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The best Netflix experience is on Roku, featuring support for English subtitles, 1080p HD video and Dolby Digital + surround sound (where available). Works easily with your Netflix unlimited membership.
Crackle delivers hundreds of full-length, uncut Hollywood movies and TV series such as Snatch and Seinfeld every month – all free and on demand.
Amazon Instant Video features more than 150,000 titles, including new release movies and next-day TV episodes to rent or purchase. In addition, Amazon Prime members can watch thousands of videos at no additional cost to their membership.
PBS has partnered with Roku to give you free and easy access to PBS original and featured programs: thousands of videos from multiple genres including history, news, science, technology and the arts. Select your favorite PBS station for a unique localized experience.
With MLB.TV Premium, you can watch over 2,430 MLB regular season games LIVE or on-demand in HD Quality. Purchase a MLB.TV Premium subscription from www.MLB.tv/Roku and catch all the action.
VUDU delivers a cinema-like experience at home with the hottest new releases and the largest HD library. Choose to rent or own from thousands of titles available in vibrant 1080p with rich Dolby Digital Surround Sound.
Get unlimited access to every episode of every season of your favorite HBO shows, including HBO original series, hit movies, sports, comedy specials, documentaries – and more – all FREE with your HBO subscription through participating TV providers.
Watch Disney videos, like clips from your favorite Disney TV shows and movies, behind-the-scenes sneak peeks and interviews, classic cartoons, online originals, new music videos, and more.
Hulu Plus brings the latest and greatest TV series to the biggest screen in the house. Enjoy every episode, all season long, of Glee, Modern Family, New Girl, and dozens of other popular TV shows in HD.
has been added to your Roku player


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This is my first post and looking for some advice!
I got into photography about 12 months ago with an Olympus PEN EPL-1, it has done me well but i feel i am stating to out grow it and it is fiddly to use in manual modes, plus additional lenses and accessories are very expensive and limited.
So i have looking around and doing a bit of research decided i want to trade up to a DSLR. Having looked about i think my best option is a Nikon D3100. i like the feel of the Nikon cameras over a Cannon.
I have also found a kit which includes the Nikon 35mm f1.8 which i like the look off, mainly for holidays and travelling.
I would appreciate some advice as to whether this is the right way to go and are there any serious reasons why i shouldn't go for this kit? I take mostly landscapes whilst out walking and street shots whilst travelling.
Thanks for your help in advance

subset: commoncrawl


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School system: We need your help to make schools safer
CHINA GROVE — Local officials urged parents Wednesday to stay involved in their children's lives and schools at an information session about school safety.
Between 50 and 75 parents attended part two of "Keeping Our Children Safe" at Jesse C. Carson High School. That's about half the number that attended part one, which focused on bullying.
The series is part of the Parents Matter Program, intended as a continuing effort to stay connected with parents.
Superintendent Dr. Judy Grissom asked each person there to reflect on his or her part in increasing school safety.
"It's not something just the schools can do. I wish it were, but it's not," Grissom said. "I'm asking all of you - all of the parents, staff and everybody in the community — to work with us to help make the schools a safer place."
Rowan County Sheriff Kevin Auten started the session by talking about safety procedures. He said shootings at Columbine High School in Colorado, Sandy Hook Elementary School in Connecticut and Virginia Tech have drawn attention to school security.
The sheriff said local law enforcement now uses a rapid deploy process to make sure that the closest responders are the first ones on the scene of an emergency.
He also said the Rowan-Salisbury School System has simplified its lockdown codes to just two — yellow, when classes continue as normal behind locked doors, and red, when there is an emergency situation. Two lockdown drills are conducted each school year.
Law enforcement recommended a lockdown after the Sandy Hook shooting because officials had heard of threats.
He said threats had come up at 12 or 14 schools. They were all empty, and some weren't even intended as threats, but law enforcement officials wanted to be proactive, Auten said.
He encouraged parents to be proactive as well.
"Know what's on their computer," he said. "Kids will post something, leave it up for 30 minutes so a few people can see it, then take it down. ... That's how a lot of the rumors start."
Carson High School Principal Kelly Withers spoke more in-depth about student safety on social media.
Withers said 73 percent of teenagers aged 12 to 17 use social networking sites. Children aged 2 to 11 comprise nearly 16 million or 9.5 percent of the active online universe.
Withers said most reports to the school of online bullying are on Facebook and Twitter, she said, but parents should be aware of another new social networking application.
"Most of our kids have SnapChat accounts, and they talk about them frequently," Withers said. "They say they send fun pictures of each other, but there's potential for bullying or other pictures on there as well."
On SnapChat, people can take a photo and send it to someone else, who can only see the photo for 10 seconds before it is deleted. The messages leave no trace on either phone. If the receiver takes a screenshot, the app notifies the sender.
Withers said children and teenagers are starting to use the app to send out inappropriate photos of themselves and others, without leaving visible proof.
"We have to try to stay on top of it and constantly talk to our students about what they're using," Withers said. "As parents, it's essential to talk to your children about the technology they have."
Withers also addressed a Jan. 31 early dismissal at Carson that happened after a power outage. She said that when students began texting and posting about the outage on Twitter and Facebook, the school's front office was flooded with phone calls from parents.
As a result, Withers said, school officials had a hard time contacting the administrative staff they needed to talk to before deciding whether to close or continue classes.
Withers encouraged parents to let school administrators make their decisions so they can get information back to parents sooner.
Wednesday's information session was originally scheduled for that evening, but it was postponed because the school was closed. The first session was held Jan. 10.
Assistant Superintendent Gene Miller said Wednesday that the school system has created a committee to study how to make its schools safer. The group has met twice already and plans to meet a third time later this month.
Miller said the committee has recommended that all elementary and school systems be equipped with a door buzzer system with video and audio.
"We're working on security systems that will allow our middle schools and elementary schools to remain locked," Miller said. "We're estimating that the cost to do this is $120,000 to $160,000, and that is in our capital outlay budget this year."
Two such systems are already in place at Hurley Elementary School and Henderson Independent High School, he said. Other similar systems are found at Bostian, Knollwood and China Grove elementary schools.
Equipping the high schools and Knox Middle School with those systems would be very expensive, he said, because they have multiple buildings. The committee is trying to find other options for them.
The school system also is including $120,000 in its budget to install exterior speakers at all of its schools so their announcements can be heard outside. Miller said it also wants to spend $21,000 on exterior lighting and $6,000 on security-related signage.
In addition, the committee is looking at getting new keys and locks, adding a school resource officer to each middle and elementary school, improving front office coverage, clarifying system-wide policies, expanding the schools' exterior camera systems and addressing mental health concerns.
Everyone in attendance Wednesday had the chance to sign a banner pledging to help make Rowan-Salisbury Schools safer for students.
Signatories included Cheryl Oster and her son Sam, a fifth-grade student at Shive Elementary School. Oster said school safety is a big concern for her.
"I was happy to hear all the things they are trying to install for security," Oster said. "It's too easy for somebody to get into the schools."
Sisters-in-law Maria Diaz and Leticia Elias attended the session together because they both have children at Norwood Elementary School. Through interpreter Miriam Bosso, they said they're glad they came.
"I was very concerned about what happened in Connecticut and wanted to know what they are doing about it," Diaz said. "I'm very happy to hear that they are implementing and coming up with specific things."
Elias said she wanted to learn about security-related rules at the schools.
"I was very interested to hear all of the uses of Facebook and Twitter, because sometimes we don't know what our kids are doing," she said.
Diaz said she was disappointed that there weren't more parents present.
"They're saying they're so concerned," she said, "but they do not take the time to come."
Contact reporter Karissa Minn at 704-797-4222.
Twitter: twitter.com/posteducation
Facebook: facebook.com/Karissa.SalisburyPost


text: Riding The Tiger "I discovered that being a President is like riding a tiger. A man has to keep on riding or be swallowed." Harry S. Truman Posted March 6, 2013 By Bryan Craig Carl Hayden: From County Sheriff to U.S. Senator Carl Hayden, pictured here as sheriff of Maricopa County. PD. On a recent trip to Mesa, Arizona, I found myself at the Natural History Museum. Most of the museum is in the old city hall building where one exhibit was the territorial jail, an intimidating series of metal prison cells. A sign hanging on the wall read that Carl Hayden was once sheriff of Maricopa County from 1907-1912. Wait…I know that name as my political history brain began to click. After some quick digging, I was impressed by the fact that Hayden and Daniel Inouye of Hawaii were the only 20th century politicians who saw their territory become a state, became their state's first Representative in the House, and served long terms in Congress. Hayden's state-wide political career took off, in part, because he was sheriff. He got to know the law enforcement and court officials who would help him win a seat in the House of Representatives in 1912. Hayden then served as Senator from 1927 until his retirement in 1969 – 56 consecutive years. It is unusual to have such longevity, but also to experience the vast changes in the country while serving in Congress. When he left the sheriff's office, Maricopa County was a quiet farming community. By the time he departed the Senate, Hayden left a considerable legacy, mainly from the federal highway system and the Central Arizona Project that brought water to Arizona from the Colorado River, thus creating modern Arizona as we know it. Both of these issues are back in the headlines today as the state's population nearly doubled in the last two decades, now at over 6 million people. Traffic congestion and air pollution remain a concern, especially in the state's population center, Maricopa County. Furthermore, Arizona could face water shortages due to climate change and growing demand. In our Presidential Recordings series at the Miller Center, we hear a couple of interactions between Senator Hayden and President Lyndon Johnson in 1964. This was a crucial year as Johnson was facing Arizona's junior senator, Barry Goldwater, in the 1964 presidential election. In one conversation, Johnson asked Hayden for help in Arizona, but Goldwater won the state anyway. However, Goldwater managed to win only five other states in the wake of Johnson's landslide. Read more → Lyndon B. Johnson Miller Center Resources Tweet


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The Importance of Displaying Children's Art in the Home
I was visiting a new friend's home for the first time recently and my favorite personal touch was that she had framed and hung a series of her son's superhero drawings. Not only did they look great, I'm sure it made her son feel great seeing them gracing the family's walls. I resolved to do something similar at home as a way to honor my son and show him that he is as important as anyone else who lives here, even if I don't let him pick out the new curtains.
Displaying your child's work shows them their creative efforts are valued, it builds their confidence and, quite simply, can be an expression of your love for them. Here are 25 examples of children's art proudly displayed throughout the home from as simple as taping up a gallery of paintings to more permanent, framed layouts.
- Julie's Vermeer-Worthy Apartment in Paris
- Abbey Nova's Home on A Cup of Jo
- Kid-Created Canvas Artwork on Small Shop Studio
- Playroom in Paula Joye's Home on LifeStyled
- Mila Goes Pink & Green Bedroom
- Leila's Room on Velvet & Linen
- Henri's Cozy, Playful Room
- Claire's Sustainable & Stylish Family Home
- Bohemian Eclectic Kids Room on Lonny
- Francis & Jane Create from Scratch for Growing Family
- Pam & Bryan's Comfortably Creative Family Home
- The Roeder's Modern Life is Beautiful
- Jennifer's Designer Touch for a Spanish Style Home
- Rachel & Mark's Bright, Beautiful London Home
- Ana Creates a Community at Home
- My Room: Beatrice & Ambrose (the smiley face art was actually made by the mother when she was a child - love!)
- Shelley & Reed's Creative Cottage
- Dee's Dual Craft & Playroom
- My Room: Everett (canvas painted by a 4-year-old sister to welcome her new brother)
- My Playroom: Kaitlynn
- Before & After: Colorful Kids' Art in the Dining Room on Pure Style Home
- Olivia & Emma's Shared Room Gets Personal
- Claire's Sustainable & Stylish Family Home
- Camilla Freeman-Topper's Home on Vogue Australia
- Framed Art in the Living Room on The Artful Parent
(Image credits: Celeste Sunderland; Seth Smoot for A Cup of Jo; Small Shop; Paula Joye; Nina/Swanky Swell; Velvet & Linen; Catherine Ouellet-Cummings; Lizzie Ford; Lonny; Jill Slater; Leah Moss; Chris Perez; Marcia Prentice; Eleanor Busing; Jill Slater; Tiny Yellow Bird; Therese Maring; Bubba Chic; readers James & Lisa; Jenn/Jak's Place; Pure Style Home; Jeannette Bauer; Lizzie Ford; Felix Forest for Vogue Australia; The Artful Parent)
16 Comments
Love this post!! As an Interior Designer of children' rooms, I always incorporate the children' art in their rooms or public rooms in the home. It fosters self esteem, pride & in many cases features a budding artist. When your child comes home with his latest masterpiece, see where you can display it. Make or buy a portfolio so you can save their creations. It's fun to look back at also.
Love! I would also suggest hanging the children's art LOW--closer to their eye level--especially if it's hung up in their room or play space. It's a favorite Montessori tip for helping children appreciate beautiful things, by putting it within their reach and in their line of sight.
Love this. I have a professionally framed piece of art my son did when he was 8. Now that he is 29 and just bought his first home, I was planning to ask him if he now wanted his artwork for HIS house!
This is funny. I just bought some frames this weekend to fame my 8 year old grandson's art. Love the post!
. . . frame, not fame
I LOVE this! As an artist, I get so much inspiration from my kids, and their art is just as prominently displayed in our house as mine. I've hand-painted frames onto the playroom walls to hang their artwork. We switch it out regularly with a few pieces of scotch tape. (You can see it on www.averyodesign.com)
I went through and photographed a bunch of my favorite preschool artwork, and arranged them on a grid using InDesign. Got an inexpensive poster print, framed it, and hung it on the wall in our kitchen. My son LOVES seeing his artwork there, and still comments about it 2 years later. The bright pops of color look great against the gray wall. I had good intentions about updating it, but I haven't so far.
Here's what it looks like. :)
Add my sentiment to the "loves"....this is a great reminder that nobody is every too young to appreciate or be influenced by art or artistic beauty.
My dad is an artist and my room was filled with really colorful paintings and etchings he did before and after I was born. I really do believe that my love for art was fostered at an early age due to all that creative work around my bed and play space.
Also, as an added perk....I recently went through a lot of the old art from that time frame and found that the stuff he did after I was born was so much more joyful, colorful and happy. What a gift to have that kind of connection with my dad's art!
My point: Even if you're not a "real" artist, make stuff for your kids' rooms. They will appreciate it in ways they can't imagine now and won't forget later.
I've had a gallery wall since the early 90's and I used to rotate/mix our daughters art into it. She's 21 now and I still have 3 of her best "pieces" showcased among photos and original work by others. Always been a big hit, even before gallery walls made a come back! Lol
I did this per Cure '14 assignment of one (of a few left) when I was in kindergarten; yellowed cream newsprint and mostly green crayon of a visit to the town library. One of those so wretchedly abstractly bad, it's good (must have been why mom saved it). Easily fit into a very vintage frame & on a table with a few similar green and cream accessories. Did it in the mid '50s so I guess I can call it MCM. Maybe Cure response too, some others, after all these years, were tossed in the trash.
I don't have children, but I would certainly hang some of the wilder, abstract paintings, like the one in Everett's room!
I have always done this with my children's artwork. They are so proud to see their things hanging in our home.
When my son was in elementary school we had an entire wall in the kitchen devoted to the art he brought home. Now that he is a teen we have framed some of his amazing photographs, and they hang with art we have collected. It is a thrill for him (and me) when visitors ask who is the artist when looking at one of his pictures.
YES!! My parents always let me put my stuff up and paint murals in all the bedrooms and the study. It is such a wonderful feeling as a child to feel that your work is valued. And, what is art, if not something that makes us think and feel? :)
I place my 3 year old daughter's art in a frame in the living room, and close to it a folder with more of her paintings. We are constantly choosing which is going to go next. She loves it!!
I bought 2 simple Ikea frames to display my son's art in his own bedroom. Maybe I should finally hang them as part of my January Cure...
Even if they aren't on the wall but on a shelf, we love them !


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A man armed with a handgun stole an undisclosed amount of cash from a check stand at a grocery store in Scotts Valley on Thursday night.
Scotts Valley Police Department seeks a man described as a Hispanic male, 30 to 36 years old between 5 feet, 10 inches and 6-feet tall for the robbery. At the time of the robbery he was wearing a band-aid on left cheek, had a tattoo on his neck and was last seen wearing a grey or brown baseball cap, black or dark-blue hoodie with white lettering that read "Cali", dark blue jeans and blue Vans-type shoes with white laces.
According to police, the man purchased two items and then drew a handgun and demanded the money in the register. After complying, the man ordered the clerk to the ground and fled on foot in an unknown direction.
The robbery took place at about 9:10 p.m. on Thursday, June 6 in Scotts Valley Market.
Anyone with information is asked to contact the Scotts Valley Police Department at 831-440-5670.


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Taylor Phinney's bid for a second stage win for the BMC Racing Team at the Eneco Tour of Benelux ended in the final corner Sunday when the rider in front of him slid out, sending Phinney into the barriers.
A Good Week
Phinney was not hurt and received the same time as stage winner Edvald Boasson Hagen (Sky Pro Cycling), who also won the race overall. Phinney wound up fourth overall, 36 seconds behind, in a race that saw him win the prologue, hold the lead through Stage 3 and finish in the top 10 five times. "It's unfortunate the last corner was really dangerous because Taylor was in a good position to do something really good today," BMC Racing Team Assistant Director Rik Verbrugghe said.
Help From Teammates
Knowing he needed only eight seconds to move into third overall, Phinney tried an attack with eight kilometers left in the 201.2 km race. "I was feeling really strong in the last 20 km so when the Katusha rider went down in front of me at the end, it was really frustrating," Phinney said. "I was extremely happy to have Karsten Kroon and Micki Schär and everyone else on the team helping me today. It was a difficult day and nobody knows these roads like Karsten, so I felt lucky to have him around me."


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Rider Interview: Track trail-blazer, US Criterium Champion and style guru; what more could you want from an interview subject. Ed Hood caught up with US Six Day star Daniel 'Hollywood' Holloway at the first event of the winter season in Amsterdam to find out what makes this flamboyant character tick.
Rider Interview: One of the most surprising signings of the 2012/13 transfer season was the move from the US amateur team Californian Giant to mighty WorldTour outfit Astana by 22 year-old Evan Huffman from Elk Grove. Ed Hood caught up with him for a chat about the past and the future.
Rider Interview: From Cervelo Test Team to SKY to OmegaPharma-Quickstep, Belgian strongman Serge Pauwels has done all the big races at the top level. He's now signed for the most active team on the transfer market with MTN-Qhubeka as they strengthen their stocks for next year - we caught up with Serge at the Worlds for a chat about his move.
Rider Interview: Chad Haga went from competing in the US to a WorldTour rider in the season's hardest Grand Tour in the matter of a year. A steep learning curve you might say, but Chad took it all in his stride. Ed Hood asked him all about his Vuelta baptism of fire.
Ten consecutive Grand Tours is quite an achievement, but then to top it off with a solo stage win is a dream come true. One of the hardest riders in the Pro peloton; Adam Hansen runs us through his Vuelta – Ten in a row, now that's impressive.
British young gun; Dan McLay has been hammering at the door of recognition in Belgium for a few years. But this season he has seen him add to his palmarés with the points jersey in Normandy and a stage win in the Tour de L'Avenir. Pro contract in '15?
Rider Interview: Monday was the first rest day of this years Vuelta a España, so for a change of air Ed Hood got hold of Kiel Reijnen – en route to the Tour of Alberta - to have a word about his Stage One and Overall Points win in the USA Pro Challenge and his season to date.
Rider Interview: Australian Adam Hansen: Compulsive Grand Tour rider, hard worker, cycle shoe designer and manufacturer and all-round funny guy. He is at the start of the 2014 Vuelta a España in Jerez to compete in his 10th Grand Tour in a row. Ed Hood got hold of the Lotto Belisol rider in the South of Spain.
Interview: As the Vuelta looms ever-closer PEZ speaks to a man whose team will be making history in the race as the first ever African squad to ride a Grand Tour. The Professional Continental team MTN-Qhubeka will start the Vuelta this coming Saturday and although they've already achieved a lot just by getting to the race, their expectations are still high.
If you're a young racer with dreams of racing in cycling's heartland you couldn't do much better than joining up with the Kingsnorth Wheelers, the amateur team set up in Ghent that has helped riders such as Garmin's Jack Bauer on to great success. We recently caught up with Peter Murphy, one of the key men behind the Wheelers to find out more.
The world - and cycling - lost one of the greats with Robin William's passing this week. The comedic giant was also a big cyclist, who often turned up under unexpected circumstances at cycling events to ride along with the crowd. We scored a rare interview with him at the one such event in 2006.
Rider Interview: There are a lot of new, young riders coming up through the ranks, just like the Yates brothers. The next could be Welshman Owain Doull, he already rides for the Irish Continental team: An Post-Chain Reaction and has a string of top results in his palmarés. The next generation.
Rider Interview: Roadside at the Westrozebeke kermis in Flanders Ed Hood spotted a rider worth a chat, AN Post Chain Reaction's Irishman, Conor Dunne. At over two meters tall and racing aggressively he was a hard man to miss on his green XXLarge Vitus. Ed caught up with him after the race...
Interview: The United Bicycle Institute has been teaching the art of steel & titanium frame building - and complete bicycle mechanics, for almost 35 years. We talked to UBI founder Ron Sutphin about what makes these wheels turn, and a lot more.
Roadside Interview: Ed Hood's first hectic day on this year's Tour de France was meant to be a rest day, but not for Ed. After the mussel party with OPQS, there were rider interviews to get. First up was PEZ favourite; Michael Morkov of Tinkoff-Saxo.
Roadside Rest Day: A day at the Tour presents hundreds of options for Roadside adventures, and sometimes it's tough choosing which path to follow. One story I was determined to get on my trek through the Vosges and Alps, was an interview with one of the Tour's Podium Girls.
Interview: Just before the big Tour de France kickoff tomorrow we managed to catch up with Paul Sherwen, one half of cycling's most famous commentary team to get his thoughts on the big race, predictions and more.
Rider Interview: The Tour de France build-up is well underway and Ed Hood managed to grab American rider Matthew Busche of Trek Factory Racing for some words before his first 'Grand Boucle'. Busche has been on a Vuelta winning team in the past, will that be enough preparation for the Tour?
Rider Interview: Just 20 years old and from the other side of the world, young Aussie George Tansley has been thrown into the deep end in the heartland of racing in Belgium but he hasn't sunk. Far from it in fact, he's come out fighting - and winning with a string of high placings and victories of late we thought it was time to catch up with this man on the rise as he pursues his dream of professional racing.
Pro Interview: One of the new signings for Garmin-Sharp this year was Portugese climber André Cardoso. Often seen at the front during the Giro working tirelessly for his team leader we thought it was time to catch up with André to find out more about him and see how he is feeling in his first year at World Tour level.


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school resources
teacher resources
school finance & grants
Testing / Accountability
student assessment & ratings
standards, college prep & programs
data, statistics & research
News & Events
communications & calendars
Approximately one week before the SBEC meeting, the agenda will be linked to the meeting date.
February 14 April 4 - Workshop May 2 August 1 October 24
Written Testimony - Written testimony offered in lieu of oral testimony should be submitted two business days before the meeting to ensure that members have had an opportunity to review it. Please submit by mail, electronic mail, or by fax. It may, however, be submitted no later than thirty minutes prior to the meeting (20 copies). Written testimony should not exceed three pages of double-space text and should be attached to a completed registration form.
Public Registration Form, (PDF 395 KB)
February 8 April 5- Workshop May 3 August 2 October 25
February 3June 8August 10October 5November 13- Special Session
April 8June 17August 12October 7
For information on earlier archived meetings/agendas, E-mail SBEC to receive a copy.
Page last modified on 10/21/2014 01:53:30 PM.
Copyright Texas Education Agency (TEA) 2007-2014


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Sunday, February 2, 2014
Glee Club Home Concert
Join the Glee Club, just back from its boffo tour of Spain and Portugal, for its annual Home Concert!
It's the best of both worlds: you can hear some fantastic music and not miss the Super Bowl. CSP 99.
Monday, February 3, 2014
Erin Michelson on Adventure Philanthropy
Erin Michelson, founder of Michelson Consulting Group (MCg) which provides strategic advisory services to help citizen sector and for-profit institutions grow their philanthropic business, is an adventure philanthropist. In fact she wrote the book on it, "Adventure Philanthropist: Great Adventures Volunteering Abroad." AND the blog on it: www.GoErinGo.com.
Erin will be speaking about her exciting and rewarding career spent traveling to every continent and more than 60 countries working with people on their own soil and living out her "living and giving" philosophy.
Tuesday, February 4, 2014
Toussaint Losier on Black Power and Police Brutality in Chicago
Toussaint Losier speaks on "Help Us Reduce Abuse": Black Power, Police Brutality, and the Problem of Institutional Accountability in Chicago.
Dr. Toussaint Losier of the University of Chicago will address the issues at the core of Christopher Dorner's manifesto through the lens of the Chicago-based Afro-American Patrolmen's League (AAPL). Established in 1968, the AAPL mobilized a cohort of lower-ranking black policement to play a lead role in efforts to force Chicago PD officials and members of Mayor Richard Daley's political machine to bring an end to an epidemic of police brutality and corruption.
Tuesday, February 4, 2014
Kanekoa Kukea-Shultz on "Lahui: Hawaiian Community Development & Sustainability"
Occidental alum Kanekoa Kukea-Shultz '00 will return to campus to lecture on his work in promoting the social and economic advancement of an important Hawaiian community.
To learn more about the topic, visit the Facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/
Tuesday, February 4, 2014
Meet the Greeks
Interested in recruitment? Meet all eight of Oxy's Greek chapters and learn about their individual missions, philanthropies, traditions and ways they are involved around campus. Get to know some Oxy Greeks and enjoy free catering from Four Cafe.


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On the strength of a flawless lead-out by the BMC Racing Team, Thor Hushovd easily won Friday's sprint finish at the Arctic Race of Norway and took the overall lead.
'Couldn't Be More Perfect'
Hushovd's victory – his sixth of the season and the BMC Racing Team's eighth in the past 19 days – was his best yet, the Norwegian road champion said. "I was so motivated and it just worked perfectly," he said. "The crowds have been amazing. There's not a lot of inhabitants in this area, but it seems everybody has come out. So it couldn't be more perfect to give them a win in my national jersey." In the final moments of the 156.5-kilometer race, the BMC Racing Team lined up its other five riders ahead of Hushovd, with Adam Blythe providing the final lead-out. By out-sprinting runner-up Tom Van Asbroeck (Topsport Vlaanderen-Baloise) and third-placed Marco Haller (Katusha), Hushovd earned a time bonus that put him three seconds ahead of Stage 1 winner Kenny van Hummel (Vacansoleil-DCM Pro Cycling Team) in the overall standings with two days to go. BMC Racing Team Assistant Director Yvon Ledanois said the result made up for the disappointment of Thursday's rain-soaked opening stage which saw Hushovd finish fourth. "I'm happy for the team: the riders and staff," he said. "Today was important, not just for the stage, but for the general classification. So to get another victory makes for good satisfaction." Hushovd also leads the race's points classification. With 21 victories this year, the BMC Racing Team has matched its win total for all of 2012.
Listen to complete comments from Hushovd (English, French and Norwegian) and Ledanois on the BMC Racing Team Audio Line.
Watch the video.


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What Is The Big Tree Register? How does my community nominate a tree for the New York State Big Tree Register?
New York State's Big Tree Register is maintained by the Department of Environmental Conservation (DEC) as an effort to recognize trees of record size and to promote an interest in their care and preservation. The State Register lists only native and naturalized species and does not include hybrid species. The authority for determining eligible species is the 1978 edition of the USDA Forest Service publication entitled Checklist of US Trees Native and Naturalized prepared by Elbert L. Little, Jr. For further information about the state and federal programs, please visit DEC's Big Tree Register web page.
More Info
New York State Big Tree Register
Information about the NYS Big Tree Register
URL: http://www.dec.ny.gov/lands/5248.html


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This holiday season give the taste of California fruit, rich chocolate and yummy cookies all nestled within a beautiful, natural wood crate accented with a festive pine tree cut-out! Friends and family will love the assortment of fresh-picked-from-the-orchard fruits like juicy Navel Orange, ripe Red Pear, sweet Comice Pear and succulent Fuji Apple. They?ll find a mix of decadent Ghirardelli® chocolate including Dark Chocolate Squares® and Peppermint Bark Squares®, hand-decorated holiday cookies, and more. When the goodies are gone, use the empty crate as a holiday server. Beautiful, natural wood crate holds the taste of fresh California fruits and rich sweets.
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This slideshow has been adapted from The Man Who Sold America: The Amazing (But True!) Story of Albert D. Lasker and the Creation of the Advertising Century by Jeffrey L. Cruikshank and Arthur W. Schultz. For more on this enigmatic innovator, read the Wall Street Journal review or order the book.
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BMC Development Team's Jakub Novak slipped out of the overall lead and into third Friday at the Bend Memorial Clinic Cascade Cycling Classic, while teammate TJ Eisenhart held onto the best young rider's jersey with two stages to go.
Constant Attacks
Serghei Tvetcov (Jelly Belly Cycling presented by Kenda) won the 147-kilometer race to earn a 10-second time bonus and take his second straight stage. Novak and Eisenhart arrived in a group 17 seconds later, allowing Tvetcov to take the overall lead by eight seconds over Chad Haga (Optum presented by Kelly Benefit Strategies) and by nine over Novak. Eisenhart said the BMC Development Team was on the defensive, especially in the final 35 km of uphill to the finish. "The whole day everyone was just constantly attacking us," he said. "We were working our hearts out to bring things back and then race to the bottom of the climb in good position. (Two-time defending champion) Paco Mancebo attacked with 7 km to go and it was an explosive attack we weren't able to go with. Immediately, I went to the front to set tempo for Jakub and keep the gap close and try to bring it back."
Two Stages Remaining
BMC Development Team General Manager Rik Verbrugghe said he was impressed with the team's efforts to hold the lead. While most teams started the race with eight riders, the BMC Development Team started with six. "It was a very fast race, with lots of attacks," he said. "In the end, it was the strongest guys who stayed in the front. But we did a good job today." Verbrugghe said it will be difficult to take back time in Saturday night's 75-minute criterium through Downtown Bend, but did not rule out possibilities for taking back time in Sunday's 133-km circuit race. "The 10-second bonification made the difference today and the last stage will be a hard one," Verbrugghe said. "So there is still a possibility of doing something on the general classification."


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Member Since 2010
"Fascinating and Well-Read History"
I really enjoyed Herodotus' The Histories, about the background and main events of the epic wars between the ancient Persians and Greeks (translated by George Rawlinson). I was hooked by "the Father of History's" enthusiastic accounts of interesting historical and cultural information and impressed by his appealing balance of objectivity and subjectivity. And I savored his many digressions amplifying the historical context, as well as his detailed accounts of the different ancient exotic cultures (like the Egyptians shaving their eyebrows when their housecats died or the Scythians making capes from the scalps of their fallen enemies), which were in a sense all similar in their violence, heroism, treachery, brutality, ethnocentrism, and superstitious following of prodigies and omens and oracles. We haven't changed so much in 2000 plus years???
Despite some listeners complaining about the reader, Bernard Mayes, I quickly came to enjoy his handling of The Histories, easily imagining myself listening to an elderly, experienced, and decent Herodotus. I appreciated Mayes' subtle changes in tone to express a variety of moods, from Xerxes' waxing wroth at some unpleasant advice and the Athenians getting peeved by the Spartans worrying that they would ally with the Persians, to the suspenseful accounts of battles like those at Marathon, Thermopylae, and Salamis that helped decide the course of world history. I found Mayes always to be right on task, always speaking with effective clarity and rhythm, always perfectly expressing Herodotus' humor, disbelief, admiration, and criticism of his historical subjects.
The only flaw in the audiobook is the too frequent, sudden flash of a kind of static, which distracts from the overall experience to the point that I'm giving what should be a five star audiobook four stars. I highly recommend it.
""How can you be happy like that?""
On the fourth day of February a "stranger [falls] out of infinity into Iping Village" in the Sussex countryside and rents a room at the local inn. His body swathed in clothes, his face wrapped in white bandages, his eyes hidden behind a pair of big blue spectacles, he cuts a bizarre figure. The local "yokels" speculate that he must have suffered some kind of accident. Or that he must be a disguised criminal on the run from the police. Or an ashamed mixed-race piebald hiding his appearance. Or an anarchist working on bombs. Or a lunatic. He claims that he's an "experimental investigator." Surely he's unpleasant and irritable, possessing "A bark of a laugh that he seemed to bite and kill in his mouth," upsetting dogs and boys, and rebuffing all attempts to get to know him with curses so that he may be left undisturbed to do his work. No one even knows his name. About when wags begin walking round the village imitating the stranger by pulling down the brims of their hats and pulling up the collars of their coats and kids begin singing a Bogey Man song whenever they see the stranger, events take a surreal turn when the vicar's house is burgled and the locals put two and two together and send the constable to arrest the stranger, who then disrobes and disappears, for, it turns out, he is the Invisible Man.
Most of H. G. Wells' The Invisible Man (1897) concerns the efforts of "the writer" to collate and interpret the testimony of various witnesses to the Invisible Man's "reign of terror" in the British countryside after the fact. Told from the points of view of countryside denizens like the proprietress of the inn and her husband, the village clock-jobber, general practitioner, reverend, and constable, and even a bachelor tramp, much of the story is a mysterious comedy of class or manner or place. When we finally learn the stranger's name and get his story from his own mouth over half way through, the tale shifts into a study of the alienated mad scientist. Even this is at a remove, however, for his monologue is narrated from the point of view of his university acquaintance Dr. Kemp, who interrupts his story now and then with questions and comments. Wells thus distances us from his scientist until, perhaps, the end of the climax of the short novel.
The Invisible Man explores themes that appear elsewhere in Wells' work: unknown wonders and terrors in the world/universe caused or explained by science may appear at any moment; people fear extraordinary things; men of science who cut themselves off from community become "inhuman"; "contemporary society" is marred by "desecrated fields" and "dank, squalid respectability and . . . sordid commercialism." It is interesting to read the novel with Wells' great short story "In the Country of the Blind," in which a sighted man enters a village of blind people and thinks to rule them, while here an invisible man thinks at first that his condition will give him wonderful advantages over the common run of sighted humanity, permitting him to perpetrate any crime and to do anything he wants.
Perhaps Wells stacks the deck against his scientist. If he had become invisible in the summer instead of the winter, if he'd been a man of calmer temper, if he'd used a different palliative than strychnine, if he'd had more money, if he'd found a less "miserable tool" than the wonderfully named Thomas Marvel, if he'd met Dr. Kemp earlier, and so on, things might have turned out differently. But because the brilliant man is self-centered, irritable, anti-social, and amoral and has become "ruled by a fixed idea" (that his experiments are the only reality), has "lost his human sympathy," has come to believe that "the common conventions of humanity" like not robbing people in their own homes "are all very well for common people," and has imagined schemes for using the "commoners" around him instead of for improving their lives, for all those reasons Wells relishes making things difficult for his scientist.
As in most of his work, Wells' writing here is concise, clear, amusing, terrifying, and literary. He provides reality-establishing scientific explanations involving optics, physics, dynamos, and chemicals for invisibility. He writes comical and vivid descriptions: "His mottled face was apprehensive, and he moved with a sort of reluctant alacrity." He applies irony liberally: "'An invisible man is a man of power.' He stopped for a moment to sneeze violently." And he is capable of harrowing prose: "Down went the heap of struggling men again and rolled over. There was, I am afraid, some savage kicking. Then suddenly a wild scream of 'Mercy! Mercy!' that died down swiftly to a sound like choking."
James Adams reads the audiobook perfectly.
People interested in the history of science fiction (this is one of the first sf stories about invisibility), in studies of criminal intellectual pride, or in compact philosophical novels, should read this book.
"Bad-Ass Biker Chick on Barsoom, er Waar, er Earth!"
Ex-Airborne Ranger Jane Carver, a "bad-ass biker chick," has a reform-school past, a two-strike prison record, and a problem with authority. She has sent Hollywood screenwriter Jason Long her true story on cassette tapes, offering to let him publish it and split any profits 50-50. Long tells us that Jane (not her real name) is about 6'2" with broad shoulders and "rugged good looks." Her story begins when she accidentally kills a sexually harassing jerk and, while fleeing the police, hides in a cave, touches a strange artifact, and is teleported to another world, aptly named Waar, populated as it is by fearsome predators and bellicose humanoids. Witnessing a massacre perpetrated by one faction of purple people on another, she befriends the survivor, Sai-Far, whose betrothed Wen-Jhai, daughter of the ruler of Ora, the greatest nation on Waar, has just been bride-napped by a powerful rival, Kedac-Zir. Thus begins Jane's pulpy adventure, involving "savage" four-armed, lizard-tailed, dread-locked tiger-centaurs, "civilized," purple-skinned, hyphen-named people, and a non-stop series of raids, brawls, duels, death matches, battles, disguises, pursuits, captures, incarcerations, enslavements, entertainments, amorous advances, romance counselings, and more as she tries to help the gormless and spineless Sai reunite with his true love so he may marry her so that her father may grant Jane access to another artifact with which to return to earth where she believes she wants to be.
Needless to say, Long is affectionately riffing on Edgar Rice Burroughs' John Carter. Both A Princess of Mars (1917) and Jane Carver of Waar (2012) begin with the reality-claiming conceit that the heroes have given their first person stories to the authors. Both heroes wake up naked on an alien world where they have super strength and jumping ability due to earth's stronger gravity. Both encounter exotic and dangerous flora and fauna and bad organized religions. Both catalyze Big Events. Both become caught up in page-turning action that devolves into absurdity if you catch your breath and coldly examine it. (The frenetic fun of Long's book is signaled by the one-word exclamation-marked titles of the chapters, like "Hunted!" "Monsters!" and "Captives!")
That said, Long is not rewriting A Princess of Mars with a female lead. For one thing, he avoids what was one of the most interesting parts of John Carter's life on Barsoom (learning the local language) by having the artifact that transports Jane to Waar automatically make her fluent in Sai's tongue. Unlike John Carter, Jane adventures not to win her own true love but to help another person win his. For that matter, while John Carter is heterosexual, Jane is a "switch hitter," and Long explores gender and sexuality more than Burroughs. Although Burroughs seems preoccupied with race (red, black, white, yellow, and green Martians), he elides the vile nature of slavery (John Carter having been on earth the "good" master of white myth beloved by his slaves), while Long explores it. And Jane (at first) has a humane reaction to killing, unlike John Carter.
The biggest difference between Burroughs/Carter and Long/Carver lies in their writing styles. The "swamp trash country girl" Jane has a cruder and more colloquial voice than John Carter, one that comically jars with the "elegant" speech of the local nobles. Jane: "I just saved your life, pal. I'll talk to you anyway I damn well please." Sai: "Tease me not, tormentor." Long also inundates Jane's narration with American pop culture references, especially similes, as in "It looked like the inside of Liberace's brain with Elvis doing the catering." Jane similarly alludes to Ty-D-Bol, the Jolly Green Giant (twice!), Angeline Jolie, Arnold Schwarzenegger, James Bond, Luke Skywalker, Frankenstein, Spider-Man, Porky Pig, Wile E. Coyote, Xena, Hulk Hogan, Justin Beiber, Elton John, Arkansas jail cells, Johnny Cochrane, Andre Agassi, Mark McGwire (twice!), the Packers (twice!), linebackers (thrice!), cheerleaders, CIA cover-ups, Larry Flynt, and more, with the result that Long's novel seems very much of its culture and era, while Burroughs' work, lacking such allusions, feels more universal and timeless. (Surprisingly, she never compares anything to John Carter.)
Some references/similes seem neat: "The silver of the rooftops against the deep black of the alleys made it all look like some huge, cubist black-velvet painting." Some seem lame: "It was as beautiful as a movie." Some seem more Long than Jane, e.g., vintage references to the likes of Steve Reeves, Clark Gable, Mae West, Heckle and Jeckle, and '50s hotrod magazines and coarse and sexist references like, "I was sweating like a whore on dollar day." Jane's language is much raunchier than John Carter's, as with "Where the f*ck have you dumped me now, you f*cking f*cks?" Given her character, that's understandable, but at times I felt that when Long's female characters talk about sex they sound like male fantasies of women rather than like real women. Jane describes light and graphic porno tableaux and often feels horny, and a female pirate captain says, "Right now I need a fat c*ck to fill my c*nt and empty my brain," while a noble woman says, "Oh yes! Harder! Don't stop! By the Seven, don't stop!" Finally, the problem is that the many pop culture references decrease the exotic experience of another world and its alien culture by making them too vividly recall ours.
The reader, Dina Pearlman, does a fine job, modifying her voice slightly for different characters, speaking clearly and convincingly. And she does a great villain-laugh.
Jane Carver of Waar (2012) is a fun, guilty pleasure that I'd only recommend to fans of the John Carter books or of female fantasy/sf characters who kick ass and talk dirty.
""I wish to learn many things.""
Anthony Ryan's epic fantasy novel Blood Song (2011), first in what I hope is only a trilogy in progress, begins with Lord Verniers, the Imperial Chronicler of the southern Alpiran Empire, recounting the time he met the legendary war hero of the northern Unified Realm, Vaelin Al Sorna. Among Vaelin's many names is Hope Killer, for in battle he killed the Hope of the Empire, the Emperor's chosen successor from among his people and Verniers' best friend (at least). For that "murder," Vaelin has spent the last five years in an Imperial dungeon, and has only now been released so that he may face certain death in a duel against the champion of the Meldenean Islands. For their part, the Meldeneans want to watch Vaelin ("the Spawn of the City Burner") die because when his father was Battle Lord of the Realm he torched one of their cities along with its men, women, and children. Verniers' italicized first person narration beginning each of the five parts of Ryan's novel reveal the Chronicler's scornful view of Vaelin's "savage" culture and his hatred of Vaelin. Verniers is also fascinated by the man with "an innate inability to be diminished" and can't resist asking Vaelin to tell his life story so he can write it down as they sail towards his impending doom.
The five parts of the novel, then, narrated in third person from Vaelin's point of view, appear at first to be Verniers' version of Vaelin's story, but the farther the novel progresses, the more it becomes apparent that Vaelin is hiding things from Verniers. . . This raises uncomfortable questions the novel may not answer: why does Ryan begin by making us think Verniers is telling Vaelin's story and then suddenly reveal that he's not, and if he's not, who is?
Be that as it may, the bulk of Blood Song is the account of Vaelin's life from age 11 when he was put by his father into the monkish Sixth Order of the Faith, the Order dedicated to smiting the enemies of the Faith and the Realm. Vaelin is shaped like tempered steel into a Brother of his new "family" (the Brothers are supposed to sever all ties to their former biological families), undergoing harsh martial training, bonding with his fellow young initiates, and gradually learning more about his biological family, about the seven Orders, about the Faith (based on ancestor worship), about its "heretic" Deniers, about realpolitik, and about his "blood song," a gift or a curse that warns him when something bad is going to happen and helps him read people. Vaelin is a compelling protagonist, a person of courage, sensitivity, empathy, morality, and kindness, as well as an instinctive, skilled, and fearsome fighter, able to kill unthinkingly and then to feel his soul soiled by the act.
Ryan writes many great lines. Pithy ones: "War is always an adventure to those who have never seen it." Humorous ones: "The smell was enough to make Scratch get up and slink away." Ultra violent ones: "[Vaelin] heard rather than saw the geyser of blood painting the ceiling and walls, as the headless corpse continued for a few steps before collapsing." Numinous ones: "He wondered if he would dream of wolves." Sublime ones: "It was the strangest and most unfamiliar landscape he had seen, a broad expanse of mostly bare rock pocked by small pools of rainwater and rocky tors rising from the undulating surface like great deformed mushrooms." And one recurring line of intense pathos, when Vaelin protests too much: "I have no father."
Stephen Brand has an appealing and affecting slight northern England accent, by which the "o" in words like love, up, and some becomes "oh," which expresses Vaelin's "barbarian" speech as heard by a "civilized" Empire listener like Verniers. In general, Brand's voice is quite appealing, intelligent, raspy, British, and sparse, a perfect match for Ryan's text. He modifies it for different characters, as with Frentice's street cockney, but never egregiously, not even when doing voices of female characters or children.
Blood Song has plenty of elements typically found in the heroic epic fantasy genre: different histories and cultures in conflict; small-scale and wide-screen graphic violence; supernatural abilities or gifts; a natural born leader hero with prodigious fighting ability, strong moral code ("I'll kill but I won't murder"), sensitive conscience ("I am a murderer"), and vital destiny; a brilliant and beautiful princess chafing in her role; a mysterious evil entity with occult evil minions; a melting pot world (no elves, dwarves, or orcs, but plenty of hunter gatherers, pirate captains, European-esque knights, British-esque longbowmen, Chinese-esque merchant princes, African or Arabic-esque nobles, etc.); and so on. But Ryan tells his story with such humane conviction, complex characters, spare prose, skillful revelations, exciting and horrifying violence, modern political vision, bracing imagination, and unsentimental pathos, that reading Blood Song was a page-turning pleasure I didn't want to end. Ryan's world creation, fantastic imagination, and narrative approach are not as weird and unique as something like J. M. McDermott's Last Dragon, but Blood Song is authentic and compelling, and fans of heroic epic fantasy should enjoy it.
"Sherlock Holmes Meets His Feminine Match"
The promising conceit of Laurie R. King's The Beekeeper's Apprentice, Or on the Segregation of the Queen (1994) is that Mary Russell, who possesses deductive powers and mental brilliance the equal of Sherlock Holmes, met the great detective in 1915, when she was fifteen and he fifty-four, became his apprentice/confidante, began helping him solve mysteries as a fully equal partner, and now as an old woman in the 1990s is writing her memoirs about her relationship and experiences with Holmes. King cleverly has Russell explain at the outset that because Holmes became a figment of Dr. Watson's imagination, because Watson's stories about him had taken on a life of their own, and because now people are writing their own stories featuring Holmes, her detective may differ from the one in the reader's imagination. She also points out that her version will be more accurate than Watson's, because the good doctor always viewed his friend from a position of inferiority, whereas she was never awed by Holmes' deductive powers, possessing them herself to an extraordinary degree.
The "tall, sardonic recluse" and the "gangling, be-spectacled girl" met on the Sussex downs after Holmes had seemingly "retired" from detective work to live on a farm where he could keep and study bees, and Russell, whose parents and brother had been killed (and she emotionally and physically scarred) in an accident, had begun living with an unloving aunt on a nearby farm belonging to her mother's family. Both being "blessed or cursed with minds of hard brilliance that alienated all but the most tenacious" people, they felt an immediate affinity. The plot gets going in earnest a few years/chapters later, after Holmes has tempered, tested, and trained Russell, who has also been studying mathematics and theology at Oxford University, and they take on a kidnapping case that "reeks of failure."
Jenny Sterlin gives a fine reading of the novel. I like her Holmes, slightly deeper than Russell, and superiorly wry. Missing from the audiobook is King's cute preface in which she writes about receiving a trunk full of Holmes and Russell artifacts, including the manuscripts for all the stories written by Russell, as if she (and not King) were their author.
King writes plenty of cool lines one can imagine Holmes uttering:
--"My life has been plagued by criminals with instinct but no sense."
--"Guessing is a bad habit brought on by indolence."
--"Reading that drivel of Watson's a person would never know I've had any real failures."
Russell also has plenty of good lines:
--"Holmes, this is Russell you're talking to, not Mr. Watson or Mrs. Hudson."
--"No! I refuse to accept a gallant stupidity in place of rational necessity. Go."
--"Reminders of my femininity always took him by surprise. However, I could not hold him to blame, for they always took me by surprise as well."
And King writes plenty of pleasurable sentences, as in this passage: "Sherlock Holmes had invented his profession, and it fit him like a glove. We watched in admiration that verged on awe, as his love of challenge, his flair for the dramatic, his precise attention to detail, and his vulpine intelligence were called into play and transformed his thin face by putty and paint into that of his brother."
However, she also writes a few melodramatic clunkers:
--"Eccentricity had flowed into madness as malignant as a poisonous spider."
-- "I was struck again by the size of that man's [Holmes'] heart."
And Holmes stroking Russell's hair to soothe her to sleep once let alone twice seems a bridge too far in character revision. And Russell and Holmes diss Watson a bit too often. And a certain Holy Land "excursus" may not be entirely meet.
Worst of all, the climax is unfortunate. After King has the criminal genius nemesis of Holmes and Russell go to so much effort arranging elaborate crimes, traps, and tricks to toy with them, and has our genius heroes go to so much effort figuring out the purpose and identity of their nemesis and setting up their own elaborate trap for her, to then have the climax come down to the Scene of Triumphant Gloating followed by the Scene of Diving and Scrambling for a Loaded Gun felt disappointing. For that matter, despite being an unobservant and illogical person, I guessed the nature, gender, and identity of the nemesis before Holmes and Russell do so, which made me think that a mystery story involving genius detectives has somehow failed.
I did enjoy the relationship between Holmes and Russell. I do like a 90-something woman writing her memoirs, because it adds a fine melancholy to everything that happens. I am intrigued by her provocatively signing her "author's preface" M. R. H. Fans of pastiches and fiction featuring Holmes should like this book.
""My prostate is asymmetrical""
A day in the life of Eric Packer, 28-year-old "hyper-maniacal" self-made billionaire genius asset manager and founder of Packer Capital, may not sound so promising as the subject of a novel, but "Maybe today is the day when everything happens." Eric's day begins after another night of insomnia. "What did he do when this happened? He did not take long walks into the scrolling dawn. There was no friend he loved enough to harrow with a call. What was there to say? It was a matter of silences, not words." He walks through the 48 rooms of his triplex apartment, "past the lap pool, the card parlor, the gymnasium, past the shark tank and screening room," before tracking currencies and examining research reports and descending in the one of his two private elevators that plays music by Satie. Leaving the 89-story residential tower, Eric enters his anonymous white limousine, telling his chief of security, Torval, "I want a haircut," though the destination lies across NY City through a vast traffic jam caused by a visit from the President of the United States. As Eric's limo crawls across town in stops and starts, he is serially joined for meetings in the car by his top aides (chief of technology, currency analyst, etc.), and at one point a doctor's associate even enters the car to give him his daily health check up and rectal prostate exam. Occasionally Eric leaves the stopped limo, to visit his mistress art dealer or to eat a meal with his wife of 22 days, Elise Shifrin, banking fortune heiress and poetess, who realizes for the first time that he has blue eyes and refuses to have sex with him because the energy involved in poetic creation is "precious."
Aside from sleep increasingly failing Eric, strange things seem to be happening today. His chief of technology assures him that "our system's secure. . . we're impermeable." Why then does Eric catch a glimpse of himself in the limo spycam running his thumb along his chinline one or two seconds before he runs his thumb along his chinline? All factors must lead the yen, which he has been borrowing in massive amounts, to drop in value. Why then does it continue to rise? Eric has read a line in a poem about a city under siege that goes, "a rat became the unit of currency." Why then do grey spandex-clad anarchist performance artists start popping up waving dead rats around in the air? He believes that "Data itself was soulful and glowing, a dynamic aspect of the life process," and that "the master thrust of cyber capital" would be "to extend the human experience to infinity, a medium for corporate growth and investment." Why then does he feel so much in his body and want to live in "meat space"? And a "credible threat" against his life has manifested itself. Why then does he feel so unconcerned and alive?
Don DeLillo's Cosmopolis (2003) explores the mind of a cyber capital potentate and by extension our contemporary world, dominated as it is by "the investment banker, the land developer, the venture capitalist, the software entrepreneur, the global overlord of satellite and cable, the discount broker, the beaked media chief." But it also speculates on the human condition in general, on love, memory, identity, pain, doubt, randomness, fate, and knowledge, all influenced by metropolitan life.
DeLillo packs into this April 2000 day in the life of Eric Packer philosophical ideas (e.g., "But how can you make words out of sounds? These are two separate systems that we miserably try to link," like "Mirrors and images. Or sex and love"); speculations on "obsolete" words (e.g., skyscraper, office, and ATM); quirky characters (e.g., the stalker Benno Levin); funny and pointed conversations (e.g., "That's not why I'm unemployable." "Then why?" "Because I stink. Smell me." "Smell me."); and bizarre and vivid set pieces (e.g., a movie scene shot in the middle of the night featuring a horde of nude people lying as if stunned or dead in an intersection). DeLilo also writes many neat descriptions, like this one contrasting people and advertisements ("Stunted humans in the shadow of the underwear gods that adorned the soaring billboards. These were figures beyond gender and procreation"). And many pithy lines:
"Poems made him conscious of his breathing."
"Money is talking to itself now."
"The logical extension of business is murder."
"What did he want that was not posthumous?"
Will Patton gives a great reading of the novel, craggy and tender, a high point being the intense stream of consciousness fugue before the climax wherein Eric ponders a closed door in a derelict building.
Not all of Cosmopolis works for me. For instance, there's a long scene of a grandiose funeral for a sufi-rap star that feels forced and unsuitable for Eric's character. But readers interested in the contemporary human condition, in cities, or in dense, rich, short novels should like this one.
"Overwrought Romantic Reign of Terror Espionage"
September 1792. The Reign of Terror is in full swing in Paris as crowds of "citoyens" enjoy the guillotining of a hundred aristocratic traitors and enemies of France per day. But wait! A plucky band of young English lords, the League of the Scarlet Pimpernel, has been rescuing condemned French "aristos" and their families and escorting them to England, thereby thwarting, embarrassing, and insulting the leaders of the Revolutionary government. And why? Because English nobles are sportsmen, "saving men, women and children from death, as other men destroy and kill animals for the excitement." And who is this Scarlet Pimpernel, the leader of the League, the brave, cunning, and audacious master of disguise who commands perfect love and loyalty from his followers? Faith, the French would pay dearly for that secret!
In this context, La, how dispiriting does Lady Blakeney (nee Marguerite St. Just) find her husband Sir Percy! True, he is tall, "massive," and handsome, and he is one of the ten richest men in England and is a close friend of the Prince of Wales, but, alas, he is also "a dandified leader of fashion," "an effete fop," "a brainless nincompoop," possessed of a lazy expression, an "inane laugh," and no intellectual pursuits. Why did Marguerite marry Sir Percy, when she was one of the most sought after women in Paris, "the cleverest woman in Europe," a dazzlingly beautiful young actress and hostess of a "charming salon" frequented by minds of "originality and intellect"? Because Sir Percy loved her more than life itself, and she had never before been so loved. That changed the day after their marriage when Marguerite confessed that she had caused the death by guillotine of a Marquis and his family, for in her pride she withheld from Percy the extenuating circumstances, immediately turning his love to contempt and hers in turn to despite. Thus by September 1782 they are the happily married king and queen of fashion in public, an estranged couple in private.
When French spies and agents show up in England hunting for the identity of the Scarlet Pimpernel so as to become able to catch and guillotine him in France, and when Marguerite's beloved brother Armand is threatened with death in France as a traitor to the Revolution, the plot of The Scarlet Pimpernel heats up.
The Baroness must be one of the first writers of historical, romantic espionage. She works hard to generate suspense. She tosses in neat reality claims, mentioning for instance that the Fisherman's Rest hostelry/coffee room is still frequented in the 20th century and that Percy's "palatial" house in Richmond is now "a historic one." Marguerite and Percy and their fraught relationship are compelling. The Scarlet Pimpernel's "arch-enemy," "the cunning devil," "the wizened fiend," the "fox-faced" French agent Chauvelin, is interesting. Even as he hates the Scarlet Pimpernel he can't help but admire him, and believes (not without cause) that every French aristo who escapes France will strive to generate support and money and armies with which to return the monarchy and stamp out the Revolution.
However, too often the Baroness overwrites. She uses the word "inane" to describe Percy at least twenty times and "fox" or "foxy" to describe Chauvelin at least a dozen, and paints the villain too infernally. She works too hard to make us idolize, if not worship, the Scarlet Pimpernel, possessed as he is of "that strong individuality which belongs to a leader of men--to a hero: to the mighty, high-soaring eagle," a "fearless lion," a man whose name brings a blush to the cheeks of the women of England, and we are repeatedly reminded of his bravery, cleverness, impudence, audacity, energy, nobility, and heroism. He is never unmodified; he is always "the brave Scarlet Pimpernel," "their brave rescuer," "the brave hero," "one brave man," "the brave eagle," "their brave deliverer," "a brave heart," and so on, ad nauseam.
The Baroness often writes febrile prose, as when female characters experience "nameless terror," "nameless dread," or "nameless misery." Not to mention sentences like, "Every word they had spoken seemed to strike at her heart with terrible hopelessness and dark foreboding." And passages like, "How lovely she looked in this morning sunlight, with her ardent hair streaming around her shoulders. He bowed very low and kissed her hand; she felt the burning kiss and her heart thrilled with joy and hope."
Furthermore, granted that the French Revolutionary government was, especially for people living in monarchies, a bloodthirsty regime madly plying the guillotine in the name of liberty, equality, and fraternity, the Baroness depicts England as "the land of liberty and of hope," but in that "beautiful land of freedom" the common English "yokels" and fishermen tug their forelocks before their noble betters and punctiliously vacate the coffee room in the Fisherman's Rest for them. Something doesn't add up.
Michael Page gives a solid reading of the novel, though I wish he would pause now and then to heighten the effect of some of the Baroness' dramatic phrases and to give the reader a chance to catch his or her breath.
Finally, I remember Scaramouche (1921) by Rafael Sabatini as being a better written, less overwrought, more suspenseful, more substantial, and equally romantic (and questioning of identity) book set in the same period.
"Too Little Magical Magyk, Too Much Movie Action"
In Flyte (2006), the second novel in Angie Sage's Septimus Heap series, eleven-year-old Septimus Heap (seventh son of a seventh son), is now the Apprentice to the ExtraOrdinary Wizard Marcia Overstrand, happily learning everything Magykal he can, cleaning the library, and dreaming of Flyte, "the Last Lost Art." (Sage uses bold font, capital letters, and archaic spelling to make Magykal things look special.) All is not well, however, in the Wizard's Tower in the Castle. An ominous Shadow has been shadowing Marcia and her ShadowSafe is taking much too long to construct. Worse, Septimus' eldest brother Simon, who resentfully ran away to live in the Badlands and learn magic from the remains of the Necromancer DomDaniel when Sepitmus and not he became Marcia's Apprentice, kidnaps the Princess Jenna (the Heap's adopted daughter), for some nefarious purpose. Without any support from the feckless adults around him, Septimus sets off to rescue Jenna. From there Sage tells a page turning story full of laughs and frights and action that you can imagine entertaining theater audiences.
There are moments of magical writing in Flyte, as when something moves up through the Marram Marshes "ice white in the moonlight," when a lab emits "a distinctive smell that reminded Septimus of burned pumpkin," and when, after a vivid description of the sentient Dragon Boat, Sage writes, "Deep in a locked hold, which no one had opened--not even Aunt Zelda--beat her heart, silent and slow." Unfortunately, despite all the Magykal Spells, Charms, Hexes, Balms, Potions, Artifacts, Wizards, Witches, and fantastic beings, such moments are rare and lost amid much uninspired writing. There are mundane similes, as when five different times characters drop or sink "like a stone" and as when a character is swatted into the air by a dragon tail "Like a baseball sailing out of the ball park," though there's nary a hint of the sport in the pseudo-medieval magical world. Some things even act as magic-mood breakers, like the Apprentice Belts that Septimus and Simon use like Batman Utility Belts.
At times Sage's suspense doesn't work because she signals what's really happening before the characters catch on, distancing the reader from their panic attacks (by, for instance, revealing that a pursuing cloud is white instead of black). Perhaps Sage is trying to make her book less scary for kids. (She also caters to kids with plenty of "gross" humor: booger-eating bugs, dragon dung, leaky sewer pipes, Land Wurm slime, cabbage sandwiches, etc.) And although she does introduce the potentially interesting Wolf Boy and Merrin Meredith, her characters, even Jenna and Septimus, feel under-developed, partly because she is so busy writing one exciting action scene after another--which actually begins causing a suspense-numbness. Indeed, despite a fair amount of Flyte going on in the novel, I rarely felt any magical wonder or transcendent exhilaration from the activity, partly because Sage usually shows Flyte during "suspenseful" action scenes.
If the story and characters were compelling enough, I wouldn't stop to ask questions, but as it is . . . Why would any pirate, no matter how notorious, keep a merchant prisoner in the hold of his ship for seven years instead of killing him or selling him for ransom? Why is Septimus so afraid of heights but dreams longingly of Flyte? Why does Jenna save someone's life at one point and then later angrily ask Septimus why he does the same thing? Why are so many of the ghosts--but not the Queen's ghost--visible to living people? Etc. And because Sage never really explains what Magyk is or how it works, despite Septimus having been Marcia's Apprentice for at least a year, for the sake of her plot she can do anything she wants any time. As a result, I often found myself asking questions like "Why do they use Magyk to make coffee?" or "Why don't they use Magyk to lift up this sunken boat?"
Gerard Doyle is a capable reader, but less enhancing than Allan Corunder was for the first book. Though Doyle is fine doing a "low, sepulchral voice" and natural enough doing women, his kids start sounding a bit whiny. The audiobook does not include Sage's "What Happened Before. . ." afterword, in which she writes amusing and neat mini-story backgrounds for nearly all the characters who appear in Flyte.
Flyte is not a bad book. It has many virtues. In addition to being good at telling page-turning stories with a heart, Sage imagines cool things like the Counterfeits board game whose counters have minds of their own. And the ShadowSafe and Doll's House are interesting and creepy. She's good at surprises. And I like her exploration of families: biological, adoptive, surrogate, coven, camp, and more. And I do like Septimus and Jenna and Marcia and Arthel and look forward to finding out how they develop in future books. But if the third book in the series is as disappointing as Flyte, I may regret having bought books 2-7 during an Audible sale. I hope that they will have less movie-ready action and more magical Magyk.
""He's not so short. He's just concentrated.""
Roughly the eighth book featuring Miles Vorkosigan in Lois McMaster Bujold's ever-entertaining space opera series the Vorkosigan Saga is Komarr (1998). It opens about three months after the events of the last one, Memory (1997), when the brilliant, curious, hyperactive, and independent Miles apparently found his calling as an Imperial Auditor, a detective/diplomat/judge/paladin who speaks with "the Emperor's Voice." Because Miles and his eight fellow Auditors wield the authority of the Emperor without rules as they solve unusual, challenging, and politically delicate cases, it would seem to be an ideal gig for Miles. And it is, but for one small drawback: it tends to put him on the defensive and to deny him his "forward momentum" that has entertainingly (for us) helped him get into and out of so much trouble in past novels. In this one Miles has traveled to Komarr with his older Auditor colleague Vorbathys to investigate the accident which may be sabotage by which a freight space ship crashed into the solar mirror system vital to the ongoing terraforming of the harsh planet. And it just so happens that Vorbathys and Miles will be staying with the family of the older man's niece, Ekaterin Vorsoisson, whose husband Etienne is the administrator in charge of terraforming in the part of Komarr most affected by the accident/sabotage.
Bujold alternates chapters told from the points of view of Miles and Ekaterin, whose husband is a domineering, serial job-changer who refers to Miles behind his back as "the Vor dwarf" (readers familiar with the series know that an assassination attempt on his parents while he was inside his mother's womb made Miles unnaturally short and large headed). The most interesting parts of this book depict Ekaterin's unhealthy relationship with her selfish and manipulative husband (sex with whom is a nightmarish labor for which she must "hypnotize" herself via ugly fantasies into being able to respond with "natural" passion to avoid his resentful guilt-trips), her curious feelings about Miles (how did he receive and survive the myriad scars on his stunted body?), and his attraction to her (which involves sensual dreams, wistful conjugal fantasies, asides like "Down boy, don't even think about it," and rhetorical questions like "So what is this thing you have about tall women and unrequited love?") It's neat for the lonely Miles to take a back seat every other chapter to a potentially strong but hitherto "self-effacing and self-erasing" woman as she wonders, "How did I grow so small?" and begins to realize that she owns herself.
All of the above is complicated by the fact that Miles, Vorbathys, and the Vorsoissons hail from Barrayar, the homeworld of the Empire that some decades ago violently absorbed Komarr so as to be able to control the planet's many wormhole jump points, which still makes some of the native Komarrans resentful if not rebellious. And by the fact that Ekaterin's husband and their young son Nikolai have a genetically-transmitted, AIDS-like adult-onset disease, her husband having refused thus far to be treated for it because of the attendant shame on being perceived to be a "mutant" in the still too macho and patriarchal Barrayaran culture. Bujold highlights that culture by having her Barrayaran characters think of, allude to, or talk about apt Barrayaran sayings, fairy tales, epic poems, legends, and such that emphasize their dread of mutants and their celebration of self-sacrificing women and heroic men.
Throughout the novel, Bujold writes plenty of her trademark witty lines of dialogue and italicized inner thoughts:
"Tien with a plan was about as reassuring as a two-year-old with a charged plasma arc."
"How could you be lovers with someone and yet feel that every moment alone with them intruded upon your privacy, your dignity?"
"I spent a career fighting the powers that be, now I am them."
"Marriage was not an experience she cared to repeat."
Grover Garden gives his usual professional reading of the novel: nothing fancy, a limited number of voices, none of which are very different from each other, but all easy to listen to (and only his voice could belong to Miles!).
Although to move her plot forward Bujold has Miles act a few times in ways that are, given the situation and his character, unbelievably obtuse or reckless, she tells an involving mystery and an appealingly awkward romance, and I recommend Komarr for fans of entertaining, political, cultural and psychological space opera who don't require violent, large-scale, and pyrotechnic action.
"Literate Age of Sail Buddy Comfort Food with Bite"
The fourth entry in Patrick O'Brien's Age of Sail books about the bosom buddies Jack Aubrey (navy man through and through) and Stephen Maturin (surgeon, naturalist, spy), The Mauritius Command (1977), probably features the most action in the series up to this point. The novel begins domestically enough, with Stephen visiting Jack at his poky Hampshire cottage where he lives with his wife Sophie, their twin girls ("bald babies" with "pale, globular faces," turnip-like noses, and the air of being "infinitely old, or members of another genus"), her obnoxious niece Cecelia, and her atrocious mother Mrs. Williams. They're struggling to get by on Jack's half-pay (as a post-captain without a ship), because Mrs. Williams lost all her money and Sophie's dowry in a foolish investment. Their hives house cobwebs rather than bees; their vegetable garden is rife with caterpillars and flies; their cow is cadaverous and dry. Jack, whose natural medium is the sea, is clumsy and lugubrious on land and spends long hours in his jury-rigged observatory gazing longingly at passing ships.
Luckily for Jack, Stephen has managed to get him an important commission: he is to captain a frigate to the Cape of Good Hope, where he will join a squadron of British ships to help them give Bonaparte and company a black eye by taking the French island colonies of and around Mauritius. Stephen is to deal with intel, propaganda, and diplomacy, while Jack is to be the Commodore of the entire action. This is but a temporary post, after which he will resume being a post-captain, but success may land him a baronetcy. It surely gives Jack a host of new worries and frustrations, partly because he frets at not being able to take part in the plans he designs, partly because he must give orders to captains who are the lords of their own ships and hope that they will perform well. It is thus vital that he accurately assess their strengths and weaknesses, and they don't get on well together. In fact, Lord Clonfert envies, admires, fears, worships, and hates Jack and feels an over-mastering desire to impress and surpass him, which, combined with his dashing behavior and manic-depressive personality, makes for a compelling character.
Throughout the novel O'Brien liberally (though never tediously) sprinkles age of sail details about food, ships, tactics, and the like, as well as about Stephen's interest in flora and fauna and human nature. And, of course, plenty of action: ferocious, "hammer and tongs" naval battles, delicately coordinated land and sea attacks, aborted actions, cat and mouse games, and more. O'Brien never repeats a battle scene, whether by its events or by how he narrates them. Now he thrusts us up close and personal into real-time action, so that we hear the thundering broadsides crashing into our ship and see the deadly wooden splinters flying around and smell the powder and blood; now he stops just before an action is about to begin and lets us see what happened in the fight by reading over Jack's shoulder as he writes an enthusiastic but circumspect letter about it to Sophie. Some of the most suspenseful scenes involve transferring landlubber Stephen from one vessel to another.
The most enjoyable part of O'Brien's books is the rich friendship between Stephen and Jack as they age, share more failures and triumphs, and gain more (not always accurate) insights into each other's character. For example, "Jack loved him, and had not the least objection to granting him all the erudition in the world, while remaining inwardly convinced that in all practical matters other than physic and surgery Stephen should never be allowed out alone." Another funny example occurs when Stephen warns Jack, "To swim so soon after dinner, and such a dinner? I cannot advise it. You are very corpulent; full of gross, viscous humours after these weeks and months of Poirier's cooking. . . . dinners have killed more men than ever Avicenna healed." Stephen's continuing ignorance about the navy is mildly exasperating to Jack and comforting to the reader. And they give each other warm endearments: "my dear," "joy," and "brother."
But O'Brien avoids writing simple bromance sea adventures by including the horrifying wounds resulting from naval warfare, the slimy politicking behind promotions and appointments, the insoluble psychological mystery of Clonfert, and the occasional misanthropy of Stephen, as when Jack says, "Without there were babies, we should have no next generation," and Stephen replies, "So much the better, when you consider the state to which we've reduced the world they must live in, the bloody-minded, wolfish stock from which they spring, and the wicked inhuman society that will form them."
With a sensual poetry O'Brien evokes the experience of being at sea in the age of sail, whether feeling so cut off from the land as to be in another world, being becalmed, surviving a hurricane, or getting under way in a frigate:
"The Raisonable began to speak as she bore up for Rodriguez, spreading sail after sail: the masts complained, the taut rigging sang with a greater urgency, the sound of the water racing along her side mounted to a diffused roar; the complex orchestra of cordage, wood under stress, moving sea and wind, all-pervading sound, exalting to the sea-borne ear."
Readers who like authentic, character-driven historical sea fiction (especially like that by Forester and Lambdin set during the Napoleonic wars) must like O'Brien's books, but should begin with the first in the series, Master and Commander, for although each book is self-contained, all work together to tell one composite story.
The reader Ric Jerrom is flawless; only he can be Jack and Stephen and O'Brien's narrator for me.
"A Witty, Beautiful Plea for Androgynous Integrity"
When I began Virginia Woolf's A Room of One's Own (1929), a fictional essay based on lectures about "women and fiction" that Woolf presented at two Cambridge University women's colleges, I expected to find a well-written proto-feminist tract (if not a "blazing polemic" as the book description on Audible calls it). I did not expect to find a beautiful, funny, stimulating, and readable pleasure. While expressing Woolf's plea that women be accorded the same things that most men have always taken for granted--enough money, privacy, space, and freedom to live and write how they will--her book presents a concise history of (mostly) British literature and a modest account of aesthetic creation, both informed by an accurate and respectful view of the sexes. Although she twice humorously confirms with her audience that no men are hiding in the room, Woolf wrote her book for both men and women. And though much of it is most applicable to the early 20th century, much of it is still relevant to the early 21st.
After introducing her core "opinion," that "a woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction," in the first chapter Woolf talks about visiting "Oxbridge," a fictional hybrid of Oxford and Cambridge Universities. There a Beadle gesticulates her off the grass, protecting the turf of the male Fellows and scholars. There a man tells her that ladies are only admitted to the library in the company of a Fellow or a letter of introduction. There she decides not to attempt to enter the chapel for a service. With sweet-tempered sour grapes, she figures that "the outside of these magnificent buildings is often as beautiful as the inside." She ponders all the gold and silver on which the university was built and is maintained and attends a sumptuous luncheon at a male college and a poor dinner at a woman's college.
Woolf's Oxbridge experience sends her in the second chapter to the British Museum to search its library for answers to questions like, "Why was one sex so prosperous and the other so poor?" She discovers that all of the many books on women were written by men, many of whom, despite living in patriarchal England, must be angry at women because they suspect that women want to seize their power.
In the third chapter Woolf cites a dead bishop as opining "that it was impossible for any woman, past, present, or to come, to have the genius of Shakespeare." This inspires her to speculate on the lives of historically invisible middle-class Elizabethan women and to imagine Shakespeare's sister Judith, whose era prevented her from becoming a playwright and drove her to suicide.
Woolf gives a history of women authors in chapter four, beginning with a couple of "eccentric" 17th-century aristocrats derided for writing poetry, moving to the first middle-class woman to earn a living by her writing, and then comparing the four great 19th-century women novelists, Jane Austen, Emily and Charlotte Bronte, and George Elliot, explaining how difficult it was for them to write in a world in which women had no private rooms and could not own anything.
In Chapter Five, Woolf examines the state of contemporary women's fiction, riffs on the scarcity in past literature of women who are close friends with women, and advises the female author of today to "be truthful" and to write "as a woman who has forgotten that she is a woman, so that her pages were full of that curious sexual quality which comes only when sex is unconscious of itself."
In the sixth chapter Woolf ties together threads from earlier chapters and promotes androgyny ("one must be woman-manly or man-womanly"), for any purely masculine or feminine mind will be sterile and barren. Interestingly, she also thinks that the sexes are too similar and that their differences should be increased. The conclusion to her book is that if women could have 500 pounds per year (enough to live on) and a room of their own (a private space) they may be themselves, write what they wish, and in time bring Shakespeare's sister to life.
Throughout her book Woolf explains interesting observations about literature: WWI replaced the "illusion" of romance with "reality," Charlotte Bronte's situation deformed her genius, "masterpieces are not single and solitary births," some writers (like Shakespeare) are more "incandescent" and "androgynous" than others, and fiction written with integrity (truth) intensifies the reader's experience of the world. And everywhere she writes supernally, whether describing prunes ("stringy as a miser's heart") or sunlight on windows ("The beauty of the world which is so soon to perish, has two edges, one of laughter, one of anguish, cutting the heart asunder"). Placing Woolf's great novels, To the Lighthouse, Mrs. Dalloway, and Orlando in the context of A Room of One's Own shows that she did write poetic, incandescent, and androgynous fiction illuminated by integrity and experience.
This audiobook version of A Room of One's Own, read to perfection by Juliet Stephenson, whose clear, intelligent, and sympathetic voice enhances Woolf's wry sense of humor, keen insights, beautiful imagery, original metaphors, and flowing sentences, is followed by four short stories by Woolf also read by Stephenson:
--"Monday or Tuesday," in which, "Lazy, indifferent, shaking space easily from his wings, knowing his way," a heron flies above a series of vivid images.
--"The Haunted House," in which a ghostly couple searches a house for buried treasure, "The light in the heart."
--"Kew Gardens," in which an intrepid snail tries to reach its goal as several imperfectly communicating couples walk by beautiful flowers.
--"The New Dress," in which Mabel Waring wretchedly regrets wearing the wrong dress to Mrs. Dalloway's party.
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Goodwill Ambassadors
Outstanding public figures, eminent businessmen and industrialists from various regions of the world are selected to improve UNIDO's visibility, profile and global reach, both with governments and the private sector. The Goodwill Ambassadors champion UNIDO's core theme – the role of manufacturing and sustainable industrial development in the overall development process.
Rajendra K. PACHAURI, India
Rajendra K. Pachauri has been the Chief Executive of the New Delhi-based Energy and Resources Institute (TERI) since 1981. In April 2002 he was elected chair of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), established by the World Meteorological Organization and the United Nations Environment Programme in 1988, and later endorsed by the United Nations General Assembly. In 2007, the IPCC, along with former US Vice President Al Gore, was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.
Pachauri has served on several international and national committees including the Economic Advisory Council to the Prime Minister of India, and the Advisory Board on Energy which reported directly to the Prime Minister of India, and has been a Senior Advisor to the Administrator of the United Nations Development Programme. He has been active in several international forums dealing with the subject of climate change and its policy dimensions.
Watch Pachauri's statement on the UN initiative Sustainable Energy for All:
Marcos PONTES, Brazil
Marcos Pontes is one of the most experienced jet pilots in the Brazilian Air Force. In 1998, he was selected by the Brazilian Space Agency to train to be an astronaut. On March 30 2006, Pontes became the first Brazilian and the first native Portuguese-speaking person to go into space, where he stayed on the International Space Station for a week. During his trip, he carried out eight experiments selected by the Brazilian Space Agency.
Although from a poor background, growing up in the suburbs of Sao Paulo, he achieved his childhood dream of becoming an astronaut by completing his elementary education and then undertaking professional skills training that enabled him to commence subsequent studies in aeronautical technology and engineering.
On accepting his appointment as a UNIDO Goodwill Ambassador, Pontes said, "Looking from space, earth is a unique and beautiful planet. We have seven billion people trying to live with some quality on this wonderful blue home, but that will not be possible if we try it selfishly. We need to get together and prepare the new generation to be citizens of one world. UNIDO can help in this challenge, and I am honoured to accept the nomination to cooperate as UNIDO Goodwill Ambassador for a better future on earth."
Watch the video on Ponte's and UNIDO's work to protect the Amazon rainforest while boosting the local industry in a clean and sustainable way: