text:
What the Press is Saying
"The GameDock may be just what the doctor ordered." - Tech Crunch
"Come on, you know this is an awesome idea." - 148 Apps
"Revel in the gaming days of yore -- eye or thumb strain-free." - Engadget
"GameDock is looking to take the iCade model to the next level." - The Verge
"Allowing for simultaneous two-player games ... is an almost entirely new concept on iOS." - Ars Technica
Turn Your Phone into Your Console
The GameDock for Apple iOS devices enables developers to turn their mobile games into console video games for your HD television. When you want the console experience, plug your iPhone into the GameDock and play with one or two gamepads while it charges. When you're ready for mobile, unplug the phone and continue playing the same game on the go.
With the GameDock, you'll never have to upgrade your console again. It remains compatible with your new iPhone and apps as you upgrade. Have the best of both worlds!
What comes in each box:
- One GameDock
- Two USB controllers
- HDMI adapter
What you'll need:
- Apple charger
- HDMI cable (for TV out)
- Durable thumbs ;)
It's About the Best Experience
Have you ever played a great retro game on your iPhone, only to be frustrated with the touch controls? Or have you wanted to play an awesome iPad game with a friend, but two people holding one tablet just doesn't feel right? With the GameDock for iOS you can play classic games the way they were meant to be played: with two controllers and a TV. Just plug the dock into your TV like a video game console and your iOS device into the dock like a game cartridge. The GameDock is designed to be compatible with existing iCade games and for dock-ready games that include two-player support and full 1080p HDTV output.
Support this project and help build the indie games ecosystem that is responsible for some of the most innovative and fun games of all time. Donated money will be used to fund production and give you the chance to be the first to receive a GameDock of your own. Supporting the little guy and having fun at the same time -- what's cooler than that?
Retro games will always have a special place in our hearts. For millennials and generation X-ers, these games remind us of our childhoods spent button-mashing and delighting in beautiful, pixelated worlds. It's time to do justice to the modern pixelated game renaissance with an iPhone accessory that brings an extra layer of authenticity to the experience.
In addition to the dock, we have developed a dashboard app that allows you to select and play games from the comfort of your couch. There's no need to get up and change which game you're playing. You can do it with your controller instead. And, of course, if you don't have a TV, no worries! The dock still connects to your phone and supports games on the small screen. It communicates over short-range bluetooth, the same used in most modern keyboards.
You'll be helping out two talented individuals bring their vision to life. Chris works for ISITE Design as an mobile solutions architect. He also founded Cascadia Games, which has released multiple Hot New Game winners in the iOS and Mac app stores. Andi works for CBS Interactive and keeps awesome sites like TV.com evolving and running with his hard work and talent. Both have masters degrees in electrical and computer engineering. You can rest assured knowing that the hardware has been designed with care!
Follow us on @iosgamedock, facebook.com/iosgamedock, and iosgamedock.com
Help fund this project to support great indie developers who work hard to make awesome retro games.
Thank you!
More Videos!
New Reward: Custom GameDock Case!
How it Came Together
Thank You!
Many thanks to the following individuals who helped make this project possible.
- Michael Medaglia for filming and patience: prettypictures.com
- Will Pickering for design review and assembly: fungizmos.com
- Krzyzstof Horn for the video music: stock-music.com
- Aimee Moody for web design and branding: http://aim-ee.com
- Matthew Mitman for 3D modeling and rendering
- Chris Rhom for prototype dock case design
Funding period
- (45 days)


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Fans of Kingsley Flood, Brian Setzer, Gaslight Anthem, Life in a Blender and "Weird Al" Yankovic have much to celebrate this summer, although that might describe nobody besides me.
It's shaping up to be an explosive summer for people who have exactly my taste in music, which may be nobody except myself. So, yay me!
I've already told you about "Weird Al" Yankovic's impending album, "Mandatory Fun," due out July 15 -- you can now pre-order it on Amazon, but he cagily left off the track listing so we can't go around guessing which songs are parodies of which other songs, or what food products might be mentioned. Well played, Mr. Yankovic.
But that's not all that's in the works for the summer months:
• Kingsley Flood, the literate rock combo based at least part-time in scenic Gloucester, Mass., is releasing a live album next week called "Live at the Armory," and you can get a six-song sampler (right now! this second!) free at Noisetrade.com. Kingsley Flood had one of the best albums of 2013 -- my review here -- and if you haven't caught on yet, I have a feeling the live disc will be a great way to break in on the Flood's ground floor.
• Brian Setzer continues his decades-long F-U to the music industry by playing only exactly what he wants to play, be it souped-up swing, rocking instrumentals or searing rockabilly -- this time it's the latter category, with "Rockabilly Riot: All Original" due out Aug. 12. He talked to Time.com about rockabilly's continued appeal and people tattooing his face on themselves, which freaks him out. He also debuted the album's lead single, "Let's Shake," which is guaranteed to promote shaking.
(Meanwhile, I await to a sequel to 2007's "Wolfgang's Big Night Out," his album of rock-swing versions of classical compositions, which was awesomer than it sounds.)
• The Gaslight Anthem quietly finished up its contract with Side One Dummy records earlier this year with "The B-Sides," which was fine if you like covers and acoustic versions of their old songs (and with a title like that, you knew you were getting leftovers). But their debut for Mercury promises to be more ambitious -- "Get Hurt" drops Aug. 19, and if first single "Rollin' and Tumblin'" is any indication, we're looking at a grungy comeback for the punky Jersey dudes.
• And finally, Life in a Blender continues to promote their utterly original album "We Already Have Birds That Sing" (review here) with a suitably creepy video for the track "Frankenstein Cannot Be Stopped" by "art-horror filmmaker" Larry Fessenden, which debuted this week at Popdose. For anyone who thought the song might be a metaphor for man's inhumanity to man, the video pretty much confirms that no, it's about Frankenstein. Check it out here:
- Read more of Pete's pop culture rants at Popdose.
- Email Pete
- Like Pete's Pop Culture Etc. Blog on Facebook


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Any ISP will supply at least basic assistance. However, more extensive support may prove necessary if a company cannot operate without internet access. For instance, a business might run a shopping website or provide shipping services in Winder, GA. Such a firm can benefit from using an ISP with 24-hour support. To evaluate the quality and speed of this assistance, business owners should call before signing up.
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"It was an intolerable situation," Mayor Paul Soglin said Monday evening of the Occupy Madison homeless encampment on East Washington Avenue, after a Dane County judge declined to issue a temporary restraining order to prevent the city from closing it down.It's so annoying to try to follow the news from this once-halfway-decent newspaper. I almost passed up this article because I wanted to know what happened last night. But here's the news from Monday night, posted mid-afternoon on Monday.
"The kind of health issues and crime problems we had on this site are not covered by the First Amendment, I think that's very clear," Soglin said.
He said that the city would wait until noon Tuesday to evacuate the site, to give people a chance to pack their things and leave.
Police calls to the Occupy site at a city-owned former car dealership in the 800 block of East Washington Avenue included some serious incidents, Soglin stressed. "We are treating the site as a hazardous waste site -- no employee going in is going to touch anything. We've had numerous reports of needles."Why was this allowed to go on so long?
About an hour earlier...Earlier than what? "Monday evening"?
... Dane County Circuit Court Judge Amy Smith told pro-bono lawyers who sought a temporary restraining order in the name of three homeless people that they had not provided convincing evidence that clearing the site would trample the occupants' First Amendment rights of assembly and free speech. In fact, there was evidence that occupants had participated in protests at other locations in the city while living at Occupy Madison, Smith pointed out.Oh, good lord, why was this a difficult issue? The protesters have left the city with a hazardous waste site to clean up and they made us waste our scarce money defending ridiculous lawsuits. You know the old lefty slogan "Property is theft." These lefties have me thinking: Protest is theft.
At about the time that Soglin spoke with reporters at a community budget session at Wright Middle School on the south side about a dozen protesters gathered in the hallway outside Soglin's office in the City-County Building downtown were ordered to leave by police officers. All but one man -- Allen Barkoff, 69 -- obeyed; he was arrested and charged with trespassing.Barkoff — we were talking about him yesterday.
What was the point of all the patience and tolerance? At some point, it would need to end and it would, predictably, end badly. Now, they've got until noon today, and then the city moves in. Brilliantly, the day is May 1st, which has long been planned as a big protest day. I can see in the social media that there's an effort to draw a crowd to the Occupy site at noon (and then to march to the City County Building for a rally). Good luck to Mayor Soglin — who's now the protesters' enemy. (We saw a "Recall Soglin" sign at the Occupy site yesterday. Another sign said: "We were evicted from our homes, Mayor Soglin.)
ADDED: Here's what we saw:


text:
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Story highlights
- Board of Health sets comment period for proposed ban on sugary beverages
- Ban would outlaw such drinks larger than 16 ounces at restaurants, food carts
- Mayor says ban is meant to cut obesity, save city health care money
New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg's proposed ban on the sale of large-size sodas and other sugary beverages moved forward Tuesday after the city's Board of Health unanimously voted to open the plan to a three-month public comment process.
The ban would outlaw such drinks larger than 16 ounces at restaurants, food carts and any other establishments that receive letter grades for food service. It would not apply to grocery stores.
"The Board of Health is a group of independent health experts ... they were reviewing this for the first time today, and then this is a public comment process. We think that this is a good process," Health Commissioner Dr. Thomas Farley said in a news conference Tuesday.
"Obviously, me as the health commissioner, I am supportive of this rule, but the board is the one that makes the ultimate decision," Farley said.
The board members, who are appointed by the mayor, will formally vote on the proposal in September, officials said.
"If approved, the city's proposal would take effect six months after Board of Health approval and would be enforced by the city's regular restaurant inspection team," a statement from Bloomberg's office said last month. "Restaurant owners will have nine months from the adoption of the proposal until they face fines."
Fines will then be $200, the statement said.
After Bloomberg announced the initiative last month, critics -- including McDonald's and Coca-Cola, which stand to be hurt by the proposal -- quickly assailed it as "misguided" and "arbitrary."
Speaking by satellite to the All Things D technology event in California last month, Bloomberg said, "This is something we think we have the legal authority to do. We¹re not taking away anybody's right to do something; we're simply making it different for them in how they do it." He said he hoped the move will help lead to different behaviors.
The city spends $4 billion a year on medical care for overweight people, he said.
The statement from his office cited health problems facing the city, including an increase in obesity. "The single largest driver of these alarming increases in obesity is sugary drinks, which have grown in size," the statement said.
It was not immediately clear what that assertion was based on.
While the consumption of sugary drinks contributes to obesity, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention does not name a single largest cause nationally.
In a report in May, the nonprofit Institute of Medicine said, despite the "difficulty of quantifying relative contributions to the obesity epidemic, researchers have found strong associations between intake of sugar-sweetened beverages and weight gain. Although the exact mechanisms of how sugar-sweetened beverages contribute to obesity are not fully known, their link to obesity is stronger than that observed for any other food or beverage."
McDonald's restaurants issued a statement saying, "Public health issues cannot be effectively addressed through a narrowly focused and misguided ban. This is a complex topic, and one that requires a more collaborative and comprehensive approach."
A statement from the Coca-Cola company said the "people of New York City are much smarter than the New York City Health Department believes. ... New Yorkers expect and deserve better than this. They can make their own choices about the beverages they purchase. We hope New Yorkers loudly voice their disapproval about this arbitrary mandate."
Broad public health initiatives have become a hallmark of Bloomberg's administration. Under the mayor, the city has banned trans fats from restaurants, smoking from parks and has placed graphic ads targeting junk food and tobacco in public transit.


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A major jewerly heist leads to the unexpected murder of two young adults, and the pursuit of those responsible falls to the elite Major Case Squad.
A small town art curator and an art authenticator are killed in what appears to be a murder-suicide, but it's really a double homicide to coverup a major art scam.
A pregnant women with a drug habit is murdered; her boyfriend's rich family arranges for her death.
Two murders are linked to a socially conscious church that has been very kind to the downtrodden, and money appears to be the motive.
An adulterous attorney, whose wife ulimately provides the evidence to put him away, murders a string of petite women.
A con artist posing as a DuPont is thought to be killed by the rich investors he cheated, but they got the wrong man.
A series of cyanide related poisonings are traced to tainted bottles of pain medication, and the Detectives have a hard time tacking down the culprit.
A reporter who was about to expose a major scandal is murdered along with his fiancee, and the investigation to find out who ordered the hit involves the mafia, an exiled drug dealer and the state's highest office.
The wife of a prominent but temperamental plastic surgeon goes missing, and he is the primary suspect in her death.
A banking titan is killed when he locks himself in the bathroom during a fire in his own penthouse, and the question is, was he murdered?
An abortion doctor is murdered by a zealous anti-abortion activist who may not have acted alone.
A heart surgeon is killed at his son's Bar Mitzvah, and his estranged wife's sister and her suitor may be involved.
A young socialite's wealthy father is killed, and the trail leads to a suspect with a double life.
A financier owes money to a loan shark, who arranges for his family to be kidnapped when he doesn't pay up.
A judge up for an Appellate Court appointment has to deal with the death of his mistress, and the threat to his career.
A man just released from prision is murdered, and the suspect is a man leading a double life.
A serial killer enlists the help of an accomplice to commit a copycat crime while he's in prison to try and exonerate him.
The body of a young woman who disappeared 20 years ago turns up in the Bronx, and the Detectives suspect a successful businessman and his college friend.
The daughter of a Russian mob leader is found dead after she announced her plans to write a second tell-all book on the family trade, but mob might not be the ones who silenced her.
A city accountant and his family are found dead, but what appeared to be a family murder/suicide is not necessarily the case.
A magazine publisher is killed under mysterious circumstances after he demands to see the crippled girl he has supported.
During the course of a homicide investigation, the Detectives uncover a major financial scandal linked to the crime.
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text:
The name of Montague Rhodes James is not widely recognized in America, and there will be little fellow-feeling for the world he chose to inhabit. Indeed, it seems as remote as a cold, unvisitable planet, viewed from afar. James was born in southeast England in 1862. His father, Herbert, was a curate; he had attended Eton, followed by King's College, Cambridge, and the dutiful son repeated the process. Monty, as he was known, won a scholarship to Eton, and then another to King's, where he took a double first in classics, plus a sheaf of significant prizes. In 1887, he was made a fellow of King's, becoming first junior dean, then tutor, and finally provost—the head of the college—in 1905. He returned to Eton in 1918, to take up the same position, and died a tranquil death in 1936, though not before being awarded the Order of Merit, the most exclusive of British garlands. His demeanor was kindly and convivial, and his mind, according to his friend A. C. Benson, was "the mind of a nice child—he hates and fears all problems, all speculation." Lytton Strachey, having read James's memoirs, remarked, "It's odd that the Provost of Eton should still be aged sixteen. A life without a jolt."
That is true enough, and many will share Strachey's scorn, yet in one respect he could not have been more wrong. If M. R. James is remembered now, and honored beyond the bounds of his school and university, it is not because of his scholarly deeds but precisely because of his talent—modestly offered, but as yet unsurpassed—for applying the very highest calibre of jolt. On quiet evenings, preferably in the dimness of the winter months, he would summon a cluster of acquaintances to his rooms at King's, settle himself down, under low illumination, and then, whether just for fun or for reasons that he himself may never fully have grasped, read aloud something like this:
Then there was the man who heard a noise in the passage at night, opened his door, and saw someone crawling towards him on all fours with his eye hanging out on his cheek. There was besides, let me think—Yes! the room where a man was found dead in bed with a horseshoe mark on his forehead, and the floor under the bed was covered with marks of horseshoes also; I don't know why. Also there was the lady who, on locking her bedroom door in a strange house, heard a thin voice among the bed curtains say, "Now we're shut in for the night."
We find ourselves, at once, in the presence of a writer who bows, as much by instinct as by training, to the governing rule of his genre: that a heavy horror is most amply conveyed by a lightness of touch. What stays with us is the offhand shrug of "let me think" and "I don't know why," as if ghastliness, far from branding the soul, were liable to slip one's mind. Even better is the word "thin," in the final sentence. It bears a trace of the sickly, the infantile, and the faraway, but also of osmosis; surely it must be the bed curtains that are thin, yet that sense of insubstantial gauziness seeps into the utterance of whoever, or whatever, lurks among them. Not for the first time, James suggests that there is something scary about fabric, of all things—taking the threadbare theme of a ghost in a white sheet and subjecting it to endless, crumpled variations.
The paragraph on horseshoes and other oddities comes from "A School Story," which was first read aloud on December 28, 1906. It was written for the boys of King's College Choir School. None would have been older than thirteen, and one wonders how they were affected, in the short or lifelong run, by hearing a middle-aged man, high in authority, fill the dark night with talk of eyeballs. They probably loved it. The tale was published in "More Ghost Stories of an Antiquary" (1911), a sequel, of sorts, to "Ghost Stories of an Antiquary," which had come out seven years earlier. Still to appear were "A Thin Ghost and Others" (1919)—note the adjective—and "A Warning to the Curious" (1925), whose title, designed to fend off but destined to lure onward, is as clear a crystallizing of James's intent as you will find.
All of these have now been freshly gathered in "Collected Ghost Stories" (Oxford), edited by Darryl Jones, who supplies a critical commentary on which James himself might have smiled. We also get a compendium of James's reflections on the art that he practiced, including the "slight haze of distance," chronologically speaking, at which the ideal tale should be set—nothing too up-to-date. Also desirable are "the nicely managed crescendo" and "a modicum of blood, shed with deliberation and carefully husbanded." In the Evening News, in 1931, James took the part of the inquiring reader: "Must there be horror? you ask. I think so." As for his motives, he cheerfully owns up to them in the preface to his first collection:
The stories themselves do not make any very exalted claim. If any of them succeed in causing their readers to feel pleasantly uncomfortable when walking along a solitary road at nightfall, or sitting over a dying fire in the small hours, my purpose in writing them will have been attained.
Must that suffice? I think not. The notion that discomfort need not be more than "pleasant," in the mind of the listener or reader, is a perennially tempting one, for good reasons. Most consumers of fiction, past and present, are weary working souls who crave diversion. The point of a mystery is to have it solved to their satisfaction, and the purpose of a ghost, however alarmingly raised, is that it should, once its petrifying duty is done, be laid to rest. Even Virginia Woolf, who usually dwelled in loftier realms of narrative, conceded, in her essay "The Supernatural in Fiction," that "it is pleasant to be afraid when we are conscious that we are in no kind of danger." Our response to ghost stories, she argued, "is a refined and spiritualized essence of fear," whereas "crude fear, with its anticipation of physical pain or of terrifying uproar, is an undignified and demoralizing sensation."
She sounds like Lady Bracknell. If anybody had the power to be snobbish about our deepest common emotions, on the ground that they really are common, it was Woolf; conversely, what matters about James is that, however rarefied the intellectual air he inhaled, and even though his social ascent afforded ceaseless opportunities for snobbery, it remains to his credit that, pen in hand, he did not hesitate to plunge into the lower and, as Woolf would say, cruder orders of feeling. A. C. Benson said of James, "I don't suppose anyone alive knows so much or so little worth knowing!" That is unjust, and it ignores the thing that James knew all too well. He knew the sensation of evil rubbing itself against us, like a cat.
Most of James's heroes are like James. Dons, obsessive bibliophiles, and bachelors: all are the embodiment of a well-bred, well-read caution, though constantly chafed by the inquisitive urge. "Canon Alberic's Scrap-book"—probably his earliest story, first delivered on October 28, 1893—was written not long after a trip to the small town in southwestern France where the plot unfolds. (James was a sturdy traveller, and my favorite moment in Michael Cox's 1983 biography of him is the revelation that in 1884, accompanied by a fellow-student, he toured France on a double tricycle, the two riders seated abreast. Think of him as the late-Victorian Kerouac.) The protagonist is a Cambridge man invited to inspect a rare folio and left quivering by what it contains:
Best of all, there were twenty leaves of uncial writing in Latin, which, as a few words seen here and there told him at once, must belong to some very early unknown patristic treatise. Could it possibly be a fragment of the copy of Papias "On the Words of Our Lord," which was known to have existed as late as the twelfth century at Nîmes? The point of the passage is not how knowledgeable it is (uncial is a form of rounded script) but how knowing. James is blowing a gentle breath of mockery into the dusty nooks of his own professional endeavors. He was a tireless tracker of manuscripts, and the list of those which he catalogued, in college libraries and English churches, is bewilderingly long, supplemented by an ominous taste for representations of the Apocalypse; such, indeed, was the origin of his academic fame, and, bizarre though it may seem to us, an unfailing source of excitement. In a short book called "The Wanderings and Homes of Manuscripts" (1919), he wrote:
The moral is: Be inquisitive. See books for yourself; do not trust that the cataloguer has told you everything. I am a cataloguer myself, and I know that, try as he may, a worker of that class cannot hope to know or to see every detail that is of importance. The creature is human, and on some days his mind is less alert than on others.
That last sentence strikes the ear like the creak of an opening door. Push a little harder, and you find yourself back in "Canon Alberic's Scrap-book," with the Cambridge man confronted by a creature less than human, or more: "Pale, dusky skin, covering nothing but bones and tendons of appalling strength; coarse black hairs, longer than ever grew on a human hand; nails rising from the ends of the fingers and curving sharply down and forward, grey, horny, and wrinkled." That is what he finds resting beside him as he consults the folio. The hand is not disembodied but connected to a beast, which slowly stands upright behind the hero's chair.
Two points are of note here. First, the beast is the incarnation of a figure in one of the scrapbook's illustrations—a sepia drawing from the close of the seventeenth century. In other words, what James does here, as elsewhere, is to summon unholy terror from the very texts and objects that concern him. Not for James the mad gothic landscape, dwarfed by high cliffs and primed with preëmptive weirdness; for where would the shock be if a monster were skulking there? As he himself said, "Bram Stoker's 'Dracula' is a book with very good ideas in it, but—to be vulgar—the butter is spread far too thick." James was an addict of the thinly spread. His characters, who tend to reside and vegetate in the undramatic flatlands of eastern England, scrape away at the borders of stained-glass windows, fondle the carvings on the end of cathedral stalls, or purchase old engravings; and there, in the course of their daily tasks and hobbies, the trouble starts—"Into this calm environment let the ominous thing put out its head," he wrote. It is as though he were secretly aware that his way of life, for which he had been schooled from the start, and whose demands he answered with such expert suavity, was at once noble, rewarding, and not enough. The stories may have been recited to friends but they were written, so to speak, in front of a mirror, by a man hoping to drown the tiny, shivering thrills of the chronic bookworm with the low snarl of a more universal emotion, that of dread. If you flourish by your wits, what could be more therapeutic than trying to scare yourself out of them?
And so to the second mark of the beast: it is not a ghost. Despite the titles of James's books, only rarely does he deal in the mere emanation, or the barely there. Instead, he is remorselessly physical, locating menace not only in persons, or near-persons, or ex-persons, but in humdrum stuff that should, by rights, be inanimate. Like a bag:
Well, I felt to the right, and my fingers touched something curved, that felt—yes—more or less like leather; dampish it was, and evidently part of a heavy, full thing. There was nothing, I must say, to alarm one. I grew bolder, and putting both hands in as well as I could, I pulled it to me, and it came.
This comes from "The Treasure of Abbot Thomas," which starts in near-parody, with a long paragraph of Latin, composed by James but ascribed to a nonexistent author; proceeds through quotations from the Books of Job, Revelation, and Zechariah; explains the solution to a sixteenth-century cryptogram; and, finally, just as our patience begins to wane, sends an Englishman down the well of a German abbey in search of lost treasure. There, in the gloom, he finds the leather bag, concealed within a hole in the wall, and pulls: "It hung for an instant on the edge of the hole, then slipped forward on to my chest, and put its arms round my neck."
The steadiness of the telling is sublime: no exclamation mark, no cry of "Oh, my God," nothing to indicate that the laws of the universe have just collapsed. "I was conscious of a most horrible smell of mould, and of a cold kind of face pressed against my own, and moving slowly over it, and of several—I don't know how many—legs or arms or tentacles or something clinging to my body." We are now at the heart of M. R. James, although the heart, buried far beneath the skin, is by no means the root of his anxiety; what he fears most is surface contact. And the surfaces that give off the most appalling charge are not steely, or aggressively angular, but soft. James, safe in the embrace of the British establishment, returned again and again, in his fiction, to the nightmare of a more intimate grasp:
As Eldred started and was turning to look behind him, a little dark form appeared to rise out of the shadow behind the tree-trunk and from it two arms enclosing a mass of blackness came before Eldred's face and covered his head and neck. His legs and arms were wildly flourished, but no sound came. The only thing more harrowing than a hug, it appears, was hair—or fur, or spiderwebs, or spiders, or anything that could slide or scuttle across the landscape of human flesh. Eldred is the villain of "The Tractate Middoth," which shows what can happen if you spend, or waste, your life with your head in your books. The face of one reader, encountered in a university library, "was perfectly dry, and the eyes were very deep-sunk; and over them, from the eyebrows to the cheek-bone, there were cobwebs." Other tales bring us spiders the size of a man's head, "covered with greyish hair," and a dozing fellow who, reaching down beside his chair, "stroked and patted a rounded something," which then revealed its face, although "no feature was discernible, only hair." Most unenviable of all is the light sleeper in "Casting the Runes":
He put his hand into the well-known nook under the pillow: only, it did not get so far. What he touched was, according to his account, a mouth, with teeth, and with hair about it, and, he declares, not the mouth of a human being.
It is not difficult to place this detail on the spectrum of sexual alarm. As Darryl Jones says, in his introduction to the new edition, here is a classic instance of the vagina dentata—the epitome of what Jones calls "the monstrous-feminine," and one wonders whether James, merrily frightening his friends on a Cambridge night, realized how closely his fright verged on the explicit. Sex, he said, was "tiresome enough" in a novel, adding, "as the backbone of a ghost story, I have no patience with it." One can picture him veering away, with a shudder of recognition, from Freud's list, under the label "Unsuitable Substitutes for the Sexual Object," of feet, hair, clothing, and underwear. His dates are a good match for those of Freud, although I can find no evidence that either man read the other, and James, in his liking for manly company, as in his religious and educational beliefs, stayed firmly rooted in the Victorian age. What truly provoked him, and what filtered into the underground strata of the stories, was not so much misogyny as a more basic, mortal panic at gazing into the face—or, heaven preserve him, below the waist—of the unknown. "I begin to think my time is approaching, but only in my wilder moments," James wrote, in 1891, as if he were contemplating death. In fact, he was referring to marriage: a fate that, unaccountably, kept befalling his friends, but to which he never succumbed.
I saw M. R. James the other day. Twice, in fact, around Christmas, which, by tradition—as both Hamlet and Scrooge would be only too eager to testify—marks the zenith of the ghost finder's year. James wore, as he habitually does in old photographs, a black jacket and a waistcoat, with a fob watch, on a chain, tucked into one of the pockets. On his smooth face was a pair of round, gold-rimmed spectacles. On the first occasion, he drank whiskey, from a decanter; on the second, noisily, a dish of soup. Candles wavered and smoked beside his armchair. By the end of the evening, only one remained alight, and even that was snuffed before he departed, leaving us in the dark.
We were there, a small band of us, to hear him read—not from a book but from memory, and not in his rooms at Cambridge but a few miles away, in the aptly named Leper Chapel, a small, very cold, twelfth-century church on the outskirts of town. Its interior walls are whitewashed, as if against infection. A fortnight later, he switched to the upstairs hall at Hemingford Grey Manor, built in the eleven-thirties and said, by some, to be the oldest continuously inhabited house in England. Over the two evenings, we heard four stories: "Canon Alberic's Scrap-book," "The Ash-Tree," "Oh, Whistle, and I'll Come to You, My Lad," and "The Mezzotint," with its troubling account of a figure who crawls across a moonlit lawn, enters a window, and emerges bearing "an object which could be dimly seen and identified as a child." Were these stories any the scarier for being recited in rooms nine hundred years old? Is it history alone that haunts us, or would James have freaked us out if we had gathered at the back of Starbucks and he had worn sneakers and jeans?
He was not M. R. James, of course, but an actor named Robert Lloyd Parry, whose mastery of the role, and of the written works, is itself an act of possession. His most inspired move is not to declaim the tales but to present them as though in casual conversation, full of fidgety hems and haws. I almost felt that I should reply by unearthing some fiend of my own. That would have been easier in the Leper Chapel, all sacred ground being conducive to apparitions, than in the Manor, whose long-brewed atmosphere was palpably benign—not a place, one felt, through which an acrid spirit might pass. But the conclusion was clear: whatever it is that oozes from James's imaginings, it does not rely on a musty atmosphere alone. His books are bedded down in pedantry and antiquity because that was where he felt most at home, yet they rustle with the suspicion that the diabolical can emerge at any time, from any environment. He would not have enjoyed "Rosemary's Baby," especially the scenes in which Rosemary takes off her clothes, but he would, I think, have defended the Devil's right to spawn in a New York apartment.
The publication of the collected stories gives us the chance to weigh James's legacy. We should not overestimate him; his excursions into the beyond will always lag behind those of his namesake Henry, who reminded Monty, when they met, in 1903, of "a respectable butler." The presence of Quint, in "The Turn of the Screw," standing foursquare on a tower, remains both spectral and solid, with an enduring doubleness that M. R. James, in his addiction to the brief and terrible moment, could not sustain. A fairer comparison would be with A. E. Housman, his contemporary and neighbor, who, two minutes away, at Trinity College, combined an equally exhaustive career of arcane scholarship with quiet, half-embarrassed ventures into a more private field—in his case, short lyrics full of wounded hearts and hopes. Housman used poetry to touch on loves that he had lost or never dared to enact; M. R. James used ghost stories to explore fears of which he could not otherwise speak. How far back those fears went we cannot know; as far as the nursery, I would guess, given the visions of draping that enfold the tales, and their preference for smothering over mothering. If you don't believe me, try "Oh Whistle, and I'll Come to You, My Lad"—by general consent, his finest and most anxiety-shrouded work, of which I will say nothing more. Readers should be led into temptation.
Two weeks ago, I came close to James again. The archives of King's College are, by an uneasy coincidence, housed in his former rooms, and there some of his letters and tales can be consulted. One thing I discovered, in the course of an afternoon, was that, as James approaches the climax of a story, he accelerates. Thus, a sentence from a tale entitled "Number 13," about a clawing arm that reaches out from a crack in a hotel door, is printed by Darryl Jones, in its finished form, as "It was clad in ragged, yellowish linen, and the bare skin, where it could be seen, had long grey hair upon it." In manuscript, though, laid down in a suitably spidery hand, there are no commas. One might say that the author, for whatever reason, was in a state of high emotion, or in a rush. Trying to decipher the manuscripts of a man who was himself one of the foremost decipherers of his era is a strange, if chastening, sensation, though not half as strange as what happens to the hero of a story called "Mr. Humphries and His Inheritance," who, on a similar quest, sits down in a library to toil over some papers. He notices a coin-size spot on the page. It opens up, "into infinite depths," and something stirs:
Oh yes, far, far down there was a movement, and the movement was upwards—towards the surface. Nearer and nearer it came, and it was of a blackish-grey colour with more than one dark hole. . . . and with the odious writhings of a wasp creeping out of a rotten apple there clambered forth an appearance of a form, waving black arms prepared to clasp the head that was bending over them.
By the time I had finished, night had fallen. The papers of M. R. James were restored to the archives. I left his rooms, thinking of wasps, and descended into the court. Choristers could be heard rehearsing for evensong in the chapel, although its windows appeared unlit. Anybody watching, as I walked away, would have thought my pace unnecessarily quick. ♦


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IE vs. Image Replacement
Sure, I admit it: there's a glaring IE6 glitch on this site. I've known about it for a while, but I'm not going to fix it. Well, there are two glitches actually, and the second is a little more tricky. But let's talk about the first.
The big red banner is displayed by image replacement on an
h1. Since I built the site, hovering caused the infamous 'flicker' in IE (which is the second problem, but I digress again.) Then I interviewed Ryan Carver for WaSP, and took a look at his IE investigation, after which I applied his method to the banner, thereby eliminating the flicker for good.
Except doing so introduced a brand new bug no one had ever seen before. What it looks like: a piece of the content from the body is being duplicated, and briefly layered over top of the banner itself. It's easier to just see it:
I have no idea what causes it or how I'd go about isolating it, and I'm not even going to bother. Instead, I'm going to point and laugh, and leave it as-is. Just because it's IE. And just because I can.
(because some make disclaimers mandatory: this 'ignore it' approach is to be taken for this site alone. mezzoblue caters to web designers, who should know better than to run IE in the first place. No, you shouldn't penalize users for their choice of browser. No, this isn't an attitude to take when doing commercial work. No, I don't know whether I'll have the fish or the chicken.)
Okay, so the second bug is something more problematic, because it does affect most everyone else. In certain instances, hovering over image-replaced links causes the link to blink out and back in as the image re-loads. Keeping an eye on the IE/globe 'throbber' up in the top right corner shows there's some network activity happening as it does this, albeit very briefly; watching your outgoing packets confirms it. IE isn't caching, but reloading (or at least re-checking) the image every single time, causing the flicker.
There's an easy fix! I wrote about it six months ago! It doesn't actually work!
Well, it does for some. But here's something I'm noticing — even with that generous caching setting turned on, in some instances IE still causes flicker. Like, on this site for one. Like, allegedly, on the Sprites demos at ALA for another. Which really causes me to scratch my head, because I purposefully layered two sets of images over top of each other to eliminate the problem.
But no matter, due to the inconsistency and terrible difficulty in tracking it down I've started to suspect it has to do with a server setting anyhow. Well lo and behold, in the very post referenced above, a link posted by Blake Scarbrough to a discussion which I either never saw or don't remember seeing points out some .htaccess configuration which may yet provide a fix. I haven't touched the code, so I can't vouch for it yet, but you can be sure I'll give it a shot when I have the chance.
update: Since there seems to have been confusion about this, despite the disclaimer, you'll note that the second problem (the one that actually is a real problem that should be fixed) I said just above I would look into and fix. And so I have. Provided you have caching turned on in Internet Explorer, the flashing problem should be alleviated. The .htaccess lines in the css-discuss thread linked above did the trick. IE still flashes if caching is set to 'check every time', but as explained in the entry from six months ago I also linked to, this is a developer setting that has to be manually turned on, so most users will not experience it. Flashing problem: solved. Original IE glitch I decided not to solve: probably solved too. Onwards.


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French toast
- Serves 3
- Prep 0:05
- Cook 0:05
Love this recipe? Click save recipe to create an online cookbook
French toast is a delicious breakfast recipe for the family. Sliced bread soaked in an egg mixture and fried, French toast is a great way to get your kids to eat eggs without them knowing.
- 3 slices bread
- 1 egg
- 1/4 cup (60ml) milk
1In a large bowl, whisk egg and milk until well combined. Preheat a non-stick frypan to medium-high heat.
2Dip each slice of bread in the egg wash until coated on both sides and put straight into the frypan.
3Cook for 2-3 minutes each side until golden and it separates easily from the frypan.
4If the bread is sticking to the pan, cook a bit longer.
5Serve plain, buttered, or with your child's favourite spread or cheese.
- French toast is a delicious way to get fussy eaters to eat eggs.
- To maximise egg intake, reduce the milk to a teaspoon or two. If you do this, there may only be enough egg wash to coat two slices of bread.
- This is a simple recipe for French toast. For a fancy pants variation, check out this luxe recipe for grilled peaches, marscarpone and panettone French toast.
- Show a special someone how much they mean to you by making them heart shaped French toast for breakfast!
- For a deliciously fruity twist on French toast, try this yummy fruit variation which comes with a side of rhubarb compote.
- This is a great way to get kids to eat eggs. To make it even more tempting cut up the toast into French toast soldiers.
- Got people coming over for brunch? This French toast bake has a sweet butterscotch base and is perfect for feeding a crowd.
- For the little ones who have to always hold their food, these French toast sticks will bring a smile to their face.
- French toast covered in choc hazelnut spread. The only trouble you'll have getting kids to eat this is if mummy doesn't leave them any.
- Recipe created by Melissa Hughes for Kidspot, Australia's best recipe finder.


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Early in her career, feeling encumbered by her given name Bertha Mae (and who wouldn't), she adopted the more sophisticated name of Bunch. I have no idea what the history was behind this name or what inspired it, but to this day even hearing the word conjures up memories of this beautiful free spirit.
Even though she has been gone for some years now, I still remember that two of her special signatures in life were her intense pride in her Cherokee heritage and her tradition of always painting her front door a deep shade of coral.
She was also a real beauty with long dark wavy hair, piercing blue eyes and a lust for life, often throwing her head back and laughing out loud. I so wish I would have know her as an adult. It would have been so much fun having her as a girlfriend.
By the time we traveled from Texas to see her, Grandma Bunch had moved from her beloved Santa Barbara (I told you she was cool), to a 40 acre ranch outside Visalia complete with an orange grove and swimming pool.
Not only did she treat us to a day at Disneyland, but we swam every day and visited every historic Catholic church and mission in central and southern California. She even bought me a first communion dress while we were there. The funny thing about that was, we weren't Catholic or even big church goers, but I loved that little lacey white dress and wore it every chance I got (good try Grandma).
Also very memorable to me about this trip was the food she introduced us to while we were there. Grandma Bunch was quite the cook. She made her own sourdough bread, spaghetti sauce and macerated apricots in brandy to serve over ice cream for the adults. I don't know if I was that impressed or it was my mother's reaction to these dishes, but they were very memorable all the same. On that trip she coaxed me into trying fried scallops and shish kabob, two foods that remain high on my favorite list to this day.
She also turned us on to one of her favorite discoveries, avocado toast. It was just a simple little recipe for buttered toast with creamy ripe avocado mashed and smeared on top like jam. It was then sprinkled liberally with freshly ground black pepper for an easy and delicious little snack that I still make often.
Over the years I've kind of customized Grandma Bunch's simple little recipe, but frequently still go back to the original for a bit of instant gratification, or when I have super ripe avocadoes that I need to use. I have found that this little recipe can kick up a summer salad supper or help make a simple cup of soup a special meal. With good avocadoes available most of the year, this is a taste of summer you can enjoy anytime.
4 slices rustic bread
2 tablespoons butter, softened
1 large tomato sliced into 8 thin slices
1 cup shredded Asiago cheese (or any other sharp flavorful cheese)
1 large ripe avocado, peeled, seeded and mashed
Freshly ground black pepper
Preheat broiler.
Arrange bread in a single layer on a cookie sheet and place in the preheated broiler. Watching carefully, toast until golden brown. Turn bread over and toast the other side lightly (this step can also be done in a toaster). Remove from the oven, butter one side before topping with tomato slices and equal amounts of the Asiago cheese. Return to the broiler, and watching carefully melt the cheese until it is bubbly and golden brown. Remove from the oven and set aside to cool slightly before topping with equal amounts of the mashed avocado. Sprinkle with a grinding of black pepper. Serve warm.
No tribute to my grandmother would be complete without something coral colored. Since Whole Foods had small watermelons on sale, I thought a refreshing Watermelon Margarita would go well with the avocado toast. My little watermelon produced approximately 3 cups of strained juice so this is kind of a benchmark for starting your recipe. Since I love sprinkling my watermelon with salt before I eat it, I think that the combination of salty and sweet on the glass rims compliments the watermelon flavor perfectly. Feel free to adjust this recipe to accomodate the amount of juice you get from your melon or to your taste preference.
Watermelon Margaritas
1 small seedless watermelon
Juice of 3 limes (approximately 6 tablespoons)
1/2 cup simple syrup (1/3 cup granulated sugar to 1/3 cup water, simmered together until sugar is dissolved then cooled)
2/3 cup tequila (or white rum for a daiquiri)
1 - 1/2 ounces orange liqueur
2 teaspoons very coarse salt
1 tablespoon granulated sugar
Crushed Ice
Lime wedges
Remove watermelon pulp from the rind and place in the bowl of a food processor or blender and puree. Over a pitcher, strain pulp through a sieve, pressing pulp with the back of a spoon to extract every bit of juice. To the pitcher add the lime juice, tequila and orange liqueur. Stir well.
Combine the salt and sugar on a flat surface. Run a lime wedger over the rims of four 10 - 12 ounce glasses. Gently dip the glass rims in the salt/sugar mixture to coat. Carefully fill glasses with the desired amount of ice. Give the watermelon mixture one more good stirring before filling glasses. Top each glass with a wedge of lime. Serve immediately. This recipe makes 4 nice big Margaritas.


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Directions to IDAV at UC Davis
The University of California, Davis is located on Interstate 80, 15 miles west of Sacramento, California. The University is a 35 minute drive from the Sacramento International Airport and a 1.5-2 hour drive from the San Francisco International Airport.
The UC Davis campus is the largest of all UC campuses, and it can be difficult to find specific buildings. Find below several maps that will let you locate us easily.
- From the UC Davis Exit on Interstate 80 to IDAV (PDF)
- From the UC Davis Exit on Interstate 80 to Ken Joy's Office (PDF)
IDAV is located on the 2nd floor of the Academic Surge building. Below is a map which shows the locations of our labs and office located there.
We get many requests for maps from the San Francisco International Airport to UC Davis. Find a suitable map below.
- From SFO to UC Davis (PDF)
A complete map of the UC Davis campus can be accessed below. Our buildings are in section K11 of the map.


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As is tradition in Italian families, Marol spends her wedding night in her family home. Her mother sleeps in the adjacent room in case Marol has any questions. Mama tells Marol, "You have any a problem, you come and see Mama."
Later, Marol's husband unbuttons his shirt, and Marol jumps up, runs next door and cries, "Mama, Mama! He has hair all over his chest!"
Mama reassures Marol, "Men have hair on the chest. This is sign of a good man. Go now and make him happy."
But when Marol's husband takes off his belt, she goes jumps up again, runs next door and cries, "Mama, Mama! He has a protrusion in his pants!"
Mama reassures her, "He finds you beautiful. This is sign of a good man. Go now and make him happy."
Finally, Marol's husband takes off his shoes. Due to a terrible childhood accident, he only has half of his right foot. Marol jumps up and runs back to her mother's room, shouting, "Mama, Mama! He has a foot and a half!"
Her mother gets up and announces, "Stand back, Marol -- this is a job for Mama!"


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Study has positive health news for kidney donors
The U of M study is the largest, and one of the longest retrospective studies to date, looking at the risks of kidney donation.
Researchers examined the outcomes of nearly 3,700 people who donated a kidney at the U of M. They tracked donors all the way back to 1963.
Out of the 3,700 donors, only 11 people went on to develop kidney failure requiring dialysis or kidney transplantation, according to principal investigator Dr. Hassan Ibrahim.
"And that risk of kidney failure is much lower than what is generally observed in the general population," Ibrahim said. "So we're really assured -- not only do they live as long, if not longer than the general population, but the risk of kidney failure is not increased."
"Not only do [kidney donors] live as long, if not longer than the general population, but the risk of kidney failure is not increased."
Donors must pass strict selection criteria before they're allowed to donate a kidney. Donors can't have diabetes, hypertension or be obese. The good health of the donor population proves that those restrictions have paid off, Ibrahim says. That should be comforting to anyone considering kidney donation.
"That would be the true reward from this work," Ibrahim said. "We're hoping it will get people more interested in living donation, because we currently have over 100,000 people on the kidney transplant list. And roughly 10 percent of these people die per year waiting for a kidney transplant."
In 1967, Tony Thein gave one of his kidneys to his younger brother Tom. Both men were in their mid 20s at the time. Tony Thein is now 70.
"It certainly has never slowed me down," he said.
The only consequence of his surgery is a small scar on the side of his back, Thein said. He wants everyone to know that he has never had any problems living with one kidney.
"If those of us who have done it over this long period of time have survived this well, I'd like to be the model for others who might say, 'Gee, I've considered it, but I'm not sure I want to go forward with it,'" Thein said.
His brother Tom is doing well, too. He turns 69 in May, and is still married to the nurse he met while recovering from his transplant.
But like any study, the U of M's findings have limitations.
The population in the U of M study does not reflect the ethnic composition of the U.S. population, said Dr. Jane Tan, a kidney specialist at Stanford University, who reviewed the research and published a companion editorial in the New England Journal of Medicine.
"It is a predominantly white population, and whether this also applies to other ethnicities, specifically African American and Hispanic -- we presume that it is, but we don't fully know," Tan said.
For example, African Americans have a much higher rate of diabetes, hypertension and end stage kidney disease than Caucasians. So it's possible they might be more likely to develop those conditions after donating a kidney.
Tan also wonders about older donors. Every year the average age of living donors increases, she said. Some people who donated 40 years ago might have been in better overall health than people who donated just 10 years ago, she said, and that could skew the results of the study.
But overall, she concludes the U of M study is well-designed and its conclusion seems solid.
"I think with this study we can more safely say that, indeed, living kidney donors screened in the way that the authors mentioned do not have undue harm in the future," Tan said.
The U of M is in the process of expanding its research to other regions of the country. They hope a more geographically diverse study of kidney donors will help them answer any remaining questions.
The study was funded by the National Institutes of Health, the General Clinical Research Centers and the Monica Libin Fund.


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Gorgeous Log Home Wrap Around Deck Only $46,000 MUST SEE Interior & Floor Plans!
There are many reasons you might consider a log home or log cabin, maybe you are looking for a place to getaway and spend holidays and weekends, or maybe you want a log home to live in full time. This great log cabin is an amazing price for an appealing log home design.
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Read the blogs!
Microsoft wants us to "Imagine life without walls"...I say, "If there are no walls, who needs Windows?"
Okay, this is a stupid question: will it still be free? Because Wikipedia said that you sometimes have to pay for a NPO software.
We're grateful for the past, present and future support of our charter and community members and we look forward to continuing to provide the best forum software out there, while keeping to the original goal: Simple, elegant, powerful, and free.
Fine! When will you release out SMF2.0 Final? I have been waiting for 2 years!
Page created in 0.225 seconds with 17 queries.Page served
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MIAMI — The suspicions airport security officials had when they saw the metal canister grew when they learned about the man who brought it in from the Middle East: a scientist who sparked a bioterrorism scare after he reported missing vials of plague samples seven years ago.
Officials shut down most of Miami International Airport overnight, roused nearby hotel guests from their beds and detained Dr. Thomas Butler until Friday morning, when he was released without charges, a senior law enforcement official said.
Tests on the canister found nothing dangerous, said the senior law enforcement official, who spoke on condition of anonymity because he wasn't authorized to release the information. Homeland Security spokesman Nicholas Kimball said the item resembled a pipe bomb.
Butler's former lawyer said the incident appeared to be a "fantastic overreaction."
Butler, 70, is a world-renowned plague researcher who quickly became the focus of a federal investigation in 2003 when he reported that 30 vials of plague samples possibly had been stolen from his Texas Tech University lab.
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He was later acquitted of smuggling and illegally transporting the potentially deadly germ, and of lying to federal agents about the missing vials. Jurors found Butler guilty of the mislabeling and unauthorized export of a FedEx package that contained plague samples he sent to Tanzania.
He was also convicted of fraud and theft and sentenced to two years in prison for defrauding Texas Tech about illegally negotiated contracts he had with pharmaceutical companies with which he also had clinical studies contracts.
Before Butler's trial, leading scientific organizations expressed concern about the criminal case against him and its effect on infectious disease research. Four Nobel laureates said in an open letter that Butler had been "subjected to unfair and disproportionate treatment."
Jonathan Turley, a George Washington University law professor who represented Butler in his unsuccessful appeals, said the scientist "has spent his entire life protecting and healing people in some of the most impoverished areas of the world. He would never do anything that would endanger people."
The senior law enforcement official told the AP that a Transportation Security Administration inspector noticed an odd container around 9 p.m. Thursday as Butler was going through customs. He had arrived on a flight from the Middle East, where he had been teaching at a Saudi Arabian university.
The inspector ran Butler's name through a database and discovered that he had been tried on the plague-related charges. Officials decided to evacuate the airport and detain Butler, who cooperated fully, the law enforcement official said.
A Miami-Dade police bomb squad spent hours scouring the airport. Between 100 and 200 passengers were evacuated from four of the airport's six concourses. Airport roadways and a hotel near the airport's international terminal were closed down. Police and airport officials described the shutdown of the concourses as a public safety precaution.
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Butler was released after tests showed that he, the container and his other belongings did not contain any hazardous biological material or explosives, the official said.
The canister was used to transport dead bacteria samples and was a legitimate experiment, said another government official who also requested anonymity to discuss the ongoing investigation. Without naming Butler, the official said the scientist is a professor at Ross University, a medical school in the Caribbean island of Dominica, and on a teaching assignment in Saudi Arabia.
Passengers, workers and others were allowed back in just as the airport was expecting the first of 1,500 passengers on flights between 4 and 6 a.m. alone — and more thereafter.
"Everything's back to normal," airport spokesman Greg Chin told the AP.Story: Cup of tea forces UK jet to make emergency landing
Butler's 2003 report of missing plague vials set off a frantic search that ended when Butler gave FBI agents a written statement in which he admitted a "misjudgment" in not telling his supervisor that the vials had been "accidentally destroyed," according to court records. At trial, Butler testified that FBI agents forced him to make the admission to calm the public's fears.
Turley said he hoped to speak later Friday with the researcher. He said the Miami incident "appears to be a fantastic overreaction," and is "ironic because we defeated all the national security counts in the case."
"The only plague claim he was convicted of was a highly technical paper violation; he literally checked the wrong box on the form," Turley said. He added, "I find it strange to evacuate an airport because a guy was convicted of contractual violations with a university."
Peter Agre, a Nobel Prize-winning biochemist who supported Butler against the 2003 charges, said he'd be astonished if Butler did anything wrong.
"I suspect because he's Tom Butler and on a list as coming from Saudi Arabia, he's being scutinized and somebody pushed the panic button," Agre said in a telephone interview from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health in Baltimore.
Butler was on supervised release from prison until 2008. He also agreed to retire from Texas Tech and to surrender his medical license.
He is not currently licensed in Texas, a spokeswoman for the Texas Medical Board said Friday.
© 2013 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.


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Grand casino project unveiled for Albany; cost estimated at up to $400 million
Developer lobbies for support from city for $400M plan
Rochester developer David Flaum unveiled his vision for an Albany casino to Common Council members on Friday and asked for a vote of support as he puts together key pieces of the $300 million to $400 million project.
Flaum outlined his plan to build a spacious gambling house and hotel with an indoor equestrian center and water park and a large horse racing betting parlor.
His presentation at City Hall featured an artist's rendering including attractions such as fountains rising from an existing pond that could be seen from the state Thruway just yards away from the project site.
Although the plan he described is incomplete, Flaum promised to hire local people, using union workers for construction and permanent employees, and to create a $2 million account for city leaders to use for things such as scholarships and social programs. Council members seemed impressed, although some raised concerns about problem gambling and traffic congestion.
"This is the site," he said when asked if he has other parcels under contract in the Capital Region besides the roughly 60 acres he has arranged to buy at Noonan Lane off Exit 23 of the Thruway.
Flaum said he considered Rensselaer County but wouldn't say if he has options elsewhere. Nor would he reveal if he is close to finding a casino company to run the 63,000- to 67,000-square-foot gambling hall he envisions for the property owned by the family of U.S. Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand.
"I don't know how to answer that question right now," he said. A gaming company with experience in running a casino will be critical to a bid for one of the four casino licenses the New York Gaming Commission is authorized to issue in three regions of upstate New York.
With lobbyist Justin McCarthy and Capital District Off-Track Betting Corp. President John Signor, Flaum described a project he said would beat any competitors for a casino license in the Capital Region.
Signor said his operation would take 20,000 square feet in the gambling house for an OTB parlor with a sports theme.
He said the addition of the OTB will broaden the field of municipalities that could benefit financially from the casino. Eight counties would get a piece of the state's revenues from the casino under state law. If Capitol OTB joined the project as a tenant, he said, any profits the betting corporation receives would be spread to the cities of Albany and Schenectady and 19 counties.
Signor said his board of directors unanimously approved the relationship with Flaum's project, even though some of the members represent government jurisdictions also hoping to build a casino, such as Schenectady, Montgomery County and Rensselaer County.
Flaum's team billed the Noonan Lane project, called "E23," as delivering $5 million in taxes a year to the city treasury and $11.4 million a year split between Albany County and the city from casino revenue sharing.
The $11.4 million, they said, is based on state Division of the Budget estimates and are actually less than what Flaum expects his project will produce.
Mayor Kathy Sheehan sounded ready to offer her support, saying that the revenues could come in handy for the financially struggling city. She called the development "an additional asset" for attracting business to the convention center planned for downtown.
"This is an opportunity to grow our tax base," she said.
McCarthy, who lobbies for Flaum and for Capital OTB and brought the parties together, said the hotel envisioned, for up to 350 rooms, could add to the city's ability to attract events such as the NCAA basketball tournament.
"I like what I hear, but what you don't hear is what you've got to be concerned with," said Common Council President Carolyn McLaughlin. "How do you say no to $10 million?"
Councilwoman Cathy Fahey sounded a note of alarm regarding the ills of gaming. "I have deep concerns," Fahey said.
Flaum said his project won't compete with existing cultural institutions and entertainment venues.
He said the project site is ideal because development would not disrupt neighbors. The land is owned by the Noonan family, including Gillibrand's mother, and is where the senator grew up.
The property is on the outskirts of Albany and is bordered by the Thruway and a cemetery and is close to the state Thruway Authority headquarters.
The council has set no time limit to decide on the project's merits and will hold a public hearing at an as yet undetermined date.
Flaum has also been trying to build a casino for the Seneca Indian Nation in Monroe County. His contract and work with the Seneca tribe was called into question by gaming competitors who asked the Joint Commission on Public Ethics to look into whether Flaum has been violating lobbying laws.
Also politically active, Flaum has been a generous donor to various campaigns and is a member of the Republicans for Cuomo team.
He and his family have donated more than $100,000 to Cuomo's campaigns, according to public records, and possibly more, based on his participation in recent Cuomo fundraisers.
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Cyber Monday Deals From Around the Web
Black Friday has come and gone, finally. Onto the next shopping extravaganza – Cyber Monday, the decidedly safer shopping day of the year.
Online retailers such as Amazon and Best Buy are selling gadgets at discounts steeper than normal — though not every deal is as much of a bargain as the retailers make it out to be.
Realistically, it will be tough to get some of the best gadgets and tech equipment on sale because companies won't have to use discounts to move them. For example, you'll have a tough time finding an iPad Mini deal, because Apple is already selling it about as cheap as it can make it.
That said, here are some top deals from around the Web today — and whether they're actually worth the price. We'll be updating the post throughout the day as new deals appear and disappear.