander (UIS), Colombia in 2011.
Florent Bruguier received the M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in microelectronics from the University of Montpellier, France, in 2009 and 2012, respectively. From 2012 to 2015, he was a Scientific Assistant with the Montpellier Laboratory of Informatics, Robotics, and Microelectronics, University of Montpellier. Since 2015, he is a Permanent Associate Professor. He has co-authored over 30 publications. His research interests are focused on self-adaptive and secure approaches for embedded systems.
Anastasiia Butko, Ph.D. is a Postdoctoral Fellow in the Computational Research Division at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL), CA. Her research interests lie in the general area of computer architecture, with particular emphasis on high-performance computing, emerging and heterogeneous technologies, associated parallel programming and architectural simulation techniques. Broadly, her reasearch addresses the question of how alternative technologies can provide continuing performance scaling in the approaching Post-Moore's Law era. Her primary research projects include development of the EDA tools for fast superconducting logic design, development of the classical ISA for quantum processor control, development of the fast and flexible System-on-Chip generators using Chisel DSL. Dr. Butko co-leads Open Source Supercomputing project and is a technical committee member of the RISC-V foundation.
Dr. Butko received her Ph.D. in Microelectronics from the University of Montpellier, France (2015). Her doctoral thesis developed fast and accurate simulation techniques for many-core architectures exploration. Her graduate work has been conducted within the European project MontBlanc, which aims to design a new supercomputer architecture using low-power embedded technologies.
Dr. Butko received her MSc. Degree in Microelectronics from UM2, France and MSc and BSc Degrees in Digital Electronics from NTUU "KPI", Ukraine. During her Master she participated on the international program of double diploma between Montpellier and Kiev universities.
Correctly implementing cache coherence protocols is hard and these implementation details can affect the system's performance. Therefore, it is important to robustly model the detailed cache coherence implementation. The popular computer architecture simulator gem5 uses Ruby as its cache coherence model providing higher fidelity cache coherence modeling than many other simulators.
In this talk, I will give a brief overview of Ruby, including SLICC: the domain-specific language Ruby uses to specify cache protocols. I will show the extreme flexibility of this model and details of a simple cache coherence protocol. After this talk, you will be able to dive in and begin writing your own coherence protocols!
Jason Lowe-Power is an Assistant Professor at University of California, Davis in the Computer Science department. Jason's research focuses on increasing the energy efficiency and performance of end-to-end applications like analytic database operations used by Amazon, Google, Target, etc. One important aspect of this research is adding hardware mechanisms to systems that enable all programmers to use emerging hardware accelerators like GPUs. Additionally, Jason is a leader of the open-source architectural simulator, gem5, used by over 1500 academic papers. Jason received his PhD from University of Wisconsin-Madison in Summer 2017. He was awarded the Wisconsin Distinguished Graduate Fellowship Cisco Computer Sciences Award in 2014 and 2015.
Compute systems are ubiquitous, with form factors ranging from smartphones at the edge to datacenters in the cloud. Chips in all these systems today comprise 10s to 100s of homogeneous/heterogeneous cores or processing elements. The growing emphasis on parallelism, distributed computing, heterogeneity, and energy-efficiency across all these systems makes the design of the Network-on-Chip (NoC) fabric connecting the cores critical to both high-performance and low power consumption.
It is imperative to model the details of the NoC when architecting and exploring the design-space of a complex many-core system. If ignored, an inaccurate NoC model could lead to over-design or under-design due to incorrect trade-off choices, causing performance losses at runtime. To this end, we have designed and integrated a detailed on-chip network model called Garnet inside the gem5 (www.gem5.org) full-system architectural simulator which is being used extensively by both industry and academia. Together with Garnet, gem5 provides plug-and-play models of cores, caches, cache coherence protocols, NoC, memory controller, and DRAM, with varying levels of details, enabling computer architects and designers to trade-off simulation speed and accuracy.
In this talk, we will first introduce the basic building blocks of NoCs and present the state-of-the-art used in chips today. We will then present Garnet, and demonstrate how it faithfully models the state-of-the-art, while also offering immense flexibility in modifying various parts of the microarchitecture to serve the needs of both homogeneous many-cores and heterogeneous accelerator-based systems of the future via case studies and code-snippets. Finally, we will demonstrate how Garnet works within the entire gem5 ecosystem.
Tushar Krishna is an Assistant Professor in the Schools of ECE and CS at Georgia Tech. He received a Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 2014. Prior to that he received a M.S.E from Princeton University in 2009, and a B.Tech from the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Delhi in 2007, both in Electrical Engineering.
Before joining Georgia Tech in 2015, Dr. Krishna was a post-doctoral researcher in the VSSAD Group at Intel, Massachusetts, and then at the Singapore-MIT Alliance for Research and Technology at MIT.
Dr. Krishna's research interests are in computer architecture, interconnection networks, networks-on-chip, deep learning accelerators, and FPGAs.
SystemC TLM based virtual prototypes have become the main tool in industry and research for concurrent hardware and software development, as well as hardware design space exploration. However, there exists a lack of accurate, free, changeable and realistic SystemC models of modern CPUs. Therefore, many researchers use the cycle accurate open source system simulator gem5, which has been developed in parallel to the SystemC standard. In this tutorial we present the coupling of gem5 with SystemC that offers full interoperability between both simulation frameworks, and therefore enables a huge set of possibilities for system level design space exploration. Furthermore, we show several examples for coupling gem5 with SystemC and other tools.
Matthias Jung received his PhD degree in Electrical Engineering from the University of Kaiserslautern Germany in 2017. His research interest are SystemC based virtual prototypes, especially with the focus on the modeling of memory systems and memory controller design. Since may 2017 he is a researcher at Fraunhofer IESE, Kaiserslautern, Germany.
Christian Menard received a Diploma degree in Information Systems Technology from TU Dresden in Germany in 2016 and joined the chair for compiler construction as a Ph.D. student within the excellence cluster cfaed in TU Dresden. His current research includes system-level modeling of widely heterogeneous hardware as well dataflow compilers for heterogeneous MPSoC platforms.
Fast and accurate estimation of CPU power consumption is necessary to inform run-time power management approaches and allow effective design space exploration. Power simulators, combined with a full-system architectural simulator such as gem5, enable power-performance trade-offs to be investigated early in the design of a system. However, the accuracy of existing power simulators is known to be low, and this can lead to incorrect conclusions being made. In this talk, I will present our statistically rigorous methodology for building accurate run-time power models using Performance Monitoring Counters (PMCs) for mobile and embedded devices, and demonstrate how our models make more efficient use of limited training data and better adapt to unseen scenarios by uniquely considering stability. Models built using the methodology for both ARM Cortex-A7 and Cortex-A15 CPUs exhibit a 3.8% and 2.8% average error respectively. I will also present online resources that we have made available from the work, including software tools, documentation, raw data and further results. I will also present results from an investigation into the correlation between gem5 activity statistics and hardware PMCs. Based on this, a gem5 power model for a simulated quadcore ARM Cortex-A15 has been created, built using the above methodology, and its accuracy compared against experimental results obtained from hardware.
Geoff Merrett is an Associate Professor in the Department of Electronics and Computer Science at the University of Southampton. He received the BEng (1st, Hons) and PhD degrees in Electronic Engineering from Southampton in 2004 and 2009 respectively. His research interests are in energy-aware and self-powered computing systems, with application across the spectrum from highly constrained IoT devices to many-core mobile and embedded systems. He has published over 100 peer-reviewed articles in these areas, and given invited talks at a number of international events. Dr Merrett is a Co-Investigator on the EPSRC-funded £5.6M PRiME Programme Grant (where he leads the applications and cross-layer interaction theme), "Continuous on-line adaptation in many-core systems: From graceful degradation to graceful amelioration", and deputy-lead on the "Wearable and Autonomous Computing for Future Smart Cities" Platform Grant. He is technical manager of Southampton's ARM-ECS Research Centre, an award-winning industry-academia collaboration between the University of Southampton and ARM. He coordinates IoT research at the University, and leads the wireless sensing theme of its Pervasive Systems Centre. He is an Associate Editor for the IET CDS journal, serves as a reviewer for a number of leading journals, and on TPCs for a range of conferences. He co-manages the UK's Energy Harvesting Network, was General Chair of the ACM Workshop on Energy-Harvesting and Energy-Neutral Sensing Systems in 2013, 2014, and 2015, and was the General Chair of the European Workshop on Microelectronics Education 2016. He is a member of the IEEE, IET and Fellow of the HEA.
Author: Boris Shingarov - LabWare
We explain how GEM5 enabled us to develop a target-agnostic JIT compiler, in which no knowledge about the target ISA is coded by the human programmer; instead, the backend is inferred, using logic programming, from a formal machine description written in a Processor Description Language. Debugging such a JIT presents some challenges which can not be addressed using traditional approaches. One such challenge is the impedance mismatch between the high-level abstractions in the PDL and the low-level inferred implementation. In this talk, we present a new debugger based on simulating the execution of the target runtime VM in GEM5; the debugger frontend connects to this simulation using the RSP wire protocol.
In an era of complex networked heterogeneous systems, simulating independently only parts, components or attributes of a system-under-design is not a viable, accurate or efficient option. The interactions are too many and too complicated to produce meaningful results and the optimization opportunities are severely limited when considering each part of a system in an isolated manner. COSSIM offers a framework that can handle the simulation of a complete system-of-systems including processors, peripherals and networks that can appeal to Parallel (Heterogeneous) Systems designers and application developers in an integrated way.
The framework is based on gem5 as the main simulation engine for processor-based systems and extends its capabilities by integrating it with the OMNET++ network simulator. This integration allows independent gem5 instances to be networked with all network protocols and hierarchies that can be supported by OMNET++, thus creating a very flexible solution. The integration of the two main simulation tools is realized through the IEEE 1516 High-Level Architecture standard (HLA), through which all communication tasks are performed. Through HLA and custom libraries, a two-level (per node and global) synchronization scheme is also implemented to ensure a coherent notion of time between all nodes.
Since HLA is IP-based all gem5 instances and OMNET++ can be executed on the same physical machine or on any distributed system (or any combination in between). The overall framework – the set of gem5 nodes, the OMNET++ simulator and the CERTI HLA – are integrated in a unified Eclipse-based GUI that has been developed to provide easy simulation set-up, execution and visualization of results. McPAT is also integrated in a semi-automated way through the GUI in order to provide power and energy estimations for each node, while OMNET++ provides power estimations for networking-related components (NICs and network devices).
Andreas Brokalakis is a senior hardware engineer at Synelixis Solutions Ltd. At the same time he is pursuing a PhD degree at the Technical University of Crete, Greece. He holds a Bachelor degree in Computer Engineering from University of Patras, Greece and a Master's Degree on Hardware/Software Co-design from the same university. Current work and research interests involve computer architecture and arithmetic, as well as design of ASIC and FPGA systems and accelerators.
Nikolaos Tampouratzis is a PhD student at Technical University of Crete, working on simulation tools for computing systems. He has joined Telecommunication Systems Institute, Technical University of Crete since October 2012 as a research associate, providing research and development services to several EU-funded research projects. He received his Computer Science diploma from the University of Crete (UOC, Greece), with specialization in Hardware Design and FPGAs. He continued his studies in the Technical University of Crete (TUC Greece) where he received his Master Diploma in Electronic and Computer Engineering in which he specialized in Computer Architecture and Hardware Design.
The breakdown of Dennard scaling coupled with the persistently growing transistor counts increased the importance of application-specific hardware acceleration; such an approach offers significant performance and energy benefits compared to general-purpose solutions. In order to thoroughly evaluate such architectures, the designer should perform a quite extensive design space exploration so as to evaluate the trade-offs across the entire system. The design, until recently, has been predominantly done using Register Transfer Level languages such as Verilog and VHDL, which, however, lead to a prohibitively long and costly design effort. In order to reduce the design time a wide range of both commercial and academic High-Level Synthesis (HLS) tools have emerged; most of these tools, handle hardware accelerators that are described in synthesizable SystemC. The problem today, however, is that most simulators used for evaluating the complete user applications (i.e. full-system CPU/Mem/Peripheral simulators) lack any type of SystemC accelerator support.
Within this context, we extend gem5 to support the simulation of generic SystemC accelerators. We introduce a novel flow that enables us to rapidly prototype synthesisable SystemC hardware accelerators in conjunction with gem5. The proposed solution handles automatically all communication and synchronisation issues.
Compared to a standard gem5 system, several changes at different levels are required, from the OS and device drivers level down to the implementation of a device model in the gem5 simulator. Instead of using files to write data for an external accelerator, perform the simulation and then read back the results, our approach communicates with the SystemC simulator through programmed I/Os and DMA engines, supporting full global synchronisation. Apart from the apparent benefits concerning the implementation and simulation accuracy, the proposed solution is also orders of magnitude faster.
Nikolaos Tampouratzis is a PhD student at Technical University of Crete, working on simulation tools for computing systems. He has joined Telecommunication Systems Institute, Technical University of Crete since October 2012 as a research associate, providing research and development services to several EU-funded research projects. He received his Computer Science diploma from the University of Crete (UOC, Greece), with specialization in Hardware Design and FPGAs. He continued his studies in the Technical University of Crete (TUC Greece) where he received his Master Diploma in Electronic and Computer Engineering in which he specialized in Computer Architecture and Hardware Design.
Modern system-on-chip architectures consist of many heterogeneous processing elements. The communication fabric and memory hierarchy supporting these processing elements heavily influence the system's overall performance. Exploring the design space of these heterogeneous architectures with detailed models of each processing element can be time-consuming. Statistical simulation has been shown to be an effective tool for quickly evaluating architectures by abstracting away complexity.
This talk describes work done on modelling the spatial and temporal behaviour of a processing element's address stream. We present a methodology that can automatically characterize a processing element by observing its reads and writes. Using these characteristics we can stimulate a communication fabric connecting many different processing elements by synthetically recreating their addresses. These addresses arrive at their destination in the memory hierarchy, spawning new messages and responses to read and write requests. Architects can now combine ynthetic processing elements that represent various different components on current and future systems-on-chip to evaluate the impact of changes at the interconnection network and memory hierarchy.
Mario Badr is a PhD Candidate at the University of Toronto working under the supervision of Dr. Natalie Enright Jerger. He received his B.A.Sc. and M.A.Sc from the University of Toronto in Electrical Engineering and Computer Engineering, respectively. He has interned with Qualcomm Research Silicon Valley and received the Roberto Padovani Scholarship for his outstanding technical contributions. In addition, he has been recognized at the university and departmental levels for excellence as a teaching assistant. His research interests include performance evaluation in computer architecture, heterogeneous architectures, and multi-threaded workloads.
ARM Research Enablement aims to enhance computing research by enabling researchers worldwide to easily access ARM-based IP and technologies, and helping them to increase their research impact. As a part of our research enablement activities, we provide a System Modeling Research Starter Kit using gem5. We have released a High Performance In-order (HPI) CPU timing model based on ARMv8-A in gem5. I will present a high-level overview of the released system, its documentation and benchmark scripts. This talk will target those who are new to gem5 as well as those who would like to promote gem5 in research.
Ashkan Tousi is a Senior Research Engineer at ARM Cambridge and an Honorary Lecturer at the University of Glasgow. He received his PhD in computing science (parallel computing) in 2015. He currently leads research enablement activities at ARM, which cover a range of different research areas from SoC design to IoT and data science.
Running workloads on gem5 is often not straightforward. This talk will discuss workload-automation and devlib, 2 new open-source tools to interact with gem5. These frameworks, written to interact with various hardware platforms, have recently been extended to include gem5 as a platform. We will discuss use cases and advantages/disadvantages of each tool and show how they can make your gem5 work easier.
Anouk Van Laer is a Modelling Engineer in Architecture: Systems & Technology group at ARM. She obtained her PhD at University College London, where she investigated the effects of optical interconnects on the performance of chip multiprocessors, using gem5.
This talk will give an overview of the state of power modelling in gem5. After discussing the basic power modelling infrastructure, it will cover the state of CPU DVFS as well as recent improvements in how CPU power states are controlled for the ARM architecture in gem5. The talk will cover these improvements in power modelling, highlighting the way in which the accuracy and versatility of the simulator have been improved.
Sascha Bischoff is a Senior Software Engineer in the Architecture: Systems & Technology group at ARM in Cambridge. Whilst completing his PhD with the University of Southampton, he spent 3.5 years based in ARM Research in Cambridge. He has spent a large part of the last 6 years working with gem5, typically with a focus on power management, ideally without impacting the delivered performance.
Across applications, DRAM is a significant contributor to the overall system power, with the DRAM access energy per bit up to three orders of magnitude higher compared to on-chip memory accesses. To improve the power efficiency, DRAM technology incorporates multiple low power modes, each with different trade-offs between achievable power savings and performance impact due to entry and exit delay requirements. Accurate modeling of these low power modes and entry and exit control is crucial to analyze the trade-offs across controller configurations and workloads with varied memory access characteristics.
In this talk, we will give an overview of the decision making logic we added to the DRAM controller in gem5 that triggers transitions to/from the power-down modes. Integrating this functionality makes gem5 the first publicly available DRAM low power full-system simulator, providing the research community a tool for DRAM power analysis for a breadth of use cases. We will conclude with simulation data that characterises the low power behaviour and shows energy and performance trade-offs for realistic workloads.
Note: This talk is based on a paper accepted at MEMSYS 17. Authors from ARM: Radhika Jagtap, Wendy Elsasser and Andreas Hansson. Authors from University of Kaiserslautern: Matthias Jung and Norbert Wehn.
Radhika Jagtap is a Senior Research Engineer working in the Memory & Systems research group. She has plenty of experience with gem5 (elastic traces, interconnect, memory controller) and is involved in several collaborative research projects, especially with academics. Currently she is exploring the problem of energy efficient data movement for sparse data workloads.


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COVID EIDL Program Enhanced to Aid Small Businesses Challenged by Delta Variant
Posted on Sep 9, 2021 in COVID-19, NewsIncreased Loan Cap to $2 Million, Expanded Use of Funds to Pay and Prepay Business Debt, Streamlined Review Processes, and Deferred Payments; First Approval and Disbursement of Loans of $500,000 or Less Also Introduced.
WASHINGTON – Today, U.S. Small Business Administration (SBA) Administrator Isabella Casillas Guzman announced major enhancements to the COVID Economic Injury Disaster Loan (EIDL) program, a federal disaster relief loan designed to better serve and support our small business communities still reeling from the pandemic, especially hard-hit sectors such as restaurants, gyms, and hotels. The SBA is ready to receive new applications immediately from small businesses looking to take advantage of these new policy changes.
"The SBA's COVID Economic Injury Disaster Loan program offers a lifeline to millions of small businesses who are still being impacted by the pandemic," SBA Administrator Isabella Casillas Guzman said. "We've retooled this critical program – increasing the borrowing limit to $2 million, offering 24 months of deferment, and expanding flexibility to allow borrowers to pay down higher-interest business debt. We have also ramped up our outreach efforts to ensure we're connecting with our smallest businesses as well as those from low-income communities who may also be eligible for the companion COVID EIDL Targeted Advance and Supplemental Advance grants totaling up to $15,000. Our mission-driven SBA team has been working around the clock to make the loan review process as user-friendly as possible to ensure every entrepreneur who needs help can get the capital they need to reopen, recover and rebuild."
Key changes being announced by the SBA include:
- Increasing the COVID EIDL Cap. The SBA will lift the COVID EIDL cap from $500,000 to $2 million. Loan funds can be used for any normal operating expenses and working capital, including payroll, purchasing equipment, and paying debt.
- Implementation of a Deferred Payment Period. The SBA will ensure small business owners will not have to begin COVID EIDL repayment until two years after loan origination so that they can get through the pandemic without having to worry about making ends meet.
- Establishment of a 30-Day Exclusivity Window. To ensure Main Street businesses have additional time to access these funds, the SBA will implement a 30-day exclusivity window of approving and disbursing funds for loans of $500,000 or less. Approval and disbursement of loans over $500,000 will begin after the 30-day period.
- Expansion of Eligible Use of Funds. COVID EIDL funds will now be eligible to prepay commercial debt and make payments on federal business debt.
- Simplification of affiliation requirements. To ease the COVID EIDL application process for small businesses, the SBA has established more simplified affiliation requirements to model those of the Restaurant Revitalization Fund.
The enhancements to the COVID EIDL program will allow more businesses greater and more flexible support from the over $150 billion in available COVID EIDL funds. Additionally, these changes will help entrepreneurs access capital at a time when, according to a recent Goldman Sachs 10,000 Small Businesses survey, 44 percent of small business owners report having less than three months of cash reserves, and only 31 percent reporting confidence in gaining access to funding.
How to apply
Eligible small businesses, nonprofits, and agricultural businesses in all U.S. states and territories can apply. Visit www.sba.gov/eidl to learn more about eligibility and application requirements. The last day that applications may be received is December 31, 2021. All applicants should file their applications as soon as possible.
For additional information on COVID EIDL and other recovery programs please visit www.sba.gov/relief. Small business owners may call SBA's Customer Service Center at 1-800- 659-2955 (1-800-877-8339 for the deaf and hard of hearing) or email firstname.lastname@example.com for additional assistance. The center is open Monday through Friday from 8 a.m. to 8 p.m. EST. Multilingual representatives are available.
Small business owners may also contact SBA's Resource Partners by visiting www.sba.gov/local- assistance.
Application Process and Fraud Control Enhancements
In addition to the policy enhancements, the SBA has invested in optimized processes and increased capacity to improve the customer service experience for applicants. Directed by Administrator Guzman to swiftly and drastically enhance COVID EIDL, the revamped management team implemented new processes and performance management such as prioritizing personnel for COVID EIDL and increasing the average number of loan application decisions made. The SBA accelerated daily processing of loan increases from close to 2,000 applications to more than 37,000 applications daily. Loan officer productivity also went from
1.86 applications per day to 15 applications per day. As a result of these increased loan review rates, the 600,000+ loan increase backlog has been cleared and new applications can be processed immediately. At the same time, and to ensure taxpayer dollars are used to support businesses that need COVID EIDL funding most, the SBA has increased fraud controls and is working in collaboration with the SBA Inspector General to closely monitor the program.
All business owners that have received previous loans through the SBA's Paycheck Protection Program (PPP), Restaurant Revitalization Fund (RRF), or Shuttered Venue Operators Grant (SVOG) can still benefit from COVID EIDL. To learn more about the application process, visit www.sba.gov/eidl.


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Ancient mushroom models, plus a recipe for oven-steamed mushrooms
In this month's Japan Times food column, I write about the varieties of mushrooms available in Japan. It has a recipe for mushroom rice in there too - one of my favorite recipes for fall, for which I have a few variations (a couple of them are on this site, i.e. here and here.
One of the things I talk about in the article is the mysterious mushroom-shaped clay objects that have been found from prehistoric excavation sites in northern Japan. Here's a picture of some of these mushroom-shaped clay objects, pilfered from the Chiba Prefectural Museum website. Aren't they amazingly lifelike?
As I wrote in the article, they are generally thought to be made as visual aids to mushroom hunting - very lifelike models of edible mushrooms that people carried around in the forests, just like modern day mushroom hunters carry photographic field guides with them. It's really fun to imagine people thousands of years ago packing up a selection of these clay mushrooms, perhaps with a basket and a little knife or something too, as they went foraging. I wonder how people in other regions tackled the problem of sticking to safe mushrooms in the days before illustrated manuals?
Whenever I go back to Japan, it really strikes me that while you can get basically any kind of fruit or vegetable, the ones that are inexpensive, and therefore most commonly used, differ a lot from the same in Europe (at least the parts I'm familiar with) or the U.S. Mushrooms are no exception. In Japan, shiitake, enoki, shimeji and maitake mushooms are quite inexpensive, while western button mushrooms are way more pricey. When I do a European style mushroom pasta with butter and garlic and wine and so on in Japan, I often use shimeji or maitake (shiitake have a too-specific aroma to me) instead of button mushrooms. (Matsutake of course are in another strosphere.)
The selection of mushrooms here in southern France is very different of course. We can, in season, get the most gorgeous chantarelles or pleurotus (oyster mushrooms) and so on at pretty fair prices. And of course there are truffles - very expensive still, but a lot cheaper than elsewhere. Here's a mound of wild mushrooms being sold at a local market. A bear to clean, since they have bits of leaves and plenty of dirty in them, but so worth it.
Recipe: Oven-steamed mushrooms in foil (kinoko no hoiru yaki)
This super-easy recipe can be made with a mixture of any kind of mushrooms you can get, even plain old button mushrooms, though the more wild-type mushrooms you can use the better. Baking times vary according to how big your mushrooms are, but range from around 20-30 minutes. In Japan I would use a mixture of fresh shiitake, shimeji and enoki, and here in France I'd use boletus, chantarelles and chestnut mushrooms if I can.
Preheat the oven to 180°C / 360°F.
For each serving, use a good big handful of cleaned mushrooms. If the mushrooms are very large or thick (e.g. if you're using trumpet mushrooms or eringi*), slice them lengthwise or shred them. Small or thin mushrooms can be used whole.
Spread the mushrooms out on a piece of foil or ovenproof parchment paper. Sprinkle with about 1 tablespoon of sake and 1 to 2 tablespoons of soy sauce. (If you can't use sake, leave it out, though you will miss out a bit on taste.) You can also add a little grated ginger if you like.
Fold the foil over and seal the edges well. Put the foil packets in the oven on a baking sheet an bake for around 20 to 30 minute, depending on the size of your mushrooms.
Open the foil carefully since it will be very hot! Serve with some kaposu or sudachi wedges, if you're in Japan (or can get a hold of these Japanese citrus fruits) or lemon or lime wedges. To make it richer, add a pat of butter to the still-hot mushrooms. Eat with plain rice, mixed into buttered pasta.
[*I am not a big fan of eringi or trumpet mushrooms. They have even less flavor to me than button mushrooms. They are a very recent introduction to Japan by the way, having only been available there since the '90s, and they are inexplicably popular...perhaps because they look so impressive.]
- Forage your way into mushroom season in The Japan Times (Note: I don't write the headlines. The article really isn't about foraging. ^_^;)
If you enjoyed this article, please consider becoming my patron via Patreon. ^_^
Re: Ancient mushroom models, plus a recipe for oven-steamed ...
I absolutely LOVE shimeji. I live in Paris and they are pretty hard to come by here, but I come from Brazil, and they are very popular there (maybe because there is a big Japanese presence in some cities, such as Sao Paulo). I had shimeji cooked this exact same way, with butter. It was probably one of the best things I ate in Sao Paulo, and that's something :D I'll try the recipe with girolles and chanterelles. Thanks for the recipe !
Re: Ancient mushroom models, plus a recipe for oven-steamed ...
I will be trying this as soon as I get home; I have a bunch of shimeji right now in my fridge. Mushrooms are my absolute favorite food ever! My father gave me the nickname of "mushroom-head" because I eat mushrooms so much! If I could I afford it, I'd probably live off of mushrooms. I have yet to encounter a variety I am not fond of.
I've used your mushroom rice recipe many times; my friends all love it!
Re: Ancient mushroom models, plus a recipe for oven-steamed ...
I love mushrooms, but can only get the normal button kind here in Egypt. I have recently found dried mushrooms, but the grocer had no idea what kind they were. they are fairly big, fluted in shape and seem to be 'veined' and are thick and meaty. They are not 'Black Mushrooms' which I get at my local Asian restaurant, because those are smooth.
Can dried mushrooms be dangerous? Can they have bad fungus in them? or are they ok since they are soaked then again cooked?
Re: Ancient mushroom models, plus a recipe for oven-steamed ...
hi ameirah,
i don't know what kind of dried mushrooms you have in egypt, but i'd think if they are dried, they'd be ok to use once you reconstitute them and cook them. here in NY, i often use the 'black mushrooms' that we find in chinese stores. for a long time, i didn't think the chinese black mushrooms were the same species as shiitake, because once reconstituted in hot water and cooked, they were so much meatier, and looked different than fresh shiitakes. but i'm told they are the same. i sometimes prefer using the dried ones because they are so much meatier and taste stronger. that's why i think the chinese dry so much food stuff; it actually concentrates the flavor.
maki, thanks for this recipe. i have recently found in japanese stores small packets of cultivated bunashimeji and maitake mushrooms, and i often add them to vegetables along with enoki. btw, i love shiitake and eringi as well. i find the eringi so meaty and perfect for sautees with other vegetables.
thanks again.
Re: Ancient mushroom models, plus a recipe for oven-steamed ...
For having tried this one before, this is a truly heavenly recipe Maki. I do it in foil too, though more frequently I put the foil pack in the rice steamer as I cook rice (that was inspired by one of your earlier posts, I think) than I bake them in the oven as it's not quite cool enough for using the oven when the mushroom season really hits here. Early in the fall, it's IMO also the best way to cook them on the barbecue (when I barbecue them, I sometime add a few slices of leek and a tbs of sake to the pack). I open the pack a few minutes at the end, so they get just a bit of the smoke taste.
Instead of fresh sudachi (that are insanely expensive around here, the rare times we even have them), I have to make do with bottled sudachi juice, or sometimes a dash of sudachi-infused rice vinegar when I'm out of the former (the same brand has a vinegar infused with kaposu, but I've not found a local store that carries it yet). I've tried fresh lime (and if I make them for guests I still put a quarter in the plate as I like the visual contrast) but I think even the bottled sudachi adds a lot more "zing".
A bunch of chopped mitsuba from the garden (the last of the season...) upon serving, and voilà!
I'll certainly try adding butter one day (I'm kind of encouraged to try it by the fact that you don't seem to have qualms, and that it's forcibly not Japanese butter you use), that sounds like a nice idea. Just a bit must balance really well the acidity of the sudachi.
I'm/was a bit reluctant to use butter in japanese dishes, and I've rarely tried some that do - both of which sounds a bit silly, I guess. What made me hesitate so much is the fact nearly all those recipes I have that use it warn at the same time that western butter don't taste or act like japanese butter (though they don't really elaborate on the difference - can it really be this great? - nor advise you on what type of western butter would be best), and some even advise to do the recipe without the butter (or in some cases, to add cream to the butter). I've mostly seen comments on the supposedly important (recipe-breaking) differences in either kaiseki or rather fancy "new" japanese cuisine books by trendy restaurant chefs - and most of my japanese cooking is rather of the homecooking kind that rarely calls for butter (I guess some more contemporary ones like Harumi might, though), and I've actually wondered if a homecook should really worry about that and the difference in taste or texture/effect is worth not making those recipes (and if it's only something for kaiseki chefs' to worry about alongside stuff like after how many minutes after shaving bonito flakes they just can't be used anymore by their standards, what type of western butter you think fit best from your experience?
By extrapolation since they suggest cream as a substitute in some recipes (those that put some butter in a western fusion sauce usually), and butter + cream as the substitue in at least two I remember (the popular modern pasta dish with spicy cod roe, and a fancy version of potato salad that called for jap. butter to cook the carrots in, or western butter with a dash of creme at the end you then let reduce), I would guess japanese butter is fairly rich and very onctuous, and, I would guess too it's generally unsalted? It sounds a bit like what we call country-style/beurre paysan/beurre artisanal - which is really rich and most often unsalted, would be a good choice)
To get back to mushrooms, I quite envy you the European offering of wild ones for decent prices. We have more problems finding some of those fresh (and wild) here - and even more for cheap - than finding the three or four most used Japanese mushrooms that are increasingly popular (and cheap, now that China has invaded the market with their grown ones. Grown, but their closed caps more-like-donko-than-regular shiitake are still a solid improvement in taste over what we had even five years ago.. and much cheaper). They even started selling the local (sort of, they come from the boreal forest in bareley inhabited areas way up north near James Bay) matsutake at some farmer markets for a few weeks in the fall. They're really great wild mushrooms, with closed caps and a really nice texture - and being local they're still in top shape when they arrive at the market (unlike those from the midwest or the West Coast, just as expensive but a little tired - that we used to get), though I suspect they taste nothing like the japanese ones. They do have a nice aroma, and they taste good and are sort of worth their price if compared to the the other wild mushrooms we have (they go for 30 to 50$/pound - about the most expensive here with wild morilles, discounting truffles which are in another league), but no matter how I've cooked them (from grilled to stewed on their own or incorporated in nabe dishes) they don't quite fit the "out of this world" bill - and I do love my mushrooms. If they're even close to what the Japanese wild ones are like, I'm totally baffled by the prices they fetch there.
Those ancient clay models are amazing (thanks so much for bringing attention on them!). Sounds like the notion of having practical uses for life-like food models in Japan goes a loooonnnnngg way back.:P (out of curiosity as I bet info of them will all be in Japanese, are they Jômon? Ignore the question if it's already in your article that I'll go read next)
Re: Ancient mushroom models, plus a recipe for oven-steamed ...
Nutrition, health, delicious -- mushroom.
My family love it.
Re: Ancient mushroom models, plus a recipe for oven-steamed ...
Great article, but I have to let you know that oyster mushrooms are not boletes. Here's a quick guide on some common (to North America at least) wild mushrooms that can be found, harvested, and eaten fairly safely. http://mdc.mo.gov/discover-nature/outdoor-recreation/how/mushrooms/edibl...
Another great mushroom resource online is http://mushroomexpert.com/ if you want to expand your knowledge beyond wild edibles or just figure out what that weird-looking stuff on your carpet is...
Re: Ancient mushroom models, plus a recipe for oven-steamed ...
What a great article. I wonder what other ancient peoples used the same method for finding edible mushrooms and plants. Also, the きのこのホイル焼き is a must for camping trips!
Re: Ancient mushroom models, plus a recipe for oven-steamed ...
Oh dear god, I just tried this recipe.
The taste is still lingering in my mouth. If I died before it went away, I would not complain. This has become an instant favorite for both me and my bf. I'd been meaning to try it since I read it, but I hadn't been able to hit the Asian market until recently.
I used enoki, a big oyster, some leftover cremini mushrooms and one other kind... Which turned out to be my favorite of the group. I was hoping you could help me figure out what it was.
It came in a cluster like enoki, but instead of being long and stringy, they were stout and somewhat firmer, sprouting up and away from the center, 1-6 cm high. The label was definitely Japanese, though I couldn't read it. They were all white raw, but after cooking the caps took on slightly more color than the stems. Any ideas?


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At John Harrison we can advise businesses in the Nottinghamshire area with a wide range of business issues. Here are some tips on saving money on office furniture and equipment...
Have you considered purchasing second-hand furniture or equipment for your offices?
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I know you all must think I have fallen off the face of the earth!! I have sat down to write this post so many times in the past several months, but just never finished it. Sorry for the extreme delay!! Soooo much has happened since my last post....almost EIGHT MONTHS AGO!! I will try to summarize as best as possible!
After the tornado hit on May 10, we spent the next 30 days at a family friend's house a few miles from where we used to live. They had 2 empty bedrooms, a bathroom, and a family room upstairs, so that we would not be underfoot...too much. They also had a fantastic backyard...jungle gym, barn with goats, meadow with miniature donkeys, and a couple of cats, too!! We are so thankful to the Lee family for allowing us to stay there and become part of their family for the month.
This is the house we stayed at, and these are The Lee's, but they are the children/grandchildren of The Lee's who own the house and let us bunk there for a month! However, this Lee family also helped us out tremendously during this time and the whole time we lived in Oklahoma! Miss them lots!
Then, in early June, the kiddos & I headed to Washington state to spend the next 30 days bouncing between grandparents. Didn't want to stay at either house for toooooo long, lest we become unwelcomed guests! It had been a long time since we had been in that part of the country, so we enjoyed the cooler temperatures & seeing the sites. Hubby joined us for the last week. He had to stay back in Oklahoma to finish up work, get what was left of our stuff packed from the warehouse, and get the van shipped out. We had a great family vacation time! I had almost forgotten about what had happened!
The fam at Paradise with a great view of Mt. Rainier...hard to believe this was taken in JULY!!
Next, in early July, we moved to Hawaii!! Woo-Hoo! We found out in April that we would be moving here, so it was literally the light at the end of the tornado tunnel! We have now been here for just about SIX MONTHS! WOW! We have been enjoying every minute of it, as you can imagine, and we have even squeezed in homeschooling between different island adventures! The only drawback, so far, is that we have been living in a townhouse this whole time without OUR STUFF as we wait for a house on base...thankfully, it is furnished! Even though it has been a drawback to be without our stuff, we are so very thankful that the Lord provided this place for us...it's within our housing allotment and is very close to a nice pool and the beach! Since we did lose a lot of our stuff, we have been able to slowly start replacing some of those things...DVDs, toys, books, a new computer & printer for me (yeah!). The word on the street is that we SHOULD be moving on base by the end of the month! (I sure hope so because that's when our lease is up!) I am really looking forward to unpacking, assessing what needs to be replaced, and shopping with insurance money!
At the Waterfall at Waimea Garden.
At Waimea Bay!
I have REALLY, REALLY, REALLY missed my stamping time & sharing my creations with you all. I hope you have been making lots of fun stuff, since I couldn't! I think a vast majority of my stamping/scrapping empire is a-ok, so I am looking forward to getting inky in the very near future...maybe in time to make some hand-made Valentine's cards and treats!
I'll be updating my blog just a little bit with the NEW 2011 Occasions Mini Catalog, specials, etc! I really appreciate your patience & the emails you have sent to me in my time of non-stamping, non-posting! So glad to start getting back in the swing of things! Aloha....Erin


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New MPC One features Akai Professional's premier multi-core processor and delivers the ultimate in standalone performance to a new generation of beatmakers.
Fort Lauderdale, FL USA (January 15, 2020) — Akai Professional, a leading manufacturer of music equipment for performers and producers, today announced the newest addition to its industry-leading family of music production centers, the powerful standalone MPC One.
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Strategies and Tips for Your Business
This article discusses the major trends occurring in the general business world as we leave 2019 in the past and look to the future. It is important to be aware of these trends for the future of your business and know how to manage/take advantage of them.
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