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According to a major recent survey by the Ministry of Health, which covered 700,000 households between 2007 and 2008, 43% of the married women in the age group of 20-24 had been child brides. The legal age for a girl to marry in India is 18 – marriages below that age are considered child marriage.Advocates against child marriage hailed her bravery. But in the paper that Ms. Goodwin presented last Friday, she noted that the triumphs that catch international attention represent just a fraction of child marriages, which are still extremely widespread in India.
"There is real competition in law in India, between federal law and the law of custom," said Ms. Goodwin, in an interview last week.
For uneducated girls, the average age of marriage is around age 15, according to the United Nations child rights group Unicef, citing figures from a national survey conducted between 2005 and 2006.
After field research conducted over two years in both urban and rural areas of several Indian states – including in Bihar, where nearly 70% of young brides said they married before they were 18 – Ms.
Goodwin said she has come to view child marriage in India as a form of human trafficking.
As in trafficking, girls have no say in the arrangement and after their marriages they often experience sexual and physical abuse in their new households. "She is the property of anyone in the household," said Ms. Goodwin.
But because this treatment happens in the realm of marriage, it is seen as separate from human trafficking, she said.
"We overlook this aspect of it because we consider marriage to be so sacred," she said. "Once one begins to unpack what this is all about, one can really see how brutal this is for these young girls."
As with trafficking, money changes hands. In this case, though, it's the "selling" party that makes the payment, in the form of dowry. The broker who helps arrange the match also makes some money. Even though the bride's family isn't getting a payment, there's a financial incentive to marry a girl earlier, since they'll need to pay the groom's family more money to take an educated girl, she found. Also, once a daughter has been sent off, that leaves a little more to go around for everyone else.
In some cases, those who are part of the formal legal system acquiesce in the custom.
"If law after law is passed but the situation is not changing that indicates there's a problem on the ground," said Ms. Goodwin. "One of the challenges happens to be, interestingly enough, with judges."
Ms. Goodwin said that while local judges attended child weddings as guests – and sometimes even solemnized the marriages – they did not often take steps to stop them from happening.
It isn't only women who get married below the legal age. In the 2007-2008 survey, almost a quarter of the boys who had married in the preceding three years were younger than the legal age of 21 when they did so. Ms. Goodwin suggests that the pressure for early marriage from the groom's side could come from mothers-in-law who want free domestic labor.
"I interviewed a young man who was 12, 13, about to get married and the mother specifically made the reference that this was going to be a new worker in the house and she didn't say this in any kind of way that intimated warmth," she said.
One of the problems, as Ms. Goodwin acknowledges in her paper, is that the choice for a bride's family is not always between the good – say, education – and the bad, early marriage. It's often between the bad and the worse, which could involve selling a daughter into prostitution.
But it's not all bad: Urbanization is reducing rates of child marriage.
Ms. Goodwin suggested that the Indian government needs to invest resources to bring some of the features of urban areas to rural areas, namely education and the presence of more people or organizations that might try to uphold the law or advocate with families on behalf of their daughters.
"So long the government treats these communities as being remote, these communities will treat federal law as being remote," she said.
The law professor said that it might be tempting for the government to see the issue of underage marriage as one in which the harm was restricted to the family sphere – and therefore not worth spending a lot of money on. But she said the government should look at the bigger picture, at costs like higher maternal mortality among teen brides, and at the higher rates of malnourishment among them and their children.
"India's economic future depends in part on what it does in these communities," she said.
And then there's the smaller picture.
In her interviews with women who had been married in their teens, Ms. Goodwin said that she would describe them as reconciled to their situation "with regret."
"There is the pressure to go along and to get along as if this is something that is decreed by something higher than government," said Ms. Goodwin. "No one wants to be told that one is violating a long-held, thousands-of-years-old tradition. They're making the best of a very compromised situation."


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High school students and their parents will have four opportunities this summer to attend informal-yet-informative sessions with faculty and other representatives of Penn State Erie, The Behrend College.
The college will host two Spend a Summer Day events, on Friday, July 27, and on Friday, Aug. 10. Each begins at 1 p.m. with a Student Services Fair; faculty from the Sam and Irene Black School of Business, School of Humanities and Social Sciences, School of Science, and the School of Engineering will be available to talk with and answer questions from students and their parents.
The fair will be followed by academic, admissions and financial aid presentations, walking tours of campus, and treats of Penn State's famous Berkey Creamery ice cream. The program concludes at 4:15 p.m.
Two evening events will follow a similar schedule. They begin at 5 p.m. on Thursday, July 26, and Thursday, Aug. 9.
The events are free to prospective students and their families, but advance registration is required and can be made online at behrend.psu.edu, by calling 814-898-6100 (toll free 866-374-3378), or by emailing firstname.lastname@example.com. Can't make one of the planned events? Individual appointments are available at any time.

subset: commoncrawl


text: gzn_march_1532 1532 march gzn yes 02 - March to protest recent police action in Selma, Alabama, March 13, 1965 Larkey, Jay Larkey, Hinda Congress of Racial Equality African Americans--Civil rights--Wisconsin--Milwaukee Civil rights demonstrations--Wisconsin--Milwaukee Civil rights Civil rights--Wisconsin--Milwaukee Civil rights workers--Wisconsin--Milwaukee Civil rights--Alabama--Selma Police brutality--Alabama--Selma Police brutality--Public opinion Civil rights workers--Alabama--Selma African American civil rights workers--Alabama--Selma Civil rights movements--United States--History--20th century Civil rights movements--Alabama--Selma Civil rights demonstrations--Alabama--Selma Civil rights movements--Wisconsin--Milwaukee Offenses against the person--Alabama--Selma Racism--Alabama--Selma African Americans--Social conditions--Alabama--Selma African Americans--Crimes against--Alabama--Selma African Americans--Civil rights--Wisconsin African Americans--Civil rights--Alabama African Americans--Civil rights--History--20th century Commercial buildings--Wisconsin--Milwaukee Parking meters--Wisconsin--Milwaukee Sidewalks--Wisconsin--Milwaukee Race relations Selma (Ala.)--Race relations Milwaukee (Wis.)--Race relations Signs and signboards--Wisconsin--Milwaukee Milwaukee civil rights demonstrators marched to protest police actions in Selma, Alabama that took place on March 7, 1965. The protest in Milwaukee was organized on March 13, 1965. About 2, 500 people marched from the headquarters of CORE to the Milwaukee County Courthouse. Some participants in the protest wore yellow armbands as a form of symbolic speech in the fight for equality in and desegregation of education and its institutions; as first symbolically demonstrated by federal marshals escorting African American children into the newly integrated New Orleans elementary schools, following Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka. Walnut and 3rd Streets--Wisconsin--Milwaukee Golda Meir Library. Special Collections Photographs StillImage http://collections.lib.uwm.edu/u?/march,1532 image/jp2 35 mm color slide UWM MSS 299, Box 1, Folder 4, Slides, 1965, Jay and Hinda Larkey Papers, 1963-1968, 1987, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee Libraries, Archives Department March On Milwaukee - Civil Rights History Project 1965-03-13 United States, Wisconsin, Milwaukee County, Milwaukee, 43.0389025, -87.9064736 United States, Alabama, Dallas County, Selma, 32.4073589, -87.0211007 United States, Alabama, Dallas County, 32.233214, -87.142289 http://rightsstatements.org/vocab/CNE/1.0/ The Board of Regents of the University of Wisconsin System


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Things have gone from head-scratching to heartbreaking for Irish singer Sinead O'Connor.
The 45-year-old took to Twitter to plead for help following her third apparent suicide attempt. The singer, who has been diagnosed as bipolar, reportedly attempted to kill herself while recovering in an Irish hospital for a broken ankle. Just a week prior, she took an overdose of pills while in Los Angeles. She also attempted to end her own life back in 1999, on her 33rd birthday.
"i realize i will be in trouble 4 doing this but...ireland is a VERY hard place to find help in. So having tried other ways 1st im asking," wrote O'Connor. "does any1 know a psychiatrist in dublin or wicklow who could urgently see me today please?'
U.S. & World
She adds, cryptically, "im really un-well...and in danger."
She goes on to admit that her latest suicidal episode was "a cry for help." Her continued meltdown comes after a whirlwind few weeks that saw her get married to a drug counselor, split after 18 days and then apparently reunite.
O'Connor blames the negative press around her marriage to Barry Herridge for contributing to her mental illness. She claims Irish papers are running attack stories about Herridge in an attempt to get him fired as a drug counselor, even alleging that O'Connor is out trying to score drugs while Herridge tends to troubled teens.
She blames the Irish newspaper "Sunday Independent" (which is nicknamed "Sindo") directly. "The sindo article about them trying to lose barry his job and everyone being shit to him for marrying me has spun me off and I'm ill," she wrote.
Hours after her desperate pleas, O'Connor returned to say she felt "much better" and was back on her medication.
Selected Reading: Huffington Post, Sinead O'Connor Twitter Page


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Big Ten Wrap & Tourney PreviewPosted by Brian Goodman on March 10th, 2011
John Templon is the RTC correspondent for the Big Ten. With action set to tip from Indianapolis on Thursday, get set for the postseason with RTC's regular season wrap-up and postseason outlook.
Postseason Preview
The Big Ten Tournament should prove to be quite the entertaining tournament. With so many teams on the bubble, every game is going to have a do-or-die atmosphere to it. Three of the four quarterfinal games, excluding the one in which Ohio State is playing, could propel teams to NCAA Tournament at-large bids. Another important matchup to watch is Northwestern vs. Minnesota in Round 1 – where they'll probably be playing for an NIT berth.
- Cold Teams: Minnesota, Illinois, and Indiana
- Is Battle Ready For last Stand?: The Nittany Lions' Talor Battle will try to finally make the NCAA Tournament. Can he shoot Penn State off the bubble and into the field?
- Is Nolen Healthy?: Al Nolen hasn't played January 22 against Michigan, but he could return this week. Would it be enough to get the Gophers rolling?
- Can Anyone Stop Ohio State?: The Buckeyes look like a juggernaut, and this isn't the time to be putting big decisions in the hands of the selection committee. In order to feel comfortable about its #1 overall seed in the NCAA Tournament, OSU probably needs to win the Big Ten's first. Northwestern played them close at Welsh-Ryan Arena – is a big upset in the making?
- Will Izzo's Tournament Touch Get Going?: Of the teams playing in the first round, Michigan State seems like the most likely candidate to reach the tournament finals. It seems like Tom Izzo just has a knack for this kind of thing by now.
- Is The Next Generation Ready?: There are nine seniors on the three All-Big Ten teams selected by the coaches, and just one freshman. Are players like Ohio State's Aaron Craft, Illinois' Jereme Richmond, Northwestern's JerShon Cobb and Michigan's Tim Hardaway Jr. ready to play significant crunch time roles? Or will they wilt under the bright lights in Indianapolis?
A Look Back
- When the season started, it looked like the Big Ten was separated into three tiers. That ended up being the case. More about this in the power rankings.
- Injuries and personnel moves played a big role in the Big Ten this season. Minnesota has gone from an early season Sweet 16 candidate to an NIT bubble team thanks to the transfer of Devoe Joseph and an injury to Al Nolen. Northwestern played with John Shurna less than 100 percent for most of the season and Indiana has been pummeled by injuries as well. While health was a constant question on those teams, Purdue managed to finish second in the conference even without Robbie Hummel.
All-Conference Team:
- G: E'Twaun Moore, Purdue (18.3 PPG, 5.2 RPG, 3.2 APG)
- G: Jordan Taylor, Wisconsin (18.2 PPG, 4.8 APG, 4.2 RPG, 8.8% TO% which is fifth best in the nation, 130.4 Offensive Rating, good for 11th in the nation)
- F: Jon Leuer, Wisconsin (18.9 PPG, 7.3 PPG)
- F: Jared Sullinger, Ohio State (17.3 PPG, 9.7 RPG, 27.1 DR%, which is 11th in the nation)
- F: JaJuan Johnson, Purdue (20.5 PPG, 8.1 RPG, 2.4 BPG) — Big Ten Player of the Year
Sixth Man of the Year: Aaron Craft, Ohio State (6.9 PPG, 4.7 APG, unanimous selection to All-Big Ten defensive team)
Game of the Year: Wisconsin 71, Ohio State 67 in Madison
Newcomer of the Year: Jared Sullinger, Ohio State
Most Improved Player: Jeff Brooks, Penn State (13.5 PPG, 6.5 RPG)
Glue Guy: David Lighty, Ohio State (12.3 PPG, 4.1 RPG, 3.4 APG)
Power Rankings
The Big Ten ended up breaking into four tiers by the end of the conference season. There are three elite teams, four NCAA bubble teams, two NIT teams and two teams going home early.
1. Ohio State (29-2, 16-2) – The Buckeyes will be a #1 seed in the NCAA Tournament and have a chance to be the top seed overall. The two losses were in conference on the road against Wisconsin and Purdue, two teams that didn't lose a home game all season. Ohio State is a definite Final Four contender and is a balanced juggernaut. Four of the team's players appeared on one of the Big Ten's three all-conference teams and a fourth, Aaron Craft, made the all-freshman team. Last week, Ohio State got its revenge against Wisconsin in record fashion. The Buckeyes made 14 of 15 three-point attempts, setting a record for the best single-game three-point percentage in NCAA history. Jon Diebler led the way by going 7-8 and scoring 27 points. Team MVP: Jared Sullinger
2. Purdue (25-6, 14-4) – A questionable two-point loss to Iowa at Carver-Hawkeye Arena might give some people pause, but it just seems like a lack of focus. Matt Painter has kept this team heading in the right direction, even without Robbie Hummel. Of course having all-league talents like E'Twaun Moore and JaJuan Johnson doesn't hurt. Still, the Boilermakers have gotten key contributions from Lewis Jackson, D.J. Byrd and Ryne Smith and the defense has been outstanding (currently second in the nation in Adjusted Defensive Efficiency according to Ken Pomeroy). The Boilermakers are probably going to be a #2 or #3 seed in the NCAA Tournament and should be able to make a deep run. Team MVP: JaJuan Johnson
3. Wisconsin (23-7, 13-5) – The second slowest team in the country also happens to have the nation's best offense. Thanks to an aversion to turnovers, great free throw shooting and an uncanny ability to this shots the Badgers finished the regular season ranked #1 in Adjusted Offensive Efficiency. Jordan Taylor probably dropped himself from conference player of the year consideration by going 2-9 from the field and scoring just eight points in the loss to the Buckeyes, but that shouldn't diminish the outstanding season he's had. The Badgers are probably looking at a #3 or #4 seed in the NCAA Tournament and it'll be interesting to see what happens if they have to play an underdog that likes to play at a faster tempo. Team MVP: Jordan Taylor
4. Michigan (19-12, 9-9) – John Beilein would get my vote for Big Ten Coach of the Year. He took a young team that was picked by everyone to finish last in the Big Ten and made it into an NCAA contender. By beating Michigan State to close the regular season, the Wolverines probably have done enough to make the field of 68, but a win over Illinois in the quarterfinals of the Big Ten Tournament wouldn't hurt. Freshmen Jordan Morgan (9.5 PPG, 5.6 RPG) and Tim Hardaway Jr. (13.1 PPG, 3.8 RPG) have been outstanding, but sophomore point guard Darius Morris (15.1 PPG, 6.8 APG, 4.0 RPG) is the straw that stirs the drink. Expect to see the Wolverines dancing as very dangerous #10 or 11 seed. Team MVP: Darius Morris
5. Illinois (19-12, 9-9) – The Fighting Illini are wrapping up a season that can only be described as "disappointing." Illinois has a ton of talent and a roster full of seniors, but players like Demetri McCamey, Mike Tisdale and Mike Davis haven't been able to put it together when it counts. It looks like Illinois won't slip to the NIT this season and should be a #8 or 9 seed come Selection Sunday. Of course Bruce Weber's team is 6-9 since starting Big Ten play 3-0, so they're heading in the wrong direction. Team MVP: Demetri McCamey (15.0 PPG, 6.1 APG, 3.4 RPG)
6. Michigan State (17-13, 9-9) – Playing the hardest schedule in the nation has skewed the record of the Spartans, who reached the Final Four a season ago. Kalin Lucas has been trying to will his team to the NCAA Tournament. He's averaged 21.6 points per game over the final five games of the season. Unfortunately Michigan State was only a 3-2 record in those games. The Spartans should make the NCAA Tournament, allowing Tom Izzo to work his March magic again, but they're going to be in the First Four or sitting on the #11 or 12 seed line. Team MVP: Kalin Lucas (17 PPG, 3.3 APG, 1.1 SPG)
7. Penn State (16-13, 9-9) – The Nittany Lions' inability to win a single significant road game and a loss to Maine are probably going to leave them as one of the final teams out of the NCAA Tournament without an upset in the Big Ten Tournament quarterfinals (assuming they get past Indiana). That's too bad, because Talor Battle (20.4 PPG, 4.3 RPG, 3.1 APG) deserved much better than that during his final season. Team MVP: Talor Battle
8. Northwestern (17-12, 7-11) – Despite what the media said about Northwestern's NCAA Tournament hopes at the beginning of the season, this isn't the year that the Wildcats break the curse. The Wildcats are hanging onto the edge of the NIT bubble, but will probably have to beat Minnesota in the first round of the Big Ten Tournament to stay there. Once again defense was the problem as the Wildcats had by far the worst defense in the Big Ten and ranked 150th nationally in Adjusted Defensive Efficiency. It came from a simple problem, too, as there were just too many open shots available against the Wildcats' 1-3-1 and match-up zone defenses. Team MVP: Michael Thompson (15.3 PPG, 2.0 RPG, 4.3 APG)
9. Minnesota (17-13, 6-12) – A five-game losing streak, including losses at Northwestern and home against Penn State this week, dropped the Gophers from NCAA bubble team to NIT bubble in about two weeks. Besides the stellar play of Trevor Mbakwe, the team has really struggled during that stretch. It probably comes from having just one experienced guard on the roster in Blake Hoffarber. Chip Armelin, Maverick Ahimisi and Austin Hollins weren't ready from prime time roles when Al Nolen got hurt. There are rumors that Nolen will be back for the Big Ten Tournament. If that's the cas,e the Gophers could be an intriguing wild card. Team MVP: Trevor Mbakwe (13.7 PPG, 10.5 RPG)
10. Iowa (11-19, 4-14) – By beating Purdue close out the regular season the Hawkeyes claimed sole possession of 10th place in the conference. That might not seem like much, but it's a good building block for Fran McCaffery's first season. McCaffery has brought a different style to the Big Ten and the Hawkeyes were by far the fastest team in the conference at 68.0 possessions per game (102nd in the country). Freshman Melsahn Basabe (11.2 PPG, 6.9 RPG) and junior Bryce Cartwright (10.8 PPG, 5.8 APG) are good building blocks for next season. Team MVP: Matt Gatens (12.6 PPG, 2.5 RPG, 1.9 APG, 1.3 SPG)
11. Indiana (12-19, 3-15) – The Hoosiers didn't win a single road game all season and are currently on an eight-game losing streak going into the Big Ten Tournament. Tom Crean's team is heading home for the season as soon as they lose in Indianapolis. Team MVP: Christian Watford (16.0 PPG, 5.4 RPG)


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The 100 Moments of TSU Athletics presented by Taco Bell® series continues by recognizing a first in Tennessee State football history.
In 1946, TSU won its first of 12 Black College National Championships. In the process, the squad also earned the school's first of 11 Midwestern Conference titles.
Coach Henry Kean's Tigers posted a 10-1 record on the year, with the only loss coming at the hands of North Carolina College in TSU's first appearance in a classic.
Among the victories were a 33-0 win over Knoxville College on homecoming and a narrow one-point win over Southern.
The strength of the 1946 Tigers was its offense. The squad boasted a total of four All-Americans and all four played on the offensive side.
The offense ran through Nathaniel Taylor who also benefitted from playing alongside fellow All-Americans Robert Drummond (tackle), William Washington (end) and Raymond Whitmon (halfback).
Drummond would later make history in 1947 by becoming the first Tiger to be named an All-American in three seasons.
The quartet helped of Drummond, Taylor, Eashington and Whitmon helped TSU put up 248 points in 1946 including two games with over 30 points.
The Tiger defense was no slouch, however. TSU held opponents to just 41 points on the year and pitched six shutouts.
A large core of the 1946 team returned the following year and repeated as champions, posting a perfect 10-0 record.
Kean ended his career with a 93-15-3 record in 10 seasons.
The 100 Moments of TSU Athletics presented by Taco Bell® highlights some of the greatest moments in honor of Tennessee State's centennial celebration. A new moment will be released each weekday for a total of 100. These moments were chosen by the TSU 100 Moments committee, which consists of alums from various departments. TSU has so many great moments, not all can be represented in these 100.
Sports Information Assistant Alex Mitchell contributed to this article.
Follow TSU Athletics on Facebook.com/TSUTigers, Twitter @TSU_Tigers and YouTube


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Limited production vehicles seem to be oozing from every part of the BMW lineup these days. The introduction of the Lime Rock edition M3, the reintroduction of the Alpina 7 series and now the X6 and 6 Series Coupe only add to their growing catalog of "exclusive cars".
Their new BMW Individual X6 Performance Edition (100 units to be produced) and the 6 Series Frozen Silver Edition Coupe (55 units to be produced) will now add to the growing list of "rare" BMWs. Offering performance, trim and exterior finishes unique to each vehicle. Only 50 X6 xDrive35i, 50 X6 xDrive50i and 55 6 Series Coupes are said to make their way into production.
The BMW Individual X6 Performance Edition is available in an M Performance Package equipped xDrive35i (+15hp, +30 lb.ft.) and an xDrive50i (+40hp, +30 lb.ft.). Both trims will come in an exclusive BMW Individual Pearl Silver metallic paint, 20-inch Y-Spoke wheels and black chrome exhaust tips. Inside will host alcantara door panel inserts and fully wrapped headliner. The seats, dashboard and center console are covered in BMW Individual Carbon Leather with Sakhir Orange accent stitching.
The BMW 6 Series Frozen Silver Edition Coupe is built on the 650i and 650i xDrive platforms. All units will be finished in the iconic BMW Individual Frozen Silver exterior paint with black mirror caps. 20-inch dual colored Ferric Gray / gloss M Performance wheels, M sport package and the Executive Package combined bring a new level of luxury to the Coupe. Inside Black Nappa leather and Gray Popular wood surround the occupants. Those who opt for the xDrive model will also receive the Cold Weather Package, complete with heated steering wheel and a ski storage bag.
MSRP for the BMW X6 come in at $81,695 for the xDrive35i and $92,895 xDrive50i (destination & handling included). The BMW 6 Series Coupe Frozen Silver Edition 650i has an MSRP of $99,295 and the 650i xDrive comes in at $102,695. Prospective customers for these Edition vehicles should contact an Authorized BMW Center to inquire about availability.


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Thanks to Toronto Life's The Hype blog for alerting me to this blog post on reading by Margaret Atwood. I think her point about ebooks stands for magazines as well. (Emphasis mine.)
I speculate that the availability of e-books is actually increasing reading, as e-books are cheap, portable en mass, and instantly available. I also speculate – based on the two previous blogposts I did on this subject, and the wide range of comments received – that readers, given the choice, would like to have both formats – the e-book to take on travels long or short, and to read to see if the book is one you might want to keep; and the paper book for favourites, gifts, cozy reading at home (in bed and bath, for instance).


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Monday, February 22, 2010
Strong Verse, Part 1: Looking forward (and backward)
8 comments:
- Patrick Gillespie said...
Hey G.M.! Just happened to drop by Silliman's and there you were.
I personally don't have anything against any particular form, least of all the lyric.
But the lyric, like free verse, is easy to write. There are no rules. And so everyone writes them whether they have talent or not. And who's going to tell them they have no talent? - by what criteria?
Writing narrative poetry isn't going to solve anything unless the poets writing it have some talent - maybe even genius.
Readers just want good poetry.
The general reader still buys poetry, though it's generally the poetry of the early 20th century or before. I suspect that if your theory were right, one would expect them to buy far more narrative poetry. But they don't. When the general reader has a favorite poet or poem they are almost universally shorter poems or lyrics. (I base this on the various "favorite poem" projects that have popped up every so often.)
I know that you love narrative poetry, but it's a small niche. I think you might be deluding yourself if you believe the reading public wants narrative poetry, but I'm ever so read to be proven wrong. Please. :-)
- March 2, 2010 at 8:16 AM
- G. M. Palmer said...
Hey Patrick!
I happened to check my analytics page and see Ron linked to not 1 but 2 pages this morning. Huzzah!
Oh, new baby is awesome by the way. If you're a facebooky sort of person there are cute baby pics to be had.
Well, remember that these buyers are buying about 1/10 of a percent of all books (that's about what all poetry sales represent) so we're still talking a nick of a niche.
We have to get poetry back in front of people--that's what I'm talking about in this series--making sure we write and encourage the three tiers of poetry--fun, full, and van so that we can encourage, sustain, and develop both poetry and a love of poetry among the widest possible audience.
- March 2, 2010 at 8:22 AM
- G. M. Palmer said...
Oh and two more things:
I think I owe Ron Silliman a drink if he's going to be at AWP. He serves as a fine foil and his links cain't be beat.
And re: the lyric:
I learned all I need to know about hyperbole from Bret Easton Ellis.
- March 2, 2010 at 8:39 AM
- Patrick said...
//Oh, new baby is awesome by the way.//
:-) Have fun and enjoy! Nothing better.
//If you're a facebooky sort of person there are cute baby pics to be had.//
I tried facebook for about two weeks, then got the hell off. I'm not the kind who likes lots of contact or "friends". In fact, Facebook cheapens the whole concept of a "friend". Folks who like me will know where to find me.
- March 2, 2010 at 9:02 AM
- Patrick said...
Sheesh... don't know where that last smiley came from.
- March 2, 2010 at 9:04 AM
- G. M. Palmer said...
Aw, don't hate on Facebook.
It's a great way to spread pictures around!
- March 2, 2010 at 11:36 AM
- J said...
GM actually approaches Truth, but it's not the "the lyric mode is useless", but....something like "poetry is 95% uselessness".
Maybe start by emulating, say,
Macbeth. or Moby Dick. Or the Manson phamily tragedy for that matter
- March 2, 2010 at 11:46 AM
- Patrick Gillespie said...
/GM actually approaches Truth, but it's not the "the lyric mode is useless", but....something like "poetry is 95% uselessness".//
Ha! Right.... But 95% of poetry is lyric, so I'm not sure what point your making!
- March 4, 2010 at 8:31 AM


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No matter what plan emerges from the debt talks in Washington, future Social Security benefits will be trimmed back.
As Congress and the White House continue their dysfunctional dance toward financial Armageddon, the elusive, $4 trillion Grand Plan that would include Social Security and Medicare reform has fallen off the table.
But in the early stages of the budget battle, a series of proposals surfaced that provide clues to what broad reform of Social Security might look like.
More must-read stories
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- Wild Wall St.
There's widespread agreement that the program needs fixing. When first created in 1935, the earliest retirement age was 65, a year older than the average life expectancy. Today, with the average life expectancy at 79, beneficiaries can begin collecting at 62 and might well live for decades into retirement.
Meanwhile, the base of support from workers paying into the system has shrunk dramatically. In 1950, there were 16 active workers paying for every retiree. Today the ratio is three to one, according to the bipartisan National Committee on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform, a committee appointed by President Barack Obama and chaired by former Sens. Alan Simpson and Erskine Bowles to come up with a plan to cut the budget deficit.Story: Debt talk damage has already been done
With more money flowing out and less money flowing in, and the baby boom generation hitting retirement age in force, the Social Security trust fund is expected begin shrinking by 2015. By 2037, the fund is projected to run out of cash, which means it could only pay out as much as it takes in. That would force immediate benefit cuts of about 25 percent if no changes were made before then.
Unless the program can be made to pay for itself, Congress would have to appropriate more than $13 trillion over the next 75 years to make up the shortfall, according to the Brookings Institution.
This wouldn't be the first time Congress enacted major changes to get Social Security back on track. In 1983, a series of tax increases and future benefit cuts extended the program's financial lifespan. The full-benefit age was lifted from 65 to 67, a portion of benefits were made subject to taxes and cost of living adjustments were delayed by six months. The overall impact was to cut benefits for a current retiree by about 19 percent, according to the National Academy of Social Insurance.
None of the current proposals envisions a cut in current benefits. But they all employ a mix of future cuts, taxes and changes in the cost of living formula.
HIGHER TAXES: As recently as the 1980s, the Social Security payroll tax covered roughly 90 percent of wages, according the Simpson-Bowles commission. But as wages above that cap have grown faster than the cap, the proportion of overall wages has fallen. Today, only 86 percent of wages are collected; by 2020 that will fall to less than 83 percent. The commission recommended gradually raising the cap to restore that 90 percent coverage by 2050. That would mean raising the cap to $190,000 in 2020, compared to roughly $168,000 called for in the current law.
RAISE THE RETIREMENT AGE: There are various proposals, but they all reflect the reality that life expectancy has risen since the program was created 75 years ago — and continues to rise. The age for eligibility already has risen to 67 for anyone born after 1960. Some proposals suggest moving the full retirement age to 70 and lifting the early retirement age for partial benefits — currently 62 — to 64 or 65. Others also include benchmarking future increases in the retirement age to advances in longevity.
CHANGE COST INDICES: Annual cost-of-living increases are based on the government's Consumer Price Index, which also is used in many government and private labor contracts to set pay levels. One commonly mentioned proposal involves using an alternative version of the CPI (called the "chained" index) that takes into account changes in consumer habits as prices rise. For example, if beef prices rise, and consumers switch to cheaper chicken, the chained index would reflect a slower increase in costs. Opponents argue that the chained CPI ignores the impact of rapidly rising health care costs, which hit older households harder and do not offer easy substitutions.
CHANGE THE BENEFIT FORMULA: Benefits for new retirees are based on their wage history, using a formula that takes wage inflation into account. Because wages have historically risen faster than consumer prices, some analysts argue that indexing benefits to wage gains tends to increase benefits slightly faster than living costs over time.
SLOW BENEFIT GROWTH FOR WEALTHY RETIREES: Changes in benefit formulas could also result in slower gains for new retirees on the upper end of the income ladder. Under the current formula, benefits are based on a percentage of lifetime wages. Changing that formula could slow benefit increases for top wage earners, who currently pay taxes only on their first $106,800 of income.
EXTEND BENEFITS FOR THE POOR, "VERY OLD": Not all proposals would save money. One of those would increase benefits for retirees after 20 years. The proposal seeks to address the rapid expansion of people living to 85 and beyond who are in danger of outliving their retirement savings. The Simpson-Bowles proposal, for example, includes a "20-year bump up" that would add 5 percent to a retiree's paycheck 20 years after they begin collecting benefits.
Another proposal would increase benefits for low-wage workers by creating a new "minimum benefit" equal to 125 percent of the poverty rate, phased in by 2017 and indexed to wages after that. The minimum would be phased down for workers with less than 30 years and more than 10 years of employment.
© 2013 msnbc.com Reprints


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Reviewed By John S (Stow, OH) Reviewed for a 2010 Toyota Venza —4/11/2015 4:59 AM
If I had to look for a complaint...the pics in the directions r black and white with black lead arrarrows to direct installation. The arrows in some instances blended into the pics. That's my negative. Directions straight forward, ez to follow. Installation time roughly an hour. Results, noticeably faster acceleration and nice sound increase during acceleration. I don't know what it does for mileage because I didn't check but I got what I was looking for as far as performance.


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There was a to-do about Gears of War being leaked a day or so ago, and while that turned out to be fake, the Final Fantasy XII leak is very real. For obvious reasons, I'm not going to link you to it, nor will I ever endorse or condone piracy so I really hope you don't discuss it here if you decide to grab it. It's not hard to find, especially when Digg.com has a link to it on their front page. This has to be the easiest pirated game to find, and being on the front page of Digg is pretty much an advertisement at this rate.
I wonder how that works though. Is this something that Digg plans on taking down? Posting links to warez is a bad thing to become known for; I'm not sure if they could be legally at risk here, but I think it's safe to say that's not a risk they should want to take. Some links don't really need to be online in such an easy-to-find way, not matter how many people "digg" them. I'm not sure how they plan on handling this, or if the link will eve be up by the time this goes live, but I'm already surprised by how long it's been available without anyone at the site doing anything about it.
At this stage too many people have it to matter, as it's already all over the Internet. Still, interest aggregators like Digg should have a much faster response time when dealing with pirated games; if they even have a plan at all.


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G4 Elite | 02 - 08 Dodge Ram 1500 8ft
The G4 Elite is the latest model in the long line of innovative Fold-a-Cover products. It's upgraded flush mounted latch handles allow you to access the cargo area with two fingers in less than two seconds! The best part? Like every Fold-a-Cover before it, you can open your cover without having to open your tailgate.


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Conduct your very own imaginary deep-space voyage! Children may create roles, build on creativity and explore language through this beautiful rocket. Made of wood. Measures 76 H x 40 W x 40cm D. Ages 3yrs+
Hape Four-Stage Rocket Ship
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Conduct your very own imaginary deep-space voyage! Play with a playmate to come up with a spacefaring story! Explain what your astronauts and aliens can do in all the different levels of the rocket ship!
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Presidential Hopefuls: Newt Gingrich
Republican presidential hopeful Newt Gingrich has come to a better appreciation for the beginnings of life — and recently reaffirmed that new understanding.
WASHINGTON — Newt Gingrich got in hot water with pro-lifers late last year when he expressed his belief that human life begins after the implantation of an embryo, not at conception.
In a now-famous interview on ABC News, Jake Tapper persisted, asking the Catholic convert if "implantation is the moment for you." Gingrich went even further afield from the Catholic and pro-life position: "Implantation and successful implantation," he replied.
As might be expected, the reaction from pro-lifers was intense and instantaneous.
The Gingrich campaign responded quickly to the controversy, issuing an early December statement that did not refer to the interview but affirmed that the candidate believes that human life begins at conception.
"I believe that every unborn life is precious, no matter how conceived," the former speaker of the House of Representatives said in the statement, putting himself on record as being against exceptions in the cases of rape or incest.
Georgia Right to Life president Daniel Becker took note of the candidate's re-stated position. Becker told the Register that in the past his organization had never been able to support Gingrich — who represented Georgia's 6th Congressional District in the U.S. House of Representatives from 1979 until 1999 — because Gingrich previously allowed exceptions in the cases of rape and incest.
"This is a significant move for him and a tremendous thing for the right-to-life movement," Becker said.
People familiar with the situation said that Gingrich held serious and substantive discussions with Catholic and pro-life leaders in the aftermath of the ABC interview.
"It strikes me that what happened [in the interview] was a bit of backsliding to his pre-Catholic self," said Matthew Franck, director of the Simon Center on Religion and the Constitution at the Witherspoon Institute, which studies the moral foundations of free and democratic societies. "The position on implantation was a very long-standing one, and his reversion was reflexive and habitual. As soon as he was reminded of Catholic teaching, he came back to his Catholic sense of self. He's getting better [on the life issues], and I believe his coming into the Church is part of the reason why."
While serving in Congress, Gingrich attained a 98.6 favorable rating from the National Right to Life Committee. He has pledged to sign two pro-life executive orders his first day in office if elected to the presidency. One order would reauthorize President Ronald Reagan's Mexico City Policy, which bars U.S. aid to non-government agencies or charities abroad that perform or promote abortion. The other would be the "conscience clause" to protect health professionals from performing "any action or procedure that he or she finds morally or ethically objectionable."
Gingrich has signed the Susan B. Anthony List's Pro-Life Presidential Pledge, which calls for defunding Planned Parenthood, as well as signing into law a Pain-Capable Unborn Child Protection Act and nominating candidates for the Supreme Court who will apply the "original meaning" of the Constitution.
Gingrich has also signed Personhood USA's Personhood Republican Presidential Candidate Pledge, which supports "the unalienable personhood of every American, from the moment of conception until natural death." Signers promise to support a human-life amendment to the Constitution and "endorse legislation to make clear that the 14th Amendment protections apply to unborn children."
Gingrich also appears to have reversed his previous stand on embryonic stem-cell research. In 2001, when President George W. Bush was weighing the issue, Gingrich said to reporter Paula Zahn on Fox News that he hoped Bush would "draw a sharp distinction between research on fetuses, which I think would be abhorrent and anti-human, and research on cells that are in fertility clinics that have never been in anyone's body."
However, at the GOP debate in December in Sioux City, Iowa, Gingrich said, "I am against any kind of experimentation on embryos," which "should be considered life because by definition they've been conceived."
A month before the Sioux City debate, National Review's Ramesh Ponnuru noted a "different rhetorical emphasis" in Gingrich's 2011 campaign pronouncements and previous statements regarding embryonic stem-cell research, but called for Gingrich to be more specific about the issue.
Marriage Issues
While Gingrich has recalibrated his position on pro-life issues, his approach to same-sex "marriage" has remained unchanged.
Back in 1996, he sponsored the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA), upholding traditional marriage. And this year, when a homosexual activist challenged his position at a campaign rally, Gingrich responded that if same-sex "marriage" was a voter's defining issue, Barack Obama was his candidate.
Gingrich opposes adoption by homosexual couples. But he does believe that certain practical "accommodations" can be made. In 2002, he told Time magazine, "There are a lot of practical relationships that we ought to find a way to accommodate. If your partner ends up in the hospital, there ought to be some ability to visit that partner. But I am not in favor of creating the notion of 'gay marriage' or 'gay adoption.'"
Gingrich has signed the National Organization for Marriage's pledge to preserve traditional marriage. The pledge includes support for a constitutional amendment defining marriage as the union of one man and one woman.
Brian Brown, director of the National Organization for Marriage, notes that Gingrich has "thought deeply about the issue of same-sex 'marriage' and has spoken out about the effects of redefining marriage on religious liberty and the courts and has released a proposal on religious liberty that is very comprehensive and shows what is at stake, that people of faith have been targeted and religious organizations have suffered."
Indeed, Gingrich has vowed that, if elected, his first executive order would be to establish a commission on religious freedom. Echoing the fears of the U.S. bishops, he has argued that the First Amendment is "being twisted" to "fit a postmodern world" and that "public expressions of faith in some quarters have gone from being normal to unacceptable."
In spite of his support for traditional marriage, some voters may have trouble pulling a lever for Gingrich, who has been divorced twice and is married to Callista Gingrich, a former congressional staffer whom he dated while he was married.
Stewardship Issues
As the Republican hopeful with the longest history in the public spotlight, Gingrich's economic plan and voting record provide insights into his likely priorities as president.
While a member of Congress, Gingrich led the "Republican Revolution" of 1994, which ushered in the first Republican majority in the House in four decades. He famously tried to convince President George H.W. Bush not to renege on his "read-my-lips promise" and raise taxes. His voting record between 1979 and 1998 earned him a 61% favorable score (out of a possible 100%) from the National Taxpayers Union, which supports lower taxes. The average score for Republicans of that era was 56%.
Today, a cornerstone of his economic platform is halting the 2013 tax increases that would result from the end of Bush-era tax cuts. Gingrich believes that stopping the tax increase will promote stability in the economy and notes that job creation improved after the cuts were extended by Congress. Gingrich would make the rates permanent.
The free-market-oriented Club for Growth describes Gingrich in a presidential white paper as being "excellent on tax issues, except when he's not." While Gingrich has always favored lower taxes and a pro-growth agenda, he has also supported what the group calls "gimmicky" tax credits, including one to help people buy computers and another to help those who wanted to travel after 9/11, to promote desired behavior.
Gingrich's economic-policy proposals included an optional flat tax of 15%. Taxpayers who want to file under the current tax code (which would include the Bush tax cuts) would have that choice. But others could file their taxes "on a postcard," as the campaign website puts it.
"The flat tax would generate growth," American Enterprise Institute economist Kevin Hassett said. Hassett is critical of Gingrich's plan to make the flat tax optional, however.
"I think a proposal like that is a bad idea because it doesn't address the complexity of the current tax code. The flat tax should be mandatory. However, other than that, this is a solid proposal that would really help the economy," Hassett added.
The Tax Foundation, which seeks to educate taxpayers about tax policy and the burden borne by them, gave Gingrich a C minus, partly because of the uncertainty generated by an optional flat-tax plan.
William McBride, an economist at the Tax Foundation, pointed out that the Gingrich flat-tax option preserves the earned-income tax credit, the credit for charitable giving and the child credit.
"That amounts to a huge tax cut for everybody," said McBride, who was critical of Gingrich for not being specific about what government cuts he would make to offset this.
One of Gingrich's economic advisers is author Peter Ferrara, a senior fellow for entitlement and budget policy at the Heartland Institute and former staff member of the White House in the Reagan administration and an associate deputy U.S. attorney general in the George H. W. Bush administration.
"Gingrich has a bold and specific vision that is a modernized version of Reaganomics and embodies the supply-side agenda," Ferrara told the Register. Indeed, economist Arthur Laffer, considered an architect of the Reagan economic policies, has endorsed Gingrich.
"Newt has the best plan for jobs and economic growth of any candidate in the field," Laffer argued when he announced his endorsement on Dec. 27. Supporters of supply-side economics contend that tax cuts, including low individual and corporate taxes, will promote investment and create prosperity.
Ferrara said that Gingrich's plan for entitlement reform rests on "structural reforms, no benefit cuts and market incentives."
Pie in the Sky?
Gingrich supports reducing regulation, which he believes is an obstacle to economic growth. He advocates repealing both the Sarbanes-Oxley Act, which he blames for discouraging investment, and the Dodd-Frank Law, which he says is harming small banks.
Like all GOP candidates, Gingrich has pledged to overturn the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, which some critics refer to as Obamacare. He has attacked former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney, the front-runner in the Republican field for president, because the health-care program he created in Massachusetts has a mandate that requires citizens to purchase health insurance. It is often considered a state-level version of the similar mandate in Obamacare.
Gingrich was embarrassed recently when The Wall Street Journal unearthed a 2006 newsletter published by Gingrich in which he praised the Romney plan he now criticizes. Gingrich hailed the Romney plan as "the most interesting effort to solve the uninsured problem in America today."
Gingrich, however, was not without criticism of the plan even in the 2006 newsletter, including his concern that the "exhaustive" list of conditions that must be covered could bankrupt the program.
Still, Tad DeHaven, a scholar at the Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank, isn't sold on Gingrich's commitment to small government. "I don't see him as someone who can be trusted to pursue a limited-government agenda," DeHaven said.
Kevin Hassett of the American Enterprise Institute disagrees.
"The one thing Newt brings to the table that the others don't have," said Hassett, "is that he would have the understanding of Congress not only to get Obamacare repealed but to get an alternative passed. It is going to take a lot of strategizing, and Newt is the guy to do that."
Charlotte Hays writes from Washington.
The Register has profiled candidates who are
vying for the White House in 2012. They can be found at
NCRegister.com and searching for 'Presidential Hopefuls.'
- Keywords:
- January 29-February 11, 2012


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|Version 6 (modified by 9 years ago) (diff),
Pros and Cons of BuildBot
This page is dedicated to a summary of the things BuildBot does well and the areas in which it is lacking. The goal of this page is to provide information to future maintainers of Twisted's continuous integration system.
- It does the job. Despite the list of "cons" below, Buildbot has provided us with years of build reporting and post-commit testing.
- It can parse the output of
trialand provide summary reports that enumerate the problems with a build.
- It can build specified branches, and along with
force-builds.pyit provides a reasonably nice interface to both submitting and viewing the results on a particular branch.
- "High Watermark" failure reporting allows us to make progress on long-term issues like "number of warnings" and "number of pydoctor errors".
- Builders can be segregated into "supported" and "unsupported", allowing us to have at-a-glance views of both the builders that should be green and the ones we hope will be green eventually.
- Slaves can check source directly out of version control.
Ease of Use
- It's very easy for third parties to do the initial setup of a build slave, allowing people to contribute hardware with relatively little friction.
- The connection between BuildBot slaves and the master is somewhat unreliable.
- Slaves with low-bandwidth connections or slaves with many builders configured tend to lose their connection and not re-establish it without manual intervention (typically in the form of a slave restart). The cause of this is unclear.
- Busy slaves tend to spuriously time out while uploading large build artifacts. It seems most likely that this is caused by the ping/timeout mechanism misbehaving, with ping responses getting stuck behind large transfers that take longer than the timeout.
- The master itself is often non-responsive, losing its IRC connection and taking many minutes to respond to web status requests.
- The web status is rendered from a significant quantity of data stored in pickles on disk. The entire rendering process is expensive and no results are ever cached.
- Certain web status views require searching backwards through all available history due to the lack of an indexing mechanism on relevant fields (such as branch name) of build data. As time goes on, this cost increases.
- Tricky Windows file access issues are not handled gracefully.
- Access to files is often denied (apparently spuriously) on Windows, causing source checkouts to fail, test runs to fail, individual test methods to fail, etc. The consequences range in severity from a failed build which is never retried to a build with a failed test which is irrelevant noise.
- Build logs are lost intermittently for reasons unknown.
- Slaves are provided to Twisted by a number of parties. It is often difficult to get these parties to upgrade software on the slave.
- New master functionality often requires a slave upgrade, due to the implementation approach of putting Python code into the slave package to implement certain operations (eg source checkout behaviors).
- The master's web status views are slow to the point of interfering with reliability (see above).
- Older slaves have profligate network usage due to miniscule message size for log monitoring (see the problem of upgrading slaves). Apart from wasting bandwidth, this taxes limited CPU resources on the master.
- There is no concept of a group of builds of a particular version of the source. This notion is heavily relied upon by the Twisted development process, since we build branches on BuildBot before merging them into trunk. The result of the builds across all of the supported builders has to be synthesized by a developer reading a web page.
- There are no reports, or reporting functionality, such as tracking or graphing of statistics, such as "number of failed builds per week" or "average test-run time". The difficulty of accessing the build history as structured data (due to the aforementioned massive-pile-of-pickles problem) makes it difficult to implement any custom reporting.
- Support for on-demand slaves is incomplete. Cloud machines or on-demand VMs on our own hardware would help (particularly during sprints), but BuildBot has poor support for EC2 (tending to leave VMs running indefinitely) and little or no support for other virtualization systems.


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WEDNESDAY, Aug. 1, 2012 (HealthDay News) -- Introducing a pet into the home of a child with autism may help that child develop improved social behaviors, new research finds.
The study, from French researchers, is the first strong scientific evidence that animals may help foster social skills in individuals with autism, but it also reinforces what clinicians have been hearing anecdotally for years.
"We hear from parents a lot that having a pet or interacting with an animal really helps their child's social behavior, but there hasn't been a study so far that has looked at that scientifically," said Alycia Halladay, director of environmental research at Autism Speaks. "This offers some intriguing evidence to confirm what parents have been saying."
Halladay was not involved with the study, which was published online Aug. 1 in the journal PLoS ONE.
Problems with communication are one of the hallmarks of autism and strategies to combat this are central to autism therapy.
According to Halladay, some people with autism use service dogs but usually to address a particular handicap, such as problems with motor coordination or hearing loss, although not yet for social skills.
Previous studies have verified that having a pet in the house actually improves family bonding and can improve the social skills of a non-autistic child as he or she learns to share with the pet and care for it.
To see if pets might have the same effect in children with autism, the study authors compared the children's social interactions (as reported by the parents of the children with autism) in three different settings: households that had never had a pet; homes that had had a pet since the child's birth; and households that had acquired a pet after the child turned 5.
In total, 260 individuals with autism were involved and the researchers were most interested in social interactions when the child was 4 or 5 years of age, because this is when the social impairments are often at a peak.
Out of 36 measures, participants who had acquired a pet after they were born scored higher in the two categories of "offering to share" and "offering comfort" after having the pet for a few years.
There was no relationship between each individual's IQ and the impact of the pet, leading the authors to conclude that "the benefits that the animals may have on individuals with autism don't seem related to how serious the autism was," said study author Marine Grandgeorge, clinical research associate at the Autism Resource Center of Academic Hospital in Brest, France.
Pets may promote pro-social behavior by acting as "distracters," Grandgeorge suggested.
"When a human is in a stressful situation, a pet seems to distract him/her from the [anxiety-producing] stimulus," she explained.
Another possibility is that the pet may help the child learn how to interpret communication signals and cues, enabling them to adjust their behavior, she added.
As to why introducing a pet later in life would have the greater effect, one possible explanation is that "the arrival of a pet strengthens the cohesion of the family," said Grandgeorge. "Most families acquiring a pet experienced an increase in quantity and quality of time spent together, and felt happier after the pet's arrival. This new mood may have positive effects on individuals with autism."
But positive findings from this one small study are not necessarily a reason to go out and buy or adopt a pet because the strategy could backfire, Grandgeorge said.
"Anecdotally, I observed a child who was focused all the time on his cat. He [had to] know where it was, what it was doing all the time and he was setting up rituals with it [and] being separated [from the] cat was a source of anxiety," Grandgeorge recounted. "All the family, including the cat, lived sorely with this situation."
More information
The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has more on autism spectrum disorders.


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The Friendship of Cal and Elizabeth
Words in Air: The Complete Correspondence Between Elizabeth Bishop and Robert Lowell
The selected letters of Elizabeth Bishop (edited by Robert Giroux) and of Robert Lowell (edited by Saskia Hamilton) have been warmly praised and much quoted by biographers and critics. Thomas Travisano, one of Bishop's most incisive commentators, has now joined with Saskia Hamilton to issue in a single book the moving thirty-year correspondence between Bishop and Lowell, revealing how this long literary and personal friendship developed and evolved, underwent painful strains, and always recovered. The poets were often geographically very distant from each other (Lowell in America, Bishop in Brazil; Lowell in England, Bishop in America); and even when they were on the same continent, they were rarely in the same state (Lowell in New York, Bishop in Oregon or Massachusetts). If they were to continue to be friends, it would have to be chiefly on the page; but each was so essential to the other that the correspondence—sometimes delayed, but always resumed—was never allowed to die.
To read through the eight hundred pages of this edition is of course unnatural; it exists to be looked into, to be browsed in, to be leafed through. (In absorbing this long relationship, the reader is greatly helped by the detailed annotation of the letters: Travisano and Hamilton have minutely identified every poem, every article, every person, every event mentioned by the poets.) Since many of the most significant literary letters had already been singled out by biographers and critics, even before the publication of the individual letter-editions, what remains to be gleaned from this new overview? It is the often delicate negotiation back and forth between two difficult and distressed poets, determined to keep the current of their writing truthful, yet equally determined to encourage and praise.
What was it that made "Cal" and "Elizabeth"—as they called each other—so necessary to each other's happiness? Certainly, they both had other literary friends and acquaintances. Lowell had three literary wives—Jean Stafford, Elizabeth Hardwick, and Caroline Blackwood—but they were all novelists; it is probably no accident (in spite of his delight in intelligent and literary women) that he never married a poet. Before she ever met Lowell, Bishop had known—in a great stroke of luck—the long-lived Marianne Moore, who became a warmly interested mentor and friend. Lowell had as his closest Kenyon friends the novelist Peter Taylor and, more uneasily, the poet and critic (and novelist) Randall Jarrell. Yet Lowell and Bishop came together from their first meeting with an almost magnetic force, and clung to each other from then on. In fact, Lowell long cherished a fantasy (not shared by Bishop) that they might have married—and the fact that they did not was, he said, the one great might-have-been in his life.
As we see the letters against the background of the lives, we find the likenesses that brought the poets into close sympathy with each other. Poetry was the first and foremost: they were each other's admiring readers. But there were many other resemblances. They both had trust funds, shared a mild…
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The POC Eastern States Cup is proud to announce "The Loeka Women's Challenge". Based on the popular POC ESC Team Challenge, the Loeka Women's Challenge will pay $1000.00 to the top four women in points, regardless of class. In this unique challenge the beginners have as much as a chance of winning cash as the pro women.
First place prize will be $400, 2nd is $300, 3rd will collect $200 and the 4th place woman will go home with $100 cash. Loeka Clothing is stoked to make this challenge possible for women in all classes of riding.
"We really had great results with the POC Team Challenge last year; it added an extra dimension to the races. The Loeka Women's Challenge seemed a perfect program to do the same, while giving back to the racers. Women Cyclists are often overlooked. This challenge is targeted to the ladies and we have a great partner in Loeka that made it possible." Say George Ulmer from the POC ESC.
Rory, Owner of Loeka Clothing, says: "Loeka is extremely proud and excited to present the Loeka Women's Challenge. We believe the Challenge set up is a fantastic way to get more women into riding and racing. This challenge gives amateurs as much of a chance as the pro's to take home the prize money. We created Loeka not only to design great clothing for women but also to help build a strong community of female riders from beginners to professionals by encouraging more and more females to try/take up cycling."
Loeka was started in the Spring 2005 when a friend of Rory's complained about the lack of cycling apparel for women – lacking style, fit, and comfort. With that in mind, Loeka was born to create a women's specific clothing line that is flattering to the female figure, feminine without being "girly", functional, and comfortable.
The POC Eastern States Cup features two USA Cycling USAC Pro Gravity Tour National Series races; the USA Cycling Eastern Regional Championship and five USA Cycling State Championships. The 2012 Eastern States Cup Season has over $28,000 available in cash prizes to amateurs and pros this season. Reaching new heights during its third season, the POC ESC has grown to 14 races. The series is the fastest growing and best downhill mountain bike race series in the USA.
Source: George Ulmer


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'Kinky Boots' kicks off national tour in Vegas
Photo: Invision
NEW YORK (AP) -- Fresh off its Tony Award-winning night, "Kinky Boots" is planning a national tour that will kick off in Las Vegas in September.
Producers said Thursday the tour will start at the Smith Center for the Performing Arts. No other cities were announced but producer Daryl Roth said in a statement it will go "from coast to coast."
"Kinky Boots" is based on a real-life shoe factory that struggles until it finds new life in drag footwear. It has songs by Cyndi Lauper and a story by Harvey Fierstein. It won six Tonys on Sunday, including best musical.


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Wow, I have really been kinda slow in the blog department for a couple of weeks now. I have a few things in queue that i will be letting out within the next week.
I got notice today that I have a presentation on the slate for SQL Saturday #54 – woohoo. I was honestly unsure of whether I would be able to present. I was hopeful but this is a new venture for me. I hope to get to meet some of you at SQL Saturday 54.
You can find more info on it here. You should be able to read my little blurb for the presentation as well as find a bit of a bio about me there.
BTW, I am a bit stoked to be able to do this in the community.


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Thanks for getting back to me. Look forward to seeing what is recommended.
Know Bob well used to run there often haven't in the last couple of years.
Paul Brown
I'll do Paul. I'm going to contact Bob Montler between Tyrone and Altoona. He has some awsome grounds and I'm told he his very knowledgeable about seed. I hope we have a dry spring because we have alot of dirt work to do before we will be ready to seed.
Thanks Paul. Our home came with a security system that we have never used. I will look into it. Might be worth the peace of mind to know the home has a little more protection when we are going to be gone for so long. Ann
The trip was great. Accomodations were less than primitive but the company and fishing were great!


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Drake - Teach U A Lesson (Freestyle) lyrics
[Verse 1: Drake]
Me and you so crucial baby
And that champagne so fuchsia baby
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And take you back home to St. Lucia baby
When raindrops hit the tan roof its crazy
That's a metaphor, did I lose ya baby?
When you are wet and covered in sweat
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If it's over fast then I promise you will relapse
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Cause guaranteed I'mma bring a lesson along
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Instead of holding out wondering what it coulda been
I confess this address to you
And I'm the post man looking for a slot I can put it in
[Lyrics from: https:/lyrics.az/drake/comeback-season/teach-u-a-lesson-freestyle.html]
With no New York number mom still upstairs
I'm two floors under but my room's sound proof
You so tempted to satisfy your urge so you don't wonder
I know I told you before I'll grab that for ya like holding a door
Cause mines it Polo and yours is Vickie
And they just spread all over the floor like
[Hook: Robin Thicke]
You feel so good
You smell so good
You feel so warm
Just like I knew you would
Can't let you go
Can't let you go
I can't let you go
[Verse 2: Robin Thicke]
You were late to school
I gonna have to see you after cla**
You've been a bad girl
Some's gonna have to teach you a lesson
You're a bad girl
Someone's gonna have to straighten you up
You've been a bad girl
Someone's gonna have to teach ya


text:
^ Will they build a parking garage for the Pathmark?
i think that pathmark is the highest grossiing supermarket in manhattan.
Also, i think they still have about 40 years on their lease, hence the previous proposals calling for it to remain open- but who knows
^ Will they build a parking garage for the Pathmark?
theres actually already an underground garage under pathmark. the entrance is in the rear off southstreet.
Unless you have something more concrete to back that up, I think I'll trust my intuition that they are in trouble.
According to the NY Sun the highest grossing Pathmark is at 125 / Lex (bottom of page 2) ...
The highest grossing Pathmark in the chain is located on 125th Street and
Lexington Avenue and the second is at 146th Street and Bradhurst Avenue.
^^ i'm human.. i was wrong
There is no "current design", unless you have some insider knowledge. Those sketches are just massing studies.
A YIMBY Crowd Rallies on the Lower East Side
By Mathew R. Warren
December 20, 2007, 3:20 pm
It's not every day that a community rallies in support of a chain store. But that is what a group of Lower East Side and Chinatown residents did today, in support of the Pathmark at 227 Cherry Street. Call them YIMBY's. Yes in my backyard.
Of course, they are opposed to something — namely, the possibility that the supermarket will be sold for $250 million to make way for luxury condos.
About 100 demonstrators armed with petitions gathered at the store, holding signs that read "Stop Gentrification!" and chanting, "$250 million for condos we can't live in, that's crazy!"
Harvey Epstein, a Lower East Side resident who is director of the Community Development Project at the Urban Justice Center, said, "If they put in luxury condos it's going to bring in higher income people. It will further spur gentrification and result in the displacement of our low-income people."
The protest was organized by O.U.R. Waterfront (Organizing and Uniting Residents on the Waterfront), an alliance of community-based organizations. The demonstrators were joined by Public Advocate Betsy Gotbaum, and representatives from the offices of State Senator Martin Conner and City Councilman Alan Gerson.
"As elected officials, it is our job to listen to the voices of the community and act in their best interest," Ms. Gotbaum said. "We need this Pathmark to remain open as a symbol of our commitment to listening to New York's communities."
The immediate area includes more than 20 public housing residences, and the Pathmark on Cherry Street has served the neighborhood's lower-income population for more than two decades.
"If I had to go someplace else, it would be at least six blocks away, and it would be very difficult for me," said Gussie Lamar, 84, who lives just across the street from the supermarket and uses a wheelchair.
Not only would they lose a supermarket in an area with few consumer options, residents said, but they also depend on the Pathmark's affordable prices, which they said they would be unable to find at other locations.
Ed Novack, 71, a lifelong resident of the Lower East Side, held up a receipt that listed his total savings from using his Pathmark card for the year at $1,116.03.
"I can't afford to go shopping anywhere else," said Mr. Novak, who lives on a fixed income.
GOLES (Good Old Lower East Side), a community group, handed out surveys to residents for a report they plan to present the Community Board 3.
"Residents are generally kicked out of the process of deciding what comes in and what goes out of their community," said Angel Seda, 26, a community organizer for GOLES, who was raised in the nearby Jacob Riis Houses. "This survey is a community assessment to show what the people want in area."
Workers at the Pathmark declined to comment about the protest, but a manager, who would not give his name, said he had yet to hear anything definitive about the supermarket closing.
Copyright 2007 The New York Times Company
More NIMBY B.S.
There are two similarly-priced supermarkets within a few blocks of the Pathmark. Nobody will go without food. There are about a million much cheaper, much healthier grocery options in Chinatown, which is basically across the street.
Nobody will be replaced by the luxury development. If you are poor and living in Manhattan in 2007, you do not pay market rents. These people are mostly in protected public or Mitchell-Lama housing, with maybe a handful in rent control and HPD/HUD programs. It's irrelevent what happens to the local market rates, since none of them are subject to the market.
I was about to say. What they're calling for is bordering on the absurd. Let's say the Pathmark some way or another goes out of business, does that mean that in order for these people to have continued access to a grocery store, perhaps the government will then have to provide that, too?
They live in these horribly designed towers-in-the-park projects that if they were designed well, would have retail on the ground floor and thus this problem of not having stores nearby wouldn't be a problem. In other words, the very buildings they are living in are the cause of their problems, not some other offsite property.
Something tells me these people, while "for" Pathmark, would be against Wal-Mart if it were to be the retail anchor for this new development.


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Friday, October 02, 2009
Paperless Friday: On Ideas and Boxes
It's Paperless Friday! And I'm thinking about ideas and boxes.
My paperless story for the day: I was asked by the dept at my ed school to turn in a Word Doc copy of the syllabus for my paperless social tech in ed class.
Problem is: I don't have a static syllabus -- I keep all of the class info/assignments/procedures/etc on a wiki that winds up being pretty fluid.
Not fluid in the sense that I change dates, procedures, and other vitals... but rather in that specific readings and the specifics about assignments are always changing and adapting to what is occurring in the social media ed landscape at large.
As I say to the students on day one: I can't honestly tell you that what's on the wiki for week eight is actually going to be there when we get there (because by the time we get there, we'll be in a 'different place' as well).
What I'm emphasizing is that helping students develop a 'way of thinking' is generally more important than whatever specific tool or skill might be next on the menu. And the 'ways of thinking' most effective in navigating the current landscapes are ways that make the most of the fluidity and dynamism inherent in the current media.
This fluidity is something that should be embraced. It's also something that points out the limited nature of static media -- whether paper syllabus or PowerPoint -- to handle fluidity.
Our way of looking at things is changing. If four years ago you would have told me that a syllabus might not be the best way to help keep my students and class organized, I might have told you that you were nuts. Not so much anymore.
We need to embrace technologies that best represent the way we think. For me, that means wikis over paper syllabi, blogs over paper essays, and Twitter and real-time search over email and databases.
Because my thinking is fluid, I need my media to be fluid. Because to take a dynamic idea and try to fit it into a static box, just seems like a great way to destroy both.
2 comments:
I get what you are saying, but it sounds as if "I'm fluid and I go with the flow" is a bit of an excuse to not have a plan. It is perfectly okay to plan and adjust based on reflections of real time, but I don't think that is an excuse to poo-poo planning, and planning is not necessarily static. Not deviating from a plan regardless of events is.ReplyDelete
- AnonymousJanuary 9, 2010 at 9:05 AM
@My Musings, I get what you're saying, as well. But I don't think this post is about "an excuse to not have a plan." I think y'all are saying the same thing: plan, but let the plan be dynamic and alive, not dead.ReplyDelete
@A Faire Alchemist, I love the idea of "fluidity" in course "documents" (what a 20th-century static word that suddenly seems to be!) like syllabi. I've been trying to create some fluid learning materials for my Latin students and have been blogging about the process <a href="joyfullatinlearning.wordpress.com>here at the Joyful Latin Learning blog<a/a>. If you're still monitoring comments here, I'd love to know what you think about the project!
gratias maximas antequam,


text:
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27 UNC physicians named 'top regional doctors'
Castle Connolly regional top doctors are those physicians who have been nominated by their peers - and deemed appropriate by Castle Connolly's physician led research team - as being among the very best – the top 10 percent - of physicians in their specialty within their region.
Media contact: Tom Hughes, (919) 966-6047, firstname.lastname@example.com
Wednesday, June 15, 2011
CHAPEL HILL, N.C. – Twenty-seven UNC Health Care physicians have been recognized as "top regional doctors" by Castle Connolly Medical Ltd.
Castle Connolly regional top doctors are those physicians who have been nominated by their peers - and deemed appropriate by Castle Connolly's physician led research team - as being among the very best – the top 10 percent - of physicians in their specialty within their region.
UNC's 30 "top regional doctors" listed below are honored alongside the 59 UNC Health Care physicians that Castle Connolly included in its most recent "America's Top Doctors" compilation.
Cardiovascular Disease – Paula F. Miller
Child & Adolescent Psychiatry – L. Jarrett Barnhill
Child Neurology – Leslie Boyce, Carl Malanga, Michael Tennison, Spencer Weig
Clinical Genetics – Muge Gucsava-Calikoglu
Diagnostic Radiology – Lynn Fordham
Gastroenterology – Michael Fried
Gynecologic Oncology – Wesley Fowler, Linda Van Le
Internal Medicine – Timothy Carey
Medical Oncology – Stephen Bernard
Neurology – Nizar Chahin, Ana Felix
Obstetrics & Gynecology – Catherine Matthews
Pain Medicine – William Blau
Pediatric Endocrinology – Ali Calikoglu, Marsha Davenport
Pediatric Infectious Disease – Thomas Belhorn
Pediatric Surgery – William Adamson
Physical Medicine & Rehabilitation – Joshua Alexander
Surgery – Keith Amos, Bruce Cairns
Thoracic Surgery – Benjamin Haithcock, Michael Mill
Vascular Surgery – William Marston
A physician-led team of researchers followed a rigorous screening process to select top doctors on both the national and regional levels. Using mail surveys, telephone surveys and electronic ballots, the research team asked board certified physicians and the medical leadership of leading hospitals to nominate highly skilled, exceptional doctors. Criteria developed by the Castle Connolly research team led to the final selection of those physicians most highly regarded by their peers in each specialty. The criteria used to determine physician eligibility for inclusion in the magazine: professional qualifications; education, residency, board certification, fellowships; professional reputation, hospital appointment, medical school faculty appointment, and experience. The physicians are grouped alphabetically by specialty and alphabetically within each specialty.


text:
This was published 7 years ago
'All I want from you ...': Packer's advice to Richie Benaud
Howzat! for a marvellous message? When Fairfax reporter Christine Sams asked cricket commentator extraordinaire Richie Benaud about working in the commentary box, he sent an email reminiscing about his long-time role at Nine.
Respect and adulation should more be accorded to those who are helping others in the world, disabled or ill and perhaps trying to get back some of the fitness they have lost.
What I want most from being a television commentator is to be able to feel that, when I say something, I am talking to friends. Most of those listening to a commentary want a commentator to assist them to understand precisely what is going on out there. If I'm able to do that then I'm very happy. Bear in mind that two of the most annoying phrases a viewer hears are, 'as you can see on your screen ...' and 'of course'.
I was working on television in the United Kingdom on BBC TV in 1963 while I was still captaining Australia.
I didn't do any Australian TV until 1976-77 when I worked for Australian cricket teammate Ron Archer's Channel 0 (Queensland) on the Centenary Test Australia v England at the MCG, then for World Series Cricket and Channel Nine for more than 30 years. I worked for BBC (UK) for 36 years, Channel 4 (UK) for six years and 2005 was the last year I worked on television in England after Mr Murdoch bought cricket's TV rights.
Of real benefit in being on television is that I have been a working journalist, starting on police rounds in 1956 on the old Sydney Sun with that great police rounds man and teacher, Noel Bailey. He taught me to write exactly the number of words required by the editor and showed me how to do it without a script, talking into a telephone, which nowadays for me relates to a microphone. I promise you it's more hard work than iconic.
For me, commentating is wonderful because of the way cricket technology has evolved over the years. Most of all that is to do with the brilliance of the cameras, and those who stand behind them, plus the director who shapes the story. The best at those I have seen anywhere in the television world is Channel Nine's Rob Sheerlock whose voice in my ear, counting down from 10 to zero, is one of the greatest confidence boosts I know.
We, and the players, start the First Test in Brisbane ... and the commentators' line-up is Mark Nicholas (presenter), Ian Chappell, Tony Greig, Mark Taylor, Michael Slater, Ian Healy, Glenn McGrath and Brett Lee. What I can assure you is that every one of us will be nervous as hell. It's always like that, particularly on the first morning of the opening match.
A few things I try to remember run along the lines of 'never ask a statement', 'remember the value of the pause', and there are no teams in the TV world called 'we' or 'they'. Only little things, but I believe they make a difference.
Best advice I've ever received was from Kerry Packer. About ten years ago we had a great summer and Kerry was so pleased that he flew in every commentator from other states for lunch in the Channel Nine boardroom in Sydney. At the table he talked to every commentator and finally he looked across the table at me.
He said, "Andrew Symonds can do just about anything, make runs, take valuable wickets, slide almost into the boundary rope to save runs, get to his feet without touching the ground with his hands and his return to Gilchrist is at flashing speed and over the bails".
"Son ... I don't want you to do that; all I want from you is to put your brain into gear before you open your mouth."
A few things I try to remember run along the lines of 'never ask a statement', 'remember the value of the pause', and there are no teams in the TV world called 'we' or 'they'.


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