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Author Affiliations: Division of General Medicine and Primary Care, Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center (Drs Isaac, Davis, Sands, and Weingart), Institute for Health Policy, Massachusetts General Hospital (Dr Weissman), Blue Cross Blue Shield of Massachusetts (Ms Cyrulik), Center for Patient Safety, Dana-Farber Cancer Institute (Drs Isaac and Weingart), and Department of Medicine, Harvard Medical School (Drs Isaac, Weissman, Davis, Sands, and Weingart), Boston; PatientsLikeMe Inc, Cambridge, Massachusetts (Dr Massagli); and Cisco Systems, San Jose, California (Dr Sands).
Electronic prescribing systems with decision support may improve patient safety in ambulatory care by offering drug allergy and drug interaction alerts. However, preliminary studies show that clinicians override most of these alerts.
We performed a retrospective analysis of 233 537 medication safety alerts generated by 2872 clinicians in Massachusetts, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania who used a common electronic prescribing system from January 1, 2006, through September 30, 2006. We used multivariate techniques to examine factors associated with alert acceptance.
A total of 6.6% of electronic prescription attempts generated alerts. Clinicians accepted 9.2% of drug interaction alerts and 23.0% of allergy alerts. High-severity interactions accounted for most alerts (61.6%); clinicians accepted high-severity alerts slightly more often than moderate- or low-severity interaction alerts (10.4%, 7.3%, and 7.1%, respectively; P < .001). Clinicians accepted 2.2% to 43.1% of high-severity interaction alerts, depending on the classes of interacting medications. In multivariable analyses, we found no difference in alert acceptance among clinicians of different specialties (P = .16). Clinicians were less likely to accept a drug interaction alert if the patient had previously received the alerted medication (odds ratio, 0.03; 95% confidence interval, 0.03-0.03).
Clinicians override most medication alerts, suggesting that current medication safety alerts may be inadequate to protect patient safety.
Adverse drug events (ADEs), defined as injuries due to medications, are common in primary care.1- 4 In a study5 of 4 Boston adult outpatient practices, one-quarter of patients who received a prescription experienced an ADE during the 3 months of follow-up, and more than one-third of these injuries were preventable. Organizations such as the Institute of Medicine and the National Patient Safety Foundation indicated that electronic prescribing is an important tool for improving medication safety, and outpatient clinicians are increasingly adopting its use.6- 8 Although rudimentary electronic prescribing can prevent errors through more legible and structured orders, experts believe that integrated clinical decision support, which can alert clinicians about inappropriate medications or harmful medication combinations, is needed to reduce the number of ADEs in ambulatory care.9- 13
To date, studies10- 12 that have examined outpatient electronic prescribing and clinical decision support alerts have been limited to a few clinicians at teaching hospitals. In 1 study12 of 5 academic primary care practices, clinicians accepted less than 10% of medication alerts, and physician reviewers concluded that more than one-third of all alerts lacked an adequate scientific basis or were not clinically useful. If the threshold for sending alerts to clinicians is set too low, prescribers may develop "alert fatigue," which can lead them to override important warnings.14
As clinicians increasingly adopt electronic prescribing, the development and dissemination of decision support systems will depend in part on whether clinicians find medication safety alerts valuable. To our knowledge, no studies have examined the behavior of clinicians regarding medication alerts in a large number of community practices or across clinicians of different specialties. This information may provide perspective on the perceived usefulness of electronic alerts in outpatient care and insights into how to design better alert systems, which, in turn, may reduce the number and severity of ADEs. Therefore, we studied the electronic prescribing behavior of clinicians in 3 states to address the following questions: How often do clinicians encounter medication safety alerts? How often do clinicians accept alerts, aborting a potentially dangerous prescription? Do accepted medication alerts vary depending on alert type (allergy vs drug interaction), alert severity, or the classes of interacting medications? Do certain characteristics of patients and clinicians affect the decision to accept an alert? Finally, what can we learn from clinician behavior regarding medication safety alerts that could be used to improve alert quality?
We studied electronic prescriptions and associated medication safety alerts generated by all clinicians who used a specific electronic prescribing system in Massachusetts, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania from January 1, 2006, through September 30, 2006. We included clinicians who wrote at least 50 prescriptions during the study period. These 2872 clinicians were distributed across 862 practices; 69% of eligible clinicians were from Massachusetts, 20% from New Jersey, and 11% from Pennsylvania. The study was approved in advance by the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute institutional review board.
All study participants used PocketScript, an electronic prescribing system (Zix Corporation, Dallas, Texas), which enables clinicians to transmit prescriptions electronically to a pharmacy via a desktop computer or handheld device. The system creates a profile of a patient's active medications based on previous electronic prescriptions written by any member within the practice. The system also references dispensed drug history from the patient's pharmacy benefit management records, which has the added benefit of including information from handwritten prescriptions and prescriptions from other clinicians within the state. A patient's medication allergies must be entered into the system by the clinician or a member of the clinician's office staff. When an electronic prescription is written, the system alerts the clinician if the patient is allergic to the medication or if there is a drug-drug interaction (DDI) with one of the patient's active medications. The system uses a set of alerts maintained by Cerner Multum (Denver, Colorado), a health information technology company. Pharmacists at Cerner Multum use a consensus process to grade the severity of each potential DDI on a 3-tier scale (1 indicating high; 2, moderate; and 3, low) based on information from pharmaceutical companies and evidence in the scientific literature. When a DDI alert is generated, a warning banner with the severity category is displayed to the clinician. The prescriber may view a detailed description of the interaction, although this information does not appear on the initial screen. A prescriber may respond to an allergy or a DDI alert by (1) overriding the alert and continuing to prescribe the medication, (2) canceling the prescription altogether, or (3) rewriting (ie, changing) the prescription for a different medication.
We abstracted the following information from the electronic prescription database: prescription date and time, prescribed generic drug name and class, alert type (allergy or interaction), interacting generic drug name and class, alert severity level, action taken in response to an alert (override, cancel, or change), binary variable indicating whether the same generic drug had been prescribed to the patient previously, and device used to enter the prescription (handheld vs desktop computer). We abstracted deidentified clinician and practice identification numbers, clinician type (physician vs nonphysician), clinician specialty, number of electronic prescriptions written by each clinician during the study period, and length of time the clinician had been using an electronic prescribing system to write prescriptions. We also abstracted patient age, sex, and number of active medications at the beginning of the study period.
If a patient takes multiple medications, several interaction warnings can arise from a single prescription attempt. Duplicate alerts can also appear for the same prescription if a clinician views an alert, cancels the prescription, and then reattempts to order the same medication.12 To eliminate duplicate alerts and to focus on the clinician's final decision of whether or not to prescribe after generating an alert, we selected the last observation of alerted prescription data sorted by physician, patient, prescribed generic drug name, date, and time.12 This eliminated 235 525 duplicate alerts, leaving 3 570 378 prescription attempts and 233 537 alerts in our final data set.
We performed analyses using the prescription writing attempt and the alert as units of analysis. We calculated alert rates for each clinician type and specialty by dividing the number of alerted prescription attempts by total prescription attempts. We examined a clinician's response to an alerted order as a dichotomous variable, accept vs override. Accepted orders included canceled prescription orders or a change of the alerted medication to an alternate drug. We calculated accept rates for each alert type, DDI severity, clinician type, and clinician specialty by dividing the number of accepted alerts by the total number of alerted prescriptions. We used the Fisher exact test to examine differences in alert rates and accept rates in each category. We also examined accept rates for interacting medication classes, limiting our analysis to combinations of drug classes that generated at least 50 alerts to achieve more stable estimates. Some drugs did not have a drug class specified, and in these instances we used the prescribed generic name in lieu of the drug class.
To examine characteristics of accepted alerts, we excluded allergy alerts (<2% of all alerts) because of variability with which practices entered patient allergy information into the electronic prescribing system. For adjusted analysis of DDI alerts, we excluded patients seen by a pediatrician or those younger than 18 since the safety concerns of medications for children differ from those for adults. We fit logistic regression models with generalized estimating equations using the response to the alerted prescription (accept vs override) as the binary outcome. We accounted for clustering nested within the practice at the clinician level and used an exchangeable correlation structure.
The multivariate model included patient age, sex, and number of active medications as independent predictors. We examined for differences in accept rates among patient age groups using a Wald test, and we examined for a linear trend across number of patient medication categories. We also examined the relationship between the decision to accept a DDI alert and clinician type, specialty, and experience with electronic prescribing. We examined number of prescriptions written during the study period and duration of time using electronic prescribing as indicators of electronic prescribing experience. Using Wald tests, we examined for differences in accept rates across clinician types, specialties, and categories of time since becoming an active prescriber and examined for a linear trend across categories of number of prescriptions written. Finally, we examined the relationship between the decision to accept an alert and prescription characteristics, including the type of device used to enter the prescription, severity level of the interaction, and whether the same generic drug had been prescribed to the patient previously. Since classes of prescribed medications are highly related to provider specialty and may therefore act as confounders, we included approximately 200 variables to adjust for the fixed effects of the most common class-class interactions. These variables accounted for more than 70% of all alerted orders. All analyses were conducted using a commercially available software program (SAS, version 9.1; SAS Institute, Cary, North Carolina).
Physicians accounted for 82.0% of the 2872 prescribing clinicians and made 86.7% of all electronic prescription attempts. Most clinicians were in primary care fields, with 21.9% in family medicine, 19.5% in internal medicine, 17.4% in pediatrics, and 3.3% in obstetrics-gynecology. Clinicians wrote 78.9% of electronic prescriptions using a desktop computer and 21.1% using a handheld device. Each clinician wrote a median of 754 electronic prescriptions (interquartile range, ±1423), with a range of 50 to 10 687 prescriptions. Clinicians had a median of 352 (interquartile range, ±426) days of experience with electronic prescribing, with a range of 0 to 1987 days.
During the study period, 6.6% of all attempted electronic prescriptions generated alerts. The DDI alerts and allergy alerts accounted for 98.3% and 1.7% of alerts, respectively (Table 1). Clinicians accepted DDI alerts less often than allergy alerts (9.2% vs 23.0%; Table 1; P < .001), although accept rates for both alert types were low. Most DDI alerts were high-severity (62.6%) or moderate-severity (29.6%) interactions. Clinicians were slightly more likely to heed major interactions than moderate interactions or minor interactions (10.4%, 7.3%, and 7.1%, respectively; P < .001).
Among high-severity interactions, accept rates for classes of interacting drug combinations ranged from 2.2% to 43.1%. Table 2 lists the high-severity interactions that clinicians accepted most and least frequently. Among high-severity alerts, clinicians frequently overrode alerts for medications used in combination to treat certain diseases, such as corticosteroids and antirheumatic agents for rheumatoid arthritis. Clinicians commonly accepted alerts that involved combinations of antibiotics and antiarrhythmic medications or antibiotics and warfarin sodium.
Table 3 gives the DDI alert rates and accept rates of different clinician types and specialties. In unadjusted analyses, physicians generated DDI alerts less often than nonphysicians (6.2% vs 8.2% of prescription attempts; P < .001), and physicians accepted a lower percentage of alerted prescriptions (9.0% vs 10.5%; P < .001). The alert rates varied by clinician specialty, from 1.2% for pediatricians to 27.5% for psychiatrists (P < .001). Accept rates varied by specialty as well, from 5.3% for psychiatrists to 17.7% for surgical specialists (P < .001).
Table 4 gives the results of the multivariable model, which examined the factors associated with the clinician's decision to accept 20 180 of 219 517 DDI alerts. We found no difference in DDI acceptance for patients of different ages or sexes (P = .09 and .69, respectively). We did not find a linear trend between alert acceptance and number of active medications (P = .15), although clinicians were approximately half as likely to accept alerts of patients who took 2 or more medications compared with patients who took a single medication. Clinicians had higher odds of accepting high-severity alerts compared with low severity alerts (odds ratio, 1.43; 95% confidence interval, 1.10-1.87). Clinicians had much lower odds of accepting DDI alerts if the patient had previously received the alerted medication (odds ratio, 0.03; 95% confidence interval, 0.03-0.03). In contrast to the unadjusted analyses, we did not find any differences in acceptance of alerts between clinician types (physician vs nonphysician; P = .10) or among clinician specialties (P = .16). Clinicians who wrote more electronic prescriptions were less likely to accept DDI alerts than clinicians who wrote fewer prescriptions (P for trend <.001). However, clinicians who used the electronic prescribing system for a longer period were more likely to accept DDI alerts (P for trend <.001).
In this study of more than 3 million electronic prescriptions, we found that clinicians overrode most high-severity DDI alerts and allergy alerts. Clinicians distinguished among different alerts, accepting some DDI combinations more frequently than others, such as interactions between antiarrhythmic agents and antibiotics. Among high-severity DDI alerts, a 20-fold difference was found between alerts with the highest accept rate and lowest accept rate. In multivariable analyses, we found no difference in response to alerts among clinicians of different specialties.
This study offers several advantages over previous analyses of medication safety alerts in ambulatory care. We examined the behavior of a large group of community-based practitioners in response to medication alerts, and the sample size allowed us to examine responses to alerts for classes of interacting drug combinations and patient and clinician characteristics associated with alert acceptance. We found that clinicians discriminated among alerts based on their severity, the classes of interacting medications, and the patient's previous experience with the medication. Given the high override rate of all alerts, it appears that the utility of electronic medication alerts in outpatient practice is grossly inadequate. For active clinicians, most alerts may be more of a nuisance than an asset.
Our results are consistent with those of previous small studies12,15 of practice sites affiliated with academic medical centers, which have shown that DDI and allergy alerts are commonly overridden. Several observers argue that to reduce the burden of outpatient ADEs, high-quality decision support must be an essential element of electronic prescribing systems.1,9,11,16,17 However, few studies have examined ways to improve alert systems. In a survey of Veterans Health Affairs physicians, clinicians recommended that DDI alerts provide suggestions for alternative medications and that previously overridden medication alerts should not reappear for the same patient.18 Clinicians who use commercial electronic prescribing systems have suggested that extant decision support systems are inadequate.17
In a 2005 national survey, only 14% of outpatient physicians reported using electronic prescribing.8,12 However, several government and private initiatives are under way to promote adoption. The E-prescribing and Medicare Modernization Act of 2003 created standards for electronic prescribing system data and subsidizes third parties to offset implementation costs.19 The National ePrescribing Patient Initiative, a coalition of private technology companies and insurers, offers free software to participating practices.12
Despite these efforts, the only clear evidence that computerized prescribing reduces ADEs is limited to the inpatient setting; only a few studies20- 24 have examined its effectiveness in ambulatory care. Gandhi and colleagues11 found that basic electronic prescribing systems with structured orders and pick lists, but no advanced decision support, reduced the number of prescription writing errors but did not reduce the number of ADEs in 4 adult outpatient practices. Unless designers integrate high-quality decision support into electronic prescribing systems, substantial improvements in outpatient medication safety may not occur.
Our findings provide some insights into ways that designers may improve medication safety alerts. Although most DDI alerts were classified as high severity, clinicians accepted these alerts only slightly more frequently than lower severity alerts. Designers should consider reducing the proportion of alerts classified as high severity by reexamining and potentially reclassifying the alerts that are frequently overridden. By prioritizing a subset of high-severity alerts and only allowing these alerts to interrupt workflow, Shah and colleagues10 improved acceptance of these alerts to 67%. Designers should also provide an option for clinicians to suppress alerts for medications that patients had previously received, since most of these alerts are overridden. Finally, designers should consider customizing alerts depending on the clinician's specialty. For example, since psychiatrists encounter alerts in one-quarter of prescription attempts, they may be at higher risk for overriding important warnings. The usefulness of alerts may vary by clinician specialty, and reducing the number of frivolous alerts for each specialty may help improve alert adherence and enhance care.
Examination of the relationship between clinician experience and alert acceptance yielded mixed results. High-volume prescribers accepted medication alerts less often than lower-volume prescribers, raising concern that high-volume prescribers may become habituated to alerts and neglect potentially useful warnings. In contrast, clinicians who used electronic prescribing systems longer accepted more alerts than novice users. These findings are amenable to several possible interpretations. Experienced electronic prescribing clinicians may know more about alternative medications that can be prescribed after an alert is generated. Alternatively, experienced clinicians may learn to trust certain alerts over time. Further study is necessary to examine these possible relationships.
Our study has several limitations. First, we examined prescriptions written using 1 electronic prescribing system. However, the alerts we examined are typical of those encountered by clinicians, and the drug interaction database from Cerner Multum is used by many commercial electronic prescription systems. Second, our inference about an alert's utility was based on the clinician's decision to accept or override an alert. However, overridden alerts may be useful to clinicians if alerts prompt clinicians to change their behavior (eg, by observing a patient more closely or by ordering additional studies). Third, we assumed that a clinician's decision to override an alert was based on sound clinical judgment, although we were unable to validate this by reviewing the medical record. Previous studies25 have shown some examples of unjustified or dangerous prescribing behavior by clinicians. Finally, we could not examine several patient and clinician characteristics, such as patient comorbidities and clinician familiarity, with the use of electronic medical records.
In conclusion, clinicians' responses to medication safety alerts have much to teach us. Clinicians override most alerts, suggesting that existing alerts may provide little value to practitioners. Unless designers take steps to improve prescription alert systems, the potential benefits of electronic prescribing may not be realized.
Correspondence: Thomas Isaac, MD, MBA, MPH, Division of General Medicine and Primary Care, Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, 330 Brookline Ave, Boston, MA 02215 (firstname.lastname@example.com).
Accepted for Publication: September 3, 2008.
Author Contributions:Study concept and design: Isaac, Weissman, Sands, and Weingart. Acquisition of data: Weissman, Cyrulik, and Weingart. Analysis and interpretation of data: Isaac, Weissman, Davis, Massagli, and Weingart. Drafting of the manuscript: Isaac and Weissman. Critical revision of the manuscript for important intellectual content: Isaac, Weissman, Davis, Massagli, Cyrulik, Sands, and Weingart. Statistical analysis: Isaac, Davis, and Massagli. Obtained funding: Weissman, Cyrulik, Sands, and Weingart. Administrative, technical, and material support: Weingart. Study supervision: Isaac, Weissman, and Weingart.
Financial Disclosure: None reported.
Funding/Support: This study was supported by a grant from the Physicians' Foundation for Health Systems Excellence.
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Wrestling on tap at Big Red
STEUBENVILLE - The OHSAA Division II Regional Team Wrestling Tournament will be held at 6 p.m. Wednesday inside the Crimson Center at Steubenville High School.
No. 3 Beaver Local will take on No. 2 Tri-Valley and No. 4 Cambridge meets No. 1 Big Red. Matches will be held simultaneously in Division 12A.
The winners will meet approximately 20 minutes after the end of the semifinals.
Entry is $7 per person as set by the OHSAA.
Smithfield to hold registration
SMITHFIELD - The Smithfield Little League will hold sign-ups from 11 a.m. to 2 p.m. Saturday and from 6 p.m. to 8 p.m. Feb. 6 at the Smithfield Firehouse for T-ball (ages 5-6), Pinto (7-8), Mustang (9-10) and Bronco (11-12). Cost is $40 per child of $60 per family.
Softball sign-ups will also be held for ages 10-and-under, 14-and-under and 18-and-under. Fees are $50 per child and $10 for each additional family member.
For information, contact league president Mike Watt at (740) 733-9956.
Bergholz sign-ups announced
BERGHOLZ - Sign-up dates and times for Bergholz baseball and softball have been announced.
They will be held at the Bergholz Volunteer Fire Department from 11 a.m. to 1 p.m. Saturday; 6 p.m. to 8 p.m. on Feb. 5 and Feb. 12; and from 11 a.m. to 1 p.m. on Feb. 23.
It is open to all boys and girls in the area with T-Ball for ages 5-6; coach pitch (7-8); and baseball/softball (9-14).
The cost is $40 for the first child in the family and $30 for each additional child in a family. The fee is payable at sign-up.
For information, contact Dick Law at (740) 543-3461.
Softball tryouts to be held
STEUBENVILLE - The Steubenville Girls Softball League will hold tryouts for girls ages 8-15 from noon to 3 p.m. Saturday and Feb. 23 in the Steubenville High School commons area. The cost is $40 for the first child and $20 for each additional child.
For information, contact Butch Brown at (740) 497-3792 or Jeremy Groves at (740) 424-2859.
PAC to meet
STEUBENVILLE - The Polish Athletic Club will meet at 8 p.m. Thursday in the clubhouse. Membership dues must be paid before the meeting begins.

subset: commoncrawl


text: Another thing that we will be seeing in a couple days is cranberries. These tasty small fruits are used in more ways than one. You can put them in stuffing, eat them jellied or whole, have them on the side, or you can even enjoy cranberries in hot oatmeal, or used in a batch of granola mix. I love cranberries when they are dehydrated because they are easy to eat when they look like raisins. No matter how you choose to eat your cranberries, they are delicious either way. Have fun drawing cranberries, and I will be back with more for you all. For now enjoy learning how to draw cranberries" folks, make sure to use this drawing next to your stuffed turkey drawing. Peace out people!


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Whenever I book tickets for a flight, I have to provide my address details, contact numbers and an email address. A contact number I understand and they'll email me confirmation to the email address. But what use do they have for my physical address? It seems pointless data gathering.
Firstly, not all airlines do. I booked a Philippines Air flight (through Expedia) last night that didn't require I enter my physical address.
So now that we've established that, we can look at those that do, and why.
Come to think of it, I'm kinda surprised now that I was able to get away with it at all. They did ask for my credit card billing address, but that's different to my physical address anyway!
There's one major reason other answers here seem to have missed out: whichever airline or online travel agent is processing your booking, if you pay by credit card or debit card online then they need your address as registered with your bank to authorise your transaction.
Well, technically any payment processor is supposed to use address in addition to card details such as CVV code to authorise the payment but some skip this step. Yes, you can authorise transactions with a bank without doing address verification, but in that case, in case of fraudulent transactions the chargeback rates are much higher. Since total value of each transaction airlines typically process can be high, higher chargeback rates will eat significantly into their costs - as well as if a particular airline is sending a higher percentage of fraudulent transactions by not doing address checking, then they may even get blocked by their payment processor.
Having your address for forwarding lost baggage, marketing purposes, et al is an added bonus that airlines / online travel agents get, but it may not be the biggest reason why they use it.
I might add another small reason, that is finance law. For example here in Czech Republic, all payments over CZK 10'000 (approx. EUR 400) should be done with a proper identification of both seller and buyer on the invoice.
Well, they just don't want anyone booking a ticket and not knowing who they are and as someone said an address is required in order to authorize your credit card. There is a lot of fraud in the airline business sadly.
And also, the computer system requires one. It does not require an address to create the booking, but an address is required to pay for the booking.
To create the booking, just a name and phone number is required plus the itinerary as basic information.
Also, the airlines used to do what's called TBM, Ticket By Mail. So they used to mail you a physical paper ticket. They are still using the old backend systems with fancy interfaces, but the information is still required to complete the transaction.
Actually Mark, that information you enter at the time of booking is not usually linked to your lost baggage data as they are usually two separate systems. So they will ask you for the information again if your bag is lost. Only as sometimes the bag is lost at the other end of your trip.


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Nike Lunarglide+ 3 Breathe Men's Running Shoes
Buy Online & Pick Up In-Store
The Nike LunarGlide+ 3 Breathe Men's Running Shoes are a lightweight daily distance trainer that doesn't sacrifice stability and cushioning. The Dynamic Support system in the midsole responds to a runner's changing needs, constantly adapting to your stride to deliver just the right amount of comfort and support. It's best for underpronators to moderate overpronators. LunarLite cushioning provides excellent shock absorption and responsiveness for a bouncy ride. And a wedge of firm foam on the back side of the midsole offers pronation support for those who need it. Nike+ ready.
- The Nike LunarGlide 3 Running Shoe is a daily distance trainer that's lightweight yet doesn't sacrifice stability and cushioning.
- Flywire for ultra-lightweight support, comfort and a snug, secure midfoot fit
- Seamless upper for long-distance comfort
- Nike+ ready


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|Arkansas State Sports Medicine
The role of the Arkansas State University Sports Medicine Department is to serve as the primary healthcare providers for all A-State student-athletes. Our goal is to ensure all the student-athletes achieve their optimal performance through the prevention of injury; recognition, evaluation, and assessment of athletic injuries/illness; immediate care of athletic injuries/illness; and rehabilitation and reconditioning of athletic injuries. Advanced care is facilitated through the Sports Medicine Department to a multi-disciplinary network of healthcare professionals in the community and surrounding region.


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betsy and mattespenshade are now friends 4 years, 4 months ago
betsy and pastmasterrigrange are now friends 4 years, 5 months ago
betsy and Amanda Brozana are now friends 4 years, 5 months ago
betsy and pastpaprez are now friends 4 years, 5 months ago
betsy and are now friends 4 years, 5 months ago
iowastate wrote a new post, Hello Iowa!, on the site Iowa State Grange 1 month ago
The Iowa State Grange site is finally "finished"! There are still a few bugs and things that I need to change and add (the other Granges will be added as I receive more information), but overall, it's done! 🙂 […]
uptonma125 wrote a new post, (no title), on the site Upton Grange 125 1 month ago
Upton Grange #125 Fun Night -Mini-Golf June 16, 2016. After a short Business meeting at the Grange Hall we all went to play Mini-Golf & have ice cream at West End Creamery in Whitinsville, MA.
florail1762 wrote a new post, 2016 July Newsletter Flora Grange, on the site Flora Grange 1762 1 month ago
Flora Grange July 2016 Newsletter
This might be a little early but things are happening real fast.
1st. Thursday, June 23rd is the Kirkland Lions Club Ladies Night Out. Those who have offered to help , p […]
idahofinn wrote a new post, Idaho State Grange News – New issue!, on the site Idaho State Grange 1 month, 1 week ago
Get your news online! June – August 2016


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Tuesday, May 1.
The human engine must come into the shop now and then for the occasional tune-up. These weeks in Lagos – loud, loutish, bullying, an invigorating kick to the head – have left me battered. The cost has been physical, emotional – financial, too. Daily life in Lagos is exorbitant; a decent cup of coffee – the Super Unleaded that keeps my engine thrumming, to extend the metaphor – costs N500-700, or close to five American bucks, forcing me to resort to low-octane Nescafe in order to cut costs. Food, too, has been a constant drain, without a kitchen at the AAF to cook for myself. Seven U.S. dollars will buy me a chicken leg and some bland jollof rice at a Western-style fast-food joint. (Calibrate these costs against your own daily expenditures, readers, and you'll get a sense of what it means to be a freelance writer.) Instead I've been frequenting a hole-in-the-wall in the Falomo Shopping Centre, Ofada Hut, where a plate of beef stew and jollof, or a tongue-scorching plate of ofada stew, is just half the price. The downside, of course, is that the food is prepared Nigerian-style: drenched in palm oil, deep-fried, and liberally peppered with red-hot chilis. This scorched-earth campaign has ravaged my taste buds and intestinal tract; there are days when it seems there's a faucet attached to my bowels. No doubt I was a sight those first few days, mopping at my brow with each forkful of jollof I shoveled into my mouth. Slowly, though, my body has adjusted; I can almost feel my taste buds straining toward each chili now, like a plant phototropically yearning for sunlight. I'm reminded of Lucia, a housemate in Ouagadougou, who had spent large portions of her childhood in Lagos. She had developed a taste for Nigerian food, and there was no going back: everything else seemed bland by comparison. And then there is the narrator of a story in E.C. Osondu's Voice of America, who says, "Any white man that eats pepper must return to Lagos."
Leaving Lagos might pose the greater challenge. Add to all this stress the debit-card misfortunes that have plagued me since leaving Joburg. Here I was a victim not only of fraudsters, but of my own cosmic stupidity – an unwavering faith in the guardian angels who have watched over me through years of hard African travel. In Africa, it seems, even the guardian angels have a dark sense of humor. I had arrived at O.R. Tambo on the morning of my flight to Nigeria, cleared customs, and only realized minutes before departure that I'd be touching down in Lagos with all of R100 – about twelve U.S. dollars – to my name. This seemed like a foolish gamble, even by my standards. But the last of the ATMs were on the wrong side of immigration; my only option was a forex bureau, which offered to give me American dollars withdrawn against my bank account in the U.S. This they did – along with an additional $700 that, I discovered two days later in Lagos, had been used to purchase tickets to Cape Town, pushing my bank account into the red. As I was coasting over the Gulf of Guinea, pondering all manner of misfortunes that might lie ahead in Nigeria, a con artist back in Joburg was perpetrating that most common South African fraud: the cloned debit card. The bank was quick to credit the money back into my account, but my card was cancelled. Now a fresh challenge: finding a way to get a new card to me in Lagos. Even in my dire situation, the bank refused to send the card direct. I had to find an intermediary. Fortunately, luck was on my side: a Canadian friend, a filmmaker, had a co-producer who was flying into Lagos from Vancouver the following week for the AMAAs. The card went to my parents in Brooklyn; my father, the perennial ass-saver, Western Union'd it to Vancouver. Days later, I gratefully met the producer and my new debit card on the red carpet at the Eko Hotel.
Within the week, at an ATM on Awolowo Road, that card, too, had been cloned. Two cards in two countries, in the span of four weeks. (Those guardian angels, yukking it up again.)
There was a way around this newly visited trauma: the bank, as it turned out, was temporarily able to "unlock" a previously cancelled debit card. Each time I went to the ATM, I had to call my bank's fraud prevention squad, answer their rote security questions, and have them unlock the card long enough for me to withdraw money. Picture me red-faced and sweaty, calling an international number at exorbitant rates on Nigeria's shoddy mobile network, while the traffic roared by me on Awolowo Road. (For security purposes, I could only call from the ATM, and the bank rep had to stay on the line for the duration of the transaction.) Withdrawing money became a terrific ordeal, and would continue to be, for the remainder of my time in Nigeria and Cameroon. But still, I could get my money. In my usual half-assed, hand-wringing way, things had come together.
But the stress was still there; life had become a daily exercise in managing it, calibrating the pressure valves, letting off just enough steam. Drinks, of course, were involved. One night I was out on V.I. with my friend Tolu, an Edinburgh-based architect who was back in Lagos on a short-term consulting gig. Our group consisted of a bunch of hard-drinking revelers with the sorts of bland jobs you would expect in any great metropole: two architects, a lawyer, a couple of civil engineers. It was after midnight: the preening hour in Lagos, when the city's long-stemmed beauties gathered in the warm glow of conspicuous spending and mutual, if bitchy, admiration. We were at Likwid, an upscale lounge that, in the span of the following hours, would get increasingly packed with attractive young Lagosians in European clothes and American-tinged accents. Tolu lit a cigar, eyeing a nearby table of tall girls in short skirts. "They're drinking Belvedere, so we can't send them a bottle of Belvedere," he said, his tone disconsolate. How seductive his life appeared to a vagrant writer! If only my biggest problems consisted of figuring out which bottle of top-shelf liquor to send to a bevy of beautiful, tipsy girls. The night was draining me; I had steered clear of the Belvedere but was spending N1,000 for each can of Amstel. I had burned through my last naira and had to dip into my last-ditch reserve: a solitary hundred-dollar bill that was supposed to get me through the week. The bar couldn't change it; I had to appeal to Tolu's brother, who exchanged it at a favorable rate, barely putting a dent in the stack of thousand-naira notes in his wallet. While I was ready to raise a white flag on the night, though, Tolu was stalking the dance floor in predatory circles, his temperature rising by degrees of mischief. "Anything the night brings, the night brings," he said.
You will not find me my slapping my forehead in Lagos or Kampala or Nairobi at such high-end shenanigans; I had seen enough of this life already, understood well that for a growing class of Africans, a bottle of Belvedere, a flat-screen TV, a well-stocked refrigerator full of European beers and imported condiments, were considered the normal trappings of a successful life, just as in the developed world. Well, these were my spiritual kin, in a sense. It's hard to divorce a contemporary American male from the circumstances of his upbringing, and a certain degree of material comfort remains, after all these years, the elusive benchmark by which I judge my life. (Not for nothing have I found a cozy home in Joburg, where I can approximate a New York lifestyle at a third of the price.) It is impossible to adequately describe to an American who has never set foot on African soil the profound sense of contentment, of spiritual well-being, that I feel whenever I leave behind the clamor of some African street for the fluorescent-lit confines of a Shoprite or Nakumatt, the shelves abundantly stocked with canned goods and hair care products, the workers diligently affixing price tags to the toothpastes and deodorants. Outside is African chaos, is uncertainty and Gomorrah; but in those safe havens of commerce I can find familiar name brands in orderly aisles, or buy a kilo of tomatoes without engaging in the bloodsport of bargaining with some slit-eyed market woman.
Yet a certain type of ambivalence persists. Too much time in Bogobiri among the aje buttas, or lunching with the technocrats in power suits at Chocolat Royal – the menu a pastiche of Western standbys and international whimsies: Philly cheese steaks, Italian subs, teriyaki, yakitori, something called the Bora Bora Pacific Salad – and you risk falling into the somnolent trap of the "sleepy middle classes" I'd heard lambasted last week. Here I remember the joke about the man who ordered a glass of room-temperature wine in a Lagos restaurant which, when delivered, was cool to the touch – a chill that matched the temperature in the air-conditioned dining room. Reality is a DIY construct; no doubt the waiter had watched the processional of Range Rovers and Mercedes Benzes pulling into the parking lot each day and assumed that life in Lagos' higher spheres and tax brackets was a hermetically sealed, air-conditioned affair. And wouldn't have been too far off the mark. What could be a greater sign of material success than the ability to bend the weather to one's whims – to keep the swampy, malarial heat of the tropics at bay with the flick of a few switches? The besuited officials in dazzlingly shined shoes who scurried from their air-conditioned cars into their air-conditioned banks and homes and offices lived in a bubble kept at 18°C; the messiness, the tropical squalor of Lagos, was always on the other side of the window pane.
I've enlisted the help of the pavement pundits to keep a sense of equilibrium. It is never difficult, in an African city of soaring unemployment, to find a group of garrulous men on a shaded bench or beneath a shop awning, discoursing on the day's events. Often they will congregate by a newspaper stand, scanning the headlines for conversational fodder, firing off polemics like a low-rent version of the Sunday morning talk shows. I have encountered these men – itinerant day-laborers, out-of-work taxi drivers, ersatz security guards, rangy youths with useless certificates from unaccredited schools – on street corners across the continent. (The women, who are usually too engaged with keeping the house, looking after the children, and managing the market stall for such idling, exist in a different sphere entirely. Yet any frequenter of an African market will appreciate how well these gossipy multi-taskers can keep both the household and the rumor mill running.) I often wonder what a difference it would make if this continent could harness all that wasted manpower. What a difference for the environment, too. No telling what all that hot air and bluster and CO2 is doing to the ozone layer.
In Lagos I don't have to go far: just steps from the front door of the AAF, under a tattered MTN beach umbrella, a group gathers daily, as faithful as congregants at Sunday mass. "Problems, crises, bombings, bombings," begins a typical harangue one morning. "Our only prayer is to solve these problems." They are mostly in their 20s, skinny, hard-contoured youths in cheap market clothes imported from the Far East, knock-off approximations of a globalized, urban youth style: distressed denims, t-shirts with mindless slogans, belt buckles festooned with dollar signs. They treat me with the natural deference of Yoruba youths to their elders, greeting me as "oga": an elder statesman, a white man no less, lending the assembly some gravitas. Today's speaker is selling airtime from a small leather manpurse around his neck. Occasionally he will break from his discourse to tear off an MTN voucher, stuffing small denominations into his satchel and scratching off the PIN with a coin. "I voted for this Jonathan, but not again," he says. Murmurs of assent from the groundnut gallery. There is no power at home, he says, his house has been without water for three days. Still, the president only offers idle promises. "Already he started the campaign for 2015," he says. I ask if he thinks Jonathan will win again, and he huffs. "He will do how we Nigerians do," he says, making a few complicated hand gestures that seem to imply the stuffing of ballot boxes.
The sun moves, the shade shifts, the bodies are rearranged to make the most of the growing shadows. Someone's baby arrives, a small gurgling boy with milk stains on his shirt. Everyone brightens, coos, clucks their tongues. Already at their age, there is pressure to marry, start a family. The strains on fatherhood here must be immense. A driver I meet down the road sighs when he talks about the challenges of raising his three children. "I am not an M.D. of a company," he says. "For a driver, the money they pay, how can I train more than three?" He makes an elaborate show of patting his pants and adds, "The pockets are dry." Lately he has been planning a trip to his village in the east: he has a fiancée waiting for him there, and their wedding day is just weeks away. But it's been months since his last visit; the pressures are too great. The last time he went home in his Sunday finery, freshly arrived from Lagos, his relatives accosted him with their financial problems, their bottomless needs. "Everyone that sees me, they ask, 'What did you bring me?'" he says. "I just think, 'Please, just let me go. Let me go.'"
Later that week I'm careening down Awolowo Road in the back of a tuk-tuk – a Keke Marwa, in Lagos parlance, in honor of the military governor of Lagos State who brought the three-wheeled vehicles here in the '90s. Beside me is Tochukwu – T.C. – a man I'd met at the AAF earlier in the week. He is a gentle, moon-faced, garrulous jack-of-all-trades. Occasionally he helps with setting up new exhibitions at the gallery, but with nothing on this week, he's offered to accompany me to Lagos Island for the afternoon. He came to Lagos from Ebonyi State, an Igbo province in the east of the country. His first trips to the city were with family – wedding parties, funerals, the endless formal engagements of Nigerian custom – but by his late teens he began to travel here on his own. In his 20s he moved to Ajegunle, a notorious Lagos slum, and then to Lagos Island, under the stewardship of a distant relative from his town. His oga, he says, was a good businessman, a good man. For newcomers thrust into the hierarchical structure of Lagos life, such stewards guarantee safe passage; they act as a frame of reference in whatever enterprise one might hope to embark upon. The lanky boys selling sunglasses and celebrity gossip rags on the Falomo Bridge have their oga as a guarantor, insurance for the wholesalers who supply them with merchandise that they won't vanish with the day's earnings before the supplier receives his cut (usually about 90 percent of the profit). T.C.'s uncle taught him the clothing business, traveling to Italy and bringing back leather shoes and belts and stylish clothes that they sold from their shop. It was a five-year apprenticeship, and then T.C. was on his own. He stayed in the garment business, selling quality imported goods – not the cheap Chinese replicas he scoffs at in the markets. The Chinese had come and ruined everything, he says, but still, business was good. He moved out of Lagos Island and onto V.I. For a while, he helped curate exhibitions at a local gallery. He is 36, still single. "I am patient," he says, as we step out of the Keke and dissolve into the market crowds. "There is no hurry."
Around us, though, there is nothing but hurry and bustle. Though we have no appointments later in the day, no schedule to stick to, T.C. walks briskly through the streets, as if energized by the rush and clamor. Lagos Island is loud, constant, relentless: the honking of horns, the thrum of generators, the ambient noise of thousands of voices raised in the din of human commerce. ("City of sonorous chaos," wrote the poet Chiedu Ezeanah, "out of which destitute music growls.") Once this place was as placid as the lagoons surrounding it; when the Portuguese arrived in the 15th century, today's metropolis was just a string of fishing villages and farms. It grew swiftly as Lagos emerged as one of the major hubs for the West African slave trade. By the time the British arrived in the mid-1800s with a view toward stamping out the trade for good, they had determined that occupying Lagos was "indispensable to the complete suppression of the Slave Trade," an occupation that they undertook, in the colonial parlance, "not without some reluctance." Having established this vital beachhead, they quickly pushed into the interior and developed trade links with neighboring kingdoms. Before long these territories were amalgamated into the British Protectorate of Nigeria, which would join with the Lagos colony in 1914 to form the Federation of Nigeria. Immigrants flocked to Lagos – the de facto and, later, administrative capital – from across West Africa, joining the ranks of freed slaves and their descendants returning from Brazil, the West Indies, and the newly independent state of Liberia. Lagos Island's mixed-up, mottled character was established in those early years – a character still reflected in the island's architecture, with its Portuguese and New World influences – and the city mushroomed as its commercial importance grew. By the 1880s the city already had a railway and telephone links to Britain; by 1898, its increasingly jumbled streets were lit with electric lights.
New arrivals from the interior must have been struck by the city's size and dynamism, this awful harbinger of the modern world. A century later, as Lagos swells to improbable proportions, the place is still overwhelming. It is impossible to name all the sights, the bewildering avenues of retail, the souq-like labyrinths of merchandise piled floor to ceiling, the endless chain of supply and demand. T.C. steers me across the street, into a market for imported clothing: cheap Chinese knock-offs of last year's fashions, oceans of denim, headless mannequins buttoned into frumpy blouses. The sellers are young men in jeans and Nikes, affecting hip-hop postures. "Oyibo!" they call out. "Oyibo!" "White!" They chase after me with stylish loafers, cut-rate imitations of some European design, holding them up to eye-level for further scrutiny. Three men stand in a line, each holding the same white communion dress on a hanger, staring dolefully past the disinterested crowds.
Traffic is sluggish, the okadas and Kekes reduced to a crawl in the face of this human logjam. We duck beneath some rickety scaffolding and squeeze into a narrow alley, and it is like we've crossed a border, arrived at some new frontier. The shops are selling bright bolts of fabric, colorful prints on Dutch wax cloth. It is the province of womanhood, of brides-to-be: the customers are pinching lace cloths between their fingertips and shushing the infants on their backs. The faces you meet here are shrewd, impenetrable, prepared for the pitched battle that comes with every transaction in Lagos. A beggar passes us, reciting Koranic verses in Arabic through a megaphone. Gutters are carved into the alleyways, brimming with dirty run-off from the night's rains. "Pure water!" a woman calls out, carrying a plastic basin full of water sachets on her head. The stalls are endless: you could blanket the Gulf of Guinea with all that fabric, the colorful prints that are covering Nigerian haunches from here to Maiduguri.
There is a method to all this retail madness. The markets are carefully organized; beyond the shaded alleyways, the dark alcoves protecting those bright fabrics against the color-devouring sunlight, we step into the open air. Now we are surrounded by dry goods: tins of sardines, cans of Milo, sacks of rice and sugar that load-bearers will heave onto their heads before staggering into the pressing crowds. The shops are arranged identically, the products, the prices, are exactly the same. How does a merchant turn a profit amid such sameness? Perhaps it is the sheer demographic weight of Lagos commerce, the numerical conviction that no amount of sellers can ever meet this megacity's demands. I suspect, too, that there are internal politics, subtle allegiances: a woman newly arrived from some distant village will probably seek out a kinsman for her business. The kinship ties in Nigeria are strong, advantageous. Even in this city of 15 million, a newcomer can hope for a soft landing.
Stepping through this crush of human traffic, prodded and squeezed on all sides, we arrive in a vast haircare emporium: wigs, shampoos, dyes, miles of extensions. A fat, haughty woman is trying on a wig, preening for a small hand mirror. "It's too short," she says. "It no look good." The attendant scurries off. His face is an asterisk of concentrated passion; there is no whim, no demand he won't cater to for the sake of the sale. He comes back with his arms full, a great ball of synthetic hair, as if he's hugging an acrylic Labrador to his chest. The woman begins to try them on, frowning into the mirror, refusing to grant him the small advantage of her pleasure. Finally, a hint of a smile cracks her face. "Give me this one black," she says, jabbing with her fat finger. The attendant stuffs it into a shopping bag. "Another one," she says. "Give me this one brown. Another one."
And so it goes. Leaving this galaxy of wigs and extensions we enter the jewelry market, its glass display cases neatly stocked with cheap earrings and bangles and gold wristwatches. T.C. stops to flirt with a young woman. ("This one does not know me," he says, as we turn away. "She sees we are the same tribe.") Nearby a neatly dressed man with a jeweler's loupe bends over a wristwatch, his fingers fiddling with a small screwdriver. He pauses, looks up, smiles. I am met with many friendly greetings and marriage proposals. Moving back into the open air, we come to a street that seems entirely overrun by wall clocks in different shapes and sizes; just as quickly, we turn onto a street lined with hundreds of children's bicycles. No commercial need goes unmet here. Another block is crowded with copy machines; further still, dozens of hospital gurneys and wheelchairs on the sidewalk, coated with a thin layer of dust. Whatever isn't readily available on the street is likely to come your way on the head of some rangy youth knifing through the crowd: socks, belts, water sachets, mangos, wooden stools, knots of ginger, dried fish, prawns, Lucozade, soy milk in recycled water bottles, slices of watermelon and pineapple, peeled oranges, loaves of white bread. Wheelbarrows push past us, loaded with apples and blue jeans and cellphone accessories. With the lunch hour upon us, husky women trundle by balancing wooden tables on their heads, laden with the pots and plates and takeaway containers they will use to dish out the afternoon's meals.
The raucous energy of this street carnival exists in a vacuum of sorts; Lagos Island is a husk of abandoned office towers and derelict buildings, relics of a decades-long decay since the government moved the capital to Abuja. The Societe Generale Bank is boarded up; the Savannah Bank building – a black-glass tower of failed aspirations – sits vacant, awaiting tenants. Across from one teeming market we pass the weathered shell of the Bristol Hotel. In its colonial-era heyday the Bristol was a choice spot for visiting dignitaries. According to a well-known story, a colonial office official of Sierra Leonean descent, one Ivor Cummings, arrived one March afternoon in 1947 with a white English colleague. The official inquired with the Greek proprietor if there was a reservation in the name of Cummings. The hotel owner said that there was indeed a reservation for a Mr. Cummings and, turning to the colleague, asked when he would arrive. The two men were outraged; when Cummings identified himself to the flummoxed proprietor, the Greek scurried off, leaving a black clerk to deal with the fall-out. Flustered, the clerk tried to explain to Cummings that blacks couldn't be admitted into the Bristol – a delicate task, no doubt, from one black man to another. A bellicose Cummings stormed off. Later that day hostile crowds poured into the hotel and trashed the lobby. The Greek proprietor was forced to flee the country.
I'm a sucker for such tales of colonial-era come-uppance; they are like period pieces furnishing the living room of my imagination. Closing my eyes I can picture bespectacled Cummings in his suit and Oxford-knotted necktie, an air of erudition about him, a set of matching leather suitcases at his feet. This is just the latest in a long string of indignities; hard to imagine the love and loyalty binding him to a crown that regards him as second-class. Behind him a queue of white guests is growing impatient. The bellhops circle nervously. The clerk at the desk, buttoned into his colonial-era vestiture, is grappling with the humiliating task of turning this dignified black man away. These two men inhabit different spheres entirely – Cummings makes trips to London, hosts garden parties attended by foreign dignitaries – yet here they share the common stain of their blackness. The red-faced Greek removes himself from the scene, eager to avoid any complications. The color rises in the Englishman's cheeks. Genteel Cummings, in that mosaic-tiled lobby lined with potted palms, a fountain tinkling musically across the room, raises hell. No blacks! "You mean as guests? For you are black yourself," he accuses the clerk, according to one account. Perhaps here the clerk burns with a secret pride; aware of the greatness of the moment, he is privileged to be laid across the sacrificial altar, to be the vessel into which Cummings pours his rage. When the mob arrives that night, maybe it's the clerk himself who stokes the flame.
It is hard to conjure that vanished world on the delirious streets of Lagos today. The colonial gentility, the haughtiness of white privilege, is long gone. One blogger, recounting the Cummings story, told of the broader protest movement it sparked: it was, in effect, the death knell of the pre-independence era in Nigeria. In the years that followed the country was swept away by a tide of nationalism, and by the pan-African fervor ignited by Kwame Nkrumah; black consciousness, black identity, became the rallying cry for a generation of activists and future leaders. The radicalness of this moment in time is impossible to fully appreciate half a century later; today's identity politics in Nigeria are played out against a backdrop of class and tribe. Blackness is an obvious fact. I wonder if the fissures formed by these newer divisions will create the same unbridgeable divide that race did 50 years ago. Class consciousness, after all, is the subtext of most encounters on the streets of Lagos. An example: on the way back to Ikoyi, our danfo gets stuck in a go-slow off of Awolowo Road. The driver, undeterred by the line of cars ahead of us, pulls into the empty lane of oncoming traffic, hoping to speed to the intersection before the light changes. We've almost reached the corner when an SUV turns into our lane. It is a muscular, polished vehicle, and the man behind the wheel – athletic, well-dressed, exuding class signifiers that are apparent even from our vantage point – is understandably put off by the danfo blocking his way. His facial muscles tense, and for a moment, I have the sense that this is just one small scene in a larger drama. The recklessness of this city's danfo and okada drivers is one of the Lagosian's favorite talking points, a scab relentlessly picked at dinner parties. No doubt the man in the SUV has been cut off, bullied, harassed by these daredevil drivers before. It is a point of principle that he stand up for himself today. Besides, he has the law on his side. He inches forward. The danfo driver, cursing, puts the vehicle into reverse. He waves his arm violently out the window, but the SUV continues to advance. The cars are backed up in our lane; there's no chance for us to merge back into traffic. The driver's rage is complete, consuming. A crowd has begun to gather – no telling which way this stand-off will go. As we back down the block a traffic cop approaches the vehicle. "I just wan buy fuel," says the driver, gesturing to a gas station on the corner. He seems convinced that the logic of this statement is irrefutable – that to drive 200 meters down the wrong side of a two-way street is justifiable, if there's fuel to be had. The cop is lenient; he lets us merge into the flow of traffic without writing a ticket. As the SUV muscles past us, the driver regards our danfo with the sort of mute, wrathful judgment of some Old Testament patriarch. Our own driver seems shrunken, chastened. There is no telling how often he has had to swallow his pride when confronted with such an overt show of superior strength. Yet when we reach the corner, his face breaks into a broad grin. He whips us through the gas station, cheating the flow of traffic, and cracks a joke at the cars stuck at the red light behind us. However briefly, he's come out ahead.


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Ronald Dean Morrison, 70, of Newton, retired Butler County Under Sheriff, passed away Thursday, Aug. 22, 2013. He is survived by his wife, Johnnie; sons, Chris (Kelli) Morrison and Kirk (Rhonda) Morrison; daughter, Trudi (David) Cook; step-children, Jeff Nunns, Lisa Nunns and Lori Nunns Michels; six grandchildren; three great grandchildren; and many nieces and nephews. Visitation will be at 1 p.m. and service at 2 p.m. Monday, both will be held at Salem Methodist Church, Newton. Memorials to Harry Hynes Memorial Hospice, Wichita. Baker Funeral Home, Valley Center has charge. www.bakerfhvc.com.
Location, ST | website.com


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Cited: Harold E. Selsor, 84, 586 Emmit Way, one-way street violation; and James D. Barnhart, 25, 1031 county Road 19, Mingo Junction, driving with suspended license and no headlights.
Arrested: William C. Brown, 57, 743 Brady Ave., bench warrant out of municipal court, Wednesday.
Arrested: Leslie J. Bennett, 36, 496 Shady Lane, Follansbee, petit theft, falsification and failure to appear warrant out of municipal court, Wednesday.
Jefferson County sheriff
Arrested: Conner M. Hanlin, 22, 461 McLister Ave., Mingo Junction, failure to appear warrant out of Wintersville county court, Wednesday.
Ohio State Highway Patrol
Arrested: Randy G. Atkins, 44, Wann, Okla., illegal manufacture of drugs, Wednesday.
Arrested: Shawn M. Lonchar, 35, 1303 Legion Road, Weirton, illegal manufacture of drugs and possession of heroin, Wednesday.
Arrested: Steven W. Rawson, 29, 71 Trails End Road, Toronto, possession of drug paraphernalia and fugitive from justice warrant out of Brooke County charging burglary, Wednesday.
Arrested: Kayla Marie Goss, 714 Cove Road, Weirton, and Eric Thomas Snape, 183 Valley Way, Weirton, obstructing an officer, and Derek Sean Ashworth, Texas City, Texas, disorderly conduct, Monday following a disturbance at 119 Taylor Ave., Weirton.
Arrested: Robert L. Baxter, 3703 Orchard St., Weirton, public intoxication and disorderly conduct, and Michael L. Baxter, 3725 Orchard St., Weirton, obstructing an officer, Tuesday following a disturbance in the 3700 block of Orchard Street.


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There are various ways to visit Point depending on your circumstances and interests
There are multiple ways to gain financial aid so that your education is never compromised
Point University has given me the opportunity to take what I learned in the classroom and apply it in real life; nothing is more special than that!
Athletics Summer Camps
For many Point University athletes, their training and experiences on the field aren't just meant to win them a game or a trophy. They believe their athletic abilities are an opportunity to minister to the community and influence people around them.read more
Lindbergh Impact Day
Students at the Lindbergh site participated in Impact Day, writing letters to orphans through the non-profit, Just One Africa. Clay and Amy Churchill, co-founders of the organization visited the site in March, presenting their mission to partner with local African leaders to create sustainable solutions for vulnerable children and provide filters for the clean water crisis.read more
We integrate faith into the entire educational process so students can strengthen their relationships with Christ while preparing for a career.
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6 Famous Unsolved Mysteries (With Really Obvious Solutions)
The world is a magical place, full of mysteries science may never understand. It's also full of bullshit that people just make up to draw attention to themselves.
At the heart of pretty much every "paranormal" phenomenon you find some lonely, attention-seeking soul, or several of them, willing to put a spooky little twist on an otherwise boring story. But it usually doesn't take a whole lot of examination to find the truth.
For instance...
#6. The Dyatlov Pass Incident
On February 2nd, 1959, during the cold winter on Kholat Syakhl ("Mountain of the Dead") in Russia, nine intrepid ski hikers decided to do what they do best, which is ski hike, whatever the hell that is. On February 26th, the first of their very dead bodies turned up. Man, who would have thought such a tragedy could strike on "The Mountain of the Dead?"
Image courtesy of Noah Scalin
It probably didn't look like this, but can you imagine?
But it was the discovery of the campgrounds that added the icing to the creepy-as-fuck cake. The ski hikers' tent was shredded. The skiers were scattered around the grounds wearing either very sparse clothing or just their underwear. Three of them were found with crushed ribs and fractured skulls, but no visible defense marks or other signs of a struggle.
Oh yeah, and one of the bodies was missing a tongue.
In case you weren't already on the phone with Mulder and Scully, trace levels of radiation were supposedly found on their bodies. The official statement on what happened was about as vague and ass-covering as possible, saying it was caused by an "unknown compelling force." In laymen's terms this means, "fuck if we know."
The story has become an internet sensation over the years, with many people blaming aliens, and then ghosts, and then the yeti, or possibly all of them working in tandem.
"So we're agreed then: We tear up their tents, take a lady's tongue, and never tell a soul."
The Obvious Answer:
So there's six things that freak people out about this one:
1. The no-tongued woman
2. A mysterious orange tan on the dead bodies
3. The ripped tents
4. The hikers' lack of clothing
5. The crushing damage done to three of the hikers
6. The traces of radioactivity
The big fact that gets lost in the re-telling of this story is that the bodies weren't found until weeks later. It's not like somebody turned their back, then five minutes later all their friends were dead and half naked.
That makes the missing tongue a lot easier to explain. As disturbing as it may be, the first thing a scavenging animal is going to go for is probably the soft tissue of an open mouth, especially if it still smelled like the burrito the hiker just ate. Laying out in the sun surrounded by white snow for days also accounts for the weird tan.
The trauma and the destroyed tent points to an avalanche. Their state of undress can be explained by paradoxical undressing, a known behavior of hypothermia victims when their brains start to freeze and malfunction. In other words, it's the kind of behavior you'd expect from a group of injured avalanche victims wandering around in the middle of the night in the freezing cold.
What about the radioactivity? Or stranger details that turn up in some accounts, like orange lights in the sky? Well, there's the fact that none of that stuff turns up in the original documents from the incident, and appears to have been added later by people who just can't resist making things spookier than they are.
It's those later accounts that have stuck in the public memory, because so many of the original reports were destroyed (this was the Cold War-era Soviet Union, which treated casserole recipes as state secrets).
So none of the details on their own prove anything other than a tragic hiking accident. The conspiracy-loving public widely reject this, too busy lighting their torches and getting their pitchforks to go hunt down an, "unknown compelling force."
Otherwise known as "snow."
#5. The Lost Roanoke Colony
The Roanoke Colony was either the first permanent settlement in America, or an elaborate practical joke. Walter Raleigh sent the colonists there and then left them without supplies for three years, perhaps just to see what would happen.
What he probably didn't expect was for the colony to just vanish. When new settlers finally arrived, none of the original colony remained at the settlement (except for the old skeleton of one guy) and the mysterious word "Croatan" was carved into a tree, right under, "Metallica Rules".
So, was it a UFO abduction? Perhaps the colonists were held in some kind of suspended animation and are still being anally probed to this very day.
The Obvious Answer:
That second group of settlers didn't really get the chance to investigate what happened to the original bunch, because a few years later an even bigger mysterious phenomena occurred: Blue-eyed, pale-complexioned Indians began showing up on nearby Croatan Island.
So what to make of these mysterious children, who looked like they might have been the descendents of white/Indian mixed race parents? On CROATAN island?
It's almost as if, we don't know, a certain group of settlers realized their colony sucked, and went and found some natives nearby who seemed to know how to live off the land. And that they then left their shitty colony forever to go live happily ever after on Croatan Island, and to have impressive amounts of sex with the natives.
"Hey, like the nearby island. Whatever, I'm sure that's just a coincidence."
#4. The Hopkinsville Goblin Case
In 1955, members of the Sutton family were out on their porch enjoying a relaxing visit/drinking binge with their good friend Billy Ray Taylor. Billy Ray decided to go out and get a drink of water from the well, when shit started getting weird.
He ran back in to tell everyone he'd seen some bright lights in the sky and that everyone should come look. According to one member of the Sutton clan, upon stepping outside the Suttons-plus-one encountered:
"... a luminous, three-and-a-half-foot-tall being with an oversized head, big, floppy, pointed ears, glowing eyes, and hands with talons at their ends. The figure, either made of or simply dressed in silvery metal, had its hands raised."
After seeing these figures coming out of the woods, showing the universal sign of surrender, the Suttons did the only thing they could do: try to kill their asses.
As they shot at the defenseless creatures with rifles, they claim to have heard clangs and ricochets as if the aliens were wearing some kind of metal armor. They said the aliens "flipped over and fled into the darkness when shot at."
The Obvious Answer:
This is a sketch of one of the aliens.
This is a great horned owl.
Look at the head of the "creature" then look at the head of the owl. Now, get really, really drunk. We're talking "mid-1950s rural Kentucky" drunk.
Ufologist Renaud Leclet admitted, "It could be a misidentification of a pair of Great horned owls, which are nocturnal, fly silently, have yellow eyes, and aggressively defend their nests."
Oh, and that sound of metal clanging and ricochets during the shooting? Get drunk and shoot towards a target in front of your tin chicken coup.
So it's either that, or there may still be an interstellar invasion force on the way to retaliate.


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NHSUPCO: NH v. Brendan Bisbee - Police officer's perjury conviction affirmed
LYNN, J. The defendant, Brendan Bisbee, appeals his convictions by a jury on five counts of perjury. At the conclusion of the prosecutor's closing argument, the defendant moved for a mistrial. He argued that the prosecutor had improperly interjected his personal opinion into the closing when he called the defendant a "dirty cop" and a "mope."
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Suppose I know that Selenium has electron configuration $[Ar] 4s^2 3d^{10} 4p^4$.
How can I use this information to then come to the conclusion that its possible oxidation states are 6, 4, 2, 1 and -2?
I understand the 6: Give up all s electrons to reach $Ar$ configuration I also understand the -2: Obtian two electrons to complete the 4th shell. I can guess why 4 is plausible: Give up all your 4p electrons
But 2 and 1? A guess for 2 would be to give up the 4s electrons, but why should it? And for the 1 I have no idea. Maybe give up one electron in the 4th shell and have it replaced by one of the 3d electrons?


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According to the new IHS study, the proposed Keystone XL pipeline would have "no material impact" on US GHG emissions. In the absence of the pipeline, alternate transportation routes would result in oil sands production growth being more or less unchanged, the study says.
[oil sands]
[greenhouse gas]
[heavy oil]
According to the new IHS study, the proposed Keystone XL
pipeline would have no material impact on US GHG
emissions. In the absence of the pipeline, alternate
transportation routes would result in oil sands production
growth being more or less unchanged, the study says.
The study also found that any absence of oil sands on the US
Gulf Coast (the destination for Keystone XL) would most likely
be replaced by imports of heavy crude oil from Venezuela, which
has the same carbon footprint as oil sands.
The pipeline's potential impact on GHG emissions has been the subject of
increased focus. President Barack Obama's June 25 climate
address indicated that the relative emissions related to increase
Canadian oil sands processing in US markets resulting from the
pipeline are key criteria for the United States' decision
whether to approve the project.
The new IHS CERA Canadian Oil Sands Dialogue study agrees
with the conclusions of the US State Department's Draft
Supplemental Environmental Impact Statement for
Keystone XL that says oil sands production is expected to
continue at similar levels regardless of whether Keystone XL
goes forward. IHS currently expects oil sands production to
grow from 1.9 million barrels per day (MMbpd) in 2013 to 4.3
MMbpd in 2030 and does not expect the Keystone XL decision to
have a material impact on the production outlook.
The IHS study points out that 3 MMbpd of additional oil
sands pipeline capacity (not including Keystone XL) is
currently proposed. Eighty percent of this proposed alternate
capacity travels exclusively through Canadaconnecting the
oil sands with Canada's west and east coastsand thus
would not require U.S. government approval.
Even if pipeline capacity were to lag behind oil sands
growth, the study says that transportation by rail is expected
to play an ongoing role and that greater investment could make
rail more economic to a level approaching that of
The study found that with sufficient scale and investment
the additional cost of transporting oil sands by rail to the US
Gulf Coast rather than by pipeline could be lowered from today.
If heavy oil sands producers were to invest in improved rail
efficiencies, the economics could be within $6/bbl compared to
pipeline (for each barrel of oil sands produced). This would
place rail well within the break even range for most oil sands
production. One source of improved economics could come from
shipping oil sands bitumen in its pure state. A lack of
pipeline capacity would incentivize such added investment.
The study also found that, were oil sands not to be shipped
to the US Gulf Coast, it would result in little to no change in
overall GHG emissions. The regionwhich contains 50% of
total US refininghas a large capacity
to process heavy crude. This means that crude oils of similar
GHG intensity would continue to be refined in the absence of
oil sands, the study says.
Venezuela is currently the largest single supplier of heavy
crude to the US Gulf Coast and would be the most likely
alternative source of heavy crude supply absent oil sands. IHS
research has found Venezuelan heavy crude to have a similar
range of life-cycle GHG emissions as oil sands imported into
the United States.
Venezuelan heavy oiland Venezuelawould be
the number one beneficiary of a negative decision on
Keystone, the study says.
The complete study is available at the oil sands
dialogue website,
All comments are subject to editorial review.
All fields are compulsory.
Alfred Gonzalez
Tom:Dilbit poses no extra pipeline riskhttp://www.hydrocarbonprocessing.com/Article/3234751/Search/Dilbit-poses-no-extra-pipeline-risk.html?Keywords=diluted+bitumen
Tom Harris
Sorry, but the IHS study results are both incorrect and too easy for pipeline opponents to defeat (and I say this as an XL supporter). Consider this: IHS study concluded: http://press.ihs.com/press-release/energy-power-media/ihs-study-keystone-xl-pipeline-would-have-no-material-impact-us-gre "August 8, 2013) –The proposed Keystone XL pipeline would have "no material impact" on U.S. greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, according to a new IHS study. In the absence of the pipeline, alternate transportation routes would result in oil sands production growth being more or less unchanged, the study says. BUT THIS ASSUMES THE ENVIRO ACTIVISTS ARE UNSUCCESSFUL AT BLOCKING GATEWAY, THE EAST/WEST (ENERGY EAST) LINE, RAIL EXPANSION AND OTHER TRANSPORTATION OF BITUMEN FROM THE OIL SANDS, ALL OF WHICH ARE MORE OR LESS IN JEAPORDY RIGHT NOW DUE TO ACTIONS OF ENVIRO ACTIVISTS. ONE COULD USE THE IHS ARGUMENT FOR GATEWAY OR ANY OF THE OTHER TRANSPORTATION PLANS AND THAT WOULD BE EQUALLY NAIVE I WOULD SAY FOR THE SAME REASONS. Remember, climate campaigners are out to kill all transportation methods between the oil sands and refineries and, at the rate they are going, they have a good chance of succeeding.IHS also say that they "found that any absence of oil sands on the U.S. Gulf Coast (the destination for Keystone XL) would most likely be replaced by imports of heavy crude oil from Venezuela, which has the same carbon footprint as oil sands." YES, BUT IF KEYSTONE XL IS BUILT, ONE OF THE BENEFITS, SO THE US DEPARTMENT OF ENERGY SAY (ALTHOUGH OTHERS DISPUTE THIS) IS LOWER GAS PRICES IN THE US, WHICH MAKES SENSE OF COURSE AS EXPANDING SUPPLY USUALLY LOWERS PRICES. WITH LOWER PRICES, CONSUMPTION WILL LIKELY RAISE AND SO WILL CO2 EMISSIONS. In the IHS report itself at http://www.ihs.com/images/CERA-Insight-Keystone-Emissions-Aug-2013.pdf it says, "The most likely alternative USGC heavy oil supply is Venezuelan crude which is in the same GHG emissions range as oil sands. Consequently, if oil sands were not consumed in the Gulf Coast, there would be little to no change in the overall GHG intensity of the US crude slate." THIS IS NAÏVE AS WELL.Comments welcome.Tom HarrisInternational Climate Science Coalitionwww.climatescienceinternational.org
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Engineers and designers are highly skilled individuals. Forcing them to enter design changes using tables, forms and spreadsheets is unproductive and uneconomical, and it increases the likelihood of human error—this is the way that most instrumentation software systems currently work. For too long, software vendors have denied engineers and designers the simple practicality of a graphical visual engineering interface with "drag and drop" capability and inbuilt intelligence, ensuring changes are automatically replicated into all the associated data and databases.
Is 2016 the peak for US gasoline demand?
Too soon to tell
July 2016


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Department of Political Science
Dr. Gregory Hall
Genese Brooks
Missions & Objectives
The Department's mission derives from the Mission Statement of the College. Specifically, the primary goal of the Department is to prepare students for successful entry into, and completion of, graduate and professional schools, especially law school. The second goal of the Department is to prepare students for entry-level professional employment in public agencies at all levels—international, national, state, and local. The Department's primary strategic objective is to increase the number of its students who attend and graduate from professional and graduate schools.
Follow the Department on Facebook:morehousepoliticalscience


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Converse Preschool Chuck Taylor Ox
Buy Online & Pick Up In-Store
Basketball's first ever player-endorser, Chuck Taylor, contributed so much to the sport that his name was put on the All Star patch in 1923. The shoe revolutionized the game and would soon become woven into the fabric of American culture as a true icon. In the spirit of originality, this special infants shoe keeps emerging as the true #1 original with fun colors and patterns.
- Preschool Converse Casual Shoe


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Senior Vice Provost for Global Faculty Development, NYU; Senior Vice Provost for Faculty Development, NYU-Abu Dhabi and NYU-Shanghai
As Senior Vice Provost for Global Faculty Development at NYU, NYU-Abu Dhabi, and NYU-Shanghai, Dr. Robin's duties include coordination of faculty recruitment and the promotion and tenure process at the global campuses. Dr. Robin is the Provost's liaison to NYU Abu Dhabi, NYU Shanghai, and the Steinhardt School of Culture, Education, and Human Development. As part of his provostial duties in New York, Dr. Robin oversees the Center for the Advancement of Teaching (CAT) and the Faculty Resource Network (FRN), an NYU-based initiative providing professional development opportunities to faculty at its 55 partner institutions, more than half of which are minority-serving. Dr. Robin is engaged as well in educational reform initiatives in Pakistan, where he serves on the board of the Habib University Foundation.
In 2004, Dr. Robin joined the Faculty of the Department of Media Culture and Communication at NYU's Steinhardt School of Culture, Education, and Human Development, where he assumed the duties of associate dean for academic affairs. He is the author of several books, including Scandals and Scoundrels: Seven Cases that Shook the Academy (University of California Press, 2004) and The Making of the Cold War Enemy: Culture and Politics in the Military-Intellectual Complex (Princeton University Press, 2001). He is currently writing a history of Cold War strategic advisors in the United States.
Prior to joining NYU, Dr. Robin taught U.S. history and communications theory at the University of Haifa, Israel, where he also served for five years as dean of student affairs. Dr. Robin's undergraduate degree is from the Hebrew University, Jerusalem (Romance Languages and History). He holds a Ph.D. in history from the University of California at Berkeley.
Visit the following links for information on the responsibilities of the Senior Vice Provost for Global Faculty Development regarding:
Matthew Santirocco
Senior Vice Provost for Academic Affairs
Ulrich Baer
Vice Provost for Faculty, Arts, Humanities and Diversity
Ron Robin
Senior Vice Provost for Global Faculty Development, NYU; Senior Vice Provost for Faculty Development, NYU-Abu Dhabi and NYU-Shanghai


text:
Women's Health
Binge Drinking a Big Problem Among Women, Girls
Jan. 8, 2013 -- Binge drinking is a prevalent and often-underestimated problem among U.S. women and girls that frequently starts in high school, a new report from the CDC shows.
The report found that nearly 14 million women in the U.S. binge drink about three times a month, having on average six drinks per binge.
The CDC defined binge drinking as drinking four or more drinks per occasion.
The highest frequency and intensity of binge drinking (at 3.6 episodes per month and 6.4 drinks per occasion) was reported by women between 18 and 24 years of age.
However, the prevalence of binge drinking among women and high school girls did not vary much with age, as about 20% of high school girls, 24% of women 18 to 24 years old, and 20% of those 25 to 34 years old all reported binge drinking.
"Binge drinking is a serious and unrecognized problem among women and girls, and it is associated with a wide range of health issues including violence, injury, sexually transmitted disease, and unwanted pregnancy," CDC Director Thomas Frieden, MD, said during a press conference.
"Fortunately, there are effective things that all of us can do to prevent it: Parents can prevent youth from beginning and continuing to drink in a harmful pattern; states and communities have guidelines that are effective at reducing binge drinking; and doctors and other health care professionals can ask patients about their drinking, because even a brief counseling session can make a big difference in helping prevent progression to binge drinking."
The study is published in the Jan. 8 Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report.
Prevalence Higher in Whites
The CDC analyzed data from the 2011 Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System. They also analyzed data from the 2011 national Youth Risk Behavior Survey to gauge alcohol use and binge drinking among U.S. high school girls in grades 9 to 12.
The definition of binge drinking used in that study was five drinks or more per occasion, not four drinks or more, as was used to assess prevalence rates in the new report.
Today on WebMD
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Single Development Tool, Tailored for Extreme Productivity.
JBoss® Developer Studio provides superior support for your entire development lifecycle. It includes a broad set of tooling capabilities and support for multiple programming models and frameworks, including Java™ Enterprise Edition 6, RichFaces, JavaServer Faces (JSF), Enterprise JavaBeans (EJB), Java Persistence API (JPA), and Hibernate®, JAX-RS with RESTEasy, Contexts Dependency Injection (CDI), HTML5, and many other popular technologies. It provides developer choice in supporting multiple JVMs, productivity with Maven, and in testing with Arquillian. It is fully tested and certified to ensure that all its plug-ins, runtime components, and their dependencies are compatible with each other
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Who can explain the proof of the formula (2.12) given here: J. Phys. A: Math. Gen. 20 (1987) 3861-3875. Printed in the UK http://ru.scribd.com/doc/118425928/Svozil-Quantum-Field-Theory-on-Fractal-Space-time It is easy to prove that in general case this formula is wrong!!!
closed as not a real question by Anthony Quas, Benjamin Steinberg, Alain Valette, Tom Leinster, Asaf Karagila Jan 4 '13 at 16:10
It's difficult to tell what is being asked here. This question is ambiguous, vague, incomplete, overly broad, or rhetorical and cannot be reasonably answered in its current form. For help clarifying this question so that it can be reopened, visit the help center.If this question can be reworded to fit the rules in the help center, please edit the question.
As Steve Huntsman points out in his comment this is just writing out the integral against the Hausdorff measure on the fractal domain in polar coordinates over the same fractal. Since the author does not specify what the fractal domain actually and merely asserts that it is distributed throughout $\mathbb{R}^{4}$ such that it is "regular and homogenous" with respect to the Hausdorff measure he is able to claim that for the right sort of fractal domain the formulas that we are used to when integrating over $\mathbb{R}^{d}$ hold even when $d$ is not an integer. That is what looks like the tricky part to me, just assuming the existence of such a fractal. The discussion of why the coefficient is what it is appears just after (2.6) and arises simply by analogy to the volume of the unit sphere that usually appears in polar coordinate transforms.
ADDENDUM (4 Jan 2013): The formula for the volume of the unit sphere that the author uses is wrong if you take it out of the context that the author takes for granted. And the author never makes the claim that it should. The logic of the paper is: given a fractal subset of $\mathbb{R}^{4}$ such that this formula for integration in polar coordinates and the volume of the unit sphere holds then the following physics can be done. It is not fair to the author to complain that when you take a fractal such that his assumptions don't hold that the formula is wrong. That being said, I still wish he had actually exhibited one of these fractals.


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I was watching this video.
When the woman gets the card wrong, she says "Mist". Is this just the German way of saying "dang" or "crap"? Does it have bad connotation? Is it appropriate to use?
I was watching this video.
When the woman gets the card wrong, she says "Mist". Is this just the German way of saying "dang" or "crap"? Does it have bad connotation? Is it appropriate to use?
The literal translation would be "manure".
It is not only limited to excrements of cows, but describes any form of animal excrements mixed with some sort of mulch (mostly Straw) that can be used as fertilizer.
Usage is, as suggested by @TheBlastOne, similar to crap in English.
It is not really an offensive word. You would usually use it if something went wrong or you made an error. Even if it is a trivial matter.
Whereas to use "Scheisse" (shit) which is more offensive the mistake would have to be more serious.
Not quite serious, but Homer Simpson´s "d'oh!" comes close. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/D%27oh, and note Home did NOT invent it.
"Crap" is close, too.
One might say "shoot" in English to avoid facies as one says "Mist" instead of "Scheisse" in German. "Mist" is what cows produce, sometimes mixed with the hay that lies on the ground in the barn. So it is not pure excrement and not really as bad, one might think.
The german word "Mist" is "dung" as well as "rubbish". A "Mistkübel" is a dustbin or a garbage can. A "Misthaufen" is a dungheap.
When ever someone speaking english uses rude words from a sexual context (most famous is "fuck") you would use in german a dirty word that comes from a fecal context (most famous is "Scheiße" - engl.: "shit").
The english word "to fuck" (in the meaning of having sex) is in german "ficken" and both come from the same origin "fuggen" which means "to fit into something" (also english "to fit" and german "einfügen" and "Fuge" come from that). But never ever a german-speaking person would say "ficken" when a english-speaker in the same situation would say "fuck". In German you say "Scheiße" or, which sounds less rude, "Mist".
Almost everyone uses dirty words in daily life. But it is really hard to learn them. You don't learn them in school nor in any official course. Everybody teaching a foreign language does as if nobody ever would use dirty words in other languages, but everybody does, in every living and every dead language.
"Mist" is the shit of a herbivore or omnivore, mostly a cow or a hog, mixed with a binding agent, mostly straw. The feces of a dog or an eagle are not "Mist" (but "Hundekot" and "Vogeldreck").
The exclamation "Mist!" is used like "crap!" in English. As Lukas said, it is not as offensive as "Scheiße". It could be used in children's tv without causing outrage.


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Hybrid View
27 Aug 2012 9:36 PM #1
Screencasts: Layouts & Refactoring into Components
I've noticed that the Sencha examples for grids, forms, trees and other components are great for people to adapt to their own needs. Where those new to Ext JS often struggle is with laying out and structuring their applications correctly.
To support some internal training, I've put together a couple of screencasts. I've tried to keep them simple and fast paced. Hopefully some people in the community find them useful too.
The first screencast covers the basics of components, containers and layouts.
The second describes how to refactor large blocks of code into loosely coupled components.
Make sure you turn up the resolution to 720p and make them fullscreen. Enjoy!
28 Aug 2012 5:41 AM #2
Very nice! .. Thank you for the time and effort! I am sure others will find it very helpful.