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First of two parts
Fifty years ago Thursday, President John F. Kennedy traveled to the Maryland-Delaware state line to celebrate one of the largest transportation accomplishments of the era, one that would have a profound effect on Harford County in the ensuing half a century.
It was estimated that as many as 5,000 people – although some put the crowd in the hundreds, not thousands – gathered to witness the ribbon cutting ceremony for the opening of the Northeastern Expressway, linking Baltimore and Wilmington, on the afternoon of Nov. 14, 1963.
President Kennedy, along with Maryland Gov. J. Millard Tawes, Delaware Gov. Elbert N. Carvel and the chairs of the two states' highway commissions attended the ceremony.
When the first vehicle entered about eight hours later, the Northeastern Expressway became the first modern-day toll road in Maryland.
In the mid-1950s, when the Maryland General Assembly first passed legislation authorizing the construction of the Northeastern Expressway, it was to be a toll facility used to bring commerce into the area.
A year later, the federal Interstate Act of 1956 was passed, which could have changed the status of the road to make it toll free. With both states having used federal highway money on other projects, however, bonds were to finance construction, and tolls were needed to repay them. A $74 million bond issue, paying 4.125 percent interest, was floated to build the toll road.
The timeline of the 12-year project was bumped up and, in just 18 months, construction workers built the 42-mile dual lane Maryland portion of the expressway from the White Marsh area of eastern Baltimore County to the Delaware State line, what became part of the I-95 system running along the East Coast.
Another eight miles, from White Marsh to Moravia Road and the Harbor Tunnel Thruway in east Baltimore, was a free road, built with federal funds, and the White Marsh exit was designed as an "escape route" for motorists who didn't want to pay the toll to jump off onto Route 40.
To construct the highway, a wide right-of-way had to be purchased and excavated in Harford, Cecil and Baltimore counties. Forested areas were cleared, and many farmers sacrificed their properties to progress.
Harford Del. Mary-Dulany James remembers her late father, William S. James, was a Maryland senator during the construction of the highway. Sen. James was instrumental in securing funding for the highway and in helping to determine its final route through Harford.
James said her father's chief concern was to do as little damage as possible to the environment.
"I was a little girl at the time," James said. "[I-95] was one of the things my father was proudest of because he was very much a conservationist."
James said it was important to her father that as many trees as possible stayed up around the highway. She said the Maryland portion of I-95 looks different than almost any other portion because it has limited "gaudy" signage. Her father wrote legislation to keep out the tall signs – "jumbos," as he called them – around interchanges that would eventually show up along I-95 in other states.
James said I-95 shows environmental, business and political communities can come together for a common good and without a lot of tension. She said the construction of the expressway required "cooperative undertakings at all levels of government."
Quicker Route
The Northeastern Expressway was designed to be a quicker alternative route to driving along Route 40, which at the time, was the major route for motor transportation in the Northeast and Mid-Atlantic region.
W. Dale Hess, a Harford County delegate when the highway was built, said that Route 40, like any road, "gets over capacity with people using it."
Hess, another Harford legislator who was instrumental in getting the project off the ground, said there was too much traffic using Route 40 to travel from New York and Philadelphia to Baltimore and Washington and points south, as well as the local traffic from communities in Harford and Baltimore counties.
On the eve of the opening, newspaper articles focused on expectations of time savings and safety from the new highway.
The expressway was anticipated to save 22 minutes in travel time for commuters driving between New York and the Nation's Capital, according to estimates at the time of its construction.
With much traffic expected to abandon Route 40, with its scores of intersections and private entrances, for a more modern, safer road, many lives were expected to be saved, as well.
Unmanned tolls
The route of the new expressway required the construction of a new Susquehanna River crossing, the most expensive aspect of the Maryland segment of the project.
The choice of location for what became the bridge named in memory of Havre de Grace resident and U.S. Sen. Millard E. Tydings, sparked considerable political debate and horse trading in the halls of the State House in Annapolis, as well as among the movers and shakers in Harford politics and businesses, before the location a few miles north of downtown Havre de Grace was picked.
In addition to a toll barrier in Cecil County, just north of the bridge, automatic unmanned toll booths, which depended on a driver's honesty to pay, were constructed in Harford at the interchanges with Routes 22, 24 and 155. The toll at the bridge was $1; a quarter at the interchanges. (The Route 152 interchange in Joppa was added some years later and also had an unmanned toll booth southbound.)
The first few days of implementation of the toll roads were not the smoothest.
A large amount of bent coins and tokens were removed from the three toll machine in the county, according to accounts published in Harford's three newspapers at the time. Often, even when a driver paid the fare, the violation bell would still sound, signaling a non-payment.
Despite the early glitches, which would persist for the ensuing two decades before the automatic tolls were removed, The Aegis reported the majority of motorists were actually abiding by the rules, and the machines showed a high yield of coins, "indicating as unexpected honest policy on the part of motorist."
Many businesses affected
As the weeks grew closer to the opening of the Northeastern Expressway, local restaurant, motel and gas station owners along the Route 40 corridor feared the coming highway would wipe out their business clientele.
From the jump, the worst was realized. Within days of the opening of the Northeastern Expressway, many of the businesses along the Route 40 corridor saw their client base cut nearly in half, according to a report in The Aegis.
"I-95 Expressway opened up commerce and people's ability to travel, but it wasn't without controversy," James said. "My dad and many other people had to stick with the vision that highway would help."
Experts figured the Northeastern Expressway would cause harm to the motel business, but reckoned other businesses would fare better, as locals would continue to patronize them. In addition, the new highway was expected to bring thousands of new residents to the counties along its route, who would in turn spur more commerce.
For The Bayou, an American style restaurant along Route 40 in Havre de Grace, some of hypotheses held true.
Amanda DiDomenico-McFadden, 54, whose family opened the restaurant in 1950, said the entire business community along the Route 40 corridor was concerned about the coming highway.
"When my parents started the restaurant Route 40 was a thoroughfare," DiDomenico-McFadden said. "If you were going anywhere you were going to pass the restaurant and when I-95 came it took some of the clientele from the restaurant."
The Bayou was able to survive despite the expressway because of its large local client base, DiDomenico-McFadden said. She said she does not recall her parents complaining much about the highway's impact in comparison to the motel across Route 40 from the Bayou, which was owned by friends of the family.
"We were lucky, my parents had a lot of local customers so they weren't depending on just the traffic of people going by," DiDomenico-McFadden said.
Despite the highway, the Bayou's clientele continued to expand and the owners eventually built an add-on banquet area. DiDomenico's parents retired and sold the restaurant in 1982 to the current owner, Lou Ward, who continues to do a good business with diners and banquets.
In the first few years of the new highway, large local employers, such as Aberdeen Proving Ground and Bata Shoe, kept the Route 40 corridor afloat, William H. Cox Jr. said. Cox was a Harford delegate from 1971-91 and was involved in many of the ensuing changes and improvements made to the highway as it grew older, including the later addition of the Route 543 interchange in Riverside.
"Bata Shoe Company had a lot of employees, which helped to keep the area stabilized," Cox said. "But when Bata Shoe started slowing down in the 1970s," he said, many of the surviving locally owned businesses along the corridor folded or sold out.
After the closing of the Bata Shoe 40 factory, Aberdeen Proving Ground became Harford's economic engine, Cox said.
Safety Concerns
Prior to construction of the Northeastern Expressway, the safety of Route 40 had become a major concern.
Between Baltimore and Delaware, there were approximately 1,450 accidents per year and 950 personal injuries, The Aegis reported. On that stretch, there were 1,000 commercial and private entrances and 87 intersections.
To mitigate accidents on the new road, a number of safety features were implemented.
Driving up I-95 from Baltimore toward Harford County today, drivers often notice the slight twists, turns and hills in the highway.
According to newspaper accounts, the expressway was designed to prevent "turnpike hypnosis," which was called "a new hazard of modern driving." The Northeastern Expressway was full of strategically placed "hills" to present drivers with a slight challenge while driving, to keep them alert and awake.
Initially, a 35-officer, 28-vehicle police unit was established to patrol the Northeastern Expressway. It was based at a new administration building erected near the bridge toll barrier in Perryville, what is today the JFK Barrack of the Maryland State Police.
'Opening is celebrated'
During the ceremony to celebrate the opening of the highway, Robert B. Moses, superhighway and public facilities expert from New York, called President Kennedy the "chief architect of our modern highway system," The Aegis reported.
Hess, who was elected to the legislature at age 24, said he had not planned to attend the ribbon cutting ceremony until the governor invited him.
"Gov. Tawes was much older than me, I was a young buck," Hess said. "He said he was going up for the ribbon cutting and asked me if I wanted to go with him."
Hess said he drove up and met former Gov. Tawes at the ceremony.
During his speech the president said the highway "symbolizes the partnership between the federal government and states, which is essential to the progress of our people," The Aegis reported on Nov. 21, 1963.
"It was quite a performance up there," Hess recalled. "We had to wait for Kennedy to come in on a helicopter. Tawes was set to walk out with Kennedy; he told me 'walk out with me.'"
Hess said it was a great opportunity to have the governor walk him out to meet President Kennedy. He said it was his first time meeting a president and he witnessed the ribbon cutting up close.
Rough first days
During the first three days of the highway's opening, The Aegis reported there were four accidents, all involving cars hitting deer.
According to Lt. Hugh M. Everline, the first commander of the 35-man expressway police unit, another 63 drivers who ran out of gasoline were assisted by police officers during the early days of the highway.
The first personal injury accident on the Northeastern Expressway occurred before the highway was even open to the motoring public.
An automobile carrying four construction workers crashed into a sand pile in the middle of the roadway on the morning of Oct. 26, 19 days before the official opening. They were transported to Harford Memorial Hospital in Havre de Grace for medical care, The Aegis reported.
An estimated 15,000 vehicles traveled on the highway on each of its first three days. At that volume, it was forecast that about 5.64 million vehicles would be using the highway each year.
A week after the expressway opened, it experienced its first personal injury motor vehicle crash.
In the early morning on Nov. 25, 1963, a car traveling near Joppa was hit by a tractor-trailer truck. The driver of the car, Philip Manzie, of Hoboken, N.J. complained of back pain following the accident, according to a account of the accident in The Aegis. Richard Green, of Fernandina Beach, Fla., who was driving the truck, was charged with "changing lanes when unsafe."
Memorial to Kennedy
The assassination of President Kennedy on Nov. 22, just eight days after he dedicated the new expressway, stunned the world. In the communities in Harford and Cecil counties, businesses and other activities shut down for days, as people wept and mourned the death of the young president.
"The new Northeastern Expressway experienced heavy traffic on Sunday as thousands headed toward the national capitol to pay their final respects," The Aegis reported on Nov. 28, 1963.
It was reported that about 25,000 cars drove to Washington, D.C. via the expressway for the president's state funeral.
Days following the assassination, The Aegis reported "since [Kennedy's] death, there have been suggestions to rename the modern road in his honor."
In 1964, the Northeastern Expressway officially was renamed the John F. Kennedy Memorial Highway to honor the fallen president.
Latest Harford County
Coming Nov. 22: JFK and Harford
- Traffic Accidents
- Laws and Legislation
- Disasters and Accidents
- Transportation Disasters and Accidents
- Restaurant and Catering Industry
- Business
- Business
- Politics and Government
- Lifestyle and Leisure
- Dining and Drinking
- Finance
- Hotels and Accommodations
- Executive Branch
- John F. Kennedy
- Crime, Law and Justice
- Human Interest
- Newspaper and Magazine
- Jobs and Workplace
- Aberdeen Proving Ground
- Maryland General Assembly


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Roselyn from the R. R. Thompson House in Carlton, Oregon, writes about what you can can do for Spring Break in the Oregon Wine Country:
Evergreen Wings and Waves Waterpark in nearby McMinnville will be open every day during Spring Break and Easter period — the last week of March and the first week of April. The educational waterpark includes ten waterslides and a wave pool. In addition, a children's museum is dedicated to teaching students about the power of water. The building housing the waterpark is topped by a Boeing 747 aircraft. Here's a video of the huge plane being hoisted to the top of the building:
The waterpark includes ten different waterslides for everyone's taste. In addition to just plain fun, the waterpark teaches youngsters about the wonder of science and the power of water through interactive exhibits and learning tools. Here's a video of one of the waterslides:
Wings and Waves is part of the impressive Evergreen Aviation and Space Museum complex, a jewel in Yamhill County. This is an attraction visitors to the north Willamette Valley will not want to miss.
The waterpark meets all ADA guidelines, according to the Evergreen website.
After the Spring Break and Easter periods, the park will be open Thursday through Sunday until June when it will again be open daily. Please check the website for days and times of operation before your visit.
Thanks, Roselyn, for sharing things to do near your bed and breakfast!

subset: commoncrawl


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Fairway Funds $26.5 Billion in 2018January 16, 2019 12:00 am
Thank you to the fantastic team at Fairway Independent Mortgage Corporation and everyone who has entrusted us with your home loan. I am proud to announce that Fairway funded $26.5 billion in home loans in 2018, helping more than 110,111 homeowners along the way.
We look forward to great things for 2019 and appreciate our incredible business partners and customers. If you or anyone you know is interested in purchasing a home or refinancing their current home this year, I would love to help. Call me today!


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Arson eyed at planned NM horse slaughterhouse
The owner of a southeastern New Mexico company that plans to begin slaughtering horses next week says his plant was hit by arson over the weekend.
Valley Meat Co. owner Rick De Los Santos says someone apparently jumped the fence and poured accelerant over the compressors to his refrigeration unit on Saturday night.
Chaves County officials say they are investigating the blaze, which they called "very suspicious."
De Los Santos says his company has been the target of many threats as news has spread of its plans to resume domestic horse slaughter.
He says his company will be unable to open as planned Monday without a working refrigeration unit.
The Roswell company also goes to federal court Friday to fight attempts by animal rights groups seeking to block its opening.


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Coco Palms Resort
|Legendary Hospitality
|Blue Hawaii Weddings
Coco Palms is a legendary resort that, for nearly 40 years, welcomed guests from throughout the islands and around the world, bringing everyone together with great aloha. From this aloha, a unique and wonderful community thrived for many years.
Romantic "Blue Hawaii" weddings and vow renewals are still being performed by Larry Rivera along the historic lagoons and in the famed chapel at Coco Palms. Larry Rivera may be contacted via email at firstname.lastname@example.com.
|Recent History
Kauai Planning Commission Approvals
Today it is the last Kaua'i hotel still shuttered by 1992's Hurricane Iniki. Plans were underway for more than three years to bring Coco Palms back to life, to restore it for all of the past guests who treasure their memories of this Polynesian paradise, and for the people of Kaua'i who could once again make these lands at sacred Wailua a place of aloha, for Kaua'i and for the world.
|The Coco Palms Resort was approved by the Kauai Planning Commission for up to 200 condominiums, 104 hotel units, retail shops and restaurants on the 18.8 acre Resort-zoned parcel. A pedestrian overpass from the Coco Palms Resort to the Seashell Restaurant was also approved.
|World Famous
|Development Opportunity
|Coco Palms is the site of the famous wedding scene in Elvis Presley's film "Blue Hawaii" It was also the home of Queen Debroah Kapule, the last reigning queen of Kaua'i
|Coco Palms, with its historical lagoons, magical coconut grove and sacred grounds, provides a wonderful setting for a development commensurate with the lifestyle and beauty of Kauai. It beckons to be brought back to life.


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In the 1977 grand jury transcript of the Roman Polanski rape case, the director's victim repeatedly describes her terror.
Several times during 13-year-old Samantha Geimer's account, she tells the interrogator she was afraid. She kept telling Polanski no – in fact for several pages the word punctuates her retelling. During the actual assault, she says, she mentally blocked him out. You can read the transcript here.
"I was mostly just on and off saying, 'No, stop,'" she says from the witness stand. "But I wasn't fighting really because I, you know, there was no one else there and I had no place to go."
But Geimer, now 50 and author of a just-released autobiography called "The Girl: My Life in the Shadow of Roman Polanski," told the "Today Show" this week that she didn't consider the incident as horrific as seemingly everyone else did.
"How do I feel about him? I hope he is well," she says on the show. "I was 13, that makes it rape. But I didn't experience it that way. In my mind, I didn't know that was illegal. I didn't understand he could go to jail for it. I was young."
Polanski, of course, pleaded guilty to the charge of unlawful sex with a minor. Then, to avoid sentencing, he fled for Europe, where he's lived since.
Geimer says she certainly feels Polanski took advantage of her, though.
"Oh yes, it was a bad thing to do, and he knows that," she tells the host.
She describes the year that followed as the worst of her life.
"From the minute my mom called the police, it just went on and on," she recounts. "The phone rang off the hook. My whole family was traumatized. It was terrible."
Her book, she says, is an attempt to tell the story on her own terms.
"I made a decision: I wasn't going to be a victim of anyone or for anyone," she writes in the memoir. "Not Roman, not the state of California, not the media. I wasn't going to be defined by what is said about me or expected from me. I was going to tell my story, my truth, through nobody else's perspective but my own. And that is what I have done."
In her book, Geimer talks about being an aspiring actress during a different time in Hollywood, when "exploiting the sexuality of young girls … was considered less transgressive than it is now," to quote Janet Maslin in the New York Times. Think Jodie Foster in "Taxi Driver" or Brooke Shields in "Pretty Baby."
After 35 years of virtual silence, except for the occasional commentary when a major Polanski film comes out (like "The Pianist"), Geimer says she remains "in touch" with her former abuser, though she's unsure what she would say to him if they ever met again.
Read an excerpt from her book here. Watch the video here:
Visit NBCNews.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy
Find Jennifer Wadsworth on Twitter at @jennwadsworth.


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I tried the community edition and liked it so much I bought 2.2.2 but it is a 32 bit app so will not run. That leaves a few options and I would like advice on the pros and cons.
- Install Alien Bob's multilib so the 32 bit QCad will run. I am reluctant to go through this non-trivial exercise because I don't need to run any other 32 bit apps.
- Get the 2.2.2 source (how?) and compile 2.2.2 as a 64 bit app. A road seldom (ever?) travelled so likely troublesome. Both QT3 and QT4 are installed so the build could be with either. Most of the online pages about building QCad are about building with QT4; they don't inspire much confidence of success but at least there is some info available.
- Download QCad 3TP and hope for the best. Is it a 64 bit package anyway? I'm a new naive user with simple drawing intentions so a TP might be good enough.
- Switch to LibreCAD (am I allowed to mention that here?). The build instructions are only for Ubuntu and Debian so that would be another lonely untravelled road.


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Senate Democrats will try again this week to extend unemployment insurance aid for the long-term jobless -- over a month since the benefits expired for 1.3 million Americans.
Negotiators have been trying to work out a compromise to restart the jobless insurance since the end of last year. Republicans blocked a three-month extension of the program last month, saying that it was not fiscally responsible.
A new version of a deal would be paid for extending a tactic called "pension smoothing" – which allows companies to reduce some payments to pensions in the short term.
Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid has scheduled a vote to advance that version of the bill on Thursday, but it's not clear that Democrats will have enough backing to overcome a 60-vote threshold and keep it alive.
Reid suggested Thursday that the impasse was due to Republican callousness towards the unemployed.
"We have an issue here. They do not want unemployment insurance extension. They don't want that," Reid said Tuesday of the GOP. "They don't care about these people as voters. We do. We care about them as voters, as human beings."
President Barack Obama, who has been frustrated in his push for the jobless aid extension, announced a new program last week to help the long-term jobless overcome discrimination during their search for work.
"Each week that Congress fails to restore that insurance, roughly 72,000 Americans will join the ranks of the long-term unemployed who have also lost their economic lifeline," he said Friday.


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"Client virtualisation means we can achieve a high level of fault tolerance to ensure maximum efficiency in critical areas. Hence, cost and consumption savings in the medium term"
Giuseppe Digeronimo, IT and Telephone Service Manager, Cannizzaro Hospital
Cannizzaro Hospital, located on the slopes of Mount Etna, is an Italian Grade III facility specialising in medical emergencies and provides a full range of diagnosis, therapy and rehabilitation services. The hospital's 34 departments and general patient services rely on state-of-the-art medical equipment in outpatient units and laboratories. The 800 workstations connected to the hospital network are managed by the technology infrastructure via 50 servers dedicated to systems and applications, with an optical fibre backbone that connects the five main buildings.
The ever-growing need for management and application solutions, together with the shortage of IT staff responsible for the management and maintenance of an infrastructure that serves about a thousand users, has long suggested the search for solutions to optimise the work of the technical resources available would be necessary. Moreover, this would result in savings in operating costs and fuel consumption. Workstation virtualisation was a crucial step in this direction so in 2011 the A&E department, with its 200 daily admissions, was designated for a pilot scheme. "Every PC failure, even something simple, meant at least three hours of downtime for the outpatient unit involved, with obvious issues for healthcare staff and patients," explains Giuseppe Digeronimo, IT and Telephone service manager at Cannizzaro Hospital.
After the three-week trial, Cannizzaro Hospital management decided to install the Zero Client package from Fujitsu Technology Solutions. In a short time all ten workstations in the A&E department were replaced by DZ22-2 for VMware virtual desktop devices and two MZ900 portable devices for working remotely. The system is managed by a Fujitsu BX400 Blade Server to ensure operational efficiency and that the required redundancy is met. Moreover, the success of the trial paved the way for extending the solution to other hospital departments.
It was the quick recovery after downtime that persuaded Cannizzaro Hospital to adopt Fujitsu's Zero Client solution as well as the tangible economic advantages seen in the medium term and the suitability of the solution for other departments. "The range of possible faults has decreased dramatically," says Digeronimo, "and with virtualisation we can restore a workstation in minutes."
The fact that devices have no operating systems or mechanical components is a great advantage, as is the presence of local-level data. This means that start-up times are immediate and there is no need to update any local hardware or software. Security (data is centralised and cannot be hacked by an outside source) and energy-saving are also significant factors. In a public health facility like Cannizzaro Hospital, electricity costs are very much an issue as they can account for 1% of total budget. Simply replacing ten PCs with as many Zero Client devices will not have a significant impact, but estimates made by IT experts showed annual energy consumption will decrease around fivefold compared to using traditional computers. As a result, savings will become significant when projected over the medium and long term, especially when considering a greater number of workstations. In three years the Zero Client solution, including the purchase of the Blade Server, will halve overall consumption and maintenance costs. Moreover, a Zero Client device life cycle is far longer than that of a standard PC.
Consequently, the initial Fujitsu BX400 Blade Server installation will pave the way for extending technology to other departments, like appointments, admissions and administration offices. The implementation phase of the VDI solution had no substantial impact on the running of the A&E department. "Medical personnel were involved right from the trial stage, so we could verify the effects of migration, and it was clear they didn't even need special training," says Digeronimo. "Nonetheless, the actual implementation was done step by step and PCs continued to function in parallel with the virtual system until they were all replaced, but this still only took a month."
Breakdowns became a thing of the past as far as workstations were concerned and this brought real improvements in the quality of service for medical and nursing staff, and also for patients.
The Zero Client solution was discovered thanks to an event organised in 2011 by DSI Sistemi, a Fujitsu partner based in Palermo. The company has become the technology partner to Cannizzaro Hospital and has worked closely with the staff right from the trial stage. Despite its past experience being mainly in the large-scale retail sector, DSI Sistemi sensed the potential for replicating this solution in public health facilities, so it began to make contact with similar services in Sicily. DSI Sistemi was also able to leverage its expertise in the VMware environment, both in implementing the solution in the Cannizzaro A&E department and in organising training courses within the facility.
Desktop virtualisation for Cannizzaro Hospital A&E department was initially implemented to relieve the overstretched IT personnel of workstation management and maintenance tasks. Subsequently, Fujitsu's Zero Client solution proved to have a number of advantages for other departments as well as A&E as it can generate substantial savings in the medium term, including 50% savings in overall client management and 60% in energy consumption. Cannizzaro Hospital has already been praised by JCI (Joint Commission International) for its A&E department software management, and the reduction in faults will certainly enhance the quality of its service and reputation.
"The Zero Client solution has been the best way to achieve cost reductions and improve quality of service, since we were able to keep workstation faults to a minimum."
Download the Cannizzaro Hospital case study (335 KB/A4, 2 pages)


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2015 Toyota FJ Cruiser Will Pick Some Design : Will The 2015 Toyota FJ Cruiser Have All Wheel Drive
Toyota FJ Cruiser hasn't indicated wanted comes about, so group is genuinely pondering of its future. That is the explanation they'll make replace for 2015 mannequin, and relying upon results, the 2015 Toyota FJ Cruiser may very well be the final run of this car. Desires are enormous, offers charges have to be enhanced, and a substantial amount of work might be used to revise all wants from previous fashions. Generally talking, this isn't car, but purchasers have the final phrase.
Toyota FJ Cruiser 2015 will decide some define delicate parts from Fj40 F×A automobile, and that form are well-known between lovers. Nonetheless, that exemplary type will likely be modernized for brand spanking new age. Upgraded car will supply two 5-inch headlights on simply out of the plastic new grille, which is likeness to specified Fj40 F×F. Hood and bumpers shall be returned to and again mounted further tire shall be topsy turvy as a testomony on nameplate.
Side entryways open ninety ranges in clamshell type for clear again seat door and passageway. Side tailgate can have swing-up glass hatch. Capacity room can be roomy, so extra issues can be obliged successfully. The 2015 FJ Cruiser can be outfitted with gigantic 32-inch tires. It will likewise attribute full suspension diversion, and bends and edged bumper flares will maintain car from harms whereas throughout manner driving.
The 2015 Toyota FJ Cruiser shall be full of one and solely motor different. It might be F.zero-l V6 powertrain, which might be match for producing 260 hp and 271 lb-ft of torque. This motor might be mated to a 5-tempo programmed transmitting framework. What can be fundamental on all bundles for 2015 Toyota FJ Cruiser are again wheel drive and a constrained slip differential are commonplace. Additionally, it's conceivable to get two-wheel-pushed 2015 FJ Cruiser. In the primary place might be mixed with formally mentioned transmission, whereas different, full-time gadget mated with a six-fee guide gearbox. Evaluated gasoline utilization charges are sixteen mpg within the metropolis and 20 mpg out and about. These will not be very good common numbers, nonetheless they're regular in tough terrain driver fragment.
There is not any knowledge at discharge and prices of 2015 Toyota FJ Cruiser. Be that as it might, it's marketed that we'll have elite distinctive model bundle for this auto discharged all through one yr from now, so we needed elementary fashions at dealerships when it reveals.
Here is main notification on 2015 toyota fj cruiser. We have the greatest method for 2015 toyota fj cruiser. Check it out for yourself! You can acquire Will The 2015 Toyota FJ Cruiser Have All Wheel Drive guide and read the latest 2015 Toyota FJ Cruiser Will Pick Some Design in here.


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Get ready for some of the most intense, over-the-top wrestling action in the world, as some of Japan's biggest superstars battle it out in the ring. Abdullah the Kobayashi and Numasawa go to war in a Fans Bring the Weapons Death Match. They'll use pots, plungers, records, chairs and anything they can get their hands on to beat their opponent into submission. Honma and Shadow WX battle in a Barbed Wire Board Deathmatch that will make even the most hardcore wrestling fan wince. Those are just a couple of the crazy death defying matches you'll see on this DVD.
- Abdullah the Kobayashi vs. Numasawa (Fans Bring The Weapons Death Match)
- Honma vs. Shadow WX (Barbed Wire Board Deathmatch)
- Sanshiro & Ibushi vs. Hero & Kudo
- Hiyuga, Kuragaki, Watanabe vs. Commando Bolishoi, Haruyama, Yoneyama
- Mikami vs. Poison Sawada
- Ito, Kanemura, Men's TEIO vs. Kasai, Bad Boy Hido, Sasaki
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I haven't been watching much American Idol so far this season, particularly the audition rounds, because of a general sense of life's-too-short-itis. Also, past Idol judge transitions have taught me that you can't really get a sense of the new judging panel from the heavily edited audition and Hollywood rounds; you need to see them assessing singers one-by-one.
Last night I watched the first Las Vegas semifinal round to get some first impressions of this year's new panel. And I was… kind of impressed? Cautiously? At least for one night, it seemed like the end of the Steven Tyler / Jennifer Lopez era means that the judging panel is again willing and encouraged to offer specific, substantive feedback on performances. You know: to judge.
In that spirit, a few very preliminary judgments, going right down the line:
Keith Urban: I didn't have much of an impression of him before he joined Idol, other than his being Mr. Nicole Kidman. I still don't have that much of an impression of him, but I became guardedly hopeful for him when critiqued Brandy for not connecting emotionally with the Travis Tritt ballad "Anymore," smiling at odds with the song's lyrics. Smiley-itis is a longtime Idol pet peeve of mine, so this was bound to appeal to me, but it's also the kind of specific, intangible-but-important feedback that the show has been short on since Simon left.
Nicki Minaj: If Keith is there for laid-back critiques, Nicki has clearly realized she's there to stand out like a pink dye job. Some people will love and some will hate it, but so far I'm loving how she's owning her judginess: "Get ready to boo again!" she taunted the crowd at one point. But she didn't seem critical for nastiness' sake last night; she was also attentive and specific in her praise. OK, Nicki also told nearly every girl she looked pretty, a longtime Idol-judge tic. But it meant something a little different every time—sometimes consolation, sometimes part of her judgment of the singer's presentation and sometimes, basically, just one final kick in the ass.
Randy Jackson: OK, Randy's the one element on the judge panel who hasn't changed. Except he has, a little. No longer obligated to be the only one behind the table willing to say anything negative, he can be more frank than he seemed in the Steven Tyler / J-Lo era, while he's also free to push back against negative reviews. He at least seems to be having a better time so far.
Mariah Carey: Mariah, you look really pretty, but so far this isn't working for me. There's no doubting the musical cred she brings to the panel, but last night she was the new panelist most clearly in the mealy-mouthed Tyler/J-Lo mode, with all the evasive generalities and stalling tactics. (Note to every Idol judge ever: you don't need to tell us how amazing the artist who originally recorded the song was. We already know! Aretha Franklin is not competing here!) I have no problem with a judge who's positive because she simply likes more things than the rest of the panel, but if you can't back it up with specifics, it seems like you're just trying to win a popularity contest.
I don't need every reality competition show to involve harsh judgment; The Voice pretty much avoids it like poison, and I watched the last season with pleasure. But that's what The Voice does and what works in its structure. Idol is a show with judges, not coaches, and I'm hoping that this season, Idol will be comfortable being itself.
I reserve the right to change my opinion within the week, of course—and we still need to see how the panel works in the live-finals weeks of Idol. In the meantime, are you on anyone's team yet?


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If you have already begun the hop you should have arrived from Brenda's blog. If you are just now finding this fabulous event you should check out Karen's blog to start at the beginning and see the entire list of blogs participating!
The card I created was inspired by the Moxie Fab Color Inspiration: Neutrals Challenge. I love these colors and I had a blast working with them for Ann's card!
The patterned papers you see are Stamp'n Up! and the cardstock is Bazzill. The beautiful stamps are from the Heartsong set by Skipping Stones Design. The inks are Close To My Heart and Tim Holtz for Ranger. The punch is Martha Stewart for EK Success, and the twine and the button with thread are vintage.
So, Happy Birthday, Ann! I hope you have a seriously fabulous day and enjoy this fun little hop we put together to celebrate!
The next stop on the hop is Joanne, so have fun HOPPING!!!!


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By Dottie Stone Coleman, MAT, MEd
Whatever their age, every interaction with our children — every word, every response, every look — has the potential to build up their self-confidence and self-esteem, or tear it down. Likewise, every behavior of our own in which we model self-confidence, respectful self-expression, and responsible self-care and self-advocacy has the power to encourage and build those kinds of behaviors in them. All eight of Attachment Parenting International's Principles of Parenting contribute significantly to building self-confidence and empowerment in our children of every age. That said, let's look at a few examples of Responding with Sensitivity — examples of beautiful parenting sure to promote the traits we so hope to see developing in our children.
Responding with sensitivity is usually done by active listening, or acknowledging feelings expressed by your children; and then affirming, or validating, those feelings. For example, "I know you're upset because we can't buy that toy today. I get frustrated, too, when I can't afford something I want."
But let's consider that there may be a third step to responding sensitively, and that is, when possible, "eliciting or suggesting an action based on the feeling."
For example, Owen, age five, wanted a new outfit for his toy dog. His mom told him they would not be buying anything else on that trip to the store, and Owen was upset. So, his mom asked him how he might earn some money to get what he wanted the next time they came to the mall. Owen had learned how to crochet at preschool, so he got busy making crochet chains of different lengths to be used as rings, bracelets, and necklaces. One day, Owen's dad let him set up shop in an unused space in Dad's office, and thanks to Dad's generous co-workers, Owen earned enough selling his chains to buy the items he wanted! He was ecstatic, and so proud of himself.
On another occasion, Owen and his mom were leaving a restaurant on an extremely hot day and just ahead of them was a family of seven — a mom with six kids, two of them babies. Owen was worried because the family didn't have a car. His mother told him they were probably walking to the bus station. Owen was sad about their situation and concerned about the little kids because of the heat. Soon nine people were crammed into mom's minivan to give these folks a ride to the bus. They caught the bus they needed and avoided a 30-minute wait. Owen felt so good about helping them; he couldn't stop talking about helping them catch their bus. What wonderful reinforcement of his compassion and for his self-confidence that Mom went out of her way to act on his concern! Of course, I'm sure she will also teach him that you can't safely take into your car just anyone who seems to need help, but in the circumstances of that day, it was so empowering that she acted on his feelings.
Nick, also age 5, is a curious, deep thinker. After encountering the idea of black holes in space, he had many questions, like "What happens to the things that get sucked into a black hole?" His father acknowledged and affirmed his curiosity by saying, "That's a really good question, Nick. I'm afraid I don't know." But Dad didn't stop there. Dad happens to have a friend who works with the particle accelerator at a nearby university. Dad arranged for Nick to talk to this friend, who did a great job of putting his answers in terms that Nick could understand. Again, a caveat: Obviously it's not always possible to answer a five-year-old's questions in terms they can comprehend. But, when we take their questions this seriously, it sends a message that their thoughts and their curiosity are important, and warrant following up on.
And one more example from Owen: A visit to Grandma's house overnight was marred at bedtime by the absence of Dino, Owen's long-time sleeping companion, who had been accidentally left at home. Owen was very tired from a long day of exciting activities, and he was inconsolable because Dino wasn't with him. Owen's father and his grandmother listened actively, sympathized, and offered substitute loveys, all to no avail. Finally, Dad suggested that Owen phone Dino, make sure he was OK, and tell him he'd be back tomorrow. The call was made, and with the help of Mom, who was at home with Dino, Owen told his friend where he was, learned that Dino was doing fine, and afterward settled down with one of Grandma's collection of snugglies and went to sleep. Dad's suggestion that Owen take some action toward restoring his connection with Dino made all the difference.
Thus, Responding with Sensitivity could be said to include three As:
- Acknowledgement
- Affirmation
- Action.
Though an appropriate action may not always be evident, looking for one is sure to result in many instances in which your child is helped to feel effective and empowered, both of which are crucial components of self-confidence.


text: In 2010 I quit my job and moved to Granada, Spain. The move to Spain was necessary but very, very difficult; however, it had the desired effect and I began to see more clearly what I really wanted to do with my life, and how I could get there. I had no choice other than to become an artist. In Spain I learnt that looking, seeing, reflecting, and drawing, was my most important career, and that all the other careers which I had been pursuing, would now supplement the development of my art practice. From this point on, I made an agreement with myself to start building a body of work which would record my role as an observer, and as an artist. My artwork doesn't permit me an escape from myself, as some artwork does. Rather, it pulls me into an exploration of an enigmatic internal space. It also allows me to explore the narcissistic threat of falling in love with one's own images and one's reflections. I question whether I will lose myself in my reflections, or whether this exploration will ultimately engender my liberation.


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Posts Tagged '13th Regiment New York Cavalry'
Military History Word of the Day – "Castrametation"
Photo: Prospect Hill, Virginia. Camp of the 13th Regiment New York Cavalry. ("Seymour Light")
[Library of Congress, CALL NUMBER: LC-B817- 7218]
While researching the influence of Jomini on the conduct of the American Civil War, I ran across an article by James L. Morrison, Jr., (Professor, History, Emeritus, York College of Pennsylvania) titled, "Educating the Civil War Generals: West Point, 1833 – 1861" which appeared in Military Affairs. He outlines the curriculum for students who would have made up a large part of the war's leadership. It was heavily skewed toward science and engineering. But the courses on the study of the science of war included the following topics:
"army organization
order of battle
- castrametation [misspelled in the text as castramentation]
outpost duties
attack and defense, and
the principles of strategy."[i]
Castrametation caught my eye. Webster provides some insight into the origins of the word.
"\Cas`tra*me*ta"tion\, n. [F. castram['e]tation, fr. L. castra camp + metari to measure off, fr. meta limit.] (Mil.) The art or act of encamping; the making or laying out of a camp." [ii]
A Military Dictionary and Gazetteer (first published in 1881 under title: A military and naval encyclopedia and available on Google Books here), puts a slightly different spin on it with the following definition:
"Castrametation. Is the art of laying out camps, and of placing the troops so that the different arms of the service shall afford support to each other in the best manner."[iii]
I have added as a new word to "the terms" page here.
[i] James L. Morrison, Jr., "Educating the Civil War Generals: West Point, 1833 – 1861," Military Affairs, Vol. 38, No. 3. (Oct., 1974), pp. 109.
[ii] Castrametation. Dictionary.com. Webster's Revised Unabridged Dictionary. MICRA, Inc. http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/Castrametation (accessed: March 23, 2008).
[iii] Thomas Wilhelm, Military Art and Science, (L. R. Hamersly & co.: 1881) http://books.google.com/books?id=GHcrAAAAMAAJ&pg=PA95&lpg=PA95&dq=what+is+the+history+of+the+word+castrametation%3F&source=web&ots=vnQF5eKGfo&sig=evmHB_wX1onpWxy-eQ9bsZHkZFc&hl=en (accessed online March 21, 2008).
Written by Rene Tyree
March 23, 2008 at 10:13 pm
Posted in American Civil War, Jomini, Military History, West Point
Tagged with 13th Regiment New York Cavalry, American Civil War, Castrametation, James L. Morrison, Jomini, Jr., Military Affairs, Military History, military strategy, Prospect Hill, Science of war, Virginia, West Point, Word of the Day, York College of Pennsylvania


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Safaris in Namibia
Peaceful Namibia has become a very popular safari destination due to a well developed infra-structure, low population density and diverse tourist attractions.
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tailor-made guided Namibia safaris.
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Cape Town, Johannesburg, Nelson Mandela and the Kruger National Park, these are famous and well-known names to most travellers to South Africa.
South Africa is a melting pot of cultures, scenic beauty, vibrant cities and a spectacular range of diverse attractions. Being one of the best developed countries in Africa, going on a private or custom designed holiday in South Africa is an alternative to scheduled group trips.
The Kruger National Park and many Private Game Reserves offer a wide range of malaria free safaris in South Africa.
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It would be our pleasure to help you plan your adventure to visit and explore this great and fascinating continent.
Our services include consulting and booking of complete all inclusive safari packages, and private guided tours covering Namibia, Botswana, South Africa and Victoria Falls.
Due to our flexibility, we can Tailor-made special interest African wildlife safaris such as overland tented camping trip or lodge safaris, photography, luxury fly-in trips.
Folktales and Stories from Africa
In our culture section of the Encyclopaedia there is short stories, myths and fables written and recorded by Chrigi-in-Africa, and folk tales on theie origins from various tribes.
An large segment of our stories and folktales are from the San people of the Namibian Kalahari, and their verbal sketching of animal behaviour.
Tribes Of Africa and Traditional People
The Encyclopaedia Afrikana section of our knowledge base, covers the various countries and the many tribes found in Africa.
This include information on some of the tribal customs, and how the traditional people utilize natural products and food around them to make things and for daily survival.
Wildlife & Plants
The largest section in our encyclopaedia concentrates on the various common species of animals, birds, reptiles and plants found in Southern Africa.
Small section on traditional medicine with the plants and herbs used by traditional tribal people in Namibia.


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Back in 2006, when I was 24, my life was cozy and safe. I had just been promoted to associate editor at the publishing house where I'd been working since I graduated from college, and I was living with my boyfriend, Henry, and two cats in a grubby but spacious two-bedroom apartment in Greenpoint, Brooklyn. I spent most of my free time sitting with Henry in our cheery yellow living room on our stained Ikea couch, watching TV. And almost every day I updated my year-old blog, Emily Magazine, to let a few hundred people know what I was reading and watching and thinking about.
Some of my blog's readers were my friends in real life, and even the ones who weren't acted like friends when they posted comments or sent me e-mail. They criticized me sometimes, but kindly, the way you chide someone you know well. Some of them had blogs, too, and I read those and left my own comments. As nerdy and one-dimensional as my relationships with these people were, they were important to me. They made me feel like a part of some kind of community, and that made the giant city I lived in seem smaller and more manageable.
The anecdotes I posted on Emily Magazine occasionally featured Henry, whom my readers knew as a lovably bumbling character, a bassist in a fledgling noise-rock band who said unexpectedly insightful things about the contestants on "Project Runway" and then wondered aloud whether we had any snacks. I didn't write about him often, but when I did, I'd quote his best jokes or tell stories about vacationing with his family.
Henry, seemingly alone among our generation, went out of his way to keep his online presence minimal. Now that we've broken up, I appreciate this about him — it's pretty much impossible to torture myself by Google-stalking him. But back then, what this meant was that he was never particularly thrilled to be written about. Sometimes he was enraged.
Once, I made fun of Henry for referring to "Project Runway" as "Project Gayway." He worried that "people" — the shadowy, semi-imaginary people who read my blog and didn't know Henry well enough to know that he wasn't a homophobe — would be offended. He insisted that I take down the offending post and watched as I sat at my desk in our bedroom, slowly, grudgingly making the keystrokes necessary to delete what I'd written. As I sat there staring into the screen at the reflection of Henry standing behind me, I burst into tears. And then we were pacing, screaming at each other, through every room of our apartment, facing off with wild eyes and clenched jaws.
My blog post was ridiculous and petty and small — and, suddenly, incredibly important. At some point I'd grown accustomed to the idea that there was a public place where I would always be allowed to write, without supervision, about how I felt. Even having to take into account someone else's feelings about being written about felt like being stifled in some essential way.
As Henry and I fought, I kept coming back to the idea that I had a right to say whatever I wanted. I don't think I understood then that I could be right about being free to express myself but wrong about my right to make that self-expression public in a permanent way. I described my feelings in the language of empowerment: I was being creative, and Henry wanted to shut me up. His point of view was just as extreme: I wasn't generously sharing my thoughts; I was compulsively seeking gratification from strangers at the expense of the feelings of someone I actually knew and loved. I told him that writing, especially writing about myself and my surroundings, was a fundamental part of my personality, and that if he wanted to remain in my life, he would need to reconcile himself to being part of the world I described.
After a standoff, he conceded that I should be allowed to put the post back up. As he sulked in the other room, I retyped what I'd written, feeling vindicated but slightly queasy for reasons I didn't quite understand yet.
One of the strangest and most enthralling aspects of personal blogs is just how intensely personal they can be. I'm talking "specific details about someone's S.T.D.'s" personal, "my infertility treatments" personal. There are nongynecological overshares, too: "My dog has cancer" overshares, "my abusive relationship" overshares.
It's easy to draw parallels between what's going on online and what's going on in the rest of our media: the death of scripted TV, the endless parade of ordinary, heavily made-up faces that become vaguely familiar to us as they grin through their 15 minutes of reality-show fame. No wonder we're ready to confess our innermost thoughts to everyone: we're constantly being shown that the surest route to recognition is via humiliation in front of a panel of judges.
But is that really what's making people blog? After all, online, you're not even competing for 10 grand and a Kia. I think most people who maintain blogs are doing it for some of the same reasons I do: they like the idea that there's a place where a record of their existence is kept — a house with an always-open door where people who are looking for you can check on you, compare notes with you and tell you what they think of you. Sometimes that house is messy, sometimes horrifyingly so. In real life, we wouldn't invite any passing stranger into these situations, but the remove of the Internet makes it seem O.K.
Of course, some people have always been more naturally inclined toward oversharing than others. Technology just enables us to overshare on a different scale. Long before I had a blog, I found ways to broadcast my thoughts — to gossip about myself, tell my own secrets, tell myself and others the ongoing story of my life. As soon as I could write notes, I passed them incorrigibly. In high school, I encouraged my friends to circulate a notebook in which we shared our candid thoughts about teachers, and when we got caught, I was the one who wanted to argue about the First Amendment rather than gracefully accept punishment. I walked down the hall of my high school passing out copies of a comic-book zine I drew, featuring a mock superhero called SuperEmily, who battled thinly veiled versions of my grade's reigning mean girls. In college, I sent out an all-student e-mail message revealing that an ex-boyfriend shaved his chest hair. The big difference between these youthful indiscretions and my more recent ones is that you can Google my more recent ones.
Online Life
In the fall of 2006, I got a call from the managing editor of Gawker Media, a network of highly trafficked blogs, asking me to come by the office in SoHo to talk about a job. Since its birth four years earlier, the company's flagship blog, Gawker, had purported to be in the business of reporting "Manhattan media gossip," which it did, sometimes — catty little details about writers and editors and executives, mostly. But it was also a clearinghouse for any random tidbit of information about being young and ambitious in New York. Though Gawker was a must-read for many of the people working at the magazines and newspapers whose editorial decisions the site mocked and dissected, it held an irresistible appeal for desk-bound drones in all fields — tens of thousands of whom visited the site each day.
I had been one of those visitors for as long as I'd had a desk job. Sometimes Gawker felt like a source of essential, exclusive information, tailored to the needs of people just like me. Other times, reading Gawker left me feeling hollow and moody, as if I'd just absentmindedly polished off an entire bag of sickly sweet candy. But when the call came, I brushed this thought aside. For a young blogger in New York in 2006, becoming an editor at Gawker was an achievement so lofty that I had never even imagined it could happen to me. The interview and audition process felt a little surreal, like a dream. But when I got the job, I had the strange and sudden feeling that it had been somehow inevitable. Maybe my whole life — all the trivia I'd collected, the knack for funny meanness I'd been honing since middle school — had been leading up to this moment.
When I started, the site was posting about 40 items per day, and I was responsible for 12 of them. The tone of these posts was smart yet conversational, and often funny in a merciless way. Confronted with endless examples of unfairness, favoritism and just plain stupidity among New York's cultural establishment, the Gawker "voice" was righteously indignant but comically defeated, sighing in unison with an audience that believed nothing was as it seemed and nothing would ever really change. Everyone was fatter or older or worse-skinned than he or she pretended to be. Every man was cheating on his partner; all women were slutty. Writers were plagiarists or talentless hacks or shameless beneficiaries of nepotism. Everyone was a hypocrite. No one was loved. There was no success that couldn't be hollowed out by the revelation of some deep-seated inadequacy.
At my old job, it would have taken me years to advance to a place where I would no longer have to humor the whims of important people who I thought were idiots or relics or phonies. But at Gawker, it was my responsibility to expose the foibles of the undeserving elite. I felt liberated — finally, a job where I could really be myself! Never again would I have to censor my office-inappropriate sentiments or shop the sale racks at Club Monaco for office-appropriate outfits. But at the same time, I wasn't quite convinced that the system of apprenticeship and gradual promotion that I'd left behind when I left book publishing was as flawed as establishment-attacking Gawker made it out to be. I'd been lucky enough, in my publishing job, to have the kind of boss who actually cared about my future. At Gawker, I barely had a boss, and my future was always in jeopardy. In my old job, I'd been able to slowly, steadily learn the ropes, but now I was judged solely on what I produced every day. I had a kind of power, sure, but it was only as much power as my last post made it seem like I deserved.
Sometimes I worried that I'd been chosen not in spite of my inexperience but because of it. Hiring women in their early 20s with little or no background in journalism was a tactic that worked for the site's owner twice before, and I expected to be a victim of the same kind of hazing my predecessors were subjected to as they learned how to do their jobs — and how to navigate New York — in public. I'd once heard someone refer to us as "sacrificial virgins," which didn't seem too far off.
Then again, being a sacrificial virgin has always had its perks. The career arc of Gawker's popular outgoing editor, Jessica Coen, seemed like evidence that talent could and should trump dues-paying. After college, she worked as an assistant in L.A. and maintained a personal blog. When, at age 24, she decided to move to New York, she had two career options: Columbia Journalism School or Gawker. She chose Gawker. Two years later, every magazine editor in town knew her name, and she was hired as the online editor of Vanity Fair. Maybe the days were over when young comers were slowly mentored as they prepared to assume their bosses' titles, covering community-board meetings or fetching coffee.
The Feedback Loop
"I tried not to read the comments," Jessica told me when we met for a drink just before I started work at Gawker. "Well, I went back and forth. But, you know, you really shouldn't read the comments." An hour into my first day on the job, I disobeyed her. I needed to know what people were saying about me. Dozens of readers had commented on the post introducing me, some of them dissecting the accompanying photo, some of them talking about how much they already hated me. Every time I wrote a post, the comments would pile up within minutes, disagreeing with or amplifying whatever I just said. Reading the comments created a sense of urgency, which came in handy when trying to hit deadlines 12 times a day.
I relayed some of the choicest bits to Henry, who also thought I shouldn't be reading the comments. But how could I convey to Henry — who sometimes, onstage with his band, played entire shows with his back to the audience — the thrill of delivering a good line to a crowd that would immediately respond, that would fall over themselves to one-up your joke or fill in the blanks with their own suggestions and information?
The commenters at Emily Magazine had been like friends. Now, with Gawker's readers, I was having a different kind of relationship. It wasn't quite friendship. It was almost something deeper. They were co-workers, sort of, giving me ideas for posts, rewriting my punch lines. They were creeps hitting on me at a bar. They were fans, sycophantically praising even my lamer efforts. They were enemies, articulating my worst fears about my limitations. They were the voices in my head. They could be ignored sometimes. Or, if I let them, they could become my whole world.
When Jessica cautioned me against reading the comments, she also told me that the commenters loved it when she revealed personal details. Not only did I find this to be true, I found it to be almost necessary. Injecting a personal aside into a post that wasn't otherwise about me not only kept things interesting for me, it was also a surefire way of evoking a chorus of assenting or dissenting opinions, turning the solitary work of writing posts into something that felt more social, almost like a conversation.
The commenters' compliments were reassuring. And though I was reluctant to admit it, there was even something sort of thrilling about being insulted by strangers. This was brand-new, having so many strangers pay attention to me, and at that point, every kind of attention still felt good. Occasionally, a particularly well-aimed barb would catch me off-guard, and I'd spend a moment worrying that I really was the worst writer ever to work for the site, or unfunny, or ugly, or stupid. But mostly, in the beginning, I was able to believe the compliments and dismiss the insults, even though they were both coming from the same place and sometimes the same people.
Like most people, I tend to use the language of addiction casually, as in, "I can't wait for the new season of 'America's Next Top Model' to start — I'm totally going through withdrawal." And when talking about how immersed I became in my online life, I'm tempted to use this language because it provides such handy metaphors. It's easy to compare the initial thrill of evoking an immediate response to a blog post to the rush of getting high, and the diminishing thrills to the process of becoming inured to a drug's effects. The metaphor is so exact, in fact, that maybe it isn't a metaphor at all.
When Henry and I fought about my job, we fought on two fronts: whether what I was doing was essentially unethical, and whether I was too consumed by doing it. I would usually end up agreeing with him on the first count — my posts could be petty or cruel — but that only made him more frustrated. It must have been hard for him to understand how someone could keep committing small-scale atrocities with such enthusiasm and single-minded devotion.
My Buddy List
Though Gawker's bloggers often worked from home, I went to the office every day at first. I was used to communicating with most people I knew via instant messenger, but it seemed important to see Alex, my co-editor, in person. I figured that we'd be able to express ourselves more easily by actually turning to each other and speaking words and making facial expressions rather than typing instant messages. But because we were so busy, we continued to I.M. most of the time, even when we were sitting right next to each other. Soon it stopped seeming weird to me when one of us would type a joke and the other one would type "Hahahahaha" in lieu of actually laughing.
Another person I ended up I.M.-ing daily was one of Gawker's most frequent targets, a blogger named Julia Allison, who, within a year, parlayed a magazine dating column into a six-figure TV talking-head job and then into a reality show, all while updating her blog several times a day. Julia wore skimpy, Halloween-style costumes to parties and dated high-profile men in high-profile ways — her tech-millionaire boyfriend collaborated with her on a blog where they took turns chronicling their relationship's ups and downs. I was initially put off by Julia's naked attention-whoring — "Attention is my drug," she often confessed. In thousands of photos on her Flickr feed she posed, caked in makeup, like a celebrity on the red carpet, always thrusting out her breasts and favoring her good side. But in the midst of this artifice she was disarmingly straightforward about how badly she craved the attention that Internet exposure gave her — even though it came at the expense of constant, intensely vitriolic mockery.
I also I.M.-ed constantly with my co-worker Josh, who joined the site as "after hours editor" a few months into my tenure, which meant that he wrote about parties and restaurants. He was cute, and given the number of hours a day we spent trapped at our desks, the flirtation that developed between us seemed unavoidable. And the medium made it seem harmless — sure, maybe our I.M. avatars wanted to hook up, but our flesh-and-blood selves would be careful to make sure things stayed professional.
In Public
It was 11 p.m. on an April night in 2007, and I was in the back seat of a speeding Town Car on my way home from the CNN studios. I was on the phone with Alex, who was at a bar. "I don't think I did a very good job," I told him. I was still full of adrenaline from being on TV, and the noise of the bar in the background as he reassured me made me think it might be fun to join him, but the driver was already headed to Greenpoint, and I was too dazed to give him new directions.
I'd been a guest on an episode of "Larry King Live," with Jimmy Kimmel as the host in King's absence. I had been told that I would be talking about "celebrities and the media." But Kimmel launched an attack on one of Gawker's regular features, a celebrity "stalker map" that relied on unsourced tipsters, one of whom claimed to have spotted Kimmel looking drunk a few months earlier. It took me a minute to catch on to the fact that Kimmel wasn't acting out some blustery caricature — he was serious about the idea that Gawker had violated his privacy, and he was genuinely, frighteningly angry.
Back at home, after wiping off the TV makeup, I logged into my Gawker e-mail account and found my in-box flooded. I scrolled through the first of what would eventually be hundreds — and then, as the clip of my appearance was dissected on other blogs over the course of the next few days, thousands — of angry e-mail messages. I ended up posting some representative ones on my personal blog:
"You got blown away. You looked like a little girl in awe of your surroundings."
"I just want to tell you how uneducated and STUPID you came off during the appearance on The LKL Show. You truly are a cheap heartless human being, who will one day have to deal with the same kind of SCUM you are."
"You were this giggling, hyper adolescent that did more to hurt your message, your site and your credibility than even coming close to simply neutralizing the debate."
Watching the clip now makes me cringe. Called upon to defend Gawker's publication of anonymous e-mail tips of celebrity sightings, I was dismissive and flip. My untrained, elastic face betrayed the shock and amusement I was feeling about being asked, somewhat aggressively, to justify something that I thought of as not only harmless but also a given: the idea that anyone who makes their living in public was subject to the public's scrutiny at all times.
I expected the miniature scandal to flare and fade quickly, but for a while it seemed as if it would never go away. The clip made its way to Yahoo's front page, and a reporter called my parents for comment. After a week or so, the volume of angry e-mail and blog comments subsided, but they stayed under my skin. I decided to try to develop a steely, defiant numbness. I told myself that the strangers who'd taken the time to e-mail me their rants were wrong and crazy, that there was nothing so bad about what I'd done.
There was a harder truth that I refused to confront, though. After all, by going on TV and having a daily blog presence in front of thousands of people, I had put myself in the category of "people who make their livings in public," and so, by my own declared value system, I was an appropriate target for the kind of flak I was getting. But that didn't mean I could handle it. A week later, I found myself lying on the floor of the bathroom in the Gawker office (where, believe me, no one should ever lie), felled by a panic attack that put me out of commission for the rest of the day.
I started having panic attacks — breathless bouts of terror that left me feeling queasy, drained and hopeless — every day. I didn't leave my apartment unless I absolutely had to, and because I had the option of working from home, I rarely had to. But while my actual participation in life shrank down to a bare minimum, I still responded to hundreds of e-mail messages and kept up a stream of instant-messenger conversations while I wrote. Depending on how you looked at it, I either had no life and I barely talked to anyone, or I spoke to thousands of people constantly.
Famous for 15 People
I started seeing a therapist again, and we talked about my feelings of being inordinately scrutinized. "It's important to remember that you're not a celebrity," she told me. How could I tell her, without coming off as having delusions of grandeur, that, in a way, I was? I obviously wasn't "famous" in the way that a movie star or even a local newscaster or politician is famous — I didn't go to red-carpet parties or ride around in limos, and my parents' friends still had no idea what I was talking about when I described my job — but I had begun to have occasional run-ins with strangers who knew what I did for a living and felt completely comfortable walking up to me on the street and talking about it. The Monday after my disastrous CNN appearance, as I stood in line at Balthazar's coffee bar, a middle-aged man in a suit told me to keep my chin up. "Emily, don't quit Gawker!" a young guy shouted at me from his bicycle as I walked down the street one day. If someone stared at me on the subway, there was no way to tell whether they were admiring my outfit or looking at the stain on my sweater or whether they, you know, Knew Who I Was. The more people e-mailed the Gawker tip line with "sightings" of me — laden with bags from Target and scarfing ice cream while walking down Atlantic Avenue — the more I was inclined to believe it was the latter.
Oversharing on Gawker
I didn't want to go to Fire Island. The trip would take two hours, and it would involve the subway, the Long Island Railroad, a van and a ferry. For a month, I'd been doing my best to avoid any venture more ambitious than the trip to the grocery store a block and a half away, whose clerks were, besides Henry, pretty much the only people I still spoke to aloud on a regular basis. Whenever I left this comfort zone, I would be seized by one of my irrational, heart-pounding meltdowns, which I would studiously conceal from my fellow subway passengers or pedestrians. The panic attacks were about a desire to be invisible, but if I showed any sign that I was having one, everyone would pay attention to me. It was kind of funny when you thought about it, and if you weren't me.
But Choire, my boss, urged me to attend the staff retreat at a house near the beach so that we could all bond as a team. Henry discouraged me from going — he didn't want me to push myself, and we were comfortable, weren't we, in our sad little world together? He was as surprised as I was when, the morning of the retreat, I managed to pry myself out of bed and get myself onto the subway. Walking into Penn Station, I saw Josh and his stylish duffel leaning against a pillar. He looked up at me and smiled in a way that immediately distracted me from thoughts of how miserable I felt. The freakout I was dreading never came, and over the course of the next few days, I forgot to always be anticipating its arrival.
We each wrote our allotment of Gawker posts in the mornings, and in the afternoons we went to the beach. The water was freezing — it was still early in the summer — and we all ran into the waves together screaming. At night Choire cooked us elaborate feasts, and afterward we played Scrabble and watched bad movies. Josh and I sat together on the couch, and I put my head on his shoulder in a completely friendly, professional way. The next day, I let him apply sunscreen to the spot in the middle of my back that I couldn't reach. As a joke, we walked down the wood-plank paths that crisscross the island holding hands. I also remember joking, via I.M. as we worked, about us wanting to cross the hallway that separated our bedrooms and crawl into bed with each other at night when we couldn't sleep. On our last day, I congratulated myself on having made it through the trip without letting these jokes turn into real betrayal. And then, 20 minutes outside the city on the Long Island Railroad on the way home, Josh kissed me.
The next few weeks eliminated every constant from my life except my job. I moved out of the apartment where I'd lived for four years with Henry, and while I looked for a place on my own, I stayed in a tiny room in a loft full of hippies who brewed their own kombucha tea. I quit smoking pot cold turkey. My parents moved out of my childhood home to a different state because my dad had a new job. My best friend, Ruth, lived a hemisphere away in New Zealand, and though we sent each other epic e-mail messages and talked on the phone, I still felt unmoored in the way you can only feel after a breakup, as if you're the last living speaker of some dying language. But even though this sense of disconnection from my old self and my old life was confusing, it felt mostly good. After all, what was so great about my old self and my old life, anyway?
I immersed myself in my job in a way I hadn't even realized was possible — I thought about Gawker, one way or another, 24 hours a day, thrilling to the idea that a review of the restaurant where Josh and I were eating dinner might find its way onto the site the following day; pillow-talking about the site's internal politics and our hopes and dreams about what we would do next. Just a few weeks earlier, I was scared to walk down my own block. Now I felt totally comfortable posting a picture of myself in a bathing suit on the site, inspiring Josh to do the same. I felt blazingly, insanely energized, and the posts came more easily than they ever had before.
I was happy, but I also wasn't a complete idiot — I knew that the euphoria I was feeling was leading to a massive crash. I'd been clinging to Henry for months in spite of our differences because, in addition to the comfort and stability he gave me, he was my sounding board — someone with whom I could share my unfiltered thoughts, without worrying about being entertaining. In his absence, I was becoming more and more open on Gawker.
After the first night Josh and I spent together, I woke up as the sun rose and sat down at my desk to write a post that was nominally about a recent New York Times article about the shelf-life of romantic love. My boyfriend and I had just broken up, I revealed, and so I had been wondering whether love really exists. I wrote that I had concluded that it does. We can't expect other people to make us happy, I informed my readers with total sincerity and earnestness, and we should live in the moment and stop obsessing about the future.
I shudder involuntarily when I read this post now. It's like stumbling across a diary I kept as a teenager. It's probably one of the worst things that I've ever written. The commenters loved it.
Gawker had recently added a counter beside each post that displayed how many views it received. Now it was easy to see exactly how many people cared about my feelings. The site's owner didn't like my "I believe in love" post, he told me, but he said he was O.K. with it because, as everyone could see, more than 10,000 people disagreed with him. Readers e-mailed me their own breakup horror stories and posted hundreds of comments, advising me about flavors of ice cream to eat, and I reveled in the attention. I had managed to turn my job into a group therapy session. "Emily, I don't really know you any more than I know the people I see every morning walking the dogs," one of them wrote. "It's more of an imagined familiarity born out of reading your words for a year. But that took guts, all the way around. And I'm in your corner, inasmuch as a somewhat anonymous, faceless, nameless commenter can be."
Would anyone still be in my corner if they knew the truth — that I hadn't in fact been dumped, and that I'd thrown myself headlong into a rebound affair with a co-worker? I wished that I could tell my old Emily Magazine readers everything that was going on in my life and ask them for advice. I wanted to organize my stories into coherence and put them out into the world. But the Internet had changed, and my place in it had changed, too: I no longer had the luxury of writing something and imagining that the only people who might read it would be a handful of funny, supportive friends.
The Fork and the Spoon
My oldest and most responsible friend, Farrin, is a 37-year-old executive editor at a publishing house. Over breakfast, she was complaining to me that she had a problem at work: the head of her department had asked her to add a photo to her profile on the department's Web page, and she wasn't comfortable with having a picture of herself posted online.
The table we were sitting at was wide, maybe four feet across, and made of planks like a picnic table. I positioned my fork all the way on the left side of the table. "So here's the spectrum of Internet self-exposure," I told her. "And here's you. You're the fork." Then I put my spoon at the right end of the table. "And here, at the other end of the spectrum . . . Julia Allison."
"So where are you on the spectrum?"
"Well, I used to be here," I said, moving a toast crust a few inches to the left of my plate, the table's midpoint. "And now I'm here." I put the crust halfway between my plate and Julia.
Farrin looked up at me, concerned. "That's not good. I think you should start moving closer to the plate."
Instead, though, I kept moving blithely closer to the spoon.
Heartbreak Soup
About a month after I broke up with Henry, my best friend, Ruth, and I created a new, anonymous blog on which we wrote to each other, as we had been doing via e-mail, about breakups and cooking. We named it Heartbreak Soup. At the beginning, we didn't tell anyone it existed, but then we decided to add a sidebar of links to other sites we liked, and a tiny amount of traffic began to trickle our way.
We used pseudonyms for the people we wrote about, but otherwise our concessions to privacy — other peoples' and our own — were very limited. I knew this wasn't smart in the same way that I knew that dating a co-worker wasn't smart, but my curiosity won out. I wanted to know what would happen if I showed myself as little mercy as I showed everyone else. "I'm bad at describing sex, or maybe everyone is," I wrote at one point, but I didn't let that stop me from trying! I ratted myself out for being a bad daughter: "I love my mom more than I love probably anyone else in the world, really. Also, she is more like me than anyone else in the world. But I often want to kill her. The thing that keeps her alive is how incredibly sad I would be if she died." I described the symptoms and probable causes of a urinary tract infection. And I wrote about how painful it was to pack up my things in my old apartment as Henry — whom I referred to as "William" — stood over me watching. I puzzled over "how comfortable I feel around him, in spite of the fact that at this point I basically feel that he's a crazy person who I sort of hate."
Josh was one of the first people I told about the blog. I wanted him to know everything there was to know about me, after all, and besides, we talked about writing all the time, showing off what we thought were our best turns of phrase. He seemed flattered that some of the posts were about him, but he said he wasn't sure how he felt about how candid I was being — though we'd never discussed it, it seemed like a good idea not to explicitly reveal that we were seeing each other, even though we left the office for makeout coffee breaks and broadcast maudlin love songs on the shared office speakers.
A few weeks later, I arrived home in the early morning hours after abruptly extricating myself from Josh's bed — he had suddenly revealed plans for a European vacation with another girl — and immediately sat down at my computer to write a post about what had happened. On Heartbreak Soup, I wrote a long rant about the day's events, including a recipe for the chicken soup I made the previous afternoon and the sex that I'd been somehow suckered into even after finding out about how serious things were with the other girl. Then I opened another tab in my browser and logged into Gawker to start compiling the morning's gossip. For a few hours, my personal dramas took a backseat — sort of — to news that a Pulitzer-winning author had described his wife's affair with a media mogul in a crazy e-mail message to his graduate students. I used the opportunity of this public figure's indiscretion to pontificate about the idea that all heartbreak is essentially the same, though everyone thinks his feelings are somehow original and special. I was essentially talking to myself.
After Josh and I broke up, I started writing more and more on Heartbreak Soup — about my friendship with Ruth, my family and the weird, sad, terrifying, exciting aspects of being single for the first time in my adult life. Word had spread through my immediate circle of friends about the blog, and it was now getting a few hundred visitors a day — about the same as Emily Magazine before I started at Gawker. I lulled myself into imagining that these Heartbreak Soup readers, like those old Emily Magazine readers, might not even know what Gawker was, that they were reading just because they liked my stories.
One night, after writing a post about my first summer in New York, I put a link to Heartbreak Soup on my Facebook page under "Web sites." By the next morning, this had begun to feel like a very bad idea, and I took the link down. The traffic spike that day seemed ominous.
Not long after, Josh told me he wanted to have a talk with me about how unsecret my "secret" blog had become. I had started working from home again, but I came into the city, and we stood, smiling awkwardly, outside the Gawker office, trying to figure out what to say to each other. I remembered the fight I had with Henry about the "Project Gayway" post. This time, I knew, I wouldn't win — but then I hadn't really won the last time either.
I offered to make the posts that mentioned Josh inaccessible by password-protecting them.
"You should be password-protected," he said, and I laughed. When he went back into the office, I walked to the subway via the alleys where we'd once secretly kissed. At home, I wrote about what had just happened on Heartbreak Soup, and then I password-protected the post, feeling strange and sad.
Losing the Will to Blog
In October, New York magazine published a cover article about Gawker's business model and cultural relevance. I took the magazine from my therapist's waiting room into her office and read aloud from the article because, I figured, why waste any of my 45 minutes by struggling to summarize it? The article painted Gawker as a clearinghouse for vitriol and me as a semisympathetic naïf who half-loved and half-loathed what her job was forcing her to become. That week, when I walked around at parties, trying to elicit funny quotes from whatever quasi-famous people were there, all anyone wanted to talk to me about was Gawker. How could I sleep at night? someone wondered. I was getting tired of justifying my job to strangers, trotting out truisms about the public's right to know and the Internet's changing the rules of privacy. And I was getting tired of writing the same handful of posts over and over again. At the end of November, I announced my resignation via a post on Gawker.
For a year, I had been getting up each morning at 7 a.m., my thoughts jostling in my head, eager to escape. I wrote constantly, responding to the events of the day in real time, under perpetual pressure to condense everything I thought and read into something readers could consume. But now I was burned out and directionless, and without an audience, I lost the narrative thread. If no one was going to get on my case for not having read and catalogued every gossip item in the morning papers by 9 a.m., why get out of bed? For months, I thought that I hated the commenters who tormented me. Now, sickeningly, I missed them. I wasn't reading The Sunday Times or New York magazine, because what was the point? I wasn't logging into instant messenger. I had terrible writer's block. My grandfather died, and I couldn't even come up with a heartfelt paragraph to read aloud at his funeral.
On Heartbreak Soup, I was reduced to writing about not having anything to write about. I wasn't cooking much, or reading much, or thinking about much of anything besides how miserable and emptied out I felt. When I posted about a week spent wandering around dead-eyed in Florida's artificial beauty the week after the funeral, one reader left a comment recommending specific brands of antidepressants. Soon after that, I lost the will to blog altogether.
The will to blog is a complicated thing, somewhere between inspiration and compulsion. It can feel almost like a biological impulse. You see something, or an idea occurs to you, and you have to share it with the Internet as soon as possible. What I didn't realize was that those ideas and that urgency — and the sense of self-importance that made me think anyone would be interested in hearing what went on in my head — could just disappear.
Two months after I quit Gawker, Josh wrote an article in the New York Post's Sunday magazine about how violated he felt when I wrote about him on Heartbreak Soup, quoting extensively from my blog posts to make his points.
On the morning that the article hit the newsstands, I made Ruth — who had moved back to New York and become my roommate — read it first. When she finished, she looked stricken. "Emily, he's so evil," she said, sounding not at all reassuring.
I slumped to the kitchen floor and lay there in the fetal position. I didn't want to exist. I had made my existence so public in such a strange way, and I wanted to take it all back, but in order to do that I'd have to destroy the entire Internet. If only I could! Google, YouTube, Gawker, Facebook, WordPress, all gone. I squeezed my eyes shut and prayed for an electromagnetic storm that would cancel out every mistake I'd ever made.
"I'm taking it down," Ruth called to me from the living room, where my laptop sat on a table, displaying our no-longer-so-secret blog.
I opened my eyes. "Don't delete it," I managed to say. "Just make it all password-protected."
I lay there for a while longer. Eventually I read the article, which was, as personal betrayals go, far worse than I'd thought it could be. But the real power of the article, as Josh must have known when he wrote it, lay in the way that it exposed me to the new Gawker regime, which had already proved itself to be even more vicious than we'd ever been. If the article had been published when I was still working at Gawker, I would have been able to steer the conversation that it provoked. But now I was no longer simultaneously sniper and target — I was just a target, and I felt powerless.
Over the next couple of weeks, I sat on the sidelines and watched as the commenters — on Gawker, on other blogs and even on Emily Magazine — talked about me the same way they once talked about the targets I'd proffered for them to aim at. Many of them explicitly pointed out that this drubbing was my karmic comeuppance — after all, I'd punished other people this way. Now it was my turn. It was only fair.
By revealing my flaws to whoever wanted to look, I thought — incorrectly, as it turned out — that I was inoculating myself against the criticism my Gawker co-workers and I leveled most often. Maybe I was talentless, bad-complected, old-looking and slutty, but no one could call me a hypocrite. I had said that everyone was subject to judgment and scrutiny, and then, by judging and scrutinizing myself relentlessly, I'd invited others to do the same.
But maybe I was a hypocrite after all, because now I was beginning to feel that no one should be subject to that kind of scrutiny. Not Josh, not Jimmy Kimmel and especially not me.
Real Life
If I were going to completely disavow self-scrutiny and unedited opinion-broadcasting, it would mean the end of my life as a blogger. While I couldn't make the Internet disappear, it had always been entirely within my power to shutter Emily Magazine the same way I'd locked up Heartbreak Soup. For about a week after Josh's article came out, I thought about doing so every time I looked at my computer. But then, as panic and sadness faded and anger set in, I started having impulses in the exact opposite direction: I wanted to defend myself and set the record straight! A few months earlier, I probably would have done it too: typed feverishly for hours perfecting the most cutting blog post possible, aired every sad secret at my disposal in a quest for revenge, published the post as soon as I was finished, then checked back compulsively to see whether it had made things better or worse. But I'd finally realized that some defenses always backfire. True, I had the ability to say whatever I wanted and an audience of people who would listen, but the best possible thing for me to do was to ignore them and do nothing. And that is what I did. For two entire weeks.
Late one night, I unlocked Heartbreak Soup and wrote one last post there. In it, I talked about how a single blog post can capture a moment of extreme feeling, but that reading an accumulated series of posts will sometimes reveal another, more complete story. I talked about how taking the once-public blog and making it private, though tempting, felt like trying to revise history.
Knowing that the worst of my online oversharing is still publicly accessible doesn't thrill me, but it doesn't scare me anymore either. I might hate my former self, but I don't want to destroy her, and in a way, I want to respect her decision to show the world her vulnerability. I'm willing to let that blog exist now as a sort of memorial to a time in my life when I thought my discoveries about myself and what I loved were special enough to merit sharing with the world immediately.
I understand that by writing here about how I revealed my intimate life online, I've now revealed even more about what happened during the period when I was most exposed. Well, I'm an oversharer — it's not like I'm entirely reformed. But lately, online, I've found myself doing something unexpected: keeping the personal details of my current life to myself. This doesn't make me feel stifled so much as it makes me feel protected, as if my thoughts might actually be worth honing rather than spewing. But I still have Emily Magazine as a place to spew when I need to. It will never again be the friendly place that it was in 2004 — there are plenty of negative comments now, and I don't delete them. I still think about closing the door to my online life and locking them out, but then I think of everything else I'd be locking out, and I leave it open.